You've Gotten Pretty Good at Using That Cover Story, Huh?

"By the way, do you boys know what happened here?"

Nagi finally decided to face reality and looked up at the sorry state of her house...

Strong as she was, she couldn't help shedding bitter tears.

Never mind anything else-how much would it cost to patch those enormous cracks in the walls on either side?!

Raising a child as a single mother wasn't easy. Their family wasn't rich at all!

Inside the Inner World, Sukuna guiltily rubbed his nose.

...Crap. All I thought about was saving her as fast as possible. I forgot that wrecking the house would be just as devastating for a family like the Yoshinos.

Well...

...Did he have to pay for this?

Would his secret stash of money cover it?

Watching Nagi clutch the microwave and sob her heart out, Sukuna felt guilty.

-as someone who had once been poor himself, he understood all too well the agony of being alive but broke.

Itadori felt just as guilty.

Sure, desperate times called for desperate measures...but Aunt Yoshino couldn't see curses. He couldn't exactly tell her he'd saved her from a ghost...wouldn't she take him for a scammer and ban him from her house for good?

His gaze instinctively fell on Junpei, who could also see curses, and he immediately noticed a Blue Jellyfish Shikigami over a meter tall floating beside him.

He froze for a moment. Was this...Junpei's shikigami?

He was rather surprised. Junpei had said he'd only recently started seeing curses, yet he could already summon a shikigami?

...If Teacher Gojo saw this, wouldn't he whisk him off to school in a heartbeat?

[Stop staring and put the finger away first! It's on the table!]

Sukuna finally remembered one of his reasons for rushing back and hurriedly reminded Itadori.

"Oh, right!"

Itadori quickly answered and took a few steps over to the table.

As he passed the dying curse lying on the floor, sliced in half, he made sure to give it a finishing kick and put it out of its misery.

Junpei's eyelid twitched at the sight, and he nervously had his shikigami, Moon Dregs, inch backward.

When Itadori had the cursed-object finger firmly in his hand, he and Sukuna both breathed a sigh of relief.

Thankfully, nothing had gone wrong. They had finally recovered the fourth finger.

Now that everything was settled, Itadori relaxed and even held up the finger to answer Aunt Yoshino's earlier question about why he'd come back.

"This is a cosplay prop. I forgot to take it with me earlier, so I hurried back to get it~"

Sukuna: [...]

...Ahem. You've gotten pretty good at using that cover story, huh?

At Itadori's explanation, a look of understanding crossed Nagi's face.

She knew kids these days liked cosplay, and some of the props really did look incredibly realistic.

She paid it no more attention and went back to cleaning up her kitchen through her tears.

Junpei, meanwhile, didn't believe a word of it-

Never mind that the thing hadn't been on the table when Itadori left. Even if it had, Junpei could sense the terrifying aura radiating from that finger. It was definitely no ordinary cosplay prop.

He desperately wanted to know what had happened. A curse showing up in his home couldn't possibly be a good thing.

He stared at Itadori, conflicting emotions in his eyes.

At that moment, Sukuna frowned at the finger from within Itadori and said,

[That's strange. How did that Stitched-Face Curse get hold of my finger?]

[And why did it put the finger here? Nagi's just an ordinary person, isn't she? What does it gain from going to all this trouble to hurt her?]

Itadori began discussing it with Sukuna in a voice low enough that Aunt Yoshino probably couldn't hear.

"Maybe it was after Junpei? The curse would've attacked both of them anyway. Junpei probably did see something at the Cinema, so maybe it wanted to silence him...but that doesn't make sense either. A Special Grade curse wouldn't need to go to all this trouble to silence someone, would it?"

Sukuna's Finger was such a precious, rare item. Would it really use one just to kill Junpei?

By then, Junpei had rushed over to Itadori. He had vaguely heard his own name, along with words like "Cinema" and "silence him."

He leaned toward Itadori and lowered his voice as well, asking urgently, "What's going on? Why was there a curse in my house? Did you make that crack in the wall? Was it to kill that curse?"

The barrage of questions made Itadori hesitate.

Uh...could he tell him all of this?

He started worrying about all the confidentiality rules Megumi Fushiguro had covered in class.

But...Junpei didn't really count as an ordinary person anymore, did he? He could see curses and had a shikigami. And even though Itadori had never mentioned it, he knew the word "curse"...so he should count as someone in the know...right?

He hesitated, then leaned close to Junpei's ear and whispered, "Let's talk somewhere else."

Junpei paused and glanced back at his mother. He knew Itadori meant they should talk away from her.

He didn't feel comfortable leaving his mother alone in a house with drafts coming in everywhere, but he didn't want to drag her into the world of curses either.

After thinking it over, he said a few words to Nagi and pulled Itadori upstairs to his room, leaving his shikigami, Moon Dregs, to stand guard beside his mother.