Tore Reksten.
This is the name of Yuta's killer.
Sukuna has never heard of this person; the name means nothing to him. According to Yuji, he levelled Yuta without ever being close to death himself, an indication that he might be closer to Sukuna's level.
Even worse, he was seen using several different techniques and during the battle, told Yuta that his ability allowed him to take techniques, not copy them.
While Sukuna is taking a quick shower and changing his clothes since they'd just come from the lake, he considers all of this, confused about what has suddenly happened. Every calculation has changed. The chances that they will emerge from battle with the Great Curses with a win has decreased significantly.
He wonders if this is the event that is ultimately going to be the error of creating the Great Curses is now unrecoverable? Is this a death sentence for humanity?
That's probably dramatic.
Sukuna puts on fresh set of clothes and finds Sayuri serving Yuji golden fried rice, tea, whatever.
Yuji looks like he really just wants to die, because Yuta's death is demoralizing.
Maybe they're both being dramatic.
There's a little hollow chit-chat; the kid is explaining the insect situation, but neither she nor Yuji really care about that. She clearly heard Yuji say Ryosuke's father had been killed, so Sukuna assumes she's sorted out the fact that her little friend is going through the difficult experience of losing a parent.
Sukuna sends Sayuri outside with her food after she finishes serving them, because they have a lot to discuss.
There's been an agreement of sorts between powerful sorcerers of this age, to not kill each other. The détente is extremely important for a lot of reasons, and even Sukuna himself has been forced into compliance.
The only way to escape from this hellish world is to get rid of the Great Curses, a task that is so monumental in size that it's greater than any single sorcerer. Even Sukuna knew right away when they were born that he would never be able to kill one on his own. If he had a magic technique that allowed him to bypass the anti-infinity field, he'd still need firepower to do the deed.
For what reason did this foreigner travel to Japan, and despite evidently possessing power they could add to their arsenal, chose to kill one of their most important weapons?
Yuji can tell Sukuna is pissed off that someone killed Yuta, and also very clearly nervous about what this means for…everyone? Sukuna being part of the 'everyone' of this era has been, weirdly, one of their saving graces. Sukuna wants to fight powerful sorcerers until he dies; he's not interested in being killed by a cursed spirit wearing cheat-armor.
Yuji assumes Sukuna is probably also mad that someone killed Yuta because he wanted to do it himself in the future when he escaped from his cage.
"Did this stupid foreigner happen to mention why he felt he needed to come all the way to Japan to make everything significantly worse for all humans living on earth?"
The tale is quite something:
Tore Reksten came to Tokyo-2 nine weeks ago, claiming he traveled from his native land of Norway in order to investigate the origins of the Great Curses and see if there was any useful information they might use against Moewe, the Great Curse that currently ruled over Europe.
Extremely powerful, he helped the Jujutsu Society with this and that, and claimed that he knew Satoru Gojo, a claim that was believable because due to his position in the Jujutsu world, Gojo had contact with many international sorcerers. Since Tore was basically the same age Gojo would be if he was still alive, and very powerful, they would have been contemporaries.
Reksten told the students stories about hanging out with Gojo during their few meetups, and the stories were, according to Yuji, so believable that even at that point, none of them know if he actually knew Gojo or not. Reksten spoke of Gojo as a lovable goofy guy.
After working with them for one month, they fully accepted him into their ranks, and at this point, he gained access to the local network that the Jujutsu Society had. This included data the Jujutsu Society had when the cataclysm started and everything they'd learned since then as they kept the network updated.
There was some minimal connectivity between people using satellite, but the internet is basically just a forgotten technology of the past. The Jujutsu Society's network was self-contained in Tokyo-2, so the only way to gain access to it was to be granted access to the building where the computers were.
After Reksten became a member of the Jujutsu Society, he continued helping them and had some thoughtful ideas about everything.
While all this was happening, another settlement that was part of the Tokyo cluster was having a massive flu outbreak, and doctors were sent in to keep the settlers from leaving and spreading the disease elsewhere.
Shoko was deployed to assist Harajuku, and when she returned two weeks prior to the fight, she learned about this new sorcerer. Upon hearing that he befriended Satoru Gojo when they were teenagers, Shoko became suspicious and spent some time listening to his stories.
