Chapter 74

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
10th September, 12:45 JST

Haruta’s entire body hurt, but her own health was the least of her current worries.

Shigemo was holding onto consciousness by a thread. He was currently so hopped up on stimulants that Haruta had stockpiled in her Juchū, that he physically couldn’t fall unconscious unless he just flat out died.

The average non-sorcerer would have died at this point. Haruta was counting on Shigemo being hardier on account of possessing cursed energy.

And besides, it was nothing that she wasn’t putting herself through as well. The stimulants in her blood mixed with the painkillers she had also injected, producing a sensation of utter invincibility, even though she knew that her body was not doing well at all.

After hitting her Black Flash, Haruta had then sacrificed more Juchū to her Arthropodal Aspect technique. She had employed it on herself to bolster her wounded body parts. Now, she decided to wrap Shigemo around this protective chitin and hold him more tightly to her back. There was also a layer of shock-absorpant chitin between her back and Shigemo’s front, which would further insulate him from any of the impacts that Haruta would suffer.

More and more pink spread out across her body until it covered every inch of her skin.

Until it became a… super-suit.

The idea had been percolating in Haruta’s mind for many years now, but ideas were mere ideas. Too many holes riddled that marvelous fantasy of hers, and rendered the benefit of it questionable at best.

Now, while the world still whispered its song to her, she could plug all those holes with but an afterthought. Perhaps she could have managed this even without the most recent Black Flash?

More and more, she came to understand exactly what it meant to be a Grade One, what it meant to have landed a Black Flash.

It was as though, all of her life, the elites of the world had been allowed to patronize an exclusive club in which they shared information and made one another stronger. And now that she had landed a Black Flash, she was finally allowed in to read their written materials.

And now, when those inside the club spoke to her, it would likely make so much more sense than before. Haruta could not wait to track down Teira-sama and shake her down for all the information that once flew over her head during their many lessons throughout the years. Her ignorance couldn’t have been helped back then, for she had no ears to hear the wisdom of her words.

Now, she did.

Arthropodal Aspect lended the user the physical attributes of their Juchū. Juchū could take the shape of any crawling creature with hard bodies.

These attributes commonly increased performance proportionally to a person’s weight. If a grasshopper of normal weight could jump a meter into the air, then a grasshopper the weight of a human could jump potentially hundreds of meters. In practice, this proportion wasn’t perfectly consistent, but the technique’s principles worked along these lines.

A suit of Arthropodal Aspect would need more than just jumping power, or stopping power, or durability. It needed everything in a blend that synergized well. Dozens of types of creatures whose attributes complemented one another would have to be weaved into the suit.

The foundation came from beetles.

The atlas beetle formed the frame of the armor, providing greater lifting strength and durability. They were strong creatures that could lift many times their weight, so they were an ideal candidate for a frame.

The armor consisted of sleek and compact frames that didn’t stick out like plate armor, or the warrior armor of old. Rather, they stuck close to her body, and were thin enough to not bulk up her silhouette.

Grasshopper musculature supplied the explosive movement. Unlike the frame that provided the steady, unyielding strength, these add-ons charged up power through tension and released it all in a single burst. They could also charge enough power to allow her a dramatically enhanced ability to accelerate.

The suit, on the helmet, contained an extra dense external nervous system belonging to a dragonfly. One of the concessions to make this suit work as-is was to ditch the idea of wings as a native part of the suit. She could instead use Arthropodal Aspect again to conjure wings as needed.

Without Shigemo getting in the way on her back, she would have created a shell for her wings to rest while not in use, so they wouldn’t get in the way mid-combat.

The dragonfly nervous system boosted her balance, proprioception and spatial awareness. This mental load was at the cost of being able to control her other Juchū. In a way, she had transferred her control ability from many small minions to just one large one—herself.

Hidden inside her forearms were spring-loaded mantis blades that could potentially surprise Suguru in the coming match. They, alongside the mantis shrimp mechanism on her forearms, she would use as surprise attacks when the time was just right.

