"Domain, Weakening Prayer."
With the Ghost Sergeant's rasping roar, thick with stale battlefield grudges, a deep red miasma surged outward from him in a rolling wave, spreading through the room until the entire ward was swallowed by it.
Inside this field of despair, where everyone wanted to die yet could not, time itself seemed to slow. The air grew heavy and viscous, hard to move, hard to breathe.
The white robed, lipless woman at the center of it all, already indistinct and blurry, began to flicker violently, like an image that might vanish at any second from a failing signal.
Her silent scream was full of agony and rage.
The Ghost Sergeant's curse was not simple physical damage.
It was more insidious, a lingering weakening effect that eroded the very foundation of the spirit.
Hunger.
Fatigue.
Exhaustion.
Layer upon layer of weakening effects latched onto the lipless ghost, relentlessly eating away at the power that sustained her existence.
Even so, the battle did not turn into the simple one-sided victory everyone had expected.
"Kieee!"
The lipless ghost shrieked, a razor edged sound that cut through the thick air. In her black, emotionless eyes, a needle thin light of spite flared.
Then something even stranger happened.
The ink black malice seeping from the walls, floor and ceiling responded to some invisible pull. Countless strands of dark resentment began to gather and stream into her body one after another.
Every time her spirit blurred and thinned under Weakening Prayer, a fresh flood of resentment rushed in to mend and refill her, making her form solid again.
The two forces became locked in a strange stalemate, weakening and replenishing, neither able to overwhelm the other outright.
"It is her… it is her…"
The moment Ai saw the ghost's full face clearly, the last fragile thread of her sanity finally snapped.
She let out a scream packed with pure terror and broke away from Kaguya, throwing herself toward Natsume as if he were the only thing keeping her from drowning.
"Lord Natsume… that face… that face without lips…"
She trembled uncontrollably, nails digging so hard into his uniform sleeve that the fabric creaked, as if she could only keep from fainting by clinging to him with all her strength.
"Damn it, can this thing still recover?"
Yuji clicked his tongue, eyes unusually grim as he watched the see-saw struggle in front of them.
"Its power just keeps coming. If this goes on, the Ghost Sergeant will get drained dry sooner or later."
His gaze slipped toward the old bronze mirror lying forgotten in the corner, the true culprit behind all of this.
There was no doubt.
Every trace of malice in this domain was being continuously fed from that special grade cursed object.
"You three. Why are you here?"
Natsume gently patted Ai's ice cold hand, soothing her trembling, while his eyes moved to the Jujutsu High trio beside him.
"Ah, that is kind of a long story…"
Yuji scratched his pink hair, smiling with a touch of embarrassment.
"We are actually here for our promotion exam."
"The old guys upstairs got some intel from somewhere that there is an unregistered special grade cursed object at Shuchiin. So they turned 'retrieving the object' into our test to move up to first grade."
As he spoke, his eyes drifted toward his teammate, whose face had gone chalk white from blood loss. Her breathing was coming in shallow gasps.
"We thought it was just some dead object. Retrieving it should have been easy. No one expected there would be a monster like that sealed inside the stupid mirror. Its power stacked with the cursed energy in the mirror and it ended up reaching special grade."
"Nobara… got hit covering for us."
There was clear guilt and frustration in his voice.
At that moment, Natsume's brows drew together.
Through his Six Eyes, he could see Nobara's life force pouring away at an alarming pace.
The gash in her arm was deep enough to show bone, and the curse clinging to it, born from the Mirror Ghost's cold malice, did not just block healing. It was actively eating away at what little vitality she had left.
If nothing changed, the sharp-tongued orange-haired girl would bleed out within minutes, the curse finishing what the wound had started.
"Troublesome."
Natsume clicked his tongue, sounding more annoyed than worried.
He gently pried Ai's fingers from his sleeve and slipped his hand into his pocket, pulling out a yellow talisman folded into a neat triangle, covered in fine golden characters.
He had drawn it himself at the office earlier, using the "advanced dispelling charm formula" he had obtained from the lottery, when he had time to kill.
But what he poured into it was not ordinary curse-breaking energy. It was cursed energy compressed and refined through the Ancient Energy Refinement Manual, carrying a faint spark of life within it.
…