[Once you stopped holding back, stopped worrying about consequences, the Zenin branch-family thugs lasted less than five minutes.]
[You didn't even need to straighten your collar. You stepped calmly over their sprawled bodies, stood at the curb, and pulled out your phone.]
[One call. Ten minutes of waiting.]
[A low, powerful engine note preceded the car itself. A top-tier luxury sedan glided around the rundown corner and rolled to a stop in front of you.]
[The window slid down. Mei Mei lifted her sunglasses from the driver's seat, those eyes that seemed built to appraise currency sweeping across the wreckage behind you. A professional smile tugged at her lips.]
["Efficient. Barely any dust on you. Hop in. This counts as the rush-service rate, by the way."]
[You didn't hesitate. The passenger door opened and closed, sealing you inside a cabin that shut out the world. Expensive leather and a faint, elegant fragrance filled the air.]
[Mei Mei's fingers glided across the touchscreen, adjusting the navigation, while her eyes found you in the rearview mirror. The look she gave was less concern, more... appraisal. Like sizing up an asset.]
["I don't mind going anywhere as long as the money's right, but this isn't exactly a convenience store run. You sure about this?"]
[Seatbelt clicked. Your gaze fixed straight ahead. The answer came flat and certain.]
["Yes. Take me to the Zenin estate. Now."]
[You'd already briefed her on the cleanup details over the phone.]
[Originally, you'd only planned to leverage her industry connections, pay to smooth over whatever public fallout a street brawl might cause. But she happened to be wrapping up a high-bounty job nearby and offered to play chauffeur on the way.]
["Tch, this really is something..."]
[Mei Mei tapped the steering wheel, her tone playful but not entirely joking.]
["You're seriously going in alone? If all you want is the kid back, why not call Satoru Gojo? One phone call and that man solves this in about a second flat."]
[She was being diplomatic about it, but the message was clear. Their recent work together had earned you her respect. She wasn't fool enough to write you off the way Naoya did. But this was one of the Big Three Sorcerer Families on home turf.]
[Storming that kind of fortress alone struck her as an investment where the risk wildly outweighed the return.]
["If Gojo goes, the whole situation changes."]
[You leaned into the plush seat, but your mind ran at a velocity that contradicted the relaxed posture.]
[You knew Naoya Zenin inside and out. He hadn't taken Megumi to hurt him, and he sure as hell didn't do it for family honor. That narcissist had failed to break you on the street, felt humiliated, and snatched Megumi as bait.]
[He wanted you on his turf. Surrounded by his clansmen. He wanted to grind you under his heel in front of an audience and stitch his pathetic ego back together.]
[Fear of Gojo's role as Megumi's guardian would keep him from doing anything too extreme. At least in the short term.]
["But if Gojo gets directly involved..."]
[A beat of silence. A flicker of resignation in your eyes.]
["It immediately escalates into a full political collision between the Gojo Clan and the Zenin Clan. With Gojo's personality, the moment he sees Megumi's been mistreated, I can't guarantee the Zenin estate would have half its walls left standing."]
["This started because of me. I'm not dragging that kid into the fallout of two families going to war. And I don't need the kind of mess that spirals beyond anyone's control."]
[Besides, you had your own reasons.]
[Across those nightmarish loops of the simulation, you'd spent two full years as a stray dog skulking through Zenin territory. That sprawling ancient estate held no secrets from you.]
[Close your eyes and the entire compound projected itself in your mind like a 3D holographic map. Every blind spot. Every alarm talisman. The Kukuru Unit's shift rotations down to the minute. Patrol routes and their dead zones. Where the Hei members tended to gather during downtime.]
[Under normal circumstances, the main estate didn't station many Hei members. Most of those Grade 1 sorcerers would be out on high-paying missions. As long as you avoided Jinichi Zenin, Ogi Zenin, and that perpetually drunk old clan head Naobito...]
[Your fingers tapped a quiet rhythm against your knee. The infiltration plan had already been rehearsed a hundred times over.]
[With Natural suppressing my presence, combined with the Ten Shadows Technique's ability to slip through shadows, even a head-on encounter won't matter. I can extract Megumi without a soul noticing. This isn't recklessness. It's a scalpel.]
[More importantly, this had to be a show of force.]
[From the start, this was never just a rescue. It was the next chapter of your conflict with Naoya Zenin. If you didn't hit that bastard hard enough to hurt, hard enough to scare, hard enough to carve genuine fear into his bones... the harassment would never end.]
