Time was tight, so Mahiru never told the people at Jujutsu High back in the original world when she would be returning.
Not that it would have made much difference.
Because over on their side, everyone was busy too. Busy past the point of breaking.
"Okkotsu, the Cursed Spirit is hiding southeast of you."
Through the trees, a young man's figure shot forward like a loosed arrow.
"Got it," he answered.
The long blade cleared its sheath. Cold light flashed.
Cursed Energy surged up along the steel, the edge swept across, and rock and Cursed Spirit alike were cut clean in two, the severed faces smooth as glass. The Cursed Spirit shrieked and dissolved.
Yuta Okkotsu's face never changed. He kept running, fast, deeper into the woods.
More Cursed Spirits came lunging out of the trees to block him.
For Yuta Okkotsu, each one was a single stroke of the sword.
"Okkotsu, we'll link up with you at the ridge ahead!"
"Right," Yuta answered, eyes still fixed forward. "Also, did you get through to the Commander?"
"We did. I'll have Ijichi patch you in right away."
A busy tone buzzed in his earpiece, and the comm channel switched over.
The voice that came through wasn't Ijichi's.
"Hello, Mr. Yuta Okkotsu." A man's voice, his Japanese carrying the English accent foreigners never quite lose. "Have you reached the designated position?"
"Hello. Yes, we're here."
"Very good. We're leaving this rescue in your hands," the man said. "We simply have no other units to spare for it."
"It's fine. I understand your situation."
"That is a great relief… In the name of the Commander of the 7th Unit of the United States Anti-Jujutsu Force, you have my thanks."
The United States. In other words, the Beautiful Country.
In the original Jujutsu Kaisen, the only places on earth with real jujutsu know-how were Japan and a handful of African tribes, but the Beautiful Country had shown up in the story all the same, invited by Kenjaku to insert itself into the Culling Game.
Their method was simple: put bullets in Jujutsu Sorcerers.
This time around, Kenjaku was already dead and could no longer extend that invitation. The Beautiful Country came anyway, the moment it caught wind of what was happening, and assembled its "Anti-Jujutsu Force" to take part in the Culling Game.
They claimed they had come to help Japan through the crisis.
And for the moment, they really were helping evacuate civilians.
So Jujutsu High and the Beautiful Country's units had struck a working arrangement — allies, at least on paper.
And now, with Satoru Gojo sealed and Mahiru carried off by the Black Hole, the Special Grade Sorcerer Yuta Okkotsu, who had arrived far too late, was leading the other Jujutsu High students on a rescue mission.
The people to be rescued were workers at a remote industrial park.
The park had been under the 7th Unit's protection, and even during the Culling Game it had kept producing basic daily necessities.
Then a Cursed Spirit Tide swept through, the park was overrun, contact was lost, and every worker inside was trapped.
The 7th Unit had its hands full, so it called in Yuta Okkotsu and the others for support.
"Okkotsu!"
"Senior!"
Yuta Okkotsu met up with the other Jujutsu High students assigned to the mission.
Panda, Fushiguro, and Miwa Kasumi.
"That Commander already sent over the park's coordinates," Miwa said.
Her expression was grim. Since the Culling Game began, not one Cursed Spirit Tide had been easy to handle. There was no telling how many Cursed Spirits were waiting inside that park, and her nerves showed.
Yuta Okkotsu saw it.
"Mm. Good work getting here. Don't worry." He smiled — a gentle, steady smile that seemed to sweep the unease out of a person all at once. "From here… I'll take point."
Vast Cursed Energy rolled off him.
A Special Grade Sorcerer on the front line. There was no better reassurance than that.
Yuta Okkotsu was strong. Extremely strong. Absurdly strong.
He had debuted already possessing the power of a Special Grade Sorcerer. After letting Rika pass on, he had briefly slipped back to Grade 4 — and then clawed his way back up to Special Grade in almost no time at all.
His total reserve of Cursed Energy was larger than Satoru Gojo's.
In the modern era he had fought Ishiryuu, Urogi Kyoko and two others — four opponents at once — and walked out of the melee the winner.
Most important of all, he never stopped growing.
The Yuta standing here hadn't yet grown into the version who fought the final battle at Shinjuku in the original story. But the sheer volume of Cursed Energy erupting skyward right now still left the three students beside him stunned.
"So this is…" Fushiguro tilted her head back, eyes trembling. "Special Grade…"
An enormous white Shikigami rose up behind Yuta Okkotsu.
"Rika, let's go!"
The young man broke into a sprint.
The Shikigami called Rika surged after him.
Beyond the treeline lay a deep valley, and at the bottom of it sat the fallen industrial park.
Factory roofs had caved in. Pipes hung snapped and dangling. Streetlights bent double, and a freight truck lay belly-up at an intersection.
Cursed Spirits came howling up out of every gap and crevice, closing in around them.
