After a long silence, Suguru Geto forced his feelings down and asked through clenched teeth, "And the assassin?"
"I don't know," Riko Amanai answered.
Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto exchanged a look.
There was no question they were grieving. But this was far from over, and they had to shove the grief aside for now. Neither of them knew how far the fight between Miwa Ran and that assassin had gone.
It looked like Miwa Ran had given her life.
But where had the assassin gone?
With Miwa Ran defeated, Riko Amanai had no guard left at her side. So why hadn't the assassin used the opening to finish her off?
The only explanation seemed to be that the assassin had been crippled too… or killed outright.
"Yeah, that would make sense…" Gojo said under his breath.
Miwa Ran was strong. For that assassin to break through Jujutsu High's Barrier and get in here, he had to have real power and slippery methods behind him… but so did she.
He had come out of nowhere, timing his ambush for the moment they were most exhausted and least on guard. Even so, going up against Miwa Ran would have cost him dearly.
Gojo and Geto had faith in Miwa Ran's strength. They believed she was as strong as they were, and they were sure of it.
"The assassin probably retreated," Geto said.
"Kuroi, take Amanai and get out of here. Get away from the Tomb of the Star Corridor and find the backup team." Gojo turned his head toward the Tomb of the Star Corridor. "Ran finished her job… Now it's our turn to finish ours."
They still had a mission.
As Jujutsu Sorcerers of Jujutsu High, it was their duty to rescue Tengen. Which meant facing the mysterious Blue Existence they had been hunting all this time, the one that had finally shown itself.
No. It seemed she had already noticed the two of them.
The mysterious Blue Existence walked out of Tengen's Barrier on her own.
Tap. Tap.
Crisp footsteps came closer, and a deep blue glow that carried Cursed Energy unlike anything they had ever seen grew brighter and brighter in the ruins ahead.
Here she came.
"She's coming," Gojo said, his face going hard. "Take Amanai and run. Find Nanami and the others, they should have arrived as reinforcements by now."
Kuroi took Riko Amanai by the hand and hurried away.
The blue light was already on them, right up close.
Before the two boys could make out the newcomer's face, what reached them first was that overwhelming Cursed Energy, and the strange, uncanny weight hanging in the air.
Flames still burned red at the edges of the ruins, and a deep blue halo ringed the entire battlefield.
Gojo and Geto braced themselves.
Then they saw a small, slight girl with blue hair standing at the center of that halo.
A girl?
It caught them off guard.
The Blue Existence they had been chasing all this time was nothing more than a blue-haired girl?
Her hair was blue like Miwa Ran's, but her bearing, her build, her presence, even her Cursed Energy were nothing alike, so neither of them made the connection.
Gojo remembered that someone at Jujutsu High had once guessed the Blue Existence might be a Special Grade Cursed Spirit. The most dangerous Special Grade Cursed Spirit in recorded history, in fact.
So was this girl a Cursed Spirit?
No. She wasn't.
She didn't feel human, but she didn't feel like a Cursed Spirit either. She was something in between a human and a pure Cursed Spirit. Something in a category all its own.
"Hello there," Mahiru tilted her head and laughed softly. "So you two are, um… the strongest of all the Jujutsu Sorcerers?"
"Satoru. Careful," Geto said quietly at his back. "This thing… is extremely dangerous."
Gojo gave a small nod. He agreed.
Then he spoke to Mahiru. "So what exactly are you? Why attack Jujutsu High?"
"Hm? You want to know why?" Mahiru tipped her head and laughed again, then answered with a bright, open smile, her voice frank and oddly innocent. "Because something I want is here, of course. And if I get my hands on it, that's good news for you too."
Good news?
The strange look on her face and the eeriness of her manner only tightened the two boys' guard. Neither of them had the faintest idea what she was talking about.
Certain now that there was no reasoning with the thing in front of them, Gojo and Geto glanced at each other and settled, without a word, on what came next.
Which was this.
Geto's hands snapped into a seal. "Rainbow Dragon!"
ROOOOAR—
Cursed Energy surged out, and a dragon's cry shook the air.
If talk was impossible and their positions could never be reconciled, then she was an enemy who could not be reasoned with, and the next step was to strike first.
Geto channeled Cursed Spirit Manipulation and summoned the Special Grade Cursed Spirit, Rainbow Dragon.
"Swallow her!"
The shadow on the ground swelled, and out of it burst a white Eastern dragon wrapped in horrifying Cursed Energy, its white scales flashing with an unnatural sheen.
That enormous body barreled straight at the blue-haired girl like a bullet train at full speed.
"Oh my?" Mahiru's smile widened.
It bloomed because her appetite for the fight was growing.
The girl raised a hand and the shadow at her feet rippled. The Heavy-Armed Darting Hare, unseen for a long while, rose out of the dark and threw itself into Rainbow Dragon's charge. The impact cracked like thunder, and the shockwave alone kicked up a storm.
