There is one thing worth knowing: a great many of the Cursed Techniques sold in the Culling Game's System Shop are not complete ones.
For example, suppose the System Shop wanted to sell the "Ten Shadows Technique." It would never put the Ten Shadows Technique up as a single, whole Cursed Technique. It would take the thing apart instead — split it into ten pieces, eleven pieces, or more — and sell each Shikigami as its own separate item.
Which means that after all that, anyone who wants the Ten Shadows Technique has to assemble it themselves.
Pure price-gouging merchant behavior.
That said, there were upsides to doing it this way.
For one thing, carving a large Cursed Technique into smaller ones brought the price down with it. So a buyer who was an old hand could accomplish a great deal for very little — and if he managed to cherry-pick only the essence of each Cursed Technique, he might even assemble something genuinely interesting.
For another, it let people learn and adapt to these Cursed Techniques far more easily. Cursed Techniques are usually complicated things, and splitting them up simplifies them.
Take this round's Cursed Speech, for instance.
For an ordinary person, Cursed Speech is already an easy Cursed Technique to grasp. Cursed Speech drives a curse through language, and talking is something everybody is intimately familiar with.
On top of that, Kenjaku had gone and split Cursed Speech apart, packaging each different phrase up in advance.
Mahiru pulled open the system panel now, scrolled through the shop, selected Cursed Speech, and dragged out a long list — every preset Cursed Speech phrase, laid out one after another.
"Stop." "Hold still." "Burst." "Twist." Line after line of short commands sold individually, and once an ordinary person bought one, they could use that single curse.
Wonderfully beginner-friendly.
"Almost everyone is picking these Cursed Speech phrases right now," Miwa said. "On average, each person buys the usage rights to one of them."
"You buy these and use them — there's no backlash to pay?" Mahiru asked, still scrolling.
"There is." Miwa nodded. "But the price differs for every phrase. Some cost very little. Some cost a lot."
The strong and the confident went for the expensive ones — "twist," "burst," that sort of thing.
Those with less confidence, or simply a healthier attachment to staying alive, picked something else, one of the less destructive curses on offer. And of course Kenjaku had made sure there was a Cursed Speech phrase suited to them too.
And so, in the Tokyo that followed the start of Season Two, if a person on the street happened to come across a fight, what they would most likely witness was…
"Squat, right there!"
"Push-ups, right there!"
"Ten minutes of planking, right there!"
"Give me three hundred pull-ups!"
— they would most likely witness a whole crowd of people who, having cursed one another, went red in the face and threw themselves into every variety of anaerobic and aerobic exercise on the spot.
Devious. The way Cursed Speech was being used here was unbelievably devious.
Most of the people in the free-for-all right now were ordinary civilians who had "learned exactly one jujutsu technique." They couldn't reinforce their bodies with Cursed Energy. The bulk of them were run-down office drones and students whose bodies would shed parts at the first hard bump. Who could possibly endure this?
Order the other guy to squat — one shout, one squat — and the whole contest came down to whether your throat gave out before their thighs did.
A hundred squats will wear a person to a rag. Five hundred will have them bawling for their parents. And a thousand? A thousand is a fate worse than death.
And Cursed Speech is compulsory.
So on the road of push-ups, there is no retreat!
What made it worse was how tiny the backlash on these particular phrases was.
Were these curses lethal?
Of course not. In a certain sense they even helped the target lose weight and build muscle — so the backlash was pitifully small!
Mahiru stood atop a high-rise, watching the battlefield in the park below. The lawn was carpeted with people hammering out push-ups in thunderous form or bounding through frog-jump squats, and even mid-jump they kept firing off Cursed Speech to load fresh "workout objectives" onto their opponents.
Ask one of them whether he was winning or losing the brawl, and he'd tell you he was gaining muscle.
Nobody could take this.
"Uh…" Mahiru's mouth twitched. Reality's capacity for the absurd would never stop outrunning her guesses. "I'll go bring the wounded back…"
The methods might be hilarious, but the malice between the people fighting down there was real. Every one of them was using Cursed Speech with the honest goal of beating down and hurting the other.
