Yuki Tsukumo is dead?
Listening to Mechamaru's message, Mahiru was left briefly stunned.
If what Mechamaru said was true, then there could only be one culprit behind Yuki Tsukumo's death.
It could only be Kenjaku.
"So why on earth did you let her go in?!" Inside the Jujutsu High campus in Tokyo, the Grade 1 sorcerer Kusakabe was loudly berating his jujutsu-assistant colleague over in Kyoto through the phone. "Both Naobito Zenin and Mechamaru ran into trouble in there. Gojo said he'd deal with it once he got back… All you had to do was hold her back!"
"How was I supposed to hold her back?!" the jujutsu assistant on the other end shouted right back. "Yuki's a Special Grade! How am I supposed to stop a Special Grade from going in?!"
And so, the worst happened. Kenjaku was in Kyoto.
And the place Yuki Tsukumo had gone was also Kyoto.
Yuki Tsukumo had always wandered about idly, never taking on any missions. But that didn't mean that, on hearing in passing that some formidable Cursed Spirit was menacing the human world, she wouldn't drop in and casually put the Cursed Spirit down along the way.
It was a coincidence that had never occurred in the original story.
And a turn of events that no normal person could possibly have foreseen.
The jujutsu assistant who'd let Yuki in, the principal of the Kyoto Jujutsu High, and Yuki Tsukumo herself — at first, all of them had believed that no matter how strong the Special Grade Cursed Spirit here might be, it could never bring Yuki down.
But the one here was Kenjaku.
In the original story, Kenjaku had once killed Yuki.
True, that time in the original Yuki had been screwed over by Tengen and hadn't used her Domain. But this time, Kenjaku still had plenty of other people at his side — and tally it up however you liked, Yuki was bound to lose.
"Cursed Spirit — in fact, by the time you hear this message of mine, I've already gone into hibernation using a hibernation pod. Because both Naobito and I were caught up in the battle and gravely wounded. We had no choice but to freeze ourselves in hibernation pods in order to stay alive."
"The one contacting you right now is a program I set up beforehand. And right now, by the program's calculations, the position you're in lies directly along the path of the [Black Hole]. You must leave at once."
The trembling of the ground was growing more violent.
Mechamaru's message played out beside Mahiru's ear.
Indeed, even if Mechamaru hadn't told her, the girl could already feel something approaching from far off.
Because the intensity of the earthquake was building. In the distance, the mountain peaks were sinking bit by bit into the earth — as though something were taking great, gulping bites out of the planet's crust.
"A Black Hole?" Mahiru's mouth twisted. "You serious?"
The Black Hole came from Yuki Tsukumo's Technique.
Her Technique could alter the [mass] of her own body and of her Shikigami. By adding this imaginary mass, Yuki Tsukumo could pulverize a Special Grade Cursed Spirit of no mean strength with a single punch — sheer, brute-force devastation.
And the ultimate extreme of this Technique was to increase her own mass to a limit beyond human ability to observe, turning herself into a Black Hole — which was why people often said Yuki Tsukumo could drag every single person in the world down with her in a mutual self-destruction.
Whether she truly could blow up the entire world was hard to say.
But the Black Hole already existed.
"To put it more rigorously, it ought to be called an [Imaginary Black Hole]," Mechamaru's message said. "Under normal circumstances, if a real Black Hole actually appeared on Earth… the whole planet would collapse."
But Yuki was certainly no lunatic who'd drag the whole world down to ruin with her.
She had walked into the mountain forest, encountered Kenjaku, discovered that Kenjaku's body was Suguru Geto, and then caught sight of Ishiryuu and the others… Without a doubt, she would have realized these people were extremely dangerous.
Surrounded, pursued, and in the clash of Domains unable to overcome Kenjaku's open-type Domain — in the final few seconds before her death, she chose to make everything in that mountain forest vanish along with her. So she opened the Black Hole, its area of coverage being that battlefield of theirs.
Kenjaku, by all rights, should have died.
But fate plays its tricks: Kenjaku just so happened to possess an "Anti-Gravity Technique," and a self-destruction capable of annihilating very nearly everyone proved, conversely, unable to kill Kenjaku.
