Chapter 71

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
10th September, 12:40 JST

For the time being, Kobayashi Jun and Mei Mei were in agreement of one thing: this Grade One cursed spirit had to die.

The matter of who dealt the final blow was immaterial to that agreement, and naturally, they would each work to safeguard the other’s life where possible. Overt betrayal was prohibited. They were on the same team now.

Of course, Jun wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking he was safe on this account alone. He was young and inexperienced, but he knew his way around lies. He would not be blinded by the benefits of this pact to the point that he would forget all the other substantial ways in which he could lose.

He couldn’t let Mei Mei know about his Coward’s Dance. It was a secret that he intended to take to his grave, or reveal only to his closest confidants. She had correctly deduced that his power was sensory in nature, so the most that he would do to help her was to warn her if she was in danger. Of course, he would be using it to keep himself out of harms way, but only proactively.

The reason he had been almost wounded so many times was because he hadn’t seen an attack coming. In that moment before death, the adrenaline coursing through his body allowed it to react before he did, removing him from danger almost automatically.

Losing control of his body had been a double-edged sword, however. It broke his rhythm and made him even more vulnerable to a follow-up attack. When this happened, he would simply run away and regroup his mental faculties before diving into the fray once more.

Still, this day had been fruitful. He had never known about this serendipitous benefit from his power, and it gave him an idea to further advance his innate technique. It seemed to him that if his body was truly capable of reacting automatically to the information from his Coward’s Dance, then one day, he might not even need to fight consciously.

Coward’s Dance gave him too much information to efficiently process, making every battle one of brains as well as brawn. Freeing up the mental load of his power could be just what he needed to become Grade One.

One day, at least. Slow and steady.

Many Jujutsu Sorcerers believed that only in mortal peril did one’s potential truly blossom. Perhaps they were right. Jun didn’t intend on finding out.

“So, what do you know about the creature, my cute kouhai?” Mei Mei was leaning her back against the tree while they both stood on the same branch. Jun’s place further along the branch was precarious and thin, but much of his training involved balance and bodily control, so it didn’t bother him.

“It swims through a darkness that it can generate,” Jun responded. “It’s fast, but perhaps not strong or durable. That depends on whether or not it can use its technique to armor its body. Otherwise, it should be fairly fragile.”

“Fragile, you say?”

“What do you have in mind?” he asked.

She snorted. “We attack on my signal. Depending on how this goes, the first strike may be the last. Knowing this, are you comfortable letting me attack first?”

“If you were confident in being able to destroy the Grade One in a single strike, we wouldn’t be talking in the first place.”

“What makes you think I didn’t seek you out because I found you interesting?” Mei Mei asked.

“Common sense,” Jun replied without missing a beat.

She snorted. “I didn’t know it was fragile until you told me.”

“Relatively fragile,” Jun corrected. “It’s still a Grade One cursed spirit. And if it’s not physically durable, then that means that it more than makes up for it in some other dimension. You can go ahead with your first strike.”

“We attack right after,” Mei Mei repeated.

“No strategy?”

“The strategy will become apparent to the both of us as we fight. That is, only if we are compatible as fighters. This is your chance to earn my grace and admiration. Exciting, isn’t it?”

Nonverbal communication in the heat of battle was tricky. He would have to be aware of both her awareness of the battlefield as well as whatever signals he ended up sending to her. Tricky.

“Fine,” Jun said. Then he reached for his back.

His suitcase was on a harness tied to his back. It was his favorite black leather suitcase, and he had been elated to find a use for it in combat. He took a moment to surreptitiously run his fingers over the oh-so-satisfying surface texture—so bumpy and grippy—before opening it, retrieving a talisman from the pile inside.

He burned the talisman with a burst of cursed energy. A black shadow formed from the remnants of the destroyed paper. It was a dark orb from which ribbons of blackness shot out, only to wrap around the orb, squeezing it into the shape of a bird.

Two eyes on each side of its head, and a grinning beak, Midnight Dreary looked almost intelligent enough to be able to talk. That wasn’t the case at all, of course. It was programmed with simple behaviors, and he could telepathically direct its course.

“A raven? You don’t say,” Mei Mei smiled. “We might be even more compatible than I initially thought.”

