The Priestesses' Voice | a Jujutsu Kaisen fanfiction

33

The town at the foot of the mountain, Tokyo, 2018

"I've sent Ijichi a text," Noriko murmured, pushing her phone back into her pocket and pulling her ink brush from the holster under her skirt. "Are you ready?"

Yuji gave a silent nod, eyes flittering apprehensively to the alleyway. Normally, he wouldn't have been scared... but after everything, they'd been through recently? What if it was another special grade? Images of Junpei flashed through his mind as he glanced to Noriko cautiously.

The two young sorcerers began to tread carefully down the alley - Yuji leading the way with Noriko following close behind him, ink-dripping brush in hand. They ascended the stone steps wordlessly and Yuji winced when his head broke above the shadow of the single-storey house next to him. The sun was cold now; pale and sharp as he cringed away from the bright rays. Pausing, he scanned the top of the verge and found his eyes following the dirt path from their location up to a graveyard. It was eerily still and he couldn't see anyone - or thing - in the immediate vicinity.

"Ahh, a graveyard." Noriko hummed in interest as she peered around Yuji's shoulder, coming to stand next to him on top of the verge. "Well, I guess that explains it."

"Explains what?" He blinked, tearing his gaze from the site to his companion, whose relaxed manner soothed his anxiety.

"Did Gojo not tell you?" Taking the lead, Noriko began to tread towards it, glancing over her shoulder when Yuji didn't follow her. He did when she gave him a beckoning gesture. "Hospitals, graveyards, schools - that sort of thing - even when there's not a curse immediately present, you'll start to be able to feel their negative energies. That's the foreboding feeling we felt down there. You know, you'd think shrines would have the same aura, but they're really quite -"

Noriko paused mid-sentence, her right hand twitching slightly around the brush, and then spun on her heel, lifting her opposite leg up to smash into a large discoloured creature that'd sprung out from the bushes. The creature reeled back, letting out a screech and Noriko dropped into a crouch, furiously scribbling on the exposed skin up her leg - the brush moving in rapid, minuscule movements. Itadori dropped slightly as well, bracing himself for an attack as he turned to the curse across from them.

It was large with a long tail instead of legs and mottled, rotting skin - which was half obscured by long black hair that dragged along the dirt as it writhed in pain. As it reeled it's head up again to look at them, Yuji spied a patch on it's face where the skin was peeling off due to Noriko's kick and shivered as it's large black eyes locked onto them.

"Don't you normally introduce yourself first when you meet someone? Ah, so rude." Her jovial tune still remained, even as she spoke to the curse. Nobara slipped into that sometimes, Yuji noted, not as much as Noriko (whose was seemingly permanent), but you could tell they both enjoyed the fight. Pushing herself back up, Yuji watched as her entire left leg began to swirl and seep into a deep blue-black before it receeded sharpy into a palm-sized circle on her calf where she'd first began to write. She clipped her brush back into her holster and gripped the space into the circle. Her hand slipped into the inky void and as she pulled it back out, her manicured fingers around an odd black hilt. "I'll take this one, you can have the other one."

As she pulled the sword out into the light, the golden blade gleamed in the sunlight and the circle faded. Perfectly polished and patterned with diagonal crossings, Noriko moved the Sword of Goujian* into both hands, holding it out in front of her.

"What do you-?" Yuji jumped as another similar creature screeched from above him, perched in a tree a few feet away. Noriko steeled her eyes on her opponent as the overwhelming aura of the sword washed over her. A national treasure, she grinned, maybe a little over-the-top... but who liked to be boring? "Eh, when did that get here?"