Chapter 18

  “The per diem is so shit!” Usami groaned, kicking an air vent on the roof gently, not nearly hard enough to damage it. “Even if we saved up for two months straight without eating anything, we could barely afford a Nyoitamori.”

  “Will you shut up about that perverted shit?!” Atsuya shouted, tossing the remains of his cigarette at Usami. The butt hit his forehead, causing him to stagger. “Look! Either you do stuff with a girl, or you focus on eating your food! You can’t choose both!”

  “Oh, man, why’d you just blow up on me like that?” Usami whined, rubbing at his forehead. “You seem… tense.” His demeanour shifted.

  Atsuya sighed, shaking his head. He reached into the pocket of his uniform jacket to retrieve another smoke. “Yaga-sensei said it himself, didn’t he? Ever since we got promoted, it feels like it’s been one death mission after another. They call us strong, but I don’t buy that.” He shook his head. “It’s the kid. The Gojo clan’s golden child. Ever since he was born, the meaning of grades shifted. We got Grade Ones and Twos coming out the woodwork, racking numbers like we haven’t seen since the end of the second world war. And now this.”

  He looked up at the sky of this city. Normally, it would be infested by so many Fly Heads that it created a persistent hum of cursed energy in the air. Like the background noise of reality itself. There was nothing you could do about it.

  In the fair city of Kanazawa, there was no noise. Only a loud, blaring absence of it. Like the ringing in your ear after leaving a loud room, or hearing an explosion. Atsuya couldn’t help but feel like he was in the ground zero of some kind of… aftermath.

  “So we need to take this seriously.”

  Usami nodded. “I’ll count on you to tell us when to run away.”

  Atsuya nodded. “Of course.”

  Then he finally felt something. Cursed energy.

  In this particular spot of nothingness—in terms of energy—that signature stood out like a bonfire.

  Atsuya didn’t wait to alert Usami. He just took off, jumping off the roof of the building to another one as he followed his senses.

  More signatures prickled at his senses, in the air. Bugs.

  The insectile shikigami.

  Practically sparks surrounding the bonfire that was the shikigami making its way through town at a rapid pace.

  He heard Usami follow him from behind. Excellent.

  Atsuya jumped towards where he could sense a bug, leaping a hundred feet—

  There.

  He saw it in a split second, floating in the sky. A pitch-black fly gushing with cursed energy. It had more than the average Fly Head, and was many times smaller, the same size as a housefly.

  He snatched—

  It dodged.

  He snatched for it again, this time using both hands.

  Then, he began to descend, prize in hand. The shikigami was far from fragile, and it seemed desperate to press itself out from the gaps in the fist he made around it. That was fine. He’d keep this fist closed for as long as it took.

  He landed on a rooftop and sensed for the bigger shikigami again—

  He felt it rush towards him at a hundred miles an hour until he saw it as a blur flying above the ledge of the roof only to land before him, ten feet away. Four arms each ending in mantis-like blades that felt… not like cursed energy. But something else, something almost shiny. The creature’s body was vaguely insectile. It had two pairs of wings on its back, like a dragonfly, and its legs were distinctly grasshopper like.

  Its head was completely smooth. No eyes, no antennae. Just a smooth black carapace shell.

  And an aura of shikigami surrounding it.

  “Holy shit!” Usami shouted.

  The mantis pointed one bladed arm at him. Then indicated towards one of its blades, its right blade. Atsuya understood the gist.

  It wanted the fly back.

  It was communicating with him. Meaning the shikigami master was open to communicating.

  “We’re from Jujutsu High,” Atsuya said. “We were sent here to investigate the recent happenings in Ishikawa.”

  It gestured towards its hand more frantically.

  “We would love to meet you, and speak to you properly.” Atsuya blinked. Wait. “Or, shikigami, can you take me to your master?” In case it had a semblance of ego.

  The shikigami blinked in front of him, far faster than Atsuya could react.

  He backed away, accidentally releasing his hand. The fly on it flew away.

