Never mind where Inumaki's song came from.
What mattered was that her Cursed Speech had bored its way into the minds of everyone standing before her, clean and sure. ——"Let's play a game."
Cursed Speech, at its core, is a curse of extraordinary malice expressed through the medium of language. And after Mahina's modifications, Inumaki's Cursed Speech now launched itself in the form of song.
["Let's play a game."]
If you traced the song's origins, it probably came from one of those ubiquitous little advertisement jingles that float around the internet. Perhaps, in those lyrics, there was once an invitation to spend a lovely time with a dear friend. Perhaps, in those lyrics, there was once a genuinely warm and heartfelt wish. But there was no doubt about it — the moment those words left the white-haired girl's lips, even the most beautiful lyric could only become the most vicious of curses... ——And every single person in front of her bowed their heads and looked at their phones. (Mahina looked too. She hadn't been controlled, but the atmosphere had gotten to her enough that she felt she had to take a peek.)
Every one of them was under her control in that instant.
Then a shadow fell from the sky.
"Give our Mahina back——!!"
BOOM!
Kamo Noritoshi dodged on pure instinct, throwing himself sideways.
Something colossal came crashing down in the exact spot where he'd just been standing.
The ground buckled. Rubble sprayed in every direction.
——It was Panda.
Taking advantage of the moment Inumaki's Cursed Speech had the Kyoto students locked in hard-control, Panda had dropped from above and launched a direct ambush on Kamo Noritoshi.
"What?!" Zen'in Mai snapped back to herself.
She wrenched free of the hard-control state, flung her phone aside, and reached for her gun.
Zen'in Mai's Technique was a Construction Technique — she built things out of Cursed Energy. The smoke grenade Todo had used earlier, and the bullets loaded in Mai's gun, were all constructs of her making.
She was going for her weapon.
But the very instant she raised it——a rush of wind came screaming in from the side.
CLANG——!
Sparks scattered.
Zen'in Mai stumbled back two steps.
Maki Zenin had come in from the flank, her weapon of choice a cursed-tool iron staff. The sparks had come from steel meeting steel — the staff colliding with Miwa's long blade. It was Miwa who had thrown herself in front of Maki in the nick of time, intercepting the blow that had been meant for Zen'in Mai.
"Nice reflexes!" Maki laughed, swinging the staff again, attacking from a different angle.
Miwa Kasumi struggled to fall back and hold the line.
And Zen'in Mai used the opening to raise her gun——
Bang! Bang!
Two shots, back to back.
Maki dodged the first with her uncanny reaction speed, then rolled behind cover and avoided the second.
"All this time and you still haven't improved at all!" Maki said, and with a sudden surge of force she swung her staff in a wide arc, smashing a nearby stone bollard clean to powder.
The bollard shattered. Rubble rained down on Zen'in Mai like a volley of stones.
In the next instant, Nishimiya Momo appeared before them, sweeping her broom in a wide flourish, conjuring a spinning barrier of wind that caught every last shard and scattered them harmlessly away.
"Damn — we didn't manage to get Mahina back, did we?" Panda retreated two steps, his voice edged with regret.
The moment Yuji and the others had been intercepted by Todo, they had sent an emergency signal to Panda's group.
That was why Panda's team had been able to arrive in time.
The plan had been to use Inumaki's Cursed Speech to hit hard and fast — a surprise suppression to pull Mahina free from the Kyoto side.
But in the end, it had failed.
Because the enemy had simply too many people.
"I see," said Kamo Noritoshi, stepping forward to place himself between Mahina, Zen'in Mai, and the others. "So it was those first-years who sent you the distress signal, was it?"
Maki Zenin, Panda, Inumaki — to Kamo Noritoshi's group, all three of them were old acquaintances. They had a rough idea of one another's Techniques. But their last real head-on clash had been the exchange event a year ago, and no one could say with certainty how much each of them had grown since then.
Thinking that, Kamo Noritoshi's gaze drifted almost unconsciously toward Inumaki.
Right now, she was the most troublesome variable.
Cursed Speech was a filthy, miserable thing to deal with.
And on top of that, rumor had it that after she'd been attacked by that blue-haired Cursed Spirit, her Jujutsu Technique had actually evolved — been upgraded somehow. No one knew exactly how much it had changed.
That Cursed Speech attack just now had caught Kamo Noritoshi completely off-guard.
The source of her Cursed Speech — everyday songs…? Given that the control effect had made everyone compulsively look at their phones…was the "game" in question a phone game?
Damn it.
He hadn't expected that fighting Inumaki would demand such a thorough knowledge of popular music… In this moment, Kamo Noritoshi felt the yawning chasm of his own ignorance with painful clarity.
