#shibuya felt like the best scenario for it since i still haven't read the culling games or afterwards yet — but we can always like

[huntershowl]

@koseigu ( sukuna. )

WELL. SHIT.

PERSEPHONE'S EXISTENCE HAS BEEN STRANGE from the very beginning. born an identical twin with enough cursed energy to power a fucking city without the added burden of orion's, without a fragment of a cursed spirit lodged in her soul like a fucking splinter, without the world-ending rage that would come to her later in life and a technique they still don't truly understand, they were never exactly slated for a benign existence.

even so: dying and coming back as an apparition while shibuya burns to ash and bone was not on their bingo card for late twenties life events.

getting used to her new form — forms — took no effort at all. going from woman to many-eyed wolfbeast feels like slipping into a second skin. not quite sorcerer and not entirely spirit, half their perception of themself (anguished, enraged, all vengeance and newly awakened) and half the world's perception of them (monstrous, lupine, revenant and ruiner), persephone HELLHOUND walks the scorched earth for the first time under paws the size of dinner plates and follows what they do not yet recognize as a cursed-energy scent trail.

they are looking for satoru. they have to make sure he's alright — wherever he has landed in this great neo-volcanic mess — and he's bound to be the most powerful presence in this space, right?

but as they bound through pools of shadow and leap between piles of debris that once were the rooftops she so adored, it is not her old friend who stands at the center of this unending storm.

it is someone different. someone far older, and far, far worse.

persephone has never seen ryomen sukuna in the flesh. they've heard stories from their employer, who was alive during his time and remains so thanks to the technique of eternal youth. they've heard of his reincarnation and how it sent the higher-ups of jujutsu society into panic. they've seen paintings, renderings, blurry images.

but the sheer presence of him has her monster-form raising its hackles, a shiver rippling through quills of black fur, many eyes wide and focused for fear of what might happen if they look away.

quietly, she lets the shadow-form melt away to decrease her visibility and watches him approach the dead, flaming disaster curse he has just utterly demolished. watches him regard it as it burns, crumbles, and disappears into ash. watches him turn his head, her living-dead-heart dropping into her stomach as he looks right at her.

so this is the trace given off by the young twins' dead bodies. god, he wasn't remotely this powerful before, was he?

perhaps it was her fate to die today after all. but no — you know what? fuck fate. it tried to kill her already and she ate her way out of the belly of hell because she has a fucking mission to finish. fear melts away into resolve, steely-eyed, calm. a call across the space, from one howling cursed-energy storm to another. ❝ i'm not here to fight. ❞