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Looking out the car window, Geto Suguru couldn’t tell if it was the beginning or the end of the forever summer. The days had blurred together, running between the mission and the college, another mission and the college, yet another mission and the college. The different notes of vomit - acrid, acidic, saccharine rot - were the only reason Suguru could tell them apart, a thousand tags in his library for a thousand cursed spirits in his belly. There were other curses keeping those spirits company, but for the life of him, Suguru couldn’t decide what to do with them.
Suguru sat up straight when a weathered signpost flashed past them. “Stop the car, please.”
The car tyres screeched and they jolted to a teeth-rattling stop. Salty-sweetness bloomed over his tongue. Suguru bit back a wince and smiled calmly at the taxi driver, who was beside himself with mortification, sputtering profuse apologies.
“It’s really fine. Don’t worry about it. I’ll walk from here.”
There was more back and forth, because of course there was. Suguru maintained his smile through it all because he had been raised right; his smile froze and his cheeks ached when he got out of the car because he knew better now.
Nanami’s complaints filtered back to him: why couldn’t they have sent Satoru? He would have mopped the entire affair after breakfast and continued to his next mission without breaking a sweat.
It made a certain sort of sense, but Suguru didn’t intend to become just another sorcerer corpse on top of the growing pile of them. Satoru wasn’t the only one who could be strong, even if he was the strongest of them.
It took Suguru a couple of minutes to walk back up the road to the sign. It welcomed him to Yamagata, or more appropriately, the old village just outside of it, pretending to be a city. There had been reports of mysterious disappearances and strange deaths, thought to be the work of a powerful cursed spirit. His instructions had been to exorcise it, which meant that Suguru would have a new cursed spirit, and a new aroma to add to his library of revolting flavours.
He kept his eyes peeled for any sign of the cursed spirit, ready for anything, even though his calmness never broke. It wasn’t his first mission. He could do this. Once the cursed spirit showed itself, he would test it and assess its strengths and weaknesses, and then he would choose the appropriate cursed spirit to take care of it.
The sun continued to beat down mercilessly even though it was already late in the afternoon. As Suguru sweated, his impatience and annoyance grew. He had to check again to make sure that he was in the right city and that the mission hadn’t been one of Satoru’s pranks.
Then, he remembered that Satoru wasn’t even back from his mission yet. With some reluctance, Suguru discarded that thought. He pushed down the urge to pull out his phone to call Shoko.
After a fruitless sweep with a shapeless, all-seeing cursed spirit, Suguru headed to the home of his contact in the city. The doughy man didn’t invite him in. Instead, he led Suguru up an ill-maintained road, snaking just past the foot of the mountain. A woman with a face like a raisin joined them, and along with her came other busybodies who fell away just before they reached their destination.
An abandoned house squatted by the side of the road, despondent, sagging from age. It looked more pathetic than ominous, but Suguru readied himself anyway, reinforcing his body with cursed energy. His all-seeing cursed spirit had picked up a blip there, after all, but it hadn’t been strong enough to warrant investigation.
How reckless of him.
The man muttered his grievances under his breath, his voice grim, promising terrors beyond Suguru’s wildest nightmare. The woman who had tagged along screeched about her poor, dead grandson, found hanging from the gate in front of her house. Her shrill voice made Suguru’s already aching head throb.
The corridors were spongy under his feet, the wood already half-rotted. The clammy stench of mildew made the air thick and damp - Suguru had a termite curse that tasted similar. It had left his throat scratchy with imaginary splinters, along with the vague paranoia of having houses fold on top of him. The man and woman continued with their prattle, having come to the end of their spiel and then looping back to the beginning all over again.
When they arrived at the end of the corridor, the man dragged his feet to the shoji and wrenched it open with a clipped grunt. The woman spewed her anger a third time, but Suguru wasn’t listening anymore.
