Now, a question — Kenjaku's second version update has let things spiral this far out of control, so what is Jujutsu High's single greatest problem?
Is it a shortage of combat power?
No. Quite the opposite.
Jujutsu High is not short of combat power.
With Yuta Okkotsu, Yuki Tsukumo, and Mahiru holding the line — three people with the strength of Special Grade Sorcerers — even the most incurable firepower-anxious worrier would take one look at that roster, let out a breath, and decide everything was going to be fine.
Then what is it?
Because human nature is evil at the root? Because everyone in the world is a bad seed, and the moment they get power they commit endless atrocities and tear order apart?
No, that isn't it either. Plenty of people did turn cruel once the Culling Game put power in their hands, but measured against the ones who didn't, the wicked were still a minority.
There is exactly one reason Jujutsu High cannot steer the situation now: they cannot manage the population of an entire country. There are too few of them.
In the jujutsu world, people born with talent for the craft are one in ten thousand to begin with, and among those under Jujutsu High's banner, sorcerers who can actually do the work and can actually be trusted are rarer still.
There are simply too few Jujutsu Sorcerers. And the official personnel who aren't sorcerers have neither the ability nor the experience to manage a cursed disaster.
Even stretching the number past all reason — say Jujutsu High had "ten thousand" people able to take part in the effort — each of them would be facing several thousand ordinary civilians. How could anyone possibly keep up?
On top of that, they have no adequate command structure. Their administration is chaos. When Jujutsu High wants civilians to do something, it has to keep issuing appeals, passing word along mouth to mouth through the internet, the phone lines, the radio.
That backward system is fine in peacetime. Acceptable, even. But in a disaster like this, in wartime, in a cursed catastrophe like the Culling Game where everything changes by the second and traditional methods fail outright, it accomplishes essentially nothing.
Because Jujutsu High's way of doing things simply cannot match the hold the Culling Game's "system" has on the public.
No matter how hard they work, the phantom Kenjaku need only push one or two measures through the Culling Game's system, and all of that effort collapses.
So…
"So why don't we just use the Culling Game's system too?"
Beep. Beep.
And so, across all of Japan, every Player of the Culling Game, every person ordinary and otherwise, heard the chime of a new notification opening on their Culling Game system panel.
Beep… Beep…
A small virtual box appeared before everyone, the kind of little gift box you'd see wrapped up for a holiday.
Everyone who saw it froze.
What was this thing?
Had that damned game designer released something new again?
Or had he used his administrator privileges to cook up another loathsome rule?
For one instant, every heart tightened.
Trembling, wary, they reached out and tapped the virtual box, and then…
Bang!
"Helloooo, everyone!!"
Confetti burst out of it, spraying every face in the country.
A chibi blue-haired little angel came bouncing out of the box along with the streamers, beaming.
"Welcome, one and all, to the Little Blue Shop! Our new store is officially open!!"
…what on earth?
"What is that girl… doing?" In one of the camps inside Jujutsu High, Fushiguro stared at the little blue creature standing in her palm, the corner of her eye twitching. "What kind of nonsense is she pulling now?"
"Let me introduce myself, everyone — I'm Administrator No. 2 of the Culling Game!" The chibi Mahiru planted her hands on her hips and grinned, speaking to the entire nation at once, carrying her message to every ear. "And I'm also the authorized representative of the Japanese government and Jujutsu High. Everything I say to you from here on carries the official will of Jujutsu High! Announcements from Administrator No. 2 will serve as Jujutsu High's official channel for information and for orders!…"
Done this way, the difficulties facing Jujutsu High could be solved rather neatly.
No means of managing people, no channel to reach them?
Then why not simply use the Culling Game itself to manage them and pass information along?
Mahiru had made use of Kaori Suo's administrator account within the Culling Game, which let her send messages and signals to every Player in real time.
At the same time, she had opened a System Shop of her own. Any Player who pulled up their system panel would find a new entry sitting there: the "Little Blue Shop."
Through the shop, Mahiru could sell or hand out anything she liked to the Players of the Culling Game. And yes, if she had wanted to, she could have used it to rake in points.
