Frieren: — Chapter 100 - Dayu, Time for Your Medicine
The Curse User trio was willing to work with Kenjaku. They had also thought through a lot of scenarios.
After watching Kenjaku use the Brain Swap technique to jump from Haibara Yu into Itadori Kaori, they figured it out fast. When forming the contract, they forbade the other party from using the name [Haibara Yu].
So they wouldn't end up hearing something like...
[Huh? Haibara Yu? Who's that?]
During the process, Kenjaku had no choice but to disclose their true name, and the preliminary agreement was finalized with other simple [Binding Vow] conditions.
Right.
There shouldn't be any problems. It was purely as a precaution that Manami and Larue stayed behind to keep an eye on Kenjaku.
But.
They also knew.
If it came to a fight, neither of them would stand a chance.
Itadori Kaori stood with her arms crossed, watching Manami and Larue with a beaming smile.
"Rest assured. A [Binding Vow] is absolutely unbreakable. That is common knowledge in Jujutsu."
"...That's... true... So why did you position Okkotsu like that?"
Manami had actually asked Kenjaku this herself: when forming the [Binding Vow], why not simply state [you may not harm any of the four, including Okkotsu], rather than specifically prohibit [the use of the Brain Swap technique]?
Kenjaku had answered like it was the most obvious thing in the world. If Okkotsu was unwilling to return, they would naturally have to bring him back by force. So [not allowing him to be harmed] wouldn't hold up.
"It's merely insurance. If the plan fails, we can still demonstrate to Jujutsu High that [we and Okkotsu are on opposing sides], which gives Okkotsu a way out. Besides, you both understand what [Rika] is. She won't agree to our plan, so we must ensure she can be sealed."
Watertight. Utterly watertight.
Larue and Manami had nothing to say.
"Ah."
The woman's eyes opened slightly.
"It seems someone from Jujutsu High has slipped inside. Could I trouble you two to handle them?" Itadori Kaori's smile was bright and easy. "I still need to secure Rika's presence."
"......."
With the Binding Vow in place, there shouldn't be any issues.
Manami and Larue exchanged a glance.
"Let's go."
Larue nodded. Manami fell into step beside him, and the two of them headed for the door.
The moment their backs were turned,
The woman slowly raised her hand.
[.!]
Larue's expression snapped.
He whipped around. At the same moment, his free hand shoved Manami hard to the side.
"[Heart and Body Catch]!"
CLANG!
The techniques collided midair and blasted a violent shockwave between them.
"?!"
"Larue!"
No time to answer. Larue looked down, his face going dark. Itadori Kaori had driven her arm straight through his chest, the technique construct and all. The woman was right in his face. Less than half a meter between them. A weapon had appeared in her hand at some point he hadn't tracked.
(A spatial ability? Kenjaku was hiding this too!?)
He swallowed the pain.
The moment their backs turned, she had moved. Larue had been on guard the entire time, but he genuinely hadn't expected a direct attack, hadn't expected her to shatter the [Binding Vow] in such a blunt, obvious way. And worse,
He couldn't fight back.
[The Curse User side may not harm Kenjaku.]
The Binding Vow held him. He dared not act.
(No time!)
At this range, Manami had almost no combat capability. She was in immediate danger.
Larue put everything left into one final shove, throwing her clear.
"Larue!"
Manami's cry cut off as the doorframe above the classroom entrance shuddered. It buckled downward, as though something enormous were pressing from above. Rubble cascaded down and sealed off the space between them.
(A gravity technique?)
Larue pressed a hand to his chest. His expression was grim.
(...I got played.)
She hadn't just broken the Binding Vow. Her methods were beyond anything he'd mapped onto Kenjaku.
In the battle against Gojo Satoru, Kenjaku had put every card on the table.
Open Domain.
Barrier Techniques.
Anti-Gravity System.
Stored Spell Technique.
Against Gojo Satoru, there should have been no opportunity to hold anything back. So why did she have this, sudden weapon, high-speed movement, abilities he'd never accounted for?
Larue's mind worked fast. But the blood loss was grinding him down faster.
His knees gave. He hit the floor with a dull thud and didn't get back up.
Through blurring vision: the woman humming softly to herself, her back to him, walking toward Okkotsu.
He wanted to stop her. But in that same moment, a [possibility] cracked open in his mind.
(Could it be...)
(This bastard is.)
He raised his hand.
Larue made the call. Binding Vow be damned, he drove his technique toward the figure in front of him.
But.
[.]
The blood loss finally won. Larue's consciousness went dark.
..............................
............
"Sharp, this one. But the task is done, I suppose."
A glance back at Larue on the floor, and she lost all interest in him. His strength barely scraped Grade One. His technique wasn't much to speak of either.
Compared to him...
"The main course is right here waiting for me~"
She licked her lips and turned toward the unconscious boy on the desk.
