The corridor sat in heavy darkness, air thick enough to choke on.
Shinjiro watched his friend's back recede down the hallway. A shape he'd known for years, now utterly foreign. What crawled under his skin worse than the strangeness was the impossibility of it: Touma was right there, walking in plain sight, yet the moment Shinjiro's focus slipped even a fraction, his mind simply... skipped over him. Like he wasn't there at all.
"How many secrets has this guy been hiding...?" Shinjiro pressed himself deeper into the corner, teeth chattering so hard he could hear them.
Touma paid no attention to the gaze boring into his back. His mind had gone still, locked into a clarity so sharp it felt surgical.
Thin Presence was active. Paired with his new ceiling of fifteen Cursed Energy, it couldn't produce the total invisibility someone like Toji Fushiguro wielded, but fooling one dim-witted Grade 2 Cursed Spirit? More than enough.
He stopped at the basement door. The wet, nauseating sound of chewing had ceased. Inside, the big-headed spirit had its back to the entrance, pawing through the mangled heap of remains as though searching for something. Savoring the aftertaste of its appetizer, most likely.
Touma didn't rush in. Killing this thing wasn't the hard part. Between Asakirimaru and a clean ambush, he put his odds at eighty percent for a one-hit kill. But killing wasn't the priority right now. Testing the technique was.
Phantom Night Parade. Freshly awakened, completely untried.
His gaze drifted past the spirit and landed on what was left of Sato's corpse.
A few bloodstained talismans lay scattered on the floor nearby, remnants of whatever desperate struggle the man had put up before the end.
Touma moved like a ghost. Soundless, weightless, slipping into the room without disturbing a single particle of air. He even used the narrow window when the spirit turned its bulk to close the distance to Sato's remains with a boldness that bordered on insane.
Now.
He reached out. His fingertip brushed a talisman soaked through with Sato's blood and lingering Residual Cursed Energy.
The technique fired. Phantom Night Parade.
A murky torrent of information surged up through his fingertip and crashed into his mind. Not words. Not language. Something deeper: the muscle memory and raw instinct of how Cursed Energy had moved through Sato's body when the man was still alive.
[Analyzing...]
[Target: Grade 2 Assistant Manager, Sato.]
[Reading complete.]
As the data unpacked itself, surprise flickered through Touma's eyes, then curdled into something closer to contempt.
"So that's what it was..."
During the first simulation, he'd watched Sato fling talismans that folded themselves into paper figures, and he'd assumed it was some variety of Shikigami summoning.
He was wrong. Reading the Residual Cursed Energy told the real story.
Sato's Innate Technique had never been summoning. It was Puppet Manipulation.
A technique that threaded Cursed Energy into a medium and granted fine motor control over physical objects. In the right hands, it could be devastating.
Sato's hands were not the right hands. His Cursed Energy pool was a puddle, and his understanding of his own technique was so shallow it was practically offensive. Fine control was out of the question. All he could manage was cramming raw energy into slips of paper and forcing them into stiff, shambling parodies of motion. Walking targets, nothing more.
That was why Sato always needed bait when he hunted Cursed Spirits. That was why he dragged low-ranking cleaners along to draw attention. His hack-job proficiency only worked when something else held the enemy's gaze. Against anything that actually fought back, the man was helpless. The only arena where Sato could play the tyrant was one populated exclusively by ordinary people.
Touma buried a cold laugh behind his teeth. Then he gathered the fifteen points of Cursed Energy humming through his body and, following the pathways Phantom Night Parade had just mapped, channeled it into the talisman in his hand.
"Reproduce."
No crippling resistance. No fluid grace, either. The sensation landed somewhere strange in between, like running in shoes that didn't quite fit.
The talisman rustled without wind, trembling as it lifted off his palm. It folded and twisted midair, contorting until it became a paper figure no bigger than his hand.
It stood on the ground, listing to one side, joints stiff, looking like it might fall apart if someone breathed on it.
"Figures."
A slight frown. His Cursed Energy reserves dwarfed Sato's, but proficiency couldn't be brute-forced. What he'd just produced was roughly on par with Sato's own half-baked craftsmanship. Couldn't kill a Cursed Spirit. Probably couldn't kill a rat. But as a decoy? Good enough.
The corner of his mouth curved, thin and cold. One finger twitched.
The crooked little figure lurched into motion, stiff legs slapping against the floor in a clumsy sprint toward the far side of the basement. It even clipped an empty tin can on the way, sending it clattering.
Clang!
The metallic crack ricocheted through the dead silence of the room.
The big-headed spirit whipped around. Clouded eyes locked onto the fleeing paper figure instantly.
"Graaah...?"
The figure reeked of something the spirit recognized. That hated stench of a jujutsu sorcerer.
No thought. No hesitation. A shriek tore from its throat, jaws yawning wide, and it lunged.
Riiip! The fragile paper figure shredded to confetti under a single swipe of its claws.
But in that precise sliver of time, momentum spent, old force exhausted and new force not yet gathered, Touma was already there.
He'd materialized in the spirit's blind spot without a whisper of warning. Thin Presence had smothered every trace of his existence until the instant his arms moved. Not even the air had noticed him.
Both hands locked around Asakirimaru's hilt. The Cursed Energy inside him was clumsy, unrefined, but instinct drove it onto the blade in a single unrestrained surge.
Die.
No flourish. No technique. Just one horizontal slash, fast and savage and precise.
The cursed blade carved through the spirit's bloated neck the way a heated knife glides through butter.
Its massive head sailed upward. Dark purple blood erupted from the stump, spattering the walls with a hiss of corrosion where each drop landed.
The spirit never even screamed. Its enormous body toppled like a felled tree, already dissolving, breaking apart into particles that scattered and vanished into the air.
Touma flicked the fouled blood from the blade and watched the last traces of the creature turn to dust.
"Puppet Manipulation for crowd control, paired with assassination from the blind spot... not a bad combination."
One disappointment, though. No mission had been active, so the kill earned him nothing. If exorcising Cursed Spirits could grant simulation attempts, that would be ideal. Something to keep in mind.
He turned toward the basement entrance.
Half of Shinjiro's face peeked around the doorframe, jaw hanging so wide a whole egg could've fit inside.
What had he just witnessed? His friend. The same meek, head-down, don't-make-waves guy he'd always known. Standing over a dissolving corpse like some cold-blooded killer, that strange blade in hand, having decapitated the same nightmare that slaughtered Sato in a single stroke.
"That... the monster's... dead?" Shinjiro's voice cracked. His legs gave out and he dropped straight to the floor.
Touma sheathed the sword, walked over, and hauled him to his feet.
"Up, Shinjiro."
"Get your face under control. The Windows crew will be here any minute." A beat. "Remember: we're victims. But... not entirely."