The violet meteor faded out, and the arena went dead silent.
For a few seconds, nobody moved.
The air stank of scorched cursed energy and cooked earth. Dust still drifted over the place where solid ground had existed a moment ago. Gojo's ridiculous speedrun had taken a carefully planned Exchange Event, the kind meant to show off teamwork, tactics, and individual skill between the sister schools, and turned it into a joke with a smoking crater for a punchline.
At the edge of the field, the Kyoto students stood frozen.
They stared at the bottomless hole like their brains had simply refused the report their eyes were trying to send in.
How are we supposed to fight that? With what, exactly?
The same ugly realization hit all of them at once.
Four years of high school left.
Four annual Exchange Events.
Four more chances to be publicly flattened by that white-haired disaster.
Something inside the Kyoto side quietly snapped.
Whatever expectations they had ever held for the Tokyo-Kyoto Exchange Event died right there. A silent agreement passed through the group without anyone needing to say a word. From now on, this trip was a government-funded field trip. Show up, sign the attendance sheet, survive the opening ceremony if necessary, then spend the rest of the weekend shopping in Harajuku or wandering Shibuya.
A few of them were already checking bullet train times back to Kyoto.
Not far away, the man responsible for this one-sided massacre was being pinned to the ground by Yaga, who had him by the collar and was grinding him into the dirt like a badly trained puppy.
"You absolute bastard! I told you to hold back! I didn't tell you to shave off the whole hilltop!"
Yaga's roar carried across campus.
After beating Gojo hard enough to vent the first wave of rage, Yaga fumbled for his phone and started calling the Windows' Assistant Managers to clean up the catastrophic mess. A second later, he switched faces so fast it was almost impressive, plastering on a strained smile as he jogged over to calm Gakuganji, who looked about half a minute away from a heart attack.
The two principals were old acquaintances. The Exchange Event was supposed to encourage mutual understanding between the students.
Gojo had somehow turned it into a unilateral nuclear deterrence demonstration.
Yaga's headache was coming from every direction.
While everyone else got swallowed by the chaos, Touma slipped away from the crowd without making a sound.
He walked toward a rise near the outer edge of the arena, where a woman with long silver hair stood alone under a tree, looking at the enormous crater Gojo had left behind.
"Hello, Ms. Mei."
Touma stopped two steps away, his tone light and warm.
Mei Mei turned her head slowly. Her sharp eyes swept over the dark-haired boy in front of her, polite, calm, harmless on the surface. She looked like she was comparing him to a file in her head.
When she spoke, her voice had that familiar lilting rhythm.
"Oh? And you are...?"
Touma did not answer right away.
He simply raised his right arm.
The response was immediate.
A jet-black crow that had been sitting quietly in the tree, acting as Mei Mei's visual-sharing terminal, dropped from its branch without warning and landed neatly on Touma's forearm.
It did not stop there.
The crow turned its dark head toward the miniature panda sitting on Touma's shoulder. Panda had been doing a very respectable job pretending to be a dead little puppet, but the bird seemed fascinated by its shiny eyes. A second later, its beak stabbed forward in a vicious peck.
Panda's head snapped aside.
Clean dodge.
Apparently, playing dead had limits. Physical attacks had touched something deeper in its core, and whatever combat instincts were built into it fired on reflex.
The crow was not discouraged. It spread its wings for balance and started hammering Panda's head with a rapid string of drilling pecks.
Panda accepted the challenge immediately.
Its stubby paws blurred.
Thwap. Thwap. Thwap.
Each peck was slapped away with surprising precision.
Bird versus bear, all taking place on Touma's arm and shoulder. It was stupid, ridiculous, and just lethal enough that laughing at it felt slightly unsafe.
Only after letting the little scene play out did Touma look back at Mei Mei and smile.
"I'm a first-year at Tokyo Jujutsu High. Touma Hayase."
He did not need to say much more.
The instant her crow slipped out of her control, Mei Mei had already narrowed the possibilities down to one. Tokyo's list of notable Innate Techniques was not long. Remove the boy who had just detonated the hilltop. Remove Geto, who could not even be bothered to participate. The remaining candidate was obviously not Shoko Ieiri.
That left the mysterious transfer student rumored to copy and reproduce other people's techniques.
But guessing was one thing. Seeing it happen in front of her was another.
Hijacking someone's familiar without warning, then using their Innate Technique smoothly enough to make it look casual, carried a lot more weight than any self-introduction.
Mei Mei lifted one elegant eyebrow, drawing out her words with practiced surprise.
"My, my... how unexpected. So after such a brief meeting, without even exchanging more than a few words, you can already use my Black Bird Manipulation properly?"
Touma's smile stayed modest.
"More or less. Sorry for the rudeness."
As soon as he finished speaking, he cut the cursed energy link to the crow and released it completely.
Mei Mei felt the visual feed snap back into place. Without any ceremony, she gave a silent order. The crow abandoned its feud with Panda at once and flew back to its perch, where it stared down at Touma without blinking.