And realized quickly that Reksten was a liar.
Satoru Gojo wasn't a nice person when he was seventeen, and if he met another guy with significant abilities who was his age, they wouldn't have been friends. There's was one person that Satoru respected as his equal at that age and it sure as hell wasn't some foreigner. Teenage Satoru Gojo was rude, arrogant, a bully, and objectively one of the worst people she had ever been forced to spend time with.
Gojo had to do so much work on himself to become the kind of person who was still missed so many years after his death.
Her high school years were spent with a very nice and kind man who grew up to be a monster and an absolute giant human pile of shit who grew up to be one of the kindest and most beloved people in her life.
The teenage Satoru Gojo that Reksten was talking about simply didn't exist. Those were lies intended to endear him to the people who loved Gojo the most: his students.
Ten days before the fatal battle, Shoko called a meeting with a very small group that only included Yuta and Yuji. She told them that Reksten was a liar and that he was deceiving them. Since they were the people Reksten had gotten closest to, they needed to quietly do a full investigation.
They compiled all the things they could remember him saying, stories he'd told, looked up what he did on the Jujutsu Society's network, and documented his movements around Tokyo-2.
While they didn't know the full extent of his powers, they knew he was very strong and that fighting him was going to be a very big risk if it came down to that.
Reksten's searches on the network included numerous files linked to Satoru Gojo, the Gojo clan, sorcerers tagged with the Limitless ability, and many other subjects tangential to Satoru Gojo, his technique, or his family.
He also did a search for Ingrid Reksten, which returned no result. According to Shoko, this is a woman's name, so he was searching to see if the Jujutsu Society had a file for a woman who was presumably related to him.
At the same time that Shoko was having her meeting, Reksten, unaware that he had fallen under suspicion, made a trip to Kyoto after searching for information about the Society of the Righteous.
A merchant who traveled to Tokyo immediately after said they were approached by Reksten, who was looking in Kyoto, the closest settlement to the Society, for a girl with white hair and blue eyes.
When Reksten returned to Tokyo-2, several of the Jujutsu Society sorcerers met him at the gate and confronted him about his suspicious behavior.
Reksten accused Yuta Okkotsu of being the one who destroyed the Society of the Righteous, because there was nothing left there, only a crater.
"To erase the evidence of what he did."
Reksten said the Jujutsu Society had stolen something that rightfully belonged to him: a little girl with Limitless Six Eyes. His sister had become pregnant from Satoru Gojo and kept her pregnancy a secret from everyone and was secretly hiding the girl until he could come and collect her.
He accused the Jujutsu Society of finding out about what they were doing, killing his sister, and eliminating the Society to hide their crime.
Sukuna was cratered the ruins of the Society with his domain expansion the day the girl came to live with him out of his concerns that there was some sort of evidence of information discussing her existence left somewhere in the camp.
Since the Jujutsu Society didn't know anything about anything concerning Sayuri, and they were not even aware there was a living Gojo out in the world, the confrontation was confusing.
Reksten and Yuta Okkotsu waged a bloody battle where Reksten revealed he was much, much stronger than any of them could have imagined and had full control of at least four distinct innate techniques.
It wasn't that he beat Yuta.
He killed Yuta while Maki and Yuji were also fighting at the same time, and even though Reksten was burned out and in bad shape by the time he finished, Yuta's death caused Rika to become unbound with all of her copied techniques and she immediately went on a violent rampage. The sorcerers were forced to let him limp off because they had to evacuate Tokyo-2, the largest settlement in Japan.
According to Yuji, even when they exorcise Rika, they'll have to abandon the settlement because it's in such poor condition. Since Rika hasn't tried to leave, they've left her there for the time being.
Reksten has issued an ultimatum to the Jujutsu Society that if they don't hand the girl over within the next seven days, he'll tell Alghera they're hiding a Limitless user. It's the ultimate, 'If I can't have it, you can't either,' and if he plays that card, Alghera will kill all the Jujutsu Society sorcerers and probably Sukuna too since it's common knowledge they're loosely allied at the moment.
But if they hand her over, he says he'll use her technique to help them attack the Great Curses.
