It was a Tuesday evening, raining just like the night their parents died.
Leo was sitting on the floor of his bedroom, surrounded by cardboard boxes, carefully wrapping his few cherished books in newspaper.
Kai was in the kitchen, humming slightly off-key while burning a frozen pizza.
Then, the smell hit him.
It wasn’t the smell of burning cheese.
It was thick, pungent, and nauseating—like rotten eggs and struck matches.
Sulfur.
Leo frowned, dropping a book and standing up.
“Kai?
Did a pipe burst or something?”
He walked out into the narrow hallway just as a deafening, mechanical roar rattled the floorboards.
The apartment walls vibrated violently.
It sounded like a freight train was barreling directly down their quiet residential street.
Leo reached the living room just as the headlights blasted through the front window, blindingly bright.
Time seemed to fracture, slowing down to an agonizing crawl.
The wall exploded.
A massive wall of steel and chrome tore through the brick and plaster like tissue paper.
The sound was apocalyptic—screeching metal, shattering glass, and the agonizing groan of the building’s structural supports giving way.
“Leo!”
Kai moved with a speed born of pure instinct.
He tackled Leo to the floor just as the ceiling caved in.
A massive wooden beam crashed down, followed by a tidal wave of drywall, glass, and crushing weight.
In the chaotic haze of dust and agony, Leo’s vision swam.
He was pinned beneath a heavy slab of debris, his lower body entirely numb.
But through the jagged gap in the wreckage, illuminated by the sparking wires of the ruined apartment, he saw the cab of the eighteen-wheeler.
The driver wasn’t unconscious.
He wasn’t bleeding.
The man was leaning casually out the shattered window, looking down at the devastation.
He was smiling—a wide, unnatural, ear-to-ear grin.
And his eyes…
they weren’t human.
They were solid, fathomless, pitch-black voids.
The man tilted his head, let out a raspy, echoing chuckle, and then simply turned his head away, utterly indifferent to the lives he had just crushed.
Then, Leo’s world went black.
The smell of sulfur was gone, replaced by the sterile, chemical stench of antiseptic and bleach.
Leo opened his eyes.
The fluorescent lights above him stabbed at his retinas.
The rhythmic, maddening beep…
beep…
beep of a heart monitor echoed in his ears.
His throat felt like sandpaper, and when he tried to move, a white-hot flare of agony shot through his entire body.
“You’re awake,” a soft voice said.
A doctor stood at the foot of his bed, holding a clipboard.
He looked tired, his eyes filled with that practiced, professional pity Leo remembered from when he was eight years old.
“Where…” Leo’s voice was a ragged croak.
“My brother.
Kai.”
The doctor lowered the clipboard.
He took a slow breath.
“I am so sorry, Leo.
Your brother…
he took the brunt of the collapse.
He didn’t make it.
He passed away before the paramedics could arrive.”
The words hung in the air, heavy and suffocating.
Leo couldn’t breathe.
The monitor beside his bed spiked, the beeps growing frantic.
“I know this is a lot to process,” the doctor continued gently, his gaze dropping toward the foot of the bed.
“You suffered severe crush injuries.
We did everything we could, but the tissue damage in your right leg was irreversible.
We had to amputate below the knee.”
Leo slowly lifted his head, fighting the dizziness, and looked down.
Where his right leg should have been, there was only a stump wrapped in thick white bandages.
He had lost his leg.
But more importantly, he had lost his anchor.
His shield.
His only family.
The doctor said something else, murmured platitudes about grief counselors and recovery, but Leo didn’t hear a word of it.
The door clicked shut, leaving him entirely alone in the suffocating silence of the hospital room.
Tears didn’t come.
Instead, a cold, terrifying clarity washed over him.
His mind flashed back to the wreckage.
The smell of sulfur.
The unnatural grin.
The solid black eyes.
Black eyes.
It wasn’t a drunk driver.
It wasn’t a freak accident.
It was a demon.
The realization hit him with the force of a physical blow.
He wasn’t in a normal world.
He hadn’t been reincarnated into an ordinary life.
He remembered a show he used to watch.
Even though the memories were blurry.
It was a world teeming with angels, demons, pagan gods, and monsters.
A world where two brothers drove around in a classic car, saving people and hunting things.
No one came to save him and his brother.
Where were the hunters when a demon possessed a trucker and decided to plow through a residential building for fun?
