Sebas sat on the top half of Black Mahoraga's corpse, watching Sukuna fight the real one.
A notification appeared in front of his face.
Just... text. Floating in the air. Like someone had typed it directly into his reality.
[R3M0RYXVX7: You won't write about your son. No problem, write about your daughter.]
Sebas stared at it.
"...Who the fuck is R3M0RYXVX7?"
He squinted at the floating text. Read it again.
"Daughter? What daughter? I don't HAVE a daughter. I have a zombie son who just got married to a volcano and a Black Mahoraga who lasted nine seconds. I'm not built for parenthood. Hell nah."
The text disappeared.
Sebas sat there for a moment. The fight between Sukuna and Mahoraga raged in the background. Buildings were exploding. The wheel was spinning. The King of Curses was having the time of his life.
But Sebas wasn't watching anymore.
Something felt wrong.
REALITY wrong. Like someone was writing this. Like the words coming out of his mouth weren't entirely his. Like there was a man sitting somewhere — at a desk, wearing headphones, probably procrastinating on something important — typing every single thing he said and did.
Sebas looked up.
"...Nah."
He looked down.
"...Unless?"
Looking up again.
"I see you."
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Okay so at this point I (the actual author) was sitting at my desk at 2 AM working on this chapter. Headphones in. Spotify on shuffle. Monster Energy half-finished. The usual.
I was mid-sentence — literally typing the part where Sebas watches Sukuna fight Mahoraga — when Spotify decided to hit me with the The Prowler's Theme.
You know the one. The spooky one.
I didn't queue it. I didn't have it in any playlist. It just APPEARED. Like the algorithm was possessed.
I paused. Took my headphones off one ear. Because the music wasn't just coming from the headphones.
It was coming from behind me.
I turned around.
There was a man in my room.
He was standing directly behind my chair. One shoe on. Shirt torn. Slightly smoking from what appeared to be recent proximity to magma. He was reading my screen — reading the CHAPTER — reading the words I was typing about HIM.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
The Prowler's theme was still playing.
"...YO WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?" I said, falling out of my chair.
Sebas tilted his head.
"BITCH," Sebas said, "DID YOU JUST TALK BACK TO ME?"
"THIS IS MY ROOM—"
His fist connected with my face before the sentence finished.
I want to describe the hit accurately. I want to convey the physics. The velocity. The impact. But I can't, because I was unconscious before my brain registered that a fictional character had just punched me in my own bedroom at 2 AM while The Prowler's Theme played in the background.
I hit the floor.
My chair rolled into the wall.
My Monster Energy fell over.
Sebas looked down at me. Unconscious. Sprawled on the floor. Glasses crooked. One AirPod still in.
"Yeah take that, monkey boy," Sebas said.
He looked at my screen. The chapter was still open. The cursor was blinking. He read the last few lines.
"What a bum, He's not even a good writer," Sebas muttered.
He scrolled up. Read Chapter 12.
"...He killed Black Mahoraga Instantly? That was supposed to be my greatest creation! This guy has NO respect for my craft."
He scrolled further. Read the part where he slips on the banana peel.
"AND HE KEEPS MAKING ME FALL OVER. THAT'S NOT FUNNY. THAT'S NOT — okay that's a LITTLE funny but STILL."
Sebas cracked his knuckles. Looked at the screen one more time. Then at me. Then at the screen.
He leaned over the keyboard and typed three words at the bottom of the chapter:
[Sebas is cool.]
Then he opened a portal in the middle of my room and stepped through.
My room smelled like magma for three days.
I woke up forty minutes later with a bruise shaped like a fist.
Sebas stepped out of the portal back into Shibuya.
The fight was over.
Mahoraga was gone — nothing left but the eight-handled wheel, cracked and dissolving on the ground. Sukuna stood in the middle of a 140-metre circle of absolute nothing. No buildings. No street. No people. Just flat, barren, scorched earth. The entire area had been shaved down to dust by Malevolent Shrine and then finished off with the fire arrow.
Hundreds of civilians were dead. Toge Inumaki was missing an arm somewhere. The curse user who'd been involved in the ritual was sliced in half from a delayed Dismantle he didn't know he'd been hit with.
Sukuna stood alone in the destruction. Four eyes scanning the horizon. Calm. Satisfied.
Then he paused.
His four eyes narrowed slightly.
"That man," Sukuna said quietly.
He was thinking about Sebas. The shoeless one. The one who'd appeared from nowhere, moved faster than him — FASTER than the King of Curses — and summoned a black knockoff of a Divine General that lasted less time than a sneeze.
"Strange," Sukuna murmured. "No cursed energy. No technique I could read. He moved faster than me for an instant. And that creature he summoned — worthless, but the method of creation was unlike anything from any era."
He flexed his hand. The one that had been burned by Jogo's magma. Healed long ago. But the memory remained.
"The volcano spirit's sudden power change. The undead creature that couldn't be killed. That domain made of... affection." Sukuna's lip curled. "All connected to that man."
He stood in silence for a moment.
Then he shook his head. Dismissing it. Whatever that shoeless man was, he wasn't relevant to Sukuna's plans. Megumi Fushiguro was relevant. The vessel switch was relevant. That man was a footnote.
A strange, fast, inexplicable footnote who smelled like another dimension and had the survival instincts of a lemming.
"Irrelevant," Sukuna decided.
He felt his control over Yuji's body weakening. The fingers' hold was fading. Time was running out.
Sukuna had already dropped Megumi off at the Shibuya tollgate — appeared for half a second in front of Shoko and Yaga, deposited the unconscious boy, and vanished before they could process what they'd seen. Megumi would live. That was all that mattered for his plans.
Now for the final act.
Sukuna walked back to the epicentre of his destruction. The spot in front of what used to be Shibuya 109. The area he'd personally turned into a wasteland. Bodies. Rubble. Silence.
He felt Yuji pushing from inside. Fighting to regain control. Clawing his way back.
Sukuna let him.
But not before positioning himself perfectly in the centre of the devastation. Standing among the dead. Surrounded by the consequences of power that Yuji's body had been used to deliver.
"Take a good look," Sukuna said.
He relinquished control.
Yuji's eyes opened.
His own eyes.
And the first thing he saw was hell.