Megumi
Megumi walked along the empty streets of Tokyo, dark eyes glancing at darker corners as the sun slowly began to set on the horizon. The sound of waves splashing against the concrete pillars that held up the bridge he walked on was the only sound that could be heard for meters around him.
It was the 2nd of November 2018, and the world as they had known it for years had changed irrevocably after Shibuya.
A sound broke the silence of his walk. A low chittering, the scramble of multi-jointed limbs and claws scratching stone. Megumi looked over the railing of the bridge and spotted the curse. It was a weak one, even if it looked the size of an SUV. Or perhaps Megumi was the one who had grown strong, even if he did not feel like it.
The curse's chameleon-like ringed eyes rolled in its socket and spun to face him, and at the sight of him, it froze, giving Megumi a better look at it. It was shaped like a mixture between a chameleon and an octopus, and looked just as disgusting as any other cursed spirit. It flickered, turning invisible, and Megumi frowned in annoyance.
"Tch," he let out before giving the spot the curse had been one last look as he began to walk off once again.
Cursed spirits had grown bolder overnight, which was due to the sudden influx of what looked like a million cursed spirits that suddenly flooded the heart of Japan, Tokyo. While they had been busy celebrating Itadori's survival, Kenjaku had been just as busy.
A great whoomp sounded somewhere above him, forcing him to lift his head to the sight of a giant bird with reptilian features. Fortunately, it kept its gaze focused on the horizon, so Megumi turned away from it.
Thousands of curses, just like it had been released into Japan overnight. Coincidentally, multiple barriers Master Tengen had spent the past centuries putting up had been pulled down, an act that allowed the thousands of curses to spread and propagate at such a level that their existence was no longer a secret, and their reveal showed why the elders had decided to keep the existence of curses a secret in the first place.
Fear.
Cursed spirits were born of negative emotions, and with the sudden outpouring of fear, worry, and other negative emotions that had followed the sudden reveal of cursed spirits to the rest of humanity, what should have been manageable thousands that sorcerers could still deal with ballooned into what was estimated to be a million curses that were slowly rendering Tokyo into a wasteland.
Megumi gave it a few days before the city was completely evacuated. It had only been days, and already the call came in shortly after. He slipped his hand into his pocket and answered it without looking at the caller ID.
"Fushiguro here?"
"Ah, Fushiguro-san. There's a letter here for you. It's important."
"On my way," he replied to the familiar voice of Kiyotaka Ijichi. There went his quiet time alone.
__
The summons had come through official channels, which meant it had arrived as a formal document in an aged envelope surrounded by a red seal and language so carefully constructed it somehow managed to sound both polite and threatening in equal measure. Megumi had read it once, set it down on the desk in the temporary housing Jujutsu High had arranged for students displaced by Shibuya, and then read it again to confirm he had understood it correctly the first time.
He had. They had finally come for him. He knew they were going to. Ijichi had warned him about it after Nanami was interrogated shortly after waking up. They had known he was going to be next, so it was hardly surprising. His first meeting with the higher-ups who controlled Jujutsu society.
He looked at the school uniform that had been carefully spread on the bed. The proper thing was to put it on. It lent an air of formality; it would have eased the wheels of the show they were about to go and put on, but Megumi Fushiguro was coming to realize that he did not care all that much for it. Not now, so he asked himself a question he had never asked before.
What would Gojo-sensei do?
He looked at himself in the mirror at the far edge of the room. His hair was messy as usual. He looked a bit pale from his already recovered injuries. He was dressed in jeans, a pair of sneakers, and a black hoodie. Satoru would go and see them just like that, and just for today, he was going to act just like his sensei.
He nodded and walked out the door, only taking the extra second to snag something off the floor. His trip to the meeting room was quick, and by the time he got there, there were a few people around the door.
The wheel he carried at his side drew looks the moment he entered the building, but it did not last, not with the scowl on his face.
He walked to the assigned room and stopped before the sliding doors, the wheel resting against the floor and the side of his knee with ease. A man stood in front of the sliding doors. Megumi did not know him, but if he was to go by the descriptions, he assumed the man was Usami Kento.
"Fushiguro Megumi, I believe?"
"Yes."
Thin eyes nodded, then turned to stare at the wheel in confusion before looking back at him with a question on his raised brow, but Megumi simply ignored it and stood still, arms folded. After what felt like an hour but was most likely minutes, he heard a whisper from the other side of the door, and Usami nodded with a thin smile before opening the door and gesturing. "The higher-ups await you."
