"It's really… you?" Miwa Kasumi's eyes trembled.
A phantom echo rose in her ears — words Mahiru had said to her long ago. "No matter where you are, if you're ever in danger, I'll come save you."
That was right.
Mahiru always kept her promises. Mahiru always made miracles happen.
And she had come to save her again.
The girl's nose stung.
She forced the sob down and gave Mahiru a brilliant smile instead. "Welcome back."
Beep! Beep!
Far away, in the command post of the United States forces, the General's eyes went wide at the report coming through his headset.
"What? You're telling me that blue Cursed Spirit is back? Confirmed by eye? Wasn't she dead?"
Mahiru had contacted the people at Jujutsu High from the world of the past long ago, so they knew she hadn't died.
But at the time, to keep Rime and the others from learning too early that Mahiru had been assassinated, the news had been kept mostly among people who could be trusted. Not every Jujutsu Sorcerer knew.
Let alone the civilians, or the grunts of the United States army.
Still, she had already dropped the act as far as Sukuna was concerned. There was no reason left to keep the fact that she was alive tucked out of sight.
The workers watched Mahiru come down, and a few in the crowd recognized her.
"It's that blue-haired Angel!"
"It's really her! It's really her!"
Shock rolled through every one of them.
"She came back to life?"
"You're kidding."
"…So does that mean we're saved?"
They had no idea what Mahiru could possibly do to save them.
But the times she had pulled them out of ruin before, and all the stories, made them believe on instinct that she had a way.
Panda, Miwa and Fushiguro thought exactly the same, of course.
"Seriously… you," Fushiguro said with a soft laugh, her shoulders finally loosening.
Mahiru turned her head and saw Yuta Okkotsu.
She raised an eyebrow in greeting. "Yo, hello there. You're the second-year Satoru Gojo told me about?"
"Yes, Miss Mahiru." Yuta's tone was perfectly polite. "Gojo-sensei mentioned you in the letter he left for me."
Then he remembered what she had said a moment ago.
"You said just now that you had a lot of points. Meaning?"
"Points are what's been worrying you, right?" Mahiru grinned with her hands on her hips and swept an arm wide. "Relax. I brought back plenty."
Every Player in the Culling Game had to hand over points to the Culling Game's system at regular intervals just to keep living. Pay by the month and it was a monthly card; pay by the day and it was a daily renewal fee.
The haul Mahiru brought back this time was enormous. Not just enough to extend the lives of the handful of people standing in front of her, but enough to buy every person in Japan several more days. It handled the fire at their feet completely — coal delivered in the middle of a blizzard.
One second Fushiguro and Miwa were still lost in the joy and emotion of her return; the next they caught the point balance on the system panel the girl had opened in her hand, and both of them jolted.
"Over a hundred million points?! Did you install a cheat engine?!" Fushiguro was stunned witless. "How do you have that many points?!"
"Didn't you say the world you went back to was the past? Did you kill every person in it? Every Cursed Spirit? That's enough to keep all of Japan alive for two or three days. Where did it all come from?"
"Secret. Not telling you." Mahiru snickered.
Then she got to work moving points.
She opened the system panel and transferred points to the workers who needed them, one after another.
And with that, the emergency was over.
By the time she had made a full round, the leading digits of her balance hadn't so much as budged. That was how much she had.
Once the people were calm and breathing easier, the next task was relocating them.
They led the workers out of the compound and into the nearest town under Jujutsu High's jurisdiction, and got them settled in.
The whole process took about an hour and a half.
In the town, Mahiru handed over more of her points to the administrators, the amount apportioned to the town's population.
Which meant the town's administrators now learned that Mahiru was back.
"Is it all right to make your return public?" Fushiguro asked.
"It's fine." Mahiru smiled.
Then something occurred to her.
"Oh, but don't tell Jogo and the others yet," she added. "I want to go back and give them a scare."
"…Uh, sure." Fushiguro didn't know quite what to say to that. "Then… I'll tell Itadori and the rest to gather at the hot spring inn and meet you there. They've all been dying to see you."
Besides, with Mahiru back, there was bound to be a mountain of things to discuss with her.
They could hold the meeting at the hot spring inn.
"Sounds good~" Mahiru agreed cheerfully.
