BOOM——!!
The wall exploded outward. The black-haired, ponytailed girl's body was hurled straight through a solid concrete wall, chunks of stone and billowing dust erupting in every direction.
Maki gritted her teeth. She kept her iron grip on the cursed tool blade, rolled once across the rubble-strewn floor, and planted one knee down to steady herself. And riding the wave of broken masonry that came flying after her — a cluster of small white rabbits.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM——!
The rabbits detonated one after another. Shockwaves flung the debris skyward and kicked up a storm of grey dust. Maki shielded her vitals with her arm, and at the same time drove her blade into the floor to anchor herself — refusing to let the blastwave send her flying again.
"Hahahaha…" From somewhere behind the haze of smoke came a girl's bright, clear laugh — like a silver bell ringing. "No way, no way — do you two seriously think you can hunt me down all by yourselves?"
Crack crack crack—
The floor beneath Maki's feet fractured. Countless white spikes came drilling up from below, like something had gone berserk underground and was growing at furious speed.
Maki bit down hard and threw herself aside with lightning reflexes — but two of the spikes still caught her, slicing across her calf and her arm. Blood welled up.
Then she snapped her head around—
The blue-haired girl was already right in her face. Close enough that Maki could feel her breath. Close enough to read every trace of contempt in her eyes.
The girl's eyes curved into crescent moons, her smile so sweet it looked nothing like the expression of someone in a fight — more like someone enjoying a game.
"Keep underestimating me and you'll both end up dead here, you know~"
"Tch!" Maki's pupils contracted. She wrenched the blade free from the floor and swung it horizontally — straight at Mahiko's neck.
It was a cursed tool, imbued with Cursed Energy. In theory, it could wound a Cursed Spirit.
The blade swept clean across — no resistance at all — sliding right through Mahiko's throat.
But the instant the edge made contact, Mahiko's neck and shoulder dissolved into butterflies.
Countless blue butterflies poured from the seam of the cut, fluttering and spiraling through the air — then condensed back together into a body, whole and unmarked.
Mahiko stepped back two paces, giggling, her laughter ringing like a silver bell.
A cursed tool of that grade couldn't scratch Mahiko. Not even a little.
"Inumaki!!" Maki shouted.
From the room Maki had just been blasted out of, a silver-haired boy came sprinting out.
He pulled down the high collar covering his mouth, opened it, and drew a breath — Cursed Energy flooding into his vocal cords.
Cursed Speech — a curse delivered through the medium of sound.
It wasn't purely a physical attack. It was a generalized curse, which meant that Inumaki's Cursed Speech could deal a certain degree of true damage to Mahiko even without him consciously targeting her soul — it could, to some extent, bypass her physical form and strike her soul directly.
In practice, though, only a little. Not nearly as much as one might imagine.
And beyond that — Inumaki himself was simply too weak.
Cursed Speech turned against an opponent who vastly outclassed you risked severe blowback on the user. Inumaki knew this. There was no way he could kill Mahiko outright with something like "Explode" or "Drop dead."
But what he needed right now wasn't to hurt Mahiko anyway.
What he needed was to stall — buy time until Nanami-sensei and the others arrived.
So all he had to do was support Maki Zenin and hold the line.
Click—
Inumaki pulled down his collar, opened his mouth, and let Cursed Energy pour into his vocal cords as he spoke — words charged with the power of Cursed Speech—
"Meow!——"
Maki: ?
Inumaki: ????????
Mahiko: "Pfft-hahaha…"
An ocean of rabbits surged out of the shadows, pooling into Mahiko's palm and fusing together into a massive hammer — as tall as she was.
Still laughing, the blue-haired girl grabbed the handle with both hands, spun once on her heel with her whole body, and swung that enormous hammer with full force directly at Maki Zenin—
BOOM!!
The shockwave from the impact launched Maki clean off her feet. Her body flipped through the air several times before she finally stopped — having blasted through two interior partition walls.
"Did you really think I wasn't doing anything this whole time?" Mahiko's eyes crinkled with laughter, the hammer resting on her shoulder as she tilted her head and looked at Inumaki — who was clutching his throat. "You're second-years already. How are you still this naive, hahahaha…"
From the very beginning, Mahiko's ambush target had been Inumaki.
The reason she'd picked Inumaki and Maki out of the whole group in the first place was that she didn't want to fight Yuji, Nanami, or Toji Fushiguro — those three were absolute nightmares to deal with as far as she was concerned.
