Construction Technique sounds pretty impressive, but in actual combat it's exceptionally clunky.
Because this kind of Jujutsu Technique burns through enormous quantities of Cursed Energy. Take Zen'in Mai from before — even drawing on every drop of Cursed Energy in her body, all she could ever knead out was a single bullet.
If she had to actually trade blows head-on, it would basically amount to her hurling one more stone at her opponent than they did at her.
Sorcerers with this kind of Jujutsu Technique are generally relegated to behind-the-scenes work, providing cursed tools to the front-line sorcerers — only by the principle of "a hundred days to forge one blade" can their true value and effect gradually be brought out.
And Zen'in Mai right now was in the same situation.
Even though her total Cursed Energy reserves had reached the upper-middle range of a Grade 1 sorcerer, the many restrictions of her Jujutsu Technique made it very difficult for her to exhibit the combat strength a regular Grade 1 sorcerer ought to display.
So the girl had to compensate for her combat power from other angles.
Such as… knowledge.
Construction Technique users, plainly speaking — they kneaded things out.
The more knowledge they studied, the more things they could knead out, and therefore the higher their combat capabilities naturally became.
And once that body of knowledge and experience accumulated to a certain level, a Construction Technique user could even knead out things that didn't actually exist in this world.
The Zen'in Mai of the past, because her total Cursed Energy was restricted, had found it very difficult to experiment, and her growth had been capped.
But now, she already had the Cursed Energy foundation in place, which meant the road of her growth had been opened up.
It was just that, right now, on the very first step of that road of growth, she had already run into a problem.
"...How come I never used to feel like this stuff was such a headache before..."
There's a difference between understanding something and having it down cold. If it were one of those open-book-exam scenarios — like crafting a cursed tool — then so long as Zen'in Mai understood the construction details of each material, she could make whatever she wanted. But for live combat, which demanded speed and immediacy, she had to drill every single "construction of a material" into muscle memory.
Compared to muscle work, Zen'in Mai was definitely better at using her head.
But a fifteen-minute crash-revision was a little Super Brain even for her.
Augh...
Zen'in Mai set down her phone and looked toward the tunnel, at the pitch-dark depths within.
Feels like I'm gonna die...
The blue-haired Cursed Spirit said she wouldn't help even if I died… Is that real, or was she bluffing? It's not actually real, is it?
Zen'in Mai felt that she was pretty good-looking, and the things she'd said earlier had been pretty sweet too… Mahiko probably wouldn't have the heart to let her die, right?
"Hurry up, would you? Useless trash — I'll have it cleared away, you know," Mahiko's sweet voice drifted into her ear. "Big sis Mai doesn't want to become useless trash, does she?"
Mahiko was just teasing her.
But Zen'in Mai really did feel a chill run down her spine.
Though she had more or less guessed that Mahiko was a good person… er, a good being.
But Mahiko's temperament and behaviour were genuinely too difficult to read. Zen'in Mai really didn't dare gamble that the other side would always be this lenient.
A lot of things were still hazy in her head, but she could only grit her teeth and go in!
Wing it on raw nerve!
Zen'in Mai pressed deeper into the tunnel.
Just like Maki Zenin, after walking for four or five minutes into the interior, the Cursed Energy in front of her surged, and the other side of the Special Grade Cursed Spirit appeared.
It was a giant snail, with countless eyes covering the shell on its back, its Cursed Energy aura just as powerful as the crab's.
"A snail?" Zen'in Mai froze for an instant — and then the knowledge database in her brain gave a sharp jolt. It was as though something had just occurred to her.
"Jiji-uuu——" The snail Cursed Spirit writhed its body, opened a maw of dripping blood, and spat a stream of acid toward Zen'in Mai.
Zen'in Mai instinctively dodged — and then remembered that she was no longer her old self, and immediately began mobilising her Technique.
Pat.
She clapped her hands together once, then pressed them flat against the ground.
A flash of electrical light effects skittered past, and a stone wall rose from the ground, blocking the acid the snail Cursed Spirit had spat out, the impact giving off a hissing sound.
Holy crap...
——That feels good.
The girl's eyes went wide.
That was Zen'in Mai's first reaction.
This wasn't, in fact, a matter of blaming the girl for being too easily contented, being happy just because she'd raised a wall out of the ground.
It was simply that her starting point had been too low to begin with.
And compared to what she had been before, the current her — heh, you couldn't call it merely shooting up to the heavens… it was a difference of mortals and immortals.
"Maki, you absolute deadweight…" the girl grinned, and as the stone wall in front of her was corroded and collapsed, she brought both hands into position before her, palms facing each other, one above and one below, sparks of electricity flickering between them. "To think I had to play your sister for over a decade — must've burned through every ounce of luck I had in my previous life!"