The Black Hole was originally supposed to self-destruct of its own accord, in accordance with Yuki Tsukumo's command, after persisting for a stretch of time.
But because Kenjaku had used an open Domain at that moment, his Anti-Gravity Technique instead cancelled out the Black Hole's self-destruct command, and stabilized it into the world.
And so, an [Imaginary Black Hole] — capable of annihilating everything while at the same time endlessly expanding — came into being.
"So, run, quickly," said Mechamaru. "Otherwise you'll be annihilated… along with everything else."
Rrrumble —— the world began to shake to its very foundations.
The distant mountain ranges toppled like dominoes; as the ground caved into a giant pit, the sky and clouds, too, like a canvas being yanked taut, twisted and warped, converging toward something that was surfacing up out of the earth.
It was the sight of light itself being distorted and captured by an immense gravitational pull.
The sky came falling down. The earth collapsed inward.
And so, a black sun rose.
There was no making out exactly how large it was, but with the light captured and warped, all they could see was a stretch of pure-black sky.
If one estimated the Black Hole's position by taking the center of the darkness as its location, then in truth the Black Hole was still very, very far from where they were — and yet by the look of it, it seemed already very, very close.
The sand and grit around them had already begun converging toward the Black Hole's direction, and a fierce wind had kicked up around them too.
Yuji Itadori and the others had received the message sent out from Jujutsu High as well.
"An Imaginary Black Hole?!" Nobara Kugisaki cried out, her voice lost in the howling wind. "How could something like that possibly exist?!"
"That thing seems to be heading this way!" Fushiguro shouted. "We've got to move, fast."
In fact, from the moment they received the message to the moment they decided to leave was really only a few seconds of dazed stupor.
And already they could feel their bodies being dragged by some immense force toward the Black Hole.
One after another, they scrambled for a way to grip the ground.
That Black Hole was moving fast! And what's more… its gravitational pull was still intensifying!
"Is Yuki really dead?" Mahiru clicked her tongue.
The notion that the imaginary mass would still exist after Yuki's death… that was indeed possible, but if the imaginary mass were still increasing, then odds were Yuki wasn't dead yet — at most on the brink of death, and still, at the center of the Black Hole, unconsciously running her Technique.
But whether or not she was dead required calculation, and it had no bearing whatsoever on the present situation… Whether Yuki was still alive or not, there was nothing they could do to save her.
Because this Black Hole had already become, in its entirety, an apocalyptic calamity of "draw near and be annihilated."
"Everyone! With me!" Mahiru gritted her teeth and shouted, fingers forming a sign, her Technique activating.
Black shadows coiled around the Heavy-Armed Darting Hare; countless rabbits surged forth as raw material, beginning anew to construct fresh armor over the Heavy-Armed Darting Hare's exterior, expanding it, larger and larger.
In the end the Heavy-Armed Darting Hare became a colossal spider armored vehicle, opening its maw and spewing out spider-silk to haul every last one of the Jujutsu High people inside. No — Fushiguro had to be excluded.
At the very same moment the flight began, Toji went "snap" and seized Fushiguro's wrist, vanishing on the spot, taking Fushiguro with him.
In ordinary times Mahiru would have given some chase, but right now it didn't matter. In passing, she also hauled the half-dead Urogi and the Spirit-Calling Granny up onto the armored vehicle, then channeled all of her Cursed Energy, steering the armored spider into a frantic dash away, out beyond the Black Hole's range of influence.
At present there was no way to gauge the Black Hole's speed of movement.
But as for its trajectory — taking one glance with a clone at the gouged-out scar the Black Hole had carved all along its path of travel, one could tell that the Black Hole moved in a straight line. Mahiru fled with them all toward the flank of that line of movement.
Rumble, rumble….
The armored spider moved very fast, but even so, for a stretch of time the Black Hole was very close to them. The spider's outer shell was torn apart, the entire world trembling. Itadori and Mai and the others watched the world outside through the windows, and saw the ground take to the air in great sweeping sheets, watched the vast Zenin estate turn to nothing in an instant.
Clatter, clatter...
Roughly half a minute passed before they finally pulled away from the Black Hole.
