In the original work, Mechamaru had built himself a giant robot.
In this current timeline, that giant robot had never appeared on Mahiru's radar, but Mechamaru had, in fact, been using it to fight throughout the Culling Game all along.
The Gundam Mahiru was piloting right now had been modeled on that same robot of Mechamaru's — just far, far bigger.
Say what you want, but Mechamaru had a genuine talent for this kind of engineering. Mahiru's Heavy-Armed Darting Hare had used his blueprints before, and this Gundam borrowed from his designs too — the precision and integration on display here far outstripped anything Mahiru could slap together out of Idle Transfiguration on a whim.
Honestly, tinkering with this thing had started as something of a hobby for her. Given the choice, she would rather have unveiled this Gundam for the first time to a crowd gasping, 'Whoa, how is that so cool?'
Unfortunately, she wasn't in the mood for fun and games right now.
Extreme fury, it turned out, could breed an unusual kind of calm.
Right now, the girl's mind held nothing but cold, composed killing intent.
"You're all going to die."
Mahiru raised her hand, and the giant raised its hand.
Immense heat gathered in its palm — a palm-cannon built on Jogo's Cursed Technique — and took aim at a distant missile battery.
It fired. BOOM!!
The girl's attack was simply unreasonable.
A staggering amount of Cursed Energy converted, with brutal efficiency, into terrifying flame.
"Attack" hardly did the sight justice.
From a distance, the blazing fire looked like a flood pouring out across the land, spreading and surging, and that flood of flame swallowed the entire position in an instant.
"Position Two has taken a critical hit! Repeat, Position Two has taken a critical hit!"
The old man gritted his teeth. "Keep going! Keep firing! Don't stop!"
It looked like the end of the world.
Mahiru was supposedly the one walking into a trap the United States had prepared well in advance, yet the scene playing out looked exactly like something out of one of those apocalypse movies where humanity takes on Godzilla.
Weren't the US forces the ones who'd been so confident of victory before the battle even started?
So why did it feel like they were the ones fighting the final boss now?
"Keep going! Don't be afraid!!" The young commander, catching the general's meaning, bellowed, "Intel says Mahiru's total Cursed Energy reserves aren't anything special!"
Mahiru was strong — absurdly strong — but it was true that her Cursed Energy reserves weren't all that large.
Compared to Yuki Tsukumo or Yuta Okkotsu, her total reserves fell well short.
So the United States' assessment was, objectively speaking, accurate.
Never mind that Mahiru could level the earth with a wave of her hand right now — if they kept feeding the fight with human lives, they might actually be able to wait her out until her Cursed Energy ran dry.
But… "A war of attrition, is it?" Mahiru scoffed. "A bunch of idiots."
If a strategy to deal with her were really that simple to come up with, Kenjaku wouldn't have fallen into her hands time and time again.
The white giant stamped one foot down hard, crushing the ground beneath it and kicking up a cloud of dust.
Was it here?
No, not here.
On the battlefield, Mahiru felt out the flow of Cursed Energy, stepped forward a few paces, crushed the ground again, then moved to another spot and crushed it once more.
"Found it," Mahiru said with a cold laugh.
A massive tail extended from behind the white giant and plunged straight into the ground.
Amid the relentless bombardment, Mahiru wasn't retaliating anymore — she seemed to be searching for something instead. The behavior baffled the US military.
"What is she doing?" The young commander turned, throwing the question out to the entire command center.
No one could answer. The other officers shook their heads one after another, unable to guess the girl's intent.
They'd find out soon enough.
A chaotic howling rose from the spot where the tail had plunged in, and a foul stench of Cursed Energy came seeping up out of the earth.
"What is—?!" The young commander's jaw dropped.
He watched countless Cursed Spirits come pouring up out of the ground, streaming up along the white giant's tail like it was some kind of pipeline, before being absorbed into the giant's body — their Cursed Energy Devoured whole.
"She found the Passage the Cursed Spirit tide flows through!" the young commander cried out. "She's Devouring their Cursed Energy — replenishing her own!"
Mahiru raised her hand, and the white giant raised its hand too.
Blinding white light gathered in the giant's palm, like a sun bright enough to light up everything.
—[Husk].
An absolutely massive-scale [Husk].
