Creating objects with Construction Technique is enormously taxing on both Cursed Energy and mental stamina.
However, this consumption of Cursed Energy is not a simple linear relationship of "this much Cursed Energy generates this many grams of object."
With the same level of Cursed Energy, the more complex the substance and the more intricate the mechanical structure, the more sharply the Cursed Energy expenditure climbs. And if on top of that you want to layer a curse onto the thing you've made and turn it into a cursed tool — that pushes Cursed Energy consumption up by yet another tier.
Conversely, however, if all you want to do is simply generate some single substance — say, fistfuls upon fistfuls of table salt — then that level of Cursed Energy expenditure actually falls squarely within Zen'in Mai's current acceptable range.
Generating a stone wall worked on the same principle.
And it was precisely because of this that Zen'in Mai had been able to pour such an enormous, enormous quantity of Cursed-Energy salt into the shell.
Until, at some point, when the snail Cursed Spirit stopped making wailing sounds and stopped writhing its body, Zen'in Mai finally ceased firing.
She backed up a few steps, her eyes carrying a touch of wariness, and observed the snail Cursed Spirit, unsure whether it was dead or not.
But honestly, this Technique of hers was actually pretty fun. She hadn't noticed that at all before.
Before, the only feeling she'd had toward her trash Technique had been pure hatred.
If Mahiko hadn't been here, Zen'in Mai might have spent her entire life loathing her Technique.
She really couldn't imagine… if she and Maki Zenin hadn't been picked up by Mahiko, what their lives would have been like.
"Phew…" Seeing that the snail Cursed Spirit really did seem to have stopped moving, Zen'in Mai let out a relaxing breath, and touched her earring. "Um, Mahiko… Master? Are you there?"
Mahiko had given each of them an earring.
Maki wore hers on her right ear, Mai wore hers on her left.
The two earrings were similar in shape — like magatama, or like the yin-yang fish in a taiji diagram, except each earring was only half of a yin-yang fish.
Maki's was deep blue, Mai's was deep green. What it was supposed to mean was anyone's guess.
Zen'in Mai had the feeling that Mahiko had her own peculiar fetishes — they were just hard to figure out.
"Hm? What is it?" Mahiko answered from the other end.
"Am I done over here now?" Zen'in Mai asked. "How's that idiot Maki doing on her end?"
That fool didn't have her brains — she wasn't going to crash and burn, was she?
Zen'in Mai had assumed the answer she'd receive would be about Maki's situation——
But the response Mahiko gave her was beyond her expectations.
"That Cursed Spirit isn't dead yet, you know. You'd better be careful."
Hm?
Zen'in Mai froze, and looked at the Cursed Spirit.
And in that very moment, from within the snail Cursed Spirit's shell, an ear-shattering blast of sound waves suddenly erupted.
A powerful shockwave shot out from the mouth of the shell and slammed squarely into the girl's body.
She'd let her guard down.
Or rather — the girl had vastly underestimated Special Grade Cursed Spirits.
Granted, this particular Special Grade Cursed Spirit had been split in two, and was on the low end of Special Grade besides… but a Special Grade Cursed Spirit was still a Special Grade Cursed Spirit.
Zen'in Mai had vast theoretical knowledge, but she lacked practical combat experience. The Cursed Spirits she had subjugated in the past had been nothing more than small Grade 2 or Grade 3 fry.
She had never once dealt with a Cursed Spirit of this calibre.
So she had no idea — a Special Grade Cursed Spirit was perfectly capable of having the cunning to play dead.
Boom——
It was like being struck by a sledgehammer.
The snail Cursed Spirit's counterattack landed squarely on Zen'in Mai's body, sending the girl flying back, slamming her violently into the wall of the tunnel.
Cough——
The wall behind her cracked apart, and blood spilled from the girl's mouth.
This is bad.
Zen'in Mai thought.