Megumi walked in, and the first thing he noticed was that it was dark, which was a far cry from what he expected. He glanced back once to see the sliding door begin to close as Usami gave him a grotesque grin. Then all was darkness. Megumi took in a deep breath and waited for a second, then suddenly there was light.
A single light bulb placed above him gave the sensation of a spotlight in an interrogation room. It lent the atmosphere a look that spoke of judgment, revealing the tightness of his brow, his set features, and the wheel in his grip. Yet it also partially revealed the room he found himself in.
He had anticipated a long table and arranged faces set in withered old scowls and frowns. What he did not anticipate was the dozen sliding doors scattered around him. A squint told him that they were made of dark lacquered wood, each one etched with seals that he barely recognized as obscuration work, old and layered and maintained with the kind of consistent care that suggested they had been in regular use for a very long time. He wondered if they worked on Gojo-sensei's Six Eyes. He was half certain they were the reason they were there.
He could not see the faces behind each door, but he could see their shapes. Shapes that suggested the presence of people. He tried to sense for cursed energy residuals or output, but the seals did their work thoroughly, stripping away all cursed energy signatures other than his own and blurring the silhouettes of the people into something generic and unreadable.
He turned his head slowly to confirm that yes, they were all like that. Arranged in a loose arc around him, and the arc was complete enough that there was no direction he could face that did not have at least one door in his peripheral vision.
That done, he remained in place and waited. He was more patient than they were in the end.
The first voice came from the second door to his left. The voice was barely recognizable. He was certain he had heard it somewhere before, but could hardly say where.
"Fushiguro Megumi."
"Yes."
"Do you know where you are?"
"I do."
"And do you know why you're here?"
He turned to the speaker. He had expected the formality, but there was formality, and then there was this. No wonder Gojo-sensei always came out with an annoyed scowl after one of these meetings.
"It was made known in the letter I received."
There was a brief pause as they collectively considered his words and the way he said them to see if there was reason for reprimand. There was none, so they continued. "You participated in the response efforts during the Shibuya Incident."
"Yes."
"You were operating under the direct instruction of Gojo Satoru at the time of the incident's initiation."
Megumi frowned before speaking. "No. Instructions were more flexible. I worked under and alongside multiple senior sorcerers."
There was a brief silence, and before the voice could speak, a second voice came from somewhere behind him and to the right. This one was completely unrecognizable, but distinctly noted as female. "What is that?"
He did not turn toward it.
"A wheel."
The silence that followed had a specific texture to it, one that he found himself enjoying. Behind the doors, the shapes shifted in small ways that the seals could obscure the identity of, but could not entirely suppress the fact of.
"You will elaborate," a third voice said from a door directly ahead.
"I'm holding a wheel that belongs to a Shikigami," Megumi said, and paused for a few seconds before adding, "I'm keeping it safe."
The shapes behind the doors went still again, and seal or no seal, their annoyance was clear. Megumi smiled internally. He was starting to see the part in all this that Gojo-sensei enjoyed.
He could feel them looking at the wheel without being able to see them do it, which was its own kind of information. They did not know what it was. They recognized that not knowing was a problem, and they had no immediate solution to that problem; this particular collection of people was not physically capable of admitting that openly, so they let it go and moved on, which was exactly what he had expected them to do. Instead, he expected them to go after something else.
"You are aware that you are not Gojo Satoru, correct? You should do well not to forget that." That was the warning he expected, so he nodded noncommittally.
This time, they started in truth with proper questions. His presence in Shibuya. His actions during the incident. The students he had been coordinating with. The cursed spirits engaged. The transfigured humans fought, and the man known as Kenjaku.
Then they reached Gojo Satoru.
"Are you aware," the first voice spoke once again, "of the council's determination regarding Gojo Satoru's status?"
"I received the documentation."
"Then you understand that any action taken toward the removal of his seal is a criminal act under the authority of this council."
Megumi looked at the door the voice had come from. The seals meant he could not see through it, but the looking was its own response.
"I understand that this is what has been decided."
"And are you going to follow that ruling?" another voice asked. This one was just as unfamiliar and deeper.
"I'm yet to make a decision."
There was silence as the group took in his words.
"You understand," a new voice finally said from a door he had not yet heard from, somewhere in the arc to his right, "what you are saying."
"Yes."
"You understand the consequences that this council is empowered to impose on anyone who breaks such orders."
"Yes."
