They say curses are born from fear.
Not from logic, not from reason, but from the raw, trembling instinct buried at the base of every soul.
The kind of fear that doesn't think, doesn't argue, doesn't ask.
It only reacts.
It hides, it claws, it screams.
The fear of fire.
The fear of death.
The fear of others.
Of ugliness.
Of suffering.
Of silence that lasts too long, or the sound of footsteps behind you when you're alone.
The fear of being consumed.
Forgotten. Worthless.
These fears fester.
Shared by thousands.
Millions.
They curl beneath civilization's mask, quiet and patient.
And when the weight becomes too much, when the pressure builds beyond breaking, when all that fear condenses into form, they are born.
Curses.
They do not arise with names.
Not at first.
They are instincts, given shape.
They crawl from the bottom of humanity's subconscious as hunger wearing a face, as pain given a voice.
They are born screaming, and that scream never ends.
They kill because they must.
They devour because it is all they know.
And when exorcised, when destroyed by the hands of sorcerers, their form collapses, and their presence is lost.
Their soul does not linger. It was never theirs.
They return to the source, to that vast, polluted well of fear from which they came.
From there, they may rise again.
A new form.
A new consciousness.
New malice.
But never the same.
Never with memory.
Never with grief.
A fear reborn is not a soul reborn.
The cycle does not bend.
Such is the law.
Unthinking. Inevitable. Absolute.
But not today.
Something happened.
Something interfered.
The boundary between worlds is not immune to curse.
When that black, suffocating energy spilled from a boy who never should have arrived in this place, the rules fractured.
Something deep and old in this land awoke, and the echoes of curses long extinguished stirred in the ash.
And one of them remembered.
A death that was not shameful. A defeat, yes, but not meaningless.
A death that came not from confusion or terror, but from fire given shape, roaring with pride even as it was incinerated.
He had believed. He had burned, not in agony, but in conviction.
That was the difference.
A curse who died believing he was right.
Something went wrong.
Or perhaps it went exactly as it must.
Beneath the skeleton of a ruined city, long drowned in Originium's slow corruption, in a place where no light had touched in years, the earth shifted.
The cinders, cold for centuries, pulsed with heat.
Something clawed upward from below.
Fingers, blackened and cracked, tore through brittle layers of scorched stone and infected metal.
The ground shuddered.
Air, dry and sour, sucked inward like a held breath suddenly released.
A groan reverberated through the ruined tunnels.
A cough, wet and guttural, echoed in the dark.
Then silence.
Moments passed.
Then fire.
A flicker first. Harmless.
A dancing ember on soot.
But it grew. Not with warmth, but with hunger.
It licked across stone and metal, and in its light, the shape of a man began to emerge from the pit.
No, not a man.
Never a man.
A figure wreathed in smoke and glowing veins of molten hate.
Flesh cracked like cooled magma.
A face scorched by pride, not pain.
He stood fully now, hunched and trembling.
The air rippled with cursed energy, heavy and unnatural.
The city above had no name anymore, but it remembered what fire was.
So did he.
His breathing was ragged.
His eyes, twin furnaces, stared ahead with blank confusion.
He raised one hand, staring at the charred stumps of what had once been fingers capable of calling meteors.
For a long moment, he didn't speak.
Then he remembered.
A flash of Sukuna's sneer.
The roar of laughter as his body turned to ash.
The sensation of vanishing, not fading.
The black, final edge of death.
He remembered.
He should not have remembered.
A curse does not carry memory from life to life.
He knew this.
The law of cursed existence forbade it.
They were hunger and fear, not soul and mind.
So why?
Why did he remember his name?
"Jogo..."
The whisper left his throat like smoke.
He was cold, despite the fire.
The feeling unsettled him.
He felt small.
Not in power, but in place.
This land was not Japan.
This cursed energy was not right.
The pressure in the air was twisted, as if the atmosphere had learned how to hate.
He took a step forward, and the ground melted where his foot landed.
The fire welcomed him like an old friend.
The flames rose higher, spiraling around his form, wrapping him in a quiet storm of heat and light.
He felt his power stir, erratic and unstable, but present.
His name remained on his tongue.
Jogo.
Not the new name that should have emerged from the well of fear.
Not a new curse, born of the same fear.
It was him.
Somehow, impossibly, truly... him.
The ash had remembered the fire.
And now, so had the world.
...
The wind had stopped moving.
The sun hadn't risen, but the heat had.
It clung to the ruined city like a fever, seeping into broken glass and rusted rebar, curling up the edges of scorched tarpaulin.
Once a functioning mining outpost under Lungmen's temporary protection, the area had been abandoned after a failed containment effort left the Originium veins exposed.
But this wasn't Originium rot.
The way the air shimmered unnaturally, the way stone glowed red beneath dust, it was something else.
Something alive.
Sesa crouched on the edge of a collapsed skywalk, visor flicking up as he surveyed the old refinery yard below.
Cracks in the concrete steamed.
Ash drifted upward instead of down, and the central ventilation tower bled a lazy column of dark smoke.
"I've seen places burn before" Sesa muttered, pressing a gloved hand against a half-melted railing. "But I've never seen them mourn."
"Hold your poetry," came Meteorite's voice through comms, cool and clinical.
"Radiation scan is clean. No chemical flare, no volatile pockets. Originium's dead quiet, but the ambient temperature just spiked three degrees in under a minute."
"Feels worse," Frostleaf said. She was standing beside a fallen road sign half-buried in slag. "My Arts are struggling. The heat's interfering. I can barely form a proper edge."
