lawly

by footfungus

lawly

24. Chapter 24

August 1995

She decided the souzu in their garden was her new favorite sound.

(Last week, it had been the ringing bells from the temple up the road. She had had to explain to kaa-chan that those bells sounded completely different from the ones at the church in town. The sounds from the temple felt round in her ears, but the ones from the church were like the wind. Kaa-chan simply smiled and patted her head.)

Iori Utahime placed the stool she borrowed from the bathhouse on the ground by the gentle cascade at the edge of the gardens near the back of her family's estate. (Tou-chan had told her that borrowing was acceptable, but stealing was not. She did not think this counted as stealing, since she planned to return the stool once she was done. Then, she realized she forgot to ask if she could borrow it in the first place…) The souzu emptied into a small pond where the cascade ended with stones lined around the edge.

Utahime pulled the skirt of her wisteria yukata up enough so the hem did not drag as she sat on the footstool and waited.

It took almost two minutes for the bamboo tube of the souzu to fill with enough water to tip sideways and dump into the pond. With a pucker of her lips, she leaned closer as the souzu tube returned to its balance, and the end hit a rock behind it with a low tunk.

She listened, eyes falling closed, and decided, A little higher than F4. Perfect pitch definitely came in handy for her technique. She would have lost her mind if she did not even know with which note to start.

While she waited for the tube to fill again, Utahime tested the note on her tongue. It was still a little difficult to make her voice drop into the fourth octave, but she hoped her voice would deepen as she aged. (Being only eight did not help either.) For now, to her annoyance, she had to rely on her cursed energy to… she tried to remember what her voice tutor had said about waves and sound, but it did not stick. She pumped cursed energy around her vocal chords, and smiled when the tone she wanted emerged.

Thankfully, the souzu finished filling a couple seconds later before she had a coughing fit—her breath control was still weak, and her tutor reminded her of it daily—and the tunk blended seamlessly with her voice.

Utahime jumped to her feet quick enough to knock the stool on its side. She cupped her hands to her mouth and squealed while her feet trotted in place. After spending all summer trying and failing and repeating until her lungs and diaphragm hurt to mimic sounds, she had done it on the first try! She could not wait to show tou-chan and kaa-chan, show them how much she had improved.

Her cursed technique could be useful. She just knew it.

"Utahime-sama!" a voice squawked from the treeline.

Utahime froze in place. She had not considered being found by her middle-aged handmaid, Umeko. Maybe if she held really still, Umeko would move along and search another part of the gardens.

"I can still see you, Utahime-sama…," Umeko droned again, unimpressed. Her voice was nearly as severe as the tight bun of greying hair at the bottom of her head.

Utahime laughed thinly and shrugged as though to apologize. It was worth a shot.

Umeko's eyes trailed the length of Utahime's skirt and landed at the hem. A frown took over her features. "Why are you dancing in the mud, miss?" she asked flatly.

Utahime glanced down at her feet, and was met with the sight of mud soaked into her shoes and socks and at least five centimeters up her skirt.

Crap. She got too carried away.

She pulled her hands away from her mouth and folded them with as much serene grace as her mother—as though this would convince Umeko that she had not found her prancing like a newborn fawn by the souzu—and stated, "Science."

Umeko was too old to be fazed by anything that came out of Utahime's mouth. "Science, miss?" she replied.

"Yes. Science." Utahime grabbed the toppled stool and began to head Umeko's way, her feet squelching in her shoes. "A very important thing to help with my cursed technique."

Umeko hummed and offered her hand to take the stool. "If you insist, miss." Her dark brown eyes pinned Utahime to the spot. "Then, miss, if you wish to avoid the master and madam discovering your," she nodded to Utahime's yukata, "science experiment, I suggest we take the servants' entrance and get you cleaned up."

Utahime perked. "I think that's a wonderful idea, Umeko," she said and began her trek back to the main house.

After several minutes of silence, Umeko said, "You have made remarkable progress with your technique this summer, miss," her voice calm and warm in Utahime's ears.

Utahime smiled softly and dropped her head enough to hide her blush behind her swinging pigtails. "Thank you, Umeko."

June 2018

I've spent too much time in Kyoto, Utahime lamented as she balanced the base of her cup of green tea in her right hand. The heat of the cup eased into her skin and joints before slowly working into her knuckles. It was not the worst prepared sencha she had ever had, but she could not call it 'great' either. 'Mediocre' maybe; perhaps 'underwhelming'. She settled on 'below expectations', especially when said cup of tea was prepared by the hands of someone who not only touted his greatness at any given opportunity, but also had the best tutors money could buy up until high school.

Years ago, she would not have thought twice about what constituted as the perfect age and steeping period of sencha leaves. Her only experience with green tea as an adult on her own was with store-bought pre-packaged tea bags, and she had found a combination of water temperature and steeping time that she liked. (She had tried matcha products that were so sweet she vowed to never touch the stuff again.)

Then, when Utahime accepted a teaching position at Kyoto Tech, she entered a tea-crazed environment. Everyone from the first-years, to her fellow teachers, to the principal of the school had strong opinions on brands, preparation, suppliers (different from brands, she was soon to learn), time to drink, and where on school grounds offered the best environments to partake. Over the course of eight years, she had grown to love tamaryokucha and kamairicha and, at her own admission, had developed into a bit of a snob in her own right.

For a man of all his supposed talent and prowess, Gojou Satoru made her a weak-ass cup of tea, and he damn well knew it. No one on staff at Kyoto would have dared to serve this to a guest.

Utahime shifted her weight in her seat to adjust her posture straighter. She sipped at her tea, eyes following Gojou from her periphery as he took a seat opposite from her at the coffee table. The furniture suited his tall stature much better than hers. His feet could lie on the floor—or stretch straight under the coffee table, as he was wont to do—while he reclined against the couch back without any additional movement. Utahime, on the other hand, was bound either to sit like she was back in etiquette lessons or to dangle her legs like a toddler in a high chair.

"So," Utahime prompted, inhaling the soothing aroma of sencha despite its less-than-desirable flavor, "what was it you wanted to discuss?" She settled her feet on the floor and braced for her back to ache in a few hours.

Gojou leaned forward to brace his elbows on his knees and steepled his fingers against his chin.

It was not often that Utahime (or anyone, for that matter) had the chance to see Gojou Satoru's feathers ruffled without the threat of impending doom and destruction looming. She might have barbed him and asked what had gotten under his skin if not for the hard line of his mouth. When he said nothing after a couple seconds, she raised the cup of sencha to her mouth again.

He declared, "There's a mole in Tokyo or Kyoto Tech."

Utahime held her cup suspended a hair's breadth from her lips. She raised her eyes to meet his blindfolded gaze. "You can't be serious."

"You know I am."

She frowned. "I won't let you casually accuse a student or a member of the fac—"

"Does it sound I'm being casual about this, Utahime?"

No. He did not, and that was the worst part about this whole conversation. It would have been a relief if his face had broken into that ridiculous moe character he affected to tease everyone on the planet. Unfortunately, Gojou had hardly cracked a smile since he shut the door.

"Do you know who this mole is?" she asked.

"No, but—"

Utahime huffed, "Then how can you possibly know there's a mole?"

"But, there've been too many coincidences popping up recently, especially around my students and…" He lifted his blindfold enough for one eye to peek out from under the edge and stared through the wall that faced the training field.

Utahime craned her neck to peer through the window of the same wall—difficult to do from where she sat across the room, but she could still make out the silhouettes of Panda and Fushiguro. Itadori's pained yelp echoed through the wall followed by the Kugisaki's sarcastic snark.

Whatever Gojou sensed (or thought he sensed) must have disappeared as he lowered the blindfold and returned his attention to her. "You saw the report about the cursed womb in Nishi-Tokyo?" he asked and crossed his legs so his right ankle rested above his left knee in a figure-four.

Utahime nodded. "I would offer my condolences for Itadori-kun's death, but he seems to have made a miraculous recovery."

Gojou's lips quirked. He took a sip his tea, no doubt saturated with enough sugar to slip an elephant into a diabetic coma. The gesture did nothing to hide his smugness about that particular piece of information. (After his grand entrance with Itadori in literal tow, Gojou's comment to Gakuganji about heart conditions had just enough bite for it to only be half a joke. Impertinent brat.)

Utahime cradled her cup in her hands and nestled it into her lap. "That why you kept it out of the report? To confirm this theory of yours?"

He grinned, more teeth than smile. "Always were one to catch on fast."

"How much trouble is Shouko going to be in for falsifying a report?"

"None. Yuuji was dead when she started the paperwork."

Utahime glowered at him. "That's a tactless joke, even for you, Gojou."

"That's 'cause it's not a joke. Yuuji's heart had been ripped out; dead as a doornail. Right up till Shouko had a scalpel and was about to start the autopsy."

Utahime, with less grace and poise than she intended—but that always was how things went for her when Gojou was in her company (or, if he were asked, when she was in his company)—took another sip of sencha. Compared to the conversation, this terrible excuse of a cup of tea was more palatable. "You think the mission was deliberately graded incorrectly so that Itadori-kun would die, then," she surmised, wishing that those words would have been more absurd than they sounded. What kind of system did they serve that made conjectures and sentences like these seem commonplace?

Gojou nodded.

She could feel the line between her brows carving deeper into her skin by the second. "I'm gonna need more, a lot more, than just a mission gone wrong to convince me there's a traitor among us, Gojou."

"I wrote up the report," he said and, with a flick of his middle finger, slid the folder on the table to her side, "but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't really make the rounds among the two faculties or if the copy you read was different. Don't even know if any of the higher-ups bothered to read it."

Utahime reached to set her cup on the coffee table and noticed, just like two years ago, Gojou had failed to provide coasters to protect the table from water or temperature damage. A vein in her temple throbbed. She gently placed the cup on the table despite the horrified objections of a voice in her head that sounded like her mother and swapped it for the folder.

A quick perusal of the cover sheet for the report—handwritten in his scrawl versus the officially typed and printed—provided no new information from what she had read before. Times, dates, locations, parties involved, and casualties were the same. Gojou, mercifully, remained silent (save for the taps of his index finger against the body of his mug) while she read through his copy of the report. Maybe she had underestimated his initial level of severity with this… theory.

Several pages in, everything appeared to be in order, until she reached the section detailing the change of status and grade of the mission. "Huh," she uttered.

He dropped his foot to the ground and leaned forward, the length of his torso nearly spanning the distance of the coffee table between them. "Got somethin'?"

She closed the folder with a snap. A thought occurred to her. She lifted her eyes and frowned until he settled back completely in his seat.

"What if I'm it?"

"What if you're what?"

Utahime sighed and clutched her cup, a purchase for her fraying nerves. "Have you considered if I'm the mole?"

Gojou waved a hand as he tittered, "Nah. Utahime, you're too weak for something like—"

She had pitched the cup and the dregs of tea like a baseball before she could really rethink it.

Gojou switched the position of his hand so that his fore and middle fingers sealed together as the remaining three folded into his palm. The cup ricocheted against his Infinity barrier and dropped to the floor—not tatami, Utahime praised—with a tink. Sencha sediment, apparently too dense to simply slide off Infinity like water, flowed like syrup along the edge of the barrier.

He held his chin between this thumb and index finger. "Maybe I should get a squeegee. Ooh! Or windshield wipers! What d'ya think, Utahime?"

Utahime knew her nostrils were flaring from her futile efforts to curb her temper further.

"Yikes, Uta," he hissed around his molars. "You won't get a man like—"

He was already smirking by the time she opened her mouth. "I. Am. Your. Senpai."

He offered a sloppy salute. "Right. Yes, ma'am. Or should I call you 'miss', since you're not married?"

Utahime huffed around a growl, "Do you want to know what I saw in your report or did you just drag me in here to insult me? Again."

Gojou held his hands up in mock surrender. "What do you have?" he asked, voice turning on a dime to serious and focused.

Utahime pressed her fingers onto the front the folder. "The report I received said the mission was reclassified as Grade 1, but there was a footnote that it could have been considered semi-Grade 1," she explained, fingers mimicking the path of her eyes as she traced the report in her memory.

Gojou's eyebrows peeked above the top edge of his blindfold. "You're kidding," he deadpanned. "Semi?"

She shook her head. "Why did you report it as Special?"

"I think a cursed womb hosting one of Sukuna's fingers easily qualifies as Special-Grade."

Utahime startled and choked out, "Sukuna?!" The movements of her fingers on the folder were short, erratic. "That's not even in your copy here," she accused. "How'd you come to that conclusion?"

Gojou sighed and crossed his arms. "Shouko wanted to analyze Sukuna's cursed energy signature in Yuuji before she started the autopsy. The levels were higher than when he was tested earlier that week." He raked a hand through his hair. "Meaning either Yuuji himself swallowed another finger—which," he cocked his head at her, "despite what you may think of my teaching, Utahime, I've expressly told him not to do willy-nilly—or Sukuna did. And with Megumi's account that he fought against Sukuna, the latter is the most likely case." He shrugged. "Of course, I couldn't include that in any copy of the report be—"

"Because it would have only proved that Itadori-kun wasn't suitable to be a host in the first place," she concluded. Her shoulders slumped, and she dropped her head forward with a heaving breath. Kaa-chan would have admonished her.

Gojou puffed a laugh. "Right. Which brings me to what I need you to do for me."

Utahime felt her eyebrows furrow.

"Keep an eye on things as Kyoto Tech for me." Though he did not use 'please'—he had not for as long as she had known him—something about his tone and the hum of his cursed energy revealed to her the request for what it was, trust.

It was one of the more bizarre and roundabout ways that a favor had been asked of her. "Am I going to live to regret this?" she groused.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and lazily shifted to a stand. If he were not as muscular, Utahime imagined the whole series of movements would have resembled a scarecrow flapping in the wind. "Let me put it this way: best-case scenario is I'm wrong, and you get to rub it in my face," he smiled, too saccharine to be genuine.

Utahime grunted in acknowledgment. She could not deny that that outcome was tempting; however, the more reasonable part of her hesitated, noting that he refused to voice what he thought the 'worst-case scenario' was. This side of Gojou, who held his cards so close to his chest that it was a wonder he could read them himself, was far more difficult for Utahime to read than the side that teased his students and made ludicrous moe faces at Yaga-sensei.

He returned the folder to his desk and locked it inside a file drawer. As he swaggered toward the door and slid it open, he made a tutting sound. "Before you head to the viewing room, Utahime," he waited for her to turn to face him, "don't forget to clean up the tea!" With a gleeful grin that would have put a rambunctious toddler to shame, he warped away.

Utahime gaped at the now-empty doorway before her brain caught up and barked, "You—you!" only to cut off with huff. She growled as she grabbed the cup from the floor and thanked the Lord that she already had reserved time in the batting cages at the end of the day.

"Where does that idiot keep his cleaning supplies?" she grumbled to the furniture.

Notes:

Thank you for reading this first chapter! I hope you enjoyed it.

I apologize in advance for time between updates. I am an incredibly slow writer, but I appreciate everyone willing to stick around for the ride.

Chapter 2: Sente 2 Roku Fuhyou ( ２六歩)—Black, Pawn 2f

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Act I: Hisha(飛車)—Rook

Chapter 2: Sente 2 Roku Fuhyou ( ２六歩)—Black, Pawn 2f1

April 2012

Utahime had witnessed Hollow Purple only once in a dozen years.

The fleets of fishermen along the coasts of Miyagi and Iwate had been struggling to make ends meet when their casts and nets produced fewer catches than before March 2011. It was to be expected—cataclysmic events would always change the environment, especially earthquakes and tsunami—but no less disappointing. To call the various fishing seasons 'failures' would be an understatement, but there was more at stake than the basal concept of what constituted failures.

Under standard conditions, the curse would have simply materialized like sludge, tar, or compost—grade 2 at most; however, between the number of people and the collective nature of their situation, their depression ricocheted and hit a single fish out in the reefs.

The official report stated the fish was from a mandarin dragonet school that had drifted far north of its typical South Pacific waters. Reptilian arms and legs had sprouted by the pectoral and back of dorsal fins, and the body had engorged exponentially. There was no way to determine how many times larger the fish-curse was before it crawled onto shore in Higashi-Matsushima.

The higher-ups had initially dispatched Utahime and a grade-1 sorcerer named Okusawa Chihane to check out the curse. Utahime had worked with Okusawa only a handful of times, but their cursed techniques complimented each other. (Chihane's missions centered around the northern prefectures while Utahime's were in the south, provided she could be spared from teaching.) They were not the flashiest of teams, but they got the job done. With any luck, she could return to her students before the end of the day, and Okusawa could be home in time to play with her baby before bedtime.

When they arrived on site, the curse was, by Utahime's best estimate, a trifle short of ten meters long. If it were not for the intense yellow and orange stripes along its vibrant blue body, the turquoise fins, and the gills (that appeared to no longer mind whether they took in water or oxygen), Utahime would have thought it was a exceedingly colorful komodo dragon that happened to be lost five thousand kilometers.

Okusawa wasted no time. She tucked a cluster of chin-length, jet-black hair behind her ear and erected the curtain around the beach.

"Emerge from the darkness," she murmured, "blacker than darkness. Purify that which is impure."

Okusawa's voice was higher than most of the female sorcerers Utahime knew, but still considered in normal range for a Japanese woman. Every time they worked together, Utahime marveled at the oxymoronic picture—Okusawa and her sweet, melodic voice uttering some of the darkest words in the jujutsu community.

"'Kay," Okusawa said after she finished the curtain and took lead. "Wanna handle this same as before?" She pointed to the other end of the curtain, behind the curse. She continued, "You do your vibration thing to immobilize it—right?—and I'll start dissolving it from the legs up, then back. Sound good?"

The curse spotted a seagull picking at insects in the sand. It lumbered the two meters that separated it from the seagull and swallowed the bird whole.

Utahime thanked God that this curse came ashore on a Thursday in April when it was still too cold for people to spend a day at the beach. This mission would have been ten times more complicated if non-sorcerer civilians were on the curse's menu.

"Right," Utahime responded resolutely. This was the next step on her journey to achieving grade 1. She and Okusawa would complete this mission and both add another success to their records—cut-and-dry, practically foolproof.

It was not.

Utahime walked around the perimeter of the curtain and determined the curse's resonance (a nasty 281 hertz) after a minute. She began to sing the matching note, increasing the volume until the curse froze in place and vibrated.

Okusawa dashed out from behind a bush across the beach, sand kicking up in clumps behind her feet. Once she reached the the curse, she summoned cursed energy to her hands and placed them on the curse's feet. Steam spattered and hissed beneath her hands, and the curse howled inside its mouth against Utahime's technique. Within a matter of moments, the rest of the foot and leg disintegrated, and Utahime released the curse so it yelped and writhed away from Okusawa.

If everything else went to plan, then Utahime and Okusawa would have completed exorcising this curse in five more iterations.

Utahime was never quite so lucky.

"What do you mean you can't spare anyone?!" Utahime screeched into her flip phone. She took another breath, to the point that her lungs and diaphragm complained against the pressure across her ribs, and repeated the resonance note. The curse attempted to thrash against the invasion of her cursed energy—its own innate energy nearly rebounding into her in one instance—but Utahime held firm.

Okusawa dissolved the cartilage connecting the curse's front left leg for a third time. The curse slumped to the ground with a pained wail as the side of its face hit the sand. Not ten seconds later, the missing appendage grew back, and the curse expanded another fifteen meters in length and girth. Okusawa swore and vaulted onto the curse's dorsal fin, dissolving the bones until it bucked her off. She hit the beach with a muted thud and a grunt.

Utahime cut of her note and spat, spittle covering the entire front of her phone, "The curse just grew again! Okusawa keeps breaking it apart—even a whole third of it!—and every time it comes bac—OH COME ON!"

The dorsal fin regenerated, larger than ever, with added spines as long as katana across the ridge to boot.

"IORI!" Okusawa bellowed as she regained her footing. "Keep it steady! Where the hell's our backup?!"

Utahime ripped the phone from her ear as a growl tore from her throat. She puffed out her chest, aimed her mouth at the curse's feet, and reached for the upper end of her vocal register. The sand vibrated fast enough to separate from the water. She seldom had the opportunity make quicksand with her technique, but she figured the situation called for it. The curse roared as it sank then stalled, half-immersed.

Utahime's voice cut out, and she gasped against the humid air. Once her breath returned, she bit, "I'm trying! I can't sing and yell at the window at the same time!"

Okusawa placed her hands on the curse's eyes. Its howls shook the curtain.

Utahime returned to her phone call. "This isn't a grade-2 curse! And if Okusawa is struggling against it, it's not grade-1 either! Send us some damn backup!"

The window replied, far too calmly for Utahime's taste, "I'm sorry Iori-san, I can't spare any more sorcerers even if I wanted to."

"What even is the point of you, then?!"

The curse lashed its tail—when had it grown a tail?!—that would have taken Utahime's head clean off had she not dove headfirst into the sand.

Okusawa hollered, "Iori, are you okay?!"

Utahime lifted her head and spat granules of sand off of her lips. "Peachy," she muttered. She pushed to a crouch and then a stand. She grimaced against the feeling of sand caught in the seam of her underwear (how it had gotten there, she never figured out) and surveyed the destruction of the beach.

Utahime swiveled her head towards Okusawa. "Do you think—" she faltered at the expression of abject bewilderment on Okusawa's face.

The atmosphere inside the curtain shifted. Gone was the sun; gone was the gentle breeze that tugged at Utahime's pigtails; gone were the squalls of seagulls, oblivious to the onslaught in front of them. The curtain, already 'blacker than darkness', bled onyx while electric purple splattered the domed walls. Wind scraped the sand off her face and burned against her smooth cheeks. Utahime felt an energy pull between her shoulder blades, and a sense of foreboding dropped in her stomach faster than the temperature.

Both she and Okusawa ceased their efforts against the curse. Okusawa stared aghast at a point beyond Utahime, her hands frozen halfway between braced for battle and slack at her sides.

Fight-or-Flight were at odds within Utahime for all the wrong reasons. The adrenaline response should have been directed solely towards the curse, especially one that she and Okusawa had been struggling to face for what felt like hours on end. Yet, it was nothing compared to the chill behind her.

All cursed techniques had sound, and each had unique frequencies that identified them based upon who owned them. Okaa-san's was A4, clear as a chime; Otou-san's a rounded A3. Utahime made a point to try and devote to memory as many of these tones and frequencies as she could, especially once she entered Tokyo Tech. The energy behind her, though, had none—even negative, if that even possible—terrified her more than anything else she had encountered.

Utahime turned around halfway to glance over her shoulder. The sight was unlike anything she had witnessed ever before. Gojou stood there with a purple, spherical typhoon balanced on the tips of his index and middle fingers. His hair swirled around his face, mimicking the counter-rotation of his cursed technique.

"Utahime," he said plainly. His eyes, uncovered, were as luminescent as the curse's skin. "Stand back."

Senses returned, Utahime and Okusawa skittered as far away from Gojou and the curse as possible in the curtain.

Gojou gently flicked his wrist so that his fingers tip forward. The orb shot from his hand like a rocket towards the curse. With each passing centimeter, the orb expanded exponentially until it was the same size as the curse and accelerated with morbid, pinpoint precision and accuracy. It swallowed everything in its path and hit the curse dead center. If the curse made any noise of horror or anguish when Gojou's attack made contact, Utahime could not hear it over the dissonance of resonant energy in the curtain.

In one blink of her eyelids, Utahime saw the curse vanish. The only evidence that it had ever existed was the trenches its claws made just outside the radius of the purple orb.

"Iori-san, what the hell is happening?!"

The window's shouts on the other end of the line yanked Utahime out of her stupor.

She shook her head and brought the phone back to her ear. "Yeah, what?"

"Oh, you're alive!"

"We are." Thanks for asking, jackass. "Mission complete."

"Glad you and Okusawa figured out how to exorcise it," the window said, tone back to blazé. "How'd you manage it?"

Utahime clicked her tongue. "Backup finally showed up."

The window made a brief sound of confusion. "What backup?"

Utahime was too tired to think about the connotations of that question.

She looked across the beach to the sight of Gojou and Okusawa examining the ravine in the sand his technique had left. He tilted his head at the deepest ridge, then pulled his phone out to take a photo. As though he sensed her gaze, Gojou lifted his head and snapped his attention to Utahime. That infernal grin of his appeared, and he offered a three-fingered peace sign.

She heaved a sigh.

Utahime supposed the higher-ups viewed her efforts in Higashi-Matsushima as 'non-performance', another black mark against her. They did not allow her to try to advance to grade 1 for a year.

At least—she had downed a whole can of beer at the thought—the higher-ups still deigned her worthy to be a teacher.

(After the scene was cleaned up and everyone returned to their homes, Utahime looked up the the size of a plain, average, non-cursed mandarin dragonet. Six centimeters.)

June 2018

The viewing room had far more seats in it than ever seemed necessary. Perhaps once, centuries ago, when both branches of jujutsu schools had enough students to make the Goodwill Exchange last a full month rather than a mere two days, the higher-ups would view the competitions from norimono2; the teachers would observe from chairs on the steps of the hondou with hardly a seat to spare. Instead, in the modern era, every person in the room easily claimed an entire row on either side of the aisle to him or herself.

Utahime sat in the front right directly beside the wall with eleven talismans. Each indicated which cursed spirits had been exorcised and burned blue or red for Kyoto and Tokyo students, respectively. Gakuganji and Mei Mei in the two rows behind her. Mei Mei's freshly manicured nails tapped against the screen of her phone constantly, the scattered ticking drowned out only by Gakuganji's intermittent throat clearing. Opposite from Utahime, across the aisle, was Gojou, playing some game on his phone. Kusakabe was supposed to be in the second row, but as of yet was nowhere to be found. Yaga positioned himself in the row farthest behind Gojou (Utahime guessed it was for his own sanity).

Utahime sighed and relaxed her neck against the back of the leather theater seat. Her eyes drooped half-shut while she waited for the group stage of the competition to begin.

Gojou's childish tittering shook her from her relaxed state, "And now a few words from our esteemed teacher, Iori Utahime-san."

Utahime's eyes bulged wide so fast she could hardly feel them as she gawked at Gojou. "What?!" she screeched before she realized he still had the intercom button engaged. The receiver in his hand was tilted her direction. She softened her voice, but mumbled, "Ummm, well, it's just…"

Amusement dimpled the corners of his mouth as he intoned, "Time's up."

Mei Mei chortled.

If possible, Utahime's jaw dropped even more. "Why you—Gojou!" she yipped, uncaring that it was broadcasting throughout the entire school grounds. Even as Gojou heralded the signal for the groups to start, she continued, "Do you not get what 'senpai' means?!"

Gojou disengaged the PA system and tossed the receiver aside with a careless flip of his hand. He ruffled a hand through his hair and settled in the seat with a cross of his leg.

Yaga's baritone washed over the room. "Satoru, behave."

"Thought I was, Yaga-gakuchou," Gojou said, content smile firmly in place.

Utahime rolled her eyes (how long had it been since she had let that unladylike habit of hers out?) and sighed to herself, "Of course you'd think that…"

On screen, the two teams sprinted from their respective corners of the grounds southeast of the hondou towards the central bank of the Lake Tenkei3.

Utahime considered the formation of Tokyo's students. The original five competitors for Tokyo formed a circle around Itadori—Panda and Maki at the front following the lead of Fushiguro's black Divine Dog, Inumaki covering the left and right flanks, and Fushiguro and Kugisaki keeping track of the rear. Given Yaga's shock when Gojou revealed one literally gift-wrapped Itadori, Utahime doubted his students had any time to revamp their original strategies to include Itadori. They would have to eliminate curses with Itadori as an adjunct, hoping he did not interrupt the existing dynamic.

Toudou exploded through a copse in a display of splinter fireworks.

Like that; interruptions like that. Utahime should have expected he would go rogue.

It did not take long for the Tokyo students to scatter and spread out the moment Toudou engaged their group and went straight for Itadori.

Utahime doodled a plump caricature of Pikachu in the upper right corner of a scratch piece of paper. Perhaps seeing Itadori face Toudou would give her a better idea of his abilities.

The twist Utahime never predicted, never conceived in preparation for the Goodwill Exchange, was that the Kyoto students would descend upon Itadori and Toudou's location a few minutes later like a murder of crows, each of them activating their individual cursed techniques simultaneously.

If Utahime had not known Gojou for as long as she did, she would have misconstrued his yawn for boredom when it was a misdirection for the clenching of his fist in his lap.

They're all attacking Itadori…, she realized.

Utahime jabbed the eraser end of the pencil against the desk until it snapped off and ricocheted against the nearest television screen. She had spent eight hours over the course of the past week and a half consolidating her notes and tailored them individually to each of her students, past and present, so they could focus on their strengths and even challenge some of their weaknesses over the course of the Exchange. Though she had no prior knowledge of Itadori's participation in the Exchange or information about his skills, it did not change the fact that her notes and ideas would offer them the best options to win this stage—which never included 'charge en masse at another sorcerer and completely disregard the objective of the competition'.

She had no earthly idea what had possessed all of them, but she could say in no uncertain terms that this was the most humiliating moment in her time as a teacher.

Then Toudou threatened Kamo's life.

Correction—that was far more embarrassing.

Gojou threw his head back and barked a laugh, his hand unfolding from its fist.

Utahime slid halfway down her seat until the top of her tailbone balanced at the edge. Her head cramped against the seat back, and her chin hit her chest, but those were minor inconveniences compared to her shame. She hid the flush spreading across her face behind a hand cupped around her mouth, fingers fanning over her cheeks. Her other arm hugged her midsection and twisted the ties of her hakama around the pencil.

At this rate, Utahime did not know if she could manage to hold out until that evening for her scheduled time in the batting cage. Between Gojou's antics in his office and before the competition started, and her students' decision to abandon the plans she had carefully crafted for them, her hands itched to whack something with a baseball bat; her bare hands would not do. It was a shame that all her meditation techniques on the train ride from Kyoto to Tokyo seemed to last only half as long as she had originally hoped.

A faint tap at the edge of her seat's desk stirred her from her musings. Utahime glanced up to find Yaga offering a fresh cup of tea. She scuffed her heels against the floor in her haste to sit up straight.