  Then the chimaeric mantis creature started cutting into the roof, vandalizing—

  No. It was writing.

  “We have no ill intentions. We will approach you in Tokyo when the time comes. For now, we are on the same side—exorcising curses.”

  Usami was the one reading. Then, he giggled. “Oh! That’s great news!”

  And it did sound too good to be true. “We need a little more to go on, sir. Sirs. Whoever—whatever this is.”

  “We will meet you eventually. For now—“ It had to reposition as it was running out of roof. “Please leave us to our task. We are not breaking any rules.”

  Jujutsu High hadn’t mentioned anything about missing persons or suspicious murders. In fact, all they had bade him to investigate was the lowering of cursed energy and cursed spirits in the region. And the people at fault were willing to come in and explain themselves voluntarily.

  Atsuya blinked.

  “Mission complete,” he said, turning around and dragging Usami away. “We’re going home.”

  “Hah! Just like that? You know, that’s why I fucking love you, my man,” he threw his arm around Atsuya’s shoulder. “You always know exactly the right time to punch the clock.”

  “We won’t get chewed out for this,” Atsuya said as he reached the ledge. Then he took a step and fell into an alleyway. Usami fell next to him a split second later. “That shikigami could have diced me up in an instant. We were no match against it.”

  “Dang! Glad they aren’t hostile, eh?”

  Towards them, at least.

  “There’s nothing a pair of small fry like us can do right now,” Atsuya said. “We’re dealing with a pack of crazy Grade One Jujutsu Sorcerers that can affect the cursed spirit ecology of an entire region. The hell are we supposed to do? It’s literally above our paygrade.”

  “That, it is! But hey, what if we just stick around a few more days? Run up our per diem and maybe we can eat something good? Maybe not Nyoitamori good—”

  Atsuya slapped Usami upside the head. “Don’t ever say that again. We go where we’re needed, and we’re no longer needed here. We may be underqualified, but we’re not layabouts, dammit.”

  “Alright. Geez!”

  000

  Kill the hidden weapon of the Hibana clan.

  The assassination business was an amazing one, Zen’in Toji had discovered over the course of the seven months that he had been freelancing. Far more lucrative than taking the occasional contracts of curse exorcism from the Jujutsu Society.

  Not to mention liberating. The world treated him exactly like what he was. Nothing more, nothing less. His clients saw a killer. The non-sorcerer women saw a stud. His victims saw their deaths and nothing else.

  Kill, get paid, fuck, gamble, and start the cycle all over again. Every step of this cycle was just great. Every part of his new life had fallen right into place.

  Toji could smile now.

  In all his twenty years of life, he had never felt this unburdened. And now, thanks to this random contract to kill some curse user out in the sticks, he was twenty million yen up.

  And if he struck it big with the horses, he’d be forty mill. And he had a good feeling about boats right after. He could turn his twenty million into a billion and then throw the party of his fucking life.

  Heheh. Soon.

  First, he’d have to get through this maze of trees. He ran between the trees, his worm curse hiding snugly in his stomach. He could smell how all the bugs in the air were tethered to a thread of cursed energy stretching wayyy over yonder. All of them seemed connected to one sorcerer, too, which was freaky. These were obviously extensions of sensory perception, which meant that the sorcerer was using them to extend his range of cursed energy perception.

  Too bad for him that he had just been matched up with the worst opponent imaginable—

  WhizzzzZZZZZ—

  Toji heard the creature’s arrival before he saw it, and he unsheathed the blade on his side to block the attack of his opponent.

  It wasn’t a cursed tool. It was just a regular katana.

  He never kept cursed tools on his person until it was time to kill. After all, any old Jujutsu Sorcerer could make out his arrival with that alone. Especially the type to come out of this no-name ‘Hibana’ clan. He had been told by his clients that their Juchū—their cursed insect shikigami—were adept at detecting cursed energy. Therefore, he had taken extra care of masking anything on his person that might exude even the slightest hint of cursed energy.

