Mechamaru’s betrayal was never reported.
That was because the high-ranking official he had been serving as a pipeline to had already been dealt with by Gojo as a “natural death,” and Utahime had objected to the whole thing.
If they wanted to track down the traitorous Mechamaru, they could have, but there was no need to waste energy on it.
If he was determined to hide, they wouldn’t find him anyway.
In a moment like the calm before a storm, announcing that an ally had betrayed them would only drag morale down for no reason.
Still, the people who needed to know had to know.
“...That’s all.”
The Kyoto students who had spent their school years with Mechamaru.
Utahime’s expression as she delivered the heavy truth to them was grim.
Two years—short, and yet long.
Given the nature of being a jujutsushi, didn’t they have the right to know the whereabouts of a comrade who had repeatedly walked the line between life and death with them?
“...No way. That can’t be true.”
“Maybe there’s some misunderstanding?”
Some denied it.
“Really? Mechamaru...”
“Well, he did always have that unreadable side to him.”
Some accepted it.
“How could he just disappear without saying anything? The second he was in danger of getting caught, he just ran?”
“Maybe he never thought of us as comrades in the first place.”
Some were furious.
As all kinds of reactions burst out here and there, Todo, the only one who had silently watched the whole thing, finally spoke.
“So what now?”
“We’ll look for him! Mechamaru definitely wants us to find him!”
Miwa shouted through tears welling in her eyes, but Todo’s flat voice did not stop.
“And how exactly are you going to find him?”
“If we track the small puppets he set up all over the place...”
“And then what? What are you going to say when you meet him?”
At that question, Miwa fell silent.
She had plenty she wanted to say if she ever met Mechamaru.
But where would that conversation end up?
What was she supposed to ask?
Why did you betray us?
What did you really think of us?
Countless questions flashed through Miwa’s mind, but no clear answer came.
“Either way, he betrayed us. I don’t know what circumstances he had, but he ran without leaving even a single word behind. That’s the end of it. He’s not a jujutsushi anymore.”
“That’s...”
“He may already be dead. Once the deal was done, the curse users had little reason to keep Mechamaru alive.”
“Todo! That’s too harsh!”
Nishimiya tried to stop him, but no one sided with her.
Not even Miwa, who had been protesting just moments ago.
They understood it too.
Todo glared at Nishimiya with cold eyes and growled, “Wake up and face reality. I don’t think there’s a single one of us so weak we’d never recover from this. Forget about Mechamaru now.”
With that, Todo left the room.
Before long, Miwa was slumped on the floor in tears, and the other students all turned their heads away before letting out deep sighs.
Someone once said that living is, in the end, just causing trouble for the people around you.
And the more people who loved Mechamaru, the more trouble his betrayal would become for them.
Even the fact of his death, when it was eventually revealed.
----------------------------------
“Junpei! Come out and eat!”
“What’s for dinner today?”
“Sukiyaki.”
“Oh.”
A hot plate was set on the table where four people sat, and meat sizzled on it, filling the air with a delicious smell.
When it was cooked to the right point, they neatly arranged green onions, mushrooms, garland chrysanthemum, tofu, and the like beside the meat, then poured in just enough broth to make it simmer.
The sauce mixed with soy sauce, mirin, and sugar stuck lightly to the bottom of the pan, and once the vegetables wilted and took on color, they cracked the eggs in front of them and dipped the ingredients in.
The well-seasoned meat and vegetables wrapped themselves in the soft egg and melted richly on the tongue.
“Mm, this is good.”
“I saw some ideal sukiyaki video suddenly pop up on YouTube’s algorithm.”
“What’s the difference between ideal sukiyaki and regular sukiyaki?”
“Apparently it was in an old drama. The ingredients are fixed, I guess. You’re only supposed to use the designated ones.”
By the time they had finished chatting about trivial things and poking through their bowls, the food they had prepared was already gone.
It was a job that used the body, and high schoolers in the middle of their growth spurt ate like monsters.
Yuji, the most physical of them all, ate the most, but the others were no slouches either.
Even Junpei, who had once looked the most frail, had recently filled out enough that he could now easily put away two large okonomiyaki by himself.
“Halloween’s coming up soon. I think I heard they’re doing a cosplay parade in Shibuya.”
“So you want us to go together?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not a holiday, but... well, I guess it’s fine.”
“What should we dress up as? Mummies? Dracula? Zombies?”
“Let’s think about it carefully. There’s still more than a week left.”
“You’re not going to go off by yourselves again, are you?”
“Cut it out.”
“What needs cutting out is your lovey-dovey nonsense...”
Smack!
“Ow!”
