Chapter 73

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
10th September, 12:32 JST

Each of Geto Suguru’s Special Grades were a problem, individually.

All three of them summoned at once was overkill for anyone not named Teira or Satoru. Still, Hibana Whatsherface had a big mouth and needed to be slapped around a little.

And Suguru was far more concerned with how Ito was doing against Kamo. He was entirely too bothered at Ito of all people stealing his rival, especially given their history. Kamo Joichi was bad news, from everything he had learned of him, and Ito had almost died once while fighting besides Suguru. A part of him had never forgiven himself for failing to protect her better, even though he knew that he had done nothing wrong.

Suguru had an intense desire not to watch Ito Aoi fall into harm again, which ran directly counter to the girl’s fanatical devotion to putting herself in harm’s way. What was he supposed to do, then? Try not to fight in her vicinity and cause himself to be distracted?

“Hey! Focus on our fight!” Hibana said again, but Suguru didn’t care. He didn’t really have an understanding of his own battle with her at all. Kurourushi was countering the Juchū swarm, and the longer he was allowed to exist, the more his cockroaches reproduced and became better able to handle Hibana. Meanwhile, she was doing her best not to be ripped to pieces by one of Tamamo’s many mouth lasers, or get caught in Kuchisake-Onna’s Simple Domain.

None of this needed his attention.

Ito was a storm of movement. It was captivating to watch her effortlessly dismantle the threat of so many blood projectiles, all the while as she pressured Joichi backwards. His cursed spirit blood was all but gone as well, leaving him with all that he could generate from his body.

A red, five-pointed star marking grew around Joichi’s right eye, and he suddenly became far faster, sending a shock of worry into Suguru’s gut.

He closed his eyes, and reminded himself of the truth.

I did all I could that day.

Between the choice of saving Ito and striking another blow at the enemy, Suguru had chosen the latter option.

He had chosen the path of the Jujutsu Sorcerer instead of the human.

In that sense, he had done all that he could that day.

I’m not Ito’s keeper.

She was strong, and she was just as old as him. She could make the same choices that he could. He could not dictate her trajectory in life out of worry.

I should actually be pissed at her.

After all, she had stolen his opponent.

Still, pissed or not, he didn’t have it in him to root against her, even if her victory would mean that he was now down a Special Grade opponent to—

Somehow, in some way, some bright pink Juchū managed to slip the net of Kurourushi’s defense, hitting Suguru’s head at full speed. It felt like being hit by a rock, as a non-sorcerer. It stung.

He glared at the Hibana girl. The battle was still. She glared at him. “Don’t look away from this, or I will kill you.”

Suguru couldn’t believe his ears.

Was she that eager to be turned into a smear on a tree?

The nerve of this fucking fly.

Fine.

“You have my attention now,” Suguru promised. “For better or for worse.”

Suguru increased his output of cursed energy across his body. The sudden increase caused the girl’s eyes to widen in shock.

As if she hadn’t expected him to be so strong.

Did she seriously think that they just called anyone a Special Grade, these days?

The sound of Ito clashing against Joichi confirmed this to be true, causing him an even greater degree of irritation.

It didn’t matter. He was stronger than Joichi. Definitely stronger than this girl.

But before he ended her chances in this battle, he thought that he should at least know her name. “I forgot your name, Hibana.”

She smirked. “You didn’t forget the one that mattered.”

“That had nothing to do with how significant you think you are. We both know whose shadow you exist under.”

She clenched her jaws. “Haruta.”

“Good game, Haruta,” Suguru said as he raised his hand. Kurourushi’s cursed cockroach army instantly swarmed around each and every Juchū in the vicinity.

Just then, Tamamo-no-Mae Incarnate opened her mouth to let out another blast of energy—

Suguru felt the incoming attack like a stab in his core of cursed energy, filling him with an unmistakable sense of doom.

He recognized that sense of doom instantly and threw himself out of the way, commanding Tamamo to do exactly the same.