  The katana shattered against his opponent’s… claw.

  A shikigami. Indeed, it was tethered the same direction as all the other bugs. This one was a mantis-like creature with four bladed arms—clearly made of positive energy. These creatures were optimized for killing cursed spirits. Highly atypical for a clan of curse users. They usually optimized for the exact opposite.

  And it had wings, too. And grasshopper legs. A real freak of nature. And fast, too.

  It attacked him again, and he dodged away from its blow easily, though he had been taken by surprise with how swift it was.

  Hm. It’s strong for its role.

  A shikigami this strong was likely the heirloom defense system of the Hibana clan, a monster that had been invested with cursed energy for years such that it could come in the defense of its clan in its time of need. Its physical statistics outstripped a Grade One curse by a mile.

  It was Special Grade. The common kind—as far as such strong entities could ever be referred to as ‘common’, of course.

  But it was Special, alright. A team of Grade One sorcerers would have to be formed in order to handle this foe.

  Without a cursed tool, he couldn’t handle the creature. Any blow he struck would be automatically healed—and he couldn’t rip it apart even if he tried. In that sense, the creature was utterly indestructible to the kind of damage that he could deal with just his body

  That was fine.

  The jig was up, anyway. He had been made. There was no more need to keep up the Invisible Man act. With that in mind, he reached his fingers into his throat, tickling it.

  The mantis shikigami attacked.

  He ran away, fingers still inside of his mouth.

  Then he jumped. His jump launched him dozens of meters into the air. He felt that there were only milliseconds left before his gag reflex finally activated.

  The mantis shikigami followed him up into the air and drew back only one arm, but twisted the rest of its body. From its stance, Toji read the power of its next attack. It was betting everything into that one claw. If it had attacked with two, three, or four, it would have split the force of its attacks too many ways.

  No, this was one decisive blow.

  Toji threw his scabbard away in order to create momentum for his body, spinning to meet the creature feet-first.

  His right foot, covered in a reed sandal, met the questing blade, big toe and the adjacent toe open. In a fraction of a second, he pinched his toes, catching the blade.

  His finger tickled the back of his throat one last time.

  He gagged.

  And out it came.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Well played, you crazy motherfucker. You almost made me sweat.

  But it was over now. He had his inventory curse in his hand, in the shape of a tiny orb that he had thrown up. And it expanded in a second as he dove down towards the ground, launching himself away from the mantis, missing a reed sandal.

  He peeled off the other before he landed, in order to maintain his sense of equilibrium on the ground. It wasn’t like any sort of sharp object would poke him in his feet anyway. His body was just too powerful.

  His inventory curse, a worm, wrapped around his shoulders, and then waist. Though he couldn’t directly make out the color with his naked eyes owing to his lack of cursed energy, he had always felt a hint of ‘purple’ in all the times that he had perceived it.

  Similarly, he felt like this clan’s shikigami were clearly… black. And what a great, ominous color that it was. He hadn’t experienced such an intense level of pushback since he was but a toddler, being made to battle cursed spirits in the clan’s basement for an entire night.

  Back then, he never would have guessed that he would come to miss that level of pressure. The same pressure that gave a scar on the side of his lip to boot.

  He licked that scar in remembrance. Maybe this mark would scar him similarly?

  Heh. Fat fuckin’ chance!

  Toji shoved his fist into the mouth of his inventory curse, its head resting on his shoulder, and reached into it. “Come on, now, come onnnnnn! Split Soul Katana! Big money!”

  It spat a handle into his grasp, and he cursed internally as he pulled it out. It was a cursed katana, but not the Split Soul Katana.

  What the fuck is wrong with you, you stupid, aborted fucking lovechild?!

  He slapped the curse atop its head, for all it would achieve. The curse couldn’t die to his un-gentle ministrations, but it could whine. Likely, it was feeling pain.

  “MOmmMMmMyYYYY?!”

  He slapped it again.

  Shut up. Not while I’m in front of opponents!