Her power must have had something to do with birds, then. Or perhaps she just really liked birds. It was difficult to tell with Mei Mei.

He sent the bird up into the sky where it transmitted information directly to his innate technique. Now, if he activated Coward’s Dance, the information received would become even sharper and even more intense. It could overwhelm him if he summoned more Midnight Drearies.

Normally, he could overclock his innate technique with cursed energy to produce more information, but using shikigami was more power efficient, and unlocked a path to even more sophisticated workings of jujutsu down the line.

Without waiting for Mei Mei, Jun jumped towards another tree, and then another, the last tree before the clearing started. Mei Mei followed closely, and then grabbed Jun’s shoulder for support as they stood on the same branch.

Breathe.

Jun ignored the hand touching him with all the willpower his hormonal mind could scrounge up and breathed to calm his heart rate. He thought about all his close brushes with death to try and distract from his more lurid thoughts.

When that didn’t work, he thought about how he felt as a child when he once saw an elderly couple share a chaste kiss at the park.

That worked.

The cursed spirit was floating what seemed like back-first on top of a pool of darkness the size of a large hot tub. It could be floating on its stomach because it was hard to tell with its nonexistent face.

“Go ahead,” Jun muttered.

“If you say so,” Mei Mei said in a sing-song tone.

Jun had, up until now, been ignoring the flock of black birds in the sky.

He had ignored them until his Coward’s Dance immediately informed him of some discrepancy in the environment.

Suddenly, one member of that flock flew upwards, separating from the circling birds. Up and up and up it flew until it became entirely invisible.

And then…

It shot downwards, covered in cursed energy so thick that it almost reminded him of one of Gojo Satoru’s attacks.

Jun missed how the cursed spirit reacted physically, as by the time he noticed a change with it, the pool of darkness rose up to intercept the falling bird.

The bird exploded upon making contact with the darkness, dispersing it everywhere and sending the Grade One flying away.

Jun’s body, tensed as a spring, immediately uncoiled as he shot towards where the Grade One was hurtling.

This was his chance.

He drew his sword and prepared to use the momentum from his charge to cleave right through the Grade One’s body. Coward’s Dance confirmed that the danger of slicing its body was less than the danger of staying away from it, allowing it to use long-range attacks.

The Grade One rolled and skidded across the ground just as Jun arrived.

It raised one arm to block.

Jun sheared through that arm on its elbow with trivial ease as he landed, but missed the monster’s body as it positioned itself away and behind him.

He turned around to slice through the burst of darkness that the Grade One spewed at him, dividing the stream in two. The grass and soil sizzled where the liquid darkness touched, causing the air to stink like vomit.

Purple blood gushed out from the monster’s wounded arm. It jumped backwards, likely to give itself time to regenerate, given how the stump bubbled and boiled like a pot of water over high heat.

An item dropped from the sky. A flight of black birds streaked across the sky, over the clearing, having dropped something on their way. A long object. An axe.

Mei Mei jumped from her tree and grabbed the axe while it was still mid-air, intending on joining the fray. Her energy was quiet and subtle as she descended. It was too quiet for the Grade One to sense at least as it focused on healing itself.

Jun gave it that time to heal itself while acting as a distraction.

The last moment before Mei Mei made contact with the monster, she exploded with cursed energy, timing it exactly to when she was to hit.

The Grade One reacted to that burst of energy by moving away. Unfortunately, it was too late. It had turned an instantly lethal strike into simply a crippling one. The axe dug through the monster’s other arm and much of its torso.

Jun was already upon it, taking advantage of its wariness of Mei Mei. It jumped away from her, and Jun intercepted its path to strike it again. A gutshot that would have eviscerated a normal human.

Then a strike across its throat.

Darkness spread from its feet and covered the ground, allowing it to slide away as though it was skating on ice, all the while as the ground sizzled underneath the darkness.

Cursed energy gushed out from it in waves. Expressionless as it was, the only way that Jun could read its panic was through the frantic oscillation of its cursed energy.

Now, it was in the middle of a wide zone of utter darkness that Jun didn’t dare step into. Mei Mei would have to use one of her birds to take care of it while it was there. Jun could potentially get greedy and throw his sword at it, but then he’d be an idiot on top of being all the things he already was. He already had too many personality flaws to deal with as it were.