Where were the angels?
Where was God?
They were off playing their grand, cosmic game of chess, treating human lives like disposable pawns.
His brother the kindest, hardest-working person Leo had ever known was nothing but collateral damage.
A statistic on a police report.
An eyesore swept under the rug of the universe.
“Why…” Leo whispered, his voice trembling with a rage so profound it felt like it was burning him alive from the inside out.
“Why was I reborn…
just to be helpless again?”
Guilt gnawed at him.
Kai had spent his entire life protecting him, sacrificing his own future so Leo could have a normal one.
And what had Leo done?
He had played the good little human.
He had stayed weak.
“If only…” The words escaped his lips, dripping with venom.
“If only I wasn’t reborn in this world.
No…
if only these fake gods didn’t exist.”
He was entirely powerless.
A crippled orphan in a world run by monsters.
Hatred, pain, and a dark, spiraling desire to destroy everything consumed his mind.
He didn’t want justice.
Justice was a human concept.
He wanted to tear the sky down.
He wanted to rip the smug, black-eyed grins off their faces.
He wanted to slaughter the demons, the angels, and every single hunter who dared to call themselves a savior while letting people like Kai die in the rubble.
As he wallowed in this bottomless abyss of despair, the room temperature plummeted.
The television mounted on the wall flickered.
The news anchor’s face distorted, melting into static.
The hospital room lights buzzed violently before shattering entirely, plunging the room into absolute darkness.
A heavy, ominous pressure settled over him—a suffocating aura that felt like the concept of fear itself had materialized in the room.
“Rejoice!” A voice echoed not in the room, but directly inside his skull.
It was sharp yet heavy, loud yet soft, monotonous yet dripping with an unsettling, ancient excitement.
“You are finally worthy.”
From the shadows beside his bed, an entity materialized.
It had no distinct shape, just a coalescing mass of pure, malevolent energy.
A hand formed from the darkness, gripping Leo’s jaw with terrifying strength, forcing his mouth open.
Leo tried to thrash, tried to scream, but he was paralyzed.
The entity shoved something hard, gnarled, and tasting like rotting ash down his throat.
It held his mouth shut, pinching his nose until his lungs burned for air.
He swallowed.
The entity dissolved back into nothingness, releasing him.
Leo violently coughed, gasping for air as his heartbeat deafened him, thundering in his ears like war drums.
Then, the world ignited.
A surge of volcanic energy erupted from the pit of his stomach.
It wasn’t magic.
The information flowed right into his head.
It was Cursed Energy raw, negative, and overwhelmingly violent.
Every cell in his body vibrated.
The agonizing pain of his crushed ribs vanished.
The dull ache in his head cleared.
Beneath the sheets, the bandages on his right leg tore open from the inside.
Bone knitted together, muscle wove itself in an instant, and skin sealed over perfectly.
His leg was back.
He threw the sheets off and stood up.
He felt lighter, stronger, completely unbound by human limitations.
His vision sharpened, piercing the darkness of the room with absolute clarity.
A burning sensation crawled across his skin.
He walked over to the small mirror above the sink.
Intricate, dark markings had manifested across his face, creeping down his neck and chest like tribal tattoos.
But it was his eyes that made him freeze.
Below his normal eyes, two additional slits slowly opened, revealing a second pair of deep, crimson irises that blinked in unison with his own.
He didn’t feel possessed.
He felt awake.
For the first time in two lifetimes, he felt absolute, intoxicating control.
Floating in the air right beside his reflection, glowing with an ominous, blood-red light, were words:
«Kill Points: 0/100
The more you kill, the more points you shall receive.
The stronger the opponent, the higher the points.
The more destined the opponent, the higher the points.
Accumulate points to unlock the remaining Fingers of Sukuna.»
Leo stared at the prompt.
The King of Curses.
The peak of Jujutsu.
A slow, terrifying grin spread across Leo’s face, mirroring the demon driver who had taken everything from him.
But Leo’s smile wasn’t chaotic; it was a promise.
“A fated path?” Leo murmured, his voice layered with a strange, dark resonance.
He looked down at his hand, watching the cursed energy flicker between his fingers like black lightning.
“No.
Fate is just an excuse for the weak.
From now on…
I’m the one who decides who lives and who dies.”
He turned away from the mirror, grabbed his torn clothes, and stepped toward the window.
He had a world to cleanse.