  The mantis shikigami flew down towards him.

  A Special Grade, for sure.

  It came down at him with all four claws. He parried one claw, twisting it aside in order to open up an avenue towards its neck.

  And there.

  He cut the creature’s head off.

  Dead. Just like that.

  He had to assume that either the shikigami was dumb as bricks, or it had been controlled by an inexperienced shikigami user.

  Either way, it didn’t matter. The shikigami had been destroyed. He now only had a simple path to follow—

  At least, that was what he had thought.

  Until fifteen exact copies of the shikigami he had just slain started raining down from the skies, all unerringly targeting him.

  Toji’s mouth split wide open, vertically and horizontally, into a wide-mouthed grin.

  How absurd!

  These shikigami were individually powerful spirits! Such was their power that Toji could nary imagine the Hei being able to tackle them without days of preparation and a dozen kukuru supporting them!

  And now there were fifteen more of them!

  Killing, getting paid, gambling, fucking, and all over again.

  Unspoken to many was how important the ‘killing’ aspect of his cycle was.

  And not just the satisfaction of sinking his knife into the throat of an unsuspecting mark.

  No.

  When his marks made him work for it?!

  When they dared to flex their all-encompassing talent in Jujutsu Sorcery?

  Toji felt a rush of euphoria that no amount of gambling or fucking could simulate.

  He jumped away. The mantises followed him with unerring accuracy. Individual egos.

  Of course. A shikigami master could never be able to control so many directly, and concurrently. They slid through the forest easily, and Toji locked in on one, dashing towards it to cut it apart with his generic katana cursed tool.

  Toji tensed his muscles.

  He parried one blow.

  Blocked another.

  And…

  Blocked the other thirteen.

  Each opening he tried to create on any individual were immediately covered up by the other fourteen!

  They were operating each with perfect knowledge of each other’s positions!

  Toji laughed.

  This mark… this one was strong.

  So Toji reached his left hand into his worm’s mouth.

  Just give me another fucking sword. I don’t care if it’s the Split Soul or not, just—for fuck’s sakes.

  It gave him an axe. A woodcutter’s axe that had been blessed into a cursed tool.

  He vaguely recalled that its cursed technique had to be activated via an injection of cursed energy—which made it useless to him, aside from how it had an inherent ability to cut through cursed spirits, and by extension, shikigami.

  With both tools in hand, he attacked.

  He opened up a weakpoint with his sword, and chopped with his axe. One down. Fourteen to go.

  The second shikigami tried to outmaneuver him, but its guard, too, opened just as easily—and far before its back-up could strike him, either.

  In this game, Toji’s victory could only be decided by whether or not he could kill these shikigami within fractions of a single second.

  The thirteen remaining mantis shikigami pulled back, and started darting to and fro. Back and forth. As if to force him into committing to an attack. Toji, however, wasn’t born yesterday—

  They all swarmed him in an instant with such speeds that Toji had been unable to move away entirely before—

  Two shallow cuts scored across his chest, ripping his kosode open.

  In return, he had taken the heads of eight shikigami in the process, each with a singular chop of each of his weapons.

  That was the hazard of bunching the shikigami up like that. They became all too vulnerable to sweeping attacks.

  Toji didn’t wait for the shikigami user to adapt. Instead, he launched himself at the remaining five shikigami, killing them off one after another until there were only two left.

  Those two flew far above him, avoiding his easy reach.

  And the shikigami’s unifying thread of cursed energy had shifted directions. Clearly, the shikigami user was making a run for it.

  Tch. Coward.

  That was fine. Toji had had his fun already. He could finish the job just hunting this craven lout down, no sweat.

  So he turned to chase the thread—

  And immediately dodged away from the shikigami darting in for his blindspot.

  Toji grinned. Punished for taking his focus away from the fight. Good one, you bastard.

  He backtracked towards the source of the thread of cursed energy, keeping his senses locked on the shikigami in the meanwhile.

  They darted in.

  He had felt their cuts before. They could barely pierce his skin.