Sukuna is sure that this is very confusing for everyone in the Jujutsu Society.
Yuji mumbles, "We don't know anything about Gojo having a daughter, much less one that's like him. We've never heard anything about it, ever. And I'm not just saying that because it's you I'm talking to. I literally mean, we have absolutely no goddamn idea what's going on. If he has a kid out there…we don't know anything about her, where she is, if she's safe…"
Disclosure is unavoidable at this point. There's no reason to hide something from an ally that an enemy knows about.
Yuji asks, "What if this kid is real, and Reksten finds her? What if something terrible has already happened?"
A long finger points to the window and Yuji cranes his head to see through the window that Sayuri is sitting on a swing hanging from a big tree, eating her lunch.
"I found the Gojo brat last fall, and have been keeping her here with me."
Yuji's jaw drops as it hits him, and he mumbles, "But her hair is like yours? And her eyes?"
"It's a disguise, you dumb donkey. Brat looks like a miniature Satoru Gojo in her default color palette."
Yuji has felt sick with worry since he found out Gojo had a child lost out in this horrible world, but the idea that child is the healthy and safe girl sitting on the swing outside is sickening in a different way. He's not a fool; he knows Sukuna isn't taking care of Sayuri for moral reasons or benevolence or charity.
"Does she know? What you did to Gojo?" he weakly asks, almost in a whisper.
Sukuna answers, "I don't have the time or patience for any silly dramatic reveals or anything like that. She knows about me and who I am. There are no misunderstandings between the brat and me. She knows about all of you too."
Yuji asks, "What now?"
Sukuna tries to think his way through this situation.
"If he killed Okkotsu in a battle where he was fighting the other heavy hitters too, there's probably a very decent chance that he's one of the sorcerers of this age whose abilities have been amplified by the Great Curses. I don't buy a foreigner overpowered seasoned Japanese sorcerers for one second, and none of you should either."
Yuji says, "We don't have a way to know that though."
Sukuna answers, "I bet the brat can see it with Six Eyes."
"We can't hand her over. I'll fight you if you try."
Ignoring the fact that it was a stupid idea, Sukuna had a binding vow guaranteeing his care and protection. He wasn't going to tell Yuji that because it wasn't his business; Yuji was only learning anything as a courtesy and to prevent the Jujutsu Society from inadvertently exposing Sayuri.
Sukuna answers, "We need to keep Sayuri with us. The plan is to level her up as much as possible in secret, and then use her Limitless for fight the Great Curses. This is a pointless and stupid deviance that only endangers any plan to target Alghera."
Yuji is relieved that Sukuna's not interested in the offer to hand over the girl in exchange for an opportunity to attack the Great Curses now.
Sukuna adds, "Yuta's copy worked by emulating cursed techniques, so when he copied, he essentially created an effigy of the original technique. There are limitations to copies; time limits and access to his copied techniques within the domain, and so forth. You knew him well, so you know his technique didn't actually give him full copies of every technique he copied without limit."
"Sure."
"This person was using multiple innate techniques without any apparently limits, correct?"
"Yes."
Sukuna says, "There are circumstances that allow a soul and body to be separated, but no circumstances when an innate technique and soul can be separated. If he has three innate techniques in his body that weren't born to him, he either has three souls in that body that aren't his, or the owners of the souls were killed when the technique was etched into the body.
"The only way for him to obtain a functioning full version of Limitless is if he devours the brat's soul, which implies he has a way to forcibly remove and consume it. It's a fascinating technique, but I have not inconvenienced myself to such an extent to have someone else eat my pet project."
Yuji is disgusted and upset and confused, but also incredibly relieved because he turns and the little girl is still enjoying her lunch, safe and sound.
"I didn't even know Gojo was a dad all this time," he mumbles.
"I don't think that Gojo knew either."
Sukuna is also flummoxed by all of this, and he just tries to slide the pieces in place.
Yuji falls asleep at the table, and after some consideration, Sukuna decides he will let Yuji sleep in his house, just this one time, because he needs Yuji to be alert to make battle plans with him. Yuta is gone; he's going to have to rely on Yuji for anything related to the Jujutsu Society now.