Suguru’s footsteps slowed and came to a stop. They had to be shitting him. He was a sorcerer, not a welfare worker. How the hell was he supposed to react to this? He pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead, scratched the bridge of his nose awkwardly, then closed his eyes only to open them again. The massive wooden cage was still sitting in the back of the room, denying him the luxury of ignoring its existence.
Within the cage, something cowered.
Suguru squinted and realised that there were two somethings in the cage. Two dirty little girls, gaunt, with faces smeared with dark blood crusted over darker bruises. The dark-haired one could only see out of one eye because the other one eye was lost in a mass of swollen flesh that made her face a strange, lopsided shape. They trembled even in each other’s embrace, their eyes filled with fearful, desperate light. When they saw Suguru, they reacted not with hope, but with grim acceptance of a fate they couldn’t possibly comprehend.
Somewhere, in the distance, came a smattering of applause.
Suguru shoved the memory away. He was working. He needed to be focused.
“What exactly is this?”
Somehow, Suguru’s voice was flat and nearly civil. He wanted to be shocked, but he really wasn’t. He had seen worse, but he would listen to their explanations before jumping to conclusions.
“What do you mean? They’re the cause of all this, right?”
“No.”
There was barely a blip of cursed energy coming from the girls, even while it flared in great spurts and plumes around the man and the woman. The reason for that was apparent, and the way the man and the woman talked about the caged girls only confirmed Suguru’s growing suspicion.
“I’ve already determined the cause of the incidents.”
The disappearances and deaths weren’t the work of a cursed spirit at all, or not one that actively targeted the villagers. It was simply the toll the city took on its inhabitants, a reflection on the growing population, and of sheer, unfortunate accident. If there was an active curse in the village, it was the unreasoning hatred the villagers harboured for all who did not belong. Suguru would have to go over the deaths again with that knowledge in mind to prove his conjecture.
“They’re strange and have weird powers! They’re using it to attack the villagers!”
“They killed my grandson!”
The girls hadn’t spoken up to beg for help or to entreat Suguru, but they burst into shouted words to defend their pride. “He’s the one who—”
“Shut up, you monster!”
The sound of applause swelled around Suguru as if he were back in that hall again, where a sea of smiling faces thronged Amanai Riko’s dead body. Satoru’s question came back to him. Strong as Satoru was, strong enough to come back from the dead, more powerful than ever, he had looked to Suguru for answers. In Suguru’s absolute arrogance, he had defended all those who delighted in the death of a girl who had only wanted to live with her chosen family. The cultists had been ignorant and blind, as non-sorcerers invariably were, so Suguru had excused their involvement in Riko’s death. There had been no meaning, and meaning was everything to a sorcerer.
How stupid of him.
Meaning was still everything to Suguru, but it took on a whole different light here. Wiping out the cultists served no purpose because neither their lives or their deaths changed anything; slaughtering the villagers meant the liberation of two young sorcerers.
But he couldn’t do that, could he?
The villagers’ hatred inspired a like hatred in Suguru. All his agonising over philosophical quandaries and whether conventional morality had any place in the world he lived in had all been a waste of time. He didn’t give a shit. He couldn’t suffer for the fucking monkeys anymore, and he would choose his fellow sorcerers over them.
The monkeys were still screaming at the girls. “Your parents were exactly the same! We should have killed you when you were babies!”
Suguru had to show the girls they could trust him, so he did it in the only way he could: he folded four of the fingers on his left hand down and conjured the last, wandering light of hope of those who had drowned at sea. A trickle of oily black smoke hung in the air, gurgling, “It… It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”
The girls stopped shaking. Ah, that biting warmth in his gut must be joy. A sorcerer always recognised another sorcerer.
“Hey— Hey! What are you doing? You can’t let them out!”
But Suguru could, and Suguru did.
The oily cursed spirit stretched out into a dripping filament, curling around the bracket of the lock. The padlock was new, bought especially for the girls, but its burnished silver coating dulled and peeled away in a heartbeat, falling away to reveal a virulent rust. Suguru gave the padlock a sharp yank, snapping it so that he could open the cage door for the girls.