Well — since it's a snail...
Metallic material, like crystals extending outward, rapidly took form in Zen'in Mai's hand,
transforming into a weapon shaped like a crossbow.
It was a sprayer.
Compared to chemistry and materials, Zen'in Mai was actually more interested in mechanical principles.
And a mechanic who could fabricate things at will out of pure imagination — that was a terrifying thing.
Zen'in Mai raised the crossbow, aimed it in the direction of the snail Cursed Spirit, and pulled the trigger——
A click.
The crossbow jammed.
Her first test fire had failed.
The snail seized the opening to spit acid at Zen'in Mai once again.
Zen'in Mai sidestepped to evade. At the same time, her left hand cycled her Technique, releasing a curtain of Cursed-Energy-laden mist as cover, while her right hand gripped the body of the sprayer-crossbow, bright arcs of electricity crackling across it.
Zen'in Mai was adding additional components to the inner mechanism of the launcher, making structural modifications.
A single roll later, the girl had finished modifying it.
Once more she raised the weapon, took aim, pulled the trigger.
Pfft——
This time, the sprayer worked.
It spat out a great cloud of dust toward the snail Cursed Spirit. The dust splattered all over the snail Cursed Spirit's face, and the Cursed Spirit immediately broke into a fit of pft-pft-pft coughs.
"Hahaha..." Zen'in Mai pulled the scope away from her eye, her face breaking into a smile. "Sweetheart, you're done for."
The mechanism the girl had designed by sheer inspiration turned out to be more reliable than even she had imagined.
This puff of dust was only the test-fire round — what came next was the real ammunition.
This time, the girl's Technique was firing at full power. Her palm brushed across the firing chamber. Cursed Energy was converted into matter, packed inside.
"11 protons, 12 neutrons, 10 electrons..."
Cursed Spirits were divided into many categories, and among them, some Cursed Spirits — because they had condensed from people's negative emotions toward certain things — took on both the appearance and even the properties of those things.
And the stronger the Cursed Spirit, the more it tended to mimic such properties. The snail before her was very likely such a case.
"And then, 17 protons, 18 neutrons, 18 electrons..."
——Sodium ion, chloride ion.
What snails in nature were afraid of was something everybody knew.
And a substance as commonplace and everyday as this was, of course, something Zen'in Mai could whip up with utter ease.
Against Cursed Spirits, brutes had a brute's playbook, and academics, of course, had their academic's wisdom.
A snail formed of Cursed Spirit energy, and table salt synthesised from Cursed Energy — when those two collided, would it produce the same phenomenon as in the real world?
Truth be told, Zen'in Mai was very, very curious right now.
"Come on."
The girl grinned, and raised the sprayer to take aim.
——The exploratory urge lying dormant in the soul of every Construction Technique user was now blazing fiercely.
"Let me spice things up for you a little."
She squeezed the trigger.
The sprayer let out a continuous pft-pft-pft of firing——
A huge quantity of white, sand-like crystalline powder erupted from the muzzle, crossed the distance between the girl and the snail, and sprayed itself thoroughly across the snail's body.
The instant these "experimental materials" condensed from Cursed Energy made contact with the snail's body, the snail let out a piteous shriek.
It began to twist its body violently, struggling with all its might to retract itself into its snail shell.
It worked.
Zen'in Mai was even more delighted.
With every spray fired off, the girl's palm worked over the firing chamber again, reloading.
Then she pulled back the bolt.
Aim again. Fire again.
Pft.
Pft.
Pft.
One spray, one re-knead, one step forward.
Amid the snail's mournful wailing, the girl walked, step by step, right up to the front of the enormous snail shell, and then kicked the shell over with one foot.
"Hey, are you really a Special Grade Cursed Spirit?"
The girl planted one foot on the snail's shell, while one hand kept the sprayer's muzzle steadily trained on the entrance of the shell.
She was laughing with manic exhilaration.
Say what you would — she and Maki really were twin sisters… Right now, their exhilarated grins were near-identical.
"You're about to become the first Cursed Spirit ever to be salted to death, you know! Hahahahaha!..."
The girl pulled the trigger continuously, aimed directly at the entrance of the snail shell, pouring vast quantities of Cursed-Energy table salt inside.
Spraying as she went, laughing gleefully.
The scene was extraordinarily bloody and extraordinarily off-the-rails in tone — to the point that even Mahiko, watching the spectacle from the sidelines, couldn't help but twitch the corner of her mouth.
"This opponent… was actually pretty well chosen."
Well, alright. So long as Zen'in Mai was happy.
But the scene of Zen'in Mai's combat right now was indeed not quite what Mahiko had originally been picturing.
Mahiko had been expecting a full-on gunfight.
But what she got, taking one look, was Breaking Bad.
Who could keep a straight face through this?
____
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