According to what Jujutsu High's sorcerers had named the 'Blue-Haired Cursed Spirit's First Law' — as long as the blue-haired Cursed Spirit makes an appearance, she's guaranteed to blindside every single person watching, dragging in some twist that nobody could have seen coming.
And that was exactly what was happening now.
Every single person there had run through their mental list of who might possibly appear on the scene — and the one possibility that not a single one of them had considered was the blue-haired Cursed Spirit.
And what made it even more shocking was that standing right alongside the blue-haired Cursed Spirit were the two girls Mai and Maki.
So Maki and Mai hadn't actually gone missing after all — they'd been caught by the blue-haired Cursed Spirit?
But then why... did the two of them, in the postures they were standing in right now, not really look anything like people who'd been caught by the blue-haired Cursed Spirit?
The aura around Mai and Maki had quietly shifted.
The two of them were standing flanking Mahiru on her left and right at this very moment, their gazes, just like hers, looking down on every member of the Zenin estate gathered below.
That posture... it almost looked as if the two of these girls had now become the blue-haired Cursed Spirit's companions. As if they, too, had come along with the blue-haired Cursed Spirit to crash the place.
"Senpai — you guys, you're okay? If you're okay... then why are you only showing up now?" Yuji Itadori was wide-eyed and slack-jawed, his head packed full of questions. "Why are you with the blue-haired Cursed Spirit... and on top of that..."
On top of that...
Where was Mahiru?
Where had that blue-haired girl gone?
Yuji Itadori looked at the three figures up above, looked at that blue-haired Cursed Spirit — and a thought that had once before surfaced in his head returned, in this very moment, to his mind all over again.
The boy's train of thought all but ground to a halt.
And the ones caught in the throes of shock weren't only the Jujutsu High group.
The people of the Zenin estate were stunned too — stunned by this abrupt, sudden twist unfolding right in front of their eyes.
And among them all, what Naoya Zenin was reeling from was something utterly different from what anyone else was reeling from. His gaze was locked, entirely, on Maki alone.
The youth, always flippant and self-satisfied, was now wide-eyed and trembling, refusing to believe what he was seeing.
Why?
Why on earth...
Maki Zenin — that piece of useless trash — apart from a change of clothes, no glasses, and slightly longer hair, looked exactly the same as before. And yet the aura she carried was utterly, completely transformed. The very moment she stood there, an invisible, terrifying pressure radiated, soundlessly, into the air around her.
The look in her eyes, the way she gazed down at them, the pressure pouring off her body — all of it was identical, identical, to that man Naoya Zenin had once laid eyes on as a boy — the man he had never been able to forget for the rest of his life.
Heavenly Tyrant...
The aura coming off Maki Zenin right now and the aura that had once come off Zenin Toji were, beat for beat, one and the same.
How could this possibly be...
One of them was a piece of trash he could grind under his heel any time he wanted. The other was an existence he had idolized since who knows when, an existence he dreamt of even in his sleep, an existence he had longed his whole life to be able to reach out and touch.
The gap between the two of them should have been a hundred thousand miles wide — and yet now, in this fashion, the two of them were overlapping into one.
Damn it... damn it damn it damn it...!!
Maki Zenin — that useless trash — had actually dared to become just like Toji...!!
"Kill them." Naoya Zenin ground out the words through his teeth, shouting. "Kill them!!"
Hearing those words, a smile spread across Mahiru's face.
In the next instant the girl lifted her head, and locked eyes with someone who had abruptly appeared up in the sky — someone floating suspended in midair.
"Yo." She greeted them with a smile. "Hello there."
As mentioned before, Mahiru hadn't actually wanted to step out onto the stage in the first place.
She'd wanted to first see whether Mai, Maki — and Yuji Itadori and the others on top of that — could handle this Zenin estate business on their own.
If they couldn't, then she would step in.
But after arriving at the Zenin estate, she had changed her strategy and decided to show herself first instead.
This was because, while here on the grounds, she had sensed a powerful surge of Cursed Energy that absolutely should not have belonged to any sorcerer of the Zenin estate.
