Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Red Fraction
09:37 JST
Staring out of the Gulfstream G550’s window, I rubbed my eyes and let out a wide yawn. My ears popped a couple times as I worked my jaw, then I slipped my headphones back on and resumed listening to the bubbly early-2000s pop music that filled most of my playlist.
If my ears were popping, then the plane was landing soon. Thank god.
A direct flight from LAX to Tokyo Haneda Airport was murder, even if I’d slept through most of it, and my legs were begging to be released onto the comfort of solid ground. Of course, solid ground came with its own complications, but I’d burn that bridge when I came to it.
After a couple seconds of gazing out at the Tokyo skyline as we approached the airport, I reached down and fished the ID card out of my breast pocket to glance over it again. Despite all the text being in Japanese, I could read it just fine.
Name: Mercer Reina
DOB: 24/01/1991
Rank: Grade 2
I was a brand-new sorcerer, barely discovered by the Jujutsu Headquarters before they bundled me onto a plane bound for Tokyo and enrolled me in Jujutsu Tech, and my rank was already Grade 2. Apparently, there was some politicking between the Jujutsu authorities of America and Japan, over who would actually get to ‘claim’ me. The American sorcery authorities were… well, minuscule. They had a dozen Grade 1 sorcerers, most of whom were apparently inexperienced and relatively weak for that grade.
Compared to Japan, boasting several times that number as well as the only known Special Grade sorcerers, America was a small player on the Jujutsu stage. It was all thanks to Tengen’s barriers, centralizing Cursed Energy within Japan and preventing high-grade curses from forming elsewhere. When a powerful sorcerer popped up, the Japanese higher-ups often had first dibs.
Couple that with my mother being Japanese, and they practically plucked me right off the mean streets of LA and shoved me onto the plane.
What I couldn’t understand was why they wanted me in the same class as Satoru Gojo, Suguru Geto, and Shoko Ieiri. All three were geniuses in their own right, and my Technique was…
I glanced down at the tablet on my lap, blinking with a ten-digit keypad and boldly displaying the form of an RQ-21 Blackjack beside it.
Well, my Technique was no Limitless or Ten Shadows. I could summon drones as shikigami, through the medium of a military-grade tablet that looked suspiciously like the killstreak tablet from one of the Modern Warfare remakes.
Drones that didn’t even exist yet, outside of my Technique. Thus far, it was the Black Hornet 4 and RQ-21 Blackjack, both unarmed reconnaissance drones, neither of which would see their first flights for at least half a decade. While I could theoretically summon as many as I wanted to, I still needed to create and “fuel” them through my Cursed Energy, meaning there was a soft limit unless I wanted to have multi-day downtimes between combat.
Aside from the relatively-weak drones, I was an American, therefore my main striking power was a tricked-out assault rifle I had acquired through somewhat dubious means. Not for the first time, I thanked my lucky stars that the Jujutsu higher-ups had allowed me to bring my equipment from America.
I yawned again, tucking my ID back into my breast pocket and letting the tablet fade into… wherever the hell it went when I wasn’t using it. If I had to guess, it was the same metaphysical hangar-space as the drones, considering that it was connected so deeply with my Technique.
“Miss Mercer, we will be landing shortly.” Said one of the assistant managers from a nearby seat, as she buckled herself in and adjusted her tie, “I’ve also been informed that the other first-year students will be meeting you at the airport, as well as your teacher, Yaga-sensei.”
“I’ll try not to fall flat on my face, then.” I quietly replied with a wry smile, removing my headphones and pausing the music on my iPod. It was a last-gen model, but perfectly serviceable for my purposes.
The Tokyo skyline got closer, closer, until it became water and runway-
THUD.
I gripped the sides of my seat with a grunt, then waited for the rumbling and shaking to stop. Flaps and panels extended from the wings, bleeding off speed within seconds of making touchdown until we were traveling at school-zone speeds.