  That’s why he gave them another opening to his body, letting them add another line to his chest while he took both their heads off.

  Then he didn’t stop to think. He just ran towards the source of cursed energy. He put the axe inside the mouth of his curse and hoped for a good pull.

  There was something about being reliant on this abortion of a curse for a good pull that reminded him all too much of gambling. He had been steadily teaching it how to respond perfectly to his cues, making it so that each time he reached for a weapon, he would get a useful one, but a part of him felt like leaving the creature untrained, just to add some more thrill to his fights.

  His professional pride warred with that instinct. There was time for play, and time for work.

  He received a new katana. Not the Split Soul Katana, but that was fine. It was hardly necessary at this juncture. He knew the weak spots of the shikigami. Their physical defense wasn’t so strong that he needed that cheat of a weapon to pierce through.

  Far in front of him, Toji heard it—a wall of buzzing so loud that it blotted out every other sound of the forest.

  Bugs.

  Thousands, millions. Tens of millions. An impenetrable wall of bugs that enclosed him on all sides, buzzing as loudly as possible.

  Toji grinned. This situation is all kinds of fucked up.

  The cursed energy in this swarm was enough to choke a city. How many centuries of single-minded dedication and preparation had gone into making this swarm in the first place?

  Still, they were just bugs. Individually worthless.

  He pushed through a cloud of bugs—

  And immediately felt a claw pierce through his pec, stabbing him.

  He cut the mantis shikigami’s head off, but not before it could jump off Toji’s body, launching him back into the middle of the swarm.

  “Hahahahah, you bastard,” Toji shook his head. Toji’s senses were one of his best weapons. The Hibana clan’s secret weapon had obviously intuited that, and had decided to hide his shikigami inside the cloud of bugs where Toji couldn’t hear or see them.

  …or so, that’s what he thought. He closed his eyes, honing his hearing even further—

  Then a swarm of flies attacked his face, crawling into his nose.

  He blew out through his nose and covered his face, eyes wide. This crazy fucking—

  He felt pricks across his body. And then a sharp sting.

  Toji’s body was a whirl as he smashed every bug pumping poison into his body. Then he rotated around, creating a cyclone of wind that pushed the other bugs away from him.

  The poison was weak—but it was numbing his muscles. Heheheh, dammit.

  Time for the single-uses.

  He pushed his hand into the worm’s mouth. “Do not fuck with me right now.”

  The worm spat out a paneled orb—the remains of a cursed spirit of fire and agony fueled by ten thousand lesser spirits before being bound into a physical vessel, mechanically operated. He pressed the button, threw the bomb in the air, and started digging into the ground underneath him, submerging himself in earth and crawling ever downwards until—

  He felt the detonation in how the earth above him pressed him into the ground.

  He turned upwards, crawling up and out of the ground. The swarm had thinned considerably, revealing the twelve large mantis shikigami floating in the air.

  He darted through a gap in their guard, pushing his body to its limits as he chased down the shikigami master.

  000

  I didn’t panic, though I had much cause to.

  This singular Mori clan assassin was a cut above any other foe I had ever faced in this new life, save Mori Tachi. In fact, I felt tempted to place him above Mori Tachi in how much he challenged my understanding of this world.

  I could sense no cursed energy from him. Clearly, that must have been his technique. A lack of cursed energy signature, and an extreme level of physicality. He was like the Hatchet Face of sensory-type sorcerers and shikigami users. A direct counter who could get close and personal before their mark ever realized it.

  The Mori clan had layers beyond anything I could have imagined. And how unfair was that? None of the other Association clans had been nearly this challenging. Perhaps it was foolish of me to ever assume that I had a monopoly on overwhelming might.

  The position that this maniac had put me in now, however… felt strangely relaxing.

  No, not quite relaxing. Gratifying, more than anything. I was in familiar territory, of being utterly out of my depth and facing off against a foe that I had no business beating.

