Timeframe: Three weeks after Junko's coma.
Location: Transfer Train to Kyoto Jujutsu Tech.
Akira sat by the window, hands trembling over his lap, hidden beneath his long sleeves. His cursed energy felt wrong — not low, not depleted. Just… foreign. Like it didn't belong to him anymore.
The train screeched as it curved through a tunnel, and his reflection flickered in the glass.
One second, he was looking at himself.
The next — a version of him with hollow eyes, lips twitching.
He blinked.
Gone.
Another glitch, he thought. Or an echo.
The escort beside him didn't react. Just kept reading from a thin booklet — probably reports about him.
When the Kyoto campus had been mentioned, he didn't protest. There wasn't a trial. There wasn't even a debrief. Just a new assignment with "health surveillance," an escort who didn't speak, and eyes that watched him even as the train moved out of the station.
Half-exiled, they called it.
Not enough evidence to seal him. Too unstable to let roam.
He turned to the papers in his lap. A profile sheet. His own.
Name: Akira Rensetsu
Classification: Grade 1 (Probationary)
Technique: Chrono-Stigmata (Instability Class)
Observational Order: Active
Host Campus: Kyoto
He sighed, then folded the paper.
The escort beside him was an older man in black. Grey hair, no cursed energy signature to read. But his aura was dense — like the kind of silence that followed war.
"You're not the first to be buried," the man said quietly. "But you might be the first to climb back out."
Akira didn't answer.
He didn't feel like someone climbing.
He felt like someone falling slowly, second by second, into a grave no one could remember digging.
He looked outside. Rice paddies blurred into forests. The sun bled orange across the sky — too warm for how cold he felt.
She's still in that second, he thought. Junko… do you hate me?
His fingers twitched involuntarily.
Did I save you… or just trap you in a death you can't wake from?
A shadow flickered across the glass again — his reflection, but blinking out of sync. This time, it lingered. The figure outside the train had his face… but it was standing still on the edge of the tracks, watching. Not a reflection.
He turned his head — nothing there.
Akira's skin crawled.
He looked to the handler again. The man had gone back to reading.
No reaction.
Akira leaned back in his seat, heart ticking faster.
Something inside ticked. Not like a clock — like a wound.
And the train kept rolling toward the place where he'd either be contained…
Or come undone.