AN: Since this story is going to heavily feature Yuji and Sukuna talking in Yuji's head when no one else would hear, please read any dialog fully in italics and single quotes as being dialog in Yuji's brain that no one else can hear.

XXX

May 2021

Yuji, now in his transitional fourth year of training, sits in the cafeteria with his breakfast, and as he brings a mouthful of rice to his lips, Sukuna says, 'It's honestly a miracle that you know how to eat anything. I'd half expect you to spit on the rice and poke it with your tongue without ever putting it in your mouth as it slowly somehow becomes drier somehow until it pretends it's been eaten enough.'

Sukuna is referring to a date that Yuji recently had, where he promised to go to sleep and leave Yuji alone, and then awoke during an intimate moment and booed at him for being bad at oral sex, ruining the mood so much that his girlfriend said she forgot something at home and left.

'I hate you so much.'

'That's such a mean thing to say to your dear old uncle, isn't it? You could have just let me out.'

'Please let me eat my breakfast in peace.'

Sukuna adds, 'Anyway, I could convince Yuko. I can make an unlimited number of tongues come out of this body. Maybe I also like a tall woman with a big ass? You certainly didn't inherit my intelligence, charisma, or ability, so at least there's that.'

So how is Yuji still in this position after all this time?

In the end, they made a deal of sorts where Sukuna healed Gojo and earned the right to reside peacefully within Yuji. That little trick he did when he brought Yuji back after over a day dead still appears to be something that only Sukuna knows how to do.

There are a lot of rules that govern this pact that effectively prevent Sukuna from doing anything particularly bad. It was probably the only way to get Gojo back, and despite the fact that it would have been incredibly satisfying to squish him in Pookuna form, Yuji feels like he made the right choice.

Unfortunately, that means he has to live with Sukuna.

Now that Sukuna doesn't have any hope of running wild again, he's settled down a bit and their relationship isn't as bad as it used to be.

Since Yuji is pretty much a full-fledged special grade, Gojo occasionally sends him to handle curses overseas that he has normally taken care of in the past, and Sukuna finds these missions satisfying.

Sukuna enjoys going to new places, seeing new things, and especially, eating new food. As part of their deal, Sukuna is sometimes allowed to choose meals with some very careful restrictions that prevent him from forcing Yuji to eat something that would be illegal or might make him sick.

Most recently, they ate a guinea pig in Ecuador, and Yuji felt so much guilt while he ate it even though it was really good. Like, really, really good. Amazing. The fact they're so cute and fuzzy left him with lingering guilt.

Now every time they walk past a pet shop, Sukuna is like a kid asking for an ice cream.

After Yuji finishes breakfast, he puts on his mask since it's a rule on campus due to COVID, and heads to the training area, where he works with some of the first years.

Sukuna predictably has a lot of opinions about plague, and they are as bad as one might assume. He also has some thoughts about people like Atsuya Kusakabe, who don't believe in modern medicine and also don't know anyone who has ever had smallpox. Except Sukuna, apparently, who reports that it 'sucked,' and that he feels the lack of plagues in the modern era have allowed imbeciles and 'runts' to fill the earth.

After helping out with the first years, Yuji leaves campus with Ijichi in order to work on an investigation, and rather unexpectedly, after a quick lunch at a little family restaurant, they are heading back to their car when he hears police sirens.

A black SUV with police escort screeches to a halt at the curb, and Yuji looks around.

The window rolls down, and Gojo is sitting in the back seat with his arms crossed.

He says, "Hey, Yuji. No idea what these guys are up to, but I guess the military has some reason to want to talk to us."

"I don't think I like that," he says with a nervous laugh, although he does get in, leaving Ijichi alone and slightly bewildered.

Sorcerers aren't permitted to participate in military action; there was literally a war that decided this, and Japan famously did not win.

The car ride is sort of tense, because the guys in the front seat don't want to say anything in front of them, and they don't want to say anything in front of them either.

It's just a very weird situation.

About five minutes before they arrive at their destination, a man in a suit with an earpiece sitting in the passenger seat leans back and says to Yuji, "You're the one that has the weapon, correct?"

"What weapon?" Yuji asks.

"The intelligence that can destroy any and all things within a two hundred meter radius."

Sukuna asks, 'Does this person believe that I am some sort of usable tool that you possess?'

'Looks that way.'

'We should eat him.'

'No, we should definitely not do that.'

'You're right. He looks like he'd taste bad.'

Yuji says to the man, "That's not really how it works. I can't just tell him to do something, and he'll do it."

"But it can do that?"

"I mean, technically? But he's not going to do it for you."

"We can be very persuasive."

The eighteen-year-old shrugs and looks out the window. "Okay? Good luck with that. I'm sure nothing will go wrong."

When the car comes to a stop, it's near a helipad, and they are taken northward, still with no explanation given.

At the end of the trip, they land outside a building bearing the name and logo of JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Yuji found it incredibly foreboding that the space people urgently needed to speak to sorcerers, and not just any sorcerers…the weapons. Gojo and Sukuna are dangerous, apocalyptic weapons. Yuji also counts himself in this group, even though he's not a proper of weapon of mass destruction.

There had been a huge news story that broke just a day before that a lunar mission that many nations worked to support had ended in tragedy.

Astronauts from several countries had traveled to the moon to set up a small colony. It was supposed to be sort of a practice run to see how people living on other celestial bodies would fare over time.

