One had fluffy hair slicked straight back.
The other had long hair and piercings across the face.
Maki blinked as she looked over the group that practically had delinquent written all over them.
They were faces she'd never seen before, and yet they didn't feel unfamiliar.
Why was that?
As soon as she asked herself the question, Maki found the answer.
They had to be the second-years.
"You guys are the second-years?"
"Yeah. Guess you first-years from Jujutsu High don't have much in the way of manners. Okkotsu's the only exception."
The man with the slicked-back hair let out a sigh.
For someone pointing out their lack of courtesy, he didn't seem offended in the slightest.
"In this line of work, isn't 'just rude' basically harmless?"
"Not wrong."
The man nodded, conceding the point.
It was a surprisingly tolerant attitude for someone who looked like a street punk.
'This is insane.'
The man swallowed dryly as he looked at the sisters sitting side by side, Maki and Mai.
His head was heating up.
What he loved was human heat.
And he had a weakness for anything that could drag that heat out into the open.
Maki and Mai were more than enough to do that.
It wasn't rational attraction.
It was monstrous strength. An alien kind of presence.
A fierce curiosity to see what lay at the core of them.
"I'm Maki. This is Mai. She's technically the younger one, but there's no age gap. I just came out of our mother's womb first."
Maki slung an arm around Mai's shoulders as she introduced them.
The meaning was obvious: your turn.
Mai looked at Maki's arm around her shoulders and sighed.
There was no way she was getting out of speaking now.
"I'm Mai. Nice to meet you."
Mai bowed her head more politely than Maki had.
She naturally left out the Zenin name.
"Kin-chan. These are those girls, right? The Zenin twins."
The long-haired one, who had been quiet until now, asked in a distinctly feminine voice.
The voice, the appearance.
Anyone would have taken him for a perfectly grown woman, but he was a man.
"Big chests, green hair, twins. Yeah, that's them."
The slicked-back man nodded and held out a hand to Maki.
She was the one leading the conversation, after all.
"I'm Hakari Kinji. Heard you two are joining the exchange event too?"
"Yeah. Just kind of happened."
Maki nodded as she shook Hakari's hand.
She acted like it was no big deal.
"So you're not that nervous? Doesn't look like you're excited either."
"With Yuta on our side, it'd be weirder if we lost. Even if you were useless, Yuta could wipe them out by himself."
Maki's judgment was dead-on.
Even in the original story, there had been mention that Okkotsu had practically slaughtered the opposition alone.
"You're kind of lukewarm, huh? Like some old man who's already lived through everything."
Hakari clicked his tongue and pulled his hand back.
He didn't like how dry she was, even with the exchange event right in front of her.
That said, one thing was one thing and another was another.
He didn't have the nerve to press her for lacking heat.
'She's stronger than me.'
Hakari's Cursed Technique was a form integrated with his Domain Expansion.
Because of that, the technique itself had noticeably poor offensive power.
Stamina. His own striking power.
That rough, abrasive Cursed Energy of his.
Those were Hakari's strengths, but Maki was the same type: a close-quarters specialist.
Except she was faster. Sharper.
And on top of that, her technical refinement was viciously complete.
Picking a fight would only cost him.
Unless he felt enough heat to rush in anyway, stupidly, recklessly...
But that wasn't the case either.
She was definitely beautiful, definitely alluring, but the stronger impression was that she was overwhelming.
The same went for Mai, sitting there in silence.
Maki noticed the dissatisfaction in his face and spoke first.
"We're not exactly in a situation where we can just be happy and enjoy ourselves right now. Try to understand."
"Hm? Something happen?"
"There's this patchwork bastard targeting our family, and one of us could be next. So we've been living with our guard up all the time."
"Patchwork? A Cursed Spirit? Or a curse user?"
Hakari's eyes lit up as he asked.
Interesting stories naturally pulled at his attention.
After a brief hesitation, Maki laid everything out.
Because making it public could only help.
