With no one behind her, with the whole of Tokyo's leadership arrayed against her, she had still shouldered every ounce of that pressure and put forward the New Gastrea Law.
She'd even set herself in open opposition to Kikunojou Tendo, the man who'd raised her to her position and who held the real power in Tokyo.
The bill went down. Again. And again.
Councilors mocked her, humiliated her, cursed her name from the floor.
The public questioned her, attacked her, sent her death threats.
She never once backed away.
That alone said everything about how much those abandoned Cursed Children meant to her.
Everything she had, she'd poured into giving those blameless children a chance to live.
A chance to stand in daylight without hiding.
And now?
The cause she valued above all others, the one she'd fought herself hollow to protect, had been knifed in the back by the very subordinate she'd sent out to serve it.
He'd carried her orders. He'd used her name. And behind her, he'd raised a blade over the children she wanted to shelter.
No one could take that easily.
"I understand, Mr. Gojo."
A roughness she couldn't quite hide crept into her voice. She dropped her eyes, unable to look at the screen any longer, fingers clenched white around the pen.
"This is my failure. I'll handle it properly, and I'll answer for it to you and to that child..."
Satoru studied her through the screen, that face full of self-reproach, the rims of her eyes gone red, and sighed.
The sound was soft, but the receiver carried it to her clearly.
"What does any of this have to do with you?"
He asked it without a trace of blame, with the calm of someone who'd already seen the whole shape of the thing.
"What?"
Her head snapped up, eyes wide and lost. That was the last sentence she'd expected.
She'd braced for a reprimand. For being careless in whom she trusted, for failing to keep her own people in hand.
"Because I'm the one who assigned Takuto Yasuwaki to..."
The defense came out of her by reflex, then thinned to nothing. Her head sank lower, a child caught in the wrong.
"Remember when your bill got voted down?"
His tone hadn't changed. He hooked a finger under the frame of his glasses and drew them down.
They slid clear, uncovering those pale blue eyes.
Eyes that usually held nothing but idle amusement or teasing mischief. Not now.
Now they were an ocean with no floor to it, looking straight through the screen at her.
"You've never actually held anything, start to finish. That's why this happened."
He laid the words down one at a time. No accusation in them. Only a fact, cold and unsoftened.
It punctured every comfort she'd been telling herself.
"I'm sorry..."
Her lips pressed tight. She kept her head down, unable to face him.
She'd always known that Seitenshi was a mascot in the hands of Tokyo's leadership. An ornament.
She'd always known she held no real authority, that any instruction touching those men's interests would die before it moved an inch.
But she'd refused to say it. Refused to concede.
Try a little harder, hold on a little longer, and something would shift. That was what she'd told herself.
Something would keep those children safe.
One sentence from him tore the whole comfortable fiction to shreds.
"Don't apologize."
He cut across her with a shake of his head.
"In this, you're a victim the same as that kid is."
His voice had gone gentler, and something almost tender ran under it.
He'd known too many people like her.
Sorcerers in the Jujutsu Society, manipulated by the higher-ups, bound by rules they hated, wanting change and powerless to force it.
Ordinary people ground down by curses without even the standing to resist.
Victims of a rotten system, every one of them. Just like her.
"Leave this to me. I'll handle it."
He pushed the glasses back into place, hiding the blue, and his voice returned to its even register with a decision in it that allowed no argument.
Her expression changed the instant she understood, everything that had come before rushing back to her.
She leaned toward the camera, urgency spilling out.
"Mr. Gojo, what Takuto Yasuwaki did was wrong, but he's still a senior officer of Tokyo..."
She knew exactly what those men were.
However badly he'd erred, Yasuwaki remained a Second Lieutenant of the Self-Defense Forces. One of their own, inside their own system.
Last time, when Satoru had dealt with two police officers who'd tortured a Cursed Child to death without a thought for consequences, Tokyo's leadership had gone up like a struck match.
Councilors had howled from the assembly floor for sanctions against him.
If he hadn't demonstrated such enormous capability and value afterward, even she couldn't have buried it easily.
There had been voices then, plenty of them, rejecting any talk of cooperation, arguing instead for putting Satoru under control and wringing every drop of use out of him.
Only her insistence had let the matter drop.
If he moved against Yasuwaki now, those men would seize the pretext with both hands.
She wasn't afraid of being targeted herself.
What frightened her was what they'd do in the shadows, the quiet vicious ways they'd take revenge on the Cursed Children under his protection.
Children who had suffered enough already. She wouldn't have them hurt again over this.
She never finished the sentence. His voice cut in over hers.
"Get your leadership together. I'll be there shortly."
The call ended.
The screen went black, and the rest of her words jammed in her throat with nowhere to go.
She sat staring at the dead phone for a long while.
At last a bitter, exhausted smile surfaced on her face.
Her teacher hadn't bothered to hear her out.
