It had taken seven days for her to ascend. Three days through snow drift and storm, two through hail, and the final two through blinding sunlight reflecting off the snow-laden mountains. And all along the way she passed the remains of those who did not survive the journey. They all perished, soaking the mountain further with the weight of death.
How fitting for the creature that dwelled at the summit.
When Sukuna received word of a warrior seeking his head, most thought he would set out to kill her immediately. After all, the path leading to his massive temple was lined with the corpses of those who once dared to challenge him. And the corpses that were not strung up along the path were likely consumed. It was his nature, and none thus far had the power to gainsay him, let alone stop him entirely.
But the more he learned of his would-be assassin, the more intrigued he became. A foreigner from halfway across the world, a rare treat…a new flavor to try. So he penned a missive to Fujiwara, demanding they send their little mercenary to him. Let him take the measure of her skill and see if she was worthy to challenge him at all.
Thus, this moment.
Nadja Hikmat had been on her knees for fifteen minutes, executing a perfect bow, eyes downcast, her blade-ready hands pressed in front of her. She touched her forehead to the floor before him, a gesture of deepest respect. Sukuna smirked from his raised dais, Uraume looking down their nose at the woman with cold disdain.
"Get up," Sukuna said curtly, and he watched as Nadja rose, slowly, oh so slowly, keeping her visible eye downcast, the other covered by a black eyepatch. Smart girl. He'd taken the heads of men and women alike who deigned to lay eyes upon him without his express permission. She had clearly done her research before ascending his mountain.
Nadja remained on her knees, sitting on her heels, straight-backed and proud. Sukuna hated that even in supplication, there was something immensely prideful about her every gesture. It irritated him. But still, he was intrigued because as far as he could tell there was not a single weapon visible on the woman.
And she had no cursed energy.
"So tell me, little attack dog," Sukuna said with lazy contempt. "Exactly what was Fujiwara's plan? You've no cursed energy to speak of, and no weapons to harm me. What exactly did you plan to do?"
Nadja considered his words, even as she sat in perfect stillness. Sukuna studied her with open appraisal. She did not so much as flinch under his scrutiny. How aggravating.
"Lord Sukuna," she finally spoke, and her voice was silky and amused. "If I divulged my plan to you, there'd be no merit in trying to execute it. Suffice it to say: I am aware that I lack what your people called 'cursed energy.' But I am here to tell you, my lord: jujutsu is not the only magic that exists in this world."
Sukuna scoffed. "Great. A warrior-philosopher. Are you going to bore me to death by extolling the virtues of other religions and teachings? I know of you, little warrior. I am told you are one of the best in battle, and yet you appear before me with neither blade nor bow. And no cursed energy to speak of…"
Actually, Sukuna found that rather odd. He'd seen sorcerers and non-sorcerers alike in his long life: all had some semblance of cursed energy. Even the meanest peasant could see spirits, and a common ordained shaman could exorcise low level spirits. This woman lacked the means to do any of that. It was…puzzling to say the least.
It happened so fast even Sukuna had to admit delight and surprise. One moment she was kneeling before him, her face impassive and serene, the next she was suddenly before him. Were it not for the whispering hiss of steel derailing from a sheath, he might have bled that day. His second mouth manifested on his throat and caught the wicked little blade in its teeth, yet it could not shatter it and so he held it and forced her to a stalemate.
"You have made an egregious error," Uraume said with malicious amusement. Nadja did not bother to even glance at them as she was now face to face with the King of Curses. And as he struck, she was gone again. He caught a whiff of her scent as she appeared across the throne room. He watched as she replaced the tiny blade in its sheath, somewhere along the nape of her neck. It was gone, and he saw not a trace of any other steel on her, but judging from the location of that sheath, he hazarded a guess that there were plenty more blades where that came from.
And he'd felt the weird energy of the steel. Not cursed, not quite, but similar. He couldn't tell if it was her only magic-imbued weapon or if there were more.
Nadja didn't give him the chance to mull it over, and when she struck again, Sukuna was ready. He caught her around the waist, but she brought her legs up to plant on his broad chest, preventing him from crushing her. She was so damned strong, and the way Sukuna struggled he thought perhaps she had the aid of some magical steroid. But no, this was all her.
Nadja pushed off and leapt from Sukuna's grasp, slippery as a fish. She executed a tight and controlled backflip until she was out of range of his grasp. At some point, she'd drawn a sword. Sukuna hadn't even seen where she'd gotten it. How annoying.
"Is this the best they could come up with?" He demanded. "When are you going to do something interesting, my would-be killer?"
Nadja vanished again, and this time Sukuna couldn't follow. There was no cursed energy to detect, and so when he felt the telltale signs of a blade cutting through the air, he barely moved in time to not lose his head. The bright silver-toned blade arced, the tip just barely grazing his collarbone, opening the flesh easily. Blood poured from the wound, staining Sukuna's bare chest in crimson.
"Oh-ho!" Nadja laughed. "So the great Ryōmen Sukuna does bleed! No god, but tough mortal flesh that parts beneath my blade! And you know what they say about things that bleed!"
There she was again, moving with a speed that had Sukuna annoyed…and just a tad worried.
He unleashed his cursed energy, visualizing dismantling her as the slashes appeared in his mind's eye. The shape of his soul poured into the technique. He wanted to splatter her all over the stone floors.
And then she did something interesting.
