On the surface, this new feature Kenjaku had added couldn't do the slightest harm to anyone. If anything, it let the people of Jujutsu High see exactly how much Mahiru had done for them, which only pulled them tighter together.
It was also a fun little toy. And free.
So for the whole of that day, anyone in Japan with time on their hands gave it a try.
Plenty of them watched what they had lived through before the Shibuya Incident of the original story. And at the same time, the topic "the original storyline" shot straight to the top of the trending list on the Little Blue Forum.
Netizen 1: Holy crap, the me in the original story got killed by some freak with a stitched-up face! Still, I got lucky this time around — my family and friends all came out more or less fine. My heart's still pounding.
Netizen 2: Man, you've got it good. Over here… I'm worse off than in the original timeline. In the original timeline my older brother was still alive. Here, he died a month ago.
Netizen 3: My condolences.
Netizen 4: In the original world I got flattened by a giant fireball. Damn it, why does Tokyo get hit by one disaster after another?
Netizen 5: But it's strange, isn't it? That blue stitched face that killed so many people in the original timeline — where is it now? Logically, if that freak existed over there, it should exist in our timeline too. Unless it's lying low?
Netizen 6: Didn't they say a stitched face had already slipped into our world? Isn't that him? They warned us a while back to watch out for anyone with that feature.
Netizen 5, replying to Netizen 6: No, no, no. That stitched face came from another world. What I'm asking is where our world's own stitched face went.
Netizen 7: No idea, but Lady Mahiru the Angel will protect us for sure.
Netizen 8: I just wonder what the Lady Mahiru of that other world is like. We didn't seem to see Lady Mahiru the Angel over there at all — the Lady Mahiru of the other world must be guarding us quietly from somewhere out of sight.
Netizen 9: Exactly, exactly…
The netizens argued it out in a dozen voices at once.
Because of that feature, a great many ordinary people in Japan were also coming to realize that a parallel world called "the world of the future" existed at all.
Jujutsu High had never publicly said a word about parallel worlds.
When Kenjaku did something, there was always a nasty motive under it. Mahiru and the others had a vague sense that he was laying groundwork for something. She had no leisure to think it through right now, though — because she had run into a situation of her own.
"Sorry, would you mind repeating your reason for stopping me?" Mahiru stood before the heavy gate with her arms folded, glaring at the soldier in front of her.
The man facing her wore a uniform with fairly senior insignia, and he looked thoroughly cornered.
"My apologies, Miss Mahiru. You're an honored guest of ours, we shouldn't be blocking you at all." He wrung his hands. "But everything past this point is classified base territory, and on top of that we've been running an operation involving classified matters lately… We really can't let you through right now. Perhaps you could take it up with our commander first?"
Mahiru frowned and said nothing.
The girl had been tracking Mahito. Just like in the original story, he was a slippery bastard, and picking up his trail was almost impossible — unfortunately for him, the one hunting him was Mahiru. The two of them shared the same origin. She knew the traces of Mahito's Cursed Energy better than anyone alive.
She had followed that trail all the way here.
To a military base belonging to the United States.
Concrete walls dozens of meters high rose ahead of her. Behind the fawning officer at the gate stood a row of soldiers with live rounds chambered, plainly on guard in case Mahiru decided to walk in anyway.
— though what those soldiers imagined they could do against her was anyone's guess.
"I'm tracking Mahito," Mahiru said, face blank, arms crossed, head tilted. "Mahito, or one of his clones, very likely slipped into your base."
"Uh, we've no way of confirming whether that's true… and we really are in the middle of a classified operation…"
"A classified operation must be pretty important, right?" Mahiru said. "You understand how dangerous Mahito is. Doesn't that worry you?"
"It does, it does, of course it worries us." The officer nodded and bowed and nodded again, smiling as if his life depended on it. "But we truly do have a classified operation running… truly. I'm begging you, just send word to our commander first… Once he gives the go-ahead we'll let you in without question, and receive you with the highest honors."