Together, they narrowly dodged Satoru’s Hollow Purple, shaped the size of a rather large basketball.

Suguru looked towards the far distance in shock, wondering what his best friend was thinking. Was he squabbling with Teira again? And a Hollow Purple, at that? How reckless could one man be?

He turned his gaze back to the battle at hand. Whatever that was, Haruta had managed to eke out a handful of seconds more in this battle, using up the very last of the shit luck she had, to be up against Suguru of all people.

000

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
10th September, 12:32 JST

Within seconds, Haruta’s entire stock of currently-out Juchū were decimated by Kurourushi’s cursed cockroaches.

Kurourushi?! Seriously, Teira-sama?!

Haruta had spent five good years training against that damned Special Grade cursed spirit. Five years being humiliated against a cursed spirit being puppeted by Teira-sama for the sole purpose of teaching her the best way to fight sorcerers and cursed spirits under a classification of fighters that Teira-sama dubbed as ‘Masters’, because they fought using minions.

Under this classification, Teira-sama was the strongest Master in the world, while Gojo was the strongest Blaster, another classification of power expression.

Each time Haruta sparred against the creature, it inevitably won. The best she could hope to do was distract its insects while she tried her best to engage it in melee combat. Theoretically, this was the area in which Kurourushi was at its weakest.

Theoretically, because the monster was still a Special Grade, with all that this grade entailed. It was, as a matter of course, an absolute monster that required the collaboration of several Grade Ones to reliably exorcise.

Or just a single Special Grade worth their salt.

Knowing Teira-sama, she did not just give Kurourushi away. She must have challenged Geto Suguru to defeat it using his own power.

Haruta had yet to find a strategy that worked against the monster, other than her deduction that it was weaker in close quarters. That was the way to defeat it.

The problem with trying that, right now, was that Geto had two other cursed spirits to keep her at bay as she tried her best to exploit a theoretical weakness in this cursed spirit. Each of those spirits had no problem keeping their distance and firing potshots at her as well.

All the while, Geto himself looked like he was itching to join the fray while she did her best to simply put dance all over the battlefield, avoiding Kurourushi’s cursed cockroaches and Tamamo-no-Mae’s blasts.

I’m going to lose.

She then felt the pressure of Shigemo hugging around her body. She heard his whimpers.

She looked at him.

One fang out of the six on his face had lost its color and faded.

Gojo Satoru’s Imaginary Technique: Hollow Purple.

It had landed at the right place, and at the right time.

Shigemo’s doing!

The knowledge that it had worked—it had worked!—filled Haruta’s chest with a fire that burned hotter than the sun itself.

She could do this.

She could win!

But how do I—?

No. Don’t think. Just do.

Do what?

Just run towards him and kick the shit out of him.

A shadow grew over the sky.

Something had infected the barrier, and now that infection spread like a rot. She wondered, for a moment, if this was a part of the games.

Geto Suguru commanded his spirits to slow down, the battle surrounding both them and Ito dying down as everyone looked at the sky in confusion.

Someone—or something’s—innate technique had hijacked the barrier. Either that, or someone had applied some kind of convoluted barrier technique to achieve this.

Haruta quietly replenished her Juchū from her impractically large stock of spares, Sense Expansion bolstering her senses as the light disappeared—wait.

Haruta used her Juchū to observe Shigemo’s face, its insectile eyes barely picking up the fact that yet another one of Shigemo’s fangs had lost its color. It used the last of the light that crept through the edges of the darkening barrier to see this.

As all light finally disappeared, the only thing left for her to sense were shapes and presences of cursed energy.

This, too, had been Shigemo’s doing.

Geto Suguru whirled on his feet, his cursed energy output somehow increasing to an even more oppressive extent.

It was clear for Haruta to see that he was utterly blind to the world.

Him, and his cursed spirits, for even though they were spiritual, their existence in the physical world came with physical requirements. They, too, required light to see.

