Why, exactly, is the King of Curses—ancient calamity given form, a name spoken like a warning—standing in his own kitchen, sleeves pushed back just enough to suggest intent, staring down a pot as though it has committed a personal, unforgivable slight?

The answer is insultingly simple.

His spouse was hungry.

Hunger, to him, is not an inconvenience. It is not something to be postponed, ignored, or endured. Least of all by them. Entire cities have been erased for less. Entire bloodlines rewritten into silence over offenses that didn’t even warrant this much thought. And yet, here it is—the thing that has drawn him not to battlefields or shrines, but to a stove that hisses like it’s daring him to fail.

There had been an outing earlier. Supposedly pleasant. Quiet. Civil.

It had not stayed that way.

Some fool—some painfully ordinary, fleeting thing—had lingered too long in their presence. A smile held a fraction too confidently. A compliment delivered with just enough boldness to imply ownership where there was none. Sukuna had smiled in return, of course.

But his smile does not comfort. It carves.

The air had tightened. Something invisible, immense, pressing down until even sound seemed reluctant to move. The offender had laughed—nervously, belatedly aware, but far too late to matter.

Sukuna had said nothing.

He hadn’t needed to.

Uraume had been dispatched the moment they stepped away.

“A minor punishment,” Sukuna had called it, with the same casual ease one might use to comment on the weather. Go on. Handle it. Quietly, if possible. Thoroughly, regardless.

And so Uraume left—efficient, unquestioning, devastating as ever.

Which is how Sukuna now finds himself here.

Alone.

Cooking.

There is, perhaps, a fleeting thought—thin as a thread and gone just as quickly—that Uraume is… reliable. Useful. Worthy of more acknowledgment than they are given.

The thought dies the moment the rice begins to smoke.

Cooking, he decides immediately, is an affront.

The heat refuses consistency, flaring and dipping with no regard for his will. The utensils feel fragile in his hands, unworthy of the force they’re subjected to. The ingredients—treacherous things—do not submit. They do not yield. They transform on their own terms, not his.

The oil spits.

The flame surges.

The rice betrays him.

One moment it is stubbornly undercooked, the next it is a blackened ruin, as though it has skipped every reasonable stage in between out of spite. Smoke curls upward in thin, accusing spirals, carrying the faint, unmistakable scent of something that was once meant to be edible.

Sukuna stills.

Then tightens.

The utensil in his hand creaks ominously, caught between survival and obliteration. Under his breath, curses slip free—old ones, heavy with history, sharp enough to cut through centuries. The kitchen feels smaller now, the air denser, as if reality itself is bracing.

He is, at this exact moment, perilously close to solving the problem by reducing the entire space to ash.

A simpler solution.

A cleaner one.

Then—

The softest interruption.

A creak at the door, fragile as a held breath.

Footsteps follow. Light. Familiar. Grounding in a way nothing else in this world has ever managed to be.

The tension does not vanish. It cannot.

But it shifts.

It loosens, like a storm reconsidering its own thunder.

Sukuna turns.

And just like that, the edge dulls. Not gone—never gone—but contained, drawn inward, sheathed beneath something quieter, something that exists for no one else.

“Spouse,” he says, voice smoothing itself into something almost composed, as though the room isn’t quietly smoldering behind him. “Do not concern yourself.”

There is a subtle shift of his stance, deliberate and precise, broad shoulders angling just enough to obscure the worst of the damage. It would be convincing—if not for the smoke, which continues its traitorous ascent, and the scent, which refuses to be ignored.

“I am,” he continues, with the full weight of unfounded confidence, “a master chef.”