But funneling the points out of ordinary people's pockets into her own served no purpose for her. So she didn't.
"So! Our shop has just stocked a whole batch of Cursed Speech products! And every one of them is completely free!"
The words landed like a thunderclap.
Free? Really?
She was giving them away?
Was there really such a good deal to be had?
Delight ran through them, and they hurried to open the "Little Blue Shop" and see what was inside.
There wasn't much on the shelves, which was understandable enough. Between the moment the idea struck her and the moment she put it into action, hardly any time had passed. The girl simply hadn't had the chance to prepare many "products."
Making a product — that is, reshaping a Cursed Technique into a format compatible with the Culling Game — was something she needed time to study. The phantom Kenjaku and Sukuna hadn't started their own "version update" until more than a month into the Culling Game, so a thin inventory in Mahiru's shop was hardly surprising.
What mattered was what those products actually were.
In the camp, Fushiguro opened the shop panel, and the first item to meet her eyes was:
[Cursed Speech — "Don't Say That"].
"…huh?" The black-haired girl blinked at it, lost. "So what exactly is she playing at?"
The description right below it explained everything.
Those three words, "don't say that," weren't a joke. Mahiru had created them for one purpose: to counter Cursed Speech.
The technique had exactly one effect — it rendered any Cursed Speech an opponent used null and void.
Elsewhere in Tokyo, on another battlefield tangled with Cursed Speech.
The people fighting here were gangsters of the most vicious sort. Two syndicates with a blood feud going back generations had used the Culling Game as their excuse to start shooting, and the fighting had spilled over into the surrounding residents until it became a free-for-all between civilians and mobsters.
"Explode!"
"Crumble!"
"Burn to ash!"
Firelight sprayed in every direction, and the blasts never stopped.
There were men here who had already killed until their eyes went red.
Beneath the backwash of all that violence, a mother huddled under a slab of rubble, her daughter clamped tight against her chest.
With a rolling crash, one gangster caught someone's "Blast away" and went flying, slammed into a wall, and slid down it.
He ground his teeth, his face twisted with rage, and by sheer bad luck he happened to turn his head. He saw the family.
"…oh?" The gangster smiled, mad and vicious.
"It's always people like you…" He pushed himself up and came toward them, one step at a time. "It's always you happy little bastards looking down on me, isn't it!!"
Seeing him close in, the terrified mother curled around her child.
The father clenched his jaw, made up his mind, and stepped out in front of the gangster without hesitation. "I won't let you touch my family!"
Behind him his wife cried out in anguish. "Don't! You can't beat him! You'll die!"
The gangster roared with laughter. "Quit struggling, you're finished — Explode!"
The man shielding his family felt something strike him.
A sensation of imminent detonation rose from inside him. Agony bloomed in the center of his chest.
He went rigid.
He was going to die.
Despair, regret, fury — every dark thing a man feels in his last seconds crowded into him. He didn't want to die. And in that same moment, he remembered the new shop the blue-haired angel had just opened, and the new Cursed Speech skill he had claimed from it not five minutes ago.
That curse… would it actually work?
He decided to try it with everything he had left.
He thrust both hands out in front of him, palms up like a man bracing a door shut.
"Don't say that."
Pfff—
A sound like air leaking from a balloon. The Cursed Speech that should have detonated came apart in the strangest way, unraveling into nothing.
The gangster's eyes went wide.
Because the man in front of him, and the wife and daughter behind him, hadn't taken so much as a scratch.
How? How was that possible?
Why had the Cursed Speech he'd spent so many points on, the technique he was so proud of, done absolutely nothing?
The gangster refused to accept it. He bellowed again. "— Explode!"
The man protecting his family hadn't even had time to breathe out before the next attack came. He shoved his hands forward again and cancelled it with the same words. "Don't say that."
"Explode!"
"Don't say that."
"Explode!!"
"Don't say that."
"Explode!!!"
"Don't say that."
The gangster kept at it, stubborn as a mule, and every failed attempt stoked his fury hotter until his face was scarlet.
