Yuji Itadori POV
I am back here again in this dream.
The last thing I could remember was feeling an overwhelming urge to keep on fighting with Nanamin.
To take my time with the thrill and enjoy learning more from him.
But then he knocked me out.
That's never happened to me before. I've never once felt like that in my life I thought with a frown.
Currently I was sitting at a campfire in this dream with Sukuna beside me. He was cooking some fish over a fire while idly humming something to himself.
His clothes were no longer ragged looking but instead replaced with a pair of white hakama pants, a black sash wrapped around his waist, on his feet were monk slippers, his upper body was covered by a loose white kimono with enough space for his extra limbs, and lastly he wore a black haori to complete his look.
"I wonder how you've been doing since you left the village," I murmured with a sigh knowing that my voice would be unheard since it was just a dream.
Sukuna's ears twitched as he glanced up from the fire to a specific tree "why don't you come out and show yourself instead of hiding from me like a coward," he called out voice dripping with annoyance and a possible hint of amusement?
For a moment I actually thought he might have been talking about me. But then a figure began to emerge from the shadow of the tree.
It was man with long black hair dressed in monk robes.
His skin was rather unnaturally pale. While his eyes had a distinct shade of red that was different from Sukuna's.
Yet the oddest feature the man had were the stich markings across his forehead.
"I didn't think I'd be spotted so easily," the man said, stepping fully into the firelight with his hands folded inside his sleeves and his expression carrying an unnerving kind of calm, "I suppose they don't call you Ryomen Sukuna, The Demon of the Forest for nothing."
Sukuna didn't look up from his fish.
"You have," he said pleasantly, "approximately ten seconds to tell me what you want. Before I chop you up and add you to my meal insect."
"Ahh but that seems inefficient. I'd taste terribly," the man replied.
"I've cooked worse." Sukuna turned the fish around letting the other side cook "eight seconds."
The man gave a smile that seemed so fake "my name is something of a complicated answer. I've carried many over the years. The most recent one people know me by is Suguru Geto," a slight pause, "though my true name the one I was born with is Kenjaku and I am what's called a magus and a humble monk, when the occasion calls for it."
"Kenjaku," Sukuna repeated, his face twisting with a bit of displeasure "and what does a magus monk want with me."
"I'd like to extend an invitation to you."
Sukuna finally looked up.
His four eyes found Kenjaku's and held them with the flat, assessing quality of a predator that hadn't decided yet whether something was prey or simply a plaything to pass the time.
"I am not interested," Sukuna declined ready to flick his fingers.
"Ah but I think you'd like to attend this," Kenjaku took one step closer to the fire, unhurried, as though the threat of being chopped up didn't bother him at "I run a school of sorts. For individuals whose abilities exist outside the conventional frameworks of certain organizations who would prefer to contain and catalogue."
"A school," Sukuna repeated flatly.
"A school where you would get considerably stronger than you currently are," Kenjaku enticed.
The fire crackled.
Sukuna looked back at his fish.
"I'm strong enough," he said.
"Certainly, you are strong for this forest," Kenjaku calmly replied,"you're strong for the villages that come to burn you out every few years. You're strong for the hunters the nobles occasionally send when you become inconvenient enough to notice," he tilted his head, "but there are people in this world, Sukuna, who would not be inconvenienced by you by even the slightest bit."
The fish sizzled.
"These people I believe would be worth combating against for someone like you," Kenjaku continued softly, "I am also quite sure you'd actually like someone who can push back against you and learn some new things right?"
I watched Sukuna's jaw tighten.
There it was.
The hook.
Not power for its own sake he already had power. Just the thing that Kenjaku had clearly identified. That being the specific hunger of someone who had never once been genuinely tested to his limits and felt the absence of it like a missing tooth.
'Don't,' I thought at Sukuna's back 'that guy is wrong in every direction Sukuna. Don't.'
Sukuna set down the fish "when do we leave?," he asked.
I dropped my head into my hands "ugh why did I even bother?"
.
.
.
The dream sadly didn't give me the mercy of a time skip.
Kenjaku's school was nothing like what the word implied.
It was a collection of locations, mostly old buildings in mountain ranges, coastal compounds with the sea battering the rocks below, once a city that had been abandoned long enough to belong to the wild again.
Sukuna and by default even me learned the stuff being taught really fast. Even if some of it was complicated for me to fully process.
Honestly it shouldn't have surprised me that Sukuna was also able to pick it up really quick. I'd seen the core of him in the village and what he was capable of on his own.
Although it wasn't so much learning as it was actually just consuming, then breaking down the taken information into their basic components, and then remade to suit himself so thoroughly that the original material taught was barely recognizable.
Kenjaku taught a lot of stuff and tricks which again by extension also worked for me...but honestly I kind of wish I had my notebook to take notes with.
I guess I'd have to quickly write down what I remember once I wake up from this dream and ask Nanamin about some of it.
Sukuna's slicing power which he had named Shrine became something far more powerful over the years.
It's been pretty strange but every time he used his technique. I felt like I could also do it by instinct, sort of like how I did with blood manipulation.
.
.
.
Currently I was watching Sukuna fight yet another student.
Said student only lasted four moves.
I watched Sukuna dismantle him with the efficient disinterest of someone completing a task they'd already solved before it began. The fight, if it could be called that, ended with the man dead on the ground.
Sukuna didn't stop though he kept going with each new combatant who challenged him.
Before long I was up on my feet with Sukuna getting ready to finish his next challenger.
"Stop he's already down!" I exclaimed, knowing Sukuna couldn't hear me, "he's already down, there's no reason to keep-"
The outcome was what it was though.
An invisible slash chopped the guy's head off.
I looked away feeling sick
The dream moved on.
.
.
.
By his 100th opponent I finally figured out Sukuna's mentality.
'If they could have beaten me, they would have but they didn't. Therefore they are finished. Therefore they deserve to die.'.
I clenched my fists.
I thought back on what Nanamin told me about how people were killed in the moonlit world.
I thought about the dead man on the ground along with the 99 others whose names I didn't know and would never know.
Who before this fight had presumably expected an after-this, the way people always do right up until they don't.
I thought back about Kenta's face in the workshop cage along with the other kids.
I thought back about my grandfather's hand under mine at the hospital and his final words 'make sure you die surrounded by people.'
Not like this though.
Not ended by supernatural consequence because you were unlucky enough to be in the radius of something you weren't supposed to see or encounter.
People deserved better deaths than that.
A natural kind of death that wasn't resulted from the supernatural.
These people Sukuna was ending hadn't gotten it either. All they got was an invisible slash to their neck or limbs.
It wasn't right or fair.
I sat back down in the dream-grass as Sukuna celebrated his victory and looked down at my hands.
The same hands I'd used to break the cage bars to escape from.
The same hands that had fired Piercing Blood through the things that had once been my friends.
Gramps had said 'use your strength to help people when you can. But don't let it swallow you whole, Yuji don't make helping people the only thing you are.'
I've accepted it I can't save every life.
I've also accepted that I'll definitely be swallowed.
Because from now on I can at least make sure that some people out there in the world can have a good end.
Not an unfair one.
My life has always felt a little empty but with this I now have something to really dedicate my strength to.
-end of chapter twelve-
So here's a new chapter let me know your thoughts so far. Positive comments and stones help boost my motivation for more updates.
I've decided that Yuji's still dead father will be this variant of Kenjaku who ended up becoming a body snatching dead apostle.
Thank you to Dragon_3871 his review really made my day and gave me the motivation to get this chapter and the next started.
Next chapter we switch back to Nanami and the things he's discovered about Yuji.