He was the heir to the Kamo family, a sorcerer who had inherited Blood Manipulation — he should have read more broadly, more widely…But he hadn't imagined there were still so many corners of the world that lay beyond his understanding.
Truly terrifying...
"I'm sorry to say it won't be enough." Kamo Noritoshi began to draw on his Cursed Energy. "Whatever it takes — we cannot hand the privilege of Mahina's assistance over to you."
His heartbeat began to swell.
The speed of his blood began to rise.
"Blood Manipulation." Kamo Noritoshi's narrow eyes flew open, and fresh blood seeped from the socket of his right eye, spreading outward in a pattern like blossoming flowers around it. "Crimson Scales — Surge!"
Mahina had once learned a few of Blood Manipulation's applications back at the Kamo household — Piercing Blood, Blood Edge, among others.
But in truth, though Blood Manipulation had been passed down through the Kamo line for generations, every individual Kamo sorcerer developed it differently, and each carried their own unique talent for it.
What Kamo Noritoshi was displaying now was another face of Blood Manipulation entirely — the Jujutsu Technique known as "Crimson Scales — Surge."
As everyone knows, blood is the medium through which energy is transported within the human body. And a user of Blood Manipulation can, through their Technique, govern the output rate of the blood circulating within themselves — achieving a dramatic enhancement of their own physical capabilities.
Blood Manipulation is a Jujutsu Technique whose skill multipliers are extraordinarily high no matter which application you look at.
And "Crimson Scales — Surge" amplified the human body to a staggering degree. In an instant, it multiplied Kamo Noritoshi's physical combat ability several times over.
Panda and the others knew full well what that technique did.
So the very instant they saw Kamo Noritoshi activate "Crimson Scales — Surge," Panda was already roaring:
"Inumaki!!"
Whoosh——
Even as Panda's shout left his mouth, the white-haired girl had already stripped off her jacket and sent it flying into the air.
Beneath the jacket——
Around the girl's waist was a belt.
Mounted on the front of that belt was a speaker — a strangely shaped, impressively cool external speaker.
The beast-eared, beast-tailed girl's long white hair streamed in the wind.
Her right hand came down and slapped the speaker.
The speaker began to play another BGM.
——"「One more look and it'll explode!」"
Bang bang bang!!——
Because Shoko Ieiri was available to heal the wounded, the students no longer had any reason to hold back.
Eight, nine tiny explosions detonated across Kamo Noritoshi's body. While the man was still reeling from the pain, Panda was already bearing down on him.
Panda's frame, next to Kamo Noritoshi, was nothing short of a wall.
Panda brought his fist down like a great hammer falling from the sky.
But Kamo Noritoshi was faster.
With "Crimson Scales — Surge" active, his physical capabilities had reached a plane beyond human.
In a posture that defied all expectation, Kamo Noritoshi arched his body back and slipped clean beneath Panda's punch.
Then, in the same motion, he reversed and drove his open palm — BANG — squarely into Panda's round belly, caving the whole section of gut inward.
duang~
Panda went sailing through the air, bouncing off the ground duangduangduang, before crashing straight into a not-yet-opened convenience store on the side of the street.
"I don't understand why you Tokyo students seem inclined to take that blue-haired Cursed Spirit's side…" Kamo Noritoshi dropped into a low stance, left hand forward, right hand drawn back, Cursed Energy rising in his left palm. "Was it something that first-year Kugisaki said? Did she shake your convictions? I find no logic in it. A thousand years of human experience have told sorcerers this: Cursed Spirits are unconditionally evil. You forget your wounds the moment they heal — you are all, truly, dangerously naive."
He reached behind his back with his right hand, pulled out a blood bag, and held it to his chest. Then the Cursed Energy in his left hand irradiated the bag.
The bag burst. Blood scattered — then hung in the air, condensing into hard, razor-sharp solids.
——Blood Manipulation: Crimson Pile.
Kamo Noritoshi possessed no Reverse Cursed Technique to heal himself, and no other means to generate blood — so every time he wished to use Blood Manipulation on a large scale, he had no choice but to carry his own blood bags on his person.
This made it very difficult for Kamo Noritoshi to throw his abilities around freely.
But it was precisely that constraint which had driven him to temper every single one of his applications to a razor's edge.
"Go!"
Kamo Noritoshi snapped his left hand forward.
Those razor-sharp blood-hardened projectiles flew in a uniform volley straight at the white-haired girl.
And Inumaki reached out again, twisting one of the dials on the belt speaker.