"Damn. If that's the situation, yeah, you wouldn't have room to let your attention wander. I get it."
After hearing the explanation, Hakari nodded.
Yeah. That would piss anyone off.
A bastard with a Cursed Technique that kneaded the soul itself.
And on top of that, a life spent on twenty-four-hour alert against the Special Grade Cursed Spirit working with him?
This wasn't the time to talk about excitement.
This was an immediate problem.
Annoyance.
That kind of emotion had to be dealt with first. It was an emergency.
"Still, it's impressive you're living normally at all. That's honestly worthy of respect."
"It's not that big a deal. Anyway, I did want to be in the exchange event too... I'm just trying not to get too worked up over it. We'll be safe while we're at Jujutsu High, but I still can't relax."
"Well, obviously. If you let your guard down and get blindsided, you're the only one who gets screwed."
Hakari let out a long sigh.
At this point, he'd gone past understanding and into feeling sorry for them.
Hoshi, who had been listening quietly, felt much the same.
If it were him, he'd have found it suffocating.
"Anyway, it was fun finally seeing your faces. Let's meet again sometime."
"Take care, all of you."
Hakari said his goodbyes and turned away.
Hoshi also gave a light wave before leaving with him.
"What a pain," Mai muttered as she watched their backs recede.
Maki couldn't disagree.
"They're a pain, but not bad, right?"
"At that level, they're fine. Compared to the trash in the Zenin Clan, anyone would look like an angel, but still."
"If we're comparing them to those bastards, wouldn't only the purged higher-ups even qualify?"
The sisters drank their juice and chatted idly.
They planned to bring up Rika after the exchange event.
Cicadaa, cicadaa.
In the heavy heat of summer, cicadas screamed as if wringing the last of life from themselves.
In a depopulated slum district of Japan, Mahito had settled into a shabby apartment building.
He was a Cursed Spirit.
Neither CCTV nor any modern surveillance technology could catch him.
But the victims of sorcery he had secured could be tracked.
So he had established routes that wouldn't draw attention.
Routes hidden well enough to slip past even Servants like Koyanskaya of Darkness and Foreigner as if flying through the air.
"I'm back~"
Creak. Mahito pushed open the battered iron door and stepped inside.
A corridor drowned in oppressive darkness.
He passed through that ominous space, thick with rolling Cursed Energy.
Rush. The moment he emerged from the dark passage, a beautiful beach greeted him.
Clear sunlight.
A paradise of clean, gentle waves lapping at the shore.
And it was no illusion. No fantasy.
It was a space that existed in reality.
Far off in the distance, red hair bobbed above the water.
This was the space spread out by Dagon, the Special Grade Cursed Spirit that looked like a stylized octopus.
"So you've returned."
Jogo, who had been lying on a white bench, sat up.
He too had been taking his ease.
The day of the decisive battle was still far off, and they were still gathering strength.
There was no need to be angry.
And there was also the memory of being beaten so badly he had nearly been exorcised.
That alone forced caution on him.
"Yeah. How are those things doing?"
"Sleeping soundly in the corner. I am maintaining them with Cursed Energy, so their physical condition is not poor."
To think he would end up tending to humans of all things.
Jogo shook his head and sighed.
"Really? That's good."
"Heave-ho." Mahito dropped the man slung over his shoulder onto the ground with a thud.
He looked asleep. There was a mark engraved on his forehead.
He too was one of the victims of the sorcery Kenjaku had prepared.
Before the previous higher-ups had been wiped out, Mahito had communicated with them through Muta, and through that channel he had learned about the victims of the sorcery Kenjaku had set in motion.
He didn't know who Kenjaku really was.
He didn't know his purpose either, but he didn't need to.
It was enough to know that these humans were vessels for someone's incarnation.
And that those incarnated beings were humans from the past.
"I hear some of them are fairly strong. How do you intend to control them? If they all rise at once, it will be troublesome."