How many times was she going to disgrace those etiquette lessons in one day?

Gojou's head appeared in her periphery as he peered around Yaga's back.

Utahime gently grasped the cup. She brought it to hover under her chin and inhaled. She gasped, "Is this—"

Yaga nodded and strode back to his seat as Utahime gingerly brought the cup to her lips and sipped.

It had been over a year since Yaga had last offered to make her a cup of tea, and he even had used leaves from his personal collection of gyokuro, the one guarded by at least two seals and a sock-'em-type cursed corpse. This particular brand of gyokuro was said to be privately planted and harvested, and only those with industrious connections could get a hold of a quarter kilo of it. Even with the respect the Iori name held in traditional social circles, Utahime was not likely to have another chance to taste tea of this quality in her lifetime unless she was successfully promoted to grade 1.

One sip—one single sip—and Utahime's nerves found a foothold on reality again. The quality of tea leaves really made the difference. Maybe she could hold on to her sanity until her batting time. She would not throw this cup even at Gojou—not that she would dare waste Yaga's tea and efforts.

Maybe she could convince Gakuganji to lump some of it into her salary. It would make her the envy of all the staff and students at Kyo—

Gakuganji.

He had had choice acidic words for Gojou following the reveal of the very-much-alive Itadori.

Gojou, on the other hand, could not care less what Gakuganji might have to say to him and ignored every sharp remark about his disrespect and insubordination leveled his way.

"Utahime," he had said instead, "got a minute to chat?" Before she had a chance to breathe or respond, he was all but dragging her towards his office.

Gakuganji was blind (perhaps willfully) to her bewildered plight and offered, "I shall impart some last-minute advice to our students and reconvene when your…"—his lip twitched as though to curl in Gojou's direction—"business is finished."

What did he say to to the students?

Utahime twirled the pencil to face lead-down. She jotted down the names of the Kyoto students and which Tokyo students they were facing one-on-one while Toudou rammed Itadori into a tree again.

She added a two hash marks next to Toudou's name. It was amazing how far he had come since she taught him as a first-year. He was hardly the same sorcerer that dove head-first into fights with curses two grades out of his league even if he had a pretty good handle on his cursed technique. She was pleased to see that he had some sort of plan in his mind; whether others understood the manner of those off-the-cuff plans was another matter entirely.

She glowered at Gojou. A nasty quirk of his that must be contagious…

Utahime peered up at the screen in time to watch Itadori roundhouse kick Toudou in the face. Toudou grabbed Itadori's ankle during the follow-through and used the momentum to launch him across the field like a discus.

She tried not to think too often about how Toudou at thirteen years her junior, barely considered a 'former' student of hers, already ranked higher than she. It was one thing if Okkotsu outranked her—his was mostly determined by the special-grade curse attached to him, and he was Gojou's student; it was another for Utahime to spend over a decade trying to claw her way to grade 1 only to be lapped by someone she considered as a younger brother and had had to beat upside the head with the English textbook throughout his first year at Kyoto. 'Stung' did not adequately describe the feeling, even if she was proud of his promotion.

Itadori landed lightly on his feet and successfully executed an agile triple combo on Toudou. Utahime added three hash marks beside 'Itadori' on the paper.

The next couple of hours were spent watching her students clash with Gojou's rather than exorcise the curses: Mechamaru versus Panda; Nishimiya versus Kugisaki ('plus Mai' Utahime added to the margins); Kamo versus Fushiguro; Miwa versus Maki, turned Maki versus Mai, turned Inumaki dropping Miwa like a log.

Inumaki's technique really is ridiculously troublesome, Utahime thought sourly. She paused for a moment then wrote it out in longhand, punctuating the whole thing with an aggressive period, the graphite shading deeper than the rest of her characters.

Gojou leaned over the aisle to catch a glance at her paper. "Careful, Utahime," he said smugly. "You'll break your pencil like that."

Mei Mei's perfume wafted over Utahime. "Damn," she drawled. "Ease up on the pressure there."

Utahime scribbled a couple final notes for Mai before she dropped the pencil on the table with a raucous clatter. She needed to keep her hands busy, though, and reached for her tea. "Why can't they all get along and focus on the game?" she groaned.

Gojou snickered, "Must be your influence, Utahime."

"My issue is only with you!" Another sip of Yaga's gyokuro eased the urge to use her pencil in lieu of a baseball bat. The smooth, rich tang of the tea traveled from the tip of her tongue to her sinuses. No, not even Gojou could ruin this cup of tea.

Utahime checked the monitor that showed Miwa, still asleep like the dead, seemingly dreamless. "Well, I should probably go get her," she said, setting her tea aside as she stood. She smoothed the crease from sitting over two hours out of the front folds of her hakama.

Gojou made a perplexed noise beside her.

She placed one hand on her hip while the other half-cocked to gesture to the monitor. "I can't just leave her like that while cursed spirits are roaming around, now can I?" She called over her shoulder, "Mei Mei, she's in the southeast glen, right?"

"Yes. She's been in that area since she fought Zenin," said Mei Mei while she picked imperceptible dead ends from her light blue hair. "I don't sense any cursed spirits in the immediate area but"—she nudged her chin at the screen showing Kamo and Fushiguro ripping apart limbs of trees surrounding the shrine to use as fodder—"some of the other battles might scare smaller spirits her direction."

"Call me if anything changes. I'll be heading out."

No sooner had the words left her mouth and all eleven of the talismans on the wall burst into red flames.

"The… game's over…," Utahime trailed off. How could her students not have exorcised a single curse? No, that was not it; it did not explain why all of the remaining talismans turned red at once.

Mei Mei strode closer to the screens as though searching for further insight. "That's strange," she said more to herself than the rest of the room. "My crows haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary." She folded one arm beneath her bust and balanced her opposite elbow on the back of her hand, gently scratching her cheek.

Gojou leaned forward in his seat, nearly repeating his posture from earlier in his office angle-for-angle, and pressed the edges his palms together—relaxed praying hands that were in stark contrast with the taut line of his neck. He tapped his steepled index fingers against his nose while his thumbs rubbed along the curve of his chin.

"As much as I would love to say that Great Teacher Gojou's students exorcised them all…," he mused aloud.

Twice today Gojou had refused to finish his thoughts. This mole business had him more spooked than Utahime initially anticipated.

Yaga cleared his throat. He explained, tone clipped, "The talismans are programmed to burn red if unregistered or unauthorized cursed energy enters the playing field."

Utahime replied, but kept her eyes trained on Gojou, "You think it's an outsider? An invader?" Or worse: more than one.

Yaga curled his hand into a fist and pressed the faces of his fingers flat against the surface of his desk. His knuckles popped and cracked as he leaned his weight into it. He made a determined noise in his closed mouth. "I'll go to Tengen and see what happened to his barriers. Mei, stay here and keep an eye on the students' whereabouts. Gakuganji-gakuchou, Satoru, Iori-san, see to the students' safety. I'll call Kusakabe and get him up to speed."

Mei Mei locked eyes with Utahime. "I'll keep you updated."

Gojou clapped his hands upon standing. "Come on, Ojii-chan," he crooned. "Time for your walk. Not too fast, though!" He turned his nose in the air. "I know old geezers don't do well with exercising after you eat"—he tilted his head in Gakuganji's direction—"or exorcising, now that I think about it."

Yaga gruffed, "Satoru!"

Utahime broke for the door. "Let's go, then."

Notes:

1. There will be a fair amount of shogi referenced in this fic. How things move will become clearer in upcoming chapters.

2. Norimono were a variation of Japanese litter used to carry nobility.

3. Since there isn't a whole lot of detail about the school grounds specifically in canon, I thought it would be fun to give some of the landmarks names. Tenkei means "a (divine) revelation".

I am blown away by the support for this fic! Thank you so much for all of your kind comments and questions. (And some of you even commented twice!) This chapter was initially going to be around 10k+ words, but the more I wrote and edited, the more I realized that this was going to be a mess of a chapter if I did not split it into two or three separate ones.

Hopefully, this chapter was worth the wait and I can finish editing the next one within the next couple weeks.

Again, thank you so much for reading.

If you're interested, you can find me on tumblr.

Chapter 3: Gote 8 Yon Fuhyou ( ８四歩)—White, Pawn 8d

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Act I: Hisha (飛車)—Rook

Chapter 3: Gote 8 Yon Fuhyou ( ８四歩)—White, Pawn 8d

June 2018

As Utahime ran alongside Gakuganji and Gojou—who had decided to run on the spine of the neribei1 for reasons she would never understand—she bemoaned the loss of her new cup of tea left in the viewing room.

Even if the tea was still around after she and the rest of the faculty finished with this emergency, it would undoubtedly be cold, and one simply did not reheat Yaga's gyokuro (and microwaving it was borderline blasphemous).

Though still scraping for some silver lining, Utahime knew that her chances of savoring that gyokuro in hopes of her sanity surviving another Goodwill Exchange in Gojou's proximity were long gone. The memories of the two sips she had before the event dissolved into (more than usual) chaos would have to hold her over until next year.

The peak of the curtain appeared in the air. The beginning of the curve spread nearly flat until it broke and sloped, threatening to engulf the entire area that contained their students.

She hollered, "Gojou! Go on ahead before the curtain comes down!"

He called back, "Not gonna work."

"Huh?!"

"It's nearly complete anyway." He hopped down in front of Utahime as they approached the finalized curtain and explained, "Whoever created this curtain traded speed of the visual effect for the practical one." He laced his fingers and pressed them away from his chest until his knuckles cracked. "Now," he said and held one hand up to the curtain, "all that's left is to break—"

An electric charge surged through the dome, bounced off Gojou's hand, and splintered the stone at his feet.

Conduits and currents, if Utahime remembered her physics classes correctly—not that she would bet any of her own money on it (and Mei would sooner donate to charity).

Gojou staggered backward from the shock of the curtain. His mouth parted slightly at the small plumes of smoke curling at his fingertips, no doubt protected from the burn by Infinity.

Utahime chose to take the high road and bit back what would have been a delicious 'Told'ya so'.

Gakuganji made a sharp noise of amusement in his throat.

"Huh," Gojou uttered.

Admittedly, what happened next was not Utahime's brightest idea. Any sane person who just saw a sorcerer of Gojou's caliber be repelled by a curtain would have taken a moment to assess the situation and come at it from another direction.

But this curtain seemed strange. The sound was not what she expected from any number of standard curtain combinations—keep out humans (close to B2)2, keep curses in (typically 900 hertz), and many other permutations. What bothered her, was how it sounded similar, if a touch inconsistent, to the frequency of Gojou's cursed energy, which on a bad day sounded purer than a C4 tuning fork.

The curtain wavered momentarily. A blip that Utahime would have missed if she had not been watching.

It was a foolish, feckless thing to do, but if their students were in any sort of danger (beyond what was established for the Exchange), they needed to get through the curtain. With that in mind, Utahime raised her right fingers to the point where the dome tipped almost vertical and pressed against the surface.

She would have stumbled forward had the nerves and adrenaline in her gut not fired her reflexes. Her hand slipped beyond the curtain.

She swiveled her head towards Gojou. "Hang on a second…," she grumbled. "Why can't you get through"—she waved her right arm aimlessly—"but I can?"

The pinch of Gojou's eyebrows was pronounced enough that Utahime could see it under the blindfold. He started, "And you didn't have to—"

She shook her head. No cursed techniques or frequencies or harmonic resonances; only Utahime standing with half her arm shoved through the curtain.

Gojou's scoff was half intrigued, half amused. "I see."

"Care to share with the rest of the class?" she asked, retracting her arm.

He smirked and flapped his hand sloppily at the curtain. "In exchange for denying one Gojou Satoru"—his whole upper body followed the shrug of his shoulders as a gesture to his person—"this curtain allows everyone else access."

Utahime hated that that explanation made sense, but to what end? What was worth this much trouble for the enemy to attack students during an inter-school melee and block only Gojou from entering the fray? And surely whoever planned this knew it was only a matter of time until he shattered the curtain. It seemed moot either way.

There were too many variables at the moment. She would have to ruminate on these questions later.

Gojou cocked his head at the curtain. "Go on ahead, Ojii-chan, Utahime. Be there in," he groaned as though running complicated calculations in his mind, "twelve minutes tops."

Utahime rolled her eyes before she bowed her head slightly to Gakuganji and stepped out of his way. She said evenly, "After you, sir."

March 1993

The smell of rain hung in the air.

Utahime snuggled deeper into her futon. The pitter-patter of the beginnings of a shower came from her ceiling. She rubbed her fists against her eyes and stretched her legs until the crick in her back released. Her leg slipped out from under the sheet and duvet until the cool spring morning breeze stung her toes and she pulled it back under the safety of her bedding.

She blinked slowly, adjusting to the grey light filling her room.

Rain—spring was here.

Utahime reached for her robe at the foot of the futon. It felt sticky and a little too heavy to be completely comfortable, but it was still too cold to walk around the house and the engawa without it. She slipped on her house slippers and padded across the room to the shouji.

Utahime pressed her ear against the small gap between the panels of shouji. There was very little noise out on the engawa; even less than when the servants, with their light footsteps, went back-and-forth between their quarters and her parents' bedroom for whatever tasks they had. A shy smile crossed her face.

Normally, she would have waited for Umeko to come in and help her dress, but this morning Utahime wanted to watch the rain herself.

She pulled the shouji aside enough that she could squeeze through, then slid it closed behind her.

The rain was heavier than when she first woke up, but not so hard that the amado3 had to be added. She wondered if kaa-chan would allow her to play in it later if she promised to wear boots and carry a golf umbrella. A part of her did not want to wait, though. "You'll catch a cold. It's still too cold," kaa-chan would say. The thought was enough (this time) for Utahime to change her mind about taking a running leap off the end of the engawa into the garden and the nearest puddle.

Instead, she held on to a pillar for support so she could lean past the engawa and hold her palm out beyond the overhang of the roof. The rain was chilly against her skin, and she had to pull herself back under the roof to dry off her hand. She shoved it under her armpit to warm her prickling fingertips.

She sat with her legs crossed beneath her. The rain continued its gentle musical ensemble, and Utahime began to sing, "The sun's behind the clouds, time for the rain to come down. Rain for the trees, rain for the birds, rain for the fish, and you and me."

The quiet shuffling of slippers against the engawa caught her attention.

"What are you singing there, hibarin4?" Tou-chan's voice was steady behind her.

"A song," she replied. Her eyes followed the fall of a water droplet from the edge of the roof. It splattered in a puddle under the edge of the engawa.

Tou-chan dropped to sit next to her. "About what?" he asked with a chuckle, poking her in the side. He wrapped her into a hug while she squealed delightedly.

Utahime laughed, "Tou-chan! That tickles!"

He bumped her with the side of his head and repeated, "What is your song for?"

"It's a rain song," Utahime said, leaning her back against his arm. "I like the rain."

She felt tou-chan sigh. "So do I. This kind of rain is nice to wake up to. Just like spring should be. It'll be good for the cherry blossoms when they bloom."

"Tou-chan?"

He hummed in the back of his throat.

"Rain makes a lot of difference sounds."

"What do you mean?"

Utahime scooted on her bottom to look at the garden and pointed. "The rain sounds different in the trees than it does on the roof. Why does it do that?"

"Oh… Well, remember how we talked about sound the other day?"

Utahime nodded enthusiastically, the short pigtails tied on top of her head bouncing against her forehead.

"And do you remember what I said about sound?"

Utahime pressed her lips together. Her eyes passed over the reeds around the koi pond, then the wind chime, and finally tou-chan. She held her breath for a beat, then two, before she said, "Nope."

He turned his head into his shoulder and cleared his throat. "They sound different, hibarin, because it's not the sound of the rain you're hearing, but what it's hitting."

"Hitting?"

"Yeah," he breathed. "Just like if I hit two different things they'll make different sounds. See—" He jumped to his feet and stepped over to the column and stood beneath the wind chimes. He rapped his knuckles against the pillar twice.

Utahime perked up. "G 5!" she cheered.

Tou-chan asked, "Is that what it is?" He huffed a laugh. "Kaa-chan has always been better at that…" He lifted his hand and flicked the bronze wind chime. It rang with a wide F 3 tone and swung backwards until it hit the clapper again. Another F 3 filled the garden. Tou-chan knelt beside her and pointed at the wind chime. "And did you see that it's the same note even when I didn't hit it?" Utahime nodded. "It's not because I hit the post or the wind chime, but those are just their natural sounds."

He settled on his rear to sit cross-legged. "So"—he clapped one hand on her knee and the other on his—"what do you think that means about the rain?"

Utahime rocked to-and-fro, nose crinkled in thought. "That…," she tried. "That the sounds are because the trees are the trees and the roof is the roof?" She pointed at the canopy of the tree. "So if I hit the tree, too, then it will make the same sound and tone like when the rain hits it?"

Tou-chan grinned and ruffled her hair. "Spot on, hibarin!"

Utahime giggled, pressing her head up against his hand. "Does that mean that the roof will always make that sound when something hits it?" she asked.

"Mhmm," he hummed. "There's a fancy name for that called 'resonant frequency', but you don't need to worry about that, yet."

She tested the word on her tongue, "Re-son-ant… free queen's tea?"

Otou-san chuckled, "Not exactly, but close. Now"—he pushed to his feet again with a stifled groan and cracking knees—"let's go get some breakfast. Kaa-chan should be finished waking up now."

Utahime wanted to groan, but caught herself, remembering what kaa-chan and Umeko said about young ladies. Instead, she said, "I wanted to stay and watch the rain."

Tou-chan held his hand out for her to take. Once he had a grasp on her hand, he lifted her to stand. "We'll ask Genjirou to pull back the shouji so we can watch over breakfast. Sound good?" He walked with shortened strides so she could keep up.

Utahime beamed. "I'd like that, tou-chan."

June 2018

It was like stepping through an isolated shower of mist of tacks, a cloud burst without the downpour. The curtain's frequency sang around her in droplets that never made her clothes wet, but pinged and pricked at the exposed skin on her body.

Utahime and Gakuganji emerged on the other side of the curtain. She checked the skin on the back of her hands; no blood or scratches. The stinging sensation began to dissipate. The humid air that normally felt heavy soothed what was left of the pain.

A sense of trepidation sat in her stomach for a beat. The sound of the curtain's interior was even closer in frequency to Gojou's resonance than the exterior with none of the steady waves that emanated from him. From a technical standpoint, it was complicated—it would have to be to keep Gojou out—yet unsteady, maybe even incomplete. Compared to one of Ijichi or Nitta's curtains, it hardly had a solid foundation. Was the other trade-off stability in exchange for strength?

The presence of intense cursed energy weighed down the air in the hemisphere.

Don't tell me there's a special-grade here… Utahime thought, wiping the sweat beading at the nape of her neck.

The clops of heavy footfalls beyond the first torii drew her and Gakuganji's attentions.

A bald man with umber skin descended the stairs that ended directly beneath the torii. "No… hey, hey, hey," he seethed. "Wait a minute. This wasn't the deal." He loosely turned the haft of the ax in his left hand. The blade nearly scraped against his leg and leather apron with each rotation. "Who the hell are you two," he demanded, "and where is Gojou Satoru?" Topaz eyes gleamed menacingly from behind the black mask that surrounded his eyes and stretched down the length of his nose. "I was promised a man tall enough to make a coat rack!"

He was strong both in cursed energy—or was that just the measure of his insanity?—and muscle, but not enough to cause the crackling in the air. Utahime dropped her right foot back and pivoted to face the intruder sideways.

"That damn baldie tricked me…" he hissed. "I want my coat rack!"

"Utahime," Gakuganji said. "Go find the students. Ensuring their safety is our top priority now."

"Yes, sir," she acknowledged with a curt nod.

"Avoid fighting unless strictly necessary."

Rack Fanatic protested, "At least let me use the woman! She'd make a decent purse." His eyes flitted to her face and amended, "But not if the rest of you is scarred."

Utahime felt her lip begin to curl, but sprinted in the direction of the glen where Miwa had fallen asleep. Of the grounds used for the Exchange, it was the farthest point from the hondou, and with no knowledge of how many curses and curse users had invaded, she had no time to spare.

Not five minutes into the trek, her phone chimed in the pocket sewn in the sleeve of her kosode. She stuck her hand inside the pocket and fished out the phone. A cursory glance at the screen revealed Nishimiya's name. At least everyone still had cell service inside the curtain.

Nishimiya's voice teetered on the edge of panic. "Sensei!" she called.

The whoosh of wind over the phone grated against Utahime's ear. Nishimya must be flying.

Nishimiya grunted, "I have… Inumaki," and followed with a strained mutter. "How is he so heavy? He's barely taller than Miwa."

"Focus, Nishimiya," Utahime bit as she bounded over the bridge that crossed the tail stream connected to Lake Tenkei.

"Inumaki's out cold and bleeding. What am I supposed to do? The curtain's still—"

"It's fine. You'll get through," Utahime panted. "It's a curtain for Gojou. Take Inumaki to see Ieiri and stay with her."

"But—"

"Mei has eyes on Miwa and I've almost reached her." She felt a repetition was in order. "Stay with Ieiri. Help how you can. I'll be back soon."

Nishimiya hesitated on the other end, but relented. "Okay, sensei."

Another call came through before Utahime could hang up.

"Kusakabe," she acknowledged as she vaulted over a wall impeding the path around the gardens. The boom of an explosion crackled from the phone.

Kusakabe coughed, "Sorry, someone on this side is having fun with the sand—" A hissed 'shit!' followed closely by a crash and a grunt filtered through the receiver.

His opponent must have been wreaking havoc on the zen garden. A shame; Yaga spent man-years tending to its maintenance. The stones would have to be replaced and sand raked smooth again. If the surrounding walls were damaged as well, the repairs would take months.

"You got eyes on the kids, yet?" Kusakabe wheezed once the static around him had died down enough to be heard.

"No, but Mei's keeping track of them. I'm almost to Miwa." Her sense of distance was always an issue, but she knew years ago it took her about seven minutes to run to that glen. Running with only one arm slowed her down, though. "Just hurry up. You'll get through the curtain no problem. Gojou'll catch up in a few minutes."

"What does that—"

Utahime hung up and stowed her phone. As much as she hoped that Kusakabe made it out of his battle all right, neither of them had the time for a chat. She had to get to Miwa before another curse or one of the attacking curse users reached her or worse.

This whole situation would have been so much simpler if Inumaki had not put Miwa to sleep. Could he have picked a more inconvenient way to incapacitate her?

No, he could not have, but he also could not have known that a group of curse users and a special-grade would attack the school. Yet… if Utahime considered Gojou's warning—hard to believe that happened shy of only three hours ago—it was entirely possible that Inumaki did know.

A sonorous strum of an electric guitar back in Gakuganji's direction echoed in her ear. Are these guys who Gojou was talking about? she thought. Are they here for Itadori-kun?

A blare like a buzzer zinged through her veins, and a chill shot down her spine as a figure appeared behind her with a breathy laugh.

Utahime crouched low and shot forward in a tucked roll, out of reach of the sword's downward arc. She pivoted on the ball of her foot to face her opponent.

Strands of charcoal hair drifted down as a shower in the space between her and her opponent.

If not for the fact that the laugh was masculine, Utahime would have thought that he was a woman. The long, bottle-blond hair tied in a ponytail on the side of his head and the purple eyeliner art on his cheeks did not sway her knee-jerk impression, either. What concerned her more—with an appearance that raucous, how had she not noticed him before? There was nothing to hide behind between the walls surrounding the gardens, and if he had followed behind her, she would have heard his shoes clacking against the stones. Furthermore, his resonance was like holding a microphone up to a speaker and scraped roughly against her nerves.

Human or curse user, if his resonance had not given him away at the last moment, Utahime might have lost more than just a few centimeters of hair.

He pouted and whined, "Damn. I thought I had you. How'd you know I was there?"

"Thanks for trimming my split ends," she replied, tone clipped, sardonic. Her eyes followed the blade of the sword down to the hand-shaped hilt in his hand; not simply shaped, but formed from a hand.

His grin was more teeth than smile. "You like it? Juuzou made it for me. Special."

A name to add to Rack Fanatic, it seemed.

He added, "And always willing to lend a hand," and hoisted the sword so the hilt rested on his shoulder.

The calming effect of Yaga's gyokuro had completely burned off. What little she had remaining upon entering the curtain was eradicated by that terrible pun. In lieu of a (sadly absent) baseball bat to take to his knees, she reached for the cursed dagger hidden in her right boot.

A third voice droned, "You aren't popular with women, are you?" interrupting the standoff.

"You run into one and all you do is talk about yourself," added a fourth.

Utahime's shoulders dropped in relief. She recognized those voices. "Girls!" she greeted, smiling while refusing to take her eyes off of Blondie.

Mai and Kugisaki quickly took to bantering between themselves rather than at a mutual target only to be cut off by the sudden change of light as the curtain dissolved.

Blondie squawked, "The curtain lifted?!" and spun in a circle, a chicken in all ways but the cut-off head.

Utahime glanced heavenward to spot a purple figure, suspended in time and space save for the wind rustling obsidian clothes and white hair. She deadpanned, "Which can only mean Gojou finally finished warming up." At least he managed to lift it in the twelve minutes he promised.

"Gojou?! Nuh-uh. That shit's above my pay-grade." Blondie shook his head, muttering something about, "Hasn't even been thirty minutes," and ran away. He vanished as inexplicably as he had appeared.

"The hell was that?" Kugisaki breathed harshly and tugged at the hem of her jacket.

Mai shifted her weight to one foot, jutting her hip to the side. "A crime against all forms of fashion."

Utahime strode towards them and placed her hands on their shoulders. If it happened to force Mai and Kugisaki closer together in a huddle, she did not care. She ignored their narrowed glances cast to each other and asked, "Are you two all right?" taking in their forms for any injuries beyond what they already dealt and received during the competition.

Mai sniffed, "We're fine, sensei." She averted her gaze to a Utahime's roughly chopped hair and stroked her forearm in a vice grip.

Nobara grunted an affirmative.

"Right," Utahime began. "I want you two to get back to the school. Go get checked by Sho—" She clicked her tongue and amended, "Ieiri, and stay put. Got it?"

Both girls nodded in assent.

Mai fixed Utahime with a look of bravado typically saved for her returns to Kyoto Tech from the Zenin estate, brandishing invisible wounds from snide and cutting voices. Utahime squeezed Mai's shoulder and clapped Nobara's.

As Mai and Kugisaki took off for the school, Utahime hollered over her shoulder, "And stay out of Gojou's way! Who knows what that idiot's gonna do now that the curtain's down!"

Kugisaki threw her hands in the air, exclaiming, "Preaching to the choir here, sensei!"

Utahime snorted a puff of air through her nose then continued her trek towards Miwa. If she had her timing right, then she would get there in another handful of minutes barring any other encounters with.

Her phone rang again.

Utahime scoffed. She could not remember the last time she had had this many phone calls in the span of two hours, let alone a day that was not her birthday (and not from her family). She did not bother glancing at the screen again as she answered, "Yeah?"

"Hime, tell me you're almost to Miwa." Mei's words, though not slurred, bordered clipped compared to her trademark languid cadence.

Utahime dashed into a thicket, ducking enough so that the branches did not whack her in the face. She hissed as a twig caught the corner of her eye, "Mei, I'm almost there, I pro—"

Mei snipped, "Gojou's about to blow up the special-grade with Hollow Purple, so get out of there now."

Were Gojou in front of her at that moment, Utahime very well could have strangled him, Infinity technique be damned. "I can't!" she insisted. "I don't have Miwa yet!"

"Well, then, get her out of there!"

"What do you think I'm trying to do, Mei?!" She paid no mind to the branch that rammed her straight in the gut and tore through a layer of the kosode's fabric.

"Just get her and get back here!"

As Utahime gathered enough breath to gripe a taciturn 'Why don't you just call him and tell him not to use it?!' Mei disconnected the call.

Utahime gawped against the stitch forming under her ribs.

Dammit, Gojou! You can Hollow Purple the special-grade after I've saved my student!

She misjudged the distance across another extension of the stream, and her left leg sunk knee-deep into an aqueous mixture of mud, reeds, and water. A string of swears tumbled from her lips, including "fish shit!" and a myriad of ways she was going to kill—not incapacitate, not exorcise, kill—Blondie, Rack Fanatic, and maybe some wayward curses left on the premises. Screw fancy tea and meditation; she was going to need a beam of wood for a bat and a pack of cheap beer after all of this was finished.

The air around her stopped suddenly, then spun the opposite direction. It was coming.

Utahime peeked over her shoulder, not far enough to catch anything but the faintest glimpse if Hollow Purple, while she continued to sprint through the forest. It was as bone-chilling, awe-inspiring, and terrifying as the last time she saw its controlled cataclysm and heard its lack of sound six years ago. Gojou must have gained more control over it since then. The pull of energy was pinpoint accurate from behind her navel and cut like a scalpel between her shoulder blades.

Except, on the shores of Higashi-Matsushima, she had not been on the receiving end of this particular technique.

Utahime did not have enough time to consider being mortified that she was in its direct path or careen out of the way. She took another step, and the orb of energy coiled tighter for an instant and swerved hard right, curving around the perimeter of the examination area.

She shifted on the ball of her foot to pivot and watch from her periphery Hollow Purple swallow everything it saw fit on its way to wherever the special-grade was.

The caw of a crow overhead made her jump and skid to a stop. She glanced up to the mid-boughs of the closest tree.

Mei's crow blinked vacantly at her for the span of several seconds with a slight tilt of its head before it took flight in the direction of the hondou.

Utahime adjusted her course in the direction the crow had cocked its head. It did not take much longer for her to arrive at the glen, bathed in the deep yellow light of mid afternoon. She heaved a sigh of relief once she caught sight of Miwa's striking hair and no-longer crisp pantsuit.

She knelt to the ground beside Miwa and shook her shoulder. "Miwa," she urged. When no response came, she tried again with more force. "Miwa, you need to wake up."

Miwa coughed and flopped over to lie face-down. A cloud of dirt puffed around her arms and hips and settled on her jacket.