The mantis shrimp mechanism—simply a very, very powerful punch—was also built into her ankles, in case she needed extreme speed at a moment’s notice. She had no doubt in her mind that this mechanism would injure her severely with each use, but that was the price that one paid for battling a Special Grade.

Special Grade…

She had to admit it, even just to herself, but Geto Suguru was strong. And from all the Hibana clan knew of him, he was still just a rank beginner. He was as green as they came, especially in the hand-to-hand department. Without any cursed techniques, Haruta was confident that she would destroy him.

In another five years, though?

Unless she somehow awakened whatever cursed trait allowed Teira-sama to be so powerful, then she had her doubts.

She was looking at the end of her potential in the form of Geto Suguru.

His own potential was limitless, his power curtailed only by inexperience. And he was still this powerful.

The suit’s external nervous system upgrades did not just stop at the helmet. She incorporated a spider’s ability to sense extremely minute vibrations, to see extremely well, and she included the resilience and recoverability of a cockroach, granting her suit an automatic healing factor that ran only on her cursed energy.

She heaped more and more layers of complexity on the suit’s nervous system, pursuing the goal of creating a combat system that could think for itself. A second brain.

Finally, she incorporated one final attack system, this time lending the aspect of a bombardier beetle. Specialized glands integrated into the forearms generated bursts of heated cursed energy. Rather than producing actual chemicals, the suit recreated the principle through cursed energy output, allowing her to release explosive pink blasts from vents hidden along her gauntlets.

The end-result was not a power-suit that anyone in the world would call fearsome, on account of the bright, hot pink everywhere, interrupted only by splashes and stripes of white: her lenses, a band around her neck, and thin inch-wide seams that separated her limbs from her body.

And there was, of course, the strange growth on the back of her torso, spreading to the front of her hips. Shigemo, covered from head to toe by chitin, allowed to breathe only via a complicated series of vents and filters that would protect him even from toxic gasses.

She knew that after this battle was over, she would have hell to pay Shigemo in hazard pay just to prevent him from abandoning her forever. Haruta had already threatened his life if he left her, once before in the past. If he decided that staying with her was certain death anyway, then she no longer had any leverage over him.

But what should I call this suit, anyway?

“Pink Scarab,” she said to herself, just to test the name out.

Geto Suguru was slowly getting up, his face no longer as pretty as it had once been. His left side drooped as though the muscle and bone there was sagging against the skin, incapable of supporting any structure. Still, his eyes were alight with fury. Covered in his slime exoskeleton, his body was entirely still while within the creature.

Kurourushi stood beside him. Tamamo-no-Mae floated behind him. Kuchisake-Onna lurked behind a tree right next to him.

And of course, there were those five cursed spirits, all of whom seemed to have sound-based strategies.

For her part, Haruta no longer felt like this fight was an impossible one. Geto was already on death’s door as it was. By activating Pink Scarab, Haruta had chosen to utilize her body rather than her Juchū. During her transformation, Kurourushi had slaughtered every single one of them that were still out. She wouldn’t replace them with new ones as the mental load of the suit was tremendous as it was.

Now, Kurourushi lost its biggest edge against her. All that was left to do was to just… kill it. Once and for all. It was probably still running on low energy from the Black Flash that it had to regenerate from. It was more vulnerable than ever before.

Kuchisake-Onna wouldn’t dare to enter into another Simple Domain clash with her, not unless it was ordered to by Geto. However, now that Haruta had gotten a taste for its Simple Domain, she wanted Geto to order the curse to try it again. She wanted to decisively crush the scissor-handling urban myth.

Tamamo-no-Mae would always be a problem. She needed to disable it if she wanted to stay in this fight for any length of time.

“Surrender!” Haruta told him.

Geto Suguru responded by making his noisy cursed spirits make noise again. Haruta reached for a safety switch in her power suit and mentally flicked it, disabling the suit’s superhuman senses.