Nobara’s fist slammed into Yuji’s sturdy head for running his mouth carelessly.
There was something she had long noticed: Yuji was surprisingly mischievous. Hadn’t he said he’d had a lot of friends since middle school?
He had that popular, easygoing sports-club-kid vibe you sometimes saw back in school.
Of course he’d have at least one girl who liked him.
“You should call Ozawa again. You met her the other day—have you even been keeping in touch?”
On a day off after fighting the Cursed Womb: Death Paintings, they had run into Ozawa Yuko, Yuji’s middle school classmate, while walking around the city.
Yuji and Junpei had gone to see a newly released mecha monster movie, and when Megumi had gone back for a bit to check on Tsumiki’s condition, Ozawa had approached Nobara, who was left alone.
“Um, weren’t you just with Itadori?”
“I was, but...”
At first, seeing Nobara with Yuji had made her briefly mistake Nobara for his girlfriend, but once it was explained that he had someone else he liked, the misunderstanding cleared up.
They chatted over coffee in a café and, one by one, called Megumi and Junpei into the scheme they were plotting, but before long Yuji showed up and the atmosphere turned tense.
Ozawa had been overweight in middle school, but after moving to the city she had grown taller and lost weight, becoming almost unrecognizable.
Everyone held their breath, waiting to see whether Yuji would recognize her, and fortunately he gave a perfect answer.
“Huh? Ozawa?”
After that, well, they all ate together, exchanged contact info, and parted on good terms.
For some reason, Ozawa’s expression had looked a little complicated, though.
“We are texting, but... do we really need to?”
“You’ve got gravure posters on your wall, and yet somehow you don’t seem interested in girls.”
“No, I mean, I haven’t seen her in a while, and... it feels like Ozawa’s a little hesitant.”
“No way. From what I saw, she definitely had feelings for you. The mood was good too. Besides, you’re into tall women, aren’t you?”
With annoyed looks, Nobara and Junpei teamed up to tease Yuji as he waved them off.
It was the couple’s cute revenge for realizing that the last movie date had been an underhanded plan led by him.
They were grateful enough to keep it at a reasonable level. Not too far.
“What are you going to name Itadori the Second when he’s born?”
“Would he also like women with big height and big butts?”
“That Kyoto gorilla with the topknot would love that.”
“Ohhh, my best nephew! Won’t you call me Uncle Todo? Something like that?”
“You have to teach the kid not to eat weird stuff, Itadori.”
Unlike the two of them, who were snickering and having a great time, Yuji’s expression was a little more serious.
“Hmm... I wonder.”
“Why are you reacting like that? So boring.”
“To be honest, the moment I swallowed Sukuna’s finger, I gave up on having a normal marriage and dating life.”
“Uh... um...”
“The more people come after me, the more the people around me will get dragged into it too. People like you, who are ready to risk your lives and fight alongside me, that’s fine. But Ozawa isn’t like that, is she?”
“I don’t want to drag her into the chain of curses.”
The mood turned solemn in an instant.
Nobara and Junpei, who had been wearing sly expressions, shut their mouths tight.
Megumi, shaking his head, smacked Yuji on the back of the head again.
“What kind of atmosphere is this? Who takes a joke as a documentary?”
“Don’t you do that all the time?”
“Yeah, Fushiguro. You’re one to talk.”
But faced with the sharp retort, Megumi also had nothing to say.
“Still, I thought I was pretty good at rolling with things.”
“You are. Except for the fact that you’re always making that grumpy face.”
Megumi briefly looked back on the past.
In his memory, he had always worn the same expression.
A filthy, dissatisfied look in his eyes. A mouth set in a hard line. The only time he had ever smiled in front of his friends was the moment he succeeded in Domain Expansion.
And if he really thought about it, he had been laughing wildly in a bizarre, blood-soaked state. Definitely.
“Huh...”
He had always called Gojo Satoru a socially inept man, but realizing he himself wasn’t much different left Megumi a little deflated.
Maybe it would be better to loosen his expression a little—he thought, and imagined himself smiling brightly.
“Furube yurayura! Hahahahaha!”
That didn’t seem right at all.
The vulgar laugh of his damn father, now faint even in memory, overlapped with it, and he gave up on changing.
The cheerful meal atmosphere had somehow become a little awkward.
“How did the conversation end up here...?”
In that situation, Junpei, sweating and watching the mood carefully, gathered his courage and raised his hand.
“Um, if we’re done eating, should we clean up? We were all supposed to visit Tsumiki today.”
“R-right!”
They hurriedly stood and cleared the table, each of them wearing an uncomfortable smile.