And the source of that Cursed Energy had now, as if by teleportation, arrived right above their heads.
This person was floating.
This person was entirely shrouded in a black robe.
This person was hanging upside-down in midair, eyes locked with Mahiru's.
Can fly, can drift through the air, this whole business had something to do with Brain-Flower, but at the same time Brain-Flower wasn't surveilling this place... when you stacked the whole string of factors together, there was really only one possibility for who this person could be.
——Urogi Kyoko.
Just like Ishiryuu, she was one of the Sendai Four Heavenly Kings — beyond any doubt a strong one, and her Jujutsu Technique for manipulating space was a particularly nasty piece of work.
Ha...
Mahiru laughed.
Urogi Kyoko's appearance left her feeling excited.
Her opponent was a strong one — then, she would open the engagement the way you open against a strong one.
"〈Don't Move! ——〉"
The blue-haired girl spoke, the Cursed Seal manifesting at the tip of her tongue. Cursed Energy poured into those three words, 'don't move,' the targeting effect locked entirely onto Urogi Kyoko.
At the same time, Mahiru's Cursed Energy was called up in synchronisation, the white speck of Cursed Energy light in her hand glowing with abnormal brilliance.
"〈Corpse〉! ——"
This was the textbook combo — lock the opponent down first, then unload the damage.
But at this very moment, the Cursed Speech failed to take any effect.
The black-robed woman continued to move exactly as normal.
She reached out one hand and seized the empty air — and then, somehow, yanked the otherwise empty sky off to one side like it were a canvas. And the patch of space containing Mahiru's white Cursed Energy light, along with that yanked canvas, got hauled away right with it.
Urogi Kyoko let out a sound of exertion, swinging the space-canvas through a full rotation. Mahiru's attack, dragged along by the warped space, had its trajectory inverted, hurled back instead toward Mahiru's own position.
That's right — this was Urogi Kyoko's signature move.
Her Technique could distort space itself, and thereby distort the direction of an enemy's attack — going so far as to redirect the opponent's own attack right back into the attacker themselves.
As for why the Cursed Speech had failed — most likely Urogi Kyoko had long since prepared herself with earplugs to defend against Cursed Speech.
And under this Jujutsu Technique of Urogi Kyoko's, the more powerful the Cursed Energy Mahiru poured into an attack, the more easily that attack would be bounced back to slam into Mahiru herself — saddling her with an enormous disadvantage.
But — when had Mahiru ever not anticipated this kind of thing?
Mahiru knew that Urogi Kyoko was one of Kenjaku's subordinates, and naturally she had foreseen that her opponent would have come fully prepared against her Cursed Speech.
Which was why, the thing she had fired out this time around — though she'd called it 〈Corpse〉 with her mouth — was, in actual fact, not 〈Corpse〉 at all.
It was...
Snap.
The blue-haired girl gave a single snap of her fingers.
That beam of white Cursed Energy light detonated with a thunderous boom, transforming in midair into a sky-covering cloud of fine powder, enveloping Urogi Kyoko entirely within it.
Urogi Kyoko's Technique could distort space and redirect directional, projectile-type attacks fired by her opponents. But against non-directional, dispersing substances — smoke, radiation, and the like — handling them became a major pain.
The powder burst outward in an instant.
It blocked off Urogi Kyoko's entire field of vision.
In this very moment, the alarm bells in Urogi Kyoko's heart were ringing wildly.
She had been sent here personally by Kenjaku. And as for exactly how dangerous, how thorny a Cursed Spirit Mahiru was — Kenjaku had warned her about it countless times before.
In this woman's eyes, nothing in the world was as important as her own life.
The powder had wrapped around her, blocking her vision completely. There was no way for her to predict from which direction Mahiru's next attack would come.
Urogi Kyoko's heart was pounding wildly. She was scared out of her wits.
So much so that, the very first instant the smoke enveloped her, she immediately clapped both hands together in front of herself — and a massive web of cracks bloomed across the space directly in front of her.
Crack, crack ——
The cracks spread out like a spider's web, fanning out across half the entire sky.
