ꜱᴜʙᴊᴜɢᴀᴛᴇᴅ | [ᴛᴏᴊɪ ᴢᴇɴ'ɪɴ 𝙭 ʀᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ 𝙭 ᴠᴀʀɪᴏᴜꜱ]

Fushiguro

Trigger warning: gore / character death.

Slow. They're always so fucking slow.

— ☾—

Toji's eyes shone bright with unnatural light, for the realm in which he had found himself was a haze, no depth, no sense of perspective, no shadow.

North, South, East or West, all directions were rendered meaningless and futile under the dim, white vapors that coated the cursed colorless echo chamber. Even sound became entirely absorbed by the molecules that wafted idly within the viscous, moist airspace.

It was like being immersed within a sensory deprivation bubble, the only tangible plane he could perceive was that which existed below him, on which his feet were solidly rooted upon.

A Shadowless Haze.

Toji hurled a verbal curse under his breath and wiped his mouth with the rugged back of his hand. 

The brume continued to hang low and oppressive, inert. Time trickled by, or so it seemed. It was difficult to tell how it migrated, if it did at all, for nothing moved and everything remained suspended in a continuous, conditional and static delay.  

Nothing occurred.

His tongue flickered purposefully over the arch of his thin lip, all senses keened into a raptorial ecstasy. And it finally hit him. The technique was incomplete. It was merely a poorly executed attempt at a true spherical realm, hence the unnatural illusion of a horizonless distortion.

Every highborn member of the three great clans knew of the Gojou's family techniques - the Limitless, the Immeasurable Void. Survivors in bygone Era's, Era's when the clans had clashed and were in a perennial state of warfare for supremacy, had recounted their surreal experience of the Unlimited Void, that metaphysical space that caused the victims to receive all kinds of stimuli and information endlessly and on repeat.

But this domain wasn't it. It was far from it. Toji could sense it, his ultra-fine intuition and superphysical instinct knew that the traveler's domain was not of the Gojou's heritage. So the Zen'in relaxed.

"Heh, watch'a gonna do, blind man? Hit me with your hokeypokey?"-and then his mouth cracked into a cut-throat grin, his predatory glare glinting with amusement-"Ya can't even see me let alone strike me, ya rancid little bugger."

But then the unthinkable occurred, as was the way of things: the unthinkable always seemed to occur.

A vague, indefinite quaking expanded below him, the vibrations rocking through the soles of his feet - sensations like the shifting of a continent , so vast in their rippling extent they consummated everything. 

The world seemed to transit beneath him, askance and sideways in a weirdly oblique displacement, though it was near impossible to discern any sense topography in this vacuous, veiled hyper-space. And the sound that propagated from this incomprehensible terraformation: a slick, damp roaring. It was the sound a billion festering worms would generate if they were to drive through decaying wood under an irregular pulse.

"If the term Moist were to make a sound, it would be this."-he chuntered sardonically, eyes swivelling in every trajectory and along the twists and turns of his curse-deprived mind could compute, his own body raring to tear the place to smithereens.

And then it appeared.

First as a source of jaundiced light, a slit into the reticence through which seeped photons that cut their way into the murky suspension only to be consumed and transformed into cursed energy - an odd transformation between fields of energy, physical and metaphysical.