The BGM from the speaker shifted once more — into something slower, more gentle. This song came from a neighboring country's pop music.
"「They threw mud at me...」"
And then another thing Kamo Noritoshi could not begin to understand occurred.
The razor-sharp blood-hardened projectiles he had hurled toward Inumaki — they began, mid-flight, to slip free of his control.
"「I planted lotus flowers with the mud——」"
Strange vines began to grow from the solids. Pink lotus blossoms bloomed and unfurled — sprouting outward from the projectiles themselves.
As the flowers grew, the solids gradually shed their original nature and function, each one dissolving in midair.
By the time they reached the white-haired girl, nothing was left but scattered dust.
"What." Mahina, watching from the sideline, had her eyes wide open. "That counts as lyrics for this?"
"What?" Kamo Noritoshi's eyes were equally wide. "You can actually do something like that?!"
"Why yes," said the white-haired girl, slapping the belt player with a snap to pause the BGM. "But we're nowhere near finished!"
Her grin was wide and unrestrained.
Inumaki had always come across as cool, composed, unreadable.
But that didn't make her someone without emotions.
——It was simply that, due to Cursed Speech, she had long struggled to communicate smoothly with the people around her…and so, over time, she had sealed that part of herself away, becoming someone who kept it all bottled up inside.
At her core she was, like any young person, full of life and eager to make noise.
And so it was that the white-haired girl's smile right now was blazing with elation.
Because...
Because the gift the blue-haired Cursed Spirit had left her...that upgraded Technique...was genuinely, deeply, endlessly fascinating.
Click.
After pausing the player, the white-haired girl hit another button.
A soft click, and one of the memory cards inside the player ejected.
Inumaki's hand moved swiftly — she pulled the card free, then reached into her pocket and produced another one.
She held the new card up, displaying it to Kamo Noritoshi.
"Next song! Music! Next!"
Inumaki flicked her wrist, and the memory card sailed with unerring precision straight into the tiny card slot on the belt player.
She immediately followed with both hands, throwing out an extravagant, theatrical gesture — both palms slamming simultaneously onto the "load song" and "confirm play" buttons on either side of the player.
The speaker sounded.
"Confirming playback..."
The BGM's character shifted in an instant — and with it, Inumaki's grin, which had been blazing with elation, extinguished in a heartbeat into something cold and grave.
Riiip——
The outer shirt was torn away and fell to the ground.
Beneath it: black.
Long hanging sleeves, ink-dark hems, and the long blade that had been carried on her back now gripped in the white-haired girl's hand.
She performed, at that moment, a textbook iai draw-and-slash.
"Song title..."
Strictly speaking, Inumaki's Cursed Speech should not have changed in any fundamental way once it took the form of song. After all, it was still Cursed Speech — merely delivered through a different vessel.
But...the truth was not so simple.
A song carries far more information than its lyrics alone. Melody, composition, lyrics, and the private understanding that forms in the silent relay between singer and listener... all of these things mean that even a single brief line of a song is saturated with information, layer upon layer.
And so, by using song as the vessel for Cursed Speech, Inumaki's technique could now accomplish things the original Cursed Speech never could.
For instance: using viral internet-meme songs from across the globe to broaden the Cursed Speech Technique's range of effect.
For instance: using lyrics with layers of meaning, so that a single sung line could achieve what several spoken curses once could not.
And then, of course, there was its highest application of all.
——Come on, then.
Inumaki tightened her grip on the blade's hilt.
The girl had never studied kendo. But now, as the BGM rose, a fierce and terrible sword-intent began to radiate from her.
It was a Japanese-style musical composition.
A theme song crafted by a gifted composer and lyricist for a swordsman's television drama — one into which a master of kendo had poured his entire understanding of the way of the sword.
Black robes swirled. Something in the atmosphere around them all shifted, and every person present felt the weight of it pressing down.
Inumaki had never trained in kendo.
But now, through what she had called her Cursed Speech Technique — though "Cursed Song Technique" would be the more fitting name — she was channeling everything the song contained: the philosophy of swordsmanship, the spirit of martial mastery, all of it pouring directly into herself.
The music rose.
And so did her voice.
The girl's form shot forward like an arrow loosed from a bowstring, her long blade clearing its sheath and drawing a line of silver light as she bore straight down on Kamo Noritoshi.
Speed: enhanced.
Strength: enhanced.
Technique: enhanced.
Swordsmanship: enhanced.
Watching from a distance, Mahina breathed a quiet "Whoa."
「Don't hesitate, pour all your strength into this sword.」
The lyrics, translated——
「Do not waver.」
「This one blade. Pour everything into it.」
____
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