This was the most powerful technique she had.
"——〈Ushura Bullet〉!!"
The principle behind this strike was to use her space-influencing Technique to strike the 'face' of space itself, shattering that 'face' to produce a hard-to-defend shockwave carrying both spatial damage and physical damage at once.
Wide area of coverage, powerful attack force.
In her desperation, Urogi Kyoko used this single strike to blanket every single direction she couldn't observe.
The cracks in space shattered apart. The massive kinetic pressure of the collapsing spatial face came crashing down across the entirety of the sky.
Wind-pressure spread outward.
Colossal force, grinding everything in its path.
The enormous impact instantly engulfed everyone standing on the giant stone hand, and at the same time blew apart every speck of powdered dust around Urogi Kyoko.
Boom-boom-boom!! ——
After that single strike, the entire stone arm was ground into nothing by the shockwave, completely gone.
Urogi Kyoko shot upward into the sky, opening up the distance, taking great, ragged gasps of breath.
That last strike just now had drained her of every drop of strength. But because she hadn't aimed it with any kind of precision, she actually hadn't dealt any real damage to the people on the ground.
At the same time ——
A savage rush of wind howled up from below.
Urogi Kyoko whipped her head around to look — and what she saw was that black-haired girl with the single ponytail, propelled by sheer raw bodily strength and leaping power, launching herself up off the ground and hurtling in her direction.
Charging straight at her position, bringing a sword-strike with her.
She could actually jump that high?!
"And who the hell are you supposed to be!!" Urogi Kyoko gritted her teeth and yanked at the space-canvas, dragging Maki's attack off to one side.
Having had her actions predicted by the blue-haired Cursed Spirit had left Urogi Kyoko thoroughly shocked. And the two helpers the blue-haired Cursed Spirit had brought along were also completely outside her predictions.
Kenjaku's original idea had been simple — just tweak the will a little and let the Zenin estate collapse from the inside on its own. But later, somebody had stepped in and killed Ogi Zenin, who knows who, and Kenjaku had figured some kind of unexpected twist might be brewing — and so he'd sent her along with two other associates over to the Zenin estate.
Kenjaku had figured that this would be more than enough, and hadn't bothered following up further.
What he had absolutely not anticipated was that the one stepping into this matter would be Mahiru — someone with no connection whatsoever to the Three Great Houses.
Kenjaku had miscalculated.
And the one breaking out in a cold sweat was Urogi Kyoko.
"Heheheheh... but what difference does any of that make..."
Down on the ground, from somewhere in the crowd, came a sinister, creeping voice.
"So long as Satoru Gojo isn't here... then it doesn't matter at all... does it...?"
By now, the Jujutsu High group had returned to the ground. The moment they heard this voice — not loud, but striking enough to be unmissable — every single one of them turned to find its source.
The voice was coming from a hunched-over old woman among the crowd.
"Her?" Mei Mei raised an eyebrow. "It's actually her?"
——Granny Spirit-Caller.
Nobody knew what her real name was. So, basing the nickname on the distinctive features of her Jujutsu Technique, people had given her this moniker instead.
Spirit-Calling Technique.
It was a Technique that had only made the briefest of cameo appearances in the original work — but it was also one that, the more you thought about it, carried truly horrifying potential and an even more horrifying ceiling.
Just as the Technique's name suggests, it could call down a person who had died in the past and have them descend into the body of someone still alive. The method of summoning involved extracting both soul and body data from the deceased person's corpse. She could choose to summon down body data alone, or to revive soul and body together.
In the original work, Granny Spirit-Caller had summoned down Toji by mistake — leading to Toji breaking free of her control and then turning around and killing her in return.
But thinking about it carefully — if Granny Spirit-Caller hadn't died, there was no question she would have severely impacted the balance of combat power between both sides in the original work's setting.
Because all it took was getting hold of a dead person's corpse, and there was a possibility of calling that dead person down back into the world... it was, truly, a Technique too terrifying for words.
Like, for instance... right now.
