The streets were silent. Suguru Geto sat beneath the glow of a crooked streetlight, the swarm curled around him like shadows pretending to sleep. The city's hum was distant, drowned out by the far louder noise inside his head.
Kishibe's grin still lingered, like an ember he couldn't shake off. He hated how it unsettled him. Why do the weakest smile like that when they die?
The question dragged him backward, through years of memory.
He saw Riko Amanai, bright-eyed and laughing as if the world had never known curses. For a moment, he had believed her optimism. He had believed Gojo's arrogance. He had believed in their mission: to protect those who could not protect themselves.
Then came Toji Fushiguro's bullet. The crack of skull, the silence that followed. And the hired hands—non-sorcerers—who had wanted her dead. Who celebrated her death.
That was the first fracture.
The second came in the village. Two cursed girls, beaten and caged because they were different. Because they were born with something others feared. Suguru had walked in with the intention of saving them. He walked out alone, his hands dripping with the blood of one hundred and twelve villagers.
The children had cried when he freed them. But he had felt no joy. Only clarity.
That was the moment he understood: the monkeys will never stop.
They feared what they did not understand. They hated what they could not control. And sorcerers, cursed with seeing what others ignored, were shackled by the duty of protecting them.
A curse without end.
He pressed his palm against his temple. Even now, the weight of that day pressed down on him like a mountain. Expelled. Branded traitor. The path away from Gojo had begun there.
Gojo.
The strongest. Unreachable, untouchable. Gojo had taken Riko's death and grown sharper, colder, stronger. Suguru had taken it and grown weaker, heavier, broken.
He had once envied Gojo's freedom. Now he despised it.
"Of course he can still protect them," Suguru muttered to himself. His voice was raw, almost bitter. "He doesn't care enough to be crushed."
But Suguru cared. He cared too much. Every curse he swallowed was a reminder of what they left behind—the fear, the ugliness, the death. He had consumed humanity's hatred until it became his own.
That was the difference. That was why their paths diverged.
The swarm stirred, restless, sensing his pulse quicken. Mimiko and Nanako's faces flashed in his memory—two small figures who had chosen him even when he had fallen. They were proof that his ideology was not just delusion. Proof that some still believed in him.
"Gojo… the strongest," he whispered. "But I am the one who understands."
His fists clenched. His heart ached.
Kishibe had stood his ground with nothing. Gojo had soared above with everything. Suguru had neither. Only failure, grief, and rage.
But failure could be sharpened into a blade. Grief could be turned into chains. Rage could become an empire.
He rose, robes heavy, eyes shadowed.
Riko's death had been the beginning. The village massacre had been the point of no return. Kishibe's death was just another stone laid on the road he walked alone.
An empire of curses. A mausoleum of monkeys.
And he would not stop building it until the world itself was buried inside.