  And yet all my greatest hits weren’t working. Poison hadn’t worked. Neither had trying to block the man’s airways. He was moving too quickly. Reacting too fast. And he knew where I was.

  I had spared the Hibana clan the fate of being host to this battle of monumental powers, running into the forest, towards the gorge.

  This monster was an annoyance to track. I had never realized it until now, just how much I relied on my cursed energy perception to sense people. That sense was omnidirectional, like sound almost, but more persistent.

  This man barely even made physical sounds as he ran through the forest, and I could sense no energy on him. Essentially, I needed to keep my eyes on him constantly to know where he was. It was like my field of view had been reduced to the width of a key hole.

  In sensing how absolutely absent of cursed energy his physique was, I had held out hope that I could phase some bugs into his body the way I could phase into physical objects. That hadn’t worked, either. His technique made him favorably Manton-limited.

  The bane of Jujutsu Sorcery. How come I had never heard of him? The files we kept on the Association’s greatest fighters were extensive, but this man…

  …was he hired muscle?

  Mori Ken’s voice had almost trembled during our call. He had been running scared. Why would he have felt even a shred of fear, knowing that he had this man on his side?

  No, even then, that didn’t make sense. The man was Mori Tachi’s older brother. He was a seasoned criminal. And still, he was scared.

  Could I beat this guy, then?

  I would have to. I had no other options.

  I used a technique that I wasn’t fond of at all.

  Arthropodal Aspect.

  I bent my hands into the Flying Lotus mudra, and made the incantation. “Arthropodal Aspect: Kamakiri!”

  Black carapace began to cover my body as I sacrificed no less than five Kamakiri’s worth of Juchū on this technique. That was five million Juchū that I would have to replenish through Reproduction. For the purposes of this fight, that cost hardly even registered to me. I would burn through all but one single Juchū to win if necessary.

  The kamakiri stationed around the Mori clan stronghold were already rushing back to Aramata to reinforce me. In fact, I was pulling back all of my kamakiri. Nothing less would do for this foe. Even as distractions.

  Still, I needed to come up with something new. At this point, I was just leading my shikigami to a slaughter. Thankfully, I could regenerate them with the Reverse Cursed Technique. That was even faster than drawing them back to me, as they could spawn right around me.

  Wings grew out from my back—a pair of dragonfly wings—and my entire head was covered, including my eyes and ears. The only things through which I could sense the outside world were the Antennae, and they had been additionally secured by the carapace. I had to watch out, though. They were my biggest weak point.

  My legs didn’t change, nor did my physical dimensions change much. Arthropodal Aspect couldn’t twist my form. Really, it was more like wearing an insectile power suit than taking on the physical aspects of whatever bug I wanted.

  Thus, my ‘grasshopper’ legs didn’t bend backwards. They did ripple with muscle, however, and the back of my calves were rowed with sharp spines.

  Endless cursed energy flowed from my bugs across Ishikawa, and into me, and I converted it into positive energy, feeding it to my deceased troops.

  I threw the remaining kamakiri at the assassin, sacrificing them to him such that they could appear next to me faster.

  He hesitated after taking out the last one, his expression twisting into bemusement. Still, he dispatched the creature.

  There was no defeating the man with shikigami, clearly.

  In desperately sacrificing shikigami to the man, I had also found that I had no way to land Black Flashes through the kamakiri. It likely had to do with my inability to sense the world’s rhythm remotely. Perhaps if the target was closer.

  I stopped at the bottom of the gorge. This place was good. Miles away from the Hibana clan compound, and any other civilization.

  The man burst out from the trees above, falling straight into the gorge and landing barefeet. He was wearing tabi, actually. Split-toed white socks. Usually, they would go with a pair of waraji, reed sandals, though I had seen him discard them both during his fight.

  He wore traditional attire. A black kosode—a short-sleeved robe of a sorts—and a blue haori on top.

  He had a small scar on the right side of his lip, and black hair. And in each hand, a katana.

  He grinned at me. “You’re shorter than I expected.”