Black hair fanned across a smooth forehead. It made his face look that much cleaner, that much more translucent. Okkotsu Yuta couldn't be called a beautiful boy exactly, but his bone structure was refined, his complexion cool and pale, and there was something fragile about him, the kind of thin-skinned, easily-broken atmosphere you'd find in the male leads of early 2010s youth angst fiction.
Oh, it was the early 2010s right now, wasn't it?
Then he really did fit the profile of a 'protagonist.'
In "Kenjaku's" eyes, what mattered wasn't the boy's looks or that particular quality. It was the talent underneath, deep and bottomless.
"Okkotsu Yuta... if only you could be fully turned to our use. What a thing that would be."
The housewife face of Itadori Kaori sighed, fingers tracing along the boy's forehead.
No risk to take on.
And Okkotsu Yuta's potential brought out to a hundred percent.
Even if the plan succeeded and Rika ended up under control, that would still hard-cap the Cursed Queen's ceiling. But if Okkotsu Yuta and Rika were left to develop on their own for a year or two, that ceiling... nobody could say where it would land.
"Only a pity..."
"Trade-offs have to be made."
People who refuse to lose anything.
Get nothing.
"Kenjaku" kept speaking to herself, but didn't move yet. Instead, she dragged another person from the corner of the classroom and dumped them at the far edge of the room.
That was Itadori Yuji.
Then, with another flip of her palm, a pouch shaped like a leather jacket unfolded.
Inside: several purplish-black, grimy fingers.
If Himmel were here, he would probably recognize them immediately.
Those were...
[Special Grade Cursed Objects]
[Sukuna's Fingers]
She fed the fingers into Itadori's mouth one by one, straightened his position, then stepped back two paces.
Her back to him now, she paid no further attention to the cursed energy building in the air, accumulating, thickening, drawing close to something solid.
"Let our plan begin."
She drew a silvery-white scalpel.
As if the [Binding Vow] meant nothing at all, the blade caught the faint light from outside. Slowly. Slowly. It descended to the center line of Okkotsu's forehead, cold and sharp, parting the surface.
Crimson beads welled along the wound and spread silently into the skin.
And with that action, three things happened almost at once.
[One: the Binding Vow went completely still. It ignored "Kenjaku's" violation entirely.]
[Two: across Okkotsu's body, a faint cursed energy began to circulate in silence.]
[That cursed energy didn't belong to Okkotsu. It was more like a 'foreign body' clinging to him, and yet it didn't feel foreign at all.]
[Because that cursed energy had stained him since the very first meeting. Whether it was Haibara Yu, or Kenjaku, or even Gojo Satoru and Himmel, all of them had felt it the moment they encountered Okkotsu.]
[That particular 'presence' had touched Okkotsu Yuta before anyone else in the Jujutsu world.]
[Three...]
[It happened slightly earlier than one and two. Just by an instant.]
[Bound by the Black Rope. Sealed within the Barrier Technique.]
[Okkotsu's finger...]
...tap.
[Moved.]
...............
.......
Weightless. Sinking backward.
Cold pressed in on all sides, like being wrapped in water. Deep blue pulled at him, dragging him down and down toward the sea floor.
The light faded in pieces. Water pressure layered over his eardrums. Every sound went away.
So far.
So far.
Bubbles drifted past in the dark. Inside them: fragments. Parents who never looked up from their own lives. Classmates who made growing up hurt. Haibara Yu's smiling face, flashing past, then dissolving like burning paper, ash scattering into nothing.
Then Jujutsu High. Brief but real. Maki. Panda. Inumaki. The way Himmel and Gojo-sensei had looked out for him.
Those images floated upward slowly, curving across the surface of bubbles, and then they burst.
He couldn't breathe. Couldn't lift his arm. Couldn't do anything. He still felt alive, but it was the kind of alive that sat right beside death.
I... what am I even...
From somewhere far away, he could faintly feel it, a sharp sting tracing a horizontal line across his forehead. Panic pressed in around the edges of him, trying to wake something up.
But.
Okkotsu Yuta had never had much of a will to live.
And being betrayed by Haibara Yu had hollowed that out even further.
The first person who had felt like his own kind,the first to reach out to him, had been trying to consume his value from the very start.
I'm sorry, Gojo-sensei. Himmel-sensei.
I......
[Cursed energy is born from negative emotions. Anger included.]
[Fighting with cursed energy takes a severe toll on the mind.]
[When cursed energy runs critically low, the backlash can push a Jujutsu Sorcerer into a state of profound collapse.]
[Because of the Barrier Technique Kenjaku had constructed, Okkotsu Yuta's technique, and the cursed energy circulating inside him, had been disrupted. That disruption reached all the way down to the mental level, stripping away what little will to survive the boy had left.]
[Youngest Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer. Most Talented Cursed Human in History. Whatever the title, demanding a resilient spirit from a boy this young is simply too much to ask.]