Rather than heading towards one of the terminals of the airport itself, the Gulfstream diverted off to one of the private hangars, one marked with a nondescript corporate logo that was probably a shell company for Jujutsu HQ.
A couple dozen people in standard work equipment quickly surrounded the aircraft as soon as we pulled into the hangar, and I almost thought they were a bunch of non-sorcerers before I caught their Cursed Energy signatures. No, they were Windows. A whole crew of Windows just to support a single private jet for Jujutsu HQ.
With a snort, I tucked my iPod and headphones into my duffel bag’s side pocket.
What an absurd place this was.
—
09:44 JST
It had been a couple months since the term started, and Shoko Ieiri still wasn’t sure what to think of her classmates. Satoru Gojo was… definitely one of the sorcerers of all time, with an ego to befit his self-declared title of ‘The Strongest’, while Suguru Geto happened to actually be reasonable half the time.
When he wasn’t getting dragged into bullshit by Gojo, that is.
The two had started out practically hating each other, but now they were close friends.
And now they were getting a new classmate, a half-American with a shikigami Technique. Reina Mercer, born in Tokyo but discovered on the streets of Los Angeles by an American Window who found her fighting a Grade 2 curse with nothing but guns and a shikigami that couldn’t even attack. Apparently, she had exorcised the curse with no injuries.
Yet another badass, to go with Gojo and Geto. At this point, the entire school would be Special Grades in the making, save for Shoko. It stung, just a bit.
When the Gulfstream jet pulled into the hangar, Shoko was sitting on the hood of the sedan and rolling an unlit cigarette around in her mouth just to pass the time. Yaga unfortunately had a consistent habit of snatching her cigs and tossing them in the garbage if she actually lit up.
“You think she’d let me have a go at shooting a gun?” Gojo asked out of the blue, and Geto sighed in response. With a pout, the taller boy said, “I’m serious!”
Geto rolled his eyes and slowly said, “Guns aren’t toys, Satoru. None of us even know how to use them.”
The boarding ramp opened after the engines began winding down, first revealing a pair of assistant managers who wordlessly hefted duffle bags down the stairs, then a black-haired girl wearing a modified Jujutsu Tech uniform appeared at the top of the steps. She wore a female uniform with a pleated skirt, lengthened to go down just below her knees.
Her eyes, a shimmering sort of amber-color, flicked between the three first-years as she shouldered a duffle bag of her own. Mercer’s features had a distinctly cold western sharpness to them, blended together with Japanese ancestry, and her curly black hair was pulled back in a low ponytail. After a second, she began quietly descending the steps, coming to a stop in front of Yaga.
“Welcome to Japan.” Yaga greeted her levelly with a small, curt bow, “My name is Masamichi Yaga, I’ll be your homeroom teacher.”
“Reina Mercer. It’s a pleasure.” She returned the bow hesitantly, as if she wasn’t quite sure how to do it, before straightening up and fidgeting with her ponytail. Her accent was a bit strange, comfortably fluent yet still tinged with just a hint of something else. Probably American-English, if Shoko had to guess.
Of course, Gojo was the first one to fill the silence with a cheery, “Yo, I’m Satoru Gojo!”
Surprisingly, he didn’t even make a crack about being the strongest. Was he coming down with an illness or something?
“Suguru Geto. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” The other boy gave her an easy smile.
Oh, shit, it was Shoko’s turn. She cleared her throat and awkwardly said, “Shoko Ieiri. Uh, how was your flight?”
Mercer seemed to deflate with a long, pitiful groan, “God-awful, I hate flying international! A Gulfstream’s better than a 747, but not by much!”
It might have been Shoko’s imagination, but Yaga’s lips seemed to twitch just a bit as he said, “You can commiserate over your travel woes on the way to Jujutsu Tech. There are a few entry assessments to go through, then a practical exam, so we don’t have time to waste."
