Frantically, I scramble out of Gojo's bed and search for my underwear. He's only lying there, hands behind his head, watching me panic. I still hate him sometimes. Especially when I see the amusement in his face and the laughter on his lips. When I'm dressed only in pants and bra, I stem my hands into my hips and glare at him.
"Get dressed," I snap, tossing him his jacket. "If we get called at this hour, it must be something important."
"Or not." Gojo shrugs.
I sigh and put my jacket on, then walk over to the bed. I lean down to him, my nose softly touching his. "Please," I whisper, closing my eyes. "I don't want to go there without you."
Gojo holds me with his fingers at my chin and pulls me into a kiss. I melt into it, but it only lasted for a second before he pulled away and nodded. "I'll hurry."
We show up to the teacher's room fully dressed, and only when I see the stares from the others, who are all dressed in pajamas (!), do I realize our error. They're all dressed appropriately for this time of night. Gojo and I, however, both show up together, wearing the same things we wore hours ago. When we sit down next to Shoko, she stares at us with wide eyes.
I don't have the patience for that. "Look away," I say, maybe a bit too harshly. "I'm sure there's more important things going on than our outfits."
"We'll talk about this later?" she asks.
Turning my head to look at her, I nod. "Later," I assure her with a smile.
Yaga claps his hands. "Everyone here?" he asks, and after an unanswered second, he continues, "Good. Aikawa and Yamazaki didn't arrive back."
I knew it! They should have been back hours ago, but for anything under two hours, we don't worry. There could have been complications, or they found someone in need. But anything over two hours is cause for concern. Nothing goes wrong for more than two hours that they will return from.
"Some of our windows found their residuals, so I'm sending a rescue team out to get them. I want all of you back here with Yamazaki and Aikawa."
And I know he means dead or alive. Whatever we can find. As long as it's all of us. I'm not worried, though, when I look at Gojo. He's already tying his blindfold around his eyes, getting ready. A smile crosses my lips, and as if he felt it, he turns his head to me. We look at each other for a moment before Yaga continues to give us the details of where we have to go and what we might be up against.
"Don't let them fool you," he reminds us. "They'll present themselves as sorcerers who are searching for our men as well, but you here are the only sorcerers who are being sent out."
We nod. As I look around the room, I smile reassured. I know these people here like the back of my hand. They're friends by now, some even family, and I won't let a fraud get into my head. Yaga sends us off, and we all get up and ready to gather outside.
Shoko isn't coming, so we have to say our goodbyes in the hallway. I hug her, and she hugs me back even though she's not a big hugger. "Come back, yes?" she demands. "I need to hear about this situation of yours." She nods with her head over my shoulder.
Turning around, I see Gojo talking to Yaga, and I smile at Shoko. "Everything," I promise. "And I'm really not worried. I'll beat him this time."
Shoko laughs, then gives me a little push. I really appreciate it because otherwise I probably wouldn't have left so soon. I would have stood with her for a few more minutes, and I would have hated myself for putting her before two of our colleagues.
But I make it outside even before Gojo does, and I stand with Nanami while we wait for him, and then Takeru, to join us. My nerves are going crazy. There's eight sorcerers standing here in the darkness, me included, and we're all ready to find and rescue two of our own. As Gojo steps next to me, I can feel the back of his hand brushing mine, and sparks rush through me.
"I want my 5000 yen back," I whisper without looking up at him. He looks down at me. "I'll bet you 5000 yen that I'll find Aikawa and Yamazaki before you will."
He snorts. "Deal," he whispers. "I'll buy you dinner with my hard-earned 10000 yen tomorrow."
I narrow my eyes at him. "Dream on."
So when we get there, to an abandoned warehouse complex at Tokyo Bay, I immediately do my best to look for them. It's an extraordinary mission: there are no cursed spirits here, not even curse users. There's just... no one. Well, I mean, there probably is, but we just can't feel them because their cursed energy is too low. First, we move as a team, all close together, Gojo at the front.
But then he stops, pointing at one of the warehouses that's barely visible in the darkness. "This one is filled with cursed spirits. I'll take care of it. Split up and look through the others."
'Split up.' Well, that's something I like to say, not to hear. But fine. "I'll go with you," Takeru says to my left.
I nod wordlessly, and we all split up into pairs. Except for Gojo, who's about to take on ALL of the cursed spirits on his own, and Nanami, who doesn't like to be responsible for another person's life, which I can now fully understand. Takeru and I move silently and carefully, but fast. As I scan our surroundings, I suddenly get why they brought the cursed spirits here: to cover up any residuals that our sorcerers might have left. They wanted to get us here, but looking for them sends us right into a trap.