[Without something unforeseen, this is where he stops.]
[................]
[Without something unforeseen.]
Blub...
Blub...
The deep water began to warm. Bubbles rose, boiling upward, and through them Okkotsu hazily saw it again.
That's right.
His first 'kindred soul.' The first one to reach out to him, it wasn't Haibara Yu.
Warm golden light falling at an angle. A hospital bed beside the window.
A loose hospital gown. [——] turning their head slowly to look at him.
Eyes curving gently. Clean and soft.
[Yuu...ta..........]
Like every good thing in the world had been crushed down and dissolved into that smile.
A voice that had no place being here.
An existence that should have been bound.
"Ri...ka......."
[You called me?]
....................
......
"Hm?"
[That instant.]
Every trace of ease drained from Itadori Kaori's face. The blade stopped at the edge of the wound, cutting no deeper.
BZZZ,
A tremor rose from somewhere under the earth, low and wrong, and it moved through the entire building.
Crack. Clatter. Clang.
The ceiling lights swung violently. A tube burst. Cracks webbed out across the walls like something was trying to break through from inside.
"...Hey. Hey, hey."
The woman's face twitched.
"Why... how is this..."
She had calculated everything.
[The Curse User trio's wariness. The Jujutsu world's positioning. Even Gojo Satoru and Himmel, those two wild cards, neutralized.]
[And most importantly: Okkotsu Yuta's will to live. And the inevitable rampage of the Special Grade Vengeful Cursed Spirit, Orimoto Rika.]
To protect her own cursed spirit form from losing control and hurting Okkotsu, Orimoto Rika had subconsciously placed a Binding Vow upon herself.
That conclusion had already been established.
[Authority rests with Okkotsu Yuta. Rika only emerges when Okkotsu has some subconscious resistance to draw from.]
Normally speaking.
She had taken all of it into account.
"But why..."
[She still missed one thing.]
[Sealing off [Okkotsu] and [Rika] wasn't the wrong idea.]
[But it shouldn't have been [Okkotsu Yuta and Orimoto Rika].]
[It should have been [Okkotsu Yuta with Orimoto Rika].]
"And" is parallel. "With" is something else, connection, fusion, two things that have grown into each other.
The reason Okkotsu Yuta was called a Special Grade who could one day match and surpass both Gojo Satoru and Himmel... was the twisted love between him and Orimoto Rika.
And that twisted love was enough to let Rika transcend technique, transcend Barrier Techniques, transcend even the [Binding Vow] she had placed on herself,
and be born back into the world.
Itadori Kaori's whole body went cold.
Because beneath her.
Okkotsu Yuta opened his eyes.
"Haibara-san... this ends here!"
Tears ran clean from the corners of his eyes. But his face was steady.
Anger held down. Grief held down. And underneath it all, something that looked like sorrow.
"You!—"
No more time for words.
Okkotsu grabbed the wrist of the figure above him with one hand. The woman's vision lurched, and then a force she couldn't fight against threw her across the room.
BOOM!
She hit the classroom wall. The explosion hit almost the same instant.
RUMBLE—,!
The ground under the building heaved. The concrete floor reached its limit and gave, tiles cracking apart and flying in every direction.
From the corner of the room, the woman pulled herself upright. The building was still shaking. Cold sweat broke across her skin. She stared, disbelieving, at the boy who still lay unconscious on the desk.
"This is... she broke the Shikigami mimicry Binding Vow—fully embraced her Cursed Spirit form—and reforged the contract!?"
Yes.
If the Black Rope and Barrier Technique could bind Rika, it was because of one specific thing: Rika's absolute, voluntary obedience to Okkotsu.
So.
Destroy that voluntary obedience. Let Rika exist as a free Cursed Spirit, just for a moment, and then form a new contract.
Because Okkotsu, as Rika's 'Master,' had always tacitly allowed this kind of action. That was why Rika could execute it unilaterally. That was how she slipped through the [Binding Vow].
[Rika, who handed all administrator authority over to Okkotsu.]
[And Okkotsu, who had never consciously accepted it.]
[Two people who once cursed each other without knowing.]
[Blessing each other again, just as unknowingly.]
The woman could only stare with an expression that said what the hell is any of this, unable to believe in a love that had twisted itself all the way to pitch black.
But there was one thing she understood without needing to think about it.
RUMBLE. RUMBLE. RUMBLE.
A massive white form rose slowly from beneath the rubble. Vast, violent cursed energy surged outward, and the wreckage of the building lifted into the air around it.
Spine wrenching backward. Head thrown back. Pure white hair whipping wild in every direction.
[คกฬӄ҇ѣ҉เเฬ๚ฬฬฬฬ!,,!,,!.!.]
The Cursed Queen roared without restraint.
➤ Next: Ryomen Sukuna, A Grand and Glorious Birth!