Even Kurourushi, despite his cockroaches.

They still targeted the nearest Juchū, but they were doing so blindly, relying on non-visual senses. An excellent hearing and sense of smell, no doubt. She was not free from Kurourushi totally.

But she was more than free enough to make the next ten seconds count.

She tuned out Shigemo’s nattering about the terrifying dark. Using Arthropodal Aspect on her legs, she gave her legs an exoskeleton akin to a grasshopper’s legs. Using this, she launched her way towards Kurourushi.

She pulled her fist back.

Kurourushi reacted instantly to the sound of her arrival. It raised its arms and crossed them.

It was for naught.

The amount of insects in the air fed Haruta a constant barrage of information that sharpened the world to a level of relief beyond anything she had dared to absorb before.

She knew that even a minute more of this information would do irreparable damage to her brain.

Thankfully, she didn’t need sixty seconds.

She didn’t even need ten.

Kurourushi’s guard had been raised at the right place to block a full-powered punch from Haruta.

She lowered her aim in response, to just below where its crossed arms met. She could feel the adjustment of her trajectory bleed away valuable energy, but it was a sacrifice she was willing to make.

Physically, she fell well short of optimal biomechanics.

Spiritually? Her cursed energy responded perfectly to her on-the-fly adjustment.

Too well, in fact.

In all her years of practicing Jujutsu, she felt that she had never made a more perfect maneuver with her cursed energy.

The closer her fist drew towards Kurourushi, the better her cursed energy resonated. The more she could hear it; the thing that Teira always talked about.

Was this blind luck? Had all the factors she couldn’t control converged at this exact moment?

Or was it, perhaps, yet another miracle?

Her fist made contact, and for the first time in her life, Haruta was one with cursed energy.

The Black Flash made her feel like a bomb strapped to her knuckles had just gone off, destroying everything except for the fist that it was attached to. Kurourushi’s massive form bent as it swallowed the destructive energy, chitin shattering from it.

She kept going, kept leaning, kept flying into the strike, intending not to simply blow Kurourushi away, but to excavate its entire abdomen.

She would exorcise this long-time rival of hers.

Unfortunately, her fist was not able to reach through its spine and out its back. Instead, the spirit simply flew away from the strike.

All the cockroaches stopped moving.

All of them stopped defending Geto Suguru.

She could go after Kurourushi and put a decisive end to it, but that would be a waste of a miracle.

She was after Geto Suguru. And unfortunately for him, she was now in the zone.

She pivoted and used her grasshopper legs to jump towards him as well.

She wanted to laugh as she felt it again, heard it again. The world was singing to her, and it demanded that she harmonize. Haruta, in response, emptied her mind of everything but her own cursed energy, and that of Geto Suguru.

She struck him on the right side of his ribcage, shattering the protective bones and crippling his breathing.

Black Flash.

One of her Juchū intercepted his flight by crashing into him and grounding him.

She was on top of him, though she couldn’t remember how.

He raised his arms to guard.

It would have been trivially easy to avoid those reinforced arms of his, but where would be the fun in that?

She struck downwards, intending on breaking his guard.

She broke the guard, and the arms, and her fist continued downwards, taking out the left side of his ribcage as well, though not nearly as destructively as the other side.

One more, to the face.

And then I’m done—

Tamamo-no-Mae Incarnate’s blast destroyed the space that Haruta had just occupied a fraction of a second before, on top of Suguru. She had acted so automatically, so much in accordance with the song of cursed energy that she could inexplicably hear, that it had not even been by her own will that she had retreated.

This maneuver cooled her mind down, and the song disappeared. As did the altered state of mind.

No more zone.

But she remembered how it felt, with a crystalline clarity. She remembered exactly how the cursed energy had obeyed her. She remembered exactly what it was that she had been given when she was in the zone.

Not to the point that she could replicate her performance without first having performed a Black Flash, of course.

