Things were getting urgent.
Mahiko frowned and looked up at the dark curtain descending from above.
It was an enormous Curtain barrier.
And not just any barrier — specifically the kind designed to prevent Cursed Spirits from escaping.
Designed to prevent Cursed Spirits from escaping... that made her heart lurch.
Because she was the only Cursed Spirit here. If they were hunting a Cursed Spirit, then they had to be hunting her — at the very least, they had a high probability of knowing she was in this location.
How did they know she was here?
Her position had been exposed?
Where had she slipped up?
She'd been practicing Domain Expansion in here — had that made too much noise? No, that couldn't be right. She hadn't made that big of a commotion, had she?
No time to dwell on it.
They'd thrown up an annoyingly solid Curtain, and at this rate she'd be surrounded by several sorcerers before she could build up enough power to break through it... but even so, it wasn't too late. Not yet.
Yes, she was trapped inside a barrier — but a barrier this large had to be maintained by multiple sorcerers working together. That meant taking out any one of them would create a crack in the barrier's integrity.
So: who to target first?
Mahiko gritted her teeth. Reality wasn't going to give her time to deliberate. She made her choice in under a second.
...…
Somewhere on the rooftop of a building in the abandoned complex.
A massive black-and-white panda lay sprawled across the rooftop's edge, his rotund body draped over the concrete parapet, his two tiny dark eyes scanning the buildings below with sharp vigilance.
To be clear — this was not an actual panda.
Well. It wasn't a furry cosplayer either.
He was a Cursed Corpse — an artificial lifeform animated by Cursed Energy.
His name was, simply, "Panda" — a second-year student at Jujutsu Tech.
Strictly speaking he wasn't human, but at Jujutsu Tech, everyone treated him as a classmate and comrade, plain and simple.
And right now, Panda and several other second- and first-year students were operating under Nanami Kento's command, moving to eliminate a dangerous Special Grade Cursed Spirit.
"Sure would be nice if Gojo-sensei were here..." Panda muttered under his breath.
Unfortunately, he wasn't.
Gojo-sensei was the strongest — and simultaneously the busiest. He couldn't be everywhere at once. Today's operation had Nanami in charge, and while Nanami was a Grade 1 sorcerer, he was still a considerable step below Satoru Gojo in raw combat power.
Not that it mattered much.
A team led by a Grade 1 sorcerer like Nanami, moving to eliminate a Special Grade Cursed Spirit, was honestly more than sufficient in terms of firepower.
They'd done a thorough analysis of the blue-haired Cursed Spirit's capabilities beforehand. Assuming she hadn't made a dramatic leap in power during this interval, their lineup was more than capable of handling her.
Panda clicked his earpiece. "Anyone got eyes on the target?"
Several students responded through the earpiece in turn — nobody had.
Then Nanami Kento's steady voice came through: "Stay alert and keep searching. If you make contact with the target, do not engage solo. Wait for the group to converge before acting."
Panda asked again: "She's definitely here?"
Nanami: "A 'Window' reported sightings of the blue-haired Cursed Spirit's traces in this area. She's not guaranteed to be here, but the probability is high — so stay sharp."
Intelligence from a 'Window', huh...
If a Window said there were traces of that blue-haired Cursed Spirit around here, the intel was almost certainly not baseless.
Panda let out a low grumble and went back to lying on the rooftop, peering down at the complex.
"Come to think of it," he suddenly spoke up again, "that Cursed Spirit turned Fushiguro into a girl, right... why, though? She's killed a lot of people, but she never killed any of the sorcerers — just turned them female. Is it because her Technique can't directly kill sorcerers?"
Nanami's voice came through the earpiece: "Unknown. Based on current intelligence, that does appear to be the pattern. But Itadori and the others encountered her at the Juvenile Detention Center previously — she was capable of killing a Special Grade Cursed Spirit, so she should be capable of killing sorcerers too. The reason she hasn't killed any sorcerers remains unclear."
The sorcerers' tactical directive was: capture if possible.