In doing so, she disabled even her normal senses. She could still feel a slight amount of vibrations from the cursed spirit screaming match, but the only one that was truly feeling the noise was Geto Suguru and his three discomfited Special Grade curses, all of whom looked varying degrees of uncomfortable.

Haruta had the urge to think of him as an idiot.

Did he seriously think that she hadn’t learned from this tactic, that was now putting him on the backfoot?

She didn’t give him time to ponder this.

She instead instantly launched herself towards Kurourushi, shattering her ankles with the mantis shrimp mechanism while pulling her fist back, preparing the mantis shrimp mechanism on her forearms.

Initially, she had feared that the mantis shrimp mechanism would make it impossible to accurately land a Black Flash. It was all about timing, after all, and timing the abnormal jerk forward of her fist’s exoskeleton was not an intuitive endeavor.

She knew that it wasn’t impossible. Not with this nervous system of hers, granting her a beyond intuitive degree of knowledge of her own body.

She could do it. She could hit yet another Black Flash—

Her fist crashed into Kurourushi’s body, blowing through its entire torso. It did not, however, explode with arcs of black lightning.

She used the mantis shrimp mechanism on her other ankle to catch up to Kurourushi while it was mid-flight, grabbing both its arms, and pulling them out from its torso with brutal precision.

From these damages alone, Kurourushi might be out of the game, already. Geto would be forced to call it back, or perhaps it was already dead. Still, Haruta didn’t care.

She wanted to make sure it was gone once and for all.

It had another pair of arms that it used to try and wrestle her.

It grabbed her arms while they were mid flight.

She used it as leverage to power up a kick aimed upwards at its crotch.

The moment before the kick landed, she released the mantis blade on her shin.

Her kick seamlessly parted the creature’s body and it didn’t stop until it had traced an entire circle, her body reseting to its initial position.

Kurourushi’s grip slackened around Haruta’s arms as both halves of it slowly parted away mid-flight.

Tamamo-no-Mae’s blast struck her right in her Shigemo-backpack, hard enough to shatter the chitin protecting him and her. The blast sent her into an uncontrolled flight that she instantly controlled by grabbing onto a passing tree and arresting her momentum.

The chitin had broken, but the package had remained protected. She would need a precious few moments to regenerate the damage before diving into the fight once again. Now she knew, however, that her armor was rated for attacks against Special Grade curses.

Taking a calculated gamble, she re-enabled the suit’s superhuman senses, confident that Geto had learned that the overstimulation trick no longer worked on her, and would only serve to hamper him.

Just as she did, she sensed Tamamo-no-Mae about to blast her again.

She took one step out of the way before even intending it, her suit acting on the information received from its superhuman senses to make this split-second decision.

With this readjustment in position, she was not only well clear of the blast, but also right in the middle of falling forward, one foot raised and ready to stomp the ground and launch her towards the Special Grade curse.

Mid-flight, Haruta saw something utterly confusing.

Kuchisake-Onna hugged Geto Suguru’s slimy form from behind, erecting a Simple Domain around them both.

In a flash, that domain disappeared, as did the slime around Geto Suguru.

And yet, he was standing unassisted, Kuchisake-Onna’s hug gradually loosening as time passed.

They had done something inside that Simple Domain. Kuchisake-Onna had bought Geto precious moments using the Domain’s time dilation feature.

To heal? To learn the Reverse Cursed Technique?

All of these options were far from palatable, but for now, they wouldn’t alter Haruta’s path towards Tamamo-no-Mae.

The cursed spirit tried to readjust the aim of her mouth-laser, but by the time she tried, Haruta was already right in its face, right arm pulled back while a mantis blade waited to pop out.

The blade sheared through Tamamo’s body diagonally from shoulder to hip, the wound so deep that it had almost bisected the creature.

Before Haruta could take it out with one final stroke from her left mantis blade, something pushed her away.