Utahime rolled her eyes. She wondered if this was a side effect of Inumaki's technique or if Miwa was simply the deepest sleeper on the planet. She lifted one of Miwa's arms and released it, grimacing when it fell to the ground again with a tunk. That position could not possibly be comfortable, and this portion of the glen was not known for lush grass ideal for a nap. (When Utahime was a second-year, the fourth-years went overboard with training to the point of rearranging that stretch of landscape. The ground had been packed so densely that she and Kusakabe had competitions to see who could bounce a rubber ball the highest. She did. Unfortunately, the ball, upon descent, happened to hit Kusakabe square on the head.) If anything, a plank of fiberboard would have been preferable than the glen.

Another sigh, this time of exasperation, escaped her. Today appeared to be a constant stream of lessons in Murphy's Law.

Utahime turned Miwa over onto her back again. She threaded her arms under Miwa's shoulders and knees and hefted her against her chest. Thank God Inumaki didn't put Toudou too sleep, she thought dryly, grunting as she knelt and rolled on the balls of her feet to a stand. She hitched Miwa's weight once more.

Miwa groaned, "Sensei, it's too early for school. I just"—her nose crinkled—"just five more minutes." She gurgled something unintelligible in her throat. "Is this real life, sensei?"

Utahime whispered, more to herself than Miwa, "Afraid so," and began the steady trudge back to the school in silence save the squelch of her left shoe every other stride.

When she arrived back at the infirmary, Utahime laid a foggy and drowsy Miwa on one of the gurneys. She rubbed the knuckles of her thumbs into her eyes. Though not particularly tired, Utahime wanted to sit and digest all of the information that had bombarded her today. However, there were still the tallies, remediations, and debriefings to be had. Her hand moved to her neck and rubbed at a knot that had formed beneath the nape.

Shouko met her gaze and took one look at her—lopped hair, scratched face (as though that diminished its value any further), ripped kosode—and pointed to a free gurney next to a sleeping Inumaki. "Lie down," she ordered.

Utahime groaned, "I'm fine, I swear." She circled her arms and legs in series to prove that she was uninjured. "It looks worse than it actually is."

"I know it is," Shouko said flatly. "Still want you to rest. Just take a cat nap. Promise I'll wake you before you have to debrief with the rest of staff. Besides"—she grabbed a fresh roll of gauze—"if they try to bother you, I can always claim doctor's orders."

Utahime shook her head. "Gotta check on the other students, Shouko. I'm f—"

"Hime," she barked. Then, softer, added, "Kusakabe's already accounted for rest of the students, so please just lie down before I have to make you."

Utahime glanced at the gurney. How dare it just sit there and look entirely inviting. It was not like she deserved it. She hardly felt that she had done enough in this attack to warrant a rest. She did not even use her technique—only ran, dodged, ran some more, then carried one student back to the school. (Just one. How many had Kusakabe or Gakuganji or Gojou—always Gojou—saved?) Had she really done anything to protect her students?

With a labored sigh, Utahime toed off her shoes and crawled onto the gurney. She may not have earned it, but who was she to disobey Shouko and her hard-won years of wisdom?

Notes:

1. I tried to look for the best term for the types of walls used in Tokyo Tech. I think that neribei is the correct term, but I'm not 100% positive. Please take my research here with a grain of salt.

2. I got this number based upon typical fundamental frequencies of voices as an average between men and women.

3. An amado is like a storm door so that walls like shouji and fusuma are not damaged by heavy rain.

4. I wanted Utahime's parents to have a nickname for her similar to "songbird". I chose a diminutive of the word hibari which is the Japanese word for a specific type of skylark found in Japan.

Hello again, readers!

Thank you for coming back to this story. I recognize that these opening chapters are somewhat slow-going because we already know these events from canon, but in a couple more chapters there will be new material (and lots of gojohime interactions)!

Thank you for everyone for the support—comments, bookmarks, subscriptions—that you gave the previous chapter. They help me keep going with this project when I have any insecurities about it.

Hope that you enjoyed this chapter, and I will see you at the next update!

Chapter 4: Sente 2 Go Fuhyou ( 2五歩)—Black, Pawn 2e

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Act I: Hisha (飛車)—Rook

Chapter 4: Sente 2 Go Fuhyou ( 2五歩)—Black, Pawn 2e

June 2018

The fetid scent of rubbing alcohol meeting a ruptured cursed-energy boil burned her nostrils and stirred Utahime from her nap. The infirmary din filled her eardrums—the metallic clang of surgical instruments; the rough ripping of gauze and bandages; the harsh whispers of voices (Utahime recognized them as Ijichi and a new window trainee whose name she had forgotten already) tallying the number of injured patients, prisoners, and deceased.

Utahime cracked one eye open and met the sight of the back of Shouko's white coat. The other soon followed suit. As Utahime's eyes continued to adjust to the stark beams of the infirmary's lights and came further into focus, she realized the coat could no longer be described as 'white'. Moss- and bile-greens congealed over a layer of phlegmy brown spattered the sleeves up to the elbows.

Shouko's arms danced with practiced ease—was it purely practice or had Shouko always had this air to her?—as she attended to her latest patient. A splash of red joined the greens and browns. A familiar umber head poked around the flaps of Shouko's coat.

Juuzou thrashed about, hollering, "Don'cha touch me, you witch! The hell is wrong with your energy?! "

Shouko replied, unperturbed, "Quit your whining, bozo." She lifted her hand, claws bared despite being gloved, and her cursed energy popped like firecrackers at her fingertips. Energy whose resonance could both heal and destroy.

(Had Shouko been in a different class, a different year, even a different school, she would have been considered the most formidable. Only when placed shoulder-to-shoulder with Jujutsu's Strongest Sorcerer and the man who tamed curses could the ability to h a l t and reverse physical damage to the body be considered paltry.)

"Konbu," a disembodied voice greeted.

Utahime smothered a groan as she rolled over to find Inumaki sitting on the adjacent gurney sucking on the straw end a pouch with 'Throat' printed on the side. He swung his legs back and forth through the gap between the support joists. The only indication he had been injured in the battle was the haphazardly slapped square of gauze on his hairline, double-wrapped in bandages tight enough around his head to make his bangs stand up straight. In the right light (and with just enough tired delirium), Utahime thought he was a dead wringer for a miniature Gojou.

That was possibly the worst thing she had ever thought of a student. She vowed—with God, the corpses of the creatures that guarded Tengen-sama's vault, and now considerably arm-and-leg-less Juuzou—that she would not do it again.

Inumaki, as though he could hear her thoughts, blinked vacantly at her.

Utahime slowly rolled to a sit. She pinched the stress line between her brows as the blood rushed back to her forehead.

"Tsunamayo," Inumaki said, voice lightly muffled behind the collar of his jacket. He extended an unopened pouch of 'Throat' to her.

Utahime gulped. She had not realized how coarse her saliva felt in her mouth. Compared to the headache, it was an oasis.

She bobbed her head. "Thank you, Inumaki. How are you feeling?"

"Takana"—he glanced at the ceiling in thought—"sujiko." A little tired, but my head's okay. "Mentaiko shake," he added, pointing at Shouko with an extension of his swinging left leg. "Tsuna tsuna takana." Ieiri-sensei took care of my throat, but suggested I take more medicine.

Utahime twisted the cap off the pouch. "Ieiri's always been good at her job," she remarked.

"Shake?" You can understand me?

Juuzou's shriek ran shrill—570 hertz, Utahime measured—causing Inumaki to snap at attention in his seat. Curious grey eyes peered over her head and tracked Shouko's movements back and forth, her heels clickity-clacking against the tiled floor.

S houko barked, "One more peep out of you and I'll stop regenerating at your elbows and knees!"

Utahime shrugged, baldly ignoring the commotion behind her. She wondered how often Inumaki cut his syntax down to the basic 'yes, no, maybe' variations. "Your family's innate technique is cursed speech, right?" He nodded. His eyes were wide over the brim of his collar. Endearing, she thought. "Otou-san's family technique has always dealt with music or sound. You may not use very many words, but your voice is very expressive."

Inumaki's legs swung more in time with a jig.

Utahime took a gulp from the pouch. The puree was sweet, more fruity than sugary, and left a pleasant aftertaste of yuzu and mint. She licked the excess from her lips with a hum. "This is really good!"

"Shake shake." It is.

"How've I never heard about this stuff?" she whispered to herself. At Inumaki's curious lean, Utahime rummaged through her sleeve and presented a handful of throat lozenges. "I typically use these," she explained. "My technique needs to"—she trilled her tongue under her breath, searching for the right word—"be sustained to work. So, more potential for breath and chord damage; less cursed energy rebound." Her lips pulled back into a slight grimace. "I think."

Inumaki held his hand out, palm facing up. "Tsunamayo?" Can I have some?

"Yes, you may."

He released a noise that from any normal person would have been sputtering, holding his hands up where his mouth was obscured by the collar, but Utahime realized it must have been how he learned to express laughter or humor. Did his technique extend to things such as sneezes or humming? How little she knew about Inumaki Toge as a whole.

Utahime knew she had some notes on him prepared for this year's Exchange, but they were limited. The time she would have spent analyzing him last year had been commandeered to focusing on how to mitigate any damage Okkotsu and Rika did to the Kyoto Tech grounds and to last year's crop of third-years. Inumaki, Maki, and Panda, naturally, had taken advantage of the diversion Okkotsu and Rika had caused (intentional or not). In hindsight, Utahime wished she had paid closer attention to Inumaki and his cursed technique; it would have been even better if Mei's crows had the ability to provide playback footage for review.

Before her thoughts could completely run away from her, he said, "Mentaiko… ikura sujiko." I've never had someone correct my onigiri grammar before… His eyes crinkled at the corners.

Utahime offered a shy smile. "Thank you for your help today, by the way," she said and chewed on the curve of the straw. It would be a shame if her instincts here proved wrong, but she felt comfortable enough to tell Inumaki this much.

"Ikura?" What for?

"For helping out your classmates," she said softly, dropping her head forward. The feathers of her bangs fell into the eyelashes at the outer corners of her eyes. "And my students. You helped keep some of them safe until the staff was able to get there."

Inumaki sucked on the straw end of his pouch with enough force to make a slurping sound reverb loudly in their corner of the infirmary. Utahime took a sip from hers to fill the gap. Once the pouch was finished to his satisfaction, he lifted the collar a final time and said gently, "Okaka ikura konbu." It was nothing.

He glanced off to the side for a beat before he met her eyes again, adding, " Takana... mentaiko tsunamayo ." Anyone would have done it .

Utahime gripped the 'Throat' pouch to a near-fist, smothering the instinct to scratch at her scar. She knew from experience that that was not the case. Selfless sacrifice was not the model of their line of work. Sacrifice for non-sorcerers, certainly; not fellow sorcerers.

Her scars burned with shame and resentment.

"Iori-san," Ijichi called from the door. "The debriefing will begin in a few minutes."

Utahime peered over her shoulder to Shouko, who was folding her gloves into each other as she peeled them from her hands, and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

Shouko jerked her head towards the exit. "You and Inumaki can go." She directed her next question to Inumaki. "The bandages can come off tomorrow morning. Let me know if you have any adverse reactions, 'kay?"

Inumaki hopped off the gurney. " Shake ."

Utahime slid off her make-shift bed and followed Inumaki out the door.

Before they turned to head their separate ways—he to the dorms, and she to an extra tea room— Utahime stopped him with a light touch on his shoulder. "Still," she said sotto voce, hoping that her tone did not sound too disillusioned, "thank you."

His eyes crinkled at the corners. " Konbu ." You're welcome.

飛

When Ijichi had signaled for her to leave the infirmary and wait in the tea room, Utahime had not expected to sit around for another half-hour for the rest of the teachers and principals to arrive. Instead, she, Mei, and Kusakabe sat in an open arc—Kusakabe against the outer wall, Mei in the corner to his right, and Utahime in the adjacent corner—and remarked on dull things from the weather to the stock market to the perfect angle for sharpening a katana.

Apparently, they three had fewer hobbies in common than Utahime realized.

She adjusted her weight of her rear and legs on the back of her heels to take the pressure off her knees; she kept her trunk and core centered above the midpoint of her tibia, a trick okaa-san had shown her when she was small. (Four years old? Five? She could not remember.)

"It's important to keep your spine straight and shoulders back," okaa-san had said. "I know you learned it a little different in your lessons, but your tutor never had to sit through five-hour banquets in the same position." She had smiled in amusement at Utahime's lips puckered in concentration. Not a minute later Utahime had lost her balance and flopped sideways onto the floor. Okaa-san burst into melodic giggles.

Kusakabe's watch (a mint condition "Dragon Ball Z" collectible) beeped three times as the next hour passed. With her legs folded beneath herself, Utahime settled in for the long haul. She layered her hands in her lap.

"Wonder how much longer they'll be," Kusakabe groaned, stretching his hands over his head.

"If they're not back by the time Goku's arm points to three, I'm leaving," Mei declared, adjusting how her braid lay across her cheek.

The door slid open and shut in a flash.

Gojou stalked across the room and dropped to a sit gracelessly yet silently in the space between Mei and Utahime. While he extended his legs loosely in front of him, he shoved two fingers under the edge of his blindfold where it touched the base of his ear and leveraged it away from the skin. A third finger hooked under and rubbed at the irritated skin.

Gakuganji entered the room, followed by Yaga and Ijichi, and Gojou retracted his fingers and shoved both his hands into the pockets of his jacket.

Yaga and Gakuganji sat at the opposite end of the room, stony and severe.

When neither school principal spoke a word, Gojou said, "As Group Battles go, I'd give this one an eight out of ten."

A chorus of clicked tongues, groans, and scoffs was the immediate response.

Gakuganji rounded. "This is a serious matter."

"I know," Gojou replied evenly.

"Then treat it as such, you impertinent brat."

Gojou sighed, "Well, no one was saying anything. Thought the tension needed some breaking."

Tact was never one of Gojou's strong suits, even as a student at Tokyo Tech. When one had a cursed technique that granted him control of the laws of time and space, tact was superfluous, obsolete. Tact was a moot point compared to the overwhelming power that bent to the whims of a man-child.

Tactless though it was, Yaga took the opportunity Gojou's comment opened. He glanced up to Ijichi. "Kiyotaka, what's the damage?"

Ijichi pinched the frames of his glasses and adjusted them to rest on the bridge of his nose again, revealing the lowermost dark ring under his eyes—not-quite a bruised yellow, but not his standard pallor. He looked tired on a good day (had since the day Utahime had met him), but following the pandemonium he seemed exhausted, propped on his feet by the furrow of his brows alone. Sweat that was too excessive to attribute only to the summer heat slid down the curve of his cheek, settling in the hollow by the mandible. His ears were pink at the tips.

He gulped. "Casualties include: three second grades, one semi-first grade, five assistant supervisors, and two cursed storehouse guards. They're"—he shut his eyes and held his breath for a handful of seconds—"they were on standby here at the school separate from Gojou-san, Kusakabe-san, and Yaga-gakuchou." His eyes opened again as he continued to read from his notes. "We're still waiting for the final report from Ieiri-san, but we're nearly certain it's the work of the patchwork cursed spirit that Nanami-san reported encountering before."

G ojou curled his lip and clicked his tongue.

Gakuganji lifted his gaze. "'Nearly'?" he parroted with enough bite to make his gravelly voice sound far clearer than in reality.

The clipboard in Ijichi's hands quivered. "W-well, sir, until Ieiri-san finishes, it's still technically just a theory or-or supposition. Not one hundred percent sure."

"How much, then?"

Utahime sighed through her nose. It appeared that Gakuganji had chosen this particular detail to obsess like a dog with a bone. (It had been the hum of cicadas two weeks ago.)

Ijichi clutched his clipboard tighter, as though it would keep his feet tethered to the spot rather than back up until he was against or through the wall. "It's not really something I can put a number to, sir."

Yaga intercepted the conversation. "More than seventy-five, Kiyotaka?"

Ijichi nodded.

Utahime pursed her lips. She wished she had her tea to keep her hands occupied. It would not be appropriate for her peers and employer to see how disconcerted this whole situation left her. Despite the boat-loads of new information collected, she felt further left in the lurch.

"Why the storehouse guards?" she asked. Her throat felt parched all at once, and she swallowed against the scratch. "Did Patchwork steal anything of specific importance?"

Ijichi grimaced. He peered under the lower rim of his spectacles at Yaga. Yaga cracked his knuckles in sequence. Gakuganji swallowed air incorrectly.

Utahime supposed she asked the wrong kind of question—for access to information considered privileged by the Higher-Ups.

Gojou said, "Six of Sukuna's fingers and the cursed wombs for Death Paintings one through three." He ignored the reproachful looks from Yaga and Gakuganji.

Utahime pressed the cuff of her kosode's sleeve between her index and middle fingers. The silk weave was a familiar chill against the calluses along her knuckles. So, it was worse than simply the threat this enemy had placed against the next generation of jujutsu sorcerers. An attack on a jujutsu school was an ideological move on the surface; the thefts belied a plan, and worse, a long-term one.

"Should we," she prompted, brushing her fingers over the fabric again, "share this information with the students and other sorcerers?"

Gakuganji exhaled, "No…" His head drooped forward. It had been some time—two years, Utahime counted in the back of her mind— since he had played his guitar and exerted his cursed energy for a length of time. Though far from exhausted, the effects of age were creeping up on him.

Yaga nodded in agreement. "It's better to keep this among ourselves," he explained. His cadence was slower than normal. "Wouldn't want even more curse users convinced that that special-grade cursed charms can be stolen so easily."

M ei tilted her head at Yaga. Her braid slid enough to reveal the corner of her eye. "Not sure this counts as 'easy', Yaga-gakuchou," she stated.

"Be that as it may," Yaga countered, "the fewer people that know, the better."

Yaga crossed his legs. He leaned forward enough to brace his elbow on one knee and perched his chin on the propped fist. The tip of his index finger traced the bow of his upper-lip, nail scratching through the stubble of his mustache. A groan of unease rumbled from his chest through the room.

"Did the curse user we captured give up anything?" he asked as he drummed his free fingers against his thigh.

Ijichi flipped to another page on his clipboard. "He said, and I quote: 'I wanted to make a clothes hanger—'"

"Rack," Utahime, Gakuganji, and Gojou droned in unison.

Ijichi cleared his throat. "Right… Rack, then." He continued to read, "'I don't know the name of that priest. The kid with the white bowl-cut. Couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl'. Then he," Ijishi sighed and thumbed the previous page back to the clipboard, "spent a few more minutes talking about a bald guy, but we couldn't tell if he was talking about himself in third-person or someone else."

Mei tutted, then addressed Utahime. "You know of any priest that happens to"—she lifted a finger for each item she listed—"be a child, have white hair, and be gender confused or ambiguous?"

Utahime clicked her tongue. "Nope."

"Sounds like he's just making this up, right?" Gojou groaned, waving his hand by his head, as though he needed any help grabbing the attentions of all six other persons in the room. He huffed, "We have any sorcerers good at extracting confessions?" A surly smile quirked at his lips. "Or should we stick to tried and true interrogative torture?"

Utahime had no proof, but somehow knew his eyes behind the blindfold scanned over to Gakuganji by the end of his question.

Something else was bothering her beyond Juuzou, among a growing list of others. "How did they manage to get through Tengen-sama's barrier?" she asked.

Gojou leaned back onto his hands and tilted his head to face the ceiling. "My guess—that special-grade the kids faced. Seems like its energy is close to that of natural spirits. Blends right in with the forest scenery. Aoi-kun mentioned it could dive into plants and use them, and Tengen-sama's barrier doesn't affect plants at all."

'Blends', Utahime noted. Not 'Blended'. She wanted more of an explanation, but Gojou would never give it with this many sets of eyes around, if at all.

"Besides," Gojou added, "Tengen-sama's barrier is more for hiding the school than protecting it. Same applies to the vaults. So if something manages to get through—Twiggy and friends—the barrier's pretty weak."

Yaga interjected, "Records indicate that the original intention of Tengen-sama's barrier was to prevent non-sorcerers in the Heian period from stumbling upon the grounds by accident and going insane or starting a witch hunt. To that end, it has never failed."

Utahime made a noise of understanding between her mouth and her nose. "At least, for now, thank goodness that all the students are safe." The losses of Sukuna's fingers and the Death Paintings aside, it was the best-case scenario—every student was able to walk away from his or her battle without life-threatening or debilitating injuries.

Moments such as these left Utahime torn. As a teacher, her priority was to the safety and education of her students while they attended Jujutsu Tech. Yet, as sorcerers, regardless of rank, their loyalties were to the jujutsu establishment that, supposedly, protected the non-sorcerers who were unaware of the havoc and pestilences that their emotions created. Their ignorance absolved them, according to the tenents of ancient jujutsu. What would the enemy do with these new acquisitions? By saving their students, did they sentence non-sorcerers to further misery?

Gakuganji stated, "Indeed…"

Yaga heaved a long-suffering sigh, pushing his sunglasses up to the curve of his forehead and rubbing at his eyes. "It's a shame," he said, "but the Exchange will have to be cancelled."

Gojou sat up straight instantly. "Woah, hey now. That's not our call."

A crow cawed in the distance as though in laughter.

"What so you mean 'not our call'?" Utahime demanded. "We're their teachers. If not ours, then whose?" (The obvious answer: The Higher-Ups.)

Gojou shrugged with a devil-may-care air. "I was thinking let the kids decide."

Utahime could not distinguish the noise Gakuganji made for a scoff or a hiccup. Ijichi's arms went slack, swinging the clipboard against his thighs in a sharp thwack. Mei managed to make her snort sarcastically incredulous rather than her typical mocking.

"Satoru," Yaga said, "You can't be serious."

"Why not?"

"The wrecked grounds," Mei supplied.

Gakuganji croaked, "Sukuna's missing fingers."

"The number of injuries the students sustained," Utahime chimed in.

Ijichi muttered, "The leveled zen garden."

Yaga jolted as though shaken from a trance. " T he zen garden was what ?"

Gojou crossed his arms and stated in a rather matter-of-fact tone, "It's the ir promotion recommendations up for grabs here."

Utahime stared at one of the front pleats of her hakama. Two truncated strands of her hair clung to the fabric stretched over her knees. She itched to pick them up, cast them aside, and press the crease as tight as she could with her bare hands.

But Gojou had a point, and, strangely, she felt chastised. If she were in her students' position, she would resent that the choice to hold any portion of control over her own career had been ripped from her, best intentions or no. (She was still in their position, but it was one matter to face it as an adult versus as teenagers still fledglings in their careers as sorcerers.)

U tahime bit the meat of her tongue. She hated when he was right. Damn him.

Yaga's fingers ceased their drumming. It seemed he came to the same conclusion.

"What did you have in mind?" he asked.

Gojou opened his mouth.

飛

Tatami was hit-or-miss among her generation.

Utahime lay on the floor of the parlor in the guest wing of the dorms. She was told in her second year that the generation before she attended had too many students to even consider converting or building guest rooms. The tatami was worn, but well-maintained. Though too firm to the touch for some, Utahime loved that the smell triggered such fond memories of home as much, if not more, than the texture. If she did not still have to discuss the incident with the students, she would have liked nothing more than to flop onto her back with her arms and legs splayed, her own rendition of a starfish.

The drone of cicada songs lulled her into the sense of a long-distance trance. If she funneled cursed energy to her ears, she could make out the hum of Tokyo's rushing traffic.

She hated that she was stuck outside the in-the-know circle again. She had pressed to be present when the students decided to continue the Exchange or not, but was not allowed access.

"Nuh-uh, Utahime," Gojou had said, shooing her into the next hallway with a freakishly large hand pressed between her shoulders.

"Why not?" she demanded and dug her heels into the floor in a futile attempt to keep him from pushing her further away from her intended path.

"Just Yaga and Gakuganji are allowed."

"But you're going, too!" she snapped. She squawked when the arch of her foot met an uneven plank of wood and stumbled forward.

"It's my idea. I gotta present it." He stuck the tip of his tongue out at her as she spun around and glared. "Besides," his tone bordered on simpering, "don't wanna ruin the surprise. Toodles!" With a wiggle of his fingers he vanished, teleporting out of the hall and leaving Utahime to gape bemusedly at the empty expanse.

No tea, no baseball bat, no beer. Only the comforting smell and texture of tatami remained to drown out the bombardments of the past—she thought back to the exact time the Kyoto c oalescence arrived at Tokyo Tech and counted— seven hours and twenty minutes.

The moment that her eyelids began to droop, the shouji slid back with a harsh clack to reveal Gakuganji with their students in tow.

Utahime pushed to her feet and smoothed her hands over her hakama.

She barely managed to finish asking, "What did you decide?" when Gakuganji shoved a slip of paper into her hands and shuffled to the back of the room. He produced a flask, seemingly from out of thin air, and took a swig.

Utahime frowned in befuddlement at Gakuganji's back. She unfolded the slip and stared at the characters. "Baseball?" she whispered, incredulous. She pitched her voice louder, "What's baseball supposed to mean?"

Gakuganji sighed in such a way it sounded like a hiss. "It's the group competition," he explained balefully.

Her students hung back by the open fusuma, watching the exchange with sharp eyes.

"Who chose baseball?" Utahime asked and did her best to not do a little jig for joy.

Gakuganji scoffed, "The Itadori brat pulled it from the box. It wasn't an option either Yaga or I included." He took another swig from his flask. "Gojou must have done something to it."

He definitely did, Utahime thought, sparing a final glance at Gojou's unmistakable scrawl before crumpling the slip in her hands.

Gakuganji gummed at the air. "I trust that you will adequately prepare the students for the game." Without further preamble, he skulked from the room. He forewent shutting the shouji behind him.

All thoughts of panic and fear for the students' safety over the past four hours and any exhaustion she felt a minute earlier fled from her mind.

Baseball: the greatest game on Earth.

If knowledge of baseball determined the rank of sorcerers, Utahime would have reached special grade by age ten. Gojou may have rigged the drawing—and she was in too good a mood to try and analyze what reasons he may have had to do so—but he was going to rue that decision. She had every intention of using her expertise to make sure that her students wiped the floor with his.

Utahime was not confident she understood the Western obsession with the phrase 'vini, vidi, vici', but she thought the situation called for it.

She scurried for the door, but remembered her students standing awkwardly outside the shouji. A quick peek over her shoulder confirmed her suspicion. "Everyone"—she gestured to the bare tatami mats around the room with wide arcs of her arms as she shuffled backwards into the corridor—"take a seat, and I'll be back in just-just," she stammered in her excitement, "just a moment."

Utahime returned to the sitting parlor not two minutes later with a blue ringed-binder with a red and white label on the spine that read 'Seibu Lions 2018'. In smaller, scratchier print beneath, there was a note '+ Kyoto Tech 2018'. She slid the door shut behind her with a determined p uff of breath.

"Sensei," Miwa prompted as Utahime situated herself in her previous lounging spot. "Are we really going to play baseball? I thought it was just a joke…" She cupped her hands around the sides of Muta's back-up communication vehicle—a copper orb with electric blue hexagons dotted along the surface, connected by green and gold lines.

U tahime tried valiantly to not beam at the question, but knew by the straining of her cheek muscles that she failed entirely. "Yes! It's true! And I have the data to lead us to victory!" She presented the binder with a flipping flourish so the students could get a better look at it, stuffed to the gills with spreadsheets and numeric analyses that she had spent the past year collecting.

Mai dropped her head into her hand and groaned, "No, sensei, please. Not the binder."

Utahime hugged the binder closer to her chest as though to protect it from her students' harsh comments. "Be thankful I thought to bring it along!" she retorted and slid her index finger behind the third tab divider and flipped the proceeding pages over the binder rings. "I don't just have stats on pros in here. All of yours are too!" To prove her point, she turned the binder around so her students could see the pages.

Miwa leaned to murmur to Nishimiya, "We have stats?"

Nishimiya huffed, "I've never played baseball."

"Neither have I," Muta's orb said.

Kamo, however, was thoroughly unconvinced. "You had no way of knowing we'd be having a baseball game, sensei," he mumbled from behind his bandages.

"Doesn't matter," Utahime brushed off. She turned to the first page of the stats she had on her students without looking. (She had pored over them as often as she had those for Seibu. Knowing the pages by touch alone was second nature.) "With what I have on you guys and"—she pulled the scratch notes she took during the group competition out of her kosode pocket—"the information I have on Tokyo's students, we're a shoe-in for winning."

"Interesting!" Toudou rejoined, voice already deep and fired up.

Mai grumbled, "Of course you're on board."

"My brother and I will have a proper battle, mano a mano."

"That's what you took away from this?!" Nishimiya hissed.

M uta offered, "'Mano a mano' doesn't mean what you think, Toudou. Baseball is not a hand-to-hand sport… "

"Now," Utahime interrupted before they went completely off track, "I assume you all know the objective and basics, so I'm gonna start with which positions you'll be playing."

M uta ' s voice crackled through his orb. "And what about me, sensei?" It probably did not have as strong a signal or the latest technology in speakers. The sound phased out, as though underwater or somewhere with high-echoing acoustics—things that were not usually noticeable on his latest Mechamaru model.

"The only position you'll be able to play while Mechamaru's being repaired is pitcher." Muta would have made a good outfielder, but she was used to making do. "Pretty sure I remember there being an old pitching machine in one of the storage sheds, if Yaga bothered to hold onto it."

Toudou cocked his chin , but Utahime continued, " Yes, Toudou, I know you wanted to be pitcher, but you'll have to settle for catcher."

H e lowered his hand, but the pout at the corner of his lips betrayed his disappointment. Tough. His build suited catcher.

Everyone else were fairly easy to assign based on cursed techniques and her estimations on batting averages. Batting lineup followed easily from there.

She might have lost a few of them, though, when she started in on baseball theory and double- and triple-plays." Any questions?"

Kamo, Mai , and Miwa all raised their hands. Muta's orb beeped twice.

飛

Thirty freaking degrees. It certainly was not the hottest temperature Utahime had experienced in June, but that did not mean she was comfortable either.

She stood before the full-length mirror in her assigned room in her chest bindings and a pair of black, cotton underwear. Her fingertips grazed across the scaled skin from her collarbone down her trunk until they settled below the seams of the underwear's leg holes. The scars, rough and raised compared to the unblemished skin along her back, flared a furious, frenetic red. They always looked so much worse during the summer. Sweat and friction were constant irritants. No matter how many layers o f lotion she applied or how light, smooth, and breathable the fabrics against her legs and arms were, the summer weather inevitably won out.

