The next village wasn't on any map.
Not that Yuta had one.
It barely counted as a village at all, just nine buildings, shaped like crumbling teeth, leaning against one another in the wind.
Corrugated metal for walls.
Tarps for roofs.
People stared as he passed the first gate, eyes narrow, hands near weapons.
There were no guards.
No welcome.
Just the slow, cautious tightening of a group that had long since learned not to trust.
He walked in silence.
Didn't lower his hood.
Didn't raise his sword.
The infected were kept in the back.
He heard them before he saw them, wet, gasping coughs, the scrape of feet too weak to stand.
A tent sagged on the far side of a dead field.
The air around it stank of sweat and bitter herbs.
Flies buzzed thick in the heat.
A makeshift sign hung beside it, written in uneven black paint.
"Contaminated. Keep out."
Yuta paused at the edge.
Watched.
A young woman emerged from the tent, too thin, skin cracked, a bundle of cloth pressed to her chest.
A child.
Breathing shallowly.
Covered in rash and filth.
She looked around once, eyes hollow, then stumbled back inside.
No one offered help.
The villagers nearby averted their eyes.
One man spat in the dust.
Yuta turned away before he said something he'd regret.
He didn't stay long.
The next village was worse.
This one had walls, real ones, salvaged steel and barbed wire.
The infected weren't hidden.
They were caged.
Like animals.
Filthy, starved, dying slowly in the dirt.
One woman banged on the bars until her fingers bled.
Screaming for her husband, who stood on the other side with a rifle and blank eyes.
"Orders" he said when Yuta stared.
"She's infected. Just kill her if you found it annoying"
The words weren't even cruel.
Just tired.
Resigned.
Like death was less painful than mercy.
That night, Yuta meditated beside a cliff.
The moonlight painted the land in pale grays.
In the distance, he could see smoke rising, too thin for cooking fires.
Probably another purge.
Another infected settlement gone to flame and screaming.
He opened his palms.
Called cursed energy.
It answered, sluggish and inconsistent.
Like it was trying to wake from sleep but couldn't remember how.
His physical enhancement worked, slowly.
His reinforcement had begun to stabilize over the past few days.
But everything else?
Fragmented. Hollow.
His copy technique remained silent, a sealed well.
Even his reversed cursed technique only flickered.
He pressed it against a wound on his arm.
A small cut.
The energy sparked, faintly.
Then fizzled.
Not enough.
Not enough to heal.
Not enough to save.
His thoughts turned again to Ayane.
To Kuro.
If he had remembered the Binding Vow sooner.
If he had offered something greater.
His sight.
His arms.
His voice.
Would it have been enough?
Would anything ever be enough?
"You'll carry more than kindness."
Gojo's voice echoed again.
Uninvited. Distant.
"If you want to protect them, you'll need to become someone the world hates. Someone it fears."
But what good was fear?
Fear hadn't saved Ayane.
Hadn't stopped the people from throwing stones at the infected girl outside the trading post earlier that day.
Hadn't kept the cold from the mother cradling her coughing son in the alley Yuta had just passed.
The problem wasn't strength.
The problem was that strength meant nothing here.
Not yet.
Not without purpose.
And right now, all Yuta had was pain.
So he watched.
He walked.
He remembered.
And slowly, like the first cracks through ice, his cursed energy stirred.
Not with rage.
But with sorrow.
A sorrow so deep it carved out space inside him.
Space for something old to return.
A whisper. A thread.
A flicker of memory not his own, someone else's technique, buried in the ghost of his soul.
He didn't know whose. Didn't know how. But for the first time in weeks, his fingers trembled.
Not from grief.
But from power beginning to wake.
...
Three days later...
There was something wrong with the wind.
Yuta didn't realize it at first.
He was used to strange winds, howling, still, stinking of rust and smoke.
The lands of Terra had shown him more kinds of decay than the world he came from ever knew.
But this wind was different.
It didn't move.
It pressed.
Like a presence.
Like a weight.
He felt it long before he reached the ruined village.
A tension in the air, not unlike cursed energy, but not his.
Not human. Not conscious.
A subconscious shiver in the environment.
Like the land itself remembered something it wanted to forget.
Yuta's boots sank into the earth as he descended a shallow hill.