The cursed spirit opened its mouth. Its head cracked open in the middle, revealing a maw of stark white teeth and a purple tongue.

It raised its head, and out from its gullet, a bar of utter darkness shot into the sky.

At that exact point, a black bird tore straight through its torso, leaving a hole behind.

That hadn’t been enough to kill the monster at all.

Neither did it stop the cursed spirit from continuing to spew darkness into the sky, until—

The darkness hit Tengen’s barrier and spread through it like an infection, blackening the sky. The warm, sunny day darkened by the second.

Mei Mei fired another bird strike, but the cursed spirit was already done, and it moved out of the way by disappearing into the darkness on the ground.

Shit.

“It’ll get dark, soon,” Jun said. “Can you handle yourself?”

Mei Mei was already retreating to the tree-line, having decided that avoiding the corrosive darkness under complete darkness was a task beyond her.

Coward’s Dance assured him that the cursed spirit was still content in hiding in its pool of darkness, but it would resurface soon, likely fully healed. This one seemed to be the type that was harder to kill on account of its regeneration and survivability rather than its durability. The bird strike through its torso should have killed any other cursed spirit with its physical dimensions.

The downside of this type was that it became weaker the more it was damaged, as each time it needed to regenerate, it would have to dip into its cursed energy stores. That would lower its attack power, and eventually make it easier to kill.

The operative word was ‘eventually’. This set-up implied that the Grade One was its strongest at the start of this battle.

Under complete darkness, it became even more difficult to kill.

Difficult for anyone without Jun’s power.

The darkness had finished spreading across the entire dome, blanketing the entire Cursed Spirit Battle Royale stage in pitch blackness.

The cursed spirit would resurface soon.

“Follow my lead!” Jun shouted, making sure to rev up his cursed energy, becoming a beacon to Mei Mei’s cursed energy perception.

Using Midnight Dreary’s information, Jun activated Coward’s Dance in full. The mental load was not what he remembered. That made sense. Without the use of his eyes, except to interpret the visual information that Coward’s Dance provided him, he now had less information to work with except the bare essentials.

Working in complete darkness… was an advantage to him.

He cracked into a grin.

The pool of darkness on the ground moved towards him. He avoided it easily, moving away from it. The cursed spirit seemed to catch on, and fought to reduce the energy signature of its darkness. It was already a very subtle technique, keeping with its theme of darkness and obfuscation, and it surprised Jun how much subtler it became to his energy perception.

Not his Coward’s Dance unfortunately.

He kept moving away as more and more of the ground became dominated by darkness.

Then, it hit a limit. It had to move the darkness furthest away from Jun towards him, as though it only had so much darkness to work with.

Perhaps most of it had gone to infecting Tengen’s barrier?

It was a shame for it.

“You have a plan yet?” Mei Mei shouted.

To that, Jun could only apologize. “Yes. And I’m sorry.”

The movements of the darkness in the ground became more erratic, almost as if it was growing irritated.

“Oh? You intend to take the win, don’t you? And here I thought we would be working together.”

“That would be pointless at this juncture,” he said.

Come on. Just jump out, you freaky-looking monster.

“You’ve talked a big game, my cute kouhai, so—“

The cursed spirit jumped out, directly towards Jun.

All Jun saw were forms and colors depicting danger and death. He moved away from certain death, took a risk by positioning himself close to serious danger, and drove his katana through the creature’s form. He recognized this form based on exactly how Coward’s Dance had rated it. The same color, the same hue, and a similar shape.

He cut it apart once, then was forced to step directly into the darkness. He coated his feet in a blaze of cursed energy, draining his tank like nothing else, as he sliced again and again and again and—

Victory went from inches apart to miles away in the span of an instant. Something deadly and dangerous approached from behind.

He turned to slice the threat in half, and then using the momentum from that rotation, he sliced the cursed spirit’s head clean off.

Finally, it began to dissolve.

And finally, he could jump out from the dwindling zone of darkness on the ground and save what was left of his cursed energy stores.

“Did you just kill my bird, Jun-kun?” Mei Mei asked.

Her bird? Her words drove the wind out of his lungs, and he wondered if he had just accidentally broken the binding vow.