If Reksten killed Yuta in a battle with the other sorcerers, he wasn't someone who could be casually approached. He also had the benefit of knowing all about Yuta when they fought while Yuta only learned Reksten's abilities at the onset of the match.
It therefore wasn't factually correct to state that Reksten was 'stronger' than Yuta as much as he had time to prepare and was the aggressor.
After the nephew is passed out in a guest room, Sukuna scribbles on a notepad in his study, trying to piece everything together.
Sukuna calls Sayuri inside and when she comes back in, she puts a half-eaten bowl of food in the refrigerator. It's not normal for her not to eat, especially since she was running around all morning, but her mood is gloomy. She sits down at the table when he gestures for her to do so.
"Ryosuke's dad died?" she asks.
"Yes."
"What happened to him? You said he was the strong."
Sukuna stares across the table at her, needing to access information that has previously been forbidden to him. He knows many things the Mother taught Sayuri, but substantial information about the woman herself was scarce. Some of the gaps were likely not due to refusal on the child's part, but because the Mother didn't tell her certain things in the first place.
For a minute, he doesn't answer her question. He needs her to tell him what he wants to know.
Sukuna says, "Was your mother's name Ingrid Reksten?"
"How do you know that?"
"We'll get to that in a moment. How about Tore Reksten? Have you heard that name before?"
"He's my uncle. My mom said she wasn't sure if he was alive, but that if he was, he'd come to Japan and find us someday. She said if she wasn't around, to go with him and do whatever he said."
Sukuna was almost certain she was going to answer these questions exactly like this, and says, "Do you remember our vow? That I'm not allowed to lie to you."
"Yes."
"Do you believe that I am smart enough to figure things out that are happening?"
"I guess?"
He locks eyes with her through her dark glasses. "Your mother was going to kill you."
"What?! My mom would never hurt me!"
Sukuna answers, "Your uncle attacked the Jujutsu Society looking for you, killed Yuta Okkotsu, and as a result of that, the entire Tokyo-2 settlement, where four thousand people were living a week ago, is completely abandoned.
"Additionally, he told them that if we have two options:
"First, we can hand you over to him so that he can steal your technique. If we do that, he says he'll help us attack the Great Curses. On the other hand, if he steals your technique, you will either die violently or you will experience something significantly worse than death and spend the rest of your life trapped in his body.
"Second, if we don't hand you over, he will tell Alghera the Jujutsu Society is hiding a Limitless user, and there is a general understanding among everyone that if Alghera finds out about you, she's going to kill you, me, and all the Jujutsu Society sorcerers and probably all of their settlements as well."
Sayuri literally cannot process the information being offered, because the existence of this person is part of her programming. If he is alive, he will come for her, and she should do whatever he wants.
Since Sukuna can't lie to her, and she's good at asking questions, so there's no reason to tiptoe around the issue. What happened, happened because she exists in the world—no other reason.
"But Mr. Okkotsu didn't even know about me. Not the truth."
Sukuna answers, "If he did, he wouldn't have told. Everything would have happened exactly the same way that it happened."
Sukuna understands now, why this child exists, how she got into the world, why the mother kept her away from the Jujutsu Society even if it meant risking her life. If he puts the pieces in place, they snap together neatly.
Tore Reksten was born into a Scandinavian sorcery house with the ability to steal techniques, a process that is almost certainly deadly to the victim.
Ingrid Reksten, his sister, was born with no technique at all, and people in this predicament are always forced to try and find ways to be useful to the clan.
Being able to steal techniques is clearly a very powerful ability, but it poses some problems:
There aren't a lot of powerful techniques in the west.
Most techniques belong to families, and those families tend to form powerful alliances in order to protect their techniques and vulnerable members. Picking off one member of a family might result in five families hunting the offender down.
In order to claim a powerful technique, in most cases, Tore would have to overpower a powerful sorcerer. This meant that while he had a path to the top, the progression would under most circumstances, require a risky and long path of gradually climbing the ladder. He would take a technique that was lowest level to get to the level above that.
There is presumably a limit to how many techniques one could hold in the body, and they wouldn't necessarily agree with each other. One couldn't put a fire and ice technique that both adapt the body in conflicting ways into the same body. And when capturing a technique, in order for it to be useful, he would have to learn how to master it.
