The serene atmosphere in the reception room shattered.
"Itsuki? Where are you?" Geto asked, his voice a mask of calm over sudden unease.
"Suguru? I was just about to call you," Kamo Itsuki's voice replied, its usual even cadence carrying a new, grim undertone.
Beside Geto, Gojo Satoru was a silent typhoon of impatience, miming elaborate fighting stances and mouthing 'Ask him! Now!'
Geto waved a placating hand, but his focus was entirely on the phone. "Call me? What's wrong?"
"I thought that's why you were calling. It seems… Shoko is in trouble."
The words landed like a physical blow. Both Geto and Gojo shot to their feet in perfect, horrified unison. "*WHAT?!*"
"Ah, Satoru's there too," Itsuki noted, hearing the outburst.
"He doesn't matter!" Geto's voice cracked, his composure evaporating. Sweat beaded on his temple, his grip on the phone turning his knuckles bone-white. "What happened to Shoko?!"
"The details are unclear," Itsuki explained, his voice clinical, a stark contrast to the panic he'd just ignited. He was in his research base, bathed in the sterile glow of work lamps, when a specific, programmed alert had pulsed in his mind—a death notification from one of his puppet creations.
He began to explain the mechanism: every significant puppet he crafted had a fail-safe. Upon total destruction, it would send a final data burst—location, cause of death, damage patterns—back to him. It was a morbid form of quality control.
"The puppet that was just destroyed," Itsuki continued, his mind accessing the data stream, "was *Yuki Mai*."
The name meant nothing to Gojo, but Geto's breath hitched. He remembered. A fluffy, clumsily stitched Alaskan Malamute plushie, a gift Itsuki had made for Shoko on a flight years ago, after the Kyoto Goodwill Event. A comforting trinket she'd kept ever since.
"The data indicates it was dragged underground by a Grade 1 Cursed Spirit and crushed by geologic pressure," Itsuki reported, his tone that of a scientist reading a sensor log. "I tried calling Shoko. The line is dead. I am already en route to the last known coordinates of the puppet."
The clinical explanation did nothing to dilute the terror. Shoko, Nanako, Mimiko—they were in a hospital, a place already seething with fresh misery. And now, a Grade 1 curse was active there, one powerful and cunning enough to attack from below.
Geto Suguru was already moving, the phone still clutched in his hand. Gojo Satoru's desire for a spar was utterly forgotten, replaced by a cold, focused urgency. The theoretical battle of titans was postponed. A real rescue mission had just begun.
Kamo Itsuki's envy for Gojo's instantaneous travel was a fleeting, bitter thought as he raced across the landscape. The timing of Geto's call was a small mercy.
After hearing Itsuki's technical, chilling report, Geto's mind instantly pieced together the horror: a curse had spawned in the makeshift hospital, one strong enough to overwhelm Shoko and destroy a grade-1 equivalent puppet. Without another word, he gave Itsuki the coordinates and, with Gojo a hair-trigger away, they vanished.
Reappearing at the hospital's edge, they found it shrouded in a simple, functional barrier—Shoko's work, a last-ditch effort to contain the threat and shield the outside world.
"She's still thinking of others," Geto muttered, pride and fear twisting in his gut. They passed through the barrier seamlessly.
Inside, the scene was one of eerie quiet. Geto didn't hesitate. With a sweep of his hand, he summoned a swarm of Cursed Spirits—not for combat, but for excavation. Ants, earthworms, moles, centipedes, all creatures of the earth, spilled forth and immediately began burrowing into the ground, their forms dissolving into the soil. Itsuki's data was clear: the attack came from below.
"This is too slow," Gojo growled, his hands already crackling with condensed blue energy. "Let me just flip the whole plot over. We'll find them faster."
"*No!*" Geto's voice was a whip-crack. "If they're buried, a pressure shift could kill them instantly. And there could be other survivors. We do this carefully."
Chastised but unconvinced, Gojo followed Geto as they blitzed through the above-ground structures, their speed rendering them blurs to any remaining conscious eye. They cleared rooms in seconds, pulling a few dazed, injured civilians from the rubble.
Finding no sign of Shoko or the girls, Geto turned to one of the rescued nurses, his voice tight but controlled. "Where was Dr. Ieiri? Just before everything went wrong?"
The nurse, trembling, pointed a shaky finger toward the eastern wing. "She… she was checking on the children in the temporary pediatric ward. The aftershock hit, and then… the ground just… swallowed part of the building."
Geto and Gojo exchanged a glance. The pediatric ward. Where Nanako and Mimiko would have been helping.
The subterranean swarm of curses suddenly pulsed a collective signal back to Geto. They had found something. Not bodies, but a cavity. And around it, the distinct, malignant residue of a powerful earth-manipulating curse.
"They're underground. East wing. The curse is still down there with them," Geto said, his voice low. "We dig. Now. But we dig to them, not through them."
The theoretical duel was forgotten. The most powerful duo in the jujutsu world became a precision rescue team, their unparalleled power forced into a delicate, terrifying game of excavation against an unseen foe and the crushing weight of the earth itself.
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