About an hour later, a row of familiar black sedans glided silently over the gravel road in front of the abandoned building and stopped.
Doors opened. Several men and women in black suits stepped out, faces grim, movements efficient. The Windows, the jujutsu world's intelligence and cleanup division. Leading them was the same investigation captain with the dour eyes, though tonight his expression carried a weight that went beyond his usual severity.
"Cleanup isn't finished, the report was never filed, and the Curtain dropped early..."
He scanned the surroundings, brow furrowed. Sato skipping out early to slack off wasn't out of character for the man, but a premature Curtain collapse pointed to something worse. A dead sorcerer. Technique forcibly released.
"Assume the worst," he said, voice low. "The Cursed Spirit may still be inside."
"Yes, sir!" One subordinate immediately raised a fresh Curtain. The rest drew hands to the cursed tools at their belts and advanced in formation, tracking the Residual Cursed Energy to the basement where it pooled thickest.
They'd braced for every nightmare scenario. Pulped remains scattered wall to wall. A rampaging spirit mid-feed. Survivors driven mad with terror, or half-eaten and barely clinging to life.
What they found when they breached the iron door stopped every last one of them dead in their tracks.
Blood hung heavy in the air, but there was no shrieking.
No spirit.
In a corner by the entrance, the young man named Shinjiro had curled into a ball, tears and snot smeared across his face, lips moving in a mindless loop: "The monster... it's dead... it's dead..." His mind had cracked clean open. Normal and expected. This was what ordinary people looked like after brushing against a Cursed Spirit.
What made the investigators' eyes go wide was the figure sitting in the center of the room.
Beside the ruined mess that had been Sato, a young man sat on a discarded stool. Calm and unhurried. When the sound of boots reached him, Touma lifted his head slightly.
"You're a bit slow."
"You..." The captain felt the Residual Cursed Energy already thinning in the air, then looked at Touma, not a scratch on him, and his throat went dry. "Where's the Cursed Spirit?"
"Killed it." Touma gave Asakirimaru a lazy twirl before sliding it back into its sheath. "It was loud. And it wanted to eat me."
Silence dropped over the room like a stone. The investigators traded glances, every pair of eyes reflecting the same disbelief.
An unregistered civilian. Armed with a cursed tool of unknown origin. Had solo-killed a Cursed Spirit.
Sato may have been useless, but on paper he was still one of the rare Assistant Managers who possessed a combat-capable Cursed Technique. If something could kill Sato, its threat level likely reached Grade 2.
A civilian who could solo a Grade 2 spirit? Absurd didn't begin to cover it.
The captain drew a long breath, strode forward, and extended his senses toward the Cursed Energy radiating off Touma's body.
"Definitely Cursed Energy... and this residue..."
His gaze dropped to the floor, to the shattered paper figure lying amid the debris. A medium, sliced apart alongside the spirit.
He crouched, tracing the faint trails of Touma's lingering Cursed Energy across the concrete. Then his head snapped up, and the look in his eyes shifted entirely.
"This is Sato's Puppet Manipulation. You used it?"
"Yeah." Touma delivered the story he'd already rehearsed, threading truth and fiction together with practiced ease. "I found one of his talismans near the body. Things were desperate. I didn't think too hard about it, something clicked in my head, and I pushed Cursed Energy into the paper the way that feeling told me to. Didn't expect it to actually move. I used it as a decoy, and then..." He tapped the hilt at his side. "Took its head off."
"Is your technique the same as Sato's?" the captain pressed, urgency leaking into his voice.
"My... technique?" Touma tilted his head, delivering exactly the right amount of confusion for someone who'd just awakened.
That answer, paired with the bewilderment on Touma's face, a performance so clean it left no seams, made the captain suck air through his teeth.
If Touma was telling the truth, this was enormous.
It didn't matter how ordinary a technique was. Anyone who possessed one would never be assigned to the bottom rung as a cleaner. Which meant only one thing: this kid had awakened his technique tonight.
The captain clicked on a flashlight, its beam falling across Touma's face. Young, Sharp-featured, Fifteen, maybe sixteen.
"Awakening an Innate Technique at this age... that alone is exceptionally rare."
But what truly set the captain's pulse racing was the nature of the ability Touma had demonstrated.
Awakening under extreme terror and manifesting the same technique as a dead man nearby? The odds of that were lower than winning the lottery. Unless... unless it was something far rarer. An ability that could copy or learn the techniques of others.
Either way, this boy had, in the very moment of awakening, kept his composure, weaponized a dead man's technique as bait, devised a tactical approach, and executed a lethal counter-strike against a Grade 2 Cursed Spirit. That kind of battlefield intelligence and psychological fortitude was worth more than raw Cursed Energy could ever be.
A genius... no. Uncut diamond, waiting for someone to shape it. The thought crystallized in the captain's mind.
Sato's death wasn't a waste after all. One worthless life traded for the discovery of a prospect like this.
The captain stood. For once, he didn't even spare a glance at Sato's embezzlement ledger, though Touma had left it in plain sight out of habit. Every scrap of his attention belonged to the boy on the stool.
Procedure still had to be followed. He questioned Shinjiro and Touma separately.
For Shinjiro, the protocol was standard: psychological intervention and memory blurring to protect a civilian, smoothing the edges of the horror until he could slide back into an ordinary life.
For Touma, it was a different matter entirely. After pulling his file and confirming a clean background, the captain took out his phone, bypassed the normal chain of command, and dialed a number reserved for special circumstances.
Masamichi Yaga, Tokyo Jujutsu High.
On the other end, Yaga had barely fallen asleep when the ringtone dragged him back. He answered with the irritation of a man robbed of rest.
That irritation evaporated within seconds.
"Say that again?" Yaga sat bolt upright, voice hard. "Fifteen years old, wild awakening, first real combat, used a dead man's talisman to kill a Grade 2 Cursed Spirit? And the technique is potentially an imitation or replication type?"
"That's correct, Mr. Yaga. And this kid's mental composure is remarkable. The way he handled the corpse, the killing... he was too calm. Far too calm." The captain glanced toward Touma, who sat quietly in the distance, waiting without a trace of anxiety. He lowered his voice. "He's a rare find. If we don't bring him into Jujutsu High soon and the Curse Users get wind of him first, we'll have a problem."
"...Understood. Bring him in. I'll see him personally tomorrow." Yaga hung up.
The captain pocketed his phone and turned back to Touma. Every trace of the professional arrogance he'd worn before had vanished. What replaced it was something closer to deference, tinged with anticipation. The way people looked at someone they expected to matter.
"Touma Hayase, right?"
"Yeah."
"Congratulations." The captain smiled, and for perhaps the first time in his career, the expression was genuine. "Your life changes today."