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Sandy gray grass brushes against Suguru's knees as he stands in what must be a meadow but looks like an ancient drawing, gentle brush strokes on parchment. As far as the eye can see, gentle hills roll like clouds, like an ocean. The sky above him is faded yellow, both nostalgic and menacing.
The last thing he remembers is Satoru’s outstretched hand.
What happened?
He takes one step, two, three. Until he’s running, his lungs burning through oxygen like it’s no more valuable than stray kindling.
“Satoru!” he calls, but there is no answer.
“Satoru!” he calls, but silence echoes his voice back.
“Satoru!” he calls but knows more than anything—this isn’t a place that would house his best friend.
What happened?
Satoru’s crestfallen face bathed in the gentle purples of a sunset, his hand outstretched, fingers coming together to form a death for Suguru, equally as purple.
And now this.
A domain. It must be a domain; there is no other answer for this. For this artificial space so choked with nostalgia and history. Someone must have interrupted, captured Suguru and left Satoru behind, saved Suguru’s life, but at what cost?
“Who else is here?”
“Finally, a question worth answering.”
Suguru whips around, aimlessly searching the empty, wilting horizon.
A breath tickles his neck. “Right here.” And he’s turning again, trying to catch a ghost.
But it’s not a spirit that stands behind him.
At least, Suguru doesn’t think it is, but it’s hard to tell. The figure looks much the same as the environment—the domain—that must be theirs. Painted in a yellow kimono, long black hair cascading down their shoulders like the swirling waters of a waterfall, a smile pressed deep into the corners of their mouth, at the same time inviting and hungry.
Something at the back of Suguru’s head itches, like a needle being inserted deep into the tissue. He has never seen this person before in his life, but every cell of his body hates them by instinct, by design.
And he’s not the only one.
Finger bones reach out of the ground at their feet like skeletal worms. They grasp the edges of the kimono, tearing the delicate fabric into unseemly shreds. Gaping jaws surface from the earth like ghost ships, teeth rattling together in a haunting symphony. The golden field swarms with corpses, flesh still hanging from some in rotting lumps.
The person before him pays no notice of the hell surrounding them. They just smile, content and venomous, staring at Suguru like he’s a brand new treat in a beloved bakery.
“Who are you?” Suguru asks, and the itch in the back of his brain answers in time with the movement of the person's lips.
“I have many names, but you can call me Kenjaku if you’d like.”
It’s an unfamiliar name, though Suguru feels like he should know it. Every part of his body screams — like a rabbit with its foot caught in a snare — that he should know this person. That he should fear this person.
His body takes a step back before he ever gives it permission to. The person’s—Kenjaku’s—lips stretch even more, satisfaction dripping from every word.
“Oh, you don’t have to be scared of me, Geto. There is nothing I can do to you here.”
Suguru swallows around the unease in his throat, refuses to let it show on his face. “And where exactly is here ?”
“Ah, good questions. As expected of a model student,” Kenjaku purrs, moving through the field of skeletons like a wraith among gravestones. Almost without looking, their hand catches at the chest of one, toppling it over into its brethren before making their seat on the bent and broken bones. “I suppose you could say this is my soul. I suppose you could say this is your hell. Both are true.”
“My hell…?”
“You are dead, Geto.”
He knows it’s true as soon as the words leave Kenjaku’s lips. A missing piece of the puzzle snaps into place with a resounding click. A fog lifts from his memory, a light turns on, revealing a clear path, A to B.
“Satoru,” he says.
“Six Eyes,” Kenjaku replies.
Satoru’s crushed expression. The sheer grief and remorse that colored his eyes, held back by the firm grit of duty. Satoru’s outstretched hand. Forming the sign for purple.
And then nothing, and then nothing, and then nothing.
The ground finds Suguru as he collapses on his knees. Bone shards dig into his skin, his nails bury into the earth. He takes a deep breath, two, several, trying to fend off the dizziness in his mind. Betrayal stings sharply at his heart and he wishes he could tear it out, gory and bloody, and bury it deep into the faded dirt.
