Sigh.
"Another day, another Doug."
Same car. Same seat. Same chauffeur, wearing the same expression of barely contained contempt. Same destination: something that needed killing.
"What is it this time? A horde of Grade 3 cursed spirits? A Semi-Grade 1? Oh—maybe a curse user who wiped out an entire primary school class?"
Silence from the front seat.
Expected. The file would tell everything worth knowing anyway. The questions existed purely to get under his skin, because the man had the face and attitude of a complete prick, and the traffic jam wasn't going anywhere, and without training, fighting, or Toji to pass the time, boredom had become its own kind of suffering.
The Rolex on his wrist caught the light as his grip on the steering wheel tightened. Not so poor after all, this chauffeur.
The ragebait had reached impressive heights before the mission site appeared and cut the experiment short.
Out of the car, door barely closed, and he was already flooring it—the look of a man who had been mentally rehearsing this escape for the past twenty minutes. All that was left to do was whistle.
"Whistle. I'd be offended… if I cared at all."
The file came back out. A skim through the first page confirmed the joke.
"Ha. A curse user who massacred a primary school class. Called it."
Said lightly, but the expression had already darkened. Two months of this. No gaps, no rest—the only reason it hadn't been daily was the injuries, and even that wasn't much of a buffer. Several missions had come close to the first one in terms of danger. Survival had depended each time on the three katanas hanging at the hip.
But even that was something that could be managed.
What was harder to manage was the accumulation. Two months of scenes that couldn't be unseen had finally made Gojo's words make sense—the ones about needing to be a little crazy to survive this work.
"Sā tatakao ka?"
---
That evening
Sigh. "Shit clan, shit mission, everything is shit in this shit life."
The exhaustion wasn't from the curse user. He'd barely warranted Shusui—Semi-Grade 2 at best, and that was generous. But relative weakness didn't make a person less capable of cruelty than the others.
The children had been flayed and hung in rows. Everything eaten that day came back up at the sight of them.
Thirty of them. That was the number used to build the pseudo-shikigami—which was closer to a cursed spirit than any proper summoning, and barely reached Grade 2 in power despite everything it had cost. When the curse user presented it, he was beaming. He talked about impaling the next target and using hundreds more children to build something stronger.
Prior missions had involved killing before. Each time, even knowing exactly what the curse user had done, a small spark of guilt followed—not for them, never for them—but for whoever might have mourned them.
When those words came out of his mouth, something snapped. Whatever was left of the restraint that usually prevented the worst possible outcome.
So after cutting down the shikigami in a single stroke, the rest took considerably longer. Keeping him alive through it required effort. The effort was made.
No pleasure in it. But it felt like the minimum owed.
No guilt followed. No remorse, no regret. The mental fatigue was still there regardless—lighter than it would have been without the Haki training, but present.
The plan upon returning to the estate was simple: sleep. Let the mind reset.
Sigh. "Another day, another Doug."
The gates were in sight when they swung open.
An unconscious Toji was being loaded into a car.
The plan for sleep evaporated.
"TOJI!"
Full sprint immediately. *Soru* used in fragments, incomplete and painful, burning through the legs just to close the distance. It wasn't enough. The car had already built too much of a lead, and at the exact moment of almost passing the man who had loaded Toji inside, he moved—fast enough that legs on the edge of failure couldn't respond, even with Observation Haki reading the blow well in advance.
A hand closed around the throat and lifted.
Cursed energy coated him from head to foot.
"Where do you think you're going, you piece of trash?"
A hand moved toward the hip—stopped immediately by a sharp, precise pain piercing straight through it. A katana, driven through the back of the hand and out through the palm.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. Pulling a weapon on your unit commander? People have died for less than that."
The blade ripped free. A guttural sound escaped before it could be stopped.
A slow head-shake followed, the performance of a man scolding a child who'd broken something precious—with cruelty running underneath every word of it.
Teeth ground together. The glare didn't waver.
"Where… did you take my brother… you bastard?" The grip on the throat was making it hard to get words out at full volume.
"Oh my, still going? What am I going to do with you?"
The act continued. That was fine—it bought time, and time was exactly what was needed. Every second he kept talking was a second of preparation.
Eyes closed. Focus pulled inward, toward the Haki.
*Take this. Two months of training, straight to your face.*
But luck seemed to be on his side. Just as the Conqueror's Haki was about to release at point-blank range—enough to strip his cursed energy coating and leave him exposed—a monstrous impact landed square on the nose.
Concentration shattered. Everything built up in that moment dissolved into nothing.
"Are you even listening when I speak? Because it really doesn't feel like it."
The broken nose and the tightening grip made answering physically impossible.
"I tried to be lenient with something as insignificant as you, but apparently that's not going to work."
The smile that followed was the kind that makes promises. None of them pleasant.
"Don't worry—you'll be well taken care of. And don't fret about your brother. If he's even half as resilient as you, he'll pull through. Won't he?"
The anger kept climbing. So did the desire to take this man's head off his shoulders.
But even free from the grip, defeat was almost certain—unless Enma connected. And even that was a gamble.
Because the man holding the throat wasn't just anyone. He stood miles above the future version of Nobuaki who would one day lead the Kukuru. Miles above almost anyone encountered so far.
The strongest sorcerer without an innate technique, standing right there.
Zen'in Natsugu.
His tongue ran across his lip. The sword slid back into its scabbard.
"Don't worry. It's been a while since that particular dungeon saw any use—but I'm sure you'll feel right at home."
Pain tore through the stomach, deep and absolute.
Consciousness began to slip.
'Toji.'
Then nothing.