Mahiru channeled her Cursed Energy and hurled it forward. Under that white light, another missile battery was swallowed and obliterated without the slightest resistance.
Several more fighter jets circled around Mahiru, diving in again and again to attack.
Countless gun barrels popped out of the white giant's back, unleashing dozens of white shells in retaliation against the fighter squadron.
The US forces had infused every round of ammunition with Cursed Energy, but the jets' engines and armor were still built to conventional, mundane specs.
Locked on at close range by Mahiru's Cursed-Energy-homing shells, several jets simply couldn't evade — their pilots had no choice but to eject and abandon their aircraft.
A single wave of attacks wiped out half the squadron.
Beep, beep.
A sound crackled through Mahiru's earpiece.
"Is something going on?" It was Miwa's voice. Since her combat ability lagged behind the others, she'd taken to serving as a communications officer at Jujutsu High most of the time these days. "Mahiru… did fighting break out over there?"
"Yeah, it did." A burning fighter jet drifted down in front of her; Mahiru casually had the white giant snatch it out of the air, crush it, and toss it aside. "We're fighting."
"Uh… what exactly is the situation…"
"These bastards teamed up with Mahito, and they're not playing fair," Mahiru said flatly. "Tell Yaga — from here on, I'm going to keep beating on them until I feel like it's safe to stop."
"Uh, okay…" Miwa didn't seem to know what else to say. "But Mahiru, please make your own safety the top priority…"
"Got it."
With that, Jujutsu High had chosen not to step in and pull her back — the last thing that might have stopped Mahiru from pressing her attack to the bitter end was now gone.
The white giant spread its arms, unleashing a hail of missiles.
They streaked across the sky like shooting stars.
Dozens of kilometers away, out on the water, an aircraft carrier's air-defense systems ran at full tilt, its anti-air guns pouring out fire, and still couldn't intercept every missile.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM—
The sound of the exchange of fire echoed across the earth and sky.
The old man sitting in the command center went ashen.
"General…" The young officer no longer knew what expression to wear. "The carrier Gray… I'm afraid she's going down."
The old man said nothing.
"She took three hits to starboard, and the hangar deck below the island's been punched through," the young officer added. "There's more damage besides. All told, the carrier's going under before long…"
Essentially, the carrier was already lost.
The other two carriers had also taken heavy fire and suffered severe losses.
Mahiru's killing intent ran deep. If destroying the missile batteries had only been about crippling their forces, targeting the carriers meant she was out to cut off their retreat entirely.
She had no intention of letting them escape — not a single one.
Another officer, standing tensely behind the general, asked, "Sir, do we keep fighting?"
He'd truly lost his nerve.
No — it would be more accurate to say all of them had lost their nerve.
God. Oh God.
It wasn't that they lacked courage or fighting spirit.
They were well aware how humiliating it was — one moment shouting "Keep going! Keep going! There's no turning back now!" and the next, already contemplating retreat.
But what choice did they have? This fight was hopeless as hell.
A war of attrition was off the table. Using their missiles' range advantage to kite her from a distance didn't work either — even from a hundred thousand miles away, Mahiru had turned around and nearly sunk their carriers.
If all three carriers went down, none of them would be getting away.
"Sir…" the young officer looked at the old man. "I think it's time we admit the wheel's turned—"
"—turned all the way around! Everyone, listen up — retreat!" The old general cut in without hesitation, slamming a hand on the table as he rose to his feet and stuffing the pipe that had been sitting there into his pants pocket. "A strategic, temporary withdrawal!"
Damn it — humiliating as it was, face mattered a lot less than staying alive.
As the saying went, a wise man knows when to yield — fighting a battle you can't win until it gets you killed was just plain stupid.
Time to bail!
"Copy that!" The young officer, order received, immediately turned to relay the evacuation command to every soldier.
Across all three military bases, every soldier let out a breath of relief at once and bolted, piling into vehicles and racing off in whatever direction led away from Mahiru.
But how could Mahiru possibly let them off that easily?
She had no intention of slaughtering tens of thousands of US soldiers wholesale, of course. But after pulling off this much disgusting nonsense right under her nose, did they really think they could just run?
Not a chance!
—"Kneel!"
