Sensing no immediate threat nearby, Megumi Fushiguro let out a quiet breath. He placed the Sukuna Finger back into its box for safekeeping, rolled his shoulders, and stood there with his hands in his pockets.
"Hey. Get those students settled first. I'll call an ambulance…"
Yuji Itadori nodded, flashing a broad grin that showed off his big front teeth. The moonlight seemed to bounce from his cheeks to his eyes like tiny flickers of light.
"Got it! Don't worry. I know these seniors—I'll make sure they're taken care of!"
Megumi Fushiguro couldn't help finding him strangely carefree. After everything that had just happened, how was he not shaken?
He had just turned to leave when Yuji Itadori called out to him.
"Hey… can I become a Jujutsu Sorcerer?"
"Huh?"
Megumi Fushiguro looked back at the pink-haired boy.
"You saw what happened, right? You know what Jujutsu Sorcerers do. I've never seen anyone volunteer for this after witnessing something like that. You can really die doing this."
"I know."
Yuji Itadori clenched his fist, then slowly opened it again. His gaze grew even steadier as he looked at Megumi Fushiguro.
"I'm not afraid of danger. Maybe that's easy to say now—when the moment comes, who knows…
But!
I'm strong!
I want the people I know to have a proper death!!"
Megumi Fushiguro thought it over seriously.
"Once those two make it to the hospital, I'll help you get in contact with them. Whether you're accepted or not depends on you."
"Yeah! Thank you so much."
"No need."
Megumi Fushiguro turned away again, preparing to notify the support staff to handle the cleanup. He pulled out his phone—
—and froze.
[No signal… Was there already none before?]
He scanned the area again.
The atmosphere had grown heavy. The light reflecting off the ground no longer felt lively; it was as if something was pressing it flat, forcing it to crawl along the floor.
Megumi Fushiguro's pupils shrank.
Setting aside the sudden loss of signal, he had seen this kind of distortion before. Back when he sparred with Akira Zenin as a child—whenever Akira Zenin failed to properly control his Cursed Energy, the surroundings would react like this.
[Feel it. Hurry. Has the Cursed Energy around us changed?]
"Something's wrong… No. No!"
Megumi Fushiguro spun around to look at Yuji Itadori. The boy was carefully lining up seat cushions on the ground, trying to make things more comfortable for the two injured students.
"This isn't right!! Get those two out of here, now!"
...
BOOM!!!!
With a violent tremor, a black figure tore straight down through the rooftop and slammed onto the ground beside them. Its voice grated like an old, damaged cassette tape, forced through a loudspeaker and amplified hundreds of times over.
"You realized it a little too late… humans."
The voice paused, as if reconsidering.
"No… Jogo said that we are the humans!"
Before Megumi Fushiguro could even turn to see what it looked like, a massive black pillar burst up from below, launching all four of them onto the top of the school building.
Megumi Fushiguro reinforced his body with Cursed Energy just in time. Aside from choking slightly on the dust from the collapsing walls, he was fine. But Yuji Itadori and the others were still flesh and blood. They couldn't endure that kind of crushing force.
Megumi Fushiguro quickly looked over.
Yuji Itadori had thrown himself over the two students, shielding them with his own body. Other than some bruising on the limbs that had been sticking out, they didn't seem seriously hurt.
"Cough… cough.
You okay?"
Yuji Itadori got to his feet and rolled his shoulders.
"I'm fine. There wasn't even any rebar here…"
...
"Is that really the point…?"
Megumi Fushiguro muttered, at a loss.
[Why didn't that Cursed Spirit keep attacking?]
He turned to look at the speaking Cursed Spirit.
Its head was shaped like a slightly slanted black circular platform. A ring of crimson light encircled it, likely serving as its eye. Its torso and limbs were made of black, sand-textured cylindrical segments. Each hand had four rough metal fingers. Black chains wrapped around its entire body, binding a coffin to its back.
Megumi Fushiguro could hardly believe the pressure coming off it.
This thing felt far more oppressive than any of the Special Grade Cursed Spirits Akira Zenin had once taken him to fight.
Why was something like this here?
And why had it stopped attacking?
"!"
A sudden realization struck him.
He reached for his pocket.
The box containing Ryomen Sukuna's finger was gone.
Megumi Fushiguro looked up again.
Sure enough, the box was in the Cursed Spirit's hand. It had already taken out the Sukuna Finger and was examining it closely… if that thick red ring really counted as an eye.
[That human called Kaori said that today, someone with pink hair would appear and allow Sukuna to manifest… But what exactly is pink…?]
In this Cursed Spirit's vision, the world existed only in black and white. It couldn't distinguish colors at all, which meant it couldn't tell which of them was Ryomen Sukuna's vessel.
And so it hesitated.
The entire Cursed Spirit simply stood there, frozen in thought.
Yuji Itadori, completely unaware of the level of danger in front of him, spoke up first.
"Hey, who are you supposed to be? If you keep wrecking the school like this, it's gonna be condemned!"
"Kōkyū."
"Huh?"
"My name… is Kōkyū."
The Cursed Spirit called Kōkyū casually tossed the Sukuna Finger onto the ground.
If it couldn't tell who the vessel was, it would just test them one by one.
"I answered your question. Now… can you eat this?"
[Kōkyū]:
A Cursed Spirit born from humanity's fear of coffins and the corpses within them, combined with fear of the iron weapons that kill.
One of the Cursed Spirits formed by this world to balance the birth of Akira Zenin…