After all, there was a certain important part of Megumi Fushiguro's body that still needed the blue-haired Cursed Spirit's Technique to restore. It was a rather significant thing to be missing — the kind of absence that could fundamentally alter the trajectory of one's life.
Though Fushiguro himself didn't seem particularly invested in changing back. But that was a separate matter.
In any case: capture if possible. And if not — they couldn't just let that blue-haired Cursed Spirit keep roaming free.
"Contact!" Nobara Kugisaki's voice crackled through the earpiece abruptly, carrying a note of surprise. "There's a barrier!"
A barrier?
Panda's head snapped up.
A barrier meant it wasn't theirs — it was something that had appeared separately.
Inside the large Curtain they'd deployed, a proliferation of smaller barriers had suddenly materialized.
At first, several larger barriers flickered in and out of existence, appearing and shattering in rapid succession. Then — they stabilized. Across the entire abandoned building complex — more than a dozen structures — small black spherical barriers had bloomed from every building. The smaller ones enclosed perhaps a few rooms' worth of space; the larger ones spanned several floors.
Viewed from a distance, it looked as though every building in the complex had been strung with clusters of black glowing orbs — dense and countless.
Panda drew a sharp breath. "What kind of barrier is that?"
Nobara's voice: "Looks like barriers that block line of sight and sound!"
Panda's chest tightened.
There were that many people here?
Under normal circumstances, a sorcerer who could maintain one or two barriers simultaneously was already impressive.
That had nothing to do with how much Cursed Energy you had.
It was like being able to hold a few kilograms of dumbbells in one hand, but being completely unable to hold a hundred balloons in one hand at the same time — the sheer number of barriers spread across more than ten buildings made it obvious at a glance that there were many people stationed at different positions, each activating their own.
How could one person possibly open this many?
Nanami's voice was calm: "Before we entered, I sensed no additional traces of Cursed Energy. I can't rule out the possibility that all of these were opened by that Cursed Spirit alone."
Panda's eyes went wide. "She opened all of these herself? Seriously? That shouldn't be possible. Cursed Energy is one thing, but barriers can only be opened in your immediate vicinity... is she using clones to open them?"
Nobara's voice cut in: "If she's using clones, can my Resonance Technique reach her real body through them?"
Then Maki Zenin's voice — low and level: "Why is she opening all these barriers?"
Right.
Why?
Barriers that block sight and sound, scattered throughout the entire complex — what was the purpose?
Nanami's blood ran cold.
"Roll call — now!" His voice turned sharp and urgent. "Is anyone missing from the channel?!"
The roll call began.
"Panda, here."
"Kugisaki, here."
"Itadori, here."
"Fushiguro, here..."
The students checked in one by one. And then — silence.
Only the soft hiss of static left in the earpiece.
Inumaki hadn't responded. Maki Zenin hadn't responded either.
Those two were gone.
Everyone understood in an instant — Inumaki and Maki had been swallowed up by one of those small barriers.
Before any of them had had time to react, the enemy had exploited that single split second of confusion and surgically cut those two away from the group, dragging them into one of the barriers somewhere inside the complex.
"Which direction were they heading before this?" Nanami demanded.
"They were — east!" Panda answered. "Over by those buildings to the east! They shouldn't have gone inside any of them!"
East...
Nanami looked in that direction.
That was more than one building.
And regardless of the assumption they wouldn't have gone inside — right now, there were no traces of those two students anywhere on the ground below the barrier zones, which meant they had been silently, invisibly dragged into a barrier inside one of those buildings by that blue-haired Cursed Spirit, without anyone even noticing.
It had happened at the very beginning — when those slightly larger barriers were flickering in and out!
Those appearing-and-shattering barriers had been soundproofed. In the middle of all that chaos, Mahiko had used them to drag those two students somewhere, and not one of them had been paying attention!
Damn it — for all they knew, Inumaki and Maki weren't even in the east anymore. They could have been moved south, north, or anywhere at all. With this many barriers spread across more than a dozen buildings, there was no way to determine at a glance which one Inumaki and Maki were actually in.