U tahime pondered leaving them uncovered. A second, third, and fourth assessment of the state of her arms and legs (her trunk and abdomen would be hidden regardless, thankfully) dissuaded her.

Five years was hardly long enough for her to grow accustomed to her own reflection, let alone expect her and Gojou's students to not gawk and rubber-neck at the sight of her. No. It was not fair to subject them or her pride to that sight. Her skin could handle another round of sweat.

She rested her left palm against the largest, most unsightly scar spanning from her right elbow over the shoulder and fanning under her clavicle. "I'll give you extra attention when we get back to Kyoto," she promised.

A sigh of resignation passed from her lips, and Utahime donned the grey, cotton undershirt and tights before she layered a purple baseball jersey and a pair of shorts. A baseball cap to top it all off would, at the very least, protect the scar on her face from scorching in the sun.

Utahime threaded her hair through the gap above the back strap and secured it with a ribbon tied in a bow.

"That'll do, Hibarin," she said to her reflection.

S he scooped up the baseball binder, grabbed her shoes, and leapt off the edge of the engawa, heading for the field.

Gojou—sporting a pale-blue button-up shirt, dark slacks, and signature sunglasses—waved her over, unbothered by the (expected) organized chaos of the students trying to set up and file into their determined positions. " Ready for the game, Utahime?"

Before she could properly rein in her temper, she threw back, " Ready to see you wallow in the agony of defeat," and ma rched straight past him for the dugout. Otou-san would have been proud of that barb . Okaa-san would have said it needed a bit more edge. Overall— not too shabby .

The match started well. Nishimiya managed to hit a double after Maki pitched one ball and one strike. Her annoyance at Kugisaki's jeers from Tokyo's dugout must have spurred her into packing more force into her swing than usual. Utahime made (another) note on the back of her scratch sheet to have a conversation—the eighth in three years—about her emotions triggering her actions. During a baseball game was alright, but it would likely get her injured (or worse, killed) in the field.

As Miwa braced ready to bat at home plate, Utahime saw her twist her heels into the dirt, a literal and emotional grounding. It seemed to serve its purpose as her bat made contact with Maki's first pitch, even though it was technically outside the diamond enough to be considered a ball. It popped into a fly, and Inumaki poised beneath it with his open glove at the ready. Though Miwa would be called out, it was still a good play.

Her pride sputtered short as she caught a flash of blonde hair darting from second to third base to her left. Her nails dug into the heels of her palms as she cried, "No, Nishimiya! Don't run yet!"

Nishimiya sprinted with a deep, cutting, gleeful smile across her face. Any sharper and she could have sliced Blondie's sword in half. Oblivious to Inumaki's catch then pass to Panda at first base, her smile faltered as she reached the third base and Gojou called, "Out!"

She looked to home plate and moped, betwixt. "Huh? Why?"

Utahime huffed, "If you don't know the rules, then ask!"

Nishimiya fumed, "I do know the rules! They hit the ball, and I run!"

Utahime pointed her arms around the field in the order the play had gone —pitch er's mound , bat ter at home , fly, second to first — explaining, "It was a sacrifice fly!"

"Sacrifice fly?! What's that, some kind of torture method?!"

"Are you simply stupid?! I taught this to you last night!"

Utahime made a note in her binder, muttering under her breath, "Should' ve stapled a crash course note card to her head…" It would be fine. They still had one more out, and t here were plenty of innings left to make up for this error. The old Yogi Berra saying "It ain't over 'til it's over" was a baseball staple for a reason.

K amo was next up to bat. If he followed her advice and kept his weight forward over the plate, the odds of his swings connecting would increase by approximately ten percent. He would likely make it on base.

Maki pitched three balls straight down the middle—fastballs, no drops or curves, the kinds that Utahime could hit by age seven .

Kamo did lean over home plate. Thank the Lord one of her students actually retained something from last night.

H e swung at none of them.

"Strike three! Batter out! Chaaaaange!" Gojou bellowed over Utahime's cajoling.

"Kamo! You have to actually swing to hit the ball! What's the matter with you?!"

She wished she could say that things settled down from the n , but that was wishful thinking. A rowdy bottom of the first inning yielded Kugisaki charging the pitcher's mound, a near three-run home run from Maki, and much stream-of-consciousness commentary from the Tokyo bench. Inumaki's onigiri speech in particular made for interesting insults.

Zero-zero after one inning was not a bad outing. At the top of the second Toudou was first up to bat for Kyoto. Ideally, Utahime would have preferred to have at least one runner on base beforehand. Toudou far and away had the highest batting average on his team, and It would have been strategically beneficial to take advantage of that. Still, if he could hit a double, his odds of making it around the diamond increased by a quarter.

It was a solid plan and the primary reason that Utahime placed him as cleanup in the batting lineup.

Or it would have if Zenin freaking Maki had not pitched a ball straight into his left cheek, and of course Toudou, the idiot, had ignored her diatribe about the importance of wearing helmets while at bat. (Though, if Maki had hit Toudou anywhere else in the head, it would have simply tickled him. Hardest skull in the region.)

Twice in twenty-four hours her plans had been shot to hell.

Utahime dropped her forehead against the dugout railing with a heavy thunk . How Miwa and Mechamaru—one who had zero baseball experience and the other whose physical body was not present on the field, respectively—managed to be the two most consistent and reliable players for Kyoto, sh e could never have predicted; she did not want to understand either. She glanced forlornly over to home plate.

Itadori knelt in the dirt, cradling a one-shot knocked-out Toudou in his arms. " Hang in there, Toudou! Don't you die on me!" he cried while everyone but Inumaki and Panda added a chorus of "Maki, nice pitch", Mai chief among them.

"Toudou…," Itadori breathed, bewildered. "Everyone… really hates you…"

Utahime grunted to herself under her breath, "I wanna go home."

A self-satisfied voice floated over to Kyoto's dugout. "Having some trouble there, Utahime?"

She bristled. "Shut up, Gojou!"

He snickered as he rolled his sleeves up over his elbows again after they unwound throughout the top of the inning.

Not long after, Inumaki surprised her with his agility. Utahime never underestimated Inumaki as a sorcerer (cursed speech was a versatile and potentially lethal ability, after all), but his ability to turn a stunted hit that would have been an unmistakable out into a chance to get on base was admirable. It was gradually dawning on her that she knew far less about Inumaki than she probably should. She swiped a sloppy star in pencil next to his name on the spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, Inumaki's success gave Tokyo an opening to score. One home run later, courtesy of the recently-resurrected Itadori Yuuji, left Utahime at a loss for any other strategies or countermeasures. She knew that Itadori would be tricky to handle, but how on Earth was she supposed to anticipate that he would hit a home run his first time at bat, even with his high batting average?

After five innings, Utahime signaled to Gojou with three small twists of her cap's brim to end the match. There was no need to drag the students through all nine.

Tokyo Tech — Kyoto Tech

2 — 0

Utahime drew the binder to her chest and bumped her forehead against the top edge. The seam between parts of the cover dug into her skin.

"What is this thing?" Gojou asked as he plucked the binder from her arms and held it above her head. "You've had your face shoved in it all day."

Utahime growled, "Give it back!" and jumped as high as she was able—and well above the national average, she might add—but to no avail against the ridiculous length of his arms. A swift kick to his knee might have solved this dilemma, if she did not already know he would activate his Infinity the moment she swung for the windup.

"Wow," he said in a sing-song voice as he lackadaisically skimmed through the sections. "You really do have everyone in here. Still ga-ga for Seibu, I see." He tilted away from her lazy attempt to jab him with her elbow. His eyebrows furrowed when she saw him reach the part where she had made notes about the students. She knew her shorthand note-taking was not the easiest to follow. She was entirely capable of using the method that her professors taught when she was earning her education degree, but she inevitably spent more time focusing on how to take the notes rather than the content. While a bit messy, she always knew what information she had and how it connected this way.

If Gojou was at all confused by her notes, it was not obvious.

A minute later, he hummed and said, "Hey, these are pretty detailed."

Utahime sniffed. "Why wouldn't they be?"

"I was never one to take notes," he admitted.

"Color me shocked…" she barbed sarcastically.

He lightly bopped the top of her head with the binder.

Utahime squeaked. Her hands flew to her ponytail and bow. Thankfully, her baseball cap took most of the abuse.

"What happened to your hair?" he asked, tone bordering on accusatory, taut.

She shoved her hands in the pockets of her shorts to avoid fidgeting with her unintentional new hairstyle. "One of the infiltrators sneaked behind me. Had a creepy hand-sword-thing, and he took off a chunk of the ends." She rocked back-and-forth from toes to heels as she watched the students squabble on the field. "No big deal. Just hair. It'll grow back."

Gojou held still for a beat, thinking (whatever occurred in that strange head of his). Then, he moved slowly enough for her to recognize the movement, but too quickly for her to do anything to stop him and skimmed his palm under the tips of her hair.

The moment passed. He dropped his hand and smacked his lips. "You should see a hairdresser stat. Nobody's gonna wanna date you with it lookin—" His face returned to its typical puckish state.

Utahime glared. "Finish that sentence and I'll strangle you with my bow."

Unperturbed, Gojou returned to reading her notes and figures out of her reach, then dropped the binder back to her height. He ran his finger under a line of characters and numbers. "How'd you come up with these?" he asked, tapping under where she had filled 0.269 under Itadori's 'hits per bat'.

Utahime pulled her hands to her hips. "It's a guesstimate."

"Based on?" he dragged out the sounds while his eyes darted around the pages, bright even behind pitch-black sunglasses. (Utahime wondered surlily if he had an eidetic memory in addition to all the other gifts God had apparently blessed him.)

"His fight with Toudou." Utahime did not expect him to tilt his head to her, appraising. "It's not an exact science, obviously," she continued, bobbing her shoulders, "but if you think about the number of hits he had against Toudou versus the number of times Toudou got a hit on him, you can come to an approximate answer.

"And"—with a quick skip she slipped her hands beside his on the binder covers, lifted it up from his palms, and snatched it back safely into her care—"I looked up Itadori-kun's athletic records from middle school last night."

Gojou dissolved into sputtered chuckles. "Very sneaky, Utahime," he playfully admonished.

"What I said before—it was still a good model for the rest of your students. Mine too." Her lips puckered in a frown. "Didn't see Inumaki-kun coming, though."

He grinned and said in a sing-song voice, "That was the plan." He slid a hand in his pocket as he turned and began to stroll away. A halfhearted wave came over his shoulder with a parting, "Thanks for the game. Text you the details in a couple days."

Right… Details. The mole. As much as the prospect of finding a traitor—another, over ten years after the last one—in their midst curdled her stomach, Utahime knew the events at this Goodwill Exchange only proved Gojou's theory.

"Gojou, wait!" she called, trotting to catch up even though he had already stopped.

He tipped his head toward her.

She dropped her voice low, barely above a whisper. "Tengen-sama's barrier works in the vault, too, right?"

"Yeah."

"Are all of Sukuna's finger kept in the same vault?"

A shrew cock of an eyebrow was his answer.

"So the intruders would've had to know where each finger was to begin with, but…," she trailed off and adjusted the binder to balance more comfortably in her arms. "How did they know that we only had six fingers?"

His sunglasses slid just below the bridge of his nose. The upper edge of his eyes were visible above the rims, waxing crescent moons of opal. Something that on any other person would have appeared to be trepidation passed over them as a blip on his radar.

Gojou rapped his knuckles against her cap's brim with one hand while the other pushed his sunglasses back into place. "Thanks for giving me something to think about, Utahime," he said and strolled away. "Try not to need rescuing before I text you, 'kay?"

Utahime rolled her eyes. Once Gojou's figure disappeared around the corner of the neribei, she allowed her upper back to unclench. The tension bled out of her shoulders, replaced with the support provided by okaa-san's advice in the back of her mind.

Loath as she was to admit it to even herself, her revelation about the fingers was further evidence that there was a traitor among them. The best she could hope for at this juncture was that the mole was an adult, not one of the students. She was still getting to know all of the students—still learning from them. Responding to a betrayal from an adult was an easy emotion to identify. What was she supposed to do if one of her students, current or former, had sold out his or her comrades?

"Anyone would have done it," Inumaki had said.

He was only half correct.

After more than a decade in this business, Utahime knew that despite the variety of cursed techniques across jujutsu society, sorcerers fell into two categories of 'anyone would have done it': anyone can protect and anyone can destroy.

The Gojou Satorus and Getou Sugurus of the world.

Maybe she was getting ahead of herself.

The knot in her stomach made her a touch queasy. She would need to get used to it; it would be a constant companion through her search.

F or the sake of the rest of the students, jujutsu society, and the world of non-sorcerers, she would investigate.

She was a teacher and a sorcerer. Her life was already forfeit for the greater good.

A skylark sang a song in the nearby sakura tree. Utahime mimicked the run.

Notes:

So sorry for the month-long wait everyone! I thought about splitting this chapter again, but in the end it would not quite work at two separate ones in my opinion.

I want to thank you all for your patience and for every piece of feedback you've given me over the past few weeks.

Hope that this was worth the wait, and I'm excited to show you guys what I have in store over the next few ones.

Thank you for reading and see you guys at the next update!

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Chapter 5: Gote 3 Yon Fuhyou ( 3四歩)—White, Pawn 3d

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Act I: 飛車 (Hisha)—Rook

Chapter 5: Gote 3 Yon Fuhyou ( 3四歩)—White, Pawn 3d

November 2005

Utahime reread the note over for a third time.

Please come to Shitou-gakuchou's office at 8:00am.

If memory served her well, it was Kigawa-sensei's handwriting.

Kigawa Takeichirou, by the accounts of his fellow sorcerers, was a person who was nine times out of ten "Neither here nor there". At 170 centimeters tall with dark brown eyes and pitch-black hair, he was dead center of the bell curve the depicted Japanese averages. He came to be the first-year teacher at Tokyo Tech by a story that was so mundane that Utahime thought she was going to fall asleep in that conversation alone. Despite this, he was a proficient teacher for both jujutsu sorcery and traditional school subjects.

On the whole, Kigawa was unassuming and did not rock the boat—until he did. One such instance while in the field, he ended up electrocuting a curse user who threatened to do such heinous things to his students that they would wish they were dead. The curse user's exact words had been redacted for the report. Kigawa cited he would have done it again.

His messages were always brief and to the point, but ranged from polite frankness to brusque and, depending on the recipient, demanding. Utahime tended to fall in his 'frank' category. (However, her third mission as a first-year reflected so poorly on her prospects of becoming a full-time sorcerer that Kigawa left her a note with only "After Training" slipped under her dorm-room door.) The 'please' was a nice touch, though. If he had hoped to catch her off guard, that certainly did the trick.

Utahime pressed the paper flat against her lower stomach.

The door to the principal's office slid open to reveal Kigawa. A tuft of his hair stuck sideways in a cowlick and bags under his eyes gave the impression that he had a fitful night or had not slept at all. He waved her closer.

"Apologies for the short notice," he said through a half-yawn despite his attempts to stifle it. He stepped aside to allow her room to pass.

The furnishings of the office were the closest at Tokyo Tech to those in Utahime's childhood home. Fusuma painted with mountains, a chabudai set for tea, and shouji. The only piece that seemed to belong in the last half-century was a desk, stained a deep red-brown. Behind it sat a man, hair feathered with strands of grey at the temples, eyes a cutting slate color, and perfectly manicured hands folded on the surface.

Shitou Kagenori had a voice that commanded the room despite quavering like tissue paper in the wind. His diction was always formal, even if the situation did not demand it, and his posture and ever-smooth port de bras reminded her of Meiji-era portraits. Half of the time, Utahime was positive that she was imagining him in modern, Western clothes, instead of a sweeping formal kimono.

"Iori-kun," Shitou acknowledged and bade her to sit with a gentle incline of his head.

Utahime sank slowly into the chair, spine parallel with the chair back.

Shitou held his cup of tea between his fingertips. The wrinkles and scars around the knuckles and back of the hand belied weakness of a man long past his prime; yet, there were no signs of pressure around his fingernails or struggling to grasp the cup.

"Were it not for the unusual circumstances," he began, "I would never entertain approaching a fourth-year for such a task."

Utahime was not sure if she should be offended or flattered.

"Nonetheless," Shitou said from behind a plume of steam, "sorcerers are in high demand and low quantity." His eyes floated over to Kigawa. "Kigawa-sensei's particular technique has been requested to handle a curse down in Okinawa"—a glance back to Utahime—"and as I'm sure you're well aware, Iori-kun, this crop of first-years cannot be left…," he paused, eyes strained at the corners. "…unsupervised."

Kigawa sighed in some strange expression of educator solidarity.

Utahime peered at Kigawa's hairline and wondered if it had receded in the past few months or it was a trick of the light.

(She should probably book an appointment to have her vision evaluated.)

Shitou languidly took a sip of his tea before setting the cup down on the coaster on his desk. "I am requesting that you accompany the three first-years on their mission tomorrow. Be an example to them. Show them the ropes."

Utahime thought that she had swallowed her tongue. She tried to speak, "Y-you—" but cleared her throat instead. "You want me to watch over them, sir?" The 'why' went unspoken.

"Kusakabe-kun and Mei Mei-kun are both on missions," Kitou said, gaze staring more at Utahime's ear than her eyes. "But I would not have asked them regardless, Iori-kun." He retrieved a cream envelope from the corner of his desk and laid it halfway between himself and Utahime. An upturn of his palm invited her to take it and begin reading the contents. "I believe that your presence would be the best balance to these three students."

Kigawa scoffed, "More like counter-balance."

Utahime glanced up at Kigawa and frowned, bemused. Shitou tapped his hand crisply against the desk, drawing her attention again. Perhaps it was better not to think too long on Kigawa's comment.

Shitou asked, "Do you accept, Iori-kun?"

Utahime took the envelope from the desk and balanced an edge on her thighs. Her palms slid to the flap so her thumb could toy with the brad.

"I'm honored to be trusted with this opportunity, sir," she said, bowing her head.

Shitou's eyes crinkled at the corners in lieu of a smile. "Best of luck, then, Iori-kun."

Kigawa sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "You're gonna need it."

飛

The assigned mission was Grade 3, Grade 2 at most, which was standard for most first-years to tackle. The curse in question was on the line between the Yamagata and Miyagi prefectures. Reports indicated that non-sorcerers on their way to the local shrine were bewildered by a series of unexplained sparks like firecrackers and spontaneously combusting trees. Shrine attendance had dropped nearly to zero.

What little Utahime knew about these first-years from seeing them around campus—she glanced over the names in the dossier: Ieiri Shouko, Getou Suguru, Gojou Satoru—gave her confidence that they could easily handle this curse or curses. She only understood the generalities of Ieiri's Reverse cursed technique and wondered how well that would apply to exorcisms. Given a preliminary skim at Getou and Gojou's track records, they were well-suited to handling a variety of types of curses and could possibly take on ones up through Semi-Grade 1. Their three combined techniques and cursed-energy reserves were formidable, and Special-Grade designations were well within their grasps.

A pang of jealously twisted in her gut. Utahime sang under her breath a ditty wrapped in cursed energy, and the tightness passed. She needed to guide, not resent them. Their innate talents would not mean anything if they could not apply them appropriately, and Shitou trusted her to handle that on this occasion.

A star written beneath Gojou's name caught her eye. She lifted the page closer to her eyes, verifying that she had read that correctly. It was not an errant mark or a habitual tap of the pen; there was supposed to be an additional note for Gojou. When she did not find anything else handwritten on the front of the page, she flipped it over.

Four words in Kigawa's neat print: he runs his mouth.

What Utahime was supposed to do with that information, she did not know, but Kigawa must have had his reasons.

Orders were to meet at the platform for the Touhoku shinkansen and take it to Sendai. Utahime alloted herself twenty minutes to spare should the first-years arrive early. (She doubted that would be the case—fifteen-year-olds were rarely on time to anything, let alone early—but she could not discount the possibility completely.)

They were six minutes late. Thankfully, the train had not arrived yet and would not leave for another fifteen minutes.

Spotting the trio as they strolled through the station was simple. Getou and Gojou were literally head and shoulders and then some above the crowd, and Shouko was taller than the average Japanese woman. Combined with the unique coloring of Jujutsu Tech's uniforms and some eccentric hairstyle and accessory choices, Utahime figured she could not have missed them even if she had tried.

Gojou gesticulated as he chattered with Getou. Getou bumped his shoulder against him, a sly smile and apparent repartee on his lips. Gojou dropped his head forward with a snort, his round sunglasses balanced precariously on his nose. Shouko—what little of her Utahime could see from her height—rolled her eyes and elbowed Getou in the ribs. His resulting strangled hiccup had Gojou guffawing hard enough to warrant smashing his sunglasses against his face with a palm to keep them in place.

They certainly seemed rambunctious.

Gojou said, quick-fire, "I'm serious! If sorcerers weren't paid so well, I'd totally make bank in eating cont—"

The gaiety and frivolity sank like a stone once they reached the platform and spotted her.

Gojou snapped his mouth shut, Getou raised his eyebrows, and Shouko smacked her lips.

"Ah," Shouko uttered, snapping her fingers to jog her memory. "Io...ri-senpai, right?"

Utahime cleared her throat and spoke louder than she typically would on account of the bustle echoing throughout the station. "Good morning. I'm Iori Utahime. Fourth-year. Pleased to meet you all."

Getou craned his neck to scan the platform, hardly necessary given his height. He squared his shoulders to Utahime, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets until his elbows snapped straight. "Where's Kigawa-sensei?" he asked, tone mellow, yet tainted with suspicion. His voice was pleasant, though—smooth, clear as a bell, gentle around the syllables.

"Indisposed," Utahime replied easily, tucking a flyaway piece of hair behind her ear. "Called away on another mission. Shitou-gakuchou asked me to fill in." She shrugged, and added, "Chaperone, if you will," smothering a delighted twitter that tried to escape her. She gestured with a gracefully lifted palm to the shinkansen on the right. "I'll give you the rest of the details onboard."

They secured two rows of two seats and rotated the front row to face the one directly behind it. It took a shameful amount of time for the four of them to agree upon an appropriate (and comfortable) configuration that mitigated as much knee-jabbing and ankle-knocking as possible. Getou and Gojou eventually sat diagonal to each other, both stretching their legs out as far as the space would allow; Utahime and Shouko slid into the empty seats next to them, respectively.

Utahime placed her feet flat on the floor between where Gojou's braced against the lower bracket of her seat. She opened the dossier on her lap.

She explained, "We're heading to an area between Yama-dera and the border with Sendai's municipality. The curse isn't interfering with tourism at Yama-dera, thankfully, but the locals wanting to attend another, smaller shrine have been scared off."

Shouko leaned forward to peer at the map. "Any idea what caused it?"

Utahime shook her head. "It appears to have some fire elements, but the memo from the window doesn't mention anything like a local festival or recent incidents that might've triggered its appearance."

Getou hummed. "Grade?"

"Three at most," she said, closing the envelope. She glanced between the three of them, smiling slightly. "Should be well within your abilities. Kigawa-sensei and Shitou-gakuchou spoke highly of you."

Getou and Shouko made small noises of acknowledgment while Gojou opted to nod and exhale loudly through his nose.

He was not speaking much. It struck Utahime as odd, considering how much he was chattering with Getou and Shouko at the station and the note Kigawa had left in the dossier.

Utahime glanced out the window, watching the countryside pass her by. It would be another ninety minutes until they arrived at the Sendai station. Despite the climatization of the train car, she could feel the air outside growing colder. She deemed her swapping her standard tights out for woolen ones an excellent choice.

飛

"Utahime, remind me why we have to walk again."

A vein in Utahime's temple throbbed. If only she could sing to herself without completely giving away her ire. Instead, she sighed. "Short-staffed. Nobody available to drive us out here. A little exercise won't kill you." She thought the train rides would have made that obvious.

"And that's senpai to you," she added.

Gojou snorted and trotted ahead as though the hike hardly fazed him.

Fortunately, stone steps made the mountainous terrain more navigable. Still, their ascent was steeper than anything on Tokyo Tech's grounds. They would be tired come morning, regardless of how the mission went.

They systematically combed the area surrounding the shrine for even a hint of the curse for hours. The autumn light had tipped into mid-afternoon, warm in color but cool in temperature. It took Shouko nearly running headfirst into the curse to find it.

The curse was as large as yearling. It was an ombré of pure white at the head—or what Utahime assumed was the head—all the way to a deep cardinal red at the rear. A gilded tail coiled from its back end up its torso until the tip hung beneath the head like a necklace. Scales encrusted the curse's entire surface; as it moved, they flexed and shifted like bird plumage. It had a beak like a parrot with an overbite, but tusks of a wild boar.

It loped through the forest aimlessly, footsteps charring fallen pine needles and tree roots in its wake.

"Think that's what we're looking for?" Shouko asked, taking another step towards the curse.

Half of the tail unfurled from its body, and the tip snapped to point in the direction of their group. A note like a shriek pierced the air.

"4,271 hertz…," Utahime mumbled to herself, bemused.

"Anybody else hear that?" Getou asked, voice strained.

Gojou growled, "Is it making that—"

Something clicked in Utahime's brain. "Take cover!" she barked.

Apparently, the first-years did know when to listen, as they wasted no time heeding her advice. Gojou and Getou crouched into notches in the face of the mountain while Shouko flattened herself behind a boulder. Utahime had but half a second to see sparks hiss at the edge of the curse's beak before flipping about a shoulder so she fit in a tree's shadow.

Bombardments that sounded like firecrackers but the size of basketballs flew through the trees, ricocheting against bark and stone. A projectile glanced the boughs that hung over Shouko.

"Shit!" Shouko hissed and flipped backwards over the boulder as half a dozen torched branches fell to where she was moments before.

Utahime hollered, "Talk to me, Shouko-chan!" and peeked her head around the trunk.

A cough, followed by an annoyed huff. "In one piece, but royally pissed off." Shouko pulled a cursed object—something like a kusarigama from Utahime's vantage point—from where it was hidden on her back under her jacket. She sidestepped through a nearby copse of trees, twirling the fundo end by the chain almost lazily, until she was in line with the curse.

The cliff face crumbled.

Utahime gasped. She glanced over to Shouko, who seemed sufficiently sheltered for the time being. A similar look at the curse and Utahime determined it was safe to run and check on Getou and Gojou. The curse settled on its hindquarters, and the colors around its scales faded. The ringing around it dissipated.

Her heeled boots crunched against the fallen autumn leaves as she dashed towards the cliff.

"Getou! Gojou! Say something!"

She—and worse, the Higher-Ups—would never forgive herself if she lost two kouhai, among the two most promising of this generation, on a mission under her charge. Shitou and Kigawa put their trust in her, and she could not bear to think what she would have to say to Gojou and Getou's families if she had failed this colossally.

She was only a few strides shy of reaching where the rock had fallen when another curse erupted from the rubble and sent her ass over head. She landed on her hip and shoulder with a grunt, glaring at the creature.

The curse's skin shifted across the entire spectrum of colors. It looked like an octopus, if a normal octopus levitated, had twenty-plus tentacles, and—it zoomed overhead, passing through trees and flames—phased through any substance.

"Youkaitako," Getou offered, languidly emerging from behind a rock while dust settled across his shoulders and hair. He slid his hands in his pockets, unhurried and unbothered. His voice was unnaturally smooth, a note of cold apathy running through the bass of his words. "Just got it last week. Pretty neat, right? Let's have some fun with it." He followed after his curse.

Gojou crawled out from his hidey-hole without a scratch or smudge of dust on him, as though he had not nearly been crushed. He cast an amused grin her way for a second before he shoved his hand into her armpit and lifted her to her feet.

"Right!" he chirped boisterously and rubbed his hands together. "Suguru, you cheat, you can't start yet!"

Utahime watched, both awed and dumbfounded, as all three of them charged, working in synchronous, yet distinct tasks of confronting this curse. Shouko twirled the fundo end of the kurasigama, then with a flick of the wrist released it so that it hooked the girth of the curse's neck, and slammed the kama into the earth. Getou's youkaitako wrangled the body; occupied tentacles remained opaque, while the rest of it phased into a translucent shimmer. Gojou bounded through the maze of rocks and craters until he stood poised in front of the curse.

The curse thrashed against its confines then went stock-still. Its beak poised open when the four-thousand-hertz tone reached her ears again.

Gojou smiled toothily, excited and boyish, and held his hands stretched towards the curse. "Cursed technique lapse: blue," he said, voice thrilled. "Times two."

"No! Wait!" Utahime shouted, but too little too late.

"Punch it, Satoru!"

A glowing blue disc appeared on both sides of the curse, close enough to influence, but not touch. The technique rent the curse held captive by the kurasigama and youkaitako at the same time the glow between its scales turned a fierce scarlet red.

It did not take a genius, engineer, or even an elementary student to figure out the combustion level of that combination: big.

The curse exploded in a thousand different pieces. Jagged, flaming scales sliced through the air like shrapnel. Several pieces whistled by Utahime's ears as she shielded her face with her arms, nose ground deep into the eyes of her elbows. She felt the heat of pieces snagging on her jacket sleeves and skirt and hit the dirt, rolling left and right until she no longer could sense any flames.

Utahime lifted her head to find a scene straight out of a late-night skit: Getou reabsorbing youkaitako while he condensed the fire curse into a black opalescent sphere; Shouko using a sizzling piece of the curse's tail to light a cigarette; Gojou jumping to reach an untouched tree branch and kipping so that he could lounge indolently across the bough. The only parts of the immediate landscape not splattered with burns were where the blue discs had absorbed the energy.

"That go to your count or mine, Satoru?" Getou asked. He finished creating the sphere and popped it in his mouth. A slick glug cut through the trees as he swallowed it.

Gojou hummed from above. "I'm the one who dealt the final blow, so—"

"Oi! You wouldn't have even gotten a shot if youkaitako hadn't held it still." Getou wiped spit from the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand.

Shouko droned, "Yeah, sure, forget about my contribution. But I think accidentally blowing up the damn thing means neither of you gets the point."