“So what are you, then?” He gasps, tries to refocus, tries to hook his attention back to Kenjaku because he feels as if he focused on his state of being at the moment, he would never stop screaming. “The grim reaper?”
“Maybe yours.”
“Don’t play fucking coy with me,” he growls, fury coiling in the strain of his jaw. “What are you?”
“That’s a bit of a shortsighted question, don’t you think?’” Kenjaku tuts with all the condescending patience a professor gives to a struggling student. “A better one would probably be, ‘What do you need me for?’ You, Geto Suguru, are my key to taking down Six Eyes.”
Suguru laughs.
He cannot help it. Hysteria breaks onto his face and mockery spills into his words. “ You are planning to kill Satoru ?”
Kenjaku’s smile doesn’t even twitch. “Not kill. Just keep out of the way. Your assistance will be much appreciated in that endeavor.”
“What?” Suguru asks, but the answer surges through him like a needle brutalizing the brain. Before Kenjaku can even open their mouth, Suguru knows. The knowledge originates in him. In the blood flowing through his veins and the neurons sparking in his brain. It originates from Kenjaku. From that smile flashing bright, sharp teeth. It originates from both of them. Irrevocably stitched into one. “No.”
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. Somebody has to take advantage of that bond of yours, if you won’t.”
But it’s not Satoru’s safety that Suguru worries about. The notion of what Kenjaku intends to do to his best friend is disturbing and unsettling, touching into that unburied trust their relationship never got over. But this is Satoru they are talking about, and Suguru can’t spend a moment worrying about the undefeatable heir of Limitless and Six Eyes when he can feel out the edges of Kenjaku’s real plan under those distracting thoughts.
“You are going to destroy everything,” he whispers at first, before his voice finds fangs, and then he’s shouting. “You are going to destroy everything I’ve been working to build!”
“Ah.” Kenjaku’s smile slips for a moment, only to make a mocking return. “I guess the cat is out of the bag. Weasley little thing, aren’t you? But I guess I should have expected that. You have such a nasty habit of hurting yourself with that overthinking head of yours.”
Suguru launches at him.
Or he tries to.
Tries to rush at Kenjaku and knock them off their stupid throne of bones, pound them into the shapeless sand below until nothing is left of their face but bloody mush.
But he never reaches Kenjaku. Every step he takes forward doesn’t happen or happens in a vacuum. As if in a dream, he finds himself moving forward and not advancing, running and never closing the distance. As if there is some unbreachable barrier between him and Kenjaku. One that separates gods from people and people from ants. One that separates the living from the dead.
So Suguru cannot reach them, cannot stain his fists with their blood.
But he can still shout at the injustice of it all.
“Are you out of your mind? You are going to destroy everything!”
“It’s an experiment,” Kenjaku says, studying their fingernails. “You could even call it an experiment to benefit humanity. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? To make sure only the strong survive?”
“Not like this! Countless sorcerers will die because of this. You put curses into people, you turned non-sorcerers into sorcerers, it’s disgusting, it’s unnatural, it’s—”
“It’s painful to you because it proves your own worldview fragile.” Kenjaku wags their finger at him. “If you want to create, you have to destroy. Destroy things, destroy people, destroy the lines between sorcerer, non-sorcerer and curse. That is the only way this species will ever evolve to the next stage. We need to stop pretending the three existences we have now aren’t just different breeds of the same species, able to intermix.”
“Just because they can doesn’t mean they should. What you are talking about is inhumane, it’s not a better future for sorcerers.”
“But I’m not trying to create a better future. I’m trying to create an interesting one.”
Suguru’s hands twitch on instinct, fingers brushing against the seam in the universe he would usually call his curses out from. But none emerge and Kenjaku’s smile tilts condescendingly.
“Oh, you really don’t like that, do you?” they yawn, leaning back on their skeletal throne. “See, this is what’s so wrong with people today. You all talk the big talk, but when push comes to shove every single one of you is so afraid of change. It’s all little steps, it’s all oh is this too much, am I allowed to do that, will I step on anyone's toes? I know it’s too late to preach now, but you should try and live a little.”