But she was better now, and she knew that it was possible for her to one day hit another Black Flash, because she had finally done it.

She had finally become a Grade One sorcerer.

000

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

Holy shit. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

Suguru couldn’t breathe, and yet that was the least of his current worries.

The vast majority of those worries all centered around the vital fact that so many of his goddamned bones were broken that he now finally understood the old adage about there being fates worse than death.

What the hell was that?

Did she… hit me with a Black Flash?

Black Flashes?!

Of all the times an opponent of Suguru would get to experience an awakening in their skills in sorcery, it had to be now, and under these godawful conditions!

The Juchū technique allows her to go without light—

—and who the hell turned off the lights in the first place?!

Had all of this been a part of Haruta’s plan? The darkness? How?

Don’t think. Just act.

Suguru couldn’t move. His mind raced for a curse that could take care of that.

He landed on the slime curse.

The portal appeared behind him, out from which a cursed spirit made of a green-brown, translucent sludge oozed out and towards Suguru. It swallowed him up—everything but his head.

Then it squeezed around him gently, forcing breaths of air in and out of his lungs.

Kurourushi was busy healing from the blow that Haruta had dealt it. For the time being, it was the only cursed spirit in Suguru’s army that could navigate this battle under these light conditions.

Wait—light!

He summoned one more cursed spirit, this one in the shape of an anglerfish out of a child’s nightmare. Its lamp was a fireball hovering away from the end of the stalk growing out of its forehead, and it swam through the air like it was under water.

The light caused Tamamo and Kuchisake-Onna to lock in on Haruta and rush her.

Suguru was well and truly finished with the games now.

Thus, he gave Kuchisake-Onna a mental command to end it all.

The Simple Domain engulfed everything between Suguru and Haruta, including them both. Kurourushi was caught within it as well, and Tamamo.

Kuchisake-Onna, the slender apparition with long black hair and eyes that grew on the hair, began to ask a question. “Am I… Am I… pretty?!”

Haruta activated a Simple Domain, freeing herself from the clutches of Kuchisake-Onna’s.

Just then, an enormous pair of scissors engulfed Haruta’s Simple Domain, preparing to slice through it. A domain clash. Depending on how she performed, this domain clash might cause Haruta to burn out her cursed technique, which would lose her the battle.

Suguru blinked. The agony of his broken bones spiked for a moment, pulling him out of the fight, and the zone. It was as though he had walked into a gap in his adrenaline rush that, for a moment, revealed the state of his body to him in the most vivid detail.

Suguru’s fighting spirit nearly shattered upon the realization of how he was doing.

He could no longer see himself winning this fight.

Something in the fight had shifted, though Suguru didn’t know what. All he knew was that Kuchisake-Onna was on the receiving end of the most disrespectful set of punches and kicks he had ever laid witness to.

How had she gotten so fast, all of a sudden? Suguru could barely keep up with her movements.

Even his cursed spirits had gotten faster, somehow. The world was spinning around him, everything moving at breakneck speeds while he sat in the eye of this raging storm.

I need to throw all my cursed spirits—

No. If I do that, Kamo Joichi might take advantage of them and harvest them for their blood.

If they were weak enough, he could do the same thing that Suguru did to Grade 2 curses and below—he could just directly sap them of their blood.

He cast a glance at Joichi’s fight against Ito.

Kamo Joichi held a tree over his head, its trunk wrapped with blood-red tendrils. He smashed it down on Ito with all of his strength.

Ito blocked the tree with one hand, then pulled a maneuver so fast and so slick that Suguru hadn’t been able to follow it, only the end-result: Ito was now on top of the tree and running towards Joichi. Before Joichi had even let go of the tree, Ito kicked him in the face.

He turned back to watch as Kuchisake-Onna was being supported by an irate Kurourushi, whose very scream seemed enough to stun Haruta’s inexhaustible Juchū.

Sound.

