Hollow Purple (Puella Magi Madoka Magica/Jujutsu Kaisen Crossover AU)

Chapter One: Curses Are Shit

Kento Nanami hated his job. He hated most of the people he had to work with, he hated the mindset that the job necessitated, and he hated the danger that it put people in. The sacrifices people had to make.

What was this job, one might ask?

A Line was drawn across his vision, and a cloth-wrapped blade followed. A seven to three ratio, drawn to sever evil.

Hunting Curses as a Jujutsu Sorcerer.

But this evil was wily and clever, going to ground time and again before the blade of judgement could fall.

The Curse he was hunting, that he'd been hunting for the better part of two weeks now, was a particularly aggravating sort. Really, he was better suited to fighting Curses that were more powerful than him, not ones that made up for their comparative weakness with cunning and troublesome Cursed Techniques.

Nanami hated his job, but he hated having to work overtime even more. As for Curses? He hated them most of all.

Nanami had pursued the Curse all the way to the edge of Tokyo Prefecture and beyond, passing through several towns of varying size on the way. He encountered it numerous times during his long journey, but each time it managed to slip through his fingers, increasing his frustration. He was honestly half tempted to call up that layabout Satoru Gojo; it was a rare Curse indeed that'd be able to escape from the self-proclaimed Strongest Jujutsu Sorcerer. But he wasn't quite that desperate yet, even if this Curse was absolutely infuriating.

By the time he caught up with the bedamned thing again, he found himself in an unfamiliar city by the sea. It was nowhere near as large as Tokyo, but it was no quaint country town either.

"Kazamino City, huh?" Nanami mused aloud, shifting the briefcase that concealed his blade to his left hand as he reached up to adjust the goggle-like sunglasses that had begun to slip down his nose. He breathed in through his nose and let his empty right hand fall to his side. To the mundane, he'd appear to be just another face in the crowd, just another tired salaryman in a rumpled suit walking home from a late shift. Indeed, the only things that stood out even a little about him were his glasses and his blond hair.

"With any luck," he sighed, his deep, rich voice laced with hints of irritation and fatigue, "this will be the last stop, and I can finally be done with this idiocy."

He really should've known better than to tempt fate, in retrospect.

-x-x-x-

Kazamino City had an odd vibe to it, compared to Tokyo. Usually, smaller cities like this weren't nearly as infested with Curses as larger ones like Tokyo and ones with rich histories like Kyoto, but you'd still see a Fly Head here and there, the occasional Grade 3 Curse or even the rare low Grade 2.

But here? Nothing. Not a single Curse anywhere, save for the one Nanami was tracking, and that set his nerves on edge. It was the spiritual equivalent of being "too quiet". Wherever humans were, so too were the manifestations of their negativity, but Kazamino was bleached clean. It felt sterile to his senses, wrong.

That was why, when he felt a great pulse of foreign cursed energy followed by the Curse he was tracking vanishing, he was on the scene in seconds. It was, by all appearances, an ordinary alleyway. Nothing of particular note stood out visually or to his sixth sense, at least not until Nanami had reached about halfway into the alleyway. Something within the bricks of the wall twinged his senses, and when he ran a hand over it, a bizarre sigil appeared, vaguely resembling an inverted bird with shattered wings. It glowed a deep, wretched purple that merely gazing upon curdled his stomach and sent alarm bells blaring through his head.

Nanami sighed and loosened his tie before bending down and opening his briefcase. He rose to his full height, a blade wrapped in white cloth stippled with black spots held in a loose but confident grip. Without further ado, he charged his fist with cursed energy and slammed it into the sigil. Rather than destroying the glyph or the brick beneath it, though, he felt the sensation of falling, and immediately knew.

He was being pulled into an Innate Domain.

"Shit."

When his feet touched down, he cast about himself immediately, blade raised in a defensive posture. When no immediate assault came, he took his time to observe his surroundings more carefully. The space was dark as a void, with an uneven path of warped, colorful bricks unnaturally suspended in the nothingness being the only thing separating him from whatever lay beneath. Far, far off in the distance, just at the edge of Nanami's senses, he could feel the faintest residual energy belonging to the Curse he'd tracked to Kazamino.

