"And it's... definitely just five people?" verifies Hayashi, her brow furrowed. "Is one of them a, a VIP, the kid of someone powerful, or something?"

"...no, not as far as I know," says Ijichi, furrowing his brows.

"Excuse me! Excuse me, please!" cries a voice from behind them where a few Jujutsu Tech employees have set a perimeter for civilians. "Is Tadashi there? He wasn't evacuated—"

    "Please stand back, ma'am! It's not safe!" says one of the employees.

"Is—is my son Tadashi alright?" she asks, voice wavering. "Please, I must know—"

    "Ma'am, please, it's dangerous there—"

Ijichi watches this, his frown deepening, and tells the students, under his breath, "She's a guardian who was here for a visit." Then, turning to the woman: "Please step away. There's a possibility that someone has spread poisonous gas throughout the center."

The woman covers her mouth with her hands, eyes widening.

"We cannot share any more details at this time," adds Ijichi.

"No..." she says, falling to her knees and covering the rest of her face, although the tears now falling free are evident anyway. "Why? Why is this happening?" she asks, before breaking into openly sobbing.

Hayashi looks at the woman with an impassive expression, then looks away.

"I don't like this," she says, very quietly. "At all. Three young and vulnerable sorcerers for five detainees? The ratio's wrong. Maybe we impressed somebody with the crocodile curse opener? But I still really don't like this. ... That said, if we are going to go in, we need to do it sooner rather than later, and make this as fast as possible."

Nod.

Ijichi leads the way to the appropriate block and says, "Be careful." He raises his left hand to eye level, thumb, index, and middle fingers pointing up, ring and little fingers folded down. "I'll put up my veil." He shuts his eyes. "Emerge from darkness, blacker than darkness. Purify that which is impure." As soon as he finishes talking, a dome of darkness emerges from above the entire facility, turning the rainy afternoon into a rainy night.

"Oh, like the one from the other day," says Itadori, looking up and out at it. "What does it do, exactly?"

"Draws curses into the area, then keeps them from getting out," says Hayashi, in a clipped, businesslike tone that is a far stretch from her usual perkiness. "While at the same time warding ordinary people away. Also lets us know when the curses inside have been killed, it's sort of - magnifying their badness over the barrier itself. So if there's nothing to magnify, it breaks."

She fidgets with her fan and looks apprehensively at the cell block, and is not quite brave enough to be the first one to go in.

"Demon dogs," says Fushiguro with the appropriate shadow pupet gesture, and the white dog emerges from his shadow. "He'll let us know if the curse gets close," he adds, and then steps in following the dog.

Itadori follows on his heels.

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.