And out of Inumaki and Maki, the reason she'd chosen to hit Inumaki first was because his Jujutsu Technique was too much of a headache.
Cursed Speech was a nuisance.
Sure, if Inumaki tried to use a controlling-type command against an opponent as far out of his league as Mahiko, he'd suffer severe blowback himself. But if he could momentarily lock down her movements — even just for a second or two — that blowback might not be fatal.
And it would absolutely irritate Mahiko, throwing a massive wrench into her plan to end things fast.
A well-coordinated Cursed Speech user working in tandem with a vanguard fighter could tie her up for a very, very long time.
If she hadn't dealt with Inumaki — that walking annoyance — right at the start, he'd have kept dragging things out with Cursed Speech until Nanami and the others showed up.
That simply wouldn't do.
Mahiko hadn't anticipated being surrounded like this. But she'd always been cautious by nature.
Staying alive required caution — that was just the reality.
So her very first strike had been aimed at Inumaki.
She'd seeded this entire cluster of unfinished buildings with clone-cameras for surveillance, and pre-positioned a large number of rabbit-clones capable of generating barriers within a set radius that blocked both sight and sound — so that in an emergency she could split the battlefield, sow chaos, and use it all as cover.
And the moment she'd detected the encirclement, she'd hastily used her clones to produce a handful of "screaming chicken" decoys capable of mimicking Inumaki's voice at roughly seventy to eighty percent accuracy.
These clones couldn't perfectly replicate Inumaki's voice — she hadn't had time to be that precise under pressure — but in the heat of battle, Nanami and the others probably wouldn't have the luxury of telling the real one from the fakes.
Through this method, she could drag Nanami's group back and forth across countless barrier pockets, keeping them constantly scrambling and buying herself a little extra time before they managed to zero in on her location.
All she needed was to take Inumaki out before Nanami arrived.
This grand Curtain trapping her had been erected by the sorcerers working in concert with Nanami. Take out even one of the participants sustaining it and a gap would open — she could slip through and escape.
As for whether those rabbit clones could be exploited by Nobara Kugisaki — whether Nobara could use Resonance to attack Mahiko's true body from a distance through them — well, when Mahiko had actually crafted those rabbits, she'd deliberately severed the soul-connection between herself and them.
She could manipulate souls, so naturally she could also cut the soul-link between herself and her Shikigami. After all, Shikigami weren't the same as her own body parts — the connection could be severed.
Which meant Nobara Kugisaki had no way to use Resonance on the rabbits to strike Mahiko's true soul.
The trade-off, of course, was that she could no longer remotely direct the rabbits for more flexible positioning afterward. But that was fine — these rabbits and screaming-chicken decoys had been disposable tools from the start.
Everything was going according to plan.
The one thing that had caught her slightly off guard was this: when she'd ambushed Inumaki, Maki Zenin's reaction had been absurdly fast.
Maki had yanked Inumaki clear of Mahiko's reach in time, which meant the initial strike had only grazed him — not enough to put him out of action in one hit.
But it didn't matter.
Because even though she'd only made contact for a split second, the very first thing she'd targeted was Inumaki's vocal cords.
In that instant, she'd used Idle Transfiguration to create a tiny, tumor-like clone inside his vocal cords — something designed specifically to obstruct his ability to speak, lodged snugly between them.
Inumaki couldn't form a single coherent word anymore.
"Cough — Meow! Meow!!"
Inumaki was in complete shock.
He bent forward, trying again and again to speak — but no matter how hard he strained, the only sounds that came out were soft, tender little meows.
He pressed his hands to his throat, pupils trembling.
Maki understood now exactly what had happened.
She ground her teeth, hauled herself up out of the rubble, repositioned herself in an instant, and charged in front of Inumaki — blade held flat across her chest, standing guard over him.
"Aw, I did want to keep playing with big sis and little bro a while longer~" Mahiko materialized, light as a ghost, in front of the cold-sweating Maki and Inumaki, pressing her palms together as Cursed Energy surged from her.
"But unfortunately, I'm a little short on time right now." She tilted her head, her smile utterly guileless. "So I'm going to have to ask you two to be good and surrender~"
And if anyone's wondering why Mahiko had to take out Inumaki to break the Curtain instead of just taking out Maki Zenin — it's because Maki Zenin has absolutely zero Cursed Energy. She was never part of the Curtain's support structure to begin with.
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Group chat of the Dead
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 Bonus Chapter for everyone