The sun was beginning to vanish behind thick clouds, and shadows stretched long across the desolate path.
His breaths came slow, frosted and shallow, and the familiar ache in his body, the one that hadn't left him since that day, burned dull in his bones.
He kept his right hand close to the hilt of his sword.
His fingers twitched.
There was no sound except the whisper of leaves brushing against stone. No voices. No birds. Just the smell of old ash.
Then he saw it.
The village.
Or what was left.
They hadn't even buried the bodies.
Not because they hadn't tried. The attempts were there, makeshift graves, stone markers, burnt offerings.
But every one of them had failed.
Torn apart. Desecrated.
Something had stopped the process of mourning.
Houses were hollowed out, scorched black on the inside.
Ashes clung to walls in handprint shapes.
Whole sections of road had collapsed inward, like the ground had simply given up.
There were people, too.
At least, they looked like people.
But none of them moved.
A man sat frozen in the square, his back perfectly straight, hands gripping a small toy cart, as though he'd been pushing it when time shattered.
A woman leaned out a broken window, eyes open and dry, mouth parted just slightly.
A group of children knelt in a circle near a shrine, unmoving, hands clasped, lips whispering inaudibly into nothing.
Yuta walked among them in silence.
The air was wrong here.
Thick. Heavy.
Every step felt like he was dragging himself through mud laced with memory.
He looked around and saw no wounds.
No blood. No signs of panic.
Only stillness.
He whispered, "What happened here.."
And the air answered.
The pressure struck like a hammer.
His ears rang.
A scream, low and hoarse, somehow both outside him and inside his skull, ripped through the village's center. Yuta staggered, clutched his head, eyes wide.
He dropped to one knee.
Not cursed energy.
Something worse.
Raw, unchecked emotion, so old and so strong it had taken shape.
Grief.
Regret.
Guilt.
The kind that kills slowly.
He looked up.
And the spiral marked the ground.
Deep.
Twisted into the stone itself.
Dozens of them.
Carved around the shrine.
Woven into the bones of the village.
It hadn't been there when he entered.
He swallowed, eyes narrowing.
Something knew he was here.
The scream came again.
And with it, the Burden.
It didn't walk. It arrived.
Emerging from the shrine like shadow peeled from light.
A twisted shape of bones wrapped in black silk and bandages, dozens of sorrowful faces stitched together to form one shifting, unstable whole.
Its body was tall, impossibly thin, arms draped in cursed chains that trailed across the ground like whispers.
But it wasn't the shape that froze him.
It was the feeling.
Recognition.
The Fear of Uselessness.
Born from the infected, the abandoned, and the ones who feel like dead weight, useless to society, unwanted by family, incapable of being saved.
<>
Yuta Okkotsu's arrival as a sorcerer has changed the balance of Terra. Cursed energy are now filled in the world of hatred and infection. A cursed spirit now can be born from people's fear and negative emotion.
And he is the only sorcerer at the moment.
Upon the last sorcerer's death, the cursed spirit and cursed energy will vanish from this world.
They will only be form near the sorcerer.
Which mean....
Everywhere he go, destruction will follow.
<>
It looked too human.
The face twisted, and he saw Rika's crying eyes.
Then Gojo's broken smile.
Then Inumaki, blood pouring from a missing arm.
Then Kuro.
Then Ayane.
Yuta flinched. He took a step back. His breath hitched.
It was him.
His sins. His failures. Made real.
"You couldn't save me."
It whispered without moving its mouth.
Yuta raised his katana.
The air trembled.
"You promised."
He focused cursed energy through his legs, forced a step forward.
"You let us die."
Chains erupted from the curse's body and snapped toward him.
He leapt sideways, rolled, but one caught his shoulder, crack, he slammed into a pillar, vision white-hot with pain.
He tried to stand.
The curse was already in front of him.
Chains spiraled like nooses.
He deflected one with his blade, only to be caught by another that wrapped around his chest and pulled.
Yuta screamed as his ribs bent, bones grinding.
He slashed desperately, breaking the chain's grip, tumbled backward, bleeding and coughing.
They launched out of the curse's sleeves, long, black tendrils made of grief-forged metal, each one etched with the names of the dead.
They moved not with speed, but inevitability, curving through the air like judgment.
Yuta moved, barely.