Overtraining tears muscle.
Push past that, and it starts damaging the heart and lungs.
This is not a joke: order someone to keep squatting long enough and you really can squat them to death.
There were seven or eight brawl sites burning across Tokyo now, and casualties had appeared fast.
Mahiru formed a hand sign. Cursed Energy surged, and the Cursed Technique released.
Countless little white rabbits came pouring up out of the shadows on the ground, wings sprouting from their backs, each of them dressed in a nurse-styled pet outfit.
They flew to the battlefields scattered across Tokyo and hauled away, one by one, the poor wretches with wrecked backs and screaming legs who had collapsed and couldn't get up, pulling them out of the fighting and carrying them all the way to the medical stations.
Meanwhile, wings beating, Mahiru descended toward the fight herself.
"I squat, I squat, and once I'm done squatting… you do push-ups!"
"Push-ups, push-ups, and once I'm done with push-ups… you plank!"
The war in the park was fervent, and it was brutal.
The weaker ones already lay foaming at the mouth on the ground, waiting for a flying rabbit to come carry them off, while every last person still fighting was flushed scarlet to the ears. The air was thick with the smell of sweat.
All one could say was that the Culling Game really was too cruel.
Mahiru spoke, the curse mark surfacing on the tip of her tongue.
— "Sleep."
It was the same Cursed Speech, but Mahiru's was in another league entirely. A single word from her outweighed everything this crowd could produce combined.
One sentence, and every enthusiastically exercising person on the field rolled their eyes back, dropped where they stood, and went out cold.
The girl pursed her lips.
The truth was that a simple pair of earplugs infused with Cursed Energy would block a Cursed Speech attack entirely.
But Jujutsu High didn't have anywhere near enough Cursed Energy earplugs, and Kenjaku was a sly one — he hadn't put that kind of cursed tool in the Culling Game's System Shop at all.
So for now, there was nothing to be done.
"Mahiru, the XXX Shopping Street is fully suppressed." Nobara Kugisaki's voice came through the earpiece.
A moment later another voice cut into the comm channel.
"Uh, yeah, Kitamachi Station's put down too." Kinji Hakari sounded like he was grinning on the other end. "What kind of hardcore Cursed Speech is this stuff… When I got here there were like five guys doing handstands and barking like dogs. That's messed up."
"You've got it easy over there," Mahiru said flatly.
"Easy how?" Hakari Kinji, contrarian to the bone.
Before Mahiru could answer, Itadori's and Panda's ear-splitting shouts crashed into the channel.
"Help! We can't handle this!" the two of them howled. "Mahiru! Get over here and help us! Save us!"
Mahiru blinked, and honestly, a small knot of tension formed in her chest. "What's wrong? What's the situation over there?"
They were actually calling for help… had they run into some genuinely dangerous enemy?
Hajime Kashimo came to mind.
Had that lunatic shown up to cause trouble?
"No, no, no," Itadori said. "We're fighting the people with Cursed Speech."
"Aren't they all incredibly weak?" Mahiru asked, baffled. "You can't handle them?"
"It's not a question of whether we can beat them anymore!" Itadori wailed, on the verge of collapse. "Their Cursed Speech has gotten seriously horrifying! It's gone from physical attacks to psychological warfare!"
Mahiru blinked again, not quite following, then beat her wings and made for the location.
It was a high school in Tokyo.
And here, our young, energetic, richly imaginative children had long since moved past low-yield nonsense like making the other guy do push-ups and squats.
They had chosen applications with considerably more killing power.
Mahiru flew over, and from a distance she could already hear the voices of curses brimming with obscenity and naked appetite for combat.
— "Sh*t yourself!"
— "Eat sh*t!"
— "Spray it!"
"Okay, I admit it, I really do have it easy over here." Hakari Kinji managed two dry laughs.