Compared to earlier Cursed Spirit Tides, there weren't actually that many here. But they were cunning. One charged head-on while two swung wide to flank. Their attacks were organized.
Anyone else would have found them a serious problem.
But the man in front of them was Yuta Okkotsu.
The blade swept across, and the front rank came apart at the waist.
A backhand stroke, and another swath of Cursed Spirits scattered into ash.
"Rika. Leave none of them," he said.
"YUUUTA!!" The Shikigami behind him screamed, wild and shrill. "You filthy things! Don't you get near my Yuta Okkotsu!!"
Rika had originally been a spirit bound to this world in the form of a Cursed Spirit by Yuta's curse. After she was resurrected, the whole of that shell became Yuta's Shikigami — the physical body of his Cursed Technique.
Rika shrieked as she tore the Cursed Spirits apart. Grabbing, ripping, crushing, like something savaging an endless supply of flimsy rag dolls.
"Okay, that's completely absurd," Maki Fushiguro said from behind them.
They were supposed to be fighting alongside him. Instead there didn't seem to be anything for them to do.
She had seen how strong Yuta was over the past while, but this was the first time she had actually run a mission with him.
She could pick out near-Special Grade Cursed Spirits in that swarm — and Yuta Okkotsu and his Shikigami were killing them offhand, without breaking stride.
He had even mastered projecting Positive Energy outward through Reverse Cursed Technique. The man was a born Cursed Spirit killer.
They pushed forward the whole way, all but unstoppable.
At last they reached the large factory at the center of the park.
It had been ringed by Cursed Spirits. Everyone caught in the disaster was sheltering inside — several hundred people, by the look of it.
Yuta shoved the factory doors open. "We're here to get you out!"
The hall was packed with hundreds of workers who had spent an agonizingly long time waiting for rescue. They were spent, hollowed out, in a bad way mentally.
At the sound of the doors, those bowed heads lifted, one after another.
Then their eyes lit up.
Joy went through the crowd.
"Someone finally came for us?"
"We… weren't abandoned after all?"
Some of them cheered. Some wept with relief.
"In a moment we'll suppress the Cursed Spirit Tide… and while it's held down, we evacuate…" Yuta laid out the plan quickly and loudly for the workers.
But when he finished, the mood had gone wrong.
Expressions all across the crowd had changed. They were staring at him with shock and confusion in their eyes.
"What is it?" Yuta frowned. Something cold moved through him before he could name it.
A worker at the front of the crowd started to speak, then hesitated.
"…And what about the points?" he asked.
Fushiguro blinked. "What points?"
"System Points," the worker said. "The System Points you use to keep living."
Fushiguro's jaw dropped.
"You're… short on points?" she said. "The 7th Unit's Commander never told us that."
The lead worker looked at her face and understood everything.
He let out a bitter laugh.
"I swear to you, we told them we were running short… but there's no point asking about any of it now," he said, and the despair in his smile was total. "We've got a few dozen minutes left. That's it. We really are finished."
Fushiguro stood there, mouth open, unable to move.
"How much longer will our own points hold out?"
"Maybe… not even five days."
Right now, what was the single greatest threat the Culling Game posed to the people of Japan?
The Curse Users and criminals hiding in the shadows?
The Cursed Spirit Tides that kept erupting without warning?
No. Neither.
It was one lethal rule of the Culling Game itself.
Every player in the Culling Game had to pay a set amount of System Points to the system at regular intervals. Fail, and they died.
And Japan held a countless multitude of people.
All those civilians needed points just to keep breathing. Even if each individual required only a little, the total was a horrifying expenditure.
In the Culling Game, protecting everyone was close to impossible.
Every point they had scraped together, by every method available, giving everything they had — and the accumulated total would only keep the people under their protection alive for another five days.
Every Jujutsu Sorcerer was working themselves into the ground, and the deadline kept coming closer anyway.
The whole world had been backed into a corner.
"I see… five days, then." In the office at Jujutsu High, Principal Yaga held his head in his hands and laughed, and the sound was bitter. "Have we run out of tricks entirely? Everything we have… and this is as far as it goes?"
In five days the points would run dry, and people would start dying in enormous numbers.
And before that happened, the countless players of the Culling Game would realize Jujutsu High could no longer produce points. Then would come infighting. Then hoarding.
So it wouldn't take five days. Japan would collapse, human society would shatter, and the Culling Game would swallow everything.
Look closely at that clock counting down to the end of the world, and there was less than three days left on it.
"The deadline's in what, a dozen-odd minutes?" Panda froze where he stood. "That fast?"
In the factory, the blue-haired girl and the black-haired girl both wore the same lost, helpless look.
The United States' 7th Unit had kept this from them.
This region was under the 7th Unit's control, which meant the workers in this industrial park should have been receiving their share of points from the 7th Unit's people.