A sorcerer having ten poorly mastered low-grade techniques could never beat someone with higher mastery of a simple technique, and some techniques are so complicated and difficult to master that it would take years to make meaningful use of them.
So, while this technique seems to have boundless potential, it comes with copious amounts of red tape.
Most of the hinderances came in obtaining powerful techniques without angering entire alliances of families. But there was a way to cheat this system:
Take a technique from a member of the clan no one knew about.
If he assumes Ingrid Reksten, aka the Mother, came to Japan with the explicit purpose of getting pregnant from someone from a powerful sorcery house so she could secretly give birth and hand the baby over to her brother, the story makes a lot more sense.
Sayuri was conceived at a time when Gojo was probably struggling with grief and extremely vulnerable to the kind of manipulation that presented itself as comfort. People like Gojo are notorious for being reckless in their personal lives because they have to be such unwavering high performers professionally.
The mother wasn't a sorcerer, so Gojo might not have felt like he needed to be on his guard.
A few irresponsible nights, she gets pregnant, breaks up with Gojo.
At that point, they would have no idea what technique the child would have, although there are six techniques running in the Gojo clan that are notable. They had no reason to think it would be someone with Limitless Six Eyes, just that there was a very high chance the baby would have some technique that was worth taking.
Gojo died and the cataclysm started two weeks before she gave birth, and one of the first things that happened during the cataclysm is that normal communication disappeared immediately. Cell phones, landline phones, the internet…governments had some satellite communications as they slowly collapsed, but most people had no way to communicate beyond their locale.
The cataclysm also came with mass migrations, people fleeing from one place to another place.
What Sukuna theorized was that Ingrid left a trail of breadcrumbs for Tore to find, maybe starting with wherever she was living at the onset of the cataclysm, telling him the next place she was going.
While leaving this trail of breadcrumbs, she gave birth to a baby with the most powerful hereditary gifts known to exist. Maybe there was a note somewhere, 'She has the same abilities as her father,' without a name or an explanation.
But Tore had no way to know how valuable the prize was, and the cataclysm being what it was, he didn't make it to Japan to look for his sister for a very long time. Considering the survival rate of non-sorcerers, there was little chance she'd survived in the first place.
Obviously, while traveling through the emerging wasteland while pregnant and then with a newborn, the easiest thing for her to do was to go to the Jujutsu Society, but if the Jujutsu Society got the baby, they'd obviously have a big fucking problem if and when Tore came around.
So she hid the baby in the Society instead, ensuring no other sorcerers, the Gojo clan, or the Jujutsu Society ever found out about her.
Ingrid did not teach her child anything about sorcery, not even in secret, except not to do it, because she didn't ever expect for Sayuri to be the one using her technique. She was, essentially, keeping Tore's prize safe from everyone until the day he could come and collect it, while Tore had no idea that the prize was of such immense value.
Eight years passed, and he finally made it to Japan to see if he can find out what happened to his sister, and he followed the breadcrumbs and found out his sister gave birth to a Limitless Six Eyes baby.
The trail led to the Society of the Righteous, which no longer exists, and all clues have been destroyed.
Tore incorrectly assumed that the Jujutsu Society found his sister and they were the reason the Society was gone and that they had killed her. It is public information that the Society was wiped out by cursed spirits, but anyone can lie about that sort of thing.
He infiltrated the Jujutsu Society and tried to find information about his sister in their computer systems, and when he couldn't find anything, traveled back to the Society crater and Kyoto, the closest nearby settlement, looking for clues.
Then he returned to the Jujutsu Society and was confronted by the sorcerers. He believes they killed his sister and stole the brat.
It perfectly explains why the Mother kept the brat a secret from everyone and even told her to stay away from sorcerers even if she was in trouble.
It's fascinating. It's diabolical. It almost worked.
Sukuna doesn't pity the brat, because there's no reason for that and that's not how his mind works anyway. He lays the cards out on the table for her and asks if there's anything in her memories that disproves this theory.
