The moment the group stepped onto the top floor of the unfinished high-rise, the air seemed to solidify into something tangible.
The dense miasma of cursed energy here had reached its absolute peak. It was no longer a simple chill, but a negative field of power, thick with despair and death, that gnawed directly at the mind. Yui and Eiko could barely even breathe. They could only just manage to stay upright by relying on the faint barrier of cursed energy that Natsume was unconsciously letting seep out around them.
At the center of the rooftop stretched a wide expanse of bare concrete. On the wall directly opposite the stairwell, a huge humanoid shadow was slowly writhing, like a smear of living ink.
Orbiting that shadow were dozens of wandering spirits that gave off a dim, wavering glow. They were like moths struggling in a spiderweb, thrashing about in vain, only to be caught one by one by the tentacles that stretched out from the shadow. Each time a tentacle coiled around one, it was dragged in and devoured completely.
With every wandering spirit it consumed, the shadow's color grew a shade darker. The aura it released swelled in strength as well.
When Natsume and the others appeared, the shadow seemed to sense them. Its devouring motion abruptly halted.
An instant later, it peeled itself away from the flat wall.
Suspended in midair, the black shadow twisted, swelled and condensed at an alarming speed, finally taking shape as a three-meter tall humanoid monster made entirely of viscous black liquid. It had no facial features, only a pair of eyes glowing a sinister crimson.
The moment it fully formed, the powerful cursed energy surging from its body, violent and chaotic, swelled to a level that had just stepped across the threshold of special grade, crashing over the rooftop in waves like a stormy sea.
"It is here."
Yashiro's expression had never been this grave. She instinctively tightened her grip on the crowbar in her hand.
Yet the one standing at the very front, Natsume, did not show the slightest ripple of emotion on his face. He was not even planning to activate Limitless for defense.
[Perfect, I can use you to test the actual combat ability of my newly contracted spirit.]
That thought flickered through his mind. Natsume spoke in a calm voice.
"Come out, Sadako."
His voice was not loud, but it carried a strange power, as if his words themselves carried binding force. The instant his words fell, the shadow at his feet began to twist and stretch in a way that completely defied physical law.
A head of dripping wet black hair, heavy with resentment, was the first thing to "grow" out of the shadow. Right after that, a pair of deathly pale arms and a slender body slowly crawled free.
The legendary horror, Sadako, appeared silently before them in a way that made one's scalp prickle with dread.
"Roar…"
The special grade evil spirit clearly felt the threat of another cursed spirit radiating from Sadako. A soundless bellow shook its body, and its massive frame lunged forward. One huge fist of black liquid, like a giant hammer, came crashing down toward the seemingly frail Sadako with an overwhelming force that could easily smash a truck flat.
Faced with this blow, Sadako simply lifted her head.
Beneath that curtain of long black hair, a pair of eyes full of endless hatred and curses stared coldly at the incoming fist.
She slowly raised her hand. Those pale, slender fingertips met the onrushing attack.
"First Technique: Annihilation."
There was no earth-shattering impact, no shockwave of rampaging cursed energy.
In the instant Sadako's fingertip touched that enormous black fist, the fist, along with the entire left arm attached to it, simply vanished.
It was not shattered. It was not vaporized. It was erased, stripped away completely from the very concept of its existence.
For the first time, something like fear appeared in the crimson eyes of the special grade cursed spirit. It could not understand why its body had disappeared. No matter how it drove its cursed energy, that missing left arm refused to regenerate, as if it had never existed in the first place.
"Wha… what kind of jujutsu is that?"
Yashiro stared, dumbfounded. As the heir of a jujutsu family, she had never seen an ability this tyrannical, this utterly unreasonable.
The difference in power between them was already like heaven and earth.
Before Sadako's terrifying ability to erase existence itself, this evil spirit that had only just become special grade was nothing more than an unarmed infant.
Sadako walked toward it one step at a time. Each time she lifted her hand, some portion of the evil spirit's body was "annihilated." It did not take long before that massive body was riddled with holes.
At last, as the evil spirit let out a desperate, silent scream, Sadako stretched out both arms and wrapped them around its core. Her figure then dissolved into a cloud of dense black mist that swallowed and absorbed it completely.
The battle ended in a little over ten seconds.
When the mist dispersed, Sadako stood in place once more. Black liquid from the evil spirit still stained her body, eating away at her flesh with a faint sizzling sound. She had taken a few minor injuries.
"Second Technique: Healing."
A soft white light rose from her form. Before their eyes, the wounds on her body knitted themselves back together at a speed visible to the naked eye, returning her to her original state.
Annihilation for offense, healing for defense. This perfect combination of jujutsu had Yashiro so jealous that she was almost drooling.
Natsume, however, knew that Sadako possessed a third, and strongest, technique of jujutsu, born from her urban legend, a technique called "Erasure." Once activated, any target who had watched her cursed videotape would be hunted down without regard for distance, pursued relentlessly until death.
Yet the conditions for triggering that technique were too demanding, and it had too great a chance of harming innocent people, so Natsume had no intention of using it lightly.
[Ding! Special-Grade Cursed Spirit successfully exorcised. Curse Points gained: 12,000!]
The system notification echoed in his mind, but Natsume did not feel pleased. Instead, his brows drew together.
At the instant that evil spirit was completely destroyed, his Six Eyes had caught a faint, discordant sense of wrongness.
[Strange… that thing was not a cursed spirit born from the aggregation of human negative emotions. It was more like an evil spirit forced into existence by some external power. But if that is the case, how could it use remote-control techniques that only jujutsu sorcerers should be able to perform?]
This doubt made Natsume turn his gaze back to the wall that the evil spirit had been using as its "nest."
"Yashiro."
"Yeah." Yashiro immediately understood. She had sensed the oddity as well. "That wall has signs that the concrete was patched over, and… very recently."
Before she had even finished speaking, she was already reaching into her small backpack and drawing out her sacred sword of physics, the crowbar that gleamed with cold metallic light.
"I got this."
With a sharp shout, Yashiro swung the crowbar and smashed it hard against the wall.
Clang.
Concrete fragments flew in all directions, and a large hole was blasted open.
The inside was not solid. Embedded within was a palm-sized box made of transparent crystal, resting quietly in the cavity. The surface of the box was etched with dense, strange runes that radiated an ominous aura.
Through the clear lid, they could clearly see a shriveled severed finger lying inside, its joints thick and knotted, its color a dark, dried blood red.
The malice and ill omen seeping from that single finger dwarfed what they had felt from the special grade evil spirit by a hundredfold.