The epiphany struck Suguru like a physical blow, reminding him of his wounds. He would have laughed at the sheer simplicity of this solution. Sound. Her damned insects were excellent sensory organs.

Why not just overload them?

Suguru released a whooping five cursed spirits, all of whom had innate techniques involving sound.

One was in the shape of a grasshopper. Another was a fat, ugly bird. The third was a large feline-type, not quite a lion or a tiger. The fourth was a floating mouth with no other facial features besides. The fifth was a cicada that floated in the air without batting its wings, like a still image.

The grasshopper began to grind its legs together. The ugly bird howled. The feline roared. The floating mouth just screamed, and the cicada released the mother of all uncomfortable sounds.

Combined, all of them made Suguru feel sick to his stomach. If it wasn’t for his abused thorax, he would have thrown up.

Haruta collapsed on top of that human backpack of hers—and Suguru still hadn’t gotten to the bottom of exactly what that cretin’s role in this fight was supposed to be.

Seriously, who was he?

Fuck it—I’m not sitting around to find out.

The blackness in the sky was beginning to disappear.

Light was slowly returning to the world.

Tamamo, now!

Tamamo released yet another one of her mouth blasts.

This one would hit Haruta all over her body, causing her severe burns. The concussive force would likely break most of the bones in her body.

Still, she would survive. She had to. She was strong. Much stronger than Suguru had first imagined. She was too strong for him to hold back against.

The attack hit.

Tamamo’s blast threw both Haruta and her friend directly into a tree. Their flight cut the tree down where they hit, and they proceeded even further than that.

Finally. Finally!

Suguru’s slime spirit walked him towards where Haruta had flown. The day was becoming brighter and brighter, and he no longer needed the anglerfish for illumination. He quickly un-summoned it before Joichi took advantage of it.

Haruta had been thrown almost fifty meters away, into the forest. When Suguru found her, it was to see her using her own, and the boy’s jacket to tie the unconscious, heavily injured boy around her back.

Her body was now covered in a chitinous pink exoskeleton. Everywhere her burned and tattered clothes didn’t cover, she wore that exoskeleton, making her look like she was on the verge of a transformation.

Rather, she was likely using her technique to mask the sheer breadth of injuries that she had sustained.

But it was over now. It was the end of the line for her.

While Tamamo charged up another mouth blast, and his choir of godawful noisemakers were preparing to let out yet another discordant hell-chorus, Suguru forced himself to chuckle at how this had turned out.

“It’s truly a miracle that you lasted this long,” Suguru wheezed.

Haruta smirked, and the expression looked both bloodthirsty and exhausted. “Three miracles.”

“Huh?”

“Three,” she repeated.

Had he knocked a screw loose in her head? A pity. What was the point of monologuing if his opponent had gone mad?

“I’ve got three more,” she said. “So hit me with your best shot, Special Grade!”

She said the words like they were an insult.

But that was only fair. She didn’t know who he was. Neither did Joichi.

Geto Suguru knew who he was, however. He knew what he could become in the future. He had faith that in time, he would be the one to mark the end of the age of cursed spirits.

He would become a god.

His friends believed it, and so he also believed it.

Tamamo released yet another mouth-blast.

This time, Haruta didn’t even try to dodge. She just ran towards it a moment before activation. Towards it.

At that exact moment—that exact, very moment—a golden disk fell from the sky, intercepting the path of the blast, erasing every bit of it that struck the shield.

And Haruta punched Suguru in the face.

Black lightning exploded upon contact, and Suguru knew only pain.

A/N: Disclaimer, Shigemo's miracles aren't making people directly stronger. Suzuki Yui didn't hit a Black Flash only because of Shigemo's miracle. Rather, his miracle set up a scenario that allowed Yui to further reach her potential. If she was never capable of pulling a Black Flash in the first place, it wouldn't have happened.

Likewise, Haruta isn't being made stronger by Shigemo's miracles. She already had what it took to hit a Black Flash. She just needed the right opportunity.