"Shouldn't even be possible," Cuora added. Her shield was already drawn, heat haze distorting around its metal rim. "Originium doesn't do this. Not like this."
Meteorite stepped forward, boots crunching over blackened pebbles.
Her expression didn't shift, but the way she checked the ridgelines suggested nerves.
Sesa followed her gaze.
There were no birds. No insects. Not even the ever-present flicker of Originium worms or mold.
Just silence.
And heat.
The group moved deeper into the ruins.
Ash hung in the air like a fog, curling around them in slow, lazy spirals.
The deeper they went, the more wrong it became.
Burnt scaffolding twisted like vines.
Metal beams sagged like wax left too close to fire.
A truck had been fused to the pavement, half its body sunken into semi-liquid concrete.
Inside the cab, the driver's skeleton leaned forward, charred to black glass.
"Mother of God..." Sesa whispered.
"No sign of explosion" Meteorite said. "It's as if the heat just... chose to rise here."
They reached what had once been a central hub plaza, with cracked vending machines and shattered lanterns overhead.
The air pulsed.
Not in rhythm, but in mood.
A steady thrum of presence, like something vast had just exhaled and was waiting to see if they noticed.
Then Cuora froze. Her shield hit the ground with a soft clang.
"...Did anyone else hear that?"
No one answered. They all heard it.
Footsteps.
Slow. Measured.
The sound of something heavy but graceful moving through fire like it belonged there.
Through the haze, a figure emerged.
Tall. Broad.
Cloaked in scorched rock and volcanic soot.
His face was carved, almost mask-like, with a single glaring eye burning bright orange.
Magma poured in lazy arcs from vents in his head, flowing upward as if gravity had become an opinion. His voice rumbled out with the depth of a collapsing cliffside.
"You insects haven't changed" he said, looking through them, not at them. "Still scrambling in the dirt beneath a sky you don't understand."
Frostleaf raised her weapon instinctively. Sesa began charging a remote mine.
"Identify yourself" Meteorite called, her bow already drawn. "You're trespassing in a designated quarantine zone under Rhodes Island jurisdiction. State your intent."
The figure tilted his head.
Smoke curled up from his shoulders.
"I remember burning longer than this planet has existed," he said, almost thoughtful. "Your names mean nothing to fire."
Then the world lit up.
The stone beneath their feet cracked and glowed red.
Fountains of flame burst from the ruined drainage grates, and the walls themselves began to drip molten slag.
Sesa dove, screaming over comms, "It's a living volcano!"
Jogo smiled.
And then he stepped forward.
...
Amiya stared at the terminal screen, its pale light flickering against her furrowed brow.
The audio log was still stabilizing, but the distortion couldn't mask the panic in Meteorite's voice.
"Visual contact established. Unknown entity... humanoid. Emitting volcanic heat signatures, unnatural terrain deformation confirmed. Operator Frostleaf compromised, Arts reaction suppressed. Cuora holding front, Sesa deploying containment... wait—"
The signal crackled. Then silence. Then only static.
Amiya's breath caught. Her ears twitched slightly, instinctively catching even the faintest ambient shifts. The thermal readings were still climbing.
She turned. "Contact Kal'tsit. Now."
A brief pause. One of the assistants in the mobile command tent handed her the stabilized comm crystal.
The feed was unsteady, but clear enough.
A projected image of Kal'tsit shimmered into view, standing at the edge of a snowfield under grey sky, her cloak barely rustling in the cold.
In the background, shapes moved, blurred by distance and fog.
The feed flickered, momentarily capturing Lappaland's blade carving through ice, a figure meeting her head-on with effortless poise.
Yuta.
"Make this quick," Kal'tsit said, her tone detached, though her eyes never left the duel beyond the feed.
"We've got a contact near the Originium exclusion zone," Amiya said.
"Meteorite's squad encountered a hostile. Unregistered. They described terrain control, melting stone, ambient heat spiking. Frostleaf's Arts were disabled. Cuora was nearly burned through her shield. It's not a natural hazard. It's something else."
Kal'tsit's head turned slightly at that. Her voice lowered.
"Describe it."
"Tall. Burning. Controlled volcanic terrain. Intelligent. Spoke in full sentences, taunting tone. Meteorite didn't say curse, but... her voice, Kal'tsit, she was scared."
Kal'tsit finally looked into the feed.
"Did it ask for anything?"
Amiya hesitated. "Yes. It asked where 'the one who dragged curses to this world' was."
Kal'tsit didn't reply right away.
Behind her, Lappaland let out a cry and clashed blades with Yuta again, sparks scattering across the snow like fireflies.
He didn't even flinch.
Amiya could hear it now, every strike of steel, the crack of ice, and that eerie pressure behind each movement.
The doctor exhaled through her nose.
"Then it's begun."
Amiya's hand clenched the terminal edge.
"Kal'tsit. What is it?"
"Something that shouldn't exist here," she said softly. "Something born of a different fear. If the sorcerer is a wound, this is the infection spreading."
"Should I deploy Blaze's unit?"
"Not yet. Pull Meteorite's team back if possible, but if they've already engaged... record everything. Every movement. Every heat spike. Every spoken word."
Another strike rang out through the feed, Yuta's blade narrowly avoiding Lappaland's neck, redirected only by a last-second twist of her Art.
Kal'tsit didn't blink.
"I'll deal with Yuta," she said. "You handle the fire."
The transmission ended.
Amiya stood in silence for a moment longer. The smell of ozone from the overloaded crystal lingered in the air.
She whispered, more to herself than anyone else, "Two monsters. One in fire. One in snow. And we're standing between them."