She'd used this method to split the battlefield.
Inumaki and Maki were in danger.
Itadori was already gritting his teeth and lunging forward, sprinting toward the last known position of Inumaki and Maki.
"Everyone stay together!" Nanami's voice stopped him cold. "Itadori! Get back here! What if she's not fighting Inumaki and Maki right now — what if she's waiting for you to scatter so she can pick you off one by one?!"
Itadori's voice was desperate: "Then what about Inumaki and Zenin-senpai?!"
"Regroup first!" Nanami said. "Her ability has terrifyingly destructive potential. We converge first, then we break those barriers open one by one — as for those two, neither of them is the type to roll over and die. We have enough time. There aren't that many barriers."
The remaining students ground their teeth and acknowledged the order, beginning to converge on Nanami's position.
Nanami cut the comms and stared out at the dozen-odd abandoned buildings, each one studded with those black-smoke sphere barriers, his brow knitted hard.
The abandoned complex was open terrain — any skirmish that broke out at any point, they could reach in seconds to provide support.
But he genuinely had not anticipated the enemy being able to split the battlefield like this — carving a wide-open area into dozens of narrow, unobservable sealed spaces, rendering mutual support impossible.
A miscalculation.
He hadn't found himself in a position this passive in a very long time.
The enemy was cunning. A truly troublesome opponent.
BOOM!
A distant explosion.
One of the black spherical barriers detonated from the inside out, shards scattering like black glass in every direction. And from within it, a shout rang out —
"Get blown away!!"
That was Inumaki Toge's voice.
Inumaki Toge — a Cursed Speech user. His Technique channeled Cursed Energy into his words, turning whatever he spoke into a "curse" that manifested real effects in reality.
— Say "get blown away," and the target would be cursed, and blown away.
Say "explode," and the target would be cursed into exploding.
A blunt, brutal, and extraordinarily powerful Technique.
That shout just now — he'd used his Cursed Speech to blast the barrier apart from the inside. Which meant...
Inumaki and Maki were in that barrier!
"Move!" Nanami ordered.
Everyone immediately charged in that direction.
The fastest was Itadori.
Leveraging his monstrous physical ability, he leaped and scaled the outer wall of the abandoned building in a handful of bounds, vaulted to the right floor in seconds, and kicked clean through a wall, diving into the shattered remnants of the now-destroyed barrier.
The others arrived close behind.
"Where are they?" They swept their eyes around the interior — nothing but the building's empty concrete skeleton, thick with drifting dust.
The next second — Inumaki's voice rang out from somewhere in the distance.
"Back off!!"
"That way!"
Nobara Kugisaki pulled out her hammer and nails. Maki Zenin formed hand signs, and a Shikigami surged from her shadow. Nanami's Cursed Energy erupted — he drove his fist directly through a thick wall in front of him, punching a path clean through to where Inumaki and Maki's voices were coming from.
The wall caved. Debris exploded outward.
They saw what was on the other side.
But what was on the other side wasn't Inumaki. And it certainly wasn't Maki.
It was a small rabbit.
A small, white, fluffy rabbit, standing on top of a rubber squeaky chicken toy, bouncing up and down without pause.
Every time it bounced, it came down squarely on the squeaky chicken's belly. The air inside was squeezed out through the chicken's trumpet-like beak, the airflow vibrating, producing sound — and with a touch of Cursed Energy amplifying it, producing it very loudly.
"Back off!! ——"
The sound it produced was unmistakably Inumaki Toge's voice.
Everyone stood rooted to the spot.
"Back off!! ——"
"Back off!! ——"
The rabbit kept bouncing. The squeaky chicken kept squeaking.
Itadori's jaw hung open. Nobara almost dropped her hammer. Maki's Shikigami hovered frozen in midair, with absolutely no idea who it was supposed to attack.
"Damn it!" Nanami's voice came out through clenched teeth, his pupils narrowing to pinpoints. "We've been played!!"
____
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