The room went silent in a dangerous way.
Like the air itself had pulled a blade.
Kinji Hakari stood near the safe, one hand still half-lowered from where he had handed over the cash. His smile remained in place, but it had changed shape. It no longer looked easy. It looked testing.
Across from him, Oden stood with the band of cash in one hand and irritation cooling visibly around him.
Hakari had called him suspicious.
Oden had been paid far less than he believed he deserved.
And somewhere between those two facts, mutual understanding had died.
Hakari tilted his head.
"So?" he asked. "Spy?"
Oden stared at him through the blindfold.
"So?" he repeated flatly. "Scammer?"
The room held for half a heartbeat.
Then Hakari laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was ridiculous.
"You think I'm scamming you?"
"You are."
"I paid you."
"You implied one million yen."
"I absolutely did not."
"You definitely did."
Hakari's eye twitched.
"That is not what happened."
Oden slipped the cash away.
"That sounds like something a scammer would say."
Hakari took one step forward.
"And that sounds like something a spy would say."
There it was again.
That bizarre, infuriating curve in the conversation where both of them became more convinced of their own conclusion and less capable of hearing the other.
Oden's shoulders settled.
Hakari's grin sharpened.
And then—
they moved.
Hakari covered the distance first.
No warning.
Just a violent burst of motion that crushed the room's remaining tension into action.
Oden shifted at the exact instant the punch came, the fist grazing past his hood and detonating into the wall behind him hard enough to rattle the room. Plaster burst outward. Wood cracked. Air snapped.
Oden's eyes widened behind the blindfold.
"Why do you hit so hard?"
Hakari followed the missed strike with a knee that came up like a battering ram. Oden caught it on both forearms, cursed energy flashing instinctively through his limbs, but the force still launched him backward across the room and into a low table.
It shattered under him.
Hakari rolled his shoulder.
"My cursed energy has edge," he said, advancing. "It's rough and serrated. Hits harder than people expect."
He smiled.
"You should be grateful. I'm educating you."
Oden came up from the wreckage in one smooth motion, one hand low, the other hooking two snakes out of his own shadow before they had fully emerged. He snapped them forward like black ropes.
Hakari ducked the first.
Caught the second.
And in that same movement felt the sting of Oden's kick slam into his side.
The impact turned him a fraction.
Hakari's return elbow missed Oden's jaw by less than an inch.
Oden slid away.
His mind was already moving ahead.
He's stronger than most.
Fast too.
And he's reading confidence as hostility.
Across from him, Hakari was having his own version of the same thought.
The blindfold brat is sharp.
Too sharp.
Definitely suspicious.
"You're from Jujutsu High, aren't you?" Hakari said.
Oden frowned.
"No. I'm from Kenya."
Hakari's fist shot out.
Oden dipped under it and answered with a palm strike to the ribs.
"That is not an answer," Hakari said.
"It answered the question you asked."
Hakari tried to backhand him through the wall.
Oden dropped flat, slid under the strike, and swept for the legs. Hakari hopped the sweep, but the maneuver was bait. Oden's shadow surged under him and Rabbit exploded out in a blur of murderous velocity.
Hakari barely got his guard up.
The impact still sent him skidding back across the floor.
"Oho," Hakari muttered, grinning wider. "You've got tricks."
The room could no longer contain them.
Oden's next exchange with Hakari tore one side of it open completely. Hakari driving him through a broken partition, Oden twisting midair and using the force to spin onto the outer walkway beyond.
The sunlight hit them both at once.
And on the rooftop, waiting with one hand tucked lazily near her collarbone, stood Kirara.
They took in the scene in an instant.
Hakari, smiling like a delinquent god of bad decisions.
Oden, hood torn at the shoulder, blindfold still in place, shadow moving wrong beneath him.
Kirara sighed.
"So it got noisy."
Hakari did not look away from Oden.
"He's weird."
Oden pointed at him.
"He's cheap."
Kirara blinked once.
Then smiled.
"Well. That does sound like Kin-chan."
Hakari clicked his tongue.
"Not helping."
The rooftop fight began properly there.
Hakari surged in again, all direct violence and feverish confidence, forcing Oden back across the concrete with strikes that felt like getting hit by sharpened machinery. Oden blocked one with reinforced forearms and hissed through his teeth.
"Seriously," he said, slipping a follow-up jab by a hair, "why are your punches textured?"
Hakari laughed and came with another combination, each hit carrying that same rough cursed energy property, each near-miss chewing through Oden's guard by abrasion as much as force.
Meanwhile, something else was wrong.
Very wrong.
Oden tried to shift left—
and his body resisted.
As if the air had developed rules without telling him.
He snapped his focus wider.
Hakari pressed him into that confusion brutally, boxing him up with body shots and shoulder checks, forcing reactions before analysis could settle. Oden answered with Tiger this time. False bodies flickering into the rooftop gloom, angled to split Hakari's targeting and buy room.
Hakari cracked one apart with a punch.
Another dissolved against the edge of his cursed energy.
The real Tiger came from behind—
and stopped.
Not by force.
By attraction.
By an invisible refusal in space itself.
Oden felt it through the connection immediately.
His thoughts sharpened.
Not a barrier.
Not immobilization.
Something positional.
Kirara was still standing back, calm, watching him with that irritating gentleness people used when they knew something he didn't.
Then he remembered.
The touch.
At the window.
Kirara's fingers on his shoulder.
"Ah," Oden muttered.
Hakari heard him.
"Figure something out?"
"You and your friends are very handsy."
Hakari threw a hook.