Backed by an endless stream of Cursed Energy and amplified through loudspeaker gear, the Cursed Speech poured into every soldier's ears.
The US military had, in fact, issued every soldier earplugs warded against Cursed Energy — but mass-produced gear was inevitably subpar.
One shout from Mahiru pinned every last soldier in place.
With a heavy thud, even the old man in the distant command post wasn't spared. The old codger had barely gone a few steps before Mahiru's Cursed Speech forced him down onto his knees, the impact making him wince and bare his teeth in pain.
His regret only kept growing.
"Take the civilians hostage — buy us time to withdraw!" he bellowed.
This was the last resort, the final plan they'd agreed on in advance.
Nicknamed, for short, the 'Collapse, Retreat, Sell-Out, Skedaddle' contingency.
The plan was true to the US forces' usual rotten form — they wanted to run, and they had no qualms whatsoever about using the civilians of all four zones as hostages.
They hadn't used the hostages to restrain Mahiru from the very start because these were chaotic times — no one could be sure she'd still want to save every single life amid such chaos.
But now that they were retreating en masse, it didn't matter anymore. Whether they used the hostages or not made no difference to them either way — so why not use them, was the thinking.
The US forces had signed contracts with a large portion of the civilians in their zones.
In exchange for stripping those people of the right to use their own system panels, they had planted a curse on every single one of them.
Activate the curse, and every one of them would die.
"Mahiru, this is bad! The US forces just sent us a message!" Miwa's voice burst into her ear again, panicked. "They say they're going to activate the curses on the workers hidden in several factories, one after another! If you keep chasing them instead of saving those workers, they're all going to die!"
"Get in! Get in!" "Is the general seated? We're about to take off!"
"Ditch anything that isn't critical! We need everyone out within the hour!"
"Don't leave any paper records for Jujutsu High! Destroy all of it…"
From the helicopter lifting off, the old man could see the distant white giant come to a stop.
She must be tearing herself apart over this, the old man thought.
Even he hadn't been fully sure whether the hostages in those factories would be enough to stop Mahiru. But now, it looked like it had worked.
How wonderful.
Kindness really was such a beautiful virtue, wasn't it…
The old man let out a short laugh, though even he couldn't say what emotion was tangled up in it.
The next moment, he froze.
In the distance, the white giant began to come apart, dissolving into countless pure-white feathers scattering across the land. The blue-haired girl's figure emerged from the center of that swirling flock.
Alongside her rose the soaring strains of a hymn, and a golden radiance surging outward in all directions.
"It's a Domain Expansion! It's her Open Domain!" The young officer's pupils shrank to pinpricks as he screamed into his radio, "Everyone, activate Simple Domain, now!!"
Whoosh—
It was already too late — the golden radiance had spread across the entire battlefield.
The whole world fell silent in an instant, as if someone had hit pause.
"—All Voices Sing to the Heavens."
Hostages as a threat? Please.
Did they really think she'd be stretched too thin to handle both?
Didn't they realize this was exactly the kind of situation her Domain was built for?
Lots of enemies? Perfect. Lots of hostages? Even better.
Mahiru's Domain didn't discriminate between friend and foe with its Assimilation — anyone caught inside it got Assimilated, no exceptions.
In an instant, her Domain spread across the field. Wherever it reached, the wounded were healed and enemies fell; the curses on the hostages were lifted with ease. Only the soldiers quick enough to react managed, with everything they had, to hold back the first wave of Assimilation using Simple Domain.
"I told you — you're not leaving. None of you." A halo hung above Mahiru's head as she looked down on them with cold disdain.
Suddenly, she heard the whistle of wind at her ear and whipped her head around.
There, right behind her, stood a blue-haired man with a stitched-together face, appearing out of nowhere, laughing triumphantly as he reached one hand toward her back. "Got you!"
It was Mahito.
He had crept up behind her under cover of Miyakogakuro and launched a sneak attack.
Squelch—
Flesh burst apart as Idle Transfiguration triggered.
Without even turning fully around, Mahiru clamped a hand around Mahito's head, single-handedly overpowering the entire output of his technique.
"Delusional?" Mahiru's voice was ice-cold.
Trying to use Idle Transfiguration against Mahiru — wasn't that just showing off your axework in front of the master carpenter himself?