-------------------------------
After tidying up the meal, they all got in a car and headed to the hospital room where Tsumiki was staying.
Normally, visitors were screened strictly, but since Megumi, her guardian, was accompanying them, the process wasn’t complicated.
Following Megumi as he went ahead and opened the door, they saw a woman lying neatly on the bed.
“Tsumiki, I’m here.”
“Hello, Tsumiki. Nice to meet you.”
All the kids greeted her, though she kept her eyes closed and did not move at all.
They didn’t know when, or if, her condition would improve, but there was still a sliver of hope that she might regain consciousness.
Speaking to someone who couldn’t answer was both respect for the patient and consideration for Megumi.
“You kept her hidden all this time, and now you’re finally letting us meet her?”
“It’s not like I was hiding her. I just never mentioned it.”
Megumi’s bitter expression as he held Tsumiki’s hand looked pitiful.
Seeing that made Junpei’s chest ache a little.
His mother had looked like that when she died too.
Buried under the blanket, but from the outside she had looked perfectly fine, as if she might sit up at any moment.
It was nice that they had all come, but what were they supposed to say?
Standing there awkwardly, Junpei decided to just talk about anything at all.
“Tsumiki. I don’t know if you can hear me, but... Fushiguro has always helped me a lot.”
Junpei slowly began to speak, explaining how he had met Megumi, what his first impression had been, and how Megumi helped him now.
“Fushiguro’s mature, so he’s easy to trust. We haven’t known each other long, but I think there’s a lot I can learn from him, both in battle and in everyday life. I’m really jealous that you have such a good younger brother, Tsumiki.”
He even tossed in a joke so it wouldn’t get too awkward.
“You’re beautiful, too, when I look at you like this. You don’t really look much like Fushiguro, though.”
“We have different parents.”
“...Couldn’t you have mentioned that sooner?”
It almost backfired, but still.
Anyway, after the long-winded speech ended, Tsumiki’s face, when Junpei looked at it again, seemed a little more relaxed, though that might have just been his imagination.
Megumi, who had quietly listened to Junpei, also seemed shy, but not to dislike the warm, tingling atmosphere.
“Um... same here.”
“I’ll go first...!”
Yuji, who had often helped take care of his sick grandfather, spoke more naturally than Junpei and started talking about this and that, and Nobara, not wanting to lose, forced out whatever words she could.
Watching his friends start talking over one another, a natural smile slowly bloomed on Megumi’s lips.
“Huh? He smiled!”
Of course a person can smile.
It was a little irritating that they had to point it out and make such a big deal of it, but he decided to let it slide.
“...Thanks, everyone.”
“What’s with the sudden sentimentality?”
Blushing a little, Junpei rubbed his chin, and his eyes caught the mark carved into Tsumiki’s forehead.
“That thing, right?”
“Yeah. I was cursed not long after I graduated from middle school.”
Whoever did it, I’ll tear their limbs off when I catch them.
Megumi growled, his eyes turning fierce in an instant, and the kids hurriedly stopped him.
“We’re next to a patient. Watch your language.”
“No, she’s not a little kid. She’s old enough to know what’s what, so what’s the big...”
“Ahem. Enough.”
“...Got it.”
“I’m sure she’ll wake up. They said she won’t get any better, but she won’t get any worse either.”
“Let’s hope so.”
After that, everyone finished their own stories and chatted about random things until, before they knew it, evening had passed and the sun had gone down.
As discharge time drew near, the mood gradually settled, and everyone seemed to be gathering their things and getting ready to leave.
Even if her condition wasn’t serious, it wasn’t good to loiter in a patient’s room forever.
But...
From the moment he saw the mark, Junpei had been feeling a strange sense of déjà vu.
“Fushiguro, wait a second.”
“What?”
“That mark...”
That ominous feeling.
The others didn’t seem to notice, but Junpei’s strangeness sensed something from the source that had plunged Tsumiki into unconsciousness.
Even though it was a small mark, he could feel the grotesque thing sleeping inside it.
The malice wafting from it made Junpei feel an unbearable disgust for a moment.
“Yoshino, don’t touch—”
Megumi’s attempt to stop him from beside him didn’t even reach his ears.
Curse.
It was a curse.
A person had been cursed.
He didn’t know when it had started.
Was it when he awakened his technique because of Mahito?
Or after his mother died?
Or when he completed his technique with the final strike of [Bloom]?
He knew it instinctively.
The hidden side of my own nature, the part I had not yet understood.
It was screaming fiercely from one corner of his chest.
Swallow it, it said.
Ah... this is...
my calling.
Before anyone could stop him, Junpei’s right hand covered Tsumiki’s forehead.
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