Nadja Hikmat blocked every single slash with the sword, and he was met with the disappointment of only one slash cutting open her cheek. The question on his mind was how she could see his technique and block it? Sukuna paused, even as Nadja took up a neutral position, her body language and languid, as if she could spill into motion at any moment. Her eyes danced with a rare glee, the type of madness Sukuna saw in scant few warriors across the endless lifetimes he'd been around.
And it was the type of thirst and lust for the fight he knew intimately within himself.
This woman was as much a storm as he was, and she was only picking up steam.
Sukuna allowed himself a wicked, wicked grin. Malicious and utterly gleeful.
"Now we're getting to know one another," he said, more of a growl than anything. The woman never took her eyes off of him. Never blinked. "The puppy is a bitch with fangs, after all!"
She blinked out of sight, and once again he barely had time to catch her blade in a secondary mouth that opened in one of his palms. He gritted his teeth at the strength of her sword's swing. She was too strong to be so slight a thing. What the fuck was she?
Nadja wrenched her blade free from Sukuna's hand, slashing the corner of the secondary mouth. Sukuna's mouth opened in a rare grimace as Nadja blinked away again. With a gesture, he healed himself.
He would have to trap her in his domain soon. She did have weapons that hurt him. Who was she? How had the Fujiwara gotten her here?
He had to kill her now. The problem was she was so damned fast he didn't have time. She was constantly moving, never giving him the opportunity to track her, never where his physical blows landed. She was annoying.
But even a conniving little viper could not outrun him for long. He began to bait her, opening his guard just enough, and the damned bitch was onto him. She danced just close enough for him to reach out, then nicked him with her sword.
She was playing with him.
No, he wouldn't summon his domain just yet. He had to disarm her first. If she could block his slashes, she very well could mitigate the lethality of his domain with whatever those weapons were.
So he began the process of disarming her and Sukuna had to admit it took a lot fucking longer than he anticipated.
The sword was sheathed, and she came at him with two serrated short swords of the same weird steel, shifting her entire fighting style to one of simultaneous attack and defense. And for fuck's sake she was still too fast for him to disarm her.
He made his slashes smaller, sustaining them like a churning fistful of tiny blades, and he used it attack the hands and wrists wielding the weapons. She was quick to adapt, but he got his victory when the blades slipped from her injured grasp…
…only to be replaced with another set of blades, one of which he saw detach from her bootheel. He smirked. Maybe disarming her wouldn't be so tedious after all.
For every blade he took from her, another took its place. From various hidden places on her body too, all made of that same deadly steel. At one point during an intense trading of blows, he saw her spit a razor at him. He had to admit: he was just as aroused as he was angry. No human had ever faced him down without jujutsu to protect them. She was something else…quite literally. Even her scent was different.
It wasn't until she was reduced to one last blade, a simple butterfly knife, engraved with strange sigils along the handle, that he changed his mind about tearing her limb from limb. Instead, he took her by the throat, grabbed a limb with each of his arms, and wrenched the blade from her. She struggled in his grasp, stronger than anyone he'd faced, and not even a spike of cursed energy to explain why she was so powerful.
Then, he remembered. Something one of the old monks said to him long ago. People were sometimes born with disabilities or exceedingly low amounts of cursed energy. These were binding vows made with the divine, not the level of sorcery that most jujutsu practitioners used. These limitations were ordained by forces higher than any of them, and could not be changed.
Sukuna deduced that this was one such woman. But still, even the lack of cursed energy did not explain her strange weaponry. Some sort of foreign magic?
He pinned her to the floor, and she glared at him with an eye the shade of magma. The eyepatch over her eye had to be for show. He could make out the thin silvered scar tissue. Someone had harmed her, but he reckoned whoever did it had paid with their lives. This little bitch was vicious.
"Uraume," Sukuna said, not bothering to look as his attendant moved with alacrity. "Gather all of those accursed weapons she was hiding on her person. We're going to have a little chat with our rude but interesting guest."
Nadja continued to glare but remained silent.
"I know what you are, little bitch-with-fangs," Sukuna crooned. "And I will send you back to Fujiwara broken and bloodied. Let them see how Sukuna treats with heaven's would-be assassins!"
Nadja was thrown in what amounted to a dungeon, though from her assessment she could tell it was just a spare room that stank of deliberate cruelty and death. A converted torture chamber from the old stains in the flagstone crevices, the various implements on the wall. She already knew what the intention was, and she sat herself upright, cross-legged, and waited.
It was a long time waiting, actually. Eventually, Nadja slipped into a meditative state. She already deduced what Sukuna was doing: making her wait, stoking her anxiety and fear, or lulling her into a false sense of security that he'd forgotten about her as his whim dictated. Nadja scoffed inwardly. He would find himself frustrated with her. She had lived too long to be intimidated by such banal tactics. If he wanted answers, he would need to come and extract them himself, and even then, she would find a way to kill him or die trying.
That he hadn't killed her when he had the chance puzzled her. She figured he would simply consume her once his whim shifted to something else. She wondered if his little frosty attendant would be the one carrying out the torture, if and when it finally came to that.
There was also the very real possibility that Sukuna did not care what Fujiwara did and would simply toy with her for his own entertainment and amusement. Either way, this was going to hurt, probably for a good long while. Ah. She'd endured much worse. Not by much, but still much worse.
Nadja's mind became quicksilver, a slipstream of thoughts that she drained into a void, clearing her mind. She focused on the present, and shut her eyes.
Three days later, she opened them, and saw the pinnacle of jujutsu sorcery darkening the doorway.