Getou and Gojou simultaneously objected, affronted and even louder than before.

Utahime jumped to her feet and crossed the distance with footfalls that were hardly lady-like.

"What kind of single-celled, moronic move was that?!" she spat, smacking sizzling chunks of detritus from her skirt.

From behind Getou's shoulder, Shouko pointed to the top of her head with a disturbed grimace.

Utahime lifted her hand to mirror Shouko's position and jumped when she heard a wet squelch before she registered a stickiness against her fingers. A small whimper came from her throat. B 8 , her brain supplied unhelpfully. One lower eyelid twitched as she dragged the offending object, a five-pronged tentacle from youkaitako, from her hair. A string of mucus stretched from the end of the tentacle, up her pigtail, and settled at the center part on her forehead.

Utahime attempted to toss the tentacle aside despite suckers on its underside sprouting and adhering to her forearm. After four tries, a deep growl, and a swing of her arm that rivaled a battering ram—borne from swinging a baseball bat in the forest behind her home as a child, kimono or no—she was free from its clutches, safe to chew out her unruly band of kouhai.

Getou shrugged, posture relaxed, near unassuming, save that he could not hide the amusement dancing in his eyes. "Dunno. It kinda"—he rotated his hand in the air to fill the gap—"came to us. Y'know, a shared revelation. Seemed like a good idea at the time."

"Troglodytes had better ideas."

Getou held his hands up in mock surrender. "Look, Iori-senpai, I get that you gotta ride us about protocol and shit—Kigawa does it all the time—but what's it matter how we do it if we get the job done?"

Precocious brat , she seethed. " Protocol is what keeps fellow sorcerers and non-sorcerers safe , Getou- kun, and keeps"—she motioned to the landscape—"national landmarks from being utterly destroyed!"

Gojou yawned from his prone position on the branch. "Protocol is what weaklings with no imagination hide behind."

Getou parried, "There's hardly any protocol for a fourth-year overseeing first-years."

Gojou added with a finger pointed toward the sky, "First-years that're stronger than her, too!"

Utahime felt her lips begin to pull back into a snarl. Okaa-san had trained her better. She redirected all that energy from her mouth down to her hands to fist in her ruined skirt. (She vowed to request that Shitou establish a budget specifically for uniforms destroyed on missions; better yet, find a way to make the fabrics fire, acid, and stain resistant.)

"And you!" She rounded on Gojou with as much fortitude that was possible while he was two meters above her. "What were you thinking?! You could've just touched it with Blue and poof! It's gone!"

He flopped his arms out to the sides so they hung freely. "Wanted to try something new."

Shouko raised her hand. "Uhhh, should I leave?" she asked blandly.

Utahime sighed. "No, Shouko-chan. And put that cigarette out!"

"Wait a minute, hold on!" Gojou rolled off the branch and landed softly on his feet. "Why does she get 'Shouko-chan'"—he stuck his arm in Shouko's direction—"he get 'Getou-kun'"—the palm shifted to jerk a thumb in accusation at Getou—"and I get stuck with," he pitched his voice to match Utahime's annoyed, acerbic tone, "Gojou?!"

"Because Shouko's my favorite."

"Obviously," Shouko chimed in.

Gojou sputtered, "A-A-After only a few hours?!"

"And you've never bothered to treat your senpai with any respect. Social protocol dictates I'm not obligated to afford you any respect." She turned around, pigtails slapping slapping against her shoulders, and began the trek back to the train station. She shot over her shoulder, a grin tugging at her lips, "Maybe you can work your way up to 'san'!"

June 2018

"Cheers!"

Utahime and Shouko clinked their glasses of alcohol and took respectable gulps.

It was late enough that Utahime and Shouko missed most of the salarymen who flooded the bars when they went off the clock.

Utahime gasped as she released her lips from the rim of her pint. This bar had the best selection of international brews and liqueurs in the Tokyo area. Certainly put Utahime's typical haunts in Kyoto to shame for the variety alone; Tokyo could not compare to Kyoto's tea shops, though.

The amber of the dark ale glistened under the warm pendant light above their table in the back corner of the bar. Most sorcerers sat with their backs to walls and a direct line of sight to at least one exit. Okaa-san—though never an official sorcerer, but consulted in logic and strategy before she married otou-san—once imparted, "Your blind spots are covered by the walls, and if you can make an easy exit from pursuers or after curses, you will control a large portion of the collateral damage to non-sorcerers."

Utahime asked, "Surprised that I didn't hear from you last night. Thought you'd want to do some heavy drinking after everything that went down." She cleared her throat while a light flush from the ale seeped up the column of her neck. "But, since I lost the baseball game, I'm not complaining."

Shouko sipped at her tumbler of umesu sour. "I spent all night cleaning the infirmary," she explained. "Turns out whatever Patchwork Face did to Tengen-sama's guards not only killed them—you read Nanami's report on the whole changing stuff on the cursed-energy molecular level thing, right?"

Utahime nodded as she took another gulp of her ale.

"So he screwed up the guards so much that their bodies shut down. Par for the course with him it seems…" Her eyes drifted to a divot in the table. "All his casualties… The ones I've examined. All of them suffered." She scoffed. "He left a gift this time, though. One of the guards—Yaga said its name was Chuuyari—literally oozed on me. Guess the body couldn't hold it together anymore."

Utahime choked on her next drink. "Are you all right?!"

"Sure thing," Shouko deadpanned.

"Why didn't you text me or ask for help, something?"

"Okay, the literally part was meant for 'oozed' there, not literally on me." A small giggle escaped her pursed lips.

"I'm so glad you find my completely justied freak-out amusing," Utahime groused.

"Sorry, sorry. Not laughing at you, honest! But I seriously couldn't ask for anyone's help. Had to quarantine the place and seal the doors with both biohazard and cursed-energy tape." Her index finger traced the rim of the tumbler as she recounted, "Then I had to somehow get into that hazmat suit, that I'm pretty sure has has been in storage since the nineties and the Higher-Ups just haven't bothered to update it; take samples of the stuff that exploded out of Chuuyari; finish the autopsy while wearing that suit, and let me tell you that trying to maneuver a scalpel with those gloves on is no cake walk. After all that was finished, then I could clean up and call it a night-slash-morning." She punctuated the end of her tale by downing the rest of her drink, hissing through her nose as it slid down her throat.

"Feel better?" Utahime asked.

"Much. Still gotta submit the report to Yaga, but"—she licked the excess alcohol from her lips—"venting about it over drinks with you helps keep it from spiraling in my head."

Utahime frowned. She was tipsy, but not so much that she could not recognize when Shouko was circling an issue. "What do you mean 'spiraling'?"

Shouko blinked deliberately, thinking, assessing. Her eyes adjusted to the mid-distance.

"You don't have to tell me if it'll get you in trouble—like your autopsy on Itadori-kun, wouldn't you say?"

Shouko sighed, "Yeah, sorry 'bout that. Wanted to bring you in the loop on that one, but Gojou said it'd be better to hold off on that." She snorted. "Probably just wanted to do it himself."

Utahime paused for a beat, tucking that seemingly-irrelevant piece of information in the back of her mind, and pressed, "So…can you tell me what you found out from Chuuyari's autopsy?"

Shouko set her tumbler back on the table. She took an index finger and began to twirl it through strands of her hair, an old habit she returned to, regardless of its length, when she had things to process. A pensive noise came from her throat.

"I've seen several cases where Patchwork's powers altered human DNA into something that I wouldn't even call 'alien'." She grumbled to the knotty wood, "It's not repulsive enough. Would be an insult to aliens…"

Her eyes cut up to Utahime and added, "But Chuuyari and Kagiren—more Chuuyari, though—their DNA had strands that were almost human."

Utahime circled both of her hands around the circumference of her pint, securing her hold. (Pint, she scoffed. Such a bizarre unit of measurement.) She felt her brows pinch into a befuddled frown. "What does that mean exactly, strand?" she asked. Her knowledge of biology only went so far as to pass Tokyo Tech's equivalent of a standard high school curriculum. DNA was hardly useful for understanding her technique.

Shouko pinched the ends of her hair and pulled them taut. "Want the first-year middle school explanation or the first-year university one?" she offered. Facts and figures danced behind cool, sharp eyes, already parsing and categorizing between the expert and the laymen terms.

Utahime snorted. "Split the difference with first-year high school?"

The corner of Shouko's lip quirked in dry amusement. She set her tumbler aside and leaned forward to prop her forearms and hands on the table. The nail of her index finger tapped against one grain of the wood.

"Both humans and spirits have strands of DNA, but they link differently. Think of each of these strands in the grain as strands of DNA, but microscopic. In humans, two strands link together to make a—"

"Double helix," Utahime finished with a jerky nod, reaching the end of her knowledge on genetics.

"Right. Instead of a double helix, spirit DNA strands come in a bunch of different shapes, but usually things that you'd expect from nature. Except Tengen-sama's. That was like, getting an accidental glimpse at subatomic space. Whatever that means. So, when I looked at Kagiren and Chuuyari's DNA, I was expecting it to look like spinning blossoms and such. But…there were these chunks that were human"—she cocked her head to-and-fro—"okay, not totally human, but not spirit either.

"It was almost like someone took half the DNA from both of them and spliced a broken double helix on the end of the strands. Ugly." She shivered.

"What kinds of spirits were they, Chuuyari and Kagiren?"

Shouko motioned to the bartender for another umesu sour. "Chuuyari was a pine spirit, and Kagiren was…volcano, I think."

Utahime adjusted her shoulders, attempting to alleviate the twisted pressure building at the bottom of her ribs. "Did…did they suffer, too?"

Shouko glanced through half-lidded eyes at the rest of Utahime's lager. "Yes," she whispered. "They weren't dead yet when they were brought into the infirmary. Chuuyari made this…noise that I wish you could've heard because I have no idea how to describe it, but"—her nose flared—"maybe that's a blessing. Next thing I knew, he expired on the table and then disintegrated." A click of her tongue.

Damn.

Utahime hugged her stomach. What good did morphing these spirits' DNA into humans' do? The attack at the Exchange was planned, methodical. Did Patchwork Face do this for cheap thrills because Chuuyari and Kagiren were there for the taking, or was there a specific purpose to mutating spirit DNA?

The server dropped off Shouko's second umesu sour and quickly took away the empty tumbler.

"Bah!" Shouko huffed, shaking her head. "Enough of that. Freaking depressing. Since this is the last night you'll be in Tokyo"—she smirked—"got anyone waiting for you back in Kyoto?"

Utahime scoffed. "Like I've got the time." She bit her lip, reconsidering momentarily. "There was someone a month ago. He was sweet, a bit shy. We met at the same specialty tea store—the one I took you to downtown. We went on a couple dates." She drained the dregs of her lager. "We had fun talking about tea, and they weren't bad dates, just—"

"Boring."

"Shouko!"

"Oh come on, Uta! It doesn't matter how nice he is; if all you have in common is your preference in tea you're never going to have a relationship." She took two heaping gulps of her drink. Her eyes turned rueful, wistful. "Take it from someone who knows."

Utahime knew there was a story behind that expression, but this was neither the time nor place to press for it. Shouko had had a difficult weekend. She had earned peace to keep that secret for now.

"Besides," Shouko said as her eyes took on an amused, dark glint. "This means I haven't lost the bet, yet."

Utahime pursed her lips. "What bet?"

"There's a pool going between me, Mei, Kusakabe, Ijichi, and Akari. Oh, and Nanami." She puffed a laugh like she would a cigarette. "Think Yaga got in on it, too."

"About what?" Utahime demanded, bewildered.

Shouko patted her back. "I'll let you know when it happens. Until then, we drink!"

飛

Utahime slid the door shut behind her, latched the lock, and sagged against the adjacent shoe closet. She toed off her shoes and left them and her luggage in the genkan. She would handle those tomorrow after class.

The Toukaidou shinkansen line was always busy, but the return trip from Tokyo felt longer (far, far longer) than the standard two hours plus or minus fifteen minutes. Maybe the stress of the weekend had gotten to her.

And she had to teach the following morning. Lovely. She would have to put Gojou's request on hold for one more day until she could find her footing again.

Her students were quieter than usual. Being attacked during a school event certainly had a sobering effect.

Throughout the entire day, Miwa halfheartedly tapped her replacement katana in the practice yard, mourning the loss of her original one to Maki. Mai ground through at least half of her pencil lead taking notes. Muta's Mechamaru, only partially complete with repairs, beeped a semi-tone lower than typical.

About three-quarters through Japanese history, the final class of the day, Miwa raised her hand.

Utahime trailed off at the end of a sentence about the Kamakura shogunate. "Yes, Miwa?"

Miwa asked, "What's gonna happen now, sensei? After the attack?"

Utahime swallowed the saliva that flooded to her cheeks. At least she did not cough in her surprise. She took a second to breathe and closed her notebook. Her hands came around to fold into each other at the base of her spine.

"The staff from both campuses have done their initial examinations and investigations. Three windows are also being brought in to provide a third perspective on the situation, to make sure that we faculty did not overlook anything. Then they will give us their recommendations on how to improve the security for future Exchange events. That's all that I'm willing to tell you right now." Just in case one of you is the mole, she thought, digging her nails into her palm to distract from the nausea that idea triggered. "Going forward," she mused, "we will do our best to provide you with the tools that, should something like that happen to you again, you will be able to protect yourselves from—"

The words "more than just curses" died on her tongue. Would that give too much away? She did not know if the second-years or any of the other students even had considered that a curse user was likely involved. And if—God forbid—one of them was the mole, did this reveal that she was investigating?

She loathed that she had to second guess everything she said around her students. It was one thing to filter her thoughts and wrap them in double entendre around Gakuganji and the Higher-Ups. She did not want to do that out of suspicion for her own students.

But it was the nature of the situation.

"Protect yourselves from whatever comes your way," she finished, feeling a bit lame.

Miwa and Mai nodded in unison. Mechamaru spoke monotonously, "Understood, sensei."

"'Kay," she spoke quietly. "Let's call it a day. We'll finished going over the chapter tomorrow."

After her second-years had finished filing out of the classroom, Utahime dropped her head in relief. That was close, she thought, musing how she could create better omissions to use in the future. (She was admittedly an atrocious liar. Half-truths and circumvention would have to do for now.)

The rest of the afternoon passed with Utahime catching up with grading and creating lesson plans in the teachers' workroom. Late afternoon trickled into early evening as the sun barely peeked through the trees outside the window. Once she finished, she switched off her station lamp and headed back to her room.

飛

Utahime slipped into a lilac cotton pajama set with short sleeves, heaving a sigh as the cool fabric hit her skin.

She filed through her collection of records until she landed on a limited-edition LP of Oonuki Taeko's album, "Copine". Otou-san had gifted it to her when she had made Grade-2 sorcerer.

She slid the record out of its sleeve, placed it on the turntable platter, and switched on the turntable. A gentle tip of the tonearm threaded the stylus through the record's first grooves, and the opening vocalization of "Les Aventures de Tintin" filled the room. The melody and staccato rhythm swirled around her.

Utahime shut her eyes and allowed the music to lull her into a semblance of a dance, the kind she only allowed to come out when she was truly alone (or completely sloshed with Shouko in her apartment). She had not realized how tense her posture had become until she felt a knot between her shoulder blades release as she spun about herself through the short hall between the genkan and her living area.

"Copine" was one of her favorite albums, a cathartic balance between uplifting and soulful. It was a go-to listen for when she needed to unwind. This weekend's aftermath proved as good an excuse as any.

The song concluded, and Utahime took a final spin. A cursory check of the clock told her it was time to assemble dinner.

It was a simple enough recipe. Two fillets of salmon marinaded in a combination of miso, sesame oil, sake, mirin, and soy sauce, while several servings of rice cooked in the rice cooker. A few minutes before she wanted to eat, Utahime would place the fillets in the grilling tray for ten minutes along with a foil packet of whatever green vegetable was in season.

Okaa-san was not the most proficient cook—Umeko made sure to keep the kitchen in ship-shape, which did not leave much room for okaa-san as lady of the house to practice—but she did her best to teach Utahime easy recipes that could be made in a kitchenette either at the Toyko dorms or in a single's apartment.

Kyoto's faculty housing was spacious enough to provide the amenities of a kitchenette with another half a square meter of counter top space for meal preparation.

It would take about an hour for the salmon to marinade completely.

In the meantime, Utahime took a turn about the room, weighing her options on locations to hide evidence on the mole.

There were not many places to hide anything, period. The furniture and elements that she incorporated in her room were traditional, ergo aired on the side of minimal, reminiscent of her childhood home. The area that had the most storage space—and by extension, a more modern style—had her desk and bookcases. Filing drawers and shelves were essential to keeping her work organized. However, it would be the most obvious place for an enemy to look if she were ever suspected or found out.

In a Western film, for this sort of situation, the protagonist would stash her top-secret materials under her bed. Utahime's eyes cut over to the closet where her futon sat in its appropriate cubicle. A mattress and box spring set where she might sandwich a board with her findings, theories, and thoughts would have been a plausible solution, albeit predictable. A futon simply did not provide that sort of cover.

The other issue was speed. Gojou never mentioned how high or deep the leak went, but she would not put it past the Higher-Ups to implement impromptu inspections of the students' and staff's quarters. She would need a place where she could hide her data at a moment's notice or less and, more importantly, be contained enough to remain hidden should her room be ransacked.

Her eyes meandered to the few pieces of wall art she could fit on the wall. Aside from the photos of her with her parents or friends, she had two larger works—a commemorative poster of the Seibu Lions roster that went on to win the 1992 Japan Series and a poster of Watanabe Hisanobu.

Utahime and her parents had watched on the television Seibu face the Yakult Swallows for seven grueling games. Three of the games had gone to ten innings, and one game was a staggering twelve. In the end, Seibu won in the seventh game. It was the game that made her a lifelong baseball and Seibu fan (even if she had to beg her parents to let her break curfew and watch).

Watanabe Hisanobu went on to be a star pitcher for the Lions, a baseball treasure, and Utahime's first crush. She could remember bringing it home after school—her second year of elementary—and announcing with self-assured gusto and no room for argument that he was the young man of her dreams, and she was going to marry him. He may have gotten older, but the cover of "Sports Illustrated" that featured him mid-pitch, cool-faced, and wrapped in lean muscle would be forever.

(Perhaps she was not as over that crush as she had thought. Probably explained her string of failed first dates, too.)

The wall…

She padded over to the wall and placed her ear against it. She knocked the surface two times. Two shallow raps echoed back to her. It was too thin to hide anything inside, also too cumbersome to handle.

She continued to knock along the wall until the sound changed, deeper and rounder. That had to be part of the structural frame. (Otou-san's head servant, Hiroto, had once told her what that was called, but she wished she could recall it.) If she had wanted, she could have decorated her room with heavy silks and paintings by suspending them from a nail driven into the—

Stud!Hiroto called it a 'stud'. It could support much more weight than the material of the wall.

A thought—so bizarre and unconventional, it could hardly be predicted—came to her, clouds in the night sky parting for the stars. She could not fit evidence in the wall, but maybe she could still use it; hide things inside a piece of art that hung from it.

Hisanobu's poster caught her eye.

Posters displayed on thick bevels like modern art in a gallery could work. Maybe there were ones with hinges or removable backings so that she could place documents and clues inside.

It would be a bold call, hiding what she was investigating practically in plain sight, but the jujutsu world had a tactical flaw. Even at Jujutsu Tech, the curriculum taught students to observe on the surface, to gather intel, but to search and investigate beneath it. Anything worth finding in their line of work was seldom visible at a first glance.

Utahime sighed, propping her fists against her hips. "I'm gonna have to build it myself…," she concluded. Wonder if the hardware store has invisible hinges…

It was not a complete plan, yet. There were still several details for this aspect alone to iron out, but she felt confident with it as a starting point, both as a place to begin investigating and to cover her tracks along the way.

Her stomach gave a soft growl. Right. She still had dinner to make.

Utahime pulled the two fillets of salmon out of the marinade and placed them and the vegetables on the grill tray. She slid the tray shut and set the timer for ten minutes.

The rice cooker beeped to signal it was finished and switched to its 'keep warm' setting.

While she waited on the salmon, Utahime reached for the bottom-most shelf and plucked a single clean sheet of loose-leaf paper from a stack in the left corner and a pencil from a space keeper to the right of that. The pencil flew across the page as she quickly sketched out a couple options for the poster mounts.

She never felt she was at all proficient at making things up on the fly, and her cursed technique was not suited to it, either. Analyzing as many possibilities as she could and planning responses meant that she was less likely to have to wing a decision and make a costly mistake.

She lightly scratched the edge of the scar on her bicep. It was a phantom itch she could never alleviate.

Maybe that was one of the things that held her back from advancing to Grade 1. It seemed the most successful sorcerers in her generation were able to go with the flow, and the highest caliber among them could be embodiment of that flow. (She never heard stories of Tsukumo Yuki having to create a plan for the curses the Higher-Ups tasked her to exorcise.)

The timer went off.

Grilled salmon, vegetables, and rice—a comforting, albeit boring, dinner. The leftovers made for a satisfying lunch the following day. Utahime's stomach gave an encouraging grumble. She grabbed a set of pot holders from a hook on the back wall and slid the grill pan out. Steam billowed up past her face, carrying the homely scents of miso and soy. Pot holders in hand, she lifted the grate of salmon away from the grill lip.

"Hope one of those is for me," a disembodied voice said from behind her.

Utahime nearly tipped the grate over in her haste to spin about-face. An alarmed squawk tore from her before she recognized her uninvited guest.

Gojou spurred forward, plastering a scorching palm against her mouth. He hardly needed to bend over the grate to avoid burning himself. "Now, don't wanna put the rest of campus on alert… Probably should've knocked first, huh?" he said with barely enough decency to appear remorseful.

Utahime growled in the back of her throat. She tossed the grate and fish on the counter, the fillets nearly sliding over the edge, and peeled his hand away. "Ya think?!" she hissed under her breath.

"In fairness to me—"

"Absolutely not!"

"—you should've heard my cursed energy. So, really, it's not my fault."

Utahime half-laughed-half-scoffed. "Please. Like you can't hide it any time you damn well want. And you said you were going to text me, not show up in my home in the middle of the night."

Gojou's head snapped a trifle straighter as though in realization. "Ah. You're right." He lifted a had in apology. It would have been a sight to behold were the whole effect not ruined by his saying, "My bad."

She huffed and allowed the pot holders to drop from her hands onto the counter. "Don't tell me you're just here to ruin my dinner plans."

"Wasn't the plan, but," he dragged out the sound, singsong,"since I'm here."

Utahime returned to the salmon and vegetables, procuring a set of chopsticks and a bowl from the drawers and cabinets. Her hand itched to pull the fillets back to a more secure state on the grill and grasped at the corners in the pinch of the chopsticks. "What? None of your other friends were willing to let you mooch off them?" she accused. "I'm sure Nanami's pay and tastes are more your style. Or gotten something from one of those high-end Tokyo bistros?"

While she popped open the rice cooker and began to mound it in the bowl, Gojou made a small noise of consideration. "Eh, maybe, but I'd rather not bother Nanami on his date and have him get mad at me, and Shouko's in one of her moods."

As usual, his tone was too lighthearted. She stammered around her shock at the revelation of Nanami seeing someone, but recovered at the implication that remained. "So you thought it'd be a good idea to drop by here, unannounced?"

"Well, yeah."

Her next demand sounded like a squeak toy in her efforts to keep her volume constrained. "How?!"

"You're too weak to kick me out. Nanamin definitely woulda tried to kill me even at that fancy restaurant, but if you ask me the whole place was too stuffy and he shoulda gone with this little café that makes—"

"The point, Gojou," she snapped, taking the aggression out on unwrapping the steamed vegetables.

She saw him shrug from the corner of her eye. His hands hid in the pockets of his jacket. "And you can't say no to a guest after all these years."

He had no way of knowing that okaa-san and otou-san would be disappointed if they ever found out that she refused to feed a guest, regardless of how emphatically, on hands and knees, she explained the levels of annoyance and disruption Gojou Satoru caused in her life. She had to concede he was right about that.

So much for her leftovers.

"Come on," she said evenly, holding out to him a fully plated dish.

Her position made her pajama sleeve ride up, uncovering a couple centimeters of the scar on her right arm.

Gojou said nothing, but the buzz of her skin made her suspect that his eyes had lingered on the scarring from behind the safety of his blindfold, and headed over to the chabudai. The silence, at the very least, was welcome. No need to draw attention to something that neither of them wanted to discuss.

He dropped to sit with his legs crossed and scooted as far under the chabudai as his thighs could fit. She followed suit not a minute after.

"Thank you for the food," he said softly, holding his hands again in a formal prayer pose with refinement that only came with being trained by the upper-echelon from childhood. Try as he might at times to sound less posh than he actually was (consonant drops, especially when he was in high school), he never seemed able to completely shed his clan's rearing of him in the small details.

Gojou held his chopsticks with the same finesse and that he used to activate any of his techniques and with as much grace as a pianist.

He had also waited until she sat down to begin eating.

By the time she asked her first question, he already had finished half of his portion. "So, other than to eat me out of my home"—she resisted the increasing urge to cough around her bite of rice as half of his salmon fillet disappeared into his mouth—"what're you doing here?"

He swallowed. "Was kind of thinking brainstorming, but if you've already found the lucky winner…"

She shook her head, wide eyes dropping to her own meal. She had seen him eat before, but it was almost always limited to sweets and desserts he brought back from missions; confections from little old ladies, who were more than happy to make him highly unusual specialty items for reasons Utahime would never understand. She could not recall ever seeing Gojou sit down and eat anything that constituted as 'real food'.

Since Utahime was sure that she was only a marginal cook, she could only guess that he was hungrier than he looked at first.

"I think I have plan," she said and took another couple bites of salmon. The salmon soothed some of her nerves. "Not a complete one, but enough to get started."

Gojou polished off every grain of rice from his bowl. He offered an equally as refined "thank you for the meal" as he had at the start of dinner. His attention, no longer centered on inhaling an entire serving of salmon, wandered momentarily to the opposite end of the table. He had snatched the sheet of paper with those God-forsaken long arms before she had even thought to look at it.

"What's this?" he chirped, interest piqued.

The sketch was not one of her best, but it got the point across.

"I'm not really sure, yet. But," she breathed, "I'm an easier target than you, so I literally don't have a lot of places to hide. This is what I came up with."

Gojou turned the page 180 degrees, then held it up so he could see it and her posters at the same time, though it almost seemed like he was covering up Hisanobu in the process. He hummed and hawed, until he said, "Not bad. Could work," and passed the sketch back to her. "Let me know how it turns out, yeah?"

Utahime quirked an eyebrow in half-defiance, eyes half-lidded more out of sleepiness than annoyance. "My DIY project or your request?"

He bobbed his head, a buoy floating in equilibrium between water and air, regard and entertained. The first signs of fatigue peeked through the veneer where the muscles from the corners of his mouth to his nose were too taut.

Noticing her scrutiny, broad fingertips patted at the skin above his upper lip. "Eh? Something on my face?"

Utahime ignored his question. "How are you gonna hold up on your end?" she asked

A chuckle. "You always gonna answer my questions with questions?"

"Only for as long as you do to me," she replied, tone easing back into the familiar exchange of banter. She braced her forearms on the table as a tripod to hold her weight up as she felt the call of slumber try to drag her under. But she could not give in yet. "So are you gonna answer the question or not?"

"I asked first!"

"Oh…right…what was yours again?"

"Utahime, you must be getting old if your memory's already going."

"My memory's fine, idiot!"

"So, is there?"

Utahime rolled her eyes. "Is there what?"

"Anything on my face!" For further clarification, he pointed at his own cheek.

She huffed, "Other than the blindfold, no."

For reasons unknown, he was not convinced, instead grunting from the base of his throat. D5.

"You look tired," she elaborated, pulling her hands from the table to settle in the basket of her lap. "That's all." Before he inevitably opened his mouth and twisted her words back on her, she said, "Don't let it go to your head."

He snorted. "Right."

"That means you answer mine now."

The curve of a pale brow barely crested over the edge of the blindfold. "Which one?"

So he had noticed. "Both."

Gojou breathed in a way that nearly sounded like the lowest notes of a shakuhachi. "Let's see…," he mumbled and reached to pluck several grains of rice she had left behind in her bowl. "Any progress you can share on that"—he nodded toward the sketch while he popped the rice into his mouth—"and the little favor would be great. As for your second question," he mused, "haven't thought that far."

Utahime scoffed. Of course he had not. She would have to ask him about it on a different day.

Try as she might to subtly hide it behind a hand, a large yawn ripped from her throat.

"Okay, obaa-chan," Gojou snickered, pulling his legs back under himself so he could stand. He strolled to her closet and grabbed the rolled futon and pillow. "I know it's past your bedtime—"

"If I'm that old, then you should show me even more respect, Gojou!" She bristled, hopping to her feet and ripping the futon from his arms.

Unbothered, he hummed a little ditty as he headed for the picture window. "Try and get some sleep, Utahime. We got a long way to go."

She nodded, too tired to bristle. "Take your own advice."

Gojou smirked and, in the blink of an eye, disappeared.

Guest successfully gone, Utahime dropped her futon on the floor and kicked it to unroll and lie flat. She spared an extra thirty seconds to put away the leftovers from dinner minus one salmon fillet and promptly crawled into the futon.

It was only as sleep overtook her that she recognized the song that Gojou was trying to hum was "Les Aventures de Tintin".

Notes:

So sorry for the delays. Some things since the last update have been a kick in the teeth.
Hope that this chapter made up for the time between updates.
Thank you for reading.

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Chapter 6: Sente 3 Hachi Gin ( 3八銀)—Black, Silver General 3h

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Act I: Hisha (飛車)—Rook

Chapter 6: Sente 3 Hachi Gin ( 3八銀)—Black, Silver General 3h

February 1997

Utahime turned ten five days before she discovered that she could walk through curtains.

It happened more as a coincidence than an intentional, carefully-planned revelation.

A curse had been spotted in the area near her family's home in Mutsu. Utahime and kaa-chan had been about town shopping for supplies to make a poster for a fourth-grade project on the life cycles of frogs.