A bear-sized Grade Three curse, malformed as any other, was opening its mouth, about to bite her heavily armored arm. As its jaws clenched, its teeth shattered upon the plate, and it pushed her harder away as it was, in turn being pushed by another curse.

No, several.

Half a dozen.

Dozens.

Without even noticing it, the battlefield had suddenly become infested with cursed spirits, far more than should ever have been involved in the game in the first place.

Geto…

Damn it. What do I do now?

She released all of her mantis blades and prepared to hack and slash at everything she could reach until there was nothing left.

Nothing at all.

000

The slime curse inside of Suguru’s body had been captured sometime in the last three months in one of the more memorable curse busts in Suguru’s recollection.

Memorable, because they usually weren’t nearly as visceral. Half-eaten corpses were old-hat to Suguru, but more creative forms of cruelty were always difficult to swallow.

This cursed spirit belonged inside the bodies of people, and took control over them for a variety of purposes, every single one of them deeply evil.

As it was also a Grade One curse, it had considerable combat prowess that only reached fruition when it was possessing a human body.

Suguru had tried to save the life of the curse slime’s final host. Defeating a Grade One was trivial, and he would have managed it too if the monster hadn’t suddenly reallocated all of its priorities into spiting Suguru, because it knew that it could not defeat him.

Spiting, by torturing its host to death, and forcing Suguru to cut his agony short by extracting the slime curse out using his Cursed Spirit Manipulation, knowing that although the slime was torturing the host, it was also the only thing keeping him alive.

Suguru tried not to think about that day very much. He knew that if he dwelled on it too much, the curse would win. If he dwelled on any of the psychological wounds that being a sorcerer had given him, then all of his enemies, whether dead or alive, would be the final victors.

If the pain ever became too great to bear, then he would just swallow it and shit it out later.

The slime reinforced his shattered bones, numbed the agony by replacing the signals that his nervous system received, firmed up bruised flesh and held together broken bones. Then, it dedicated all of its vast stores of cursed energy to continue enforcing his body. Usually, such a degree of cursed energy manipulation done by a third party would be impossible inside of another person or creature’s innate domain—the bounds of their body. That was, barring a great enough difference in power.

Suguru was more powerful than the slime curse, so this should have been impossible. Fortunately for him, the slime curse was a part of his power. His Cursed Spirit Manipulation had done something to better align its being and construction with Suguru’s own cursed energy.

Suguru’s army was akin to his very own flesh and bone.

As such, each and every curse was akin to his hands and fingers. Akin to his arms.

He commanded the bulk of his army out, knowing exactly how catastrophically this could go. He didn’t care anymore. He would smother the opposition without hesitation.

And he would finally finish his business with Joichi.

Tamamo was down and recovering inside Suguru’s inner dimension, while Kurourushi’s… clone was also doing much the same. Upon the cockroach Special Grade’s ‘death’, it had managed to copy all of its information—its physical and spiritual parameters as well as its memories and personality—into a shikigami of its own creation, a lesser version of itself. Once the original died, the lesser version inherited all that Kurourushi now was.

That included its wounds, which was why it was licking away at them in his inner dimension.

Damaged as they were, in the end, they were still Special Grades worthy of the name. Next time, Suguru would try to direct them more intelligently. Their defeat had been his fault, after all.

He turned his back on Hibana Haruta, who was inside a giant ball of curses, busy trying her best to cut past the enormous crush of cursed spirits fighting against her every step of the way. That power armor of hers looked expensive to maintain. Unless she was Teira and had infinite cursed energy to play around with, this would drain her in time. It would have to.

It was an inelegant way to win, but Suguru was well past the need to appear elegant.

Ito and Joichi were a fair bit away from Suguru. Sixty meters away, and rapidly closing in. He could sense Joichi running away from Ito to make his way towards the cursed spirits. He was after their blood.

Ito was following behind, hot on his heels.

And Suguru stood in his way.

