To reiterate: anything reproduced by Mahiru's "Re-Contract Manifestation," even if it originally had nothing to do with jujutsu, would still carry Cursed Energy because of Mahiru's reproduction, thereby gaining the ability to harm Cursed Spirits.
The tide of Cursed Spirits surged toward Mahiru.
Pinching a paper scroll between two fingers, the girl reproduced sky-splitting thunder and lightning that tore through everything in an instant. Rumble—
This time, Mahiru had compressed an entire three years' worth of a single generator's total output into one brief instant, then poured it all out in a single breath.
So the power was absurdly immense.
Blinding silver-blue lightning utterly engulfed the entire underground hall in that instant, swallowing, piercing, and scorching every Cursed Spirit—tearing them into fine powder.
In barely a blink, the Cursed Spirits that had surged close were wiped clean.
But the girl's brow furrowed slightly.
Because those Cursed Spirits were pouring endlessly out from deep within the passage. Clearly, killing one wave would immediately be followed by the next—slaughtering Cursed Spirits wouldn't cure the root cause.
She'd have to destroy the passage itself.
Before her, another wave of Cursed Spirits lunged forward, snarling and shrieking hideously.
Mahiru drew another scroll-like contract from her satchel between two fingers, about to unleash her Cursed Technique again.
But the Cursed Spirits changed direction as a group.
They no longer surged toward Mahiru; instead they wheeled around and together forced open the rock strata overhead, boring toward the surface and the world outside.
These Cursed Spirits had actually chosen to dodge Mahiru's edge and find another way out.
Ring-ring-ring-ring... Inside the tent, an alarm suddenly blared, waking the two girls.
"...!" Mei Mei bolted upright, her expression instantly turning grave.
The ground was trembling, violent rumbling rising from beneath the earth, countless Cursed Spirits howling, and a nauseating, filthy aura of Cursed Energy pervading every corner of the air... Without a doubt, while they'd been fast asleep, some enormous upheaval had occurred here!
"...?!—" Utahime finally snapped to as well, her face full of panic. "What's going on? What happened? Have Cursed Spirits appeared?"
No, that couldn't be right? This Cursed Spirit aura was way too over-the-top!
Even a Special Grade Cursed Spirit wouldn't give off this kind of Cursed Energy, would it? Could that mysterious Blue Existence have come here? Utahime's face went pale, looking utterly terrified.
Mei Mei, meanwhile, was calmer and quicker to react.
"Let's go!" Mei Mei grabbed Utahime and dragged her out of the tent, fleeing toward the outside of the haunted mansion.
"But! Wait!" Utahime shouted, twisting to look back, her eyes brimming with worry. "Ran-Ran's still inside! What about Ran-Ran?!"
"She's far stronger than you or me!" Mei Mei said, running outward with all her might. "She'll be fine!"
Would she be fine?
Mei Mei pulled Utahime all the way out of the haunted mansion.
And it was precisely at that moment that, with a thunderous roar, the earth split open and countless Cursed Spirits burst through the surface like an erupting volcano, pouring out from beneath the haunted mansion. The entire old estate was blasted skyward, the building disintegrating in an instant.
—That blue-haired girl—would she really be all right?
Watching this surging tide of Cursed Spirits pour out, Mei Mei couldn't stop the trembling in her heart.
On that question, she honestly had no certainty herself. What she'd said just now was only to comfort Utahime... As far as she knew, a tide of Cursed Spirits on this scale was not something an ordinary Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer could withstand. Let alone that the blue-haired girl was still just a student.
She was indeed a genius.
But the disaster before them was no longer something an ordinary genius could handle.
...Would she really come out of this unharmed?
Even as Mei Mei kept suppressing the negative thoughts, terrible premonitions kept surfacing in her mind. Once again, that blue-haired girl's smile rose before her—a girl of peculiar temperament who nonetheless held flawless goodwill toward them.
Mei Mei abruptly clenched her teeth.
She quickly shoved Utahime into a relatively safe corner.
"Stay here and don't move," Mei Mei said in a low voice.
"?" Utahime blanked for a moment. "Wh-what do you mean?"
Gritting her teeth, Mei Mei turned to gaze at the churning tide of Cursed Spirits. "I'm going to look for Miwa Ran."
With that, she stepped off and charged toward the old estate that had already been reduced to rubble.
—She simply couldn't stand by and do nothing!
However, the very second after Mei Mei took that step, a sudden change erupted.
A Cursed Energy violent to the utmost extreme detonated without warning from the very center of that tide.
A magnificent, blinding blaze roared up from within the horde of Cursed Spirits, surging straight into the sky and staining half the night crimson. The densely packed Cursed Spirits let out shrill, mournful wails within this sea of fire, burning to ashes wave after wave.
And in the very center of that roiling explosion of smoke, a blue-haired figure, hanging by one hand from the handle of an umbrella, drifted out lightly along the airflow the blast had kicked up.
[Re-Contract Manifestation]—[Thermal Power Plant Fuel Generation Regulations].
A thermal power plant burns fuel.
And what Mahiru's [Re-Contract Manifestation] reproduced this time was precisely the process of fuel combustion. The energy of a colossal amount of fuel ignited in the same instant all transformed into these flames soaring into the sky.