The fact that he'd not instantly come under attack suggested that this Domain was incomplete, which was fortunate. Incomplete Domains were still a hassle to deal with, but the difference between a Curse capable of generating an incomplete Domain and one capable of performing a proper Domain Expansion was akin to the difference between a bobcat and a Bengal tiger. Both were dangerous and could kill you, but there was very clearly one of the two that you'd rather have to deal with.

That being said…

Nanami let out a slow breath and rolled his shoulder as he walked forward. This place definitely wasn't a normal Domain, incomplete or otherwise. There was something in the air, an oppressive weight that went beyond mere cursed energy. Coupling that with the strange sigil that had acted as the entrance to the Domain, as well as the unnaturally pure state of Kazamino City as a whole, it painted a suspicious picture.

Pondering on such things would have to wait, the bespectacled Sorcerer realised, as a swarm of downright bizarre beings swooped down on him. He hesitated to classify them as Curses, as though they certainly possessed cursed energy, they felt far less like an ordinary Curse and far more like a shikigami, a Curse that had been bound and subjugated to a Jujutsu Sorcerer's will. After another moment of consideration, though, that classification was too discarded. A shikigami would contain two cursed energy signatures: that of the tamed Curse and that of the Sorcerer who'd tamed it. These things had but one.

As he weaved among them with practiced efficiency, lashing out with his still-bound blade, he got a better look at them. Each one of them was barely larger than a Fly Head, and not much more of a threat than one either, but what drew the eye was unquestionably their forms. Gemstones, was his first thought, gemstones with tattered crow wings. As Nanami destroyed the strange, Curse-like beings, the few that had flitted out of his attack's range glowed, and then launched tiny needles of cursed energy at him in a volley.

An attack of that magnitude would've only been dangerous to a non-Sorcerer, but Nanami brought his blade around to smash the attack out of the air nonetheless, quickly continuing the motion to destroy the remaining creatures. Dangerous or not, there was no reason to take an attack when nullifying it cost minimal cursed energy.

The blond reached up and loosened his tie, before unbuttoning his suit jacket and striding further into the strange, strange Domain he'd found himself in.

The iridescent brick path seemed to extend infinitely into the void, spiralling madly with no rhyme or reason and paying no heed to the laws of physics. What direction constituted "up" could and did change several times, as the path made several twists and loops that wouldn't have been out of place on a roller coaster track. Were Kento Nanami a less seasoned Sorcerer, this might've unsettled him, or perhaps even impacted his ability to fight. As things were, however, the ex-salaryman merely filed it away as another data point to consider regarding the anomalous nature of the Domain.

As he followed the path, he was accosted thrice more by additional flocks of the strange gem-bird constructs, and thrice he dispatched them with fluid ease. After the third flock, upon taking another step forward, an open archway of stone loomed before him where seconds prior there had been naught but the path stretching into the void. Past the archway, he could see the vaguest outline of a room, but most was concealed by shadow. Here and there he could see large, ovaloid silhouettes that seemed to shift and quiver every few seconds.

The contents of the room, however, were not the most pressing thing occupying his attention. The moment the archway had appeared, the cursed energy of his target had reappeared, incredibly close by.

Of greater concern, however, were the two additional energy signatures that he'd not perceived at all up until that very moment, both bearing power exceeding the pseudo-Grade 1 he'd tracked here. Granted, the Curse only qualified as a pseudo-Grade 1 on account of its troublesome abilities and not based on the quality of its cursed energy, but still. A complication.

One of the signatures was identical to those of the constructs he'd faced on the way through the Domain, albeit several magnitudes more powerful. The other, though, was distinctly human in nature, albeit not quite like that of a Jujutsu Sorcerer or Curse User. The second signature was rapidly converging on the room in front of him from a different direction, and even as he took a step into the dark room, a red blur erupted through the wall to his left, hurling aside several of the quivering ovals and coming to a stop in front of him.