But no. He knew that he hadn’t. There was no telling that Mei Mei’s bird would have damaged the spirit properly. For all he knew, it could have pushed the spirit back into the pool of darkness where it would continue to rest and recuperate.

He sheathed his sword and walked towards the tree that she was on. “I only swore to work together with you to defeat the Grade One. I never swore to just let you have the last strike.”

She must have used the noise and the burst of cursed energy as a clue to land her strike. Clever of her, but Jun had seen this coming from a mile away.

“Ballsy of you to skirt so close to breaking a binding vow, my cute kouhai,” she said as she jumped down from the tree to stand in front of him. She had filled her legs with cursed energy to tolerate the fall, more than necessary in fact. Without sight to time her landing, she had been forced waste that energy. “Hopefully, you don’t end up dying under uncanny circumstances as the heavens conspire to doom you.”

“Likewise,” Jun replied without missing a beat, for she had acted recklessly by firing off that bird. It wouldn’t have hit Jun, but it could have sabotaged both of their efforts.

“I’ve made up my mind about you,” Mei Mei said. “We’ll stay in touch.”

“Good,” Jun said, holding his hand up towards her. “I look forward to working with you. Let’s shake hands.”

Upon being prompted, she groped in the dark for his hand. Jun used the outlines of Coward’s Dance to take hers.

“I look forward to working with you, too. Let’s make lots of money, okay?”

Jun smirked. Money, huh. He wouldn’t say no to that.

000

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
10th September, 12:38 JST

The first thing that Takahashi Hana felt when she saw seven upperclassmen from Kyoto surrounding her in the middle of the forest was not fear.

The profundity of her bad luck had all but paralyzed her with warring emotions of grief and amusement. She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, and she felt bored on top of this. Stimulated and understimulated at once.

In short, all her options were boring.

“What the hell? It’s just a girl,” one of them muttered. These Kyoto students all had uniforms that matched closely with the Jujutsu High standard. Only a couple had modified theirs to appear more brutish, ripping their sleeves at the shoulders, or leaving their shirts half-unbuttoned.

This particular gang looked slightly mismatched, like two gangs having merged together. Two of them looked heavily damaged as well.

Hana activated her innate technique, Queen Pheromone.

All the scent particles wafting from her heavily perfumed body became tinged with a nigh-imperceptible layer of cursed energy.

And then, in a matter of time, she would figure out a way out of this bind. Or lose.

It was boring. She had lived this before, so so many times.

In the world of non-sorcerers, no one had ever bothered her in her life. She knew why, of course. She was cute and had an agreeable personality.

For a time, she had felt like she was the cutest and most charismatic human on the planet. All the things that her classmates and friends complained about, she never experienced. The world seemed to bend over backwards to please her at every turn, and hadn’t it been for just how nice it was to be treated in such a way, she would perhaps have acted against her better judgment and taken more advantage of this.

The unfortunate fact of being an unwitting sorcerer in the world of non-sorcerers was that eventually, her destiny had to catch up to her. If it hadn’t been for Teira, then she would have been killed by cursed spirits while still living locked inside a gilded cage, waited on hand and foot by everyone she came across.

Also, if it hadn’t been for Teira, she never would have discovered that all this benevolence she had experienced throughout her life had been due to her innate technique.

It was an innate technique that any sorcerer could easily rebuff should they be made aware of it, which was why Hana had to make sure to keep it a secret.

In keeping her technique a secret, however, she came across a fatal flaw in her plan: a victory would never look like a victory, not for her.

The boys were communing amongst each other while Hana steadily filled the air with her technique, ignoring their mindless chatter about how it wasn’t fair to gang up on a girl.

All the while, she pictured how this must look to Yaga-sensei and the other teachers. Soon, they would offer her some kind of handicap, maybe a fight with the half-beaten boys. One or both of them. She could negotiate one, and then perhaps beat him. She wasn’t confident that she could. Her hand-to-hand skills were the worst in the class, probably. She was only better than Aomori and Ishikawa.

If she lost, even with the handicap, then the teachers would write her off without hesitating.

They probably still would, even if she won, and continued infecting the others with a mindless loyalty for her.

Her power worked better if she talked, but she couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth and embarrass herself by pleading. There was a cost to being pathetic, especially to someone like her who usually always got what she wanted without having to beg. It was a strike to her dignity. She felt that if her dignity was struck enough times, she might develop some kind of personality disorder or something.