The news report said the lander crashed into the surface on the moon due to a technical malfunction and all twelve of the astronauts had been killed.

To Yuji and Gojo, it is foreboding that just one day later, JAXA wanted to talk to powerful sorcerers.

Sukuna says, 'This is sort of exciting! Something bizarre and grotesque must have happened.'

'Yes, how wonderful. Something bad happened, and innocent people died,' Yuji sarcastically answers.

'You're so uninteresting.'

They're taken to a very big room with a long metal conference table that seats twenty-four, but it is empty, and they are guarded by men with big guns.

There is a wall with one huge screen, and another with a different huge screen, which is filled with video boxes for people joining the meeting remotely. There are sixty-two little video boxes on the screen.

There are number of people watching remotely that are Japanese and Satoru can sense a room down the hall with lots of people in it, so he thinks Japan's representatives for this meeting are just sitting in a different room.

Gojo stares at the wall, looking at the participants in the other room with Six Eyes, and they squirm visibly on camera, feeling the intensely creepy sensation of being watched through the walls.

Then, he looks away.

"Anyway, what is this about? You obviously have something for us. I would assume calling us is an option of absolute last resort for you. We don't want to talk to you guys either. Let's see whatever it is," Gojo asks as he sits with Yuji.

The mouth on Yuji's cheek appears and Sukuna adds, "Show us the killings!"

Yuji slaps his hand over his cheek.

There's a translator, and someone who introduces himself as Bob Fletcher, the director of Project Hermes, the failed lunar mission. He looks like a mean caricature of an American nerd: big glasses, pens stuck in his shirt pocket, brown hair dotted with grays.

The other people observing them seem to mostly be hostile to the idea of their presence there, as it is inevitable that some just learned about sorcery in the last twenty-four hours and many, born into countries that are not Japan, may not even believe sorcery is real.

The crazy stuff that happened in Japan in 2018 has largely been dismissed by the scientific community as some sort of large hoax perpetuated by the Japanese government to explain away terrorist activity and everyone is fine with that outcome.

Sorcerers didn't want to be out in the open anyway.

There are complaints and grumblings in heavily accented English from many of the talking heads on the screen.

Nonetheless, the video is played on the other big screen.

When the video begins, a hatch is opened, and two astronauts in spacesuits are carrying a crate from an external cargo hold away from the lander on the moon, which has evidently landed successfully. They are joined by the others as they unload gear.

HD cameras on and in the ship film from different angles, and everything continues to be normal until someone asks if anyone feels the ground shaking.

Suddenly a huge depression appears in the moon dust, and then there's screaming, and the largely monochrome scene is suddenly stained with red.

Since sound can't travel through a vacuum, they can't really hear what's going on outside their suits normally, but some soundwaves travel through the ground and are picked up by different helmet microphones, creating a cacophony of strange stomps and distorted noises, screams, tearing sounds, crashes.

The astronauts are killed, one by one, in a screaming panic, by a monster or monsters that are invisible to them and the camera. One of them disappears and then reappears, then is peeled like an onion. If it was a cursed spirit, all three sorcerers present would have assumed it ate the astronaut in his spacesuit and then regurgitated it, removed the suit, and ate it again.

Others were not eaten and were left strewn about although once they were all dead, they did see their spacesuits being ripped up and toyed with.

There's a long expanse of silence where the video is sped up, as the surviving cameras continue to film, frozen on the horrific scene.

Then the hatch is pulled shut, latched, and locked, and an invisible intruder passes through the airlock to the pressurized part of the lander, like it understands how to do that. In this part of the lander, they can very clearly hear all kinds of weird little noises. Gurgling hisses, the sound of something hard lightly scraping on the metal floors, the weight of something heavier than a human moving around in a tight space designed for a human.

Flips and gauges start to seemingly adjust themselves, manipulated by an invisible creature that either has hands or something similar to hands that have similar functionality.

This goes on for quite some time, until the keys on a keyboard start to compress and binary code begins to appear on the screen. It takes forever.

The video ends there.

Bob Fletcher, the director of the mission, says, "That signal is currently being transmitted into deep space. We don't know what it is, but it is broadcasting from very close to home. Obviously, the reason you two, or three, or however you count yourselves, are here is because on Earth, the business of fighting invisible horrors falls on so-called 'sorcerers.' Is this one of your monsters?"

Gojo seems a bit hesitant to answer, and says, "No, it is not like a cursed spirit on Earth. Cursed spirits on Earth are a byproduct of human consciousness, and since there is no human consciousness on the moon, there cannot be a cursed spirit.

"However, there are other possibilities. Obviously, this is a concerning situation, so it might be wise to be more open despite the fact that it is convenient for both of our respective fields for us to ignore each other."

"You know something?"

Gojo nods, answering, "I would assume that no one in this conference call is superstitious or believes in the supernatural. It's preposterous to cling to those things in this age, after all."

"Are you saying cursed spirits aren't real?" someone asks.

"They are real but calling them 'cursed spirits' is not accurate from a scientific perspective."

"Then what are you saying?"

Satoru feels like once he lets the genie out of the bottle, it will never go back in. On the other hand, he finds the situation deeply concerning. They don't know what the monster was, or if there are more of them, or really anything except that it appeared to have intelligence and it was attempting to communicate with someone, somewhere.

Gojo says, "The advent of sorcery on Earth was likely extraterrestrial in nature, rather than supernatural. The fact that we are here means there have always been other things like us out there."