The blur solidified into a raspberry-haired girl, clad in a maroon dress-like coat with a mandarin collar, beneath which a pink skirt could be seen. A bright gemstone twinkled just above her collarbone, from which Nanami could feel an intense concentration of cursed energy. A cursed tool of some sort, perhaps?

The girl's combat boots of the same color pressed against the ground as she shifted her stance, practiced hands twirling a bright red, wide-headed spear into position between the two of them. Even as Nanami sized up the girl calmly, her crimson eyes scanned him in turn, her mood made clear by the furrow of her brow and the downturn of her lips.

"And who the fuck're you?" the girl demanded, baring her teeth at him and displaying her sharp canines.

Nanami adjusted his glasses and fixed her with an unimpressed stare. "I advise you to point that spear elsewhere. I am not your enemy." His posture was relaxed, but he kept a firm grip on his blade in case negotiations broke down. "To answer your question, 'who the fuck I am' is Kento Nanami, a Jujutsu Sorcerer. Now, " his eyes sharpened, "perhaps you'd be willing to return the courtesy?"

The redhead regarded him warily for a long few moments before finally giving a "tch" and relaxing her posture slightly, leaning her spear against her shoulder. It was clear, though, that she could move to attack from that position just as quickly and fluidly as he could from his.

'Her cursed energy isn't on the same level as mine, but she's got the battle experience to make up for it,' Nanami realised, a sour taste biting at the back of his throat. 'Just what has this girl gone through that she's this hardened at her age?'

"Sakura Kyouko. Magical Girl." She said, pulling him from his thoughts. "So, what the shit's a Jiujitsu Sorcerer, and why's one in my territory, hunting my prey?"

"Jujutsu," Nanami corrected absently, "as in Juryoku, cursed energy. Very different from the martial art." He adjusted his spectacles again, and continued. "As for what a Jujutsu Sorcerer is, that is complicated, but the succinct explanation is that we are people who are trained to use cursed energy, and we use it to hunt down Curses and exorcise them. I tracked one such curse here to Kazamino all the way from Tokyo, and that hunt led me to this Domain."

Kyouko let out a "Hah?" of confusion. "Domain? This is a Labyrinth. And I don't know shit about curses or whatever, but the Witch at the end of this Labyrinth is mine. You got that, blondie?"

Nanami let out a scoff, while internally filing those terms away for later discussion. "Brats these days, no respect for their elders. Do as you like; who kills what is irrelevant to me. I am here to do my job and then go home." Under his breath, he muttered, "They'd better have my overtime pay ready."

Kyouko's reaction to his mumbled words was miniscule. Indeed, most would've missed it entirely, but the girl's eyes widening a fraction and her shoulders stiffening was not lost on Nanami at all. Yet another puzzle piece regarding the "Magical Girl" fell into place, and he very much disliked the picture that was taking form.

His contemplation of the Depressing Case of Sakura Kyouko was interrupted, however, as the trembling eggs that populated the corners of the room finally hatched. A cascade of small explosions surrounded the two, and from those explosions rose beings far less pleasant looking and noticeably more threatening than the gem-birds from before.

Long, many-chinned necks rose from morbidly obese, hairless bipedal bodies, reminiscent of a plucked chicken...if that chicken had skin the color of slate, stood on six spindly legs made of chitin, and had more rolls than a bread factory. Where wings should have been, each bird abomination had a pair of speakers, from which echoed a faint, old-timey jazz that skipped and stuttered unsettlingly.

The creatures' worst feature by far, however, had to be what rested atop their necks. Rather than a head remotely resembling that of any sort of bird, their necks terminated in a waxy, featureless humanoid head.

As one the monstrosities turned towards Nanami and Kyouko, the fronts of their heads splitting open vertically to reveal a sideways maw filled with misshapen fangs made of stained glass. The stuttering music coming from the creatures rose in volume even as the static and corruption in it grew more prominent.

As thirty-odd beings straight out of a nightmare circled closer, Magical Girl and Jujutsu Sorcerer took positions back-to-back almost as a matter of course. A spear was twirled into position and a cloth-wrapped blade was raised with cold efficiency as two very different warriors came into sync despite having met moments prior.

"Now, let's get to work."