"Domain Expansion : Infinite Void"
.
.
.
.
This body was not his.
And yet, if he hesitated, everyone would die.
The sky over Shinjuku was stained in a choking hue of orange and black, a twilight born not from any sun, but from the burning remains of a dying city.
Skyscrapers lay snapped at their spines, glass shattered like ice across the streets, sirens long since silenced beneath the weight of curses and ash.
What had once been Tokyo's beating heart now resembled a sacrificial altar, smeared in blood and lit by hellfire.
Yuta Okkotsu floated above it all, suspended in midair by a cursed technique that did not belong to him.
His limbs trembled, skin slick with sweat that steamed in the corrupted air.
Inside Gojo Satoru's body, he was an imposter.
The Six Eyes strained to process information faster than his soul could interpret.
Infinity flickered, unstable, threatening to collapse under his indecision.
Across from him, Sukuna stood atop a twisted shard of concrete, face half-split in a grin that did not need to be earned.
Blood still clung to his fingers, fresh from sorcerers Yuta could no longer remember.
Behind the King of Curses, Shikigami circled the ruins, remnants of Megumi's broken will enslaved to a new master.
"You look tired, Okkotsu," Sukuna said, his voice casual, almost amused. "Do you think wearing your teacher's skin makes you strong? You reek of borrowed pride."
Yuta didn't answer.
His throat was raw, lungs ragged from overusing cursed energy that responded like a foreign organ.
Gojo's techniques weren't meant for him.
He had seized the body in desperation after Gojo's soul was obliterated, hoping to wield his mentor's power one last time, long enough to kill Sukuna and end it.
It hadn't been enough.
His own techniques, copy, reversal, even Rika, were unstable inside this flesh.
The soul transfer had fractured halfway.
Something had broken.
Perhaps it had always been broken.
Sukuna moved, and the air cracked like glass.
Yuta brought Infinity up a heartbeat too late.
A slash tore through space, shearing the sky, and blood exploded from his side.
Not Gojo's blood.
His.
His soul was starting to be rejected, the cursed techniques unraveling in protest.
He dropped lower in the sky, teeth clenched, one arm hanging uselessly by his side.
His vision blurred, and he felt the distinct, sickening lurch of his grip slipping.
Not just on the fight, but on the body itself.
"You're failing," Sukuna said. "It's over."
Yuta coughed, and blood hit the inside of his mouth, warm and metallic.
He thought of Maki.
Of Panda.
Of Toge, wherever he was now.
He thought of Yuji, and how many people they had lost already.
He thought of Rika, not the twisted, monstrous curse, but the girl who smiled through tears and held his hand even after death.
"I made a promise" Yuta whispered.
Sukuna raised a hand.
The air darkened, pressure compressing around them like a black sun preparing to collapse.
"I don't care" Sukuna replied.
The final slash came silently.
It passed through Infinity like a knife through fog, reality itself bending around Sukuna's malice.
Yuta didn't feel the pain.
There was no scream.
Only the sound of wind, and the sensation of falling.
As his body was split in two, Yuta's soul was ripped away from Gojo's flesh, severed violently mid-transfer.
He felt his cursed core unravel, not with fire, but with cold. Something ancient and cruel laughed in the void between breaths.
And then there was nothing.
No light.
No death.
Just falling.
Falling.
Until his eyes opened again.
And the sky above him was not Shinjuku.
It was gray and cracked, laced with unnatural veins of black rock.
The air buzzed with wrongness.
He was in his own body now, somehow.
Thin. Human. Weak.
Around him, strange towers loomed, half-mechanical, half-organic, silhouetted against a sky that knew no sun.
In the distance, sirens wailed.
Yuta Okkotsu, last of the special grade sorcerers, had died.
But he was not dead.
Not anymore.
...
He didn't know how long he lay there.
Time moved strangely in this place, like a dying watch ticking backward.
The sun never rose. The light never shifted. And the air smelled like burned stone and old blood.
Yuta pulled himself from the crater one breath at a time.
Every muscle in his body screamed in protest.
His cursed energy was still inside him, but barely.
A thin thread. A dying ember.
When he tried to call on it, no technique answered.
No curse responded.
Just raw reinforcement.
He used it to numb the pain in his legs and tighten the skin around an open gash near his ribs.
He had no bandages. No talismans. Just instinct and survival.
He climbed out of the pit and stood on unsteady ground.
The landscape was a graveyard.
Twisted buildings in the distance leaned at unnatural angles, choked by spires of black crystal that pulsed like diseased organs.
Trees with metallic bark had grown through rusted train tracks.
There were no animals.
No wind. Only the distant, static hum of the world itself.
He walked.
Step after step, like a ghost wandering a battlefield.
At one point, he passed what looked like a corpse slumped against a wall of metal and stone.
It had no face, melted or eaten, he couldn't tell.
Its skin was marked with strange lesions, the edges blackened like something had burrowed under it from within.
Originium.
He didn't know the name, but he could feel it.
It throbbed against his cursed energy, rejecting him like a rival immune system.
His soul and this land were incompatible.
The longer he breathed here, the more his chest ached.
His body felt heavier. Slower.
And something was watching him.
At first, he thought it was his imagination.
A side effect of the trauma.
Paranoia from waking up in a nightmare.
But it didn't fade.
It lingered behind his thoughts, like a second set of eyes pressed against the back of his skull.
Then he heard it.
Wet footsteps.
Not behind him. Not to the side.
Under him.
He froze.
The ground twitched beneath his feet.
A fissure split open just ahead, quietly, like skin peeling apart.