Granny Spirit-Caller pressed her palms together, fingering the Buddhist prayer beads in her hands, muttering indistinctly under her breath, as if reciting some kind of incantation.
As she chanted on, an ancient Cursed Energy began spreading outward, taking hold of every single Zenin estate guard standing in her vicinity.
Granny Spirit-Caller's Jujutsu Technique was, at this very moment, taking effect on every single member of the Zenin estate's guard unit known as the 'Kukuru Squad.'
These guards had trained in martial arts since childhood and possessed bodies considerably more robust than ordinary ones; as vessels for the Spirit-Calling Technique, they were perfectly suited.
The Zenin estate didn't lack money. They didn't lack land.
But what they lacked least of all, in fact, was their history.
Uh, or — to put it more bluntly... what they didn't lack was the corpses lying in their ancestral burial ground.
A thousand years of history — how many corpses must have been buried in those grave plots of theirs?
The Zenin estate was indeed a traditional clan — but the fact that Naoya Zenin could idolize Toji proved that Naoya, in fact, wasn't all that traditional himself.
In order to seize the position of clan head and stand against the new-school faction, Naoya Zenin — upon learning of Granny Spirit-Caller's Technique — had made a decision in direct defiance of his ancestors: he had opened up the entirety of the Zenin estate's burial ground, the resting place of every ancestor in the clan, to Granny Spirit-Caller.
Over the past several days, Granny Spirit-Caller had had herself a grand old time digging through the Zenin estate's burial ground.
This was, after all, an ancestral burial ground that had been accumulating for over a thousand years.
Even if you assumed the clan produced only two or three sorcerers per hundred years, that burial ground would have to contain the corpses of thirty or forty sorcerers — and that was just a conservative estimate.
Over the several days the estate-division assembly had been postponed, Granny Spirit-Caller had been mining for gold and digging for treasure in the Zenin estate's ancestral burial ground...
A full two days of solid digging.
Hauling out every Zenin aunt and great-aunt, every uncle, every grandpa and grandma she could find... turning them all into raw material for the Spirit-Calling Technique.
And Naoya Zenin saw nothing inappropriate about any of this. On the contrary — making the predecessors of the Zenin estate serve as his own subordinates gave him a tremendous sense of accomplishment.
"Oi, oi... you've got to be kidding me..." Fushiguro Maki said, looking at the scene unfolding in front of her, cold sweat beading on her forehead. "He's...actually summoning down this many sorcerers all at once?"
"Hm? What's the deal here... no wait — what? For real?? Bahahahaha..." Off to one side, the moment Mahiru caught what was going on over there, she started cracking up laughing.
Her attention had originally been entirely fixed on Urogi Kyoko, but the instant she clocked what Granny Spirit-Caller had pulled off, the girl just lost it.
"Bahahahaha — get out of town, this is actually a thing..."
The girl really hadn't expected that Naoya Zenin would be willing to sacrifice the ancestral burial ground itself and pull off a Heroic-Spirit-style summoning of every ancestor in the clan to come fight on his side.
She'd never in her life seen anything this batshit insane.
It felt about as insane as Yuta in the original work straight-up commandeering a Satoru Gojo Gundam mecha.
And right as she was still in the middle of laughing, every single member of the Zenin estate's 'Kukuru Squad' guard unit in front of her was having their face and body silently distort and shift, transforming into the appearances of every great-aunt and great-uncle in the clan's entire family tree.
Granny Spirit-Caller could choose to summon down body data alone — and Cursed Energy and Jujutsu Techniques fell under the category of body data, equally within the Spirit-Calling Technique's range of effect.
"You worthless trash..." Naoya Zenin lifted his blade and pointed it skyward, laughing. "Come and have a look — see just how high this lord's going to raise the Zenin estate to its peak!"
Mahiru was honestly laughing her ass off.
"You're actually capable of going to these lengths?" The girl felt as if her stomach were going to hurt from how hard she was laughing. "You really are making me look at you with new eyes, Naoya Zenin..."
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🔥 New history: Jujutsu x Mieruko: Oh no, am I a villain too?
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