Before Takeru can open the door to the first warehouse, I stop him. "Be careful," I whisper, and he nods. Inside, there's only darkness. Darkness and an overwhelming amount of residuals. I wonder how they even found the spirits if they're just normal humans. What even is their goal here? Harvesting our cursed energy, okay, but what does that do? What do they want with it? The good thing about this job is that cursed spirits don't have a motive. You don't have to question why they're doing what they're doing. Humans, they're not so easy. They think, and you can never know why they think what they do.
We creep through the darkness, and I wish I had Gojo's eyes. Before I can react, someone stabs me in the side. I scream out and grab the darkness where the knife was coming from. My hand finds skin, and I squeeze, pulling whoever this is into the small light coming from outside. The man is thrashing with his free arm, trying to stab me again, but Takeru kicks him in the knee, dislocating it, and the man falls to the floor with a grunt, my hand still clenched around his forearm, twisting it.
"Takeru!" I shout when I spot the flash of another knife, and my colleague reacts just before the fake-sorcerer reaches him.
I take care of the man in front of me, pulling the knife out of my side, and using it kill him. Takeru has vanished into the darkness, and I can only hear grunts and groans, sounds of a fight. I follow the feeling of his cursed energy until I find him, my eyes trying so hard to see in the darkness. I pluck one of my own knives from my harness and get to Takeru's help. I find two more people hiding in the shadows, and one of them slices open my cheek. Nothing Shoko can't fix with a touch of her finger.
After minutes and minutes of fighting and bleeding and stabbing, silence is restored in the warehouse. When I pull him back into the light, I can see that my colleague is bleeding even worse than me from his upper arm and the side of his face, and there's a slash in his pants across the inside of his thighs. He can be glad that his attacker only caught his pants because there's an artery that's almost as important as in the neck or the wrists.
"Are you okay?" I ask him before we continue walking.
Takeru only nods. "You're bleeding," he tells me as if I didn't know that before.
I nod back and wipe the warm blood off my cheek. "It's nothing."
Only when we're sure that the warehouse is empty, we exit it. Sounds of fights echo around the space, combined with the sound of the waves close by. The warehouse that held the cursed spirits is gone. I don't know what Gojo did to it, but there's only a black stain on the ground where the warehouse stood. Looking around, I can't spot Gojo, so I focus on the residuals instead.
"There!" I exclaim when, amongst the cursed spirits and normal footsteps, I find two trails of cursed energy that definitely come from our colleagues.
Triumph fills my chest as I follow the trails, Takeru close behind me. It's hard not to lose the tracks amongst the maze of residuals, but they lead us into a warehouse somewhere in the middle. It doesn't look any different from the others, but something feels different. They're in here. And they're alive.
Takeru and I slowly push open the door. He's holding a gun, I'm holding a knive in each hand, and I immediately find a target. I fling one of my knives at a dark figure that moved in the shadows, but apparently don't hit anything because there's no scream and no sound of a falling body. It's eerily quiet in here.
"Hold on, don't shoot!" someone calls from the darkness. "I cleared in here. They're all dead. Don't shoot."
Takeru looks at me, and I slowly shake my head. This isn't a voice I recognize. He'll probably pretend to get closer to us so he we can see his face, but we won't let him. He gets close enough, he can hurt us. We don't know what weapons he's carrying, so us staying hidden in the darkness is a good strategy.
I pull out another knife to replace the one I'd just thrown as Takeru makes his way deeper into the warehouse. I stand still and wait for whoever to come at me. Which they do. Two men, huge, jump me from both sides. One gets a knife shoved between his ribs and immediately falls to the floor in a pool of blood, but the other one isn't going down that easily. I stab and stab, but he somehow doesn't care. Before I can stab him another time, he stops me by taking my hand in his and squeezing. The knife drops to the floor, and I'm pretty sure my hand is broken.
What am I even doing? This is a normal human, I'm a sorcerer. He's not even a competition. Once I realize that, he's dead seconds later. I run across the warehouse, into the corner opposite of the one Takeru went to. I fling two knives imbued with cursed energy, and they both find their target. Two men down. From the other side, I can hear Takeru taking down several people himself.
By now, my eyes have adjusted to the extreme darkness in here, and I can see the outlines of two figures in front of me. I skid to a halt and fall to my knees in front of Yamazaki and Aikawa, both tied down, gagged, and unconscious. Thrill and victory run through me, firstly because we found them and they're okay, and secondly because I found them first.