He ducked one, leapt over another, and cursed under his breath as a third wrapped around his calf and dragged him across the dirt like a rag.
He twisted his body, pulled cursed energy through his arms, and sliced upward with his katana, shearing through the link.
Sparks and blood burst free.
He rolled to his feet.
Only to be slammed in the ribs by a second chain, sending him crashing into the wall of a half-collapsed house.
Pain. Immediate. Deep. His arm went numb.
He grit his teeth and lunged forward, reinforcing his legs, crack, the stones beneath him exploded as he launched off the ground, sword raised, a battle cry ripping from his throat.
It didn't pursue.
It just watched.
And spoke again.
"You're not the strongest. You were never anything. You don't protect. You bury"
He hesitated.
And the memory rose.
Like floodwater. Like poison.
...
"If I lose," Gojo had said, "you're next."
They were sitting on a rooftop in Shinjuku.
The night was quiet.
The sky still whole.
"You'll be the strongest, Yuta. Whether you want to or not."
"I don't think I can."
Gojo had smiled.
Not a bright smile.
A tired one.
"Neither did I."
...
The chain wrapped around his ankle.
Yuta crashed to the ground.
The curse didn't stop.
Didn't need to.
It wasn't trying to kill him.
It wanted him to break.
And it was winning.
He tried to stand again.
And failed.
Blood filled his mouth.
His shoulder was dislocated.
His body screamed.
"You don't deserve to live" the curse hissed.
"You never did."
It split.
Not with blood.
But with memories.
He was in Shinjuku.
Gojo's body, still and bleeding.
Yuta screaming, trying to transfer his consciousness back.
Trying. Failing.
Watching the barrier collapse.
Feeling the disconnect.
The final rejection of the soul.
He snapped back, too late.
A hand, not made of flesh, but braided threads of his own regrets, wrapped around his throat and slammed him into the shrine.
Then again.
Then again.
His body cracked against the stone, the air forced from his lungs.
The shrine cracked.
The curse's voice hissed beside his ear.
"They died because of you."
Yuta's fingers closed weakly around his blade's hilt.
His vision blurred.
One eye swelled shut.
His ribs shrieked with every breath.
Yuta closed his eyes.
Kuro's smile.
Ayane's voice.
Inumaki's sacrifice.
The battlefield. The blood.
...
"Take mine."
He remembered Inumaki kneeling before him, one arm gone, the other reaching forward.
"I trust you."
...
"STAGGER."
Yuta didn't remember shouting.
But the curse reeled.
The word had weight, not clean, not refined like Inumaki's, but real.
It struck like a blunt sword.
Sloppy, brutal, but undeniable.
The curse stumbled.
Yuta moved.
A roar tore from his throat as he lunged forward, sword raised with both hands, cursed energy burning along the edge.
He screamed as he brought it down, cutting through one of the curse's arms.
The fabric of its body resisted, then split, then howled, the screams of every regret it carried surging free.
Yuta pressed forward.
"DROP"
The cursed speech faltered mid-word.
Pain tore through his throat.
His voice gave out, blood sprayed from his lips.
His vision blurred.
The curse laughed.
Then lunged again.
Chains spiraled.
He dodged one.
The second ripped through his thigh.
He went down screaming.
The fight became a blur.
Metal.
Dust.
Voice.
Memory.
Yuta fought like a man drowning, slashing, breathing in spurts, dodging by inches.
His body broke.
His thoughts fractured.
The curse whispered with every movement, feeding him his own nightmares in a loop.
"You never saved anyone."
"You are alive instead of them."
"You could have stayed dead. It would've been kinder."
Then...
Silence.
He knelt.
Bleeding.
Cold.
The curse hovered above him.
The final chain raised.
Yuta looked up, one eye swollen shut.
And whispered.
"Die."
The word landed.
Not because it was perfect.
But because it was honest.
The curse froze.
Its many faces turned.
Each one blinked once.
And then began to disintegrate.
Not in ash. But in dust of memory.
Chains shattered.
Silks unraveled.
And the core of the curse, a single, weeping, silent face, collapsed inward, folding like paper.
Gone.
Yuta fell to the ground.
The sky above him faded into dusk.
He could not cry.
He could not speak.
He lay in silence, listening to his own heartbeat, echoing like thunder in an empty grave.