Oden barely got the flat of his forearm behind it in time and was still launched three steps sideways.
Kirara spoke at last.
"You're adapting quickly."
Oden turned his head slightly toward them.
"Unfortunately for you, I love puzzles."
He tested the field again.
Moved toward Hakari and felt a pull.
Moved another direction and felt resistance.
Oden began assembling the pieces. This was probably a Jujutsu Technique. And it couldn't belong to Hakari here or seeing his personality he would have told him about it already.
Also he would have used it in the room. But it only started working after Kirara saw them. So it was likely Kirara's Technique.
And Kirara's technique wasn't just "can't approach." That would be too simple and crude.
No.
It had sequence.
Relation.
Attraction and repulsion based on marked cursed energy.
Which meant two things.
First: he had been tagged the moment Kirara touched him.
Second: anything sharing his cursed energy could be tagged too.
His shikigami.
That was why movement around the rooftop had become such nonsense.
He wasn't fighting one opponent and one support.
He was fighting geometry.
Hakari crashed into him before the thought finished, shoulder-first, and drove him into the rooftop access structure hard enough to spiderweb the concrete. Oden coughed, then answered with Ox.
Flame burst across the rooftop in a low crushing wave.
To redraw space and force movement.
Hakari hopped back through the edge of it with a grin and called out, "Kirara!"
"I know."
Kirara lifted a hand slightly, eyes narrowing.
Oden felt the pattern shift.
Attraction.
Distance.
Order.
Then it clicked fully.
Southern Cross.
Closest to farthest.
A route, not a lock.
If he moved in the correct sequence, he could break through.
And if his shikigami shared his cursed energy signature under Kirara's technique, then they could also become stepping stones or traps.
Oden exhaled once.
Then stopped trying to force direct approach.
That was what Kirara wanted.
Instead, he used Goat.
A burst of bodies spilled outward, swarm-like, disrupting the rooftop with sheer numbers. They were not especially powerful, but they were noisy, mobile, and perfect for cluttering visual information. Hakari cursed and started smashing through them anyway, each hit leaving one less body in motion.
That was fine.
They were not the attack.
Through the shared field of cursed energy, Oden marked the movement pattern.
Goat to Snake.
Snake to Rabbit.
Rabbit to Oden.
He moved accordingly, not by distance, but by relation.
For one fraction of a second, the rooftop made sense again.
Kirara's eyes widened.
Oden was already in.
Tiger lunged from his shadow to split Hakari's attention.
Rabbit detonated off a broken vent housing and blurred across the roofline.
Oden used the opening not to attack Hakari—
but to reach Kirara.
Hakari realized it a heartbeat late.
"Oh, that's bad—"
Oden ducked under Hakari's reaching arm, spun through a blind angle opened by Tiger's fake body, and closed the last meter on Kirara with a brutal economy of motion.
Kirara tried to retreat.
Too late.
Oden slammed the flat of his palm into their midsection and followed it with a shoulder check that drove them off balance. Then Snake erupted from his sleeve and wrapped around Kirara's wrist and ankle simultaneously.
Kirara hit the rooftop hard.
The technique's spatial pressure on Oden vanished immediately.
Hakari stopped.
Looked at Kirara.
Then back at Oden.
"…You figured that out way too fast."
Oden adjusted his stance, breathing harder now.
"You two talk too much."
Kirara groaned from the ground.
"That was rude."
"You tagged me first."
Hakari cracked his neck.
"Well," he said, smile returning, "now it's simpler."
He meant one-on-one.
Oden did too.
Which was why he changed ranges immediately.
Hand-to-hand had worked while Kirara's technique muddied spacing. But now the board was clear.
Snake rose behind him.
Its jaws opened.
And from within the dark coil of its body, Oden drew a katana.
One clean pull.
Steel sang into the night.
Hakari's smile widened.
"There it is."
Oden lowered into stance.
One hand on the sword.
One free.
Hakari came in smiling and hit him with a flurry savage enough to force retreat even with the blade involved. Oden used the katana exactly how he'd been trained, controlled edges, the blade acting as frame, lever, shield, and punishment all at once.
Hakari's forearm met the flat with a crack.
Oden rotated, drew the impact off line, and answered with a sheathless iaido-style backhand that struck Hakari across the collarbone like a steel club.
Hakari skidded, then rushed again.
"Still think I'm scamming you?"
"Yes," Oden said.
Hakari laughed and punched him through a rooftop unit.
"Still think I'm from Jujutsu High?"
"Yes!"
They met again in the debris cloud.
Fist against blade.
Kick against guard.
Snake darting low to force ankle checks.
Rabbit used sparingly now, only for burst displacement, never wasting it against Hakari's reflexes.
Hakari for once had to respect every beat.
He took a slash across the sleeve.
A pommel to the jaw.
A Snake-assisted elbow to the sternum.
And every time he got hit, he looked happier.
"That's it!" Hakari barked. "Now you feel real!"
Oden exhaled sharply after slipping another body shot.
"You're definitely insane."
Hakari grinned.
"Maybe."
Then his hands came together.
The mood changed instantly.
Even the rooftop seemed to recognize it.
Hakari's smile deepened into something dangerous, delighted, absolute.
Oden felt the shift before he understood it.
A domain.
Hakari looked him dead in the face.
"You know," he said, "for a Jujutsu High spy, you're pretty entertaining."
"I'm not a spy," Oden snapped. "And for a club owner, you're very bad at paying people!"
Hakari laughed.
Then opened his Domain.
"Domain Expansion."
The world slammed sideways.
"Idle Death Gamble."
And reality changed.
---
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