The cold came first.
It spread from the pavement beneath him, seeping through his jacket and into his bones with a patience that felt almost kind. The copper taste of his own blood had long since flooded his mouth, thick and warm in stark contrast to the spreading numbness in his limbs. The alley around him was quiet now. Too quiet. The screams had stopped five minutes ago, maybe ten. Time was getting slippery.
Three left.
The thought surfaced through the fog, sharp and insistent.
Three were still inside.
His fingers twitched against the concrete, nails scraping uselessly as he tried to push himself up. The movement sent a fresh wave of agony through his midsection, bright and clarifying. The gut wound was bad. He'd known that the second the knife had twisted. But knowing and accepting were different things entirely, and Dante had spent his entire life refusing to accept a goddamn thing.
Get up.
His body didn't listen.
Get. Up.
The world was fading at the edges, colors bleeding into a uniform gray that reminded him of old television static. The distant sound of sirens grew fainter instead of closer, like someone was slowly turning down the volume on reality itself.
She's still in there.
The last thought came with a face attached. Wide eyes. Scared. Trusting him to make it okay because that's what big brothers did, right?
They made things okay.
Then the world cut to black, and even the regret dissolved.
===
Dante sucked in a breath, his hands flying to his stomach on pure instinct. His fingers found smooth, unbroken skin beneath his blood-soaked shirt. No wound.
He was standing.
He looked down at himself, turning his hands over in the flat, directionless light. The blood was gone. The knife wound that should have killed him had vanished like it had never existed. His clothes were pristine, the same outfit he'd worn into that alley. Everything was exactly as it had been before the first punch was thrown.
What the hell?
He looked up, searching for context and finding none. He stood in an endless expanse of white. The light had no source. The space had no walls or ceiling, a sterile void that felt both suffocating and infinite.
Brain's shutting down. Has to be. This is what dying feels like. Hallucinations. Chemical dump.
The thought was comforting in its rationality, right up until he spotted them.
Two figures stood in the distance, perfectly sharp against the formless void. One seemed to drink in the light around him, a dark point of absolute presence. The other radiated something that made Dante's eyes water if he looked too directly, like staring at the sun.
They were just standing there. Waiting.
He'd died with a job unfinished, with people still in danger, and now he was trapped in some cosmic waiting room with two strangers who apparently had nothing better to do than stand around looking mysterious?
Fuck that.
"HEY!" Dante started walking, his footsteps making no sound against the not-floor. "Hey! You two!"
His voice died the moment it left his mouth, swallowed by the void without even the courtesy of an echo. The silence that followed was oppressive, the kind that made his ears ring.
He walked faster, then broke into a jog. The figures didn't move. They just watched him approach with what felt like infinite patience.
As the distance closed, details began to resolve.
The man on the left possessed a towering, symmetrical build that made people stop and stare. His white hair stuck up in artful chaos, catching the omnipresent light and somehow making it look deliberately styled.
He wore a simple dark jacket with a high collar over what looked like casual clothes, the whole ensemble suggesting someone who'd rolled out of bed looking effortlessly put together. His posture was loose, weight shifted onto one leg with his hands tucked casually into his pockets.
The black blindfold covering his eyes should have made him look vulnerable.
It didn't.
Dante felt seen. Truly, completely seen in a way that made his skin crawl. Like every thought he'd ever had was being catalogued and filed away by something vast and unknowable hiding behind that strip of cloth. The sensation was wrong, fundamentally wrong, like being naked in a room full of mirrors.
The figure on the right was younger. A teenager wearing what looked like a school uniform, all dark fabric and high collar. His posture was bored, slouched in a way that suggested terminal disinterest with everything around him. Black hair fell across his forehead, and for a moment he looked almost normal.
Then Dante got close enough to see the details.
The tattoos crawled up the kid's neck like living things, intricate patterns that felt ancient in a way his mind couldn't quite process. They extended onto his face, harsh black lines that created a geometric pattern across pale skin. The smile playing at his lips was wrong. Too knowing. Too cruel. Like a predator that had learned to imitate human expressions without quite understanding what they meant.
Movement caught Dante's eye. Two additional eyes slitted open on the teenager's cheekbones, burning with an amusement that felt older than civilization itself.
The air around the teenager grew heavy, pressing down with a silent promise of violence. It felt like ozone before a lightning strike, and Dante's hindbrain screamed at him to run.
Dante stopped a few feet away, his jaw tight as he looked between them. The frustration burning in his chest helped push back the instinctive terror trying to root him in place.
"What the hell is happening?" His voice came out rougher than he intended. "Who are you guys?"
The one in the blindfold tilted his head, and somehow Dante knew he was smiling even though he couldn't see his face. When he spoke, his voice carried an easy charm that made the words feel like an inside joke Dante wasn't part of.
"Satoru Gojo." The pause that followed was deliberate, weighted with an amusement that suggested he was waiting for recognition that wouldn't come. "And you could say I'm the strongest sorcerer there is."
The fuck is a sorcerer?
The teenager didn't even bother looking at Dante fully, just cut his eyes sideways with an expression of profound disdain that made something hot flare in Dante's chest.
"Ryomen Sukuna." His voice was a low rumble that seemed to vibrate in the air itself. "Lower your tone, brat. You're in the presence of your betters."
Dante felt his lips pull into a smirk before he could stop himself. The defiant words were already forming, the same instinct that had gotten him into every fight he'd ever been in surging to the surface.
"Or wh—"
The world stuttered.
One moment he was standing, that smirk still on his face. The next, he felt something cold and impossibly thin trace itself across his midsection. There was no pain. No tearing sensation. Just a strange feeling of separation, like his body had decided to politely disagree with the laws of physics.
His top half slid sideways.
The white void rushed up to meet his face. From his new perspective, lying on his side, he could see his own legs still standing there. They swayed once, twice, then toppled over like a building in a controlled demolition.
There was no blood. No gore. Just the clinical, impossible reality of his body in two pieces.
Sukuna stood exactly where he'd been before, four eyes fixed on something in the middle distance with the same bored expression he'd worn throughout the entire exchange. He hadn't moved. Hadn't even shifted his weight.
The last thing Dante saw before the world went black again was that expression of terminal disinterest, like swatting him in half had been about as noteworthy as brushing dust off his sleeve.
SNAP.
Dante gasped, his hands flying to his stomach as he stumbled backward. He was whole. Standing. Completely unharmed.
The phantom sensation of the cut lingered, a ghostly line of cold across his abdomen that made his breath catch. He looked down at himself, patting his chest and stomach with shaking hands.
Nothing.
He looked up at the two figures, shock and something resembling fear finally breaking through his defenses.
What kind of asshole...
"Oh?"
Sukuna's voice cut through the silence, carrying a note of genuine surprise that made all four of his eyes focus on Dante with sudden, predatory interest.
"He's alive."