“...By ‘practical exam’, do you mean me fighting for my life?” Mercer hesitantly asked, raising a bombastic eyebrow.
“Something like that.”
—
09:51 JST
Once I got my bag stowed in the black sedan’s trunk, Yaga took the wheel and Gojo called shotgun, while I piled into the back with Ieiri and Geto. The assistant managers had their own car, into which they chucked the bags with the rest of my gear, so I wouldn’t need to try and fit almost two hundred pounds of assorted guns and ammunition into a sedan with four other people in it.
“Before we get to Jujutsu Tech, I have to ask you something, Mercer.” Yaga spoke, steering the car out of the hangar with smooth, practiced motions, “Why did you decide to become a sorcerer?”
Shit, he was asking that question now? He wasn’t the principal yet, so I probably wouldn’t be expelled if my answer was bad, but still…
I took a deep breath in, then sighed. Fuck emotional vulnerability, all my homies hate emotional vulnerability.
“Asking me to choose between being a sorcerer or staying in Los Angeles is like asking me to choose between getting a million dollars tax-free or having my femurs broken in an alleyway by a thirty-six year old white man named Cleetus.” I said, propping my head up with a hand and ignoring the snickering from Gojo as I stared out of the window, “Coming here means I get guaranteed employment, room and board, and a six-digit salary if I can get strong. All of that is better than living on the streets in LA. That’s all there is to it.”
Right beside me, Ieiri held in a snrk, covering her mouth and poorly concealing her smile at my joke.
“So, you’d put your life on the line, just for a salary?” Yaga raised an eyebrow in the rear-view mirror.
“I was already putting my life on the line in LA, just to get by. At least I’ll get paid half-decently as a proper sorcerer.” I retorted, “I’ll live the rest of my life as I want and I’ll die without regrets, because even if being a sorcerer gets me killed, I got paid six figures to blow shit up at some point in my life.”
“Hah, Suguru, the new girl’s a riot!” Gojo crowed, slapping his knee hysterically.
Geto snorted, not dignifying that with a response.
Rolling my eyes, I grumbled at the so-called Honored One, “The day I snap, you’re the first to go.”
He only howled louder until Yaga chopped him on the head and growled, “Children, behave yourselves.”
I’d just met these people, yet it felt so… easy to let down my guard around them. They weren’t just two-dimensional characters on a screen being animated by some overworked MAPPA femboy in kneesocks operating on two hours of sleep and fifteen coffees. Just like everyone else in the world, they were people. People who had such an easy dynamic that it only felt a little awkward to enter it as the new girl from overseas.
Despite myself, I smiled just a bit.
—
11:13 JST
“So, do we get to see the guns now?”
I rolled my eyes at Satoru Gojo for the twentieth time as I unzipped my bag and said, “Yes, you get to see one of my guns. No, I’m not handing you a loaded fucking firearm. I’m American, not stupid.”
After the initial entry assessments were done, Yaga had done us the favor of setting up a table near Tokyo Jujutsu Tech’s long-defunct outdoor archery range, for me to stage my weaponry and do a little show-and-tell session. Apparently, he trusted the other three enough to leave us unattended while he handled some kind of meeting, which was touching but also somewhat concerning.
“Reinaaaaa, I’m the Strongest, I can handle a gun!” The white-haired menace wheedled, hands in his pockets, “If a Grade 2 like you can handle one, I’ll be just fine!”
“He’s lying, he can’t.” Ieiri helpfully cut in.
“Shoko, you little Judas-!” Gojo grumbled as he made faux-grabby motions toward her that she quickly dodged and fled from. The two idiots scuffled for a few seconds before I cleared my throat conspicuously, and they both separated with innocent whistles.
God, this really was a clown parade. And what did that make me, the junior clown apprentice?
With a sigh, I opened my bag properly and withdrew the customized FN F2000 assault rifle from inside, keeping the barrel pointed at the sky while I opened the action and racked the bolt to show clear.