That casual little demonstration pushed Mei Mei's estimate of him sharply upward.
Because on a certain level, this ability was terrifying.
She could not figure out how he had done it. Their closest physical distance before this moment had been right now, face to face. When he escorted the Kyoto delegation earlier, she had only watched from afar. No touch. No clash of cursed energy. Even if she included the few times they might have crossed paths before, it still amounted to nothing more than a passing glance from across a room.
And from that alone, with no strict activation conditions, no strand of hair consumed, no explanation forced out of the target, he could analyze and replicate her Innate Technique?
As an independent sorcerer who treated information and money as her lifelines, Mei Mei understood the value of that immediately.
This was not something Gojo's invincible destructive power could replace. It was not something Geto's vast collection of cursed spirits could imitate. Even Yuki Tsukumo, the other Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer wandering around overseas, did not offer anything quite like this.
This was unique.
Information value. Strategic value. Combat value.
All in one body.
Silently reading an opponent's entire hand before the fight even began, then turning those cards against them, went beyond ordinary combat.
A strong intuition settled in Mei Mei's mind.
This dark-haired boy, hidden perfectly in the blinding shadow cast by two special-grade monsters, was much more than the "backline healer who can replicate Reverse Cursed Technique" the rumors described.
He was a predator waiting in the dark.
The last bit of casual dismissal left her posture. Mei Mei tilted her head, and the expression on her face shifted into something more like a merchant considering a valuable client.
"So, Mr. Hayase, I assume you didn't come all the way over here just to show off that you can copy my technique. Time is valuable."
Touma did not bother explaining with words first.
He reached into his uniform pocket, calm as ever, took out what looked like an ordinary bank passbook, and handed it to her.
Something sharp flashed in Mei Mei's eyes.
She accepted it with one manicured hand and flipped to the first page. Her gaze ran across the long string of digits printed beside the balance.
The corners of her eyes lifted.
The cool, guarded edge around her melted at once, replaced by the warm and welcoming attitude she reserved for paying clients.
She closed the passbook, held it lightly between two fingers, and gave it a small wave. Her voice brightened by several degrees.
"A very pleasing number. So, esteemed customer, what would you like from me?"
Touma did not dance around the point.
"I want to learn New Shadow Style."
"...Hm?"
For once, real surprise slipped through Mei Mei's composure.
From her ruthlessly practical point of view, someone like Touma had no obvious reason to spend time learning New Shadow Style. He could copy powerful Innate Techniques. Why grind through an old school discipline like that?
The usual logic was simple. Sorcerers born without an Innate Technique, or those with mediocre talent, learned New Shadow Style because they needed a fallback. Even among sorcerers who did have techniques, most learned it for one specific reason: Simple Domain, the emergency rope you grabbed when an enemy opened a proper domain.
But Touma, with his all-purpose replication ability, should not have any obvious gap in firepower or defense. He had not even bothered taking a Grade 1 evaluation.
The amount in the passbook had already settled the job the moment Mei Mei saw it, but curiosity still got its hooks into her.
She had to ask.
"That's a strange request. Mind sharing why?"
Touma met her gaze directly. His voice was calm, but there was no playfulness in it this time.
"Curiosity. You saw it yourself, Ms. Mei. My Innate Technique, Phantom Night Parade, can replicate any other Innate Technique without restriction. But during an earlier experiment, I found a blind spot. My technique can't touch abilities that aren't inscribed on the body from birth. Things like New Shadow Style, which exist purely because someone studied, refined, and passed them down."
He paused.
Something fierce flickered in his dark eyes. Almost obsessive.
"So I'm curious. Desperately curious. I want to understand what that kind of thing looks like from the inside. Creations of human effort that exist outside my technique's reach. But New Shadow Style has strict lineage restrictions and contractual bindings. Trying to negotiate access by myself would be a nightmare. So I'd rather entrust it to you, Ms. Mei. As long as the price is right, you can handle any commission flawlessly."
Mei Mei studied his open, earnest face and turned his explanation over in her mind.
At first glance, it sounded absurd. But the logic held.
This was not practical necessity. It was hunger. His technique could not copy it. He could not obtain it easily. That gap had made him want it even more.
Twisted logic.
Coming from Mei Mei, that was close to praise.
Jujutsu sorcerers were not normal people. Every one of them carried some warped obsession, some irrational thing that kept pushing them forward. In her eyes, Touma's fixation on "things that can't be copied" was not all that different from her own near-pathological love of watching the numbers in her account climb.
Same creature, different flavor.
Possessiveness and curiosity, pushed too far.
Once that clicked, the rest of her doubt vanished.
Mei Mei tucked the passbook into an inner pocket close to her body, then turned back to Touma with a smile full of professional charm and contractual certainty.
"Deal. Your reasoning is compelling, and your sincerity has been received loud and clear. Consider this small matter handled."
With money lighting the fuse, Mei Mei's mind shifted into high gear.
Within moments, she had already laid out an elegant solution for Touma.
A perfect way to bypass New Shadow Style's lineage restrictions entirely.