As the gale died down a little, Mahiru and the others stepped out of the armored vehicle — the place the Black Hole had passed through had already become a massive canyon, choked with dust and smoke, not a single blade of grass left.
Mahiru's eyes flickered a couple of times; she lowered her head and pulled out her phone — under the Black Hole's influence, even the phone signal was in chaos. Mahiru called up a map and worked out the Black Hole's path of travel. This was bad. The girl gritted her teeth.
Along the Black Hole's path of travel lay several small towns, and then it would draw near the Tokyo metropolitan area… ultimately reaching Yokohama, reaching Tokyo — annihilating everything.
And on top of that, time was extremely tight.
As the city population grew, the difficulty of evacuation would increase exponentially, and on top of that, many places were even now continuously being struck by earthquakes….
"Everyone's going to die, huh?" Mai's mouth twisted. "This is just an utter disaster."
Most likely, countless people were going to die.
No — perhaps the death of one city's population was merely an appetizer to the calamity.
The Imaginary Black Hole wasn't a real Black Hole, but it did possess some portion of a Black Hole's properties.
Its gravity was still expanding.
Perhaps, if things went on like this, what got annihilated would no longer be one city, two cities… but one country, two countries…. And plainly, visibly, they were hard-pressed to come up with any good solution.
"Senior Miwa and the others are already in Tokyo helping evacuate people," Kugisaki said. The girl looked rather lost now. "But… will there really be enough time? And besides, what about those villages and towns?"
The people in the villages and towns… had they all been abandoned?
No — to put it bluntly, was evacuating crowds inside Tokyo even of any use at all?
"The next village or town will enter the Black Hole's range of influence in about ten minutes, and Tokyo, in roughly one to two hours," Mahiru spoke up, letting out a soft sigh. "Haah… let's just treat it as a showdown."
The reason a calamity is a calamity is that, in the face of calamity, most ordinary people can do nothing but pray.
The words "Black Hole," to anyone who knows what those two words mean, are utterly terrifying. So then — it wouldn't hurt to put it another way.
Let's go have a showdown with the out-of-control Yuki Tsukumo and Kenjaku.
Put that way, it probably became a little easier to accept.
Indeed, in theory whether or not Tokyo was annihilated had nothing to do with Mahiru. Bluntly put, she was a Cursed Spirit; even if she went up to the Moon she could survive.
But just as she'd said before, her love for this world outweighed everything else.
At the same time, she was also selfish.
For people who had nothing to do with her, she wasn't enough of a do-gooder to go risking her life to save them.
But in Tokyo, she still remembered how the uncle by the roadside who often gave her ice cream would laugh so heartily, still remembered how the young lady at the shopping mall had helped her pick out pretty clothes...
For the moment Mahiru had once again lost her fixed identity in human society, but she would still go back in the form of a blue-haired girl, and the people who remembered her would still, as ever, give her little gifts and greet her.
How annoying.
If only there were some function that could "rescue with one click" everyone she wanted to save. Pity there wasn't. So...
"I've got to save them all…" Mahiru sighed again, her eyes already gone deadly serious.
Then let's have that showdown — Brains, and Yuki too.
The calamity wrought by Yuki Tsukumo and Kenjaku was, no doubt, something that not even they themselves could stop.
Right now the girl had no means, either, to eliminate a Black Hole.
But had the girl really done so few "seemingly impossible" things before? Ha... Not to mention, right now, they had one reinforcement who had already come back.
"This is just… ridiculous."
White, short hair. A tall, slender frame.
With eyes that shimmered like watery glass-jewels, a man with white hair, blue eyes, and black clothes hovered in the sky, gazing at the terrifying Black Hole baring its ferocity at the whole world not far off, weariness flashing across his eyes, then severity and earnestness flashing through as well.
"I just got done cleaning up a whole bunch of messes… and it turns out there was still a boss here waiting for me, huh..."
The strongest modern jujutsu sorcerer, the Jujutsu-High-certified Special Grade Sorcerer, Satoru Gojo — here and now, had finally returned.
Mahiru's strongest modern reinforcement had arrived.
In that case — let's give it a try… and see whether they can bring down the Black Hole.
____
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