They were about to part ways for a while.
Before leaving, Mahiru made a point of saying a proper goodbye to Yuta Okkotsu. He was one of the story's late-game powerhouses, the super carry in the fight against Sukuna. She had to build a good relationship with him.
But Yuta Okkotsu's attitude toward her was better than she had expected.
Maybe it was because of the sheer number of things she had done that could fairly be called great. Or maybe it was because Yuta Okkotsu was Satoru Gojo's biggest devotee — anyone Gojo trusted, he would naturally trust too.
Either way, Mahiru found no trace of wariness in his eyes.
"See you at the hot spring inn later, then."
The girl spread her wings and flew toward home.
Returning to familiar ground put her in an undeniably good mood.
Even in the world of the past, where she could barely find anyone dangerous and had already gotten Kenjaku tuned up nicely… nothing beat home.
Now, how should she startle Jogo and the rest?
Smiling, turning ideas over, she flew back into that stretch of land.
And then she blinked, because the place had changed enormously.
Their hot spring inn counted as a remote corner of Japan, but there had always been a decent number of towns and villages around it, and eventually all of those had become the turf of her little band of Cursed Spirits.
Those towns and villages had never held many people, and they had never been prosperous.
Now they were crowded. Almost unrecognizable.
"That's a lot of people."
And the construction was packed far denser than before.
Night was closing in.
From a distance, the lamplight and firelight clustered thick across the land.
Probably because of the Culling Game catastrophe, people from a wide radius had been siphoned here and were treating the area as a shelter — after all, several disaster-class Cursed Spirits held court in it.
Great stretches of old wasteland and scrub had been leveled to build housing and facilities of every kind, forming camps that sprawled over the hills.
Most of them were timber halls and wooden cabins. No guessing required as to whose Cursed Technique had raised them.
People swarmed through the camps, hurrying about their business…
No — the word "camps" gave the false impression that the buildings were crude. Better to call it one vast wooden townscape spilling over hill and valley. Hanami's Cursed Technique really was authoritative; Wood Release existed to put up houses.
The buildings Hanami raised were sturdy and handsome, and tall, and big.
Signs on them marked what each one was for, and every district looked clearly assigned.
Mahiru studied it all from a distance.
That building over there, for example, was named… huh?
"Mahiru Cafeteria"?
"…What the hell?" Her jaw dropped.
A cafeteria is a cafeteria, fine, but why use my name?
It couldn't actually be my cafeteria, could it?
So weird.
Mahiru landed, altered her features a little, walked up to the nearest person and asked, "Why is that cafeteria called the 'Mahiru Cafeteria'?"
The man froze, and then his whole face changed, folding into grief. "Ahh, you must be new here… Everyone who lives in this place knows the story."
Mahiru was even more lost. "Yeah… I'm new…"
"Well, what's to be done with you," the man sighed, dragging over two chairs from who knew where. "Sit down first."
"Uh…"
"It was on the battlefield against Mahoraga — a final duel worthy of being carved into the history books of all Japan. The battlefield fell so quiet that nothing was left but falling rubble and the sound of breathing…"
Ignoring Mahiru completely, the man sat in his chair, gazed up at the sky, and launched into the tale with a mournful face.
"Er…" Mahiru gaped at him.
Setting aside the strangely rehearsed, boilerplate delivery… what this man was reciting was the story of how Mahiru had fought Mahoraga heroically and given her life for the people of Japan.
Now she understood. Now she remembered. In these people's eyes she was still "killed in action"!
"…Haah… and so," the man finished the story after several minutes and let out a long sigh, "everyone cherishes Lady Mahiru's memory, and on top of that this is Lady Mahiru's territory. So to honor her, people naturally started naming places after her."
So it was all in her memory!
All right, I died — but if you're going to commemorate me, commemorate me properly!
Mahiru took off again, and from the sky she surveyed one place after another bearing her name, and her head began to ache.
"Mahiru Amusement Park" she would leave aside for now. Ordinary names like "Mahiru Hospital," "Mahiru Department Store" and "Mahiru Tower" she could ignore for the moment… but what in the world was the "Mahiru Washing Plant"?!
Who names things like that?! Is that place for washing me?!