The sounds that followed were small. The tap of fingers against wood, the ruffle of beads hitting each other as they were moved, the echo of fingers scratching a jaw. He had made his decision clear, but they could not act on any of it yet. They needed him to actually disobey before they had cause that would hold under the scrutiny that external pressure had suddenly made it inconvenient to ignore.
A crime needed to be committed for them to hold him to it. They knew that he knew that. Which made the fact that they had come to such a decision regarding Gojo Satoru in the first place surprisingly... stupid and sufficient only to hold back the people terrified of them in the first place, because the moment the crime was committed, then Gojo Satoru would be free once more, and they would not have to contend with the person who released him.
They would have to contend with a pissed-off Gojo Satoru. He wondered how they would fare.
The sounds came to a slow stop, and then came the pivot in the discussion, a pivot so smooth it made it clear the preceding conversation had only ever been the prologue to what they actually wanted.
"We will move," the voice from directly ahead said, "to the matter of your Shikigami."
Megumi kept his face still, as his hands tightened around the wheel. This had been the goal from the beginning.
"The Ten Shadows Technique," the first voice began, the one that was oddly familiar, "is a hereditary ability of some renown. Its upper limits have historically been a subject of considerable interest to this council." A pause that had been rehearsed. "Shibuya provided data that significantly revised our understanding of those limits."
"The Eight-Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General Mahoraga," the female voice read out from somewhere behind him with careful pronunciation, "was summoned during the Shibuya Incident and engaged in combat with the Special Grade incarnated sorcerer designated Ryomen Sukuna, during the period in which Sukuna had assumed full control of the vessel Itadori Yuji."
"Yes," Megumi said, turning to the new woman.
"The engagement resulted in significant structural damage to the surrounding area," another voice said, coming from a different door now. They were rotating the speakers deliberately, he realized a second later, to prevent him from orienting toward any single fixed point of authority. "Damages that our assessors have categorized as, in part, attributable to the Shikigami's actions."
"Shibuya was half destroyed already by the time my Shikigami stepped in," Megumi said.
"Of course, however, the question of proportionality remains," a new voice said, "and it is one this council takes seriously. The Ten Shadows Technique in your hands produced a Shikigami capable of causing damage on a scale comparable to a natural disaster. The question of whether the summoner bears responsibility for the actions of the summoned is not a new question in jujutsu law, and the answer has historically been yes."
Megumi looked at the door directly ahead.
"You are suggesting," he said, "that I am responsible for damage caused by a Shikigami that was fighting Sukuna, during an incident that your council failed to prevent, in a city that was already being destroyed by cursed spirits your council also failed to prevent."
"We are suggesting," a new voice said, carrying careful neutrality, "that the power demonstrated raises questions about oversight. About the appropriate framework for monitoring a technique of that magnitude. About whether a student operating without adequate supervision should be allowed to wander about unrestrained and unchecked."
Megumi let out a breath and moved to speak, but before he could, another voice continued smoothly after.
"It has been decided, Megumi Fushiguro. On the basis of the danger of your curse technique, to yourself and to the general public, restrictions shall be placed on you on acts such as the summoning of the Divine General, henceforth-"
"I object," a gravelly voice called out, in a tone that shook the entire room, putting an end to the farce at once.
The sudden silence in the room was loud, and Megumi could almost feel the hidden men and women rotate their heads in search of the speaker. Only Megumi had an idea of where the voice came from, and he was just as surprised.
The voice had come from the shadows at his feet, which was not a direction that voices usually came from, and it was deep enough that the single light above Megumi had flickered in response to the bass of it before steadying again.
It took them a few seconds to realize where the voice came from, and when they did, Megumi could almost feel them freeze on the spot because from Megumi's shadow, a hand reached out, then another. The two pale hands gripped the edges of his shadow, and with what he knew was a monumental flex, Mahoraga pulled himself out of his shadow. The flickering light obscured him for a second, but when it stabilized, it revealed the Divine General in his full glory as Mahoraga rose to his full height behind him.
The top of his head crested the roof of the building to the sudden gasps of everyone present. The single light focused on Mahoraga and revealed he was wearing a black suit, a white inner shirt, and a tie. The pale Shikigami cracked his neck to the side as he readjusted his black tie, his winged appendages flaring to show he was looking at everyone before giving a wide and terrifying grin, and Megumi suddenly realized the wheel, which had been vibrating every few seconds earlier, was no longer in his hand.
KLNK.
Now it rested above Mahoraga's head.
A/N: Yes. The Meme is real.