Kaa-chan noticed the change in the air before Utahime and yanked her by the back of her uniform jacket to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk. It had to be something adults could do better than children, Utahime decided, because it took a sudden explosion followed by a burst of shouts and screams from a street over for her to realize what was wrong.

Kaa-chan's hand quickly moved from Utahime's jacket to her hand and moved to run away from the commotion.

Utahime knew about jujutsu sorcerers. It was unavoidable given her family's long standing in jujutsu society. However, she had never seen sorcerers fight up close.

A black dome like a snow globe painted with calligraphy ink appeared just behind the buildings to their left.

Non-sorcerers and civilians who had escaped from the street were in a panic, pushing and shoving anything and anyone that happened to get in their way.

Utahime dropped her supplies so that her other hand could also grab onto kaa-chan's. Despite her best efforts, her clammy hands slipped, and the scrambling and darting of non-sorcerers carried her small body farther away from kaa-chan with each passing second.

"Utahime!" Kaa-chan jumped and reached toward her like a salmon swimming upstream.

Anything Utahime tried to shout back was lost among the sea of voices.

Eventually, she found a way to break free from the throng, and fell off to the side, nearly crushed against the edge of the dome. She looked to people, who continued to flock and scuttle as though the dome was not there.

When it first appeared, the dome had hardly made a sound. Now, as Utahime gathered her footing, wincing as the scrapes of the pavement on her palms made themselves known, she noticed that it hummed.

It was soothing, in a weird way, reminding her of tou-chan's voice. Did this…Utahime tried to remember what it was called. Towel? Blanket?

In the near distance, a much clearer and calmer voice than the shoppers' said, "Yes, Gakuganji-san, the curtain has been raised!"

Curtain! Peering up at the black expanse, Utahime thought it was a good word, but in her opinion snow globe was still a better description. She would have to ask tou-chan about it; he would know.

She wondered if curtains had voices since they could hum…

She knew the note that came from the curtain because it was unique to all the other voices, just above C3. She could try to match it. The range of her voice had grown since she tried with the souzu, but this was even lower. It drowned out the screams of the patrons and pedestrians around her—soothing, strangely, against the shrill notes bouncing off every surface around her.

The curtain called to her, inviting her to try and sing its note. It sounded so much nicer than the crying behind her.

Her cursed energy glided around her vocal chords—kaa-chan had shown her a diagram in a textbook about what those muscles looked like under her skin—and pressed against the edge of the dome as she sang. In front of her, the curtain vibrated and reverberated back at a louder volume.

"Whoa," she said faintly. That was new.

Utahime repeated the note, a little stronger this time, and held it longer. The curtain vibrated and wiggled even more than the first.

As she began to peer closer, the curtain swished like a wave and tugged her into it. She had no time to react to even cut off her note when she was suddenly inside the dome, nose-to-nose with a metallic-green curse covered in pustules and boils.

This was not the first time Utahime had seen a curse, but certainly the first that could kill her in an instant.

Tou-chan had told her that Mutsu was a large enough city that there would always be small curses running around every day. Some of them were even cute, she thought, because they looked like puff balls or overgrown sea urchins. Tou-chan would pull out his kagurabue[1] and play a series of runs, even a variation on traditional Aomori songs, and the curse would peep before shriveling or popping out of existence.

This curse bared at her two rows of fangs dripping with eggplant-colored drool. Utahime hoped it was drool and not some kind of blood.

A long string of drool dropped from its gaping maw and splattered against her uniform skirt. The drool turned the skirt from a deep navy to crane-white before burning away like acid. Utahime gulped and choked on a squeal before she jumped to her feet and took off as fast as she could, the curse hot in pursuit.

"Yaga!" an invisible voice shouted. "Where the hell'd the kid come from?!"

Utahime did not dare to look behind her to see how close the curse was. She knew she would trip over something if she did not keep her eyes focused ahead.

A grunt, a sharp whoosh, and a shriek from the curse so shrill Utahime had to cover her ears. Something hard hit her in the back, and she fell to her hands and knees against the concrete. She caught herself just before her nose smashed against the ground and rolled sideways so she was on her back. Her head shot up, and she saw a tall man with tan skin wrestling with the curse.

He attempted to put the curse in a headlock, but the curse pushed him back several meters with a wide swipe of its claws. He grappled with it two more times while the other man ran up to her and used his back as a shield.

"Hang on, kid," he grunted and tucked her in his arms so her face was pressed against his chest and arm. He reeked of cigarettes.

Through a tiny gap under his armpit, she saw a small animal bounce overhead and sucker-punch the curse squarely in the face. The curse stumbled backwards and collapsed on its back. The tan man quickly grabbed a dagger from his belt and shoved the blade into the curse's belly.

For a creature with such a frightening roar in battle, it died with barely a lonely whimper. The wind carried it away as its body turned to ashes, leaving the scent of hot garbage in the air.

Utahime clenched her hands around her front.

"Finally," the man above her huffed. He pulled back and frowned at her. "Could you… uh…"

Utahime wiggled out of his hold and ran over to the hole in the pavement where the curse had fallen.

The tan man cleared his throat. "Are you all right, miss?" He turned his head back to the other man. "Tanaka, start pulling the curtain down."

The inkiness of the dome began to disappear, and light shone through the air, warming her skin.

She nodded. "What kind of curse was that?"

Tanaka said, "So she can see them…"

"Utahime!" kaa-chan's voice came from down the street. The hiss of her cursed-energy settled over their heads.

"Kaa-chan!" Utahime smiled. She could feel tears forming in her eyes, but was not sure why.

She skidded to a stop just in time to drop to her knees and take Utahime by the shoulders. "Don't you ever do that again," she said, syllables stiff on her tongue. "Do you understand me?!"

Utahime's voice was stuck in her throat. The tears burned the corners of her eyes. She sounded like the frogs she had heard in class. Somehow, she managed, "But, kaa—"

Kaa-chan stood and flattened her palms across the front of her skirt with a snap. Her eyes bounced back-and-forth between Utahime and the man with the stuffed animals. "How did this happen?" Her voice was calm like the first drop of rain on pavement.

Out of the corner of her eye, Utahime saw the small animal walk up to the three of them. Now, though, she could see that it was not an animal at all, but looked like a blue stuffed creature from a claw machine.

It circled the group and came to stand beside Utahime. It gave her a thumbs-up—she did not know of any animals that had thumbs other than monkeys; this did not look like a monkey—and then switched to a guts pose.

The tan man stroked the hair on his jaw. "We're not sure of that either." He glanced down at Utahime with the not-monkey. He squatted until he was eye-to-eye with her and said, "You were not there when we lowered the curtain."

Utahime shook her head. A knot in the hair beneath her ear stung at the roots. When did she get that?

"Do you remember how you got inside?" he asked.

Kaa-chan watched Utahime closely from behind amber eyes.

"I—" she paused, then looked to kaa-chan for support. Kaa-chan blinked slowly and nodded.

"The people, uh, the crowd. I couldn't hold onto kaa-chan's hand, and then I fell against the curtain." She curved her hand in the air to show the shape of the dome. Her eyes fell to her feet, and she clutched her uniform skirt. "I've never seen one. Tou-chan told me about them a few times, but only what they looked like and what they did."

The tan man grunted softly, listening.

"Didn't know they had sounds. I… I thought it would be silent." Utahime looked again between kaa-chan and the tan man, the fighting stuffed animal now hung off one of his shoulders. "Li-like the first snow in winter, but when I tried to sing and sound like it, i-it grabbed me."

The tan man turned on his knees back to talk with his partner. "Curtains have a sound?"

The other man shrugged, humming a noise that almost sounded like 'I don't know'.

Kaa-chan said, "Yes. They do, but I'm surprised she could hear it this soon. It took me until I was fourteen."

Utahime hopped a couple steps closer to kaa-chan. She wiped the last of the tears from her eyes. Her breath did not feel as tight and heavy against her chest. "You can hear them, too?"

Kaa-chan nodded. "I had to develop it."

Utahime's brows pinched in confusion.

"I had to work hard and practice a lot to be good at it."

"Like me with kanji tests?"

"Exactly like that." Kaa-chan placed her palm on the back of Utahime's neck. Her fingers gently stroked the fuzzy hair that had escaped from Utahime's pigtail.

The tan man dug into a pocket inside his jacket and pulled at a card. He held it out to kaa-chan. "Your daughter has a gift. She would do well here when she's old enough."

Kaa-chan read over the card. "Thank you, Yaga-san," she said, not unkindly, but Utahime could hear the tired quaver in her voice.

Several minutes later, the two men and the plushie got into a black car with dark windows—as dark as the curtain had been—and drove away from the scene, almost like they never had been there.

Kaa-chan held out her hand to Utahime. The crowds were gone. Why did kaa-chan want to do that?

She glanced down at kaa-chan's legs. Her stockings were ripped at the knees, and the hem of her coat was covered in dirt and wet with something that did not smell like water.

"You okay, kaa-chan?" Utahime asked, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth (the inside; etiquette lessons said ladies did not bite their lips). She placed her hand in kaa-chan's.

Kaa-chan sighed quietly and gave Utahime's hand a light squeeze. "I am if you are, hibarin," she said with a shy smile. "Are you ready to go home?"

Utahime nodded and began walking toward their house, swinging her joined hand front-and-back in time with the note the curtain had played earlier.

"Kaa-chan?"

"Yes?" She peeked down at Utahime as they went around a large puddle.

"Do we have to tell tou-chan what happened?"

Kaa-chan laughed lightly under her breath. "Yes, we should. He'll be worried about us."

"Okay," Utahime said, bobbing her head back-and-forth.

"But," kaa-chan spoke like she was sharing a secret, "we can keep tou-chan from completely freaking out if we order in some pizza and give him a couple bottles of beer."

Utahime giggled and squeezed her hand again.

June 2018

The following morning, Utahime woke with every piece of her futon askew above and beneath her. The set of sheets were tangled around her shins, while the mattress had rotated almost perpendicular to her torso. Somehow, the duvet had ended up semi-draped over the chabudai. Sweat matted her hair across her forehead and the back of her neck.

Kyoto, fortunately, was not quite as sweltering or humid as Tokyo, but that did not make waking up to find herself drenched in sweat any more comfortable. With a grimace, she peeled the remainder of the sheet away from her legs, sticky as fly-paper. A put-out huff burst from her nostrils. She would need to hang the futon out to dry throughout the day.

After she had breakfast and collected additional materials she planned to cover in class, Utahime dragged the linens of the futon to the edge of the shouji screen. Some colorful curse words accompanied her as she set up the drying rack on the engawa and slung the sheets, duvet, and mattress over it. Thankfully, the breeze seemed gentle, yet constant. Maybe they would finish drying by the time she returned from teaching.

With how slowly the morning progressed, Utahime suspected she would make it back to her room within the next week.

Lunch was a welcome reprieve from the drudgery.

Utahime's stomach gurgled loudly into the quiet teacher's lounge, even though she already had finished half of the sandwich she had picked up from cooler. She dropped he head forward and groaned quietly and slowly in the back of her throat.

"You okay there, Iori-san?" a voice prompted from beyond her periphery.

Utahime hummed an affirmation.

Unjou Miori[2] had been the third-year teacher at Kyoto Tech for only a couple years longer than Utahime. She had an air of confidence that seemed to both settle and intimidate her students.

Nishimiya had mentioned once that Unjou-sensei was the near-epitome of what a female jujutsu sorcerer should be: poised, graceful, beautiful ('Gorgeous,' Utahime had thought at their first meeting), and in full control of her powers. Teaching was a bonus. Kamo nodded in agreement and offered a bland, "The main branch would have considered her a suitable bride." Toudou settled in a pose reminiscent of The Thinker and said, "She is a worthy opponent to Takada-chan." Utahime could only assume those were all compliments in their own rights.

Days like those made Utahime wonder if non-sorcerers had such conversations—where the stakes and expectations seemed counter-intuitive to the essence of being human.

Sleek, midnight hair fell over Miori's shoulder in a slick wave, a waterfall, as she sat at her desk next to Utahime. In the light of the early afternoon, it shone like starlight; a perfect compliment to warm skin and charcoal eyes.

Utahime instinctively reached for the cluster of hair behind her right ear that spread toward her temple. No matter how much she deep-conditioned or packed it in masks, that part of her hair stayed crimped, alternating between rough and rougher. As she ran it between her thumb and index finger, she counted the number of accordion folds in one patch before it switched to a section that could have been used as sandpaper.

It never was the same since the incident.

"An accident," the official report had ruled it.

Her parents refused to call it anything but "negligence" on the establishment's part.

Utahime found stable comfort in the neutrality of "incident", and it had stayed that way for four years.

Miori's voice, too squeaky and nasal for Utahime's tastes, broke through the silence. "Egg sandwich today, Iori-san?" she prodded curiously.

Utahime peeked down at the half-eaten sandwich in her hands. The flavor combination was not her first choice (or second or third), but it was edible, did not have any of her absolute noes. Were it not last night's uninvited guest, she would have been digging happily into a serving of hearty leftovers.

"Yeah," Utahime responded wistfully. "I ran out." She had no doubt that her first thought would have gone over terribly: 'Gojou Satoru broke into my apartment in this middle of the night and ate what I wanted to have for lunch today, and would have stripped my refrigerator of anything edible had I not given into his demand for dinner'. Unjou would inform Gakuganji. Gankuganji would bluster through the halls for the rest of the day and demand a gathering of the Higher-Ups.

No, it was much simpler to avoid mentioning Gojou in any capacity at the Kyoto campus, at the very least to spare Utahime's sanity.

Or Unjou would have assumed Utahime was joking. Those were often the two responses to Gojou. His actions were not as predictable as the average person's reactions to him.

Utahime mused whether that unpredictability was why the Higher-Ups despised him so much. It certainly never endeared him to her.

Though his penchant for pointing out her weaknesses was one thing she could count to happen with nearly each of their interactions. Altercations, her mind supplied alternately.

"Bummer," Unjou said, sagging in her seat so that her head tilted backwards over the back of her rolling chair. She exhaled a groan-turned-sigh. Her hair swished over the chair, swaying in time with the pulse of the air conditioner's blasts from across the room.

"Toudou's essays this year have really upped the ante. Vocabulary's improved, too, but I wish that his explanations were a bit more…"

Utahime quirked an eyebrow and chuckled, "Normal?"

"I was going more for 'grounded'. He gets the point across, but sometimes his metaphors are so far out there I almost get lost in the weeds."

"What was the topic this time?"

"Supply-chain between Japan and its closest trade partners. Apparently the availability and distribution of Takada-chan—"

Utahime hummed blandly.

"—tickets and merchandise from cities to countryside is a very simplified version of the international one. It's not wrong per se…"

"But it takes you out of the original topic, right?"

"Yeah. Sometimes I wonder about that genius IQ claim."

"No, he is. I've seen the results."

Unjou gaped. "You're joking."

Utahime swallowed another bite. "He has a knack for noticing patterns, but how he explains them to the rest of the world is still a mystery to me."

"He write anything like this"—she flapped the limp copy of Toudou's paper in the air—"when you taught him?"

Utahime tapped the eraser of her pencil against her upcoming mathematics lesson plan, eyes drifting to the ceiling. "He once wrote a piece about the benefits of post-workout rest, ice, cold, elevate, and related it back to the eating habits of people who were born and live in Hokkaidou."

Unjoustared flatly. "Seriously? Is it true?"

Utahime grimaced. "I guess. I can't disprove it." And like hell I'd ask Gojou if it were possible… "But he was able to back it up with some sources. Unfortunately, his grammar was still a mess, so any positives I could have made towards his grade were undone by the general…," she trailed off, searching for the word, "unprofessionalism of which words he chose to use."

"Meaning?"

"It was a weird combination of super technical terminology and lingo that the kids use that it felt like it had a split personality."

"I see," Unjou said, staring out the window to the reflecting pond in the garden directly outside. "Got anybody like this in your batch of second-years?"

Utahime considered Muta, Miwa, and Mai briefly before snorting. "No one's like Toudou."

Nozokibuchi Ousuke[3], the first-year teacher, poked his head into the workroom, and said, "Excuse me, Unjou-san, Iori-san. Unjou-san, would you mind helping me with setting up a demonstration for my next class?" A faint blush dusted rose on his cheeks.

Unjou finished circling something on Toudou's essay with a flourish. "Sure thing. Be right there." She turned back to Utahime. "If you think of any more tips on how to handle Toudou, let me know. I need all the help I can get to keep up with him," she laughed. "Enjoy the rest of your sandwich, Iori-san." With that she swished out of the workroom, Nozokibuchi trailing after her as though in a trance.

Alone with her thoughts again, Utahime picked at her egg sandwich. Only when the bell for the next class rang did she toss the rest in the garbage, her appetite lost.

飛

The afternoon classes dragged in the post-lunch fog like a dirge. It proved to be increasingly difficult in getting her three— only three—students interested in classic literature, poetry, and stanza structure when they looked ready to roll onto the floor and take a nap.

(She was not even entirely sure that Mechamaru needed to nap, but if an automaton could express weariness, he did.)

Utahime stood at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in one hand and her notes on "The Narrow Road to the Deep North " [4] in the other. While studying Edo poetry seemed like a drag to the average student, she found Matsuo Bashou's form provided the inspiration for some structures in modern pop songs. His poetry was a classic taught across the entire country for a reason.

After she finished writing a stanza on the board and marking it with notes about phrasing and diction, Utahime turned back to the lectern and surveyed her class. "Now, can anyone tell me—?"

Miwa raised her hand as sharply as the slice of her katana in the simple domain. The small muscles between her brows quivered.

Utahime paused mid-sentence and placed the corner of her thumb at the place on the page where she last explained. "Yes, Miwa?"

Miwa tucked a loose piece of her bangs behind her ear. "Did you go through all of this when you were in school, sensei?"

"Well… yes. Some of it twice or more to get my teaching certification." A pause. Utahime rolled the piece of chalk between her fingers. "Why?" Her finger tapped against the side of the chalk. This was not exactly the right moment for personal questions.

"Did it make you a better sorcerer?" Miwa asked, instead.

"Miwa, do you have a question about Matsuo Bashou or not? Or maybe the poem?"

Mai cut in, "She wants to know how any of this is supposed to help us fight curses." She crossed her arms and leaned them against the top of her desk.

Utahime slid her gaze from Mai, to her right to Miwa, and then over to Mechamaru.

"Yes," Miwa said, shoulders curling forward. "That."

Matsuo would have to wait, it seemed.

Utahime gripped the underside of the lectern to rein in the urge to snarl. Instead, her teeth struck like dueling foils with each passing syllable. "Because if you ever want a chance to live a normal life where you aren't chasing down curses or being chased down yourself then you have to have a basic education. It gives you options. Opportunities."

Mai made a sound that could have been a snort or a scoff, but hid it in the turtleneck collar of her uniform. Her tone was polite nonetheless. "Such as?"

Utahime tapped the toe of her boot against the base of the lectern. "Nanami Kento. He decided he didn't want to continue hunting and exorcising—"

"Why?" Miwa piped.

"—for personal reasons," Utahime nearly ground through her teeth. "He finished at Tokyo Tech, got a degree at university, and went to work in the private sector. Business. Finance."

Summer 2007 was both a lifetime ago and yesterday if it were a minute or even a second. Gaunt faces and flat eyes stared back at her at the funeral. A cacophony of silence.

Utahime had not known Haibara Yu; too much of an age gap to cross paths at school. She knew of the lightness he brought to sorcery, though, and of the warmth he provided to those in his sphere of influence.

She could not recall if that was the first instance she had seen Nanami wearing dark glasses or had wondered if Getou Suguru's eyes had always been pitch-black.

Mechamaru's voice echoed slightly. "I thought he was working with Ino-san as a Grade-1 sorcerer…"

"Now, yes, but he wasn't active as a sorcerer for several years. And he was not paid for curses he did not exorcise even if he was Grade-1."

The point dawned on Miwa and Mai's faces. Mechamaru's head turned off to the side.

Utahime sighed. "My job… is to make sure that I give you all—all of my students—as many tools as I know how that will keep you alive both in the field and the real world." She smiled ruefully. "I'd be a pretty sorry excuse for a teacher if I didn't do that at least." The three students said no more. "Good. Now that that's asked and answered, we're finishing with Matsuo. Expect him to be on the next test."

Class progressed normally until the end of the day. Utahime held up a finger before she dismissed them.

"Okay," Utahime droned, extending the vowel as she finished getting her paperwork in order. "Two weeks before we went to the Goodwill Exchange, I asked you to get signatures from your parents or guardians for permission to begin training with Grade-2 and Semi-Grade-1 curses. I'll be assigning specific curses we have in the vaults here to you based upon your evaluations from your first year and what I saw of your skills during the Exchange." She pulled her notes from the back of the folder, brandished with messy short hand and the sketch of a slightly overweight Pikachu, and placed them on the lectern.

Miwa and Mai groaned. Miwa hid her face behind her hands while Mai dropped her forehead against the desk with a hard clunk.

Muta remained silent.

Utahime swallowed any urges to frown in confusion at his lack of reaction. The Exchange was not Muta's best outing in Mechamaru. For all of the points he had accumulated over the past year towards his promotion to a Semi-Grade-1 sorcerer, he had not shown well against Panda. He allowed his personal grudges against, from what she could understand of his conversation through the screen, Panda's mere existence.

She tried to recall any notes from Nozokibuchi about Muta that might have shed light from where that diatribe had come.

Quiet, self-effacing, collaborative—those were the bare-bones notes Nozokibuchi had left about Muta. Not even a full sentence to be found. They were words steeped in semantics, permutations, and connotations.

Miwa had half a page dedicated to her family's financial situation. 'My jujutsu inspiration: Gojou Satoru' she had written on her questionnaire in first-year. Nozokibuchi had made a point about Gojou's looks, school-girl crushes, and how they were not appropriate motivations for survival in this business. Utahime suspected it was admiration for Gojou's mission success rate and income. Perhaps a combination of both.

Mai's was a paradox: an essay that said nothing of consequence about Mai, the person and student, and everything about the stronghold that the Zenin clan had on jujutsu's schools. She was entirely removed from the Zenin clan in all ways but nominal.

Utahime supposed that their permission slips would reflect their circumstances as much as their first-year assessments.

Miwa's permission slip had her father's signature, bold and neat. A grease stain and slash of crayon decorated the upper-right corner of the page.

Muta handed his in with all the cold detachment Mechamaru could express. The signature line had half of his father's name, the strokes on the characters heavy as though the pen almost ripped through the page. A diagonal line struck through the first signature. Below that was a second signature with his mother's calligraphic handwriting in china-blue ink.

Miwa and Muta gathered their belongings and slipped out of the classroom, chatting about dinner options.

Mai tried to hide her face in the collar of her uniform as she placed her permission slip on the lectern. She made to scuttle from the room unnoticed, as though it were possible with only two people present.

Utahime peered down at the signature on the form and squashed a gasp. "Mai," she intoned.

Mai turned on her heel and stared at Utahime, a deer caught in the cross-hares.

Utahime beckoned her come closer to the desk. "Is there something going on I should know about?"

"Something, sensei?"

"At ho—" she caught herself and recalibrated. "At the estate." She flipped the page around to show the signature at the bottom. Zenin Naoya might as well have been written it in golden ink for all the characters screamed at its readers.

Mai hesitated a moment too long. "I'm not sure what you mean."

Utahime slid Mai's into the middle of the pile on the left, shielding and smothering the loudness of the name. "I'm surprised," she began, balancing her tone between gentle but not patronizing, firm but not forceful. Her cursed-technique and training always came in handy for that, she found. Voices were her instruments. "I would have expected to see one of your parents' signatures on here. At most Zenin Naobito's, but never his son's." In the Iori clan, an heir apparent would have presumed too much to cross a boundary like that, but the Zenin were a different breed.

Mai crossed her arms and raised her chin, but her nails dug into the skin at her elbows. "I'm not sure what you want me to say, sensei."

Utahime smiled, rueful. "It's not about want for me , Mai," she explained. "I just want to make sure you're okay." Safe went unsaid. "Did neither of your parents want to sign it?" How are they treating you?

There was only so much Utahime could say or ask the students of Big Three Clans without getting hounded in return. The walls had ears, she supposed. A few years ago, when she first started teaching at Kyoto Tech, a new, First-Grade sorcerer-turned-teacher was pilloried and practically dragged on hot coals for attempting to interfere, presumably, in the affairs of a Kamo girl who was set to marry the heir of the main house line. Another heir apparent. He was fired and his existence wiped from the Kyoto premises in less than eighteen hours.

Utahime had to tread carefully in this territory. Mole or no mole, one wrong move here could undo the tentative and precarious trust that Zenin Mai had given Utahime by pissing off the wrong people in the Zenin clan.

"It's unusual seeing a permission form signed by someone as young as Zenin-san." To alleviate the tense air in the room, she smiled softly. "It would be like Gojou giving Okkotsu-kun permission to go traipsing around the countryside with only Panda as a supervisor."

Blessedly, a faint smile curled on Mai's mouth.

A small thread niggled in the back of Utahime's mind—a call back to Tokyo Tech to deal with a training-yard brawl, bloodied lips, broken noses, a rabidly cussing Shouko, and severe Shitou-gakuchou.

Perhaps the analogy between Gojou and Zenin Naoya was not the most accurate. She had only meant to draw the parallels between their ages, but, judging by the feline smirk hidden behind Mai's smile, that did not appear to be the conclusion Mai made.

Utahime blinked out of her thoughts. It did not matter. The point was Mai's fears had been abated for now.

飛

The number of faculty, staff, and students at Kyoto Tech was limited. That made certain parts of this…mission (if she could even call it that) that Gojou assigned her simpler; however, it made keeping her investigations covert all the more difficult. These were not plain strangers she had to investigate. They were her colleagues, bosses, and students. Best-case scenario: none of them was the mole. Worst-case: someone within her inner sanctum had conspired with the enemy, putting students and invaluable artifacts and weapons at risk.

This is such a mess, Utahime thought as she tried to understand the differences between plywood and OSB, if there were any.

The office supply store had a sale on cork boards—three for ¥2,000. That was the easy part; building the system to display and hide this setup was not.

The hardware store proved to be more of a maze than she had anticipated, and she felt that she had to have one of the sales associates follow her through the aisles to keep up with her questions. Perhaps this whole idea of hiding information was absurd. The associate's polite smile, too tight at the corners of his lips, made the concept seem overly complicated. Maybe she could just keep them in a folder at the bottom of her bookcase.

She had never seen so many hinges in her life. (And all of them had at least six parts per unit!) Growing up, she had on occasion watched the servants and groundskeepers fixing things here and there, but would more often become distracted by the clinks of tools against nuts and bolts and the pitches that they made. She knew enough that she could tell a slot screwdriverapart from a Phillips. That much knowledge proved to be useful for basic repairs.

The associate briefly asked for an explanation on what, exactly, she planned to build. (Somewhere in Tokyo, Utahime could imagine Shouko laughing herself breathless at the situation.) She highly doubted any description she could conjure in that moment would make any bit of sense, whether she had enough a grasp of hardware and tools to start.

Thankfully, she had had the wherewithal to bring her scratch drawing with her for any further questions. While the associate glanced over her rough schematic, much the same way as Gojou had, darting to the various sketches and measurements in different corners, Utahime glanced at the display of hooks over his shoulder. Several styles had a gold-like finish, but many more looks closer to silver or chrome. Too shiny for any of her needs.

The associate raised his head and nodded, more enthusiastically than before. "We can make this work!"

He was eager to demonstrate how the invisible hinges worked exactly. Utahime smiled through a sigh, surprised that her idea had come across clearly on the page.

An hour later, Utahime exited the shop weighed down with all the materials she (supposedly) needed and a couple thousand yen poorer.

The confidence the associate had at the store in her ability to create this device was not long for this world, though. As Utahime laid out her materials on the floor of her room, it felt as though every piece of advice the associate had given her had never existed, as though the piles of screws, hinges, and boards had appeared out of nowhere.

"Stop it, Hibarin," she huffed, setting her shoulders back to pull her posture up, and knelt to the floor with her feet tucked under her bottom.

"If I can design it," Utahime said to herself as she blinked blankly at the materials spread across her floor, "I can make it." The affirmation did nothing to help the sense of confusion.

"If I can design it," she repeated with sharper annunciation on the hard consonants, "I can make it."

To her surprise, it provided a modicum of reassurance.

Utahime pushed the chabudai up against the bookshelf to leave as much of the floor space open for her to construct… whatever it was that she had planned. There was no official name for this sort of contraption, she was sure. (If the Higher-Ups decided to only fire her—should they discover that she was investigating without their approval—rather than flay her alive with one of the curses that Geto had left to wander around the Tokyo campus last year during his Parade, then perhaps she could patent it. Then it would finally have a name.)

But first—

"I guess I should start building the sides…," she mused aloud, grabbing a measuring tape and a pencil.

By the time she finished constructing the back face, the heat of the sun no longer hit the nape of her neck.

She scrunched her nose and lips as she dumped the screws for the invisible hinges from the baggie into her palm. The associate at the store made the process of installing these sound simple—it should be simple, she had no power tools—but the same could not be said when she had to try and figure it out from the crude drawings on the back of the package.

Her first attempt at deciding where the hinge should go was a bust. The hinge would have opened the wrong direction and swung directly into, and possibly through, the wall. Thankfully, she had had enough foresight not to screw it in. The second was more promising and would fold in the direction she wanted, but was spaced too close to the corners.

After the third and fourth tries with slight modifications, Utahime huffed to herself, "Only way to find out, Hibarin." She braced the hinge against the inner wall of the box with the meat of her thumb while her other hand grasped for a screw and the corresponding screwdriver. With the screwed lined up with the appropriate hole, she pressed the point against the wood and threaded the head of the screw with the back.

The screwdriver canted and scraped the screw against the side of her thumb. Utahime hissed and muttered a few choice words for what the screw could do to itself. If she had not already developed calluses from years of playing musical instruments, she would have been remiss for the loss of smooth hands.

It would take time to assemble what she had envisioned, but well-worth it, she hoped, if it kept her students safe.