Several of Suguru’s flying cursed spirits circled the air high above. Seven of them flew in a lazy circle before abruptly diving downwards, flapping their wings to gain more and more speed during their descent.

The first cursed spirit missed, exploding the ground only half a meter in front of Joichi, launching him into the air at exactly the right trajectory.

The remaining six cursed spirits were locked on his position. Joichi had too little time to move away.

Instead, he covered himself in a bubble of blood.

The cursed spirits made contact one after another, each of them exploding into spiritual gore. Even if Joichi managed to seize their blood, it would disappear in time unless Joichi somehow managed to overpower the vanishing effect with his own cursed energy.

This… eventuality was almost entirely divorced from Suguru’s understanding of reality, and of cursed spirits. Yet, he just had to consider it as a likely possibility. Too many things today had shown him that nothing was impossible, that everything that could happen, would happen.

Suguru pursued the ground zero of the multiple cursed spirit kinetic bombardments, while Ito was closing in from the opposite side.

He reached Joichi far before Ito could. Joichi was on his feet, red blood entering his body from his surroundings. Rather than waste energy by generating new blood, he was conserving the old blood. Monstrous that he was regarding his cursed energy capacity, he was clearly running on a drained tank. How drained, Suguru couldn’t tell at a glance.

He had no wounds on his body. Nothing of that nature showed through the many tatters on his clothes—long lines slicing apart the fabric, and presumably also the flesh beneath. Clearly, he had regenerated from this damage.

Joichi looked up, just in time as Suguru’s fist crashed into his nose, throwing him backwards, right towards Ito, who jumped and kicked, bending Joichi’s torso backwards with a sickeningly loud crack.

Suguru summoned a cursed spirit in the shape of a fat sparrow with thorns all over its legs and talons. It grabbed Joichi mid-flight, taking him far away from Ito, who only gave Suguru a betrayed look. It was the most animated that Ito had ever been in her disapproval of him, but Suguru couldn’t bring himself to act the polite and amicable classmate. She had stolen his target first.

The shrike flew ever upwards, and through it, Suguru could sense it readjust its grip on Joichi constantly, riddling him with holes as he tried his best to regenerate.

“You defeated Haruta?” Ito asked.

She was still inside the giant ball of cursed spirits, still cutting away.

But she was slowing down. Finally.

Suguru smiled sharply. “Soon, but no thanks to you.”

She was covered in blood. There was spatter all over her face, and her uniform had absorbed quite a bit of it along her sleeves and her skirt. Still, she looked no worse for wear at all. With dread, Suguru wondered if she had awakened the Reverse Cursed Technique. Knowing her, that was a distinct possibility.

Ito… just grinned. “Wow, she’s tough, isn’t she? You look like a complete wreck.”

Suguru scoffed. “You’ve been fighting a fraud for the last ten minutes and he still isn’t down. I stepped in, and now look.”

Ten meters away, the shrike, now bleeding purple along wide gashes across its body, dove down with Joichi now caught in its maw.

The speed at which they dove was such that the shrike instantly died.

If Joichi did the same, then Suguru had no worry for his conscience. As he was right now, he could feel nothing at all except a quiet irritation that he was better than this, and yet he had almost lost.

He summoned another cursed spirit in the ground zero of Joichi’s collision towards the ground. This one was special. It was in the shape of a tree, its trunk a dark purple, and its leaves a sickly blue, like the pallor of an asphyxiating human.

Its branches peeled Joichi’s bleeding, near-dead form from the forest floor, stabbing holes through him to better secure him to its trunk.

Once his body touched the trunk, angry spikes of purple wood popped out from him, one taking out his lung, and another interrupting his spine.

Two more through each of his shoulders.

Two through each of his wrists, interrupting the muscles that were meant to control his fingers. Without those, he could no longer increase the power of his sorcery with Jujutsu.

All the while as he punished this cretin, all Suguru felt was a sudden rightness with the world. Nothing inexplicable or utterly random was getting in the way of what the world deemed as its natural course, the strong defeating the weak.

