Chapter Text
Her chest heaved as she took in the information her eyes were sending her brain.
She couldn’t have been gone for longer than an hour—she was convinced of it. How had her village fallen to ruin in such a short time?
Flames clung to the wooden houses and completely disintegrated the thatched roofs. The yelling and screams that caused her to run back into town had subsided, but she could not see any people.
She had snuck out of her house because she couldn’t sleep—as was typical. A melody was stuck in her head, so she wanted to play her lute. However, her father had previously reprimanded her for waking them up in the middle of the night with her playing. She thought if she snuck off into the forest and played for a little, by the time she came back, she would be ready for sleep.
When she had left her village, everything was quiet. Normal.
Now it was anything but.
Her lute slipped from her fingers and hit the ground.
Had someone’s house caught on fire and it simply spread through the village? No, she heard screams and commotion, it couldn’t have been a simple fire. Did a curse do this? She’d never heard of a curse being able to wield fire, but she hadn’t seen many curses in her short lifetime.
Fear kept her feet glued to the dirt as her eyes searched for something to clue her into what happened. But nothing came.
After several lifetimes, she took her first step out of the woods. She waited to see if something would attack her before moving further into her desecrated village. The crackle of flames and shuffle of her feet were the only sounds following her through the deserted pathway.
And it wasn’t until she reached the first house that she got her clue.
The body of one of the hunstmen in her village was torn open in the doorway of his house. His clothes were melted into his skin where the fire had ravaged him the worst. His teeth were exposed as if he had bared them, but she realized it was because his lips had been burned away.
But her eyes were mostly stuck on the gaping wound in his chest.
He wasn’t burned alive. Something had killed him and possibly many others.
Her cursed energy broke open in her chest, begging to be utilized. She scanned the area around her as she used her technique to form a short spear in her hand.
The more she looked around, the worse things became.
Where there wasn’t fire, there were dead bodies. People she knew and who had been kind to her, other kids she had been friends with… all laid lifeless either halfway out of their homes or fully in the road.
There were bodies among the villagers that she did not recognize, and a few had horses lying dead next to them as well.
She crept closer, utter horror fueling her steps.
One of the horse's heads had been cut off cleanly and precisely. Its rider had his torso split from the rest of his body in the same manner.
What kind of weapon could have done such a thing? No long sword she had ever handled was sharp enough to do that kind of damage.
As she moved deeper into the village, she saw more of those peculiar slashes, though they became shallower and smaller over time. And when she spotted her own home, adrenaline shot through her veins.
She had forgotten about her parents in the insanity of the past half hour.
The girl broke out into a sprint, running into her house which was almost fully engulfed in flames.
“Mama," she cried, her guilt and fear soaring to levels she never thought possible. “Mama! Dad!”
She could see into the area they slept in, and it was covered in flames. She ran over and saw their bodies completely blackened, their limbs curled into themselves at unnatural angles.
Smoke entered her lungs as ashes and flames licked at her flesh, but she didn't feel it.
“Mama! Daddy!” She had made a commitment when she turned 13 to stop calling her father ‘Daddy,’ because she was a teenager now, and that was for babies. But in that moment, it was the only name she could get to come out of her mouth.
She cried and screamed for her parents and for everything she had seen outside as reality caught up with her. The spear clattered to the floor when her hands went to her hair and pulled at the roots.
The discomfort that comes with having proximity to fire pricked at her eyes and burned the back of her throat. She blinked over and over, trying to clear the horrendous sensation of ash making a home on her lash line.
Then the girl blinked once more, and was suddenly flying backwards out of her house, landing on her back with a heavy thud.
The night air cooled the burned skin of her arms as the pain finally registered. The skin was red and would eventually scar, but it was not severe.
“The way you’re screaming and carrying on will attract more bandits,” a male voice said.
Foregoing the pain in her arms, she rolled and maneuvered herself back onto her feet to face whomever pulled her from her house. Whoever it was seemed to have survived the attack on her village, so he couldn’t be anything good.
Never in a million years could she have predicted what was then standing in front of her.
It was a man… no, a boy, likely only a couple years older than herself, with four arms.
Four.
And if her eyes were telling her the truth—which she was seriously starting to doubt—a mouth stretched into a smile across his stomach.
Did he have four eyes, too?
Her thoughts stuttered for several moments, but eventually came back in a somewhat coherent manner. She coughed smoke from her lungs before speaking. “Bandits?”
His bottom pair of arms crossed and folded in front of himself. “That’s your first question right now?”
She nodded, not knowing what else to say.
Her mother told her not to make comments on other people’s appearances, and to be frank, his abnormalities were extremely low on her list of priorities at that moment. She was in extreme shock and did not have the mental capacity for much thinking.
Her question puzzled him, but he didn’t grill her any further. “They attacked this village two hours ago. By the time I showed up, the only people that were still alive were bandits.”