“Hey, you guys.” He smiled, and it came surprisingly easily. “Come outside with me for a second.”
The two girls stared at him. It took Suguru several moments to realise that they were too weak to go anywhere on their own. Suguru drew in a deep breath and offered them his hands - they grabbed his arms and looked like they would bolt.
The monkeys kept screaming, hopping mad.
With a jerky motion of his hand, he sent the seawater curse at the two villagers. They dropped to the ground, thrashing violently as they became endless founts of briny water.
Suguru turned his back to the monkeys and crouched down so that he was at the same level as the girls. “I’m Geto Suguru. What are your names?”
The girls were apprehensive, but a sliver of hope was better than the nightmare they had been living in. The dark-haired one started crying, only to have the one with the light brown hair hiss at her to stop. Her bottom lip quivered but her words were clear when she responded, “I’m Nanako. Hasaba. Mimiko’s my sister. Our parents d-died and the village— those people— they put us here!”
Suguru nodded. He understood. Surprisingly, his resolve didn’t waver. His decision had freed him from pointless navel-gazing, and nothing felt more right than taking care of those two girls. “I need to finish my job here, but I’ll take care of you from now on.”
Mimiko’s nails dug into Suguru’s arm as she grimaced through snot and tears. “Why?”
“Because I can, so it’s my duty.” Those old words felt new on his tongue, and they resonated with his true self more than they ever had. Finally, he could say that tired phrase and actually mean it. “Besides, what’s the point in freeing you if I can’t protect you?”
The sisters were struck dumb by Suguru’s answer. Whether or not they believed him didn’t matter at that point. It was too soon to tell, and he had so much work left to do.
Suguru remembered where the rotund monkey lived, so he fished around in the dead monkey’s pockets for the keys. The monkey wasn’t useful to him alive, but his house would do well enough as shelter until they could leave.
“Can you walk?”
Nanako let her stomping feet be her answer. Mimiko timidly shook her head, so Suguru moved closer to pick her up. She cringed, not out of fear or mistrust, but out of shame. She was covered in days’ worth of filth, after all, and she was clearly aware of how awful she smelled. She was also too old to ask to be carried around.
“It’s fine. You’re hurt.”
In the end, Suguru ended up carrying the sisters down the mountain, anyway. Starvation had taken a toll on them, and they had only been afforded the bare minimum of what they needed to survive. Suguru had planned to clean up the mess he had created when the girls were safe and more comfortable, but that was never to be.
The villagers that had gathered to celebrate the exorcism of their village curse looked on in dismay, chasing away the phantom applause that haunted Suguru once and for all. There was no Satoru to help him, no Satoru to question him. Suguru put the girls down and stepped in front of them. With a beatific smile on his face, he conjured a cockroach curse and a spider curse and sent them to the monkeys.
It took him several hours to clean out the village. By the end of it, Suguru was stained as the girls were, but none of the blood was his and he had chosen his path, whereas they had been captured and imprisoned. He could only hope that he could give them the same choice, and that they would choose truly.
A day later, Suguru left the village a stronger person, strong enough to protect Mimiko and Nanako. Anyone else might have taken off to escape certain retribution, but Suguru saw no meaning in fleeing when everything, everyone he cared about was in Tokyo. Those feelings were like a curse in their own right, but one that he took on gladly.
He exorcised the curse of his birth first. His parents had raised him right, but it hadn’t been the sort of right that Suguru could understand anymore. He would make his own right, his own correct, his own sorcerer’s world, and he knew exactly where to start.
Suguru stopped thumbing the wheel of the lighter he always carried for Shoko. He should test the waters, even though he had a feeling he already knew her answer, and that of Satoru.
His mind made up, Suguru pocketed the lighter, weirdly comforted by the old habit in his new world.