And the man went on erasing every curse thrown at him with the technique he'd picked up from Mahiru's shop, growing more amazed and more elated with each repetition.
"Why is this happening!" the gangster screamed, coming apart at the seams.
The man was thoroughly enjoying himself. "Don't say that."
Scenes like it were playing out all over Tokyo.
More and more people discovered how well the Cursed Speech Mahiru had given away actually worked. More and more of them realized what an absurdly effective lifesaving trick the blue-haired girl had handed them.
It was almost unbelievable.
Every one of the hundred-odd Cursed Speech commands Kenjaku had stocked in the Culling Game's shop could be undone by that one short phrase of Mahiru's.
The Cursed Speech brawls across the country had already boiled to white heat. But as more and more people started saying "don't say that," the curses everyone had bought from Kenjaku's shop misfired, without a single exception.
A whole crowd of rioters, stripped of their curses, got beaten black and blue by counterattacking citizens armed with wooden sticks and paving bricks — routed, noses bloodied, weeping and sniveling as they ran.
In their panic and desperation, they hit upon a brilliant countermeasure to "don't say that" —
namely, using "don't say that" to counter "don't say that."
That's right! "Don't say that" could cancel "don't say that" too!
This was getting out of hand. One side would say "Explode," and the other would answer with "Don't say that."
So the rioters started saying "don't say that" as well.
Two mobs, your "don't say that" wiping out mine, mine wiping out yours — and the great "Don't Say That" War began.
From a distance, a battlefield that had looked like a Harry Potter wizards' duel, spells flying back and forth in a blaze, transformed within minutes into something closer to an occult ritual: everyone standing face to face, chanting the same sentence over and over, the winner decided by who could talk faster.
"This is way too mystical," Fushiguro said, watching from afar with a grin splitting her face.
"Well, does it work or doesn't it?" Mahiru spread her hands and let out two smug little laughs.
Kenjaku had handed everyone a gun and plunged the world into chaos. So Mahiru handed out free bulletproof vests, and the disaster began to smother itself.
It was very simple logic.
Designing a Cursed Technique that could be installed en masse in every ordinary civilian was hard. But Mahiru's understanding of Cursed Speech, and her research into it, ran several times deeper than even Toge Inumaki's. Building "don't say that" had cost her almost no effort at all.
All across the country, the chaos began to reverse.
And Mahiru hadn't designed only one anti-curse curse.
She had also stocked her shop with a second phrase: "Rebound," which sent the effect of an opponent's Cursed Speech straight back at them.
That one was far nastier.
It worked only against Cursed Speech, but within that scope it worked beautifully.
Facing the gangsters, civilians whipped out "Rebound," and before the thugs could react they were hit by their own curses. In no time at all the rioters were shattered into a rout.
Eventually the only counter the wrongdoers could think up for "Rebound" was — "Rebound," bouncing the reflection back at its owner.
So the battlefield turned into "Rebound," "rebound your rebound," "rebound the rebound of my rebound"… an extraordinarily convoluted yet utterly primitive kind of warfare.
*
"Well?"
In the distant future world, Sukuna was asking the phantom Kenjaku about the current state of the "modern world."
"The streets must be running with blood by now, hahaha…" Sukuna laughed, golden hair spilling long over his shoulders, chin propped on one hand as he watched the phantom Kenjaku slowly withdraw from his "observation state."
The two of them looked at each other.
Sukuna's smile faded by degrees.
"They aren't running with blood?" he asked, his face going odd.
"…haah." The phantom Kenjaku had no idea how to answer, so he only sighed and put a hand over his face.
No. Not remotely.
He had expected the country to become a hell on earth, corpses heaped in the streets, fires everywhere, every single person wailing in agony…
But no.
People were shouting, all right. They just weren't shouting in pain.
In the space of a few hours, Mahiru had taken the hell on earth he had hoped for and meticulously engineered, and turned it into… something extremely abstract.
The phantom Kenjaku felt tired to his bones.
Genuinely, thoroughly tired.
He was out of ideas, and it showed on his face.
____
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