A massive host of Cursed Spirits were all burned to ashes by this single attack of Mahiru's.
It was absurd.
Gazing up at the blaze, watching Mahiru drift on the wind mid-air holding her umbrella, Mei Mei couldn't stop her eyes from trembling.
This intensity of attack... to wipe out so many Cursed Spirits in one go—such power was already far beyond that of an ordinary Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer.
In truth, she'd had some vague guesses about the depth of this blue-haired girl's power before.
But now it seemed those guesses had been far too conservative.
"Ran-Ran—!" Utahime cried out in alarm, running to Mahiru's side and inspecting her up and down. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?!"
"I'm fine, I'm fine." Mahiru waved her hand with a bright smile to reassure her.
Utahime let out a breath of relief.
Then she pointed at the pit over there, out of which a fresh new tide of Cursed Spirits was still emerging, her tone panicked.
"Ran-Ran, do you have any idea what that thing is?!" Utahime asked nervously. "Is that a Cursed Spirit nest? Why are even more Cursed Spirits coming out now... how could there be this many Cursed Spirits underground?!"
Mahiru looked in the direction she was pointing and shook her head with an air of great seriousness.
"Hmm... I don't know either."
She was lying through her teeth with her eyes wide open.
Then she stroked her chin and frowned slightly. "But well... probably if we just destroy the source, it'll be fine."
"Destroy the source?" Utahime was stunned. "How can you make it sound so easy? The source of that many Cursed Spirits..."
Anyone could see how difficult that would be.
So many Cursed Spirits... though they were all merely Grade 1 to Grade 3, sheer quantity brought about a qualitative change, and the source was clearly troublesome beyond measure at a glance.
But Mahiru was mulling over other things.
This was a passage of the Culling Game, a corner of another world seeping in—though in truth it was only a corner. The passage was more like an experimental attempt: not strong, and not stable. If Mahiru could freely use her own original Cursed Technique, she could easily snuff out this source.
But right now Mei Mei and Utahime were both watching from the side. She couldn't very well knock these two out cold and then use her technique, could she?
Yet if she didn't knock them out, and she didn't want to expose her identity, then what came next would become terribly troublesome.
Ah well, in that case, she'd just bring out the strongest output means currently at "Miwa Ran's" disposal.
Mahiru let out a soft breath and drew from the deepest part of her satchel a bulging kraft-paper file envelope, slowly breaking its seal.
Her gaze turned toward the distant hole on the ground from which the tide of Cursed Spirits was surging anew, and the Cursed Energy fluctuations all around her began to grow extraordinary—so much so that the other two girls beside her fell silent of their own accord.
Right now, Mahiru would deliberately keep her Cursed Energy at the level of a Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer.
But Cursed Energy output was still affected by many factors—such as the nature of the technique, and the efficiency of Cursed Energy conversion.
And Mahiru's Cursed Energy conversion efficiency happened to be extremely high.
"Re-Contract Manifestation—"
The Cursed Energy fluctuations grew stronger, and the air turned scorching as the technique activated.
The two girls behind Mahiru involuntarily stepped back; the warning within their hearts told them Mahiru's next strike would be utterly terrifying.
Unlike Reji of her past life, Mahiru was someone with a deeper understanding of modern society, so her use of the [Re-Contract Manifestation] technique was more flexible and her thinking more expansive.
Large-scale civil engineering construction involves changes in physical quantities of very great magnitude, and under extreme construction conditions such as undersea tunnels, engineering teams often use blasting to break through the tunnel.
So then—under the Cursed Energy limits of a Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer—how much power would all the blasting required for a single tunnel amount to when stacked together?
Even the girl herself didn't know.
So, she was looking forward to it. So, she began to grow excited.
The girl broke into a smile.
She swung her arm hard, scattering all the documents in the envelope into the sky. Nearly a hundred pages of contract paper burned in the air with Cursed Energy, turning into blue sparks that filled the heavens.
The Cursed Energy surged to its extreme, the air instantly blanketed in searing heat. As if sensing something, Mei Mei's pupils shrank, and she immediately tackled Utahime down and shielded her beneath her own body.
In that moment, the world seemed to fall silent for a single second. Then—
—BOOM!!! The heavens collapsed and the earth split.
The earth trembled violently as a pillar of fire, terrifyingly thick, wrenched up from underground and shot straight into the clouds, turning the night as bright as day.
A violent shockwave spread madly outward from the blast's center, and wherever it passed, rows upon rows of trees were snapped in half at the trunk and torn up by the roots.
On the ground, the two girls' eardrums ached from the shock, and they were nearly blown away by the blast wave; it was only by resisting with Cursed Energy that Mei Mei kept their bodies steady on the ground.
Facing the raging wind, Utahime struggled to lift her head and struggled to open her eyes.
She saw the sky-piercing pillar of fire utterly swallow the hole from which Cursed Spirits had been endlessly pouring, the densely packed horde of Cursed Spirits all reduced to ash and vapor.
The attack had targeted the [passage] beneath the hole; the explosion originated underground, so the entire stretch of ground bulged upward from the blast.
"This is way too insane—!!" Utahime screamed at the top of her lungs into the raging wind.
Was this really