The tinkle of her phone's ringtone—a combination of Japanese- and Christian-monk bells—pulled her from her task. Utahime shook the sting out of her hand as she reached and unlocked her phone. The caller ID showed her family's home number.

"Hello?" she prompted, balancing the phone between her ear and shoulder while she shuffled to the bathroom to grab the first-aid kit.

Kaa-chan's voice, warm and familiar, filtered through the speaker. "Hibarin!"

Utahime smiled around the click of her tongue as she dabbed disinfectant on the wound. No matter how she braced herself, it always stung.

"Kaa-san!" she replied, heart and tone buoyed by tenderness. "How are you? How's tou-san?"

Kaa-chan chuckled, "That's our line, Utahime." Her tone trailed into something tense and stilted at the end. Before Utahime could even ask what she meant, kaa-chan continued, "When were you going to tell us that there was an attack at Tokyo Tech?"

Utahime sighed, "Probably tomorrow, actually. Besides, there wasn't exactly much time to make personal calls during and after the attack."

Even through the receiver, she could hear tou-chan harrumph in the background on the other end.

"Any casualties?" kaa-chan asked, settling back into her old-form mode to analyze.

"A couple," Utahime admitted as she wrapped a bandage around her finger. "Nobody that you'd know. The campus spirits took the brunt of the damage."

Tou-chan's voice was louder. He must have taken the phone from kaa-chan. "Are you injured?"

"Other than nicking myself with a stupid screw, no. I'm fine. Tired, but fine."

If it were possible for silence to sound unconvinced, her parents were capable.

"I promise," Utahime said. "All my students are alive and well, and the ones that were injured won't have any lasting effects." When she was met with more noncommittal hums and grunts, she tried a different tactic. "Shouko gave them all—including me—clean bills of health."

She lightly tossed the plastic wrapper in the garbage. "How did you know about the attack, anyway?"

Tou-chan cleared his throat.

"Zenin Naobito," kaa-chan said plainly.

Utahime dropped her head back, frowning at the ceiling's light fixture. That was twice in five hours that she heard first-degree separation with the Zenin clan's main branch.

Feedback hummed through her left ear. 3,176 hertz…

She pulled the phone away from her ear and with the opposite hand rubbed at the lobe and pressed against the tragus. No sound; not tinnitus.

Utahime placed the receiver to her other ear. The tone continued.

She pressed her palm over her mouth. The breath from her nose hit her fingers with ragged huffs. Her parents' voices faded into the background, the thread of the conversation lost to Utahime as her mind reeled with the possibilities of what would make that sound.

"Sorry, kaa-san, tou-san, I just realized I forgot to..." She whacked her heel against the chabudai and bit the inside of her cheek to silence her pained yelp. Damn her improvisation skills. "For-forgot an ingredient for dinner. The whole dish will be ruined without it. I'll call you again in a few days—bye!" She barely heard tou-chan's babbles of confusion as she ended the call.

Utahime's uninjured thumb pressed against the lock button before she dropped it on the coffee table, as though a simple push-button would offer another layer of security if her suspicions were true. Her hands on instinct reached for her laptop, fingers poised to open a new window with a search engine and type 'how to find a wire tap', when Gojou's warning resurfaced in her memory. If the mole had found a way to bug her phone (or clone or whatever criminals these days did), then it was safer to assume that he or she also had a way of tracking Utahime's internet searches than not.

Instead, she typed in the name of the bookstore three train stops from the school. "Two hours 'til closing," she muttered to herself.

As she grabbed her keys and wallet, Utahime stalled, standing half-in the genkan, half-out. If her suspicion was right and indeed there was sort of recorder in her phone, would there also be trackers on her credit cards?

She growled under her breath and mentally added another stop to her trip, doubting that Gojou was putting up with this kind of shit at Tokyo.

After a five-minute stop to her bank's ATM, Utahime stormed into the bookstore two train stops from the school and made a beeline for the information-technology section.

Her eyes danced across the titles along the spines of every size and shape of book. A couple of instances, she thought her vision glazed-over at the overly technical and specific topics covered in the relatively small area when compared to fiction or history. Just as she was ready to call off her search or grab another sales associate, a bright green book with purple block lettering caught her eye.

She pulled An Idiot's Guide to Surveillance off the shelf and skimmed the table of contents.

Introduction: No, I Wasn't Abducted by Aliens
Chapter 1: World Wide Surveillance
Chapter 2: The Scandals of History (and the Surveillance Behind Them)
Chapter 5: Telephoto Lenses: More Than Just For Birds and Sports
Chapter 11: Tracers, Trackers, and Extrapolation
Chapter 14: Phone Cloning vs Bugging

Utahime hated that half of the chapter titles no longer sounded as absurd as they did Gojou cornered her at the Exchange.

She murmured while reading the page titled 'Is someone listening in or should you get some sleep?', "This is insane. I sound insane."

With a huff, Utahime snapped the book shut and shifted several cases over until she came upon a book that went over the basic components of cell phones and what tools she would need to take one apart if the fancy struck her. (It turned out, handling cell phone components involved special screwdrivers. She would have to write a letter to the associate at the hardware store thanking him for convincing her to buy the deluxe bit and driver set.)

She power-walked several aisles over to where she knew the trashiest romance novels called home. She stuck her hand out at random, plucking a title up as she sped down the row. A cursory glance at the cover showed it to be some Heian-period historical fiction with a magical twist. Perfect. If she was going to drive herself half-insane searching for a mole in Kyoto Tech and determining if she was under surveillance, then by God she was going to treat herself to a mind-numbing read.

And, she opted to make a quick detour on her way to the registers, if she was going to be full-blown paranoid, she might as well grab a couple books on teenage brain development and teaching she had asked Gakuganji to purchase last year. (She never heard back from him or the Higher-Ups about them.) If the school wanted to know why she was out on a school night—though still well-within mission hours of operation—then she had a reason.

The cashier at the main register, who appeared to be no older than some acne-scarred twenty-year-old from Kyoto University, bowed his head and read from the monitor, "That'll be ¥4,265." If her purchase choices appeared odd to him, he said nothing. He probably saw his fair share of otaku rotate through with their weekly or monthly hauls of manga or hentai. He held his hand out to take her credit card.

Utahime slid four-¥1,000 banknotes and a single ¥500 banknote across the counter.

The double-take he did was endearing on his young features. (His expression had a flicker that resembled Miwa's wide-eyed innocence.) She wondered how often he had to handle cash these days.

The register opened with a harsh clatter. Voices of the patrons in line behind Utahime began to buzz with confusion.

The cashier cleared his throat and counted Utahime's change onto the counter. She nodded her thanks, collecting the remaining coins, and grabbed her bagged books.

Once safely back in her apartment, Utahime took out her new copy of Idiot's Guide to Surveillance, slipped into her pajamas, and did her nightly ablutions. She figured she could get through the first three chapters and still be asleep at a reasonable time.

Except, she realized she had left her futon out on the engawa and her construction project was still in a million piles on the very floor which she needed to sleep.

Utahime sighed, raking a hand through her hair, "Should've seen that one coming." The most annoying part was there was no Gojou-shaped tornado to blame like the night before.

Notes:

[1] A kagurabue is one of several types of Japanese flutes.

[2] Unjou(運乗) is made from the characters that mean "luck, fortune" and "(nth) power", and Miori(深緒利) has the characters that mean "depth", "cord", and "interest".

[3] Nozokibuchi(覗渕) is made from the characters that mean "peep/peek" and "edge", and Ousuke(応助) has characters that mean "agreement" and "assistance".

[4] I thought the translation of "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" was nicer than "The Narrow Road to the Interior".

Hello again, everyone, and thank you for returning to this story!

I am so sorry for the delay with this one. Life has been life, writing has been difficult and slow. You know the drill by now, but I'm still sorry. Hopefully this chapter made up for the wait.

I'll be honest, I'm not completely satisfied with this final product, but it is the best I can give right now.

Thank you to all of the comments, kudos, and bookmarks over the past three months! I appreciate every one of them.

Question: is it better to respond to comments individually or in the end note like this? I'm not sure which is preferred on ao3.

Thanks again for reading, and until next time!

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Chapter 7: Gote 3 San Kaku ( ３三角)—White, Bishop 3c

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Act I: Hisha (飛車)—Rook

Chapter 7: Gote 3 San Kaku ( ３三角)—White, Bishop 3c

December 1989

The futon was warmer than the air in her room.

She was curled up in her futon. Umeko had put two extra quilts on top of the futon blanket. Even with the winter doors on the outside of the house, the room was still cold.

In the winter, Utahime liked to scoot down in her futon. She wanted the blankets to cover her whole body, all the way up to her nose. It made her ears a little cold, and one time she tried putting her whole body in the futon, but Umeko said that it made Utahime snore and dried up her mouth. (Utahime thought her mouth tasted funny after sleeping like that.)

Safe and cozy in her futon, most nights Utahime slept 'like a log'. Tou-chan still had not told her what that meant— how could logs sleep?!—but she thought it was a good thing.

Something woke her in the night.

At first, it was a poke in her tummy, and it tickled a little.

Utahime made an unhappy noise in her throat and opened her eyes. They felt a bit sticky and crusty, but not as itchy as last night.

Her room was dark, and the sun was not up yet. The sounds of the house were normal for winter: quiet, except for the soft touches of snow and bumps of wind against the winter doors. (Kaa-chan said that if Utahime listened carefully, as best she could, that she might hear the tiny kuwash and ting of snowflakes hitting the ground and each other. Utahime thought that when the wind was not blowing and being noisy, that the snowflakes sounded sharp like swords hitting each other. She wondered if snowflakes cut like swords, too.)

The poke disappeared from her tummy. A moment later, she thought she felt another blanket was on top of her futon.

The sound in the air changed, too. It was soft, but so different from all the other noises of the house and the night. Kaa-chan had taught her to recognize this note first, out of all the notes that a piano could make: C4.

She frowned and squinted in the darkness. She thought Umeko only put on two blankets, but she had a hard time moving her legs left and right.

She was still sleepy. Her head felt fuzzy and kind of too heavy for her neck. She did not want to sit up.

Utahime lifted her head and tried to count the blankets, but could not see well. She grunted and groaned as she pulled a hand out from inside the futon and pressed her pointer finger on the blankets. One blanket, she counted and moved the finger up. Two blankets.

Her finger brushed against nothing.

Where's the third blanket? she thought. Why does it feel heavier? Umeko only put on two blankets?

All at once, a weight pressed down on her chest and shoulders. Utahime fell back against the mattress and squeaked.

Then she could not kick her legs at all.

Utahime looked around the room, searching in the dark for someone or something. She had a hard time pulling her other hand out from inside the futon and slapped around her chest and shoulders. She needed to get the person's hands off of her. She needed to get away from him or her or it and run and find tou-chan or kaa-chan or Umeko. (Did a curse get into the house? Who was doing this? Why was this happening?!)

But when she felt her hands touch the skin of her neck and the scratch of her woolen pajamas, there were no hands other than hers.

Utahime patted and smacked her chest and cheeks. The weight was still there. It still hurt. And it was heavy and kept getting heavier.

She tried to sit up again, but the weight kept pushing her back down.

Her eyes started to burn. Tears slid down her cheeks and stuck to her skin in the cold air.

Utahime raised her voice. "Kaa-chan! Tou-chan! H-help." Her voice did not sound right because lips shook as she began to cry, coughing when the weight grew again.

Another sound inside the room was like bubbles caught in syrup. She did not understand until some sort of energy curled around her and shot through the ceiling that she was the one that made it.

Utahime scrunched her eyes shut as snow and splinters fell on her face. The winter air was a shock to her skin.

The whole house seemed to wake at once. Light bulbs turned on out in the halls. Footsteps loudly hit the floors and doors slammed. The servants' voices started out quiet, unclear, but soon were barks and growls like wild animals.

Utahime felt another tear hit her cheek. She did not have to wait for long. Kaa-chan and tou-chan threw open the shouji to her room and fell to their knees.

Kaa-chan carefully brushed the wood and snow off Utahime's face and pressed her hands against her cheeks. They were gentle, comforting.

Tou-chan moved like a cat from one side of the futon to the other. He quickly pulled the corners of the blankets and comforter away from Utahime, then grabbed her and set her in his lap. A large hand (sometimes it looked almost as big as her whole head) touched the back of her neck and pushed so her face laid on his shirt.

Kaa-chan still had her hands carefully touching Utahime's cheeks. Her thumbs made tiny circles over the skin. Tou-chan bent his legs and leaned Utahime back against a knee.

Their cursed energies sounded funny and were even louder than the servants running all over the house.

Umeko appeared. She took one long step into the room and said breathlessly, "Utahime-sama, are you all right?!"

Utahime sniffed loudly. "It-it hurts."

"What hurts?" tou-chan asked. His hand rubbed the back of her head.

"The push."

Kaa-chan nodded to tou-chan. She lifted Utahime to her lap. "Where do you feel the push?"

Utahime coughed when a couple tears ran up her nose. She pointed to her chest and then to her shoulder. "Here and here are the most, but it's all over me."

Tou-chan hummed and frowned.

"I promise! I'm not lying!" Utahime shouted.

"We know that, hibarin," tou-chan said gently.

Kaa-chan spoke, "We feel it, too. I think everyone here feels it."

"Yes, Utahime-sama," Umeko added. "It's not just you. I felt something...uncomfortable right before I heard your call."

Utahime sighed. She was not alone. They believed her. "But it doesn't hurt you?"

Tou-chan said, "I think it affects you more because you are still small."

"What is it, kaa-chan?" she asked, rubbing her nose on the back of her sleeve. Snot spread on her pajamas and on her right cheek. The mucus was sticky and made her cheek feel tough and itchy.

"I don't know," kaa-chan said softly.

Utahime turned around in kaa-chan's arms and looked at tou-chan. He always had an answer. Kaa-chan always said he was the smartest person she knew.

Tou-chan rubbed Utahime's back. "I ... I'm not sure, hibarin. But"—he held her cheek in one of his hands, big and warm—"kaa-chan and I felt it, too. We believe you. And as long as we're here, we won't let it hurt you."

"Really?" she asked, rubbing her chin to keep it from shaking again.

"Really really," he said. His eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled at her. "Nothing stands a chance against kaa-chan, right? Not a single curse or human."

A tiny giggle sputtered out of Utahime. "That's right." She turned her head to find kaa-chan talking lowly to Umeko. "Kaa-chan?"

Her eyes met Utahime's. They looked ... Utahime was not sure of the word, but she thought it was like not being happy, but also not sad. Kaa-chan had a couple deep lines showing between her eyebrows. Then, as quickly as Utahime blinked, her face returned to how kaa-chan always looked at her daughter. "What is it, hibarin?" she asked.

"Can ... can I sleep with you and tou-chan tonight?"

Kaa-chan glanced at the hole in the ceiling and roof. Snow continued to float down into the room with the icy winter wind.

"I think that's a good idea," kaa-chan said. As she helped Utahime to her feet, she added, "Why don't we get tucked in while tou-chan finishes talking to everyone in the house?"

"Okay."

Her parents' room was much bigger than hers, but also got chillier in the winter. Still, it was nice that they had a futon where all three of them could fit. Utahime liked to snuggle in the middle, hugged by tou-chan and kaa-chan from both sides.

Utahime slid under the covers and scooched up against kaa-chan. Her back felt cold without tou-chan to complete the hug. "There really isn't a curse out there trying to get us?"

Kaa-chan ran her fingers through Utahime's hair while her nails tapped against her scalp. "No, I don't think so, but even if there is"—she pressed a kiss against Utahime's forehead—"we'll take care of it and protect you. Just like tou-chan said."

Utahime wanted to ask more questions, but kaa-chan started to hum a lullaby, one she had not heard in a long time, that obaa-chan sang to kaa-chan when she was a girl. Even if her stomach still felt funny, from the invisible weight or nerves, her eyes slowly fell shut, and she fell asleep with kaa-chan's humming echoing in her head.

飛

A week later tou-chan opened a beautiful, fancy letter at the dinner table.

Utahime sat up on her knees and tried to look at the letter.

"What does it say, tou-chan?"

Utahime did not know many characters, yet. When kaa-chan and Umeko read books to her, she saw things that kaa-chan called 'hiragana' (she thought).

There were not a lot of hiragana in this letter.

Tou-chan finished reading the letter. "A Gojou heir has been born. Last week, on December the seventh."

"What's an heir?" Utahime asked.

"When this baby grows up," tou-chan said, "he will the leader of the Gojou clan."

Kaa-chan said, "December seventh ... that was the night we felt that force."

Utahime blinked at kaa-chan. "The weight I couldn't see?"

Kaa-chan nodded.

Utahime frowned. "The baby did that? How can a baby touch all of us if he isn't here?" She looked up at tou-chan again. "You said 'he', right, tou-chan?"

Tou-chan nodded and glanced at kaa-chan. "Yes, that's right. The child's a boy. It's written here he inherited both the Limitless and Six Eyes techniques..."

Kaa-chan asked, "They manifested already? In a newborn?"

None of that made sense to Utahime, and she wanted to make tou-chan answer her question when something shiny in the letter caught her eye.

She pointed at the biggest characters on the page in gold ink, then layered again with blue ink—the brightest blue Utahime had ever seen, even brighter than the sky on a spring day. "Why are these characters so much bigger than the rest? What do they mean?"

Tou-chan chuckled, rubbing her head and ruffling her hair. "That's just the new baby's name: Gojou Satoru."

July 2018

After a few nights of poring over the contents of Surveillance for Idiots, Utahime determined that the only way she would be able to truly know if there was a listening device in her phone was to open up the damn thing herself.

A simple concept in theory, with the minor exception that Utahime did not have the first idea of how to do that. Nearly a week after her first expedition to the bookstore, she scoured the shelves of the electronics' section for manuals on the components and constructions of smart phones. (She spent an embarrassing amount of time flipping her phone in the palm of her hand in every direction so she could compare it to the photos in the manuals.)

"You a spy or somethin'?" a disembodied voice called from her left.

Utahime's head snapped up and whirled towards the end of the aisle to find a young man in an employee uniform apron with his hands shoved into the depths of the kangaroo pouch. The college student who had rung up her purchase the previous week, sporting fewer blemishes than last time it seemed, approached her while she compared two different publishers' manuals. His brown hair was unruly around his eyebrows, nearly curly from the summer humidity.

Utahime laughed. "No, nothing like that. Just a high school teacher." She marked her place in one manual with her thumb. "Why, do I look like I'm undercover?" she chuckled wryly.

He cleared his throat. "S'not like that, ma'am," he said, eyes darting to the shelves when she tried to look at him directly. "But s'not every day that a miko shows up here and spends her time looking at electronics books." He shoved his hands in his pockets hard enough that his shoulders nearly touched the bottom of his earlobes.

She nodded. "You're right. But as you said"—she patted one of the hakama legs with the manual's cover—"I'm dressed like a miko, and it's probably not the best outfit for blending in with the crowd."

He still would not meet her gaze. His lips tilted up a fraction at the ends. "I-I know it's not store policy to say this ... " His voice dropped to a whisper, "There're a bunch of videos and breakdowns for these sort of things online for free."

Utahime breathed, "Oh ... right."

He finally lifted his eyes, albeit only as high as her chin or a point in the background beyond her shoulder. "Just wouldn't want'cha to waste your money."

Under normal circumstances, she might have taken him up on his offer. She had already spent twice as long in the bookstore this time than she had before, and she did not feel like she was any closer to realizing if she had a target on her back than she did the other night. Regardless, her motivations and explanations were out of bounds for everyone except Gojou at this point, sorcerer or no.

She still was not willing to risk the chance that the mole or the Higher-Ups were monitoring her internet history. If they were, all that was there to find were emails, teaching newsletters, and hours upon hours of cat videos. Phone breakdowns were too conspicuous.

"It sounds like a good idea," she hesitated, "but I'm pretty slow at all of this."

He glanced at more of the manuals lining the shelves.

"Iori Utahime," she said with a slight drop of her head. "Since I've been coming more often these days."

"Ya-yamaguchi Sousuke," he stammered and bowed deeply. When he finally stood to his full height—not much taller than she was, perhaps a handful of centimeters—he offered, "If you need anything else"—he gulped and licked at a chapped spot on his lips—"please, just lemme know."

A smile that felt wistful at the edge creased along her mouth. "I appreciate your offer, Yamaguchi-san, but I couldn't possibly cause such an imposition—"

His laugh was boyish, charming despite the quavering quality she could hear at the upper and lower ends of its range. He whispered, "There's not that much going on here, Iori-san." Brown eyes glanced down to the book in her hands. "You've bought the most interesting books I've seen in a long time."

"They're certainly not my normal reading material," she mumbled. (Another mark her etiquette tutor would put against her.) A little more loudly, she added, "Is this an edition you'd recommend."

Yamaguchi blinked a trifle owlishly at her.

"You seem to know a lot about phones and electronics," Utahime elaborated.

Somehow he managed to shove his hands deeper into the apron pouch while his shoulders continued to reach for his ears. How someone so socially uncomfortable ended up working in retail, Utahime did not understand.

"I've always been interested in technology," he said quietly enough that were it not for her cursed technique Utahime doubted she would be able to hear him. "Was always takin' things apart to see how they worked. I"—he coughed over a lump in his throat—"I can't say I've read a lot of manuals, but my mentor in high school kept this publisher his bookshelf." He plucked a third manual from the shelf just beyond Utahime's reach and offered it to her.

Utahime set the other two manuals on the closest shelf and accepted the book. Mobile Phone Schematics, vol 4 by Robert Lawrence, translated by Tachibana Seiko. She thumbed through the book to the index and found the pages for her phone's model. Once she had it open to the corresponding pages, she took in the schematics and explanations. It did not explain everything—What the hell's a PAD? Utahime found herself bewildered by that acronym with each evaluation of these resources—but she supposed she did not need to understand every minutiae of mobile phones.

Utahime hummed and looked up at Yamaguchi. "I think this is just what I needed," she said. "Thank you, Yamaguchi-san."

飛

Utahime took a step back from the large wall of her living area to get a better vantage of the finished 'display case', as she decided to call it.

Not to boast about her own craftsman skills—because Lord knew that ladies with etiquette tutors in her family's social circle never expected to work with their hands—but she was proud at how well the final product suited the rest of her furnishings and decorations.

The front face of the case's bevel had her poster of Watanabe Hisanobu adhered with sticky-tack. The deep brown stain Utahime decided to color the wood made his turquoise uniform pop even more than before. He was now the focal point of the room rather than the shouji screens that Kyoto Tech had not replaced (or bothered to repair) for at least two decades.

It had taken her longer than she would have liked to figure out how to make the display seamless, and with many more knicks and pricks to her fingers and nails to add to her collection of scars, but she was satisfied that no one would be any the wiser about what was ensconced behind Watanabe's athletic frame.

Her initial drawings of the display had the case opening from left to right like a clamshell box where the edge and lip of the lid would be seen regardless if anyone was looking for it. Now, the inner chamber of the case, outfitted with one of her three cork boards, a dozen push pins, and a clear plasticine folder with a hole punched through the upper right corner, was a touch (three millimeters on each side to be exact) narrower than the outer portion. The 'seam' was where the lid touched the wall. A second cork board was mounted to the inside of the lid so that it faced its match when the case was closed. For convenience sake, Utahime had hung a zipped pouch by a binder ring and push pin and filled it with highlighters, pens, and paper clips.

Tou-chan and kaa-chan would be proud of her creation. No fancy tutors or overseers need apply.

Two short hums of a heron filled the room. A text notification on her phone.

Utahime sighed and dragged her eyes to the device lying inauspiciously on the chabudai. She already had spent a week poring over An Idiot's Guide to Surveillance. She had to do something about that frequency she kept hearing whenever she took a call, for her sanity's sake, at least.

Before she could move forward with that, though, Utahime figured that she needed to get a handle on a preliminary list of suspects from Kyoto Tech for the mole. (She could only hope Gojou was being as thorough on his end.)

She grabbed a blank sheet of paper and sat criss-cross at the chabudai.

First and foremost: fourth-years.

Utahime added three hash marks along the line rule of the paper and added a name beside each—Iwahama Hinatsu, Osada Takashi, and Yorinaka Akari[1], respectively.

In terms of timeline, none of the fourth-years had been around either the Tokyo or Kyoto Tech recently for information coming through either school to get out. Besides, curses were cropping up like weeds. Fourth-years had enough on their plates to try and juggle while spread thinly from the highest-populated cities to the farthest corners of the countryside (not to mention the sorcerers dispatched abroad).

Still, even if instinct told her that none of the fourth-years were involved, she still had to find enough evidence to eliminate the possibility.

Yorinaka Akari would likely be sent up to Hokkaidou to deal with curses that cropped up from the dwindling number of daylight hours. Her natural affinity to produce beams of light made her a good fit to combat long winters. Presently, though, she had heard that the Higher-Ups had tasked her to work in Nagasaki. There was not a lot of information about the curse she was meant to exorcise, though.

Was it possible for someone who was not present at the Goodwill Exchange or even in Tokyo at the time of the incident, either student or faculty, to be involved in this apparent plot?

Unlikely, she concluded and amended the section with dots above the hash marks beside their names. She made a note to the margin to check the mission rosters for Iwahama and Osada's recent assignments.

'Third-years,' she wrote, followed by another three bullet points. She listed Kamo Noritoshi, Toudou Aoi, and Nishimiya Momo.

Beneath the cluster of hash marks was another batch with the names of the second-years. Scribbling out the names—Miwa Kasumi, Muta Kokichi, Zenin Mai—was automatic at this point in the school year.

Utahime bobbed her pencil a couple times after finishing Mai's second character—onyomi meaning 'reliant'. There was nothing to say (Yet? she found herself wondering) that Zenin Naoya's signature on Mai's form or Zenin Naobito's call to Utahime's parents were at all related to her current investigation, but the timing was, to say the least ... Was it suspect? That seemed too confrontational, sounded too conclusive when all she had to go on was a gut feeling.

Maybe they were nothing at all, and this request from Gojou simply put her on edge.

Maybe it was that it had been nine years since she had last spoken to Zenin Naoya. (Had it really been that long?)

Utahime pinched her thigh through her hakama. Enough, she huffed. I'm seeing shadows where there are none.

She returned to her list.

Kyoto Tech had three first-year students: Denhachi Kagerou, Nitta Arata, and Tobisaki Jitsuko[2].

Unfortunately for them, when their time to be included in the Goodwill Exchange next year came, they would be a step behind their Tokyo Tech counterparts for lack of experience. At the staff meeting two months prior to the Exchange, Nozokibuchi had insisted two of his first-years were prepared to participate, citing that they were evenly matched to Tokyo's two remaining first-years.

The memory came unbidden. Itadori Yuuji sprang forth from the box that Gojou had wheeled out and presented to the faculty and students gathered at the entrance to Tokyo Tech. His classmates' reactions—ranging from faintly humored to outright homicidal (Utahime was fairly certain she heard Kugisaki hiss 'I'm gonna kill him. Again.')—were far from the jubilant welcome back from the dead that Gojou had no-doubt sold him. Somehow, Tokyo's crop of first-years this term were even more bizarre than the last one, a matter that seemed nigh impossible considering that class included a special-grade cursed child and a talking panda.

Nozokibuchi's logic had been sound, given the information he had at the time. Nevertheless, Gakuganji had vetoed him, satisfied with the lineup of second- and third-years in light that, without Okkotsu and the suspended third-years, Tokyo's collective rank was lower than Kyoto's.

In hindsight, part of that bothered her. Though she cared for Miwa and Mai very much, objectively Utahime had to agree with Nozokibuchi; including Denhachi and Tobisaki at the Exchange would have afforded Kyoto a higher collective ranking, even without the surprise appearance of Itadori. While his grades were exemplary, Niita's cursed technique was not developed enough yet to use outside of defense, rescue, recovery. (Gakuganji never would have given him a second thought. He had never seen Shouko fight in the field, though, had never seen what 'soft, healing' cursed techniques could do to the insides of curses and humans alike.)

But Gakunganji, she assumed, had instructed their students to put their focus on taking out Itadori. How? The most she and the rest of the instructors had known about Itadori before that time was he was Sukuna's host and he had died; she inferred that he at least had control of his body as a host, hence his delayed execution, but that did not imply that he had control of Sukuna's arsenal of powers. Yet, Kyoto had attacked him without abandon during the group stage, despite the lack information.

Why had Gakuganji left two theoretically stronger sorcerers behind?

Utahime's hand slid gently across the page amid the faint taps and scratches of the pencil against the paper.

At the top of the page she wrote "Kyoto Metropolitan Technical School". The title somehow sounded more like an official beginning to this investigation than anything she had done thus far. Names gave objects power. Best to keep this title vague, she decided, swallowing around a dry patch in her throat.

Nozokibuchi and Unjou were unlikely to be complicit in any of this. They spent too little time in Tokyo to know anything about the campus, and Utahime recalled from their introductions that they both graduated from Kyoto Tech before going the window-to-teacher route. For reasons unknown, Gakuganji or the Higher-Ups always requested she accompany him or deliver messages and materials to Tokyo; if Nozokibuchi or Unjou were ever requested, she was unaware. Utahime doubted that they had enough information about Tokyo's campus to provide directions to the curses and curse users that invaded the Exchange.

However, there was a digitized record of the items held in the vault and Tokyo's campus layout in the computer system. It sounded too simple, but if Utahime were the mole, assuming that she had scant knowledge of the data shared between the two schools, it would be the first place she would look. Unfortunately, following that line of inquiry opened up more possibilities for suspects rather than eliminated. It could be anyone.

Utahime bit her lip as she tapped the pencil eraser against the table, seventy-three hertz, considering members of faculty and staff. Mei Mei was among the most flexible of sorcerers in terms of location, second only to Gojou (but everyone was considered at least second to him). Her work and missions tended to send her to Kyoto frequently enough that Utahime would find herself waving to Mei at least once a week. According to Shouko, Mei curried favors and information for Yaga that she saw her on campus more often than Gojou some days.

Mei, Utahime knew with absolute certainty, had simple, yet steep stakes. Everything can be bought, Hime-chan, she had crooned on a joint mission with Utahime in 2006. While Utahime had her doubts, and even more concerns, she could not entirely eliminate the possibility of Mei's involvement in such a plot, provided the enemy was able to meet whatever demands she had set.