[In your simulation memories, across those two years, the rest of the clan had been no saints. Ogi with his scheming, Jinichi with his brutality, even Naobito behind that hard-drinking swagger. None of them were good people. But none of them had ever stooped to kidnapping a child off a public street. That baseline of family pride and dignity? Naoya had flushed every shred of it.]
[So your objective was crystal clear. Not to beg. Not to negotiate. To demonstrate power.]
[You needed the Zenin Clan to understand that Megumi Fushiguro wasn't just a vessel carrying the Ten Shadows Technique. He was an investment that only bore returns in your hands.]
[In this rotting jujutsu world, reason was a dead language. Only strength and self-interest spoke.]
[At Megumi's age and current development, he couldn't showcase the Ten Shadows Technique to the Zenin Clan himself. So you'd do it for him.]
[And thinking further out, this fed into a much larger design. Suguru Geto's ideology of exterminating all non-sorcerers was too warped and extreme for you to ever endorse. But the nauseating feudal order the Big Three Sorcerer Families maintained disgusted you just as much.]
[If you wanted to fix this world without destroying it, you needed a voice at the table. The Zenin Clan was a critical piece on that board.]
[Too early to act on any of it. But someday, you hoped Megumi would be the one to inherit that clan and burn the rot out of it.]
[The long chain of calculations settled your aura into something dense and still. This was what separated humans from animals. Even at the peak of fury, you could wage a rational, measured game. Fools who let their emotions drive, fools like Naoya, always ended up digging their own graves.]
[One deep breath pushed the web of strategy back down where it belonged. You turned to Mei Mei.]
["I know what I'm doing. Even in the worst case, I've got a contingency. Drive."]
[Mei Mei studied you through the rearview mirror. A long, searching look.]
[The face reflected back didn't carry Gojo's arrogance, or Geto's fathomless, unsettling magnetism. And yet something about the calm radiating from your core, bone-deep and unshakeable, had its own strange gravity.]
["How interesting..."]
[A soft laugh. A shake of her head. Her foot eased onto the accelerator. In raw cursed energy and talent, he's a world apart from those two Special Grade monsters. But sitting next to him feels... more reassuring than being beside Gojo. Is this what they call charisma?]
[Seems like this job might be an investment in a growth stock.]
[The car merged onto the highway toward the outskirts. Neon signs outside stretched into ribbons of light. Something crossed Mei Mei's mind, and without taking her hands off the wheel, she fished a weathered-looking file from the glove compartment and tossed it onto your lap.]
["Bonus intel. That defunct group you've had me watching, the Star Religious Group? There are signs of it coming back to life. Though 'revival' isn't quite right. More like a hermit crab crawled into the old shell and inheritance, slapped a new coat of paint on it, and called it a new sect."]
[She was right. Since that summer when everything changed, you'd never stopped digging into the truths lurking behind this world. Especially the real puppet master hiding in the dark.]
[You flipped the file open.]
["Is this a lead on what I asked you to look into before?"]
["The private investigator I hired turned up some interesting material while digging around."]
[Mei Mei's voice dropped lower in the quiet cabin.]
["These are private interview transcripts from core members of the Star Religious Group."]
[Under the dim amber reading light overhead, your eyes raced across pages of handwritten notes. The penmanship was hasty, a little rough.]
[The interview subjects were all former high-ranking members, major donors, or inner-circle operatives of the Star Religious Group. According to the records, in the days just before the bounty on Star Plasma Vessel Riko Amanai was announced, each of them had independently witnessed something strange during the cult's most secretive gatherings.]
[The former leader of the Star Religious Group, a man who'd always looked down on non-sorcerers like insects beneath his feet, had been holding frequent, clandestine meetings with an unknown woman.]
[And in these core members' recollections, the leader's demeanor in that woman's presence had been almost... subservient. Like a believer standing before an actual god.]
[What made it truly unsettling was the absence. The cult's full roster, its investor lists, its partner records. No trace of this woman anywhere. If these witnesses hadn't been gathered years later and their memories cross-referenced, this phantom might never have surfaced at all.]
[Your gaze swept the fragmented descriptions like a scanner, until your finger froze on a single detail circled heavily in red ink.]
[The core members couldn't agree on the woman's face. Descriptions were vague, contradictory.]
[But every last one of them mentioned the same thing.]
[You stared at that line, and the words that left your lips were barely above a whisper.]
["A woman with visible... suture lines on her forehead?"]