Mahiru clicked her tongue and looked up, sweeping her eyes along the wall. Dozens of meters tall, with a handful of Cursed Energy Barriers layered over the top… enough to stop an ordinary person. Nowhere near enough to stop her.
The soldiers in front of her did carry the scent of Cursed Energy — they had probably bought Cursed Techniques through the Culling Game's system — but not one of them could take her in a fight.
So she could simply refuse the refusal and force her way in.
But after turning it over, Mahiru let out a quiet sigh instead.
"Fine. I'll head back for today, then." She waved a hand and turned, her tone offhand. "Watch yourselves in there."
Delight climbed all the way to the officer's eyebrows, and he nodded rapidly. "Yes, yes, thank you kindly."
Mahiru left.
There were two reasons she hadn't barged through.
First, traces of Mahito's Cursed Energy were scattered in a great many places, so she couldn't be a hundred percent certain that whatever had burrowed into this base was Mahito himself rather than a clone.
Second, civilians across a lot of Japan depended on United States troops for care and administration, so she needed to keep things cordial with them, at least for now.
Besides, if people really did die in there, the odds were that they'd be the United States' own soldiers, and they could answer for themselves. Mahiru was no saint. She couldn't look after everything.
She could also tell that the so-called "classified operation" was probably a convenient fiction — an excuse to fob her off.
Mahiru decided to go to Jujutsu High first and have them talk to the military, see whether anything smelled wrong, and plan her next move from there.
She spread her wings and flew all the way back to the hot spring inn.
She pushed open the door, meaning to ask Jogo how the search for this world's Satoru Gojo was coming along.
What met her instead were Mai and Maki, sitting in the living room.
Neither of them looked the way they usually did.
"Eh? What's up?" Mahiru paused, caught off guard. "Did something happen to put you two in a mood?"
Mai lifted her gaze to meet Mahiru's, something complicated in it. "Not really… it's just, we saw our fates in the original world."
"Ah." That explained it. "No wonder."
So they'd seen how Mai died.
Fair enough. Even if it was a version of themselves from another parallel timeline, watching Mai die that miserably would shake either sister. The shared-memory feature only reached as far as the opening days of the Culling Game — and that was precisely when Mai had died, so the timing tracked.
Well, well.
Mahiru planted her hands on her hips and grinned, bright as sunshine. "Relax! It's fine! There's nothing to worry about! Stick with your boss and nobody is ever hurting you again!"
Mai and Maki traded a look. Maki shrugged, amused, and Mai bit back a laugh. "All right, all right. We'll just sit here waiting for the good life, then…"
Mahiru assumed the two of them had watched those old memories and started dreading a future tragedy all over again. But the sisters knew perfectly well that the curse woven through their fates had been shattered long ago, by the blue-haired girl standing right in front of them.
Those complicated looks had come from something else entirely: from realizing, once again, exactly what kind of terrible abyss Mahiru had dragged the two of them out of. They were simply marveling at it.
While they were talking, Jogo strolled in with her hands stuffed in her pockets, Hanami trailing behind her.
Mahiru's eyes lit up at the sight of them. "Yo, good afternoon! Jogo, that job I handed you — did you get around to it?"
"I've flown circles over the Japanese mainland God knows how many times," Jogo said, mouth twisting. "That gadget you gave me hasn't so much as twitched."
"Huh. Is that so…" Mahiru rubbed her chin.
No reaction meant Satoru Gojo's Prison Realm most likely really wasn't in this world.
Then something else struck the girl, and she leaned in beside Jogo, curious. "Speaking of which, did you use that new Culling Game feature?"
Jogo looked puzzled. "What new feature? You mean that shared memory thing?"
"That's the one, that's the one. Have you tried it?"
"I wasn't interested myself, but Hanami and Dagon were, so I went along and tried it with them. Why do you ask?"
"I want to hear what you made of it."