“This is my usual weapon, the F2000. It costs more than most Americans make in a month and they don’t sell it to civilians, which is why I genuinely cannot afford to lose it. I’d rattle off the specs but I don’t think any of you understand or care. In general terms, it shoots a relatively small bullet at relatively high speeds, and I have thirty shots before I need to reload.” I explained, to appropriate ooh-ing and aah-ing from the three other students, “It’s a good weapon for lefties like me, because it ejects the casings forward instead of directly into my fucking face, and it’s compact enough to fit in a backpack without unnecessary suspicion if I take the suppressor off. As for the suppressor, that’s the tube on the front, it makes the gun quieter. Questions, comments, concerns? Do you guys even care about this?”
“I, for one, find it interesting, and we do need to know what you can do if we want to fight alongside you.” Geto said, before a thought seemed to strike him and he asked, “Ah, how does the size of the bullet impact things like fighting curses?”
“I… don’t actually know, I haven’t encountered any curses strong enough to shrug off more than a magazine or so.” I admitted with a shrug. Curses tended to die when shot, and I hadn’t really spent much time pondering the effects of stopping power on them that much.
Ieiri cut in with a tilted head, “So, why don’t normal sorcerers get guns? If they’re so effective, shouldn’t sorcerers be using these all the time?”
“I guess gun laws are stricter here, iunno.” I shrugged again, “It’s not even that hard to imbue Cursed Energy into them, it’s just a pretty basic trick. If I had to guess, it’s societal stigma combined with it being near-impossible to get decent weaponry in Japan.”
“Well, guns are pretty weak if you get into higher levels of combat.” Gojo nonchalantly declared with a smug-ass grin, “You know, one guy actually tried using one on me.”
“I can guess how that went.” I deadpanned.
Really, I could. Some poor fucker unloading an entire magazine into Satoru Gojo, only for every single bullet to hit Infinity and do fuck-all, while the arrogant bastard himself had even odds of just beating the shit out of the fucker or using Blue to Power Word: Scrunch his ass.
That was why I couldn’t imagine myself rivaling him at all. Satoru Gojo simply existed in a different realm from me. Relying on firearms was a weakness at the levels a Special Grade Sorcerer was expected to fight at.
Gojo got even smugger until Geto slyly declared, “Stay bulletproof all you want, Satoru, it doesn’t change you stumbling over your feet in our spar last saturday.”
“Oh we’re just throwing out fighting words now, huh!? Still doesn’t keep me from trashing your ass whenever we fight for real!” He retorted, Cursed Energy shifting dangerously as he leaned forward to jeer at Geto.
It took barely a twitch to trigger the two into lunging at each other.
A groan escaped the only other girl in the class as she rubbed her eyes tiredly, “Oh my god, they do this every fucking daaaay…”
“This is normal? Deadass?” I gave her a wide-eyed look.
God, they were belligerent in the anime, but these two were even worse in reality.
“Yeah, no, a good day is one where those two knuckleheads don’t wreck half the school.” Ieiri confirmed, heaving a long sigh before cupping her hands to her mouth and shouting at Gojo and Geto, “Hey, nerds! If you keep fighting, you’re gonna miss Mercer’s awesome gun demonstration!”
Rather a bit flatteringly, they froze, quickly composing themselves as if they hadn’t been fully ready to run the ones in an archery range that hadn’t been used for the past five years.
I gave them a deadpan look as I said, “And y’all are supposed to be older than me?”
“Age doesn’t equal maturity, I’ve come to realize.” Geto smoothly replied.
“...Alright, whatever, I wanna shoot a gun and then eat some lunch.” I huffed, fishing a 30-round metal STANAG magazine out of my bag and slotting it into the F2000 before racking the bolt, “The suppressor makes it quieter, but it’s still a loud motherfucker, so either reinforce your ears or cover them.”