And a Mahiru Incineration Plant, of all things…
Might as well stick my name on the breeding farm and the slaughterhouse while you're at it!
And none of that even mattered, really. What truly left Mahiru with nothing to say?
From up in the air she could see statues of Mahiru and portraits of Mahiru in staggering, colossal, oceanic quantities, planted in every conceivable spot.
On rooftops. In plazas. On streetlamps. Everywhere, all of them decked out with slips of writing — "Her Voice and Face Live On," "Her Name in the Annals of History," "Boundless Merit"…
Set a giant photo of Mahiru and a giant statue of Mahiru down in a square, hang a silk banner on the left reading "Your Kindness Gave Us New Life" and one on the right reading "Dead Yet Living," then plant a few sticks of incense in front and lay out some plates of fruit — people who knew would say it was Mahiru, and people who didn't would assume someone had hauled the Guanyin statue out of the local shrine.
This was deranged!
Bang!
Mahiru shoved Jogo's door open.
"Can we please change some of that?!"
The shouted protest gave Jogo a start.
"You're back?" The white-haired girl brightened a little — and for Jogo's face to shift that visibly, the delight had to be running very high. "Why so suddenly?"
But Mahiru had already forgotten her plan to startle Jogo.
Because she was the one who had gotten startled.
"What is going on with the names of all those shops?!" Mahiru bellowed. "And those statues! Those photos! Are you the one stirring up trouble?!"
Jogo looked entirely innocent. "Nope. People did all that on their own. Are you embarrassed? Thin-skinned, aren't you."
"What does thin skin have to do with anything?!" Mahiru shouted. "It's completely deranged!"
"Is it?"
"It is!"
"But they did it of their own accord." Jogo shrugged. "The savior they believed in died, and it happens to be an age of chaos and disaster. Without some kind of powerful spiritual beacon, Cursed Spirit or human, it's hard to hold your own mind together, don't you think?"
Mahiru worked her mouth. "What I'm saying is, couldn't you organize things a bit? Make it all look nicer?"
It made perfect sense for people to revere her. The girl had saved lives many times over, and right up until she gave her life she had been in this very region helping with disaster relief and reconstruction… If the people had put up a monument for her afterward, or built a shrine and stood her inside it, Mahiru wouldn't have found that strange at all.
The problem was how her statues and portraits had been arranged around town. It was excruciating.
"Haah."
Forget it. It didn't matter. She had never expected Jogo and that crew to have normal taste, or to bother making her statues and portraits look good.
"Where are Hanami and Dagon?" Mahiru glanced around and realized Jogo was the only one in the inn.
Little Kaori and Maki and Mai weren't there either.
"Oh, right, there's an event in the town center tonight," Jogo said.
"An event? A festival?"
A festival was a fine thing. The Japanese loved holding festivals. At a moment of such crushing pressure, some entertainment everyone could take part in would do wonders for solidarity.
Mahiru smiled, pleased. "Was the event your idea? You're making progress."
"Er, if you want to call it a festival… then sure, it counts." Jogo's face went strange, her tone hesitant.
"Huh? What's with that tone?" Mahiru gestured with both hands, puzzled. "Isn't it the communal kind, with flowers and lanterns and everyone singing and dancing together?"
"Er, yeah. It's that kind of event."
"…?" A bad feeling crept up on Mahiru.
The girl walked out of the inn.
She and Jogo went together to the place where the festival was supposedly being held.
It was the plaza, and it was packed shoulder to shoulder.
Nearly everyone from the surrounding area had gathered.
Exactly as Jogo had confirmed, people were cradling flowers, people were carrying lanterns, people were singing, all of it circling the stone monument at the center of the plaza…
But there was one glaring problem…
"The flowers you mentioned are funeral wreaths?!"
There were flowers, all right. Funeral wreaths.
There were lanterns, all right. Sky lanterns.
People were singing, all right, brimming with feeling — except every last song was either "Lady Mahiru, We Still Remember You" or some folk dirge for departed family and friends…
Oh, come on…
And a hard look at that monument in the middle of the plaza revealed a gravestone with her name carved into it!
How was this a festival?
"This is people wailing at my grave!" Mahiru screamed at Jogo.
____
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