Finally, one of the boys sighed and smiled at Hana in a way that he likely deemed as comforting. “It’d be unfair to our team if we were to let you go now, so I think it would be for the best if you just went ahead and surrendered.”

Dammit. Now I have to speak.

Hana made her eyes glisten as she drew her eyebrows together. She threw in a pout for good measure. “But I haven’t gotten any points yet. I need to do something.”

That was the truth. Her hunt had gone catastrophically as she kept running into her classmates and enemy sorcerers, all of whom would steal her prey because they had arrived faster.

She needed a combat engagement, or this whole thing would become a massive waste. She had no illusions that she would be selected for the second round of the Exchange Event, so this was her only opportunity to distinguish herself.

“You’ll get seriously hurt if you try,” the boy continued. “I really do think it would be for the best if you just surrendered. None of us want to hurt you.”

“I still have my pride as a Jujutsu Sorcerer!” she shouted, balling her fists and yelling into the air in a distinctly child-like way.

The boy’s eyes widened and he nodded in consternation. “I understand. I’m sorry. Then… who do you wish to fight?”

Hana instantly pointed at the most beaten-up boy, who opened his mouth slightly at being selected so quickly.

The boy who had been speaking gently pushed the injured boy towards Hana. He walked towards her, trying his best not to limp.

All the while, Hana cut off her Queen Pheromone. The more obvious it became, the easier it was for a sorcerer to detect the sudden bout of mindless loyalty and try to address it in some way. The easiest way was just to manipulate cursed energy into your brain in large amounts.

Long-term exposure would likely lead to permanent mental changes, but if she told these people about her technique, then it would become public knowledge.

She had no choice, really, but to let her technique set permanently and then vow never to abuse this position of power she had. It was a simple and quick solution to what she didn’t doubt many would consider to be an ethical dilemma out of some kind of folk myth. As always, she had no interest in discussing her choices with anyone else. No one would really understand.

Even she didn’t understand. She was… just a child.

This isn’t wrong, she reminded herself. I’m just using the cards that were handed to me at birth.

“Please go easy on me,” she said to the injured boy, whose eyes widened at her audacity. Ultimately, between her charm, her cuteness and the pheromones adding new neural connections to his brain, he acquiesced with a sigh as he raised his fists.

He had a swollen-shut left eye and was favoring his left leg, meaning he was unable to quickly address someone trying to take advantage of his blindspot.

Hana didn’t wait for a bell. She just moved, which took away her opponent’s options. She slid to his left side and punched him on his throat. While he staggered away in shock, she wrapped her body around him on his back and began to apply pressure on his neck.

After ten seconds, he disappeared from her grasp, having been knocked unconscious by her.

Excellent.

She stood up and bowed at the waist to the gang of boys, who were utterly nonplussed at what they had just seen.

Seven had become six, and now, no matter how anyone sliced it, Takahashi Hana had done her part in this team battle.

One down was break-even, but two down was profit. Thus, she needed at least one more win to have contributed more than just the bare minimum for her team.

“I want to fight him next,” she pointed at the other injured boy.

One of them laughed briefly, likely in shock. The others seemed to slowly understand that she was more than just a damsel in distress. That might affect things.

The Queen Pheromone made people loyal to her, but it didn’t induce the complex concept of respect in people. While Hana had never truly been tormented by anyone in her life, she had most definitely been disrespected. For most of her life, she hadn’t actually known that she had been disrespected, and she hadn’t related to all the other girls in her life that would share their own accounts of more blatant degrees of disrespect.

Ultimately, she had only been able to shut her eyes for so long before the non-stop train of infantilization and underestimation convinced her that respect was not necessarily a key component of loyalty.

But it could be forced, of course. In the end, loyalty went farther than respect. Loyalty was surety. It bought respect.

If, in the far-flung future, these boys were still alive and in the height of their careers, then they could potentially grant her a boost as well because they were loyal to her.

And with their loyalty, she could teach them respect, make them better humans, not just to her, but to all girls.

She could do what Teira always wanted to achieve with the Women’s Union.

Baby steps first.