The defining trait of the Special Grade Cursed Spirit Rainbow Dragon was the hardness of its body, top of the scale, essentially unbreakable.
The Heavy-Armed Darting Hare that Mahiru shaped with the Ten Shadows Technique had no business competing with it on hardness.
But…
They broke apart the instant they hit, then slammed into each other again.
On the first clash the Heavy-Armed Darting Hare had clearly come off worse. This time, an arm blade sprang out of its side arm.
The blade bit into Rainbow Dragon and sheared that unbreakable shell wide open, blood spraying out.
Rainbow Dragon howled in pain, thrashing and twisting to stop the cut. But the blade was far too sharp. Carving the dragon was like carving tofu, and in a blink a massive wound had opened along its flank.
Watching from a distance, Geto's eyes went wide.
"That's Rainbow Dragon, the hardest thing I have!"
He had no way to explain it.
The truth was that Mahiru had mounted the Split Soul Katana she had obtained in this world onto the Heavy-Armed Darting Hare.
What used to be a cannon-fodder meat shield, useful only for support, had transformed into the sharpest edge on the field.
"ROAR!!"
Rainbow Dragon whipped around, clamped its jaws on the Heavy-Armed Darting Hare and hauled it into the sky. The Hare's Split Soul Katana arm blade spun into a meat grinder and reduced the dragon's mouth to a bloom of blood. The two of them tore at each other in midair.
Wow. Special Grade cursed tools really are convenient.
Armed with a Special Grade cursed tool, the Heavy-Armed Darting Hare now hit at the level of a fairly strong Special Grade Cursed Spirit. A leap forward, no other way to put it.
Even Mahiru was impressed.
Just then something tugged at her senses, and she pulled her gaze back to find a tide of Cursed Spirits surging in from every direction, packed so thick they nearly blotted out her entire field of view.
"Drown her!"
Geto had launched his second wave.
"That kind of attack doesn't work on me, you know," the girl said, spreading her arms wide.
A small white rabbit surfaced from the ground and spat flame upward, setting every one of the insect-swarm Cursed Spirits around her alight at once. The whole space vanished under a sea of fire.
For an instant, everything was hidden from sight.
And in that same instant, the girl's easy expression changed.
Her head snapped around.
Behind her, in the direction the flames had blinded her to, the wall of fire twisted and caved inward.
A fist wrapped in a lethal, terrifying blue halo.
The silver-haired boy stood at her back, those sapphire eyes glittering with a cold that cut.
"Die!"
Gojo drove his fist forward.
—Blue!
Layering Limitless's Blue onto his fist and delivering it with the punch concentrated Blue's power even further. It was a usage Gojo would not work out until many years down the road.
But here, mid-fight, the prodigy caught a flash of insight and taught himself the trick ahead of schedule.
A genius. There was no other word.
The raw output of Limitless was staggering.
The punch warped the entire space around it. Flames, air, even the rubble underfoot were gathered up and dragged in by Blue's crushing pull, all of it rushing toward the exploding center.
Mahiru's smile turned outright delighted.
Facing that searing blue light, the blue-haired girl pressed her palms together and drew them apart, the grin on her face spreading wide and reckless. "In that case, I can finally go all out too!"
White light blazed between her hands.
This was it. Since defeating Mahoraga and Devouring part of it, this was the first time the girl had run at full power.
Come on!
"—[Husk]!"
BOOOOOM—
White struck blue like two comets grinding into each other.
Sky and ground broke together, the whole battlefield sinking inward like liquid under the weight of that force.
"What?!"
The young white-haired boy's pupils shrank. He didn't believe it.
With the Six Eyes, he could tell that her Cursed Energy output efficiency was no worse than his own, and that in this exchange the power behind her Cursed Technique had come out a notch above his Blue.
At the heart of the blast he was thrown clear, tumbling a long way through the air. She only drifted a few meters backward, light as a leaf.
Damn it.
Gojo gritted his teeth and caught his balance.
But the blue-haired girl moved like lightning. An afterimage flickered, and she was in front of him again.
He looked up. An absurdly enormous snow-white hammer was already raised high above him. Flame jetted from its tail like a rocket burn, and the face of it aimed down at him shimmered with a pale golden halo.
"Damn it—"
WHAM!!
The giant hammer came down.
Gojo had the defense of Limitless. By all rights that hammer could never touch his body. And yet the pain arrived along with the shadow of the falling hammer.
Disbelief flickered through his eyes.
That pale golden halo had punched clean through the defense of Limitless.
Don't tell me this is…
"It's Domain Amplification!" the girl said with a laugh, swinging the hammer and hammering Gojo out of the sky. "Want to beg for mercy?"
This was great!
So great!
The girl was riding the highest of highs, her thoughts bouncing back and forth between isn't this a bit much? and can it get even more ridiculous?
Absolutely exhilarating.