There's something she said a long time ago, when they first met, when he told her she wasn't allowed to hug him, and she said her mom didn't like hugs either, which he found a bit odd because she sounded like a very protective mother and Sayuri was quite young to be at the age where physical affection no longer occurs.
Sukuna can tell from her silence, as she sits lost in her thoughts, that she is sorting through her memories, testing his theory that her mother never loved her and was only protecting her power.
She is smart, and he knows if he's wrong, she'll be able to say so with confidence.
If she was born with a different technique, maybe it would have been different. Circumstances left Ingrid with an opportunity to crown her clan with the ultimate power, and that was the most important thing she could ever do for them.
As far as Sayuri was concerned, a normal kid might simply dive head-first into denial, but Sukuna knows that she isn't a normal kid. She already went through all kinds of hell, and had made peace and found herself living under the protection of her father's killer. Resilient people are resilient because their minds don't let them play these sorts of games to cope.
Sayuri has been struck by the curse that Satoru Gojo lived under every day of his life. He was a walking weapon, first and foremost, a person holding a power that everyone hated, feared, or envied.
The old men in the room desperately wanted a Satoru Gojo they could control, but they feared him when he made it clear he would never allow that. He had to develop his own vision for the future to defend himself against everyone else's.
When his students are gone, his humanity will be entirely forgotten because it is transient, while power is immortal.
Sayuri's humanity is irrelevant too. The only thing matters about her life is that she carries within her the power to end this age, and seeds for a great tree that everyone believes has been cut down forever.
She will spend her entire life surrounded by people who want to steal, use, or control her power. Some of those people would be clear about what they were doing, like Sukuna, who has never kept his intentions any sort of secret, and some of those people would become her friends and people she trusted.
He wonders how long it would be before she surrounds herself in her infinity to keep everyone away.
As it dawns on her that she's never been truly loved by anyone in her life and all the care she's ever received was just about controlling her power, she just sits still and stares forward.
In this case, the incredible lust for her power led to a massive outbreak of violence that destroyed an entire settlement and led to one of the strongest sorcerers being killed.
Finally, after an eternity, she asks, "Is it my fault that Mr. Okkotsu died?"
Sukuna answers, "The only person whose actions you get to choose are yours. You have the ability to decide what the future of this world will be. People are going to fight to take that from you, to eliminate it, to control it…this will not be the last time blood is spilled in your name. It won't be the last time. In fact, it won't even be the last time it's going to happen this week."
"Something else happened?"
"Something else is going to happen. We're going to go run some errands."
"Are you going to give me to Tore?"
Sukuna answers, "Right now I am the one who owns you and your power, and I have no intention of letting you out of my grasp until you do what I need you to do for me."
"But you have to give me up or everyone will get hurt."
"When you are strong, you don't have to let other people tell you what your choices are. He tells us this or this, but there are many different other choices we can make."
"Are you going to kill him?"
Sukuna's tone is somehow quite cheerful when he answers, "He's probably not going to get that lucky."
The brat is, before all things, still a child, and her sense of safety is the most important factor in controlling her morale. Sukuna knows that as long as she knows he will continue to keep her safe, she'll be okay.
As for this mess with Tore Reksten…
There can only be one Most Horrible Uncle in Japan and Sukuna is proud to say it's always going to be him. He doesn't take kindly to the challenge.
When Yuji awakes from his near comatose sleep late that night, he's a little surprised nothing terrible happened to him while he was asleep.
So many things have happened in the world, and it still feels so strange and so wrong to just exist with Sukuna like this, especially when he's living in Megumi's body.
Yuji wonders what the world would be like if Gojo had arrived to the school two minutes earlier before he ate the finger. Would the world still be like this?
Most of the time, he feels like none of the decisions any of them made changed anything at all.
He spent so much time grieving about Shibuya, but since one out of every thousand people was still alive a year later after that event, Yuji struggled with the reality that maybe only three of them would have even lived. That made everything Sukuna did seem irrelevant too.
Yuji feels like nothing good has happened in so long.
Yuta is gone, Tokyo-2 is gone, and the other settlements are struggling to take in all the evacuees. Things are getting worse, not better.
At the center of everything is the monster sitting in front of the television watching…old episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians?
"…are you serious?"
"Serious about what?"