She could already picture the storm about to break over Tokyo's political world.
How far it would go this time, she couldn't guess.
The business with the two officers had left plenty of resentment banked among the higher-ups.
Whatever those men had done in private, they'd worn the badge of the Tokyo government.
Satoru had ignored the law and disposed of them personally, which in the eyes of those men amounted to spitting on the authority of the entire administration.
Worse, most of Tokyo's leadership didn't consider what the officers had done to be wrong at all.
Getting rid of one Cursed Child. Was that a problem?
No.
Not in the slightest.
To them, eliminating a walking time bomb that might turn into a Gastrea at any hour was hardly a fault.
It was protecting Tokyo's future.
The great majority of Cursed Children possessed no real combat ability.
They couldn't serve as Initiators against the Gastrea. They consumed survival resources Tokyo could barely spare. And in the end they became hazards waiting to detonate.
Did the leadership know the truth of how those girls lived?
Of course they did.
They knew better than anyone. Abandoned across the districts, beaten, abused, hunted for sport.
More than knew. Every last piece of it had their tacit blessing.
Let the men below quietly execute unarmed children. No one would ask.
Because if the numbers weren't whittled down a little at a time, then once the virus in them broke loose and they turned, the cleanup would be considerably harder.
Manpower, materiel, casualties. All of it costly.
Stripped bare, the Cursed Children were consumables to these men. Nothing more.
However many died, none warranted a moment's grief.
A few years and a fresh generation would be born and grown.
An inexhaustible resource.
If not for the magic Satoru had displayed, so far outside anything they understood, and that strange power he called Cursed Energy, they'd have moved against him already.
The strength of one man is finite, in their reckoning. The strength of numbers is not.
However exceptional he was, however powerful, most of them figured there had to be a ceiling.
He was still human. He'd tire. He'd slip.
The Gastrea were stronger, more terrible, endless, blotting out the sky.
And the Monolith had held them off all these years regardless.
Could one Satoru Gojo really be worse than an entire species?
Their inaction now was an experiment, nothing more.
If this soft approach could deliver every scrap of his power into their hands, so much the better.
Holding the Tokyo Area would be the least of it. Wiping out the Gastrea entirely, reclaiming all of Japan, none of that would be off the table.
But if things failed to bend the way they wanted...
Then they wouldn't hesitate to reach for the quiet methods, the ones that don't survive daylight.
Whatever it cost, an uncontrollable variable would be removed.
None of which entered Satoru's calculations in the slightest.
He hadn't cared what these people thought from the first day, and he cared less about what they might attempt.
Set against the higher-ups of the Jujutsu Society, who commanded countless sorcerers and had spent a thousand years sinking their roots, this pack with a handful of guns and artillery pieces didn't rise to the level of clowns.
He'd been willing to cut down the men who held every cursed technique there was.
These ones hardly registered.
He slid the phone into his pocket.
Turning, he looked down at Yasuwaki and the others still on their knees.
Under a lead-grey sky, the sun stretched his shadow long across the ground.
The glasses hid his eyes. Nothing of his expression showed.
But the pressure rolling off him had nearly gone solid, a mountain none of them could see, pressing down until the three of them didn't dare breathe above a whisper.
He lowered himself into a crouch.
Long fingers held the phone he'd just hung up.
He tapped its smooth back against Yasuwaki's cheek. Once. Again. Light little pats.
The motion was almost playful, almost bored.
Every tap sent a violent shudder through the man that he couldn't suppress.
Blood and cold sweat ran together down his jaw and dripped onto the concrete, spreading in a small dark stain.
"Relax. I'm not going to kill you right now."
He might have been remarking on pleasant weather. That faint trademark smile even sat on his face.
"Not here, anyway."
The addition came lazily.
Yasuwaki found nothing in it to smile at.
No relief reached him either.
There was only terror, bottomless, in his marrow.
Because the killing intent under those words came through with perfect clarity, thick enough to choke on.
It wasn't a joke.
It was real, and it was cold enough to burn.
Satoru stopped looking at him and turned toward the girl in the corner.
The instant he turned, the chill and the killing intent evaporated.
The smile softened into something warm, spring sun on winter snow.
Nothing about him resembled the man who'd been radiating death a moment earlier.
He walked over quietly and crouched down again.
Bringing his eyes level with hers, so his height wouldn't loom over a child already frightened badly enough.
"There we go. You're safe now."
Soft and low, so as not to startle the small creature in front of him.
"Come on. I'll take you somewhere full of kids just like you."
The wariness hadn't left her eyes. He kept his voice gentle.
"Nobody's going to push you around there."
"There's hot food, warm blankets, and plenty of friends your own age."
"And tomorrow, someone's going to take all of you somewhere even safer, even nicer."
"There's sunlight there. Grass. No more hiding in dark wet places."