"The Maxwell's Demon Protocol..."
The twins muttered the name of Suzuki's theoretical solution in unison. They sat perfectly still on his sofa, staring at the man who had stubbornly refused to give up on them.
Nerd. Waste of talent. Coward.
How many times had Suzuki been mocked behind his back with those exact words? In the eyes of the traditional, blood-soaked Jujutsu society, a powerful Zenin heir choosing to enroll in a mundane university to study classical physics was a disgraceful waste of time. If he had time to read textbooks, he should have been out exorcising Special Grade curses, amassing political power, and bringing glory to the clan! Why on earth would a sorcerer waste his prime years in a college library?
But sitting in his apartment, Maki and Mai finally understood the truth.
He hadn't gone to Kyoto University for himself. He had endured the mockery, the disdain, and the grueling academic exams entirely for them.
While the rest of the world either spat on them for being failures or offered them useless, pitying condolences about their tragic fate, Suzuki had quietly looked at their "curse" and decided it was just a broken equation. He didn't treat them like cursed anomalies; he treated their situation like a broken sink that just needed a highly specialized wrench.
"Yes," Suzuki nodded, tapping his temple with a deeply arrogant, uncharacteristically smug grin. "The reality isn't that your souls are cursed by the heavens. The reality is simply that everyone else in this archaic society is a complete idiot, and I am an absolute genius."
"..."
"Hahaha...!"
Mai and Maki stared at him in stunned silence for a split second before they both burst into explosive laughter.
They laughed so hard that their chests ached and tears began to stream freely down their faces. Suzuki's words were incredibly shameless—especially since he knew he had heavily relied on his Manager to finalize the math—but it didn't matter. If he hadn't spent years manually studying physics, the Manager wouldn't have had the foundational data required to formulate the cure. He had bypassed the cruel, traditional Jujutsu mandate that required one twin to die for the other to thrive.
"An idiot... how funny...!" Mai gasped, squeezing her eyes shut as she laughed, aggressively wiping at her face to hide her ugly-crying from him.
"I see... so it really wasn't a curse..." Maki's voice was much quieter. She tried to maintain her stoic composure, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the hem of her skirt. But her defenses completely crumbled, and thick, silent tears cascaded down her cheeks.
Suzuki watched them cry for a moment, pushing up his glasses. "...Should I sit here and wait for you two to finish crying, or should I continue?"
"Continue!" they both shouted instantly, furiously scrubbing their eyes.
They couldn't wait another second. They had been waiting for this exact moment their entire lives. Aside from Suzuki, they didn't truly trust anyone in this world. Other people might have admired Maki's grit or Mai's beauty, but nobody had ever actually tried to fix their suffering. Everyone else treated their fate as an unchangeable tragedy.
"Okay, but manufacturing this solution is going to take a bit of time," Suzuki warned, gesturing to the scattered blueprints on his desk. "I need you two to stay here with me while I finalize the calibration."
"Yes!" they answered without hesitation.
Creating a custom Cursed Tool capable of regulating the quantum entanglement of two human souls was incredibly difficult, and more importantly, it was astronomically expensive.
This was the true reason Suzuki had refused to buy a house and chose to rent a modest apartment. He had completely liquidated his massive mission savings to acquire the exotic, highly-classified cursed materials required to forge the tool. When the twins eventually peeked at the financial ledgers on his desk and realized just how many hundreds of millions of yen he had secretly burned for their sake, they were entirely at a loss for words.
Suzuki hated traditional Jujutsu work. He hated risking his life. Yet, he had spent years bleeding in the gutters, hunting nightmarish curses, just to amass a fortune he could spend entirely on their freedom.
In that quiet apartment, both Maki and Mai silently vowed that they would follow this man to the very depths of hell if he asked them to.
"What's wrong? Why are you two suddenly sitting so close to me?" Suzuki asked a few hours later, pausing his soldering iron as the twins practically boxed him in at his workbench.
"What? You don't like it?" Mai teased, leaning her shoulder against his arm.
"...You two are in my light. You're making it hard for me to calibrate this micro-seal."
"Oh? So you mean we're making you lose your calm?" Mai asked smugly, a light, genuine blush dusting her cheeks as she looked up at him through her lashes.
"..."
Suzuki was completely speechless. He slowly turned his head to look at Maki for help, but the usually aggressive tomboy was just quietly staring at him, her eyes practically shining with intense, unspoken devotion.
"...If you have the free time to sit here and say something stupid," Suzuki sighed, "how about you go buy me some food? I am starving."
"Who are you calling stupid?!" Mai roared, her smug facade instantly breaking. "Hmph! I'm not wasting money on takeout! I will make you something myself. Just sit there and focus on your work!"
With an indignant huff, she marched into his kitchen and aggressively started pulling out pots and pans.
"....."
Suzuki stared at the kitchen doorway in mild disbelief, but he smartly kept his mouth shut and returned to the soldering iron. He needed to finish this immediately.
Mai's Construction technique theoretically could have created the tool from nothing, but the cursed energy cost would have instantly killed her. The object was too complex. Suzuki had to build it entirely by hand, physically etching the Maxwell's Demon algorithm into the cursed metal.
"Is there anything I can help with?" Maki asked softly, hovering near his elbow.
"Yeah. Hold that thermal clamp steady for me."
"Okay." Maki nodded, her hands moving with absolute, unwavering precision as she assisted him.
Between the Manager's automated calculations, Maki's steady hands as a lab assistant, and Mai keeping them fed, Suzuki finally completed the masterpiece.
It was a sleek, unassuming black metallic choker, inscribed on the inside with microscopic, physics-defying cursed seals.
"Wear it, Maki," Suzuki said, holding it out to her.
"Okay."
Maki didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second. She took the metal band and snapped it around her neck. Mai held her breath, her hands clutched tightly in front of her chest.
Click.
The moment the clasp locked, the reality of their existence fundamentally shifted.
The parasitic "leak" between their souls instantly slammed shut. Mai suddenly gasped, stumbling forward as her internal cursed energy reserves, no longer violently draining into her sister, instantly stabilized and pooled into a dense, potent reservoir.
Simultaneously, the microscopic trickle of cursed energy poisoning Maki's body was eradicated. It hit absolute zero.
A terrifying, suffocating physical pressure suddenly exploded outward from Maki's body. Her muscles tightened, her senses expanded to godly proportions, and the heavy chains of the Zenin Clan's curse shattered into a million invisible pieces.
"Done?" Suzuki asked, adjusting his glasses.
"Done!" they both cried out, their voices choked with absolute euphoria.
Unable to contain themselves, Maki and Mai threw themselves forward at the exact same time, tackling Suzuki into a massive, tearful hug.
It would have been a perfectly heartwarming moment, except for one small, critical miscalculation.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
"Ouch! OUCH! STOP! STOP!" Suzuki shrieked, his eyes practically bulging out of his skull as his ribs groaned in protest. "MAKI, LET GO! YOU NOW HAVE A FULLY AWAKENED HEAVENLY RESTRICTION! YOU ARE GOING TO SNAP MY SPINE IN HALF!"
As Suzuki desperately gasped for air while trapped in the crushing grip of a newly forged demigod, he made a very important mental note:
Before I violently take over the Zenin Clan... I really, really need to teach her how to control her new super-strength.