Yuji points.
"I was very bored for a very long time. My DVR has a lot of episodes since the brat takes so much of my time."
Yuji sits on the opposite side of the sofa and Sukuna pauses his show. "She doesn't seem to hate you. Obviously, it's best that she was here and not with us."
"The fact you lot would have gotten her killed is the reason I have inconvenienced myself with childcare. It does not suit me."
Yuji says, "I don't think I can take care of her right now."
"No one is making that offer. I'm not doing anything horrible to the brat. She is obviously doing just fine. You're basically head of the Jujutsu Society now, so it seems like you have other things to tend to. But that's not what matters. I need to know everything that you know about Reksten."
Sukuna harvests information about Tore Reksten from Yuji, writing it down neatly.
"Are you scared or something?"
"With Okkotsu gone, we have to make some strategic moves. I don't expect you to understand."
Yuji says, "I don't really care if you don't like me, but it just kind of annoys me that you really go out of your way to shit on me. More than anyone else."
Sukuna looks up from his notebook and asks, "Was that a question? Do you expect some sort of answer? Looking for a shoulder to cry on? I have four and zero of them are for your tears."
Now in his mid-twenties, and frankly quite tired of Sukuna and all of his shit, Yuji asks, "A few years ago, I did a DNA test on your blood. It said you're my dad. Are you my fucking dad? And Kenjaku…do you somehow? Kenjaku, and you, and then me? But you were only fingers then."
Sukuna, who was fully engrossed in thinking about his upcoming battle, slowly turns and stares at Nephew with a rather neutral, empty expression. He says nothing, only continues looking into Yuji's eyes, blinking now and then.
"Yuji, do you think you are my son?"
"The DNA said so."
"Do you know how you can tell you're not my son?"
"How?"
"Because if you were my son, you would be talented and interesting. But you're not."
Yuji sighs. "So you didn't…with Kenjaku?"
"I am insulted by the question and refuse to acknowledge it. There was a man who had sex with Kenjaku while he wore your mother's corpse. It wasn't me."
"Are you sure?"
"I think that's something I would remember."
Yuji snatches the notebook out of his hand and throws it across the room. "Just fucking tell me how we're related! I know that we are. It is obvious we are. You look like me, except as a gigantic goddamned freak. You are closely related to me as you could possibly be. Tell me!"
Sukuna scowls and slaps at Yuji, who catches his hand, and then there's a brief slap fight; nothing serious as Sukuna doesn't want to destroy his own house.
One of them has four arms and the other has two, so Yuji gets slapped simultaneously with Sukuna's free arms.
"How are you going to have a slap fight with someone who has twice as many hands?"
"Just tell me!"
Sukuna groans and rolls his eyes. "Fine. So annoying. I'm your uncle. Does that answer all your questions? Are you happy now?"
"That just leaves me with more questions."
Sukuna kicks him off the sofa. "Too bad. I already have a bothersome child who constantly asks me questions. Go get my notebook."
Since he has no intention of explaining his hostile feelings to Yuji, Yuji just seems irritated.
Objectively, Sukuna knows Yuji has been top-tier for a long time, but he doesn't wish to acknowledge that except in whatever minimal capacity required now that Okkotsu is gone. With Yuta out of the picture, Yuji is both the strongest sorcerer and the last thread that might keep the Jujutsu Society from disintegrating.
Sukuna thinks the mission of the Jujutsu Society is silly and thinks it would probably be best if it fails, but the Jujutsu Society is training young sorcerers and Sukuna will probably need some of them in the future.
He needs Yuji to become successful as the leader so that he doesn't lose access to the kids they're trying to train, and he unfortunately also needs to heavily rely on Yuji in any strategy to fight the Great Curses.
Sukuna's nearly visceral hatred of Yuji is like that of a bird who freed himself having to frequently do business with the bird cage he escaped from. Yuji is too valuable to kill, but the existence of the prison means there exists the possibility that he will be confined again.
By the time that he heads up to his room, he's figured out what moves he is going to make and what he plans to do, but he's left with one order of business.
In an instant, his consciousness appears in the shadow, where Megumi is curled up in a ball.
"Megumi, let's break up. I found a new body."