  How tall did he expect an eight-year-old girl to be?

  “Hibana Teira,” I said to him. “Your name?”

  He snorted. “You can call me Toji.” That name was absent from every record of the Mori clan’s membership. “So you’re the Hibana clan’s secret weapon, right? It’s really just you.”

  He spoke as if the Mori clan didn’t already have all this information in the first place. Mori Tachi did, after all. “And you’re the Mori clan’s secret weapon.”

  He laughed. “Please. Their secret weapon is money. And with that money, they saw fit to hire me. To kill you.”

  What?! All they did was send an assassin? Did that mean that they didn’t find me worthy of taking seriously?

  Given how easily he was dispatching my forces, I couldn’t argue with that at all.

  “I gotta say, girl—it’s been fun fighting you. I probably should have asked for more pay,” he looked up at the sky in thought. “Not every day that you run into Special Grade sorcerers.”

  Something was wrong.

  Why was he talking so much?

  His wounds. His bites.

  Nothing bled. Nothing felt amiss to my senses.

  Oh god.

  He has a healing factor. He was buying time!

  I stomped the ground, creating a Black Flash.

  His eyes widened in shock at the sight, and I cocked back my fist, charging it with every ounce of cursed energy in my little body. He was open. I could cast my senses about him. All I had to do now was hit him at the exact moment where the world and my cursed energy synched.

  Quiet.

  Too quiet.

  The world gave me no go-ahead.

  It couldn’t compute Toji’s presence.

  I landed my fist into his cut up chest, blowing him back to the wall of the gorge with a bang.

  But he hadn’t hit the wall with his back. He had bent his body to land at the wall feet-first, crouching, before—

  His fist dug clean through the carapace protecting my mid-section before traveling into my gut, sequentially flattening internal organs, and constricting my torso such that my ribs started cracking. The fist didn’t stop its advance until it pressed into my spine, shattering it, too.

  Mercifully, before the fist could pierce clean through me, physics began to assert itself. I flew to the opposite wall of the gorge.

  Then into the wall.

  A hand grabbed me by my throat, pulling me out of the wall.

  Then it threw me to the ground.

  I gave up on fighting back. Instead, I just pumped my body full of positive energy, fighting to restore myself with each impact. He threw me into the air, flying me above the gorge.

  Then he jumped, and kicked me into the forest above the gorge.

  Positive energy.

  He was suddenly right on top of me, stomping his heal into my head, burying it.

  Positive energy.

  He picked me back up again, and ran towards the gorge.

  He didn’t throw me into it.

  He jumped into it while holding my body, pressing me against the wall as he fell. I cut a gouge through the stone, and a second later, realized that that had been light treatment.

  Once we landed, he had the footing to press me into the stone and run next to the wall, making me dig a horizontal furrow through it.

  Once he was finally tired of that, he pulled me out of the wall and started spinning.

  Hundreds of rotations per second. Then thousands.

  Then a release—

  Cursed energy rushed into me in a flood to protect my body—especially my head—and restore it.

  Rocks and mud slid into the gorge, falling over me and burying me alive.

  I welcomed the rest.

  It allowed me to heal half of my injuries. Of course, the questing hand returned, digging through the soil and finding me, yanking me out by my throat.

  He held me up, inspecting me with a raised eyebrow. All my carapace was gone, and it was all the ripped tatters of my kimono could do to not fall off my abused body. “You’re just a kid,” Toji said with disgust.

  And then I heard a bone-chilling scream. Even Toji grimaced at it.

  From the shadows, she appeared. Michiko, dressed in dark gray robes, her face a mess of swirling vortices that were psychologically painful to look at. And her open mouth screamed in horror. “?????-???????????!” Her voice caused my soul to literally shake. I could sense it.

  Oh god, please no. “Michiko, go! Save yourself!”

  “You know that ugly hag?” Toji asked. Damn him. Damn him!

  “? ???’? ???? ??? ?????!” She clasped her hands together. “?????? ?x???????!”