Location: Kurozawa Exclusion Zone — a dead ward sealed two decades ago.
There were no birds in Kurozawa.
No wind.
No insects.
Just rusted swings, flickering street lamps, and the low hum of cursed air — thick like tar, pressing down on the lungs. Akira stepped through the veil alone, boots crunching glass and powdered bone. The sky above was pink — not a sunset, but broken color, like a palette spilled by a mad god.
The mission file was a paragraph long:
"Spatial-temporal anomaly detected.
Solo reconnaissance.
Observe.
Return.
"Bullshit." He knew what this was. HQ wanted to break him. Force his Echo to show itself. Maybe even snap his psyche in half. And part of him... wanted to let them.
He stepped past a rusted gate twisted by CE warping. A child's bicycle lay melted into the pavement. Street signs looped themselves into Möbius strips. The sun inched forward, then reversed, then stuttered in place. Time here was bleeding. Just like him. His nose dripped blood again. Right eye twitching. Fingernails cracked from the pressure of holding his own existence together. The weight of too many timelines crushed his joints. His left hand twitched.
"Let this second shatter."
He whispered it without thinking. Nothing happened. Not yet. The technique was hungry now. It wanted pain before it listened.
Half a kilometer east, Gojo Satoru stood with one hand in his pocket, surveying a warped temple structure half-devoured by cursed moss. "Black market exorcists were here. Probably dumped some forbidden relics," he muttered. "HQ doesn't even clean up its own trash." Then he felt it. A pulse — time vibrating unnaturally. Not stuttering. Not rewinding. Splitting. He turned. His Six Eyes narrowed. "...What the hell is that?"
And then he saw him. A lone figure, kneeling in the street, bleeding from both ears, eyes rolled back — surrounded by flickering versions of himself.
Akira screamed. He didn't hear it. The Echoes were speaking now. Not with voices. With ideas. Emotions. Instinct.
"Stop rewinding."
"Let us out."
"You killed her again."
"Time's a noose and you're the rope."
One of them — the tall one with broken fingers and a missing jaw — stepped forward.
"Let me show you the moment she should've died."
Reality cracked. A domain shell erupted — unstable, unsealed, incomplete. Mirrors grew from the asphalt. Clock hands speared from the ground. Roads bent into spirals of impossible time. The sky bled backward. Akira stood in the center, body limp, Echoes speaking through his mouth,
"You won't chain me again."
Gojo landed in front of him in half a second. Infinity flared. "Woah there, kid. That's a nasty looking curse cocoon you're hatching." No response. Just Echoes — three of them flickering around Akira like afterimages. One cried. One laughed. One sharpened a clock hand into a blade. Gojo raised a brow. "Tengen didn't mention this in the dossier." The laughing Echo lunged. Gojo sidestepped it easily, but it froze mid-air, rewound itself, and lunged again — this time from behind. His Limitless auto-deflected it, but he still clicked his tongue. "Clever bastard."
Then all three Echoes moved at once. Gojo caught one by the throat — only for it to explode into a burst of broken seconds. Time rewound. The others tried to trap him in an infinite loop of five seconds of combat — like a curse-encoded genjutsu. But Gojo was already three steps ahead. His CE tore through the loop like paper. He snapped his fingers. Blue. The Echoes scattered.
He didn't attack Akira — just stared. "Still in there, kid?" Akira's mouth opened. Not his voice:
"She's still screaming."
Gojo flinched. Something in his chest tightened.
"...Who?"
"Junko. She dies in every timeline. And he keeps watching."
flicker of guilt passed through Gojo's expression. He didn't even know who that was — but he'd heard that tone before. Survivors of failed missions. Broken jujutsu tools. Students who were just a second too slow. Akira convulsed. The domain cracked louder.
And then… it stopped.
One of the Echoes knelt beside Akira and whispered something only he could hear. The domain retracted like breath. Time stilled. All that remained was shattered glass and the smell of static. Gojo knelt next to the boy. Akira's eyes fluttered.
"...Did I break it?"
Gojo didn't smile. For once.
"You broke something."
Later. HQ got fragments of the report. Distorted footage. No clear answers. Gojo submitted a handwritten line:
"Subject's cursed technique is not temporal control. It's temporal erosion. Recommend surveillance, not suppression."
Akira was returned to Kyoto in a coma-like state for 72 hours. Upon awakening, he whispered something that no one wrote down. But Momo Nishimiya — watching from the outside — did.
She saw the way his eyes didn't focus. The way the clocks in the room ticked out of sync around him.
"The Echoes are learning to lie."
And behind him, just for a second, she thought she saw… another Akira.
Smiling.