Timeframe: One year before Sukuna's resurrection.
Location: A civilian zone in Tokyo.
Akira Rensetsu wasn't a prodigy.
Just a Grade 2 support sorcerer. Neatly documented. Well-mannered. No domain. Useful. Replaceable.
He had a clean technique, good instincts, and a partner who always covered his blind spots. Her name? Junko Himura — calm, perceptive, a sharp blade in quiet hands.
The mission was supposed to be nothing — a minor curse near an abandoned subway. No veil. No casualties. No legacy.
The air was heavy with rust and damp stone — not from time, but from something older.
Train rails stretched like skeletal veins into pitch darkness. Broken vending machines slumped in corners, half-melted from cursed corrosion. Every step echoed like a whisper that didn't belong to you.
The walls were lined with peeling posters from twenty years ago — ghost stories on crumpled paper. Warnings in forgotten ink. Someone had once painted over the emergency exits with talismans, now half-scorched and bleeding cursed residue.
No trains ran here. No people. No sound except your breath and the faint clicking of cursed insects nesting in the tracks.
This was a graveyard of movement — a place time had rejected.
And that was why they were here.
Junko scanned the area. "Nothing stronger than Grade 3," she said, adjusting her gloves. "We'll be done in ten."
Akira half-smiled, nerves buzzing. "Yeah… unless it's lying."
He always felt it — a tremor just under the surface of reality. Like time itself was a brittle thread waiting to snap.
They moved through the tunnel, quiet, CE suppressed. The curse emerged from the wall — sinew and teeth, eyes stitched shut. It shouldn't have known their names.
But it whispered, "…Rensetsu…"
Then it lunged.
Akira blinked — and Junko was already screaming.
A black limb tore through her chest, her blood splashing across the tiles. Ribs snapped like dry twigs. The air smelled like iron and static.
His legs froze. His stomach flipped. Time fractured in his brain — he wasn't thinking, he wasn't strategizing.
He just said:
"Let this second shatter."
Reality snapped.
The blood vanished. Junko gasped, alive.
Akira's heart pounded like a hammer against glass.
"What… what was that?" she said.
He couldn't answer. Then the curse attacked again — and this time, Junko burned. Her skin blackened from the inside out, her veins glowing with cursed heat. Her screams were not human — they cracked his soul.
Akira screamed.
"Let this second shatter!"
Again.
Junko alive.
Then dead. Her skull crushed against the tunnel wall. Grey matter on tile. Her body spasmed like a broken puppet.
Again:
"Let this second shatter!"
Again.
Her spine split down the middle. Her throat torn wide. The sound she made — a wet, rattling gasp — would never leave him.
Time wasn't clean. Every rewind left him more nauseous, like something inside was peeling away. Skin off bone. Memory off soul.
Thoughts pulsed 'Am I saving her… or just replaying her death? Is this mercy? Or cruelty?'
She's dying in new ways. And I'm the reason.
He saw her eyes — wide, then blank, then gasping again. Blood in her teeth. Terror behind the iris.
She feels it too. Every loop. She's remembering.
How many deaths does one soul endure before it shatters?
Four rewinds.
On the fifth, Akira gritted his teeth and moved before the death. His cursed energy flared. He didn't scream. He didn't chant. He just acted.
The curse charged.
He struck.
A cursed stake — glasslike and jagged — drove through its heart. Not a technique he knew. One that answered.
Junko collapsed to the ground, breathing — barely.
Her pulse thinned. Her lips trembled.
Then… stillness.
Alive, but vacant. Her eyes didn't track him.
"Junko?" he whispered, crawling closer.
Nothing.
She was alive — vitals stable — but unresponsive.
A living shell.
The mission debrief was quiet. The footage glitched. Evaluators muttered about CE distortions. One vomited blood watching it.
Junko was placed in medical stasis. They called it 'curse-induced coma.' But Akira knew better.
Final verdict:
Technique Class: Instability.
Classification: Forbidden.
He was quietly promoted to Grade 1.
Then marked for observation.
Then erased from official records.
No trial. No sealing. No execution.
Just a paper trail that ended mid-sentence.
But Akira still felt the seconds ticking — not around him…
Inside him.