Well, she's not just going to let the boys go in alone, now is she? They might go and do something incredibly stupid.

In she steps.

It only takes a few steps for the first thing to go wrong.

"Wait!" says Fushiguro, extending an arm to the side to block the path of his partners. The reason is clear enough: the two-story block seems to have been extended into a veritable skyscraper, repetitions of cells and walls and piping in ever-more-bizarre rearrangements as they go farther and farther up. "Fuck. Another Domain." He shuts his eyes, turns around, and opens them again. "And the door is gone." As is, indeed, the wall; they are right in the center of an open space, the hallway they just walked through nowhere in sight.

"Ohhohohono, and the Domain is brand new. I do believe we woke the baby up. Which way's the edge, I can't—quite—tell."

"He can," says Fushiguro, pointing at the dog. "I am making an executive decision. This mission is a failure; we are looking for the exit now."

Oh wow okay he's hot when he takes control, too. "Yes, Senpai!"

Hayashi gives a firm nod.

Exit! Exitexitexitexit, they should not have walked in here in the first place, Ijichi said 'trust your instincts' and she didn't and she's a dumbass. Which way is the exit, doggo, Hayashi would like out of here right this instant.

Not very close, given how the dog immediately starts leading the way farther into this maze. Not too quickly—if they're sprinting they will tire themselves out and become easy targets for the curse—but at a reasonable clip.

They arrive at a courtyard, and if it wasn't clear that they should leave before it definitely is now. There are three corpses, if you can call them that: one of them is missing an arm and the entire lower body, and the other two are piles of bones, dried skin, and destroyed organs with some scraps of clothing visible here and there, only recognisable as two corpses by the presence of two skulls.

Itadori takes a few steps closer, then covers his mouth. "Found Tadashi," he says, softly, pointing at the less destroyed of the corpses, whose shirt indeed has an ID tag with his name.

Thanks, she hates it.

"Here's hoping they had quick deaths with a minimum of suff—"

And then the floor eats her and she's gone.

"—Hayashi!" How—the dog should have noticed the curse—

"Fu-Fushiguro," says Itadori in a trembling voice, pointing at a wall, where the white dog's head seems to have embedded itself somehow.

Fushiguro takes a few steps towards Itadori and says, "We are running. Now. We need to get ou—"

His mouth stops moving. His muscles all stop. He can't move—he can barely move—he looks to his right, to see what he knows is already there—

The curse is—at the same time the most and least humanoid he's ever seen. Bipedal, with four eyes along strange ridges on its head.

Right. There.

He can't move. The aura of wrongness, the presence, it's more overwhelming than anything he's ever felt—

It's more overwhelming than Sukuna. No—Sukuna was definitely holding his aura back. This thing—isn't. It's not as strong as Sukuna, but it's a special grade, and he cannot—he can't—he needs to—move—

Move move move he needs to move he needs to—do something—he has to—has to—

It happens faster than Fushiguro can track. Itadori is standing there, as frozen as he is, but then something clicks, something changes in his face, and he grabs his cleaver by the handle and tries to cut the curse, to do anything, to break this spell—but it happens so fast he doesn't see the curse move, barely sees Itadori move, all he sees is Itadori there, at the end of the motion, arm extended where he tried to cut it—

—and his left hand is gone. He didn't see it, barely felt it. He tried to move, tried to cut, and—the thing—the thing was too fast. He's frozen again, but he hears the wet plop sound of his detached hand falling to the ground behind him, launched by the creature's strength, followed by the clink sound of the cleaver that hand had been holding as it hits the floor.

"I... ta... dori..."

Itadori's hand—sliced off—just—just like that—?

So, this is a familiar feeling. The exact same one she had when she landed in the cursed croc's domain. Well, this was obvious in retrospect. Of course the one female sorcerer would be a curse summoning beacon in the detention center for male inmates. And then, of course, if you're separating sorcerers, you'd pick the one most likely to be dogpiled by every single goddamn curse made out of even a trace of sexual frustration.

God, she's so stupid. So incredibly, enormously stupid. This is not how she did things when she was on her own. If it were, she would be dead now. She might be a dead woman walking. Apparently being surrounded by pretty boys makes her forget some basic fucking lessons, like 'think about the place you're going into before you do, so you have an idea of what to expect' and 'you can always just not go.' Apparently she thinks being in school means that the higher ups always know better than she does. That her gut saying that this risk is not worth it, that this is stupid, that something's not right, that this is a trap, is something to be ignored because someone told you to.

The curse woke up the minute they stepped inside the cell block. Who's one of their trio that is one tenth of a set of cursed objects? Who is likely to activate any nearby fingers of a certain King of Curses? Why would anyone want to send Itadori, the brand new baby sorcerer with a giant target on his back, into a barrier holding a curse that's potentially on the edge of metamorphosing into something very, very nasty? When he's part of a matched goddamn set? Most of which is at large? Yeah. This was a fucking trap.

The worst part is, it was made by her own side.

And now here she is, surrounded and outnumbered by intelligent curses that would like very much to make her life short and miserable.

"Fine, assholes," she says, drawing her needles and unsheathing her fan's blade. "But for the record, you're trapped in here with me."

The curses surounding her—should know better. But they don't, and they attack, and she very much should be a higher grade sorcerer than 3.

"No."

"If I die, you die with me!"

He's wrapped his arm with his belt to stop the bleeding, but it hurts and he knows it won't be enough, if only he could—convince—Sukuna—

"Correction: the fractions of me in this body die with you. I still have eighteen other fragments of my soul scattered around. I'll be fine." He chuckles a bit, the sound reverberating through Itadori's body. "But if you want to switch with me, go ahead and switch. I'll make sure you regret it. Maybe I'll start with your pretty boyfriend, here, make him wish he had never met you before he dies. And the woman? She and I are going to have some fun."

"I'll never let you do that."