From it, a figure rose.
It wasn't a curse.
Not exactly.
It was humanoid, but wrong.
Limbs too long.
Joints too sharp.
A helmet fused to its face like a surgical graft, wires dangling from the back of its neck into the soil below.
Originium spikes jutted from its shoulders, pulsing with dull orange light.
It didn't speak.
It didn't scream.
It charged.
Yuta's body moved before his brain did.
Cursed energy flooded into his legs, and he dodged right, barely avoiding a claw that shattered stone where his head had been.
His breath caught in his throat.
He raised a hand and tried to summon something, anything.
Nothing came.
He gritted his teeth, pressed his fingers together, and forced his cursed energy into formation.
"Simple Domain."
A translucent veil shimmered around him for half a second, just enough to deflect the creature's second strike.
The shell collapsed immediately. He'd barely had the energy to form it.
The creature screeched, a high, metallic warble, and lunged again.
This time, Yuta met it head-on.
He reinforced his arms and legs, drove a knee into its chest, and heard something crack.
It didn't fall.
It didn't bleed.
Instead, it convulsed, as if the impact had excited whatever was festering inside it.
Originium shards exploded from its back in response.
Yuta was thrown through a pile of collapsed scaffolding.
Metal bit into his shoulder.
He landed hard, rolled once, and tried to stand.
Pain flared through his right arm, it was broken.
The creature advanced slowly now, head tilted, curious.
Yuta stared at it, breathing hard.
Blood dripped from his nose.
His vision flickered.
His cursed energy was running dry.
He had no technique.
No allies.
No voice to call his own.
Just his name.
Just his will.
He let the cursed energy in his legs surge one last time, pushed off the ground, and launched himself forward like a missile.
His broken arm screamed.
His vision narrowed.
And with his one good fist, he slammed the creature in the head.
The blow connected.
The helmet cracked.
The thing screeched and reeled back.
Yuta landed, stumbled, and dropped to one knee.
The air felt like acid in his lungs now.
His heart wouldn't stop racing.
He raised his head.
The creature, staggering, emitted a shrill pulse of light, and then retreated.
It folded back into the earth, as if melting into the metal veins beneath the ground.
Gone.
Yuta collapsed against a wall and stared into the sky.
It hadn't even been a real fight.
Just a scavenger testing its prey.
And he had barely survived.
His hand trembled.
"I'm not going to make it like this" he whispered to no one.
Silence answered.
Not even the wind.
Just the sound of his breathing, and the slow, steady hum of a world that hated him.
...
Yuta didn't sleep.
There was no safety in this place.
No night to pass into morning.
Only the constant low whine of energy under the earth and the ever-present sense that something was watching him from just outside the range of his senses.
He took shelter beneath the twisted wreckage of what might have once been a rail station. Rusted beams jutted out like broken ribs.
The ground was soft here, dirt and glass mixed with metal shavings that stuck to his skin.
His cursed energy was drained to the bone, but he forced it to his fingertips just enough to numb the worst of the pain.
He hadn't stopped shaking.
The encounter with the Originium-bound creature played on repeat in his mind.
Not because it had nearly killed him.
But because of how weak he had become.
Gojo would've handled it without blinking.
Hell, even Yuji would've torn through it with one good punch.
But Yuta, last of the special grades, was crawling in filth, hiding from half-formed monsters.
He stared at his hands.
So many techniques had once lived there.
Cursed speech.
Copy.
Rika.
Even domain expansion.
His body remembered them. The shape of the energy, the rhythm of their release.
But now?
Empty. Stuck.
As if someone had torn pages from a book and left only the margins.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
And then, like a whispered word behind the veil of thought, something stirred.
It wasn't memory.
Not exactly.
It was more like a wound inside his soul, a part of his cursed core that pulsed with sudden heat, foreign and wrong.
His breath hitched.
He leaned back against the wall and clutched at his chest.
It wasn't pain.
It was pressure.
And then the sound came.
A voice.
Faint.
Distant.
A single syllable, like a name almost forgotten.
"...ta..."
His eyes snapped open.
The darkness in front of him began to shift, not physically, but in impression.
The shadows stretched.
Warped.
He blinked, and for just a heartbeat, the wreckage transformed into something familiar.
Tatami mats.
A shrine rope.
The scent of burning incense.
It was his childhood home.
No. It was what his memory thought it looked like. The detail was wrong.
The corners were smeared. The air was too cold.
And standing there, at the far end of the hall, was Rika.
Not the monstrous cursed spirit.
Not the grotesque armor of rage she had become.
But Rika Orimoto as she once was, innocent. Smiling. Her hands clutched at the hem of her skirt.
"Yuta~" she said softly.
He couldn't move. Couldn't speak.
"Why did you let me die again?" she asked.
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
Her smile twisted, not cruel, but sad.
Like a ghost realizing it had been forgotten.
"You let all of us die. You could've saved everyone~"
The scene shattered.
Yuta gasped and doubled over, cold sweat pouring from his skin.
The air returned to its heavy, toxic self.
The rail station loomed overhead again, dark and rusted.
He coughed violently, dirt filling his mouth.
His cursed energy sparked uncontrolled in his fingertips.
The fragment inside him, the cursed core, was reacting.
He pressed a hand to his chest.
Something had flared deep within, not fully awakened, but touched.
A piece of her.
Not Rika the curse.
Rika, the memory.
A shard of his own technique.
It hadn't returned. But it had screamed.
And it wanted something.
He clenched his fists and stared into the dark.
So did he.