Gakuganji—

Utahime clicked her tongue. Sometimes she wondered how Gojou would react to her statement that he and Gakuganji were more alike than they realized. Gakuganji's reaction she felt very assured; vehement, spittle-flying denial and gnashing of teeth like a boar gnawing on a bone. While their end goals were on the surface as diametrically opposite as water and oil—Gojou would be water, if she had to guess—no one who knew both of them could deny they were equally determined and righteously convinced that their objectives for the jujutsu world were for the benefit of their students and the greater good.

However, Utahime was never privy to Gakuganji's machinations despite what Gojou, Shouko, and Nanami thought. He never shared how he planned to maintain or rearrange the status quo.

She wrote after his name 'work with curses and/or users to keep the Higher-Ups in power?'. She hoped she was wrong, but a peculiar, sharp squirming in her gut kept fueling her suspicions.

It would be expensive time-wise to individually verify and eliminate suspects one by one, especially with what little free time Utahime had outside of school and missions, but with more questions than answers, it seemed like the best option.

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes and groaned. So much for developing a healthy circadian rhythm.

In the meantime, Utahime needed a clearer timeline of the Goodwill Exchange; not of the curtain coming down or the break into Tengen's vault, but of her students' locations and movements throughout the exercise. The reports she and the other faculty had submitted to the Higher-Ups concerning the incident were not as detailed as those from a typical mission.

Utahime grabbed another sheet of paper from the sheaf and began to draw an aerial map of Tokyo Tech's grounds.

The proportions were off; that much was obvious. Her skills at drawing were rudimentary at best, though fortunately not poor enough to resort to caricatures of people or things. Besides—she made a series of short, wavelike strokes in segments, circling around the kanji for Lake Tenkei—accurate drawings were not the goal. Hastily sketched maps did not need to be lifelike.

(Her mind wandered momentarily to Gojou's report and his drawing of the cursed spirit he had so glibly named 'Twiggy'. She could hardly say it was a good likeness for the spirit. It had more cause to be offended by his interpretation of its likeness than its moniker.)

Torii were relatively easy to depict by nature. She added Gakuganji's 'music' kanji along with ... She frowned, realizing Rack Fanatic's family name had slipped her mind. When the name did not suddenly appear like a message from the heavens after a handful of seconds, she settled with writing the katakana 'rakku' next Gakuganji's character.

Utahime chose to ignore the voice in the back of her mind that sounded like tou-chan chortling, "Is Rack Fanatic any less offensive than Twiggy?"

Scalloped ovals with two lines beneath each circle formed the forest to the northeast of Lake Tenkei. Utahime wrote Nishimiya and Kugisaki's primary kanji between the trees followed closely by Mai's. She circled Mai and added an arrow that lead to the clearing. Maki's kanji stayed in the clearing. Utahime could not remember Maki's exact movements prior to her altercation with Mai, primarily because Maki was too damn fast for someone with so little cursed energy.

Toudou had spent the entire time with Itadori.

Kamo and Zen—

Utahime erased the mistake with a huff, tucking a longer strand of her bangs behind her ear. Kamo and Fushiguro did not have most of her attention during the Exchange. Kamo was a capable sorcerer even when she taught him the previous year. Compared to Toudou and Nishimiya, he caused Utahime very few restless nights.

But, she frowned, that only means I haven't paid him too much mind. It certainly was a blind spot.

Despite his fight against the inheritor of the Ten Shadows technique, Kamo had far fewer worrisome and inexplicable explosions than Toudou and Nishimiya.

Damn clan prodigies and their special techniques, Utahime thought, scowling as she added Kamo and Fushiguro in the soubou on her map.

Utahime wrote Miwa's character in the clearing where Inumaki had knocked her out. At the very least, it made her movements easier to account and track.

As for Inumaki...

Utahime suspected that, like her, due to the nature of his cursed technique, he had to remain unnoticed until the moment he needed to strike. (Using Muta's cell phone to incapacitate Miwa was inspired, but Gojou would never hear it from her.) However, it left a number of holes in Utahime's recollection of his movements during the exercise. According to the official report Gakuganji and Yaga had distributed via email, Inumaki had somehow ended up with Kamo and Fushiguro, but that still left a gap in Utahime's timeline.

She drew the arrow to place Inumaki near the courtyards by the soubou.

Muta and Panda were the final students to note. After their scrap on the roof of the oldest student dormitories (long since last used due to the precipitous drop of number of prospective sorcerers; the damage to their roofs was of little consequence) she lost track of their whereabouts. According to the official report, Gakuganji retrieved the still-functioning pieces of Mechamaru after he placed Rack Fanatic's mangled body into Kusakabe's custody.

Utahime drew another arrow from Gakuganji's 'sound' character over to the old dormitories.

She checked the clock on her bookshelf. 23:18. She should call it a night. Maybe she could get some insightful reading Mobile Phone Schematics, vol 4 done.

Muscle memory allowed her to lay her futon out with minimal mental stimulation. She quickly slipped into her pajamas, followed her nightly ablutions (minus a couple of moisturizing and brightening masks that she did not have the energy to bother applying), and settled into the envelope of the futon with the manual in hand.

Utahime flipped to the corresponding pages to her phone model and scanned the spread, It was a good recommendation from Yamaguchi. The language was at times a trifle above her pay grade, but was still for the most part clear.

The bubble of hope that had buoyed her for a handful of minutes reading the introduction to the section burst when she reached the first sentence that broke down the phone bit by bit.

'This manufacturer employs the use of two pentalobe screws to hold the screen and backing together,' it read, followed by a picture of a screw head the size of a violin fine tuner with a curved, five-pointed star in counter-relief.

A type of screw Utahime had never seen. A type of screw she did not own.

She dropped her hand holding the book against the floor beside her with a heavy plodsh and glared at the ceiling in annoyance.

Damn it.

飛

She was back at the bookstore two days later. By a stroke of luck, Yamaguchi was on shift, reading a paperback novel at the checkout counter.

"Oh, Iori-san," he said as she approached, slipping a bookmark into the novel in his hands and setting it on the countertop. "Didn't expect to see you back so soon. D'ya need somethin' else?" He scratched at the hair on his nape. His eyes darted from her face to the book in her arms then off to the side, somewhere in near space.

Utahime cleared her throat. She stuck her thumb between two pages marked by a neon purple sticky note and opened the manual. "May I?" she asked, voice more sotto voce than perhaps was acceptable, but Yamaguchi did not seem to mind, nodding to the counter.

"'Course," he almost hiccupped, pushing his novel off to the side with a wide sweep of his forearm across the counter's surface.

She turned the book so it was right-side up from his vantage and ran her index finger along the listed types of screws found in her phone model.

"You seem like you know a lot about computers and electronics," Utahime said.

Yamaguchi tried to straighten his unruly bangs. "It's part of my degree at the university."

Utahime made a soft noise of understanding through her nose and returned to the book. "I have the Phillips and cross types of screw drivers," she explained and pointed to the next type on the list, pentalobe. "But I've never heard of this before. Wouldn't even know the first place to buy it."

Yamaguchi peered down at the book. "Pentalobe's kinda new to the electronics world. The company that makes this type of phone"—he peeked up at her, eyes wide with curiosity—"this is your phone, righ'?"

Utahime nodded.

"'Kay." He cleared his throat and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. "So, this company," he elaborated, tapping the picture of the logo in the upper left corner of the page, "wanted people to only use their official maintenance outfits 'n stuff. None of the local repair men or things like that. So, they made a special screw with a brand new style of head. That way, people'd hafta go to their stores and they'd charge an arm 'n a leg for repairs.

"But," Yamaguchi continued when he noticed she had a question, "people adapt. Places started makin' compatible drivers for the screws so average people and repair shops can fix things."

"Then I can buy one?" Utahime perked up.

Yamaguchi smiled sheepishly. "Yeah. There are a few places online—"

"Anywhere local?"

He blinked, befuddled. "Sure." Brown eyes stared at her for a beat. "You really don't like the internet, d'ya?"

Utahime expressed a laugh that was half a huff. "Not recently, no."

"You're a weird one, Iori-san," he stated, before his eyes went comically wide. "N-no-not that that's a bad thing. 'S just—"

"Yamaguchi-san, it's all right. I'm not offended. It is a little weird. Right now it's just ... easier to buy things in person." With cash, she added to herself.

Yamaguchi chuckled anxiously. "Yeah, yes, okay." He pulled a notepad and pen out from his uniform apron. "This shop's got everything you'd need for electronics, but it's a bit hard to find. So, first if ya pass the statue of the fish with three eyes, you've gone too far."

飛

The electronics repair shop was another three stops on the train line farther from Kyoto Tech than the book store. Were it not for Yamaguchi's detailed directions—he had written them down on the back of a promotional flier in the neatest penmanship Utahime had seen from a student in all her years of teaching—she would have entirely missed the entrance.

'Hole-in-the-wall' did not scratch the surface of the awning the size of a matchbox that displayed the shop's name in sun-bleached characters: Inari Computers and Electronics.

Utahime opened the door.

"Be with you in a moment!" a rough, rotund voice called from the back. F5 Utahime noted. It was hardly a pure sound, but was steady and solid in its execution.

A red, floor-to-ceiling curtain separated the shop into two sections as far as Utahime could tell. She assumed the front was the store and behind the curtain was where the owner or employees did the repairs. The front was stuffed to the gills with pieces of machinery and electronics she could never hope to recognize in her wildest dreams. Light from the busy street filtered through the door and glinted off gold and silver pieces attached to green boards.

Utahime gingerly reached for a plank about the size of her thumb under a sign that read 'RAM/Memory'. Was this a 'board' for a computer? Maybe a 'card'?

She tapped a fingernail on the plank where there were no lines or dots of silver or gold. The tink was short, shallow. Plastic.

How could something so small and made of plastic be powerful enough to make smart phones and computers?

The swish of the curtain drew her attention away from the shelves.

An elderly gentleman with hair at his temples and hairline sprinkled with grey and white strands, emerged from the gap from behind the curtain, giving Utahime a peek of towers of drawers and cubbies filled with screws, drivers, and myriads of objects and tools that seemed entirely too cumbersome to be used in the high-precision work of electronics.

The curtain closed, and the unknown world behind it vanished once more.

"Can I help you?" the gentleman croaked.

Utahime retrieved the guidebook from her bag and flipped to the relevant page marked by a fuchsia sticky-note. "I'm looking for a specific screw driver, and I've never seen it before. I was told it's called a"—she scanned the page—"pentalobe driver by a young man who recommended this place. A Yamaguchi-san."

The gentleman's face relaxed. "Ah, yes, Sousuke-kun. He's a good kid. Good head on his shoulders. A shame he doesn't have a girlfriend, yet." His eyes lingered on the expanse of her hakama from knee to ankle.

Utahime nodded. "He recommended this shop," she said, trying to keep her smile soft but not too familiar. "I'd like to purchase one of these pentalobes." There was nothing to be gained by acknowledging whatever his comments on girlfriends implied.

Inari smacked his lips. "Not everyday a woman walks in here asking about screwdrivers..." he mused aloud. His eyes cut back to her. "You know you can buy this for dirt cheap on the internet."

Utahime swallowed the exasperated sigh that wanted to crawl up her windpipe. "Yes, I realize that, but I prefer doing transactions face-to-face."

"And you understand I can't compete with online prices, right?"

"I'd prefer to think of it as supporting a local business."

His laugh was even rougher than his speaking voice, as though he had smoked two packs of cigarettes per day for forty years.

Utahime sniffed the air, but could not detect any scent of tobacco. He was not a smoker, then; just had a naturally raspy voice.

Inari said, "I can see why Sousuke likes you."

"Pardon?"

"You're the first person he's sent my way that wasn't tagging along with him from university."

"Well," Utahime trailed off as she closed the guidebook. "He's been very helpful with my questions."

Inari hummed as he nodded and darted behind the curtain again. "What size pentalobe do you need?" he yelled through the fabric.

She grimaced. The guidebook provided a wide breadth of information about components of her model of smart phone, but not the specific diameters of the screws and their respective drivers.

"Phone-sized?" she opted.

"P2, then," he said more to himself than her. Miscellaneous sounds of opening and shutting of drawers followed by louder clatters of rummaging mixed with Inari continuously muttering under his breath. "Where'd the hell did it go? I just saw it over here last week ... Can't let Sousuke down ..."

Utahime rested the guidebook against her abdomen. "If you don't have one, it's not a problem," she called through the curtain. "You really don't need to go to so much trouble." Maybe it was something she needed to go to a larger city to find. Osaka and Tokyo had had their ear on the electronics industry far longer than Kyoto. Would it be worth texting Gojou and requesting he purchase this driver instead? Would that be pressing her (very limited) luck too far? She could not be confident in contacting anyone, especially Gojou, until she verified or disproved the source of that tone the other night.

As she began calculating how much time she would need to carve out of her already hectic schedule to make another trip to Tokyo, Inari exclaimed, "Aha! There you are, you rapscallion."

Utahime could not recall the last time she had heard someone use the term 'rapscallion' even among her parents and their peers. Was Inari older than she initially thought?

The curtain whirled around Inari to fill in the negative space left in his wake as he burst back to the main side of the store. He presented the screwdriver to Utahime like a servant might offer sake to his master with a steady head and a faint tilt of deference.

Utahime shifted the guidebook to balance in the crook of her elbow with one hand supporting the spine as she accepted the screwdriver, pinching it between all five fingertips. She rotated it enough to look at the head- ;a confounding five-pointed star with rounded tips.

"This what you were looking for, miss?"

She nodded more times than were strictly necessary, but at least she would not have to traverse across the country in search of a particular, practically-elitist screwdriver. Her grip on the guidebook relaxed, fingertips and first knuckles unfurling halfway from their clutch on the book's cover.

"Exactly what I needed. Thank you, Inari-san."

"Excellent." He beamed crookedly. "Will that be all for you today?"

"Yes, sir."

He rang up the price at the register. The total displayed as 849 yen Utahime did not know how much this style of screwdriver went for on the general market and was not about to question how much Inari charged. At least it was less than one thousand yen; no second stop to the ATM needed this trip.

Utahime pocketed her change. "Thank you again for your help, Inari-san. I'm very grateful." She moved to take the shopping bag when he dropped inside something that resembled a large guitar pick.

"Sir? I haven't paid for that." Utahime tried to stick her hand in the bag but Inari shoved it off the counter into her arms.

"No charge," he said serenely.

"Inari-san, I," she almost choked on air, "I must insist." Propriety and appropriate protocol dictated as such; kaa-chan taught her that personally.

"My shop, my rules."

Utahime righted her bangs with her fingertips. "May I ask why?"

"Because you're gonna need it if you're using that driver for what I'm guessing it's for."

Utahime inhaled and squared her shoulders. "You're a sharp one, Inari-san. I appreciate your knowledge."

Inari's eyes twinkled something slightly mischievous. "Say hello to Sousuke-kun next time you see him," he added airily as she stepped out the door.

Next time? Utahime pondered, before shaking it off and making her way back to the station.

飛

Utahime returned to a half-finished stack of grading on her chabudai. She ran a hand down her face and groaned.

On average, grading was a clear-cut task for her. It took far less time than lesson plans and corrections. Even with the handful of Grade-2 missions assigned to her every couple weeks, Utahime was, in her modest opinion, rightfully proud that she graded and returned her students' assignments in a timely manner. (The same could not be said of Nozokibuchi if Momo's complaints last year were any indication.)

However, searching for mole—Moles...plural? she considered with a thread of dread forming in her sternum, but shook it off with a sigh—and searching for a singular, simple means of opening her phone were putting her reputation as an efficient grader to the test.

Utahime set her purse and shopping down on the floor and finished marking her class's quiz on sinusoidal equations from two days prior.

Her stomach growled impatiently. Utahime repeated the sound in return. Food would have to wait, she decided as she made a correction on Miwa's quiz that the amplitude of a wave equation did not change due to an increase or decrease in the period.

With a puff of air in resolute relief, she stowed away her papers for the following day of class and cleared the surface of the chabudai.

Brandishing the appropriate screwdriver—stupid, ridiculous, shape, she thought as she ripped it from the shopping bag—she set her phone on the chabudai and removed the back cover of the body.

Before she got too far into the process of disassembling her phone, she crawled over to the speaker system next to her record player. On the shelf below was a museum of her music players and storage over her entire lifetime. Cassettes and CDs lined the shelf from right to left in order of type, then alphabetical by artist, then by year of release. Shoved in the left corner, with what little space was still available, were audio adapters to connect her other music players to the speaker system and each of the associated music players she had bought and received throughout the last twenty-odd years.

Utahime pulled out her old mp3 player. It weighed as much as the average brick (about as hard, too) and had its fair share of scratches on the front from being dropped by accident, but what it lacked in sleekness and modern bells and whistles, it more than made up for in its storage capacity and durability.

She flipped the player's switch to the 'on' setting and lightly ran the side of her thumb around the track pad. The corresponding lights on the player's screen cycled through dozens of artists before she found the one she wanted. With a firm press of the center button, she selected Hello Sleepwalkers, and immediately chose the first song on the list of their discography.

The scratch trills of an electric guitar filtered through the speakers for three counts, then broke into a near calamitous riff complete with a heavy bass, deep and staccato drum line, and another guitar to provide to harmony.

Her hope, should her assumption that someone was listening to her through her phone prove correct, was that "Midnight Rendezvous" proved to be loud enough that anyone on the other end of the bug would not be able to hear her messing around with her phone's components.

For good measure, though, Utahime twisted the volume dial up a couple more clicks.

She winced slightly at the pressure against her ears. Even with the highest quality speakers she could afford, the volume still grated against her sensitive ear drums.

She never understood how people could walk around with earbuds or headphones or cochlear implants with their music and podcasts blaring like sirens against their inner ears like it was nothing more than a tickle against their senses. Maybe that was what made them normal. She could not stand it; could hardly bear to turn her own music up beyond the ten percent mark on the dial.

Her stomach gave another curmudgeonly gurgle.

"Not now," she admonished and spread open the guidebook to the left of her work space.

Blessedly, the pentalobe screwdriver was the correct size and smoothly slid into the grooves of the screw head.

Utahime had no way of knowing if the turning of the screws could register on a listening device—Idiot's Guide to Surveillance did not go into much depth about the different levels and sensitivities of them, only major distinctions—but it would be foolish of her to assume falsely.

The air in her apartment stilled, then ballooned like a bubble forming underwater, before returning to its standard state. "Gojou," she stated to the room.

"Yo, Utahime!" Gojou chirped from near her front door.

At least he had the decency, if that word even applied, to warp into her genkan.

"Never took you for a Noragami fan, Utahime," Gojou said, carelessly toeing off his shoes before stepping up into the room.

Utahime frowned and leaned closer to the phone, careful to rotate the screws slowly with as little noise as possible. She uttered absently, "Huh?" and kept her eyes on the miniature screws.

"The song," he insisted as though it at all clarified his statement or provided any relevant context.

She muttered, "Still don't know what you're talking about."

He chuckled under his breath, "Never mind." From her periphery she caught him rake his hand through his hair in a quick pass before sliding it back into its hidey-hole in his uniform jacket. He plopped down across from her on the other side of the chabudai.

"What'cha got there?" he chirped.

Utahime kept her head down as she slid the guide book over to him.

He picked it up and intoned a bland note in his throat, 349 hertz. "Not sure how knowing electronic parts is gonna help your students achieve their best sorcerer-ing potential—or whatever shit the Higher-Ups called it at last month's meeting—but you do you. Seems like a waste of time to me."

She continued to ignore him and set the second screw off to the side.

"I'm surprised you have the music this loud," Gojou mentioned, pointing to her audio system. "Mind if I turn it down a bi—"

"Leave it," she ordered as she pulled the flat pick-thing Inari gave her from the shopping bag.

Gojou held up his hands in mock surrender, chuckling, "Okay, okay, you win. Must really like this song."

Having never done anything like this before, Utahime had not the slightest idea how much force she would need to apply in order to separate the back from the rest of the case. She pulled the guide back across the chabudai and read over an advisory note in the synopsis. The author made it sound like opening smartphones required more pressure than people typically thought, but not so much that it entailed recruiting a hulking man to open the proverbial pickle jar (or a variety of tsukemono the translation note indicated).

Utahime placed the flattest part of the pick flush where the edge of the screen met the back panel for the phone and pressed until it slid between the lips.

Gojou remained blessedly silent as she worked the pick wedged between the groove along the phone's entire perimeter. Once she completed the revolution, a small pop sounded through the room at the same time that "Midnight Rendezvous" reached a crescendo after the bridge, the loudest point of the song.

Utahime felt breath ease out of her. She had not realized she had been holding it while she worked on separating the shell that made up her phone. (She belatedly hoped that that pop had not meant she had damaged her phone beyond repair. At least I know a good repair shop now, she thought sardonically.)

As though sensing the weight of the moment, Gojou slid his sunglasses down, subjecting the device to as full an analysis that Six Eyes could provide him.

Utahime swallowed. She pinched the lip of the back cover between her thumb and index fingernails and lifted it like the lid of a clamshell, careful not to snag or yank the cable that connected to the battery like the manual instructed. Her right hand reached for another screwdriver in case it came in handy.

The inside of a phone was surprisingly tidy. It was not as neat or organized as Unjou's filing system, but every part had its appropriate place and it did not interfere with the others.

She inspected the flowchart of dismantled components for what felt like the hundredth time in the last two days and compared it with what she saw in person.

There, she realized when one part of her phone did not line up with the manual's, her eyes blurring at the edges until only the phone remained clear; her throat and lungs dropping into the acid bath of her stomach. I wasn't imagining it.

A bug. A wire tap. A covert listening device. Utahime did not care what the correct title was. It was moot and inconsequential to the fact that someone was monitoring at the very least her calls.

The driver clattered against the chabudai as it fell from her limp hand. In a few hours, she certainly would quail at her lack of self-control and awareness to the state of a metal driver against a precious heirloom. However, that vein of thought and its volume paled in comparison to the pulse of blood in her ears and adrenaline dive-bombing through her veins.

Utahime was not sure how she got to her feet. Within two blinks she was across the room and turning the volume for "Midnight Rendezvous" up another three clicks.

Gojou's brows dropped below the upper rims of the sunglasses as he frowned. He said, "What's the ma—"

She shoved a hand under his armpit to find purchase around his triceps while the other took hold of the same arm's elbow and yanked him to follow her lead whether he remained sitting or stood.

The faint register of him hissing and cogitating under his breath would have made her smirk under normal circumstances. Nothing had been normal since the Goodwill Exchange, though, and it was with that resignation in mind that Utahime took a hairpin turn around the end of the display wall, swung Gojou in an arc around her, and shoved him into her bathroom with the door slammed shut behind them.

He looked at her in the reflection of the vanity mirror. "At least..." his words garbled as the adrenaline spike crashed and left her ears ringing. "...dinner first," he finished.

"Shut up," she said reflexively.

"Okay, between the blaring music and the James Bond routine, I'm starting to think you've been replaced with a really bad clone, so, wanna tell me what this"—he gestured sloppily between the two of them and then her bathroom—"is all about?"

'A bug,' she mouthed, flexing and clenching her hands in front of her in a gesture she hoped signaled to Gojou her emphasis.

She should have known he would be willfully obtuse about it.

Gojou grinned. "Is widdle Utahime scared of some cweepy cwalies?" he simpered and leaned down close enough to meet her at eye level. "Have no fear!" He soldiered on despite Utahime's attempts to rub craters into her temples with her thumbs. "I don't mind holding your hand while you call the exterminator."

Utahime yanked her hands away from her face and out of his immediate vicinity. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the wall. "In the phone, you idiot," she hissed.

Gojou exaggerated shifting to look over her shoulder. He tilted his head, considering the wall, plain and off-white save for a squeegee that hung from a hook and a shower caddy that sported two shelves of skin care products that she used daily; on the other side of the wall, Utahime's cell phone. His mouth rounded into an 'O' shape.

He popped his lips. "Right."

"What the hell am I going to do?!" she demanded. Her thoughts began to form into words before she could properly consider them. 'Word vomit' Umeko had defined it when Utahime was ten. Utahime would have preferred to literally vomit at the present moment. "I don't even know who's listening. Why would they want to listen to me of all people? It would make much more sense to bug you—wait, where's your phone? Did you bring yours in here?" Her hissing rivaled the cacophony of rain during a typhoon against corrugated metal roofs.

"Yep," he said, sliding it out his pocket and waving it in the air lackadaisically.

"Moron!"

"Okay, I actually didn't do anything this time. How're you already mad at me?"

"Give me that!" she demanded and ripped the phone from his grasp. She held it to her ear, searching for an extraneous or aberrant frequency. Nothing.

"You done?" Gojou asked, barely bothering to rein in the most ridiculous parts of his amusement.

Utahime huffed through her nose. "Why would my phone be tapped and not yours?"

"Access, most likely. Hard to plant a bug in a phone if its warping all over the world."

She nodded. The urge to word-vomit began to dissipate. "So, what now?" At his bemused head tilt, she elaborated, "We can't just stay in here all night going over this mole business."

Gojou tapped his chin as though in thought. "I don't know, throw up some curtains, add a settee, maybe a candle and it could be pretty snazzy office."

"Gojou!"

"Yeah, yeah, I hear you," he said. Then, his posture snapped fully upright, and his eyes swiveled to her, glowing epiphanies. "I have an idea."

"Always a dangerous sentence coming from you."

"Let's go out."

"Excuse me?"

"Outside."

"I guessed that."

"Without our phones."

"That doesn't explain any—"

He threw the door to the bathroom open with enough exuberant force that Utahime briefly considered checking if he ruined the hinges.

"After all," he said, the volume of his voice only slightly louder than normal, definitely acting, "we shouldn't fall into the same bad habits as our students! It's rude to keep checking your phone when dining out with a friend. I'll leave mine here, too!" On cue, he chucked his cell phone across the room until it collided with the side of her bookcase and fell to the floor on its face.

Whoever was on the other end of that bug would likely have heard Gojou if he spoke normally. Now, the entire Kyoto campus knew he was here, too.

Gojou strode over to the speaker system and shut it off. In a blink, he was back in the genkan with his shoes on and slipping hers onto her feet. He slung his arm around her shoulders and pulled her in until her side was flush with his.

"Wait! What if I get called for a mission?" she exclaimed.

"Don't worry about it. S'been a quiet night anyway."

Her teeth began to bare in the beginnings of an indignant snarl—the beginnings of a diatribe at the tip of her tongue, though she might be weaker than he, she, too, was still called out to exorcise curses—when the air around the two of them began to spin on an axis different than the one she knew was normal for the Earth. 'Different' was too broad a word to accurately describe the sensation. 'Opposite' felt closer; did that mean that the Earth was turning in the opposite direction, the sun now on a course to rise in the West, or were the North and South Poles being turned head over foot? Maybe it was none of those things.

There was a brief fragment in time, small enough that Utahime's brain could barely catch it before it was gone, where she could make out the matter of her room in Kyoto simultaneously with the matter of Gojou's desired destination. Both places occupying the same space.

Or were they?

Utahime peeked up at Gojou from the corner of her eye. She knew his cursed technique required a high level of knowledge of calculus and physics that were still theory to the non-sorcerer world. Her own marks in physics were none too inconsequential; voice and sound and how those impacted the world were extensions of waves and harmonic motion. However, even when he was a skinny first-year and she was a mere fourth-year prepping to go out into the world, she could only recognize clusters of the equations he would doodle on Shouko's homework or on the back of his weekly copy of "Shounen Jump".

The warmth of his body disappeared from beside her, and the release of his technique's pressure dissipated from around them, a vacuum that had lost its grip on a container of air.

Gojou had teleported them to an alley off one of Kyoto's main streets. Utahime sniffed daintily at the acrid stench of bile and vomit off to the sides. (It was a Thursday evening, but she supposed that drunks and depressed salarymen did not care which day of the week it was when they chose to imbibe to excess.) Gojou strolled ahead to the mouth of the alley with his head tipped back to face the sky.

Light pollution was a problem in Kyoto; more so in Tokyo.

(It was the middle of the night in early spring 2007. Utahime found Gojou balanced on the canopy of an ancient sakura tree. His eyes were uncovered, uninhibited, untethered as he stared transfixed at the black expanse above, surrounding this orb that humans dared to call their home.)

Utahime never considered that perhaps Six Eyes allowed him to see beyond the red and yellow tinges light reflected across the atmosphere. Perhaps the stars were visible to him all year round. Though—it occurred to her as he turned around, grinned, and bobbed his head towards the street, urging her to follow—if he could see the stars and what existed beyond, did that mean that he also watched them die out?

She forced herself to blink once and trailed after him.

"Pick your poison," he said.

She lifted a brow. "For what?"

"For dinner. Duh."

Notes:

[1]
a) Iwahama Hinatsu 岩日夏 from the character readings meaning 'rock, boulder, crag, cliff, anchor', 'sunlight', and 'summer'
b) Osada Takashi 治田剛士 with readings meaning 'to govern/to calm down', 'rice field', 'sturdy/strength', 'gentleman'
c) Yorinaka Akari 頼中明 with readings that mean 'trust/request', 'in/amid', 'bright/light'

[2]
a) Denhachi Kagerou 電蜂影郎with character readings meaning 'electricity', 'bee/wasp/hornet', 'shadow', 'son'
b) Tobisaki Jitsuko 飛崎實子 with readings that mean 'fly', 'small peninsula', 'truth', 'child'

For more information about wiretapping and how your phone is listening to you (if you want to go down that rabbit hole):

Wiretapping

Is My Phone Listening in? On the Feasibility and Detectability of Mobile Eavesdropping

If you're interested in how to dismantle and fix your phone, computer, and everything electronic in between, iFixit has a lot of great resources. This teardown overview provided a lot of information for this chapter.

Once again, I need to apologize for how long this took to write. My only answer is life is life. I hope that the length of this chapter was worth the wait.

Thank you for all of the feedback left on the last chapter. It kept me writing sometimes even when I had a lot of doubt.

Hope that you all enjoyed this chapter. Until next time, thank you for reading.