"Nothing," Jogo said, blunt. "Couldn't relate."
Mahiru blinked.
"Because who we are now is nothing like who we were in that so-called original world." Hanami smiled beside her and spread both hands. "Our faces, our goals — all of it is completely different. There's simply nothing left to relate to."
No grief over the deaths of their original-story selves. No particular feelings about the gulf between Mahiru and Mahito, either.
"Another version of me isn't me" — that, roughly, was the attitude.
Mahiru puffed out her cheeks, unimpressed. "What a boring reaction."
Jogo: ? What reaction were you after?
The white-haired girl was gearing up to fire off another jab when she sensed something and went still.
Mahiru's face turned serious in the same instant, and her head snapped around.
That familiar smell. That revolting smell.
Mahito!
Mahito had surfaced on their turf — and he was close. Very close.
Whoosh—
Inside the house, everyone except Mai moved.
A violent rush of wind tore through the room. Mai's eyes went wide. Between one blink and the next, every one of them was gone.
Two or three kilometers from the hot spring inn, a crowd was breaking into panic.
A colossal flesh-worm monster, two stories tall, was rampaging through the buildings.
"Hahahahaha—"
Shrill, manic laughter came pouring out of the worm. Mahito's upper body was embedded in the crown of its head, and the laughter was spilling from his mouth.
The louder the fleeing civilians below screamed, the thicker their terror grew, the more gleeful his laughter became — as though he were savoring every last drop of it.
The attack had come out of nowhere.
So completely out of nowhere that… looking at him now, Mahiru felt only bewilderment. She had no idea why he would suddenly show up to attack the ordinary people here.
"Hahaha…" Mahito was still laughing as he stretched both arms wide.
The worm beneath him opened its vast mouth, and countless arms and tentacles spilled out, reaching for the crowd.
The next second, firelight flashed. Every one of those arms and tentacles burned to ash on the spot.
The laughter drained out of Mahito's face, replaced by confusion. He raised his head and met the eyes of the white-haired girl standing before him.
Bafflement.
Consideration.
Deeper thought.
Recognition.
Then his mouth split open and he roared with laughter.
"Holy — no way? No damn way! Jogo, what the hell happened to you? Hahahaha!" Mahito clutched his stomach, laughing until tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. "That is so twisted, hahahahaha, that is genuinely so twisted… I knew you'd thrown in with the humans, but who turned you into that? Somebody's got a filthy sense of humor…"
Mahito howled with laughter.
He kept it up for ages, fighting to rein it in, but every time he pictured what Jogo used to look like he only laughed louder.
Jogo frowned, raised a hand and snapped her fingers. A streak of firelight flickered — then a huge fireball roared up into the sky and devoured Mahito's enormous flesh-worm body whole, burning it to cinders in seconds.
Mahito was dead.
No. One of Mahito's clones was dead.
"…What did he even come here for?" Mahiru landed beside Jogo, frowning. "A provocation? Was he bored and looking to pick a fight?"
That clone had been pitifully weak.
Show up, strike a villain's pose, get stomped flat in one blow… wasting his own Cursed Energy and a clone for nothing. Had he really burned all that just to get a look at what Jogo had become?
"I hate that guy. He's disgusting." Jogo's voice stayed flat beside her. "Lucky for us the one standing with us is you."
"Oh, yes. Exactly," Mahiru said, glancing sideways and lifting an index finger. "That is the reaction I was hoping for."
So what had Mahito actually come here to do?
Mahiru had barely a few seconds to chew on the question before a flood of news posts about attacks appeared on the Little Blue Community. The girl stared for a moment, stunned.
At the very moment the flesh-worm Mahito hit them, every region under the control of Japan's Jujutsu High had been attacked as well. And every attacker was one of Mahito's monster clones, each one more grotesquely shaped than the last.
"This guy…" Mahiru narrowed her eyes.
Now everyone on the Jujutsu High side could see that there was something hidden behind Mahito's bizarre behavior.
____
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