She had been gone for two hours? She knew that when she got wrapped up in music, time seemed to go by a lot quicker, but she never realized how blind she was to its passing.
Her hands shook in embarrassment and anger.
Why would bandits do any of this? For a few resources? For fun? Because the government wouldn’t do anything about it?
It would have been easier for her to digest if a curse had done this, then the lack of humanity in the act would have made sense. Curses didn’t feel or run on anything but the instinct to consume and kill. But humans pillaging and murdering their own kind? It broke something in her that would never be repaired.
Her thoughts eventually caught up with the boy’s words. “You were here when the bandits still lived?”
Sharp canines greeted her as the boy smiled. “Don’t worry, they were dealt with quickly.”
Goosebumps skated across her skin, and though the idea of this boy being able to murder so many people should have scared her… all she felt was comfort in the fact that it was over. That he had ended it. He must have been a sorcerer—that much she knew. No normal person could kill so many people and appear so unscathed. Well, most sorcerers wouldn’t be able to do that either. He must have been powerful, too, she concluded. He had to have been concealing his cursed energy from her, though, because she felt nothing.
“Thank you for killing them,” the girl said, bowing at the waist. “You honor my parents in bringing an end to their murderers.”
A dry sound she assumed was a chuckle scraped her eardrums. “I honor no one but myself.”
She righted herself to face the boy. “You’re being modest. I cannot thank you enough. Take me to your village so I can tell everyone of your heroics.”
Her words sent the boy into a laughing fit. Embarrassment colored her cheeks. “You misunderstand me. I honor only myself because I act for my own pleasure. I did not kill the bandits because they were bandits, I killed them because I wanted to.”
Her brow furrowed. “Well why did you want to?”
The top pair of his arms shrugged. “Why does anyone want to do anything?”
His line of thinking reminded her of the philosophical questions the older kids in her village would ask the elders. She never really cared for philosophy in the past, and she was certainly much too exhausted to care at that moment.
Before she was able to gather a response, the boy turned on his heel and began walking away. The girl didn’t know if he wanted her to follow, or if she should even want to follow, but her wondering didn’t last long.
He casted a look over his shoulder. “Are you coming or not?”
Her legs stumbled over themselves as she tried to catch up with the boy. He couldn’t have been more than 3 years older than her, but he was significantly taller. One of his strides was at least equal to two of hers. He didn’t slow his pace even though she was fairly certain he knew she was struggling to keep up.
She wasn’t sure why she was following the boy. He was a stranger, and all she knew was that he had murdered a lot of people. But he had saved her from the flames of her house when he didn’t have to. That had to count for something. And to be fair, anyone could have prompted her to follow and she would have obliged at that moment. Her family was dead, all her belongings burned, and her entire village was gone. What did she have left to cling to? If she stayed in her village, nothing good would come of her. More bandits could have been attracted to the smoke, and god knows what they would have done to her. She had her cursed technique to defend her, but she was still just a kid. She could have tried to walk to the next village over, but it was far away and she doubted she would’ve survived the trek.
So she followed the boy, telling herself it was out of necessity and not also because there was something about him she found interesting.
“Are you taking me to your village?” She asked.
“I don’t have a village.”
She huffed. “Then where are we going?”
The boy grumbled something along the lines of “I’m going to regret this." Then said his next sentence for the girl to hear. “Just shut up. You’ll see.”
The girl crossed her arms, but did not argue. Grief and fatigue plagued her so intensely, she wasn’t sure what she would be doing if it weren’t for the boy. There was no way she would have had enough wherewithal to survive the night, let alone several days or weeks. Her brain eagerly gave up on critical thinking and decided to rely on the stranger for the time being. If she was her complete self, she never would have made a decision like that, but it was the only decision she could make now. Trauma and shock had robbed her of normal functions.
Plus, the boy truly had saved her from the flames in her house. She decided that day to spend the rest of her life attempting to pay back the debt she owed.
She figured getting his name would be a good place to start. “What’s your name?”
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?”
So she did, begrudgingly.
The girl watched his back muscles move as he walked. He had a lot more going on back there with double the arms than that of a normal person, and it kind of fascinated her. She realized she was staring—which her mother had told her was not nice—so she forced her eyes away from his form.
His next words came several minutes later when the pair were exiting the village. “Sukuna.”
“What?”
He glanced back at her. “It’s my name.”
Sukuna.
She had never heard it before, so she took a guess at it being his first name. “What’s your surname?”
“Don’t have one.” The boy did not elaborate.
Where did he come from? What kind of person didn’t have a village or a last name?
She wanted to ask him, but she had gathered he wasn’t a man of many words. She also knew he had a penchant for violence and didn't want to provoke him accidentally.
The boy didn’t ask for her name, but she wanted to tell him anyway. She thought of sharing her full name, but wanted to avoid embarrassing him due to his lack of a surname. So she gave him her first name, locking away her last for only her to ever know.
“My name is Tsukito.”