"We'll strip away their emotions. It might be a pain putting them down, but I'm counting on you."
"A pain? Those insignificant things are only fit to pad out our numbers. They are nothing."
Jogo bared his teeth in a grin.
For someone as strong as him, it wasn't arrogance. It was confidence.
His battle with Zenin Naoya had only been a bad matchup.
By nature, he stood on a far higher level.
'That brat... young as he was, his combat experience was absurdly deep. Even the flow of his Cursed Energy had been seasoned.'
After his defeat, Jogo had replayed the fight with Zenin Naoya over and over, chewing on his anger.
Again and again.
There had been factors then that couldn't be helped, but now things were different.
He had grasped the opponent's hand, even including Domain Expansion.
And with that knowledge, he could respond.
An ability that accelerated the user and froze whatever he touched.
Once he knew that, it wasn't frightening.
'It would have been nice if that spy had known... but it can't be helped.'
Through Mahito, Jogo had contacted Muta.
He had asked his questions, but the only answer he got was that Muta didn't know.
In the first place, he had only been a messenger for the higher-ups.
A shut-in holed up in his room couldn't be expected to know that much.
At least, that was how Jogo saw it.
He did keep Muta's betrayal in mind, but "I don't know" wasn't enough evidence by itself.
If Muta had fed them outright false information, that would have been another matter.
"Anyway, how many more are you planning to gather?"
"Hm. As many as I can scrape together. The Jujutsu Sorcerers have started collecting these people too lately, so it's gotten kind of annoying."
Mahito sighed and scratched his backside.
For the past few years, little by little, those who had once moved in secret had started expanding the scale of their operations.
That had turned it into a competition over victims of sorcery, but...
He couldn't bring himself to touch them directly.
The best he could do was steal away as many as possible, quietly.
"The second I attack, I'd just be handing our location over to them. I'd rather not let my range of movement shrink."
"For the sake of a great undertaking, one must know how to endure humiliation. Admirable."
"It's not anything that grand. I just want to make sure of something."
Smiling, Mahito nudged the man's body with his foot.
What kind of cursed object was inside him?
What kind of incarnated being would emerge?
Even Mahito didn't know.
The moment he touched him with Idle Transfiguration and woke him from sleep...
Only then would he find out.
"I will move that one to the storage area."
Rustle.
Someone stepped out from the forest.
A sturdy, muscular build without an ounce of wasted flesh.
It was Hanami, the Special Grade Cursed Spirit with thick branches growing where eyes should have been.
"Oh? Hanami. Mind taking care of it?"
"Yes. You have worked hard bringing in soldiers, so please rest."
"Thanks. I'll do that."
While Hanami hoisted the man lying on the sand over a shoulder, Mahito went and sat beneath a parasol.
"Ah, that's refreshing. Now then, maybe I'll read a book..."
Creeeak. Before Mahito could pick up the book lying on the table beside him, the old iron door opened.
There were only two kinds of people who came through that door.
Petty thieves with no fear and no luck, or collaborators.
"Perfect timing. Another one's here."
Mahito smiled as he looked toward the open door.
The human who had entered was a collaborator.
White hair streaked with lines of red.
A kimono.
Just from the clothes alone, it was obvious this wasn't an ordinary modern person.
Their Cursed Energy said the same.
Quiet, cold, and savage.
It carried something inhuman within it.
That human walked over to Mahito.
Like Mahito, they were carrying a sleeping human afflicted by sorcery over one shoulder.
"Have you found the fingers?"
The human asked.
The voice was female, and the manner of speech was archaic.
"Regrettably, not yet."
"Do not become so absorbed in gathering soldiers that you forget what matters. Rabble are only useful for buying time in the end. Our true fighting force is..."
"Sukuna, right? I know. That'd be good for us too."
Mahito waved a hand with a grin.
At a glance, it looked like he was just humoring her, but he meant it.
The woman looked at Mahito and sighed.
There was no need to continue the conversation any further.