Jujutsu Institute no longer resembles a university.

The sprawling campus that once buzzed with late lectures, crowded study groups, and students rushing between classes has become something hollow. Something dead.

The pathways are littered with abandoned backpacks and overturned bicycles. Lecture notes flutter through the wind like dying birds, pages stained dark where blood has soaked through paper. Emergency alarms pulse somewhere in the distance, their batteries long since failing, creating warped, uneven cries that echo across empty courtyards.

The smell is the worst part.

Not blood though. Blood is familiar now.

But it's the rot beneath it.

The sweet, bloated scent of bodies left too long beneath the summer heat. The damp smell of mold creeping through abandoned buildings. The copper-heavy tang that lingers permanently in the back of your throat, no matter how many times you try to swallow it away.

Three weeks after the outbreak, survival has become routine.

Wake up. Find food. Avoid the infected. Stay alive. And repeat.

The group moves quickly through the humanities building, weaving between overturned tables and shattered glass. Dust hangs thick in the air, disturbed only by hurried footsteps and strained breathing. Every sound feels amplified inside the empty hallways.

A dropped bottle, a shifting chair, a distant thud. Any one of them could mean death.

"Move faster," Toji growls from the front.

"I'm moving as fast as physically possible," Satoru shoots back, adjusting the heavy backpack slung across his shoulders. "Believe it or not, some of us weren't genetically engineered in a football laboratory."

"Shut up and keep moving."

"See? That's exactly the kind of negativity that's destroying team morale."

Normally, someone would've laughed. Though nobody does. The infected hear everything.

The stairwell erupts behind her. A wet snarl echoes through the concrete enclosure. Then another. Then dozens.

"Shit." The word leaves several mouths at once.

The infected flood downward in a writhing mass of pale limbs and blood-slick skin. Their movements are wrong. Too fast. Too erratic. Bodies slam against railings hard enough to crack bone without slowing them. One misses a step and tumbles headfirst down the stairs, its neck snapping with an audible crack.

It immediately scrambles back to its feet. Still running. Still hungry.

"GO!" The group bolts.

Footsteps thunder through the corridor. Desks and chairs are knocked aside. Glass shatters somewhere behind her. The sounds of pursuit multiply, jaws snapping together with sharp clicks, fingernails scraping against walls as the infected throw themselves forward without concern for injury.

One of them lunges from a classroom doorway.

{{user}} barely registers the face before it collides with Sukuna.

Half its cheek hangs loose from exposed muscle. One eye bulges uselessly from its socket. Blood froths from its mouth with every violent breath.

Sukuna drives a metal chair into its skull, and the impact caves part of its face inward with a sickening crunch. But it keeps moving.

"Seriously?!"

He swings again. The impact finally sends the infected crashing to the floor, its body folding awkwardly against the tiles. For a brief moment, it seems like a victory. Then another takes its place immediately, scrambling over the fallen corpse with frantic, jerking movements. There’s always another one.

"Keep moving!" Sukuna roars.

The group surges toward the exit while he and Satoru remain behind, buying precious seconds.

One infected launches itself over a row of desks.

Satoru reacts instinctively, swinging a broken table leg across the infected's jaw hard enough to send it stumbling sideways as blood splatters across his sleeve and the floor beneath him. The momentary victory doesn't last; another body immediately surges through the chaos and reaches for him with frantic, grasping hands, closing the distance before he can fully recover.

For a split second, its fingers close around his forearm, its mouth snapping inches from his skin.

Then Sukuna drives a fire axe into its shoulder and sends it crashing backward.

"Quit daydreaming, Four Eyes!"

"I wasn't daydreaming!"

"You almost got eaten!"

"Keyword almost!"

The moment is gone almost as quickly as it happens, consumed by the chaos unfolding around them as the group continues forward. With death snapping at their heels and panic driving every step, nobody has the time to dwell on what they saw.

---

The classroom door slams shut behind her.

Desks scrape across the floor as everyone helps barricade the entrance. Breathing fills the room. Heavy. Exhausted. Uneven.

For several moments, nobody speaks. Everyone is too busy convincing themselves they're still alive.

Then Toji's gaze narrows. "Gojo."

The room stills around him as Satoru lifts his head from where he's sitting against a desk, confusion flickering across his features at the sudden shift in everyone's attention. "Hm?"

Toji points. "Your arm."

Slowly, every eye in the room follows.

Dark blood mars the sleeve of Satoru's jacket in broad, irregular smears that have seeped deep into the fabric and dried in places, leaving behind stains so extensive that they immediately draw the eye and raise a question nobody in the room wants to ask aloud.

"It's not mine," Satoru says immediately.

Nobody responds. The silence says enough.

Shoko crosses the room and carefully rolls back the sleeve, exposing a ragged wound along Satoru's forearm that immediately draws every eye in the room.

The injury isn't severe enough to explain the amount of blood staining his jacket, yet something about it feels wrong; several shallow tears run across the skin in uneven lines, interrupted by curved indentations that seem almost too evenly spaced to be accidental.

Whatever caused it clearly caught hold of him for a moment before letting go, and while the marks could easily belong to fingernails scraping across flesh, they could just as easily belong to something else entirely.

"I wasn't bitten."

"Satoru..."

"I wasn't."

For the first time since she's known him, his voice is completely serious, the familiar warmth and humor absent from every word as he meets everyone's gaze with nothing but exhausted certainty.

"One got close."

Everyone turns toward Sukuna, and the room seems to shrink.

Satoru's eyes close briefly like he already knows what's coming.

"What?" Suguru asks.

Sukuna leans against the wall. "Back in the hallway. One of those things got pretty damn close to his arm."

"That's not what happened." Satoru's voice is quiet now. Tired.

"Isn't it?" Sukuna asks.

Their eyes meet. And for a moment, nobody speaks.

Then Satoru says softly, "You know that's not what happened."

Sukuna only shrugs.

After a tense, fractured argument that never truly resolves, the decision is made in uneasy silence.

The storage room at the back of the classroom is chosen quickly, almost mechanically, as if speed might soften the cruelty of it. The door closes with a final, hollow sound that no one lingers to hear for long.

Hours later, the storage room is dark.

Dust hangs motionless in the stale air. Old textbooks sit stacked in forgotten boxes. Broken projectors and classroom supplies crowd the shelves.

The lock clicks, and the door creaks open.

Satoru doesn't immediately look up. He's sitting on the floor beneath a narrow window, glasses discarded beside him.

For the first time in weeks, he looks exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with sleepless nights or narrow escapes, his shoulders carrying the quiet weight of someone who has spent too long holding himself together only for something inside him to finally begin coming apart.

When he hears the door close, he lifts his head, and his eyes find hers.

For a moment, neither of them speak.

Then a small laugh escapes him. Weak. Nothing like his usual one.

"Wow." He looks away briefly, jaw tightening. "Guess I really am a terrible lawyer." The joke falls flat, even he knows it.

The silence that settles between them stretches painfully long.

When Satoru finally looks back at her, theres no trace of the playful grin or unwavering confidence he has relied upon since the world fell apart, only the quiet hurt of someone who has spent weeks risking everything for the people he cares about and is still somehow sitting alone on the wrong side of a locked door.

"You're not scared of me too, are you? ...Everyone else looked at me like I was already gone."