After Devouring Mahoraga, the nature of her body had shifted, and on top of that came all the experience and technique-honing she had piled up in this world of the past. She had expected to improve. She had expected to get stronger.
What she hadn't expected was a leap this enormous.
Her Cursed Energy conversion efficiency was ridiculous now.
And her total pool of Cursed Energy had multiplied several times over compared to before.
Somewhere along the way, she had come this far without noticing.
Somewhere along the way, she had even taught herself Domain Amplification.
The girl began to laugh without holding anything back.
Having pounded Gojo into the ground, Mahiru kept after him, dropping out of the sky and chasing him with the hammer.
Domain Amplification meant wrapping a Domain around your own body so that your physical attacks could cross the defense of Limitless. It was, essentially, a technique invented for the sole purpose of countering Limitless.
While Domain Amplification was active, Mahiru couldn't use her Cursed Technique.
But no one could match the girl's precision in handling Cursed Energy, and she flipped Domain Amplification on and off exactly as she pleased. When Gojo hit back with Blue, Mahiru shut the Amplification off and traded blasts with Husk. When he turtled behind Limitless's defense, she flicked the Amplification back on and smashed him head-on.
The girl pressed the chase without pause, her offense growing fiercer, her adjustments smoother.
Against a young Gojo who hadn't yet learned to open a Domain, Mahiru could honestly have dragged a crowd over, opened her own Domain, and finished both of them then and there. She didn't.
Because she was enjoying this moment far too much.
She could feel the power she had gained from Devouring Mahoraga, strong but unsteady, settling into something solid over the course of this fight.
The more she explored, the more she tested, the more she found she could do. It turned out she was a little stronger than even she had imagined.
And the young Gojo could only be suppressed, hounded, beaten into a wretched mess, wounds all over him.
BOOM—
Mahiru's hammer sent Gojo down again.
She put the most into that one. The white-haired boy was driven straight into the ground.
Then space itself locked up for a heartbeat.
Mahiru turned her head.
A female ghost Cursed Spirit with a tangled mess of hair stood not far off.
"I'm asking you… I'm asking you… I'm asking you…"
She lifted her face and split open a hideous mouth.
"Am I pretty?!"
Kuchisake-Onna. Another Special Grade Cursed Spirit in Geto's collection. When she asks her question, a crude, simplified Domain forms for a moment. Refuse to answer, and you're frozen where you stand.
Answer, and the mechanism strikes you down.
But it was dull.
The bare-bones Domain a Cursed Spirit like that could build was genuinely dull. How was a Domain master of Mahiru's caliber supposed to be trapped by something so crude?
A halo lit up above the girl's head, the glow spread outward, and the Special Grade Cursed Spirit's Domain shattered on cue.
Geto, a cursed tool in hand, closed the distance behind Mahiru in a blink.
The girl turned her head and simply used Cursed Speech.
"—Freeze!"
What?!
Geto's pupils shrank.
Then Mahiru's Heavy-Armed Darting Hare punched him off his feet and sent him flying. Up in the sky, the struggle had already ended with Rainbow Dragon beaten.
Mahiru stood where she was. This time it had been a clean sweep. She had assumed fighting the two of them without opening her Domain would be a strain… and now even she found it a little unbelievable.
The Gojo and Geto of this era probably aren't stronger than Yuki Tsukumo, right?
So did that mean she was now in the same bracket as a standard Special Grade? Or even above it?
Clatter—
Mahiru went still.
She looked back over her shoulder.
At the sight, the corner of her mouth twitched. "Come on, you… you have got to be kidding me…"
Gojo had risen out of the broken rubble, a translucent white glow circulating across his body, the wounds on the boy closing fast enough to watch with the naked eye.
Ha…
Unbelievable.
In the original story, sure, he only grasped the true meaning of the Reverse Cursed Technique because Toji Fushiguro ran him through. But this time all she'd done was hammer the guy a few times…
And somehow he'd awakened anyway?
Mahiru didn't know what to do with that.
She had to admit it. Gojo really was the most terrifying prodigy alive.
Still…
She watched him climb slowly to his feet, lift his head, those deep blue eyes locking onto hers.
She watched him raise a finger, and at the tip a crimson brilliance began to flicker, like a star in the dead of night.
Gojo had learned Reverse Cursed Technique, and with it he had naturally grasped Cursed Technique Reversal.
The reversal of Blue, which stands for attraction, is Cursed Technique Reversal: Red, which stands for repulsion. And where Blue and Red overlap, there is something more powerful still: Hollow Purple.
In this moment Gojo's gaze was calm and burning at once. That was the kind of "excitement" that concentrates so completely it stops showing any emotion at all.
And Mahiru broke into an eager smile all over again.
Because she had just noticed something. It looked like she could use Reverse Cursed Technique too.
She could feel it as well…
That spark. The inspiration to take her own Cursed Technique and Reverse it.
____
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