I did the former, circulating Cursed Energy to my ears as I spotted the paper target haphazardly mounted at the end of the archery range. It was a pretty standard silhouette-type target, so I centered the rifle’s holographic sight over it and squeezed the trigger twice.
Two loud SNAPs rang out, punching a small hole through the chest of the target.
Another two came half a second later, then another two after that. The ejection tube at the front of the gun flicked open and spat out a steaming brass casing that spun end over end before landing on the gravel.
“Huh, not bad!” Gojo commented, leaning forward to squint at the target, “I almost lost track of the bullets!”
I switched the selector to full-auto, took aim at the center, and held down the trigger until the magazine ran dry with an echoing CLICK. A line of holes stitched their way up the target until the last three shots landed directly on the silhouette’s forehead, and I smoothly removed the empty magazine while tilting the gun forward to empty its ejection tube.
“Anything else you want me to show-and-tell, while we’re here?” I asked the others, racking the F2000’s charging handle a few times to clear it before I set the weapon down.
Gojo hummed, tilting his head like a cat sizing up his next meal, “Y’know, those crusty old elders made some kinda fuss about your Technique, said it might be Special Grade depending on your shikigami. I wanna see what that’s all about.”
“...Gojo, I don’t know what they told you, but I can summon drones. They can’t even attack.” I deadpanned, letting my tablet drop into my hands with a sigh, “But sure, whatever. My Technique is called Machines Of War, it allows me to unlock various forms of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. They function mostly like shikigami, except for the fact that they’re not organic. Once I’ve unlocked a type, I can create multiple examples of it within a fifth-dimensional hangar-space, where I expend Cursed Energy to fuel them before deploying them either through an incantation and mnemonic hand-motion or through this tablet.”
Tapping in an eight-digit code with the tablet’s stylus, I swept the faux-pen over a dozen icons before tapping the [DEPLOY] button, and a dozen Black Hornet mini-drones shimmered into a hovering formation.
“That’s the Black Hornet 4 PRS, a mini-scale recon drone with a basic high-strength camera. I can sustain a couple dozen of them, and they’re good for infiltrating buildings. They can’t really do much else.” I explained, piloting them through a few basic maneuvers around myself.
Of course, Gojo had the audacity to pout, “Really? Man, that’s so weak… They don’t even explode, or anything? I thought you Americans had drones that shot missiles and bombs and stuff.”
“Yeah, well, not all of us can win the genetic lottery and get the Unkillable God Superpowers, but now that you mention the idea of exploding drones…” I trailed off.
God damnit, had this idiot actually stumbled onto something? I usually charged my drones to full capacity using my Cursed Energy, but overcharging them…
Locking eyes with one of my Black Hornets, I felt at its Cursed Energy battery, then gestured towards the paper target at the end of the range. The drone zipped forward, greedily absorbing all of the energy I flooded it with until it hit the target and-
BOOM!
I flinched and took a step back, then a grin spread across my face. The target had been reduced to scraps of paper floating to the ground, and a small burnmark scarred the surface below it.
“Thanks, Gojo. Now I’ve got kamikaze drones.” I cheekily declared, already feeling the destroyed drone returning to its hangar-space to be repaired by my Cursed Energy.
“Don’t inflate his ego even further…” Geto groaned, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
Of course, it was that particular moment that Yaga arrived.
His eyes flicked back and forth between me, the target-that-was, my remaining eleven drones, and Gojo.
“...I was going to give Mercer her schedule, but now I want to know who brought grenades to what was supposed to be a simple bonding demonstration.”
Of course, I resorted to my only recourse.
“Gojo gave me the idea!”
“Wha-!? I just said it was lame that they couldn’t explode! You’re the one who decided to make it go boom!”
“And you still gave me the idea, therefore it’s your fault! I’m fourteen, I’ve got no impulse control!”
“Children, enough!”
We went quiet with a near-inaudible eep.