The girl felt as though all her internal organs were screaming in agony. Her left arm — from the impact against the rock — had bent at an abnormal angle. Almost certainly fractured.
Being attacked at point-blank range was one factor.
The other was that the girl was not in the habit of using Cursed Energy to reinforce her own body.
So right now she'd been beaten to absolute ruin.
If she hadn't, in that desperate moment, hastily constructed a sheet of black crystal breastplate over her chest, she would probably have already lost the ability to fight entirely.
And that sheet of black crystal — was the very material she had used to construct the sprayer, the material she was most familiar with handling.
Ha...
But to say she'd lost the ability to fight… honestly, she didn't seem much better off as it was.
The girl crashed to the ground.
She struggled upright, blood streaming down from her mouth and nose, the shattered breastplate tumbling from her chest.
She had no idea where her weapon had been blasted off to.
Meanwhile, the Cursed Spirit in the distance seemed to be undergoing a kind of cocoon-reborn transformation.
A muscular, sinew-covered humanoid Cursed Spirit was crawling out from inside the snail shell.
This humanoid Cursed Spirit was staggering as well, its limbs incomplete.
Zen'in Mai's attack just now had indeed inflicted damage — but in the end it had failed to kill it outright.
A Cursed Spirit's self-repair speed was extremely fast.
Right now — the girl had lost.
So what was she going to do now?
The girl propped up her body, looked at the Cursed Spirit in the distance, and broke into a bitter smile.
That shockwave just now had come along with an extraordinarily powerful sound wave, so both of the girl's eardrums had been ruptured.
Which was why she naturally hadn't noticed that, right behind her… before Mahiko had spoken up to warn Zen'in Mai, she had actually long since silently made her way over here.
To ensure that the moment the girl was about to suffer a fatal injury, she could intervene in time.
But for now, Mahiko hadn't yet stepped in to save her.
She was quietly observing Zen'in Mai from the shadows behind her, wanting to see how Zen'in Mai would handle this.
Zen'in Mai, you see, had not been through the countless battles and trials her sister had. At school, she had always just been coasting by.
Excluding yesterday, this was the first time she had been thrown into a life-or-death crisis of this magnitude.
In theory, Mahiko had already made her stance clear long ago — she wouldn't step in to clean up the mess. And if Zen'in Mai failed, then naturally Maki on her end wouldn't be able to kill her Cursed Spirit either, and in the end the Cursed Spirit would simply grind her down.
In this crisis situation, what would Zen'in Mai do?
Mahiko was curious.
And then she saw Zen'in Mai...
Throw her head back and start laughing.
"Hahahaha..."
Maybe the adrenaline had finally kicked in, or maybe the girl's soul had simply found a kind of exhilaration in this life-or-death struggle.
With her body in tatters, the girl began to laugh.
Then she straightened up, faced the Cursed Spirit across from her, and raised an index finger.
"Construction Technique! — Seven Cannons!!"
This was the last drop of Cursed Energy left in the girl.
Faced with this final life-or-death crisis, the girl's final choice was — screw it.
The last of the girl's Cursed Energy gushed forth, electric arcs trailing from her abdomen all the way down to the ground.
And then, atop the ground, seven small earth-cast cannons rose up out of nowhere.
Cannonballs took shape along with them.
Muzzles tilted downward, all simultaneously aimed at the Cursed Spirit.
"Let's see if you spray me to death first! Or if I blow you to pieces first! You piece of garbage!"
As her Cursed Energy was utterly drained, all seven earth-cannons fired their shells in unison.
The shells the girl had constructed didn't just carry Cursed Energy — their destructive power had been enhanced as well.
As the muzzles roared and the shells flew out together, the cannon fire engulfed the Cursed Spirit.
Boom-boom-boom-boom...
The explosions sent the ground shaking and the mountain trembling. The tunnel filled with billowing smoke and dust. The girl could no longer support her own body, gasping in great, ragged breaths, and collapsed to the ground.
With effort, she lifted her head.