"Uh…" Mahiru's expression grew delicate, and the wings at her back slowed their beat.
The girl began to reconsider whether to keep flying forward.
So it had finally happened. Attacks with no floor whatsoever.
The true essence of Cursed Speech had, in the end, been carried to its glorious heights in the hands of certain boys possessed of a conqueror's will.
There was no doubt about it: that high school in the distance had already been swallowed by the vortex of war, and Mahiru didn't need to get any closer to imagine exactly how thick the "aroma of battle" was over there.
Wow…
"You know what, I'll leave this to you and Panda." Mahiru tilted her head toward the earpiece. "I won't be coming… with your strength and Panda's, Itadori, handling those guys should be no trouble at all. I've got more important business, so I'm heading back!"
"Don't!" Itadori sobbed. "Don't say that!"
In the face of a battlefield this cruel, even the stoutest heart would waver.
And while they chatted, the fighting at the high school escalated.
"Drink water!"
"Hold it in!"
"Hold it for five hours!"
God. She didn't dare think about what came next.
"Ahem… anyway, be careful not to catch any friendly fire, okay?" Mahiru covered her guilty conscience with an airy tone, then — over Itadori's cries of "It's everywhere! It's everywhere!" — quietly turned around and flew away from the place.
It was the first time since the Culling Game began that Mahiru had refused to join a fight.
Mm.
Naturally, the hardest challenge has to be left to the protagonist.
I believe in you, Itadori. You'll definitely solve this catastrophe.
Mahiru flew off without looking back.
All right, joking aside.
It might sound like most people were just roughhousing, but the blood and death spreading out of the Culling Game's free-for-all had already reached a severe level.
The ones who truly bore malice toward society, or who carried greedy ambitions, were hurting other people with no limits at all.
The brawls they set off were injuring an enormous number of people, and the casualty count was climbing fast.
Mahiru left the high school and went on to suppress another melee at an office building.
That one had started when a salaryman who had spent years being bullied at work struck back at his own superior, and from there it had spiraled beyond stopping.
In Japan, bullying had always been a serious social problem, and countless people, repressed and full of hatred, had become the fuse for one brawl after another.
This couldn't go on.
It was still controllable now, but drag it out another day or two and control would be gone.
Mahiru knew she had to find a way to solve this.
But how?
Turning it over in her mind, she put down two more disturbances. Once she felt properly rested, she returned to the place where Satoru Gojo had vanished and opened her Domain again.
This time, she opened it not only to search for where Satoru Gojo had gone, but also to make contact with the "past world."
The light of the Domain gathered into pale golden clouds, and as the clouds drifted apart, the figure of Kaori Itadori Kenjaku appeared within them.
"?" Kaori Kenjaku met Mahiru's eyes and blinked in surprise. "Is this… a real-time connection?"
"That's right. Real-time."
"You nearly startled me," Kenjaku said with a laugh. For whatever reason, she seemed to be in a good mood. "So what are you contacting me for?"
Mahiru asked it straight out. "Do you have any way to interfere with the Culling Game's shop?"
"The Culling Game's shop? The one that sells Cursed Techniques?" Kenjaku repeated, puzzled.
The Culling Game in the past world had never fully started, and the version update hadn't reached them either.
"Exactly." Mahiru nodded.
She ran through the situation on her side from start to finish.
Kenjaku stroked her chin, understanding dawning on her face.
"I see… that really is a troublesome business," she said. "But you know how it is — our account privileges aren't sufficient. The shop items and new rules they created with that other administrator account can't be revoked, not even if I squeezed Tengen completely dry."
"True. I know all that." Mahiru rubbed her own chin. "Which is why I want to ask whether you can add things to the System Shop."
…Add things?
Kenjaku went still for a moment.
Then, as if she had worked out precisely what Mahiru intended, a smile of keen interest spread across her face.
"If it's only a matter of putting a few things on the shelves," she answered, smiling, "then that we can still manage."
Mahiru smiled too. "Then that's settled."
Let's go stir up a little chaos.
____
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