Since it’s impossible for Suguru to actually hit Kenjaku in the face, he settles on imagining it. On imagining the impact of his fist against skin, the crackle of cartilage in Kenjaku’s nose, the hot spray of blood. There’s nothing he wants more at the moment than to make Kenjaku shut up.
“You are insane.” He says the words slowly, deliberately, annunciating each syllable like the emphasis of it would be enough to drill them into Kenjaku’s skull for eternity. “Your ideas are meaningless, pointless, like a child’s scribbles. You have no goal, no ambition. You just want to play in the sand until either something interesting happens or you get bored and kick the whole thing down.”
“That is quite accurate, so you do understand!” Kenjaku claps their hands, beaming with pride that sets Suguru’s teeth on edge. There’s just something about Kenjaku that makes him want to gore his own throat bloody.
“I understand that everything you do is pointless!” he bites out. “Throwing the world into chaos is not an answer to anything, it’s no goal to pursue. The world needs rules, it needs structure, it needs those at the top—”
“And those at the bottom?” Kenjaku tilts their head, twirling a lock of hair around their finger. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Geto Suguru, but aren’t you the one who wanted to exterminate those at the bottom? Killing all non-sorcerers, how is that any less pointless than what I’m trying to achieve?”
“It’s not pointless!” The words burst out of Suguru’s mouth louder than expected, more desperate than expected, as if he’s not just trying to convince Kenjaku, but also his own self.
As if he hadn’t already spent years trying to believe he had succeeded in just that.
“It’s not pointless. Maybe someone like you, who lived with nothing but chaos in their head, doesn’t know how to tell the difference anymore, but my ideals do have a point. It’s as simple as two plus two so try and keep up. If we kill all the non-sorcerers, then the curses will cease to be and then—”
“Sorcerers will live happily ever after. What a touching theory, truly humanitarian if we ignore the genocide of billions.” Kenjaku rolls their eyes, resting their chin in their palm. “Really, Geto, who’s the child now? Not even I think that I, as a single individual — ”
“I am not alone, people support my cause—”
“Could kill off — and let’s be very generous in our estimations of the sorcerer population here — 99% of humanity and still have this end all sunshine and rainbows? Would you like to add a unicorn to that picture too before I draw a rain cloud as your grade?”
“It’s a perfectly plausible—”
“It’s perfectly incredible how well you are able to lie to yourself. Really, even I am impressed. But you wanted to think like adults, so let's think like adults. Even if you limited your destruction to only Japan, it would completely destroy the country. There is just no feasible way to run it with only sorcerers. As you would say, it’s simple math. The—remember how generous this number is—1% of Japan's population simply can't adequately run a country. What you would get, Geto, is anarchy: everyone scrambling to adjust, to try and make something out of nothing, fighting for position, power, survival. Chaos. So tell me again, how are my goals any more ‘insane’ than your own? How are we not working towards the same end result from two different sides?”
They finally, blessedly, stop talking. Suguru has no words left to fill the silence. He tries. He tries to think, to pull out the nobility, the righteousness, the inherent justice of his own actions. There are things to say, surely there are things to say. He has been working doggedly at this since he was a teenager, swearing he would never let the children in his care experience the same horrors he did. A goal like that couldn’t have been pointless. A goal like that can’t possibly equal the utter chaos and destruction this phantasm suggests.
He wants to open his mouth. He wants to speak his truth. But he can’t. And he doesn't. His tongue is leaden. His heart is filled with iron. He might be able to lie to himself, but he can never lie to the person living inside his head.
And Kenjaku knows it too.
“Good, I can see we have finally reached an agreement,” they say, standing up and brushing bone dust from their robes, the imagery off it wavering like smeared ink. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, the process is complete and you’ll disappear any second now. Try to make peace with it. Goodbye, Geto Suguru.”
They disappear, leaving Suguru stranded in the land of bones and sand. He falls to his knees, half expecting to seize, to crack, to disappear.
A moment passes.
Another.
Another.
An infinity of them.
Nothing happens. He is alone. He is whole. He is still there.
Nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
Somewhere through the sand, he hears Satoru calling his name.