She had no desire to use her power on anyone she wasn’t fighting, or anyone in her class for that matter. As weird as all the boys were, she had an odd fondness for each of them that she felt she would lose if they were to become too attached to her. She had regretted using Queen Pheromone on Geto for this reason. She didn’t actually want to be treated with mindless loyalty.

At least not all the time.

It was easier to imagine turning these boys into her supporters, however. She hardly knew them, and they had ever-so-slightly pissed her off by asking her to surrender and telling her that none of them wanted to fight her poor, pathetic, fragile self.

She stood up straight, and before she could select him, the other injured boy approached her.

He had a swollen left cheek and a less pronounced limp on his right foot—

“Wait!” one boy shouted. He was wearing a black yukata, with a sword strapped to his side. He had a ponytail as well, and his eyes were narrowed and intense. “This is ridiculous. Let’s just defeat her and move on. Why give her the chance to eliminate yet another one of us?”

The boy that had first spoken to Hana looked to the one in the yukata, rolling his eyes as he did. “We’re just giving her a fair shot, Zen'in. Besides, Honda and Yu weren’t going to be good in a real battle.”

“That doesn’t mean that they’re useless,” Zen'in said.

“Hey!” Yu, or perhaps Honda shouted. “I won’t go down easy, so don’t discount me already!”

And yet, it seemed like they were all accepting of the fact that Hana may genuinely beat him.

“Alright then!” Hana butted in. “Gang up on me then, and defeat me. I’m sure that’s far safer, and commendable, than letting me fight fairly.”

Zen'in glared at Hana. “Then I will fight you.”

Oh shit, no, not him!

It just dawned on her what his name was: Zen'in. He was a real sorcerer, not a mere upstart like most others. He had the same advantages that Gojo and Teira had.

She could not defeat him.

He had already been affected by her Queen Pheromone, and yet he was being antagonistic towards her. It didn’t make sense. He should be feeling a sense of loyalty and protectiveness towards her. Was he ignoring these human impulses with sheer discipline? Or was he perhaps a psychopath? He didn’t strike her as such.

“That’s excessive,” the other boy said, but Zen'in continued speaking to Hana.

“The Exchange Event isn’t a place where mediocrity is celebrated. Either you perform at the level of everyone else, or you are eliminated. This is for your own good,” he said as he slowly approached her.

Perhaps she had overestimated the power of her innate technique. Loyalty was the core of it all. Loyalty.

Had she neglected to imagine how someone else might imagine the concept? How the concept would ring as to someone with a cultural background as ancient as Zen'in’s?

Regrettably, she had a lot to learn.

The Zen'in drew his sword.

Hana fought the anger boiling in her gut at how this Exchange Event had turned out, and opened her mouth to surrender—

Five boys surrounded Zen'in in a semi-circle, all of them placing themselves between him and her.

“Give it up, Zen'in,” said the one who had spoken to Hana the most.

“This is foolish,” Zen'in frowned. “Why are we protecting this girl?”

“It’s about fair play,” he replied. “This is just a game. We have careers to think about outside of it, and it makes no sense for us to crush an underclassman like this. We should be thinking about building bridges and—“

“You’re not playing the game right!” Zen'in shouted. “We need to eliminate her for our own good. Why are we—why are we even discussing this?!”

“This is lame, even for you, Zen'in,” someone else scoffed.

“You people sicken me,” Zen'in grimaced in utter disgust. “I should cut you all down where you stand for being such pushovers. I don’t see a single man among you. You are children.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

It occurred to Hana that by now, any sane sorcerer would suspect that mental suggestions were in play to make everyone act so idiotically.

The vital factor in Hana’s mind was that boys were already prone to act idiotically as long as there was a girl somewhere in the equation.

To be able to separate mental suggestions from male nonsense would require a degree of wisdom that none of these boys seemed to possess.

In a way, she was lucky to live in a society where men were idiots about women.

The Zen'in whose given name Hana still didn’t know finally left. Once he did, they all turned to her tiredly. The boy who spoke the most agonized about what to say for several long moments until he just sighed. “But Zen'in was right. We must play the game. Go ahead. Choose another opponent. We won’t interrupt this fight.”

Hana beamed in joy.

Then suddenly, the barrier above their heads gradually began to darken, slowly plunging the world into darkness.