It should have been equally easy to take Haruta out of commission, but his streak of bad luck had allowed her to almost defeat him.

“I almost had him,” Ito muttered, her tone tinged with disappointment.

“I’m a little bit cranky right now, Ito-san,” Suguru said tiredly. “So excuse me if my overstepping cancels out your overstepping.”

Just as Joichi was about to surge his cursed energy output, a branch sliced his throat, severing veins and arteries. Joichi spent that split second before unconsciousness, and then death, to heal his throat.

No. He manually controlled his circulation, making the blood flow from one severed section of vessel to the other.

In doing so, his output decreased as he focused on healing himself.

Suguru had the tree slice him along the veins on his forearms. His output of cursed energy decreased, and his Reverse Cursed Technique usage increased considerably. He couldn’t attack and heal at the same time.

Suguru could just… continue to do this all day. That was fine. Eventually, the reprobate would run out of energy.

Finally, Haruta began to run out of cursed energy as well. Her movements became more sluggish, and the cursed spirits began to overpower her, until—

Something snapped. Not on Suguru’s side, but on Haruta’s.

The plate broke, and one of his cursed spirits finally managed to land a clean hit on her, biting through flesh and shattering bone. He stopped it before it could delimb her entirely, and ordered them to just chew on her for the time being.

Within moments, the spirits scattered away as only a few were needed to systematically break through every bit of that ridiculous superhero suit of hers.

Soon, that compartment on her back shattered, revealing the dazed blond boy she had brought into this fight, for reasons that Suguru still couldn’t puzzle together for the life of him.

The cursed spirits pulled the savaged Kyoto students to him. Each of Haruta’s limbs were being chewed up by no less than two spirits each, and the blond boy was being constricted by a serpentine cursed spirit, all the while as he was being pulled towards Suguru and Ito by other spirits.

There, they settled. Suguru’s blood cooled, and he could finally notice the agonized screams of Joichi—who had been screaming ever since the tree had captured him. Screaming, but stubbornly refusing to give up.

The same went for Haruta and her friend. They weren’t screaming, but they also weren’t giving up.

“Surrender,” Suguru said to them. “Or I’ll try my best not to kill you when I render you both unconscious.”

“I’ll never—“

Suguru punched her in the face before she could complete that sentence. Then again, and again. On the jaw. Her skull. Her nose. Nothing.

She just looked beaten up and bloody, but she wasn’t falling unconscious.

It struck Suguru just then, how ugly this business really was.

He sighed and twirled his fingers in the air. Just then, a goblin-like cursed spirit dug itself beneath her supine form, wrapped its arms around her neck and began to pull.

Her face turned bluer and bluer.

A lack of oxygen was the safest way to knock her unconscious at this point. It would have to work.

Suddenly, Suguru heard it.

The feedback of a sound system, echoing throughout the forest.

Then, “Testing, testing. Can y’all hear me? If ya can, and ya ain’t from Tokyo, just know that you are capital F Fucked!”

“Nakamura!” Ito cried into the air, eyes wide in disbelief.

Suguru’s eyes were also wide in disbelief.

Because he recognized exactly what this was, without failure. He recognized it because it had happened already. Four times, it had happened.

Four times, pure, uncut bullshit had caused him incredible disadvantages, and had done the exact opposite for Haruta.

The Hollow Purple that had thrown Suguru off, the sudden darkness, the chains of Black Flash, the random projectile that had taken a hit for her—

Suguru refocused on the asphyxiating Haruta and began to pummel her with all the strength in his body.

Haruta spat out blood.

Then, her features sharpened. She grinned an evil grin that chilled Suguru’s soul.

The world froze as Daiki’s voice filled the air, accompanied by the quiet riff of a piano in the background, as well as a clearly electronically edited vocal track.

Haruta grinned as the pressure of her worsening state halted entirely. Neither her nor Suguru could breathe at this very moment.

They had been caught in the effect of a barrier.