As the smoke and dust dispersed, the Cursed Spirit, its body torn to ruin, was still standing.
Even Zen'in Mai's all-out attack had failed to kill the Cursed Spirit.
Her use of her Technique was still too unpolished, and the precision of her attacks had room to improve.
In the end, she had still failed...
"Not bad at all, big sis Mai. You did way better than I expected."
Huh?
Zen'in Mai froze.
It was only at this moment that she realised the sound coming from her earring — Mahiko's clone — actually wasn't from a speaker-style earpiece; it was being transmitted directly into her brain. Her eardrums had been destroyed, but Mahiko's voice was appearing inside her head directly.
The girl felt her shoulder being gently patted from behind.
Immediately afterward, a warm current flowed through her entire body, and her injuries began to rapidly heal.
The pain started to fade, and the sounds in her ears once again became clear.
Then, with a boom, a column of white light erupted suddenly from behind her, grazing past her ear, and slamming straight into the snail Cursed Spirit.
The white light was blinding.
In a single instant, the snail Cursed Spirit's body was utterly obliterated.
Zen'in Mai opened her mouth slightly. She was a bit dumbstruck.
The Cursed Spirit that had just dragged her into a desperate struggle was actually one-shot to death by Mahiko with one casual attack.
She turned around, and the blue-haired girl was standing right behind her, smiling brightly with her hands clasped behind her back.
"Beautifully done, big sis Mai. Let me give you a little praise."
Mahiko did genuinely think Zen'in Mai had done well.
Even though she had lost the fight, compared to Mahiko's predictions, it had already been a beyond-expectation performance.
Mahiko's gaze fell on the snail Cursed Spirit.
That Cursed Spirit had been blasted into a lump of meat — but it was still slowly reconstructing its body.
The Cursed Spirit wasn't dead.
Because over on the other side, Maki was still bare-handedly thrashing the crab meatball.
Mahiko reached up and touched her ear: "Big sis Maki, stop playing around. Let's go have dinner."
"Heh..."
Over on the other side, Maki Zenin wiped the sweat from her chin with the back of her hand and looked down at the Cursed Spirit in front of her — already pulped to mush — a thoroughly satisfied smile breaking across her face. "Sure."
The girl had been pummelling this Cursed Spirit in front of her like a maniac for over ten minutes now.
She had vented every shred of pent-up frustration and resentment from these past years onto this punching bag in front of her — and she felt absolutely refreshed.
But she was no longer interested in carrying on bullying the weak.
She turned and picked up the longblade from the ground.
As the longblade left its sheath, the Cursed Energy shimmering across its surface was not particularly pronounced — it was simply a fairly low-quality cursed tool that Zen'in Mai had casually crafted for her.
But in Maki Zenin's hands, with even the tiniest sliver of Cursed Energy, she could draw out the full destructive potential of this blade.
Squelch, squelch.
The pulp on the ground re-coalesced, once again returning to the form of that crab Cursed Spirit monster, while Maki raised the longblade high in a single-handed grip.
The next second, her figure simply vanished from the spot — and only a beat later did a fierce, violent gale explode through the air.
Swsh——
A flash of cold light. Maki swept the blade through at a speed no observer could possibly track,
cleaving the Cursed Spirit before her cleanly in two, with no capacity for resistance whatsoever.
The crab Cursed Spirit was slain.
And on Mahiko's side, she too watched as the snail Cursed Spirit — pulverised into powder — crumbled into ash, its Cursed Energy dissipating, and she understood that Maki on her end had brought her game to a close as well.
"Hmhmhm, not bad at all." Mahiko stroked her chin and broke into a smile. "And so, for the real business that comes next — it's time to go to the Zenin estate and see what's what."
Zenin estate — I'm coming to bring you ruin, you know?
____
👻🔥Seek: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Jujutsu x Mieruko: Oh no, am I a villain too?
Let's hit these goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = 1 extra chapter for the public!