Apparently no such thing had ever happened.
Those points had been skimmed. Stolen.
Now, looking at the people in front of her who would meet their deaths in a dozen minutes, she felt a helplessness that ran all the way down to the bone.
There was no time to go back to Tokyo for points. All they had on them were the ones earned killing Cursed Spirits on the way in.
And those points… even if Yuta Okkotsu wiped out every last Cursed Spirit in this Tide, he almost certainly couldn't gather enough in time to save everyone here. Half, at best.
And the other half?
The other half would die.
Silence settled over the hall.
The lead worker laughed, bitter again.
"Save the young ones first."
In a situation like this, all that was left was choosing.
The workers began sorting themselves.
The young to one side. The older to the other.
Quiet, orderly, no arguments.
Maki Fushiguro watched from the side and felt something press down on her chest until she couldn't breathe. In the face of this, she was useless. Utterly useless.
Then a little girl, the family member of one of the workers, walked up in front of them.
She tugged at the hem of Miwa's clothes.
"Miss, are you that Angel lady?"
Miwa went still.
"My mom and dad told me about her." The girl looked up at her. "The lady with blue hair is the Angel. She's a hero. She's saved everybody lots of times."
"So this time, can you save my mom and dad? I don't want them to die."
Miwa's eyes shook.
Fushiguro's fists clenched.
"I…" Miwa drew a deep breath and heard her own voice tremble.
Should she tell this girl that Mahiru wasn't even in this world?
Should she tell her that none of them could save her mom and dad, because they were too weak, because against this thing called the Culling Game all they could do was scrape by in the cracks…
Am I supposed to tell her that?
Miwa's hand closed hard around her sword hilt.
She was weak.
Miwa really was weak.
Since the Culling Game began, everyone had been improving. She alone had stayed exactly where she was, going nowhere.
By rights, she was the one person nobody would have blamed for hanging back and doing nothing.
The smart move now was to hand this girl off to Yuta, to Fushiguro, and let them answer the question.
But right then her fingers found the butterfly earring — the one Mahiru had given her, the one she had carried with her ever since.
"…Yes," Miwa said, her throat working, as if she had just settled something inside herself. "I'm going to save everyone."
Fushiguro's head snapped around at that.
Miwa's face was set. She raised a hand and called up the Culling Game's system panel.
"Hey — Miwa, wait…" Fushiguro started.
Miwa didn't answer. She kept scrolling through the panel.
Kenjaku had a nasty sense of humor.
He had deliberately made points this scarce precisely so he could watch people everywhere start tearing each other apart.
He had foreseen that Jujutsu High would run into exactly this kind of dead end today, and so, with that same nasty humor, he had left behind one method of acquiring a large sum of points in a hurry.
Suicide.
Yes. Suicide.
If a Jujutsu Sorcerer from Jujutsu High chose Self-Termination, then in exchange for that life they would receive a great many points.
Miwa meant to trade her own death for that sum, and get these factory workers through the next few minutes.
The girl's mind was already made up.
"Miwa. Calm down." Yuta had realized what she was about to do.
Fushiguro reached out to grab her shoulder.
Too late.
"Huh? Miss, is that true?" The little girl's eyes shone, her whole face lit with delight. "You're really going to save us?"
"That's right." Miwa smiled at her, eyes crinkling.
It was only pressing a button on a system panel, when you got down to it. Nothing to make a fuss over… just a simple thing any Jujutsu Sorcerer could do.
Funny, really — this little girl had actually mistaken her for Mahiru.
Ha.
Then doing this counted as looking after Mahiru's reputation for her. Mahiru would owe her a thank-you when she got back.
Miwa lowered her gaze to the Self-Termination button on the panel in front of her, and let out one soft laugh.
Mahiru, I'm sorry. I was going to give you a present next time we met, as thanks for protecting me, for saving me… but I can't leave these people to die.
So I'm sorry.
You'll forgive me for never paying you back, won't you?
"Ah, it really is the Angel lady!" the girl cried out in wonder. "You really are her!"
Fushiguro and Yuta couldn't stop Miwa from working the panel, and there was no time left to talk her out of it.
Hearing the girl, Miwa laughed. "That's right, I'm—"
The words died in her throat.
Because the little girl was looking up. Above them.
Miwa's head jerked up. Fushiguro, Panda and Yuta looked up too.
White feathers drifted down. Hymns echoed. A chaotic doorway unfolded amid rippling pale-gold light — and a familiar figure stood within it.
Miwa's pupils shrank.
"Huh?" The little girl made a puzzled sound. "Two blue-haired ladies?"
"Heard you were short on points?" Mahiru's wings beat as she emerged from within the gate of time and space, smiling as she greeted them. "Well, isn't that lucky. Points happen to be the one thing I've got plenty of."
Mahiru… was back.
____
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