81. Nullified Toge

"I'm home," Inumaki Toge said, grinning happily at his parents, his bright smiles reaching his eyes.

He thought that they will be happy. Ecstatic. Over the moon at hearing him speak to them properly for the first time in his entire life since birth. He even got himself ready with the cheers and happy hoots from the rest of the Inumaki clan members that are present.

But no.

That didn't happen. What he had envisioned did not happen.

That greeting, and those two words. What he had just said made his mother cry.

The sobbing, waterfall type of crying.

Drama unfolds.

She came hurling herself at him, tears, snot and all. Wrapping both arms around her son, Mrs. Inumaki sobbed her heart out while crying into Toge's chest.

Inumaki Toge is 164cm tall. His mother is 151cm tall.

Toge smiled and wrapped both his arms around his mother's small frame. It's so easy for his mother to disappear from sight with how small she is, just like how small Maguro is.

"My baby boy!" Mrs. Inumaki cried woefully, her tears coming down like waterfalls on her beautiful face. Maguro was struck by a sudden revelation that even while crying, Mrs. Inumaki still managed to remain dazzlingly beautiful.

A shadow loomed over them and wrapped Toge and his mother in a tight embrace.

That's Inumaki Haruka – Toge's father. He is 172cm tall. Easily, both of them disappears when Haruka envelops them in his arms.

"Anata~!" Mrs. Inumaki cried, glancing up at her husband, who also looked just about to cry. "Anata! Our baby boy! Toge! Toge he- Toge!"

"Yes, my darling. I heard it too," Haruka said to her, gently patting her head to console her. He knew she's sad, but also happy that their baby boy calls them Mother and Father. This marks the first time since his birth that he had called them without any repercussion from the cursed marks.

Turning towards Toge, Haruka patted his head and smiled, eyes red from holding back tears. "We're really happy, Toge-kun. Really, really happy."

Usually, the cursed marks power will forcefully compel his parents to do his biddings if he ever calls on them. It comes with a price, as always, and causes him extreme throat irritation. His parents would feel a tight coil around their body, like a binding that forces them to attention at the Cursed Speech. But now, it seemed as if Toge is speaking normally, and showing no signs whatsoever that he's having his normal throat pain. Haruka was glad of this part, and appears beyond happy that his son is now capable of normal speech, and as to how he does that…

How… how he does that…

It was as if both of them realize the same thing at once. Mrs. Inumaki stopped crying, and snapped her head to look up at Toge.

Inumaki Haruka did the same.

Alarmed, Toge balked in their arms.

"She's pregnant," Inumaki's father blurted out comically, eyes wide with disbelief as he stared down at Toge, grabbing his son's shoulders and gave him a panicked shake, then gave a quick glance at Maguro, then back to Toge. "She's pregnant, isn't she!?"

Hold on. There's an explanation to this. Just hold on a bit.

You see, the Inumaki clan's powers are inherited and kept within the family. The Heir of the family ascends to become the Head, and continues to hold the Snake and Fang's powers until the next Heir is conceived. By then, the Head's power would have waned, and the Heir would have inherited the power by the time they're a little over 3 years old. They could still wield the Snake and Fang power by drawing on the Cursed Mark on their skin, and its powers is still lethal.

Not as strong as the Heir's powers, but lethal enough to keep the clan's name strong and feared.

And the first sign that an Heir is conceived and the power of the Head is gradually waning – is when they could start speaking normally.

One might wonder how does the rest of the family members cope with this power. Being Inumaki, their blood allows them to withstand the Snake and Fang mark on their skin. Some chose to ink it on their skin permanently, some choose to use ink drawn on their skin temporarily during battle. Inumaki's father had the Snake inked on both of his palms permanently while the last mark inked on his tongue. Being Head, he is strong enough to draw the Cursed Speech's powers even with just one Snake held in front of his mouth.

A normal human could never have the Snake and Fang mark inked on their skin. They'd simply die.

The Heir holds the most power as they grow older, while the rest of the clan members including the Head are merely using the powers by drawing on a mark. The Head is there to keep the Heir and the clan safe, as well as bequeath the full span of the family's Cursed Speech and other techniques to the Heir and only the Heir, and this cycle will go on until the next Heir is conceived.

Panda chooses this time to pop into the warm family reunion and yapped up happily, "Ohh! Really!? I told you there's a baby, Maki."

Toge was beyond gobsmacked. And at this point, he realizes just what kind of things are running in his parent's mind right now, and his ears heated up, mortified with his father's flabbergasted reaction. The very idea of getting Maguro pregnant with his baby while they're still in school is just… its beyond comprehension. Hell, both of them are still babies in the Jujustu World themselves! If anyone is not ready to be parents, its them!

And he'd be really, really careful to use a rubber to avoid that situation.

There's a flurry of hoo haas erupting behind Toge's father, where all the woman and younger children in the Inumaki clan all whispered excitedly with each other upon hearing that loud exclamation.

That preposterous idea of a loud exclamation.

"Ohh! A new heir?!" someone old gasped in delight.

"At that age?!" a younger voice replied in the midst of the crowd.

"Oh, my Kami, was this true!?" another equally old voice was heard, sounding plenty charmed with the idea of a new baby in the family. "Oh! A new heir!"

"I don't understand, but we're supposed to feel happy about this?" a small child's voice asked, confused with the situation simmering in the family crowding around at the entrance.

"Oh, but they're so young!"

"The younger, the better," someone said, and everyone instantly gave him a very dirty look.

"That is not true!" Maguro exclaimed. Miffed with the assumption, her face and neck flushes in embarrassment. She finally gets why Panda kept blabbing about babies already. "We haven- No! That's not true! No baby! There is no baby Toge! No baby Toge!"

Toge, on the other hand, gradually finds this situation hilarious. He couldn't get his father's stumped face out of his mind and laughed happily. "I'm just Nullified, Father," Toge continued to laugh, his voice boyishly clear as he speaks, finding the situation quickly spiralling out of control, but in an extremely entertaining way. He patted his father's arm and laughed, "There's no way I will dishonour Maguro-chan like that. Plus, we have Gojo-sensei here stopping us from having one."

Gojo was laughing openly at Haruka's panicked expression earlier, but snapped back to his usual self-halfway through a laugh and glared angrily from behind his dark shades upon hearing Toge's explanation. Did that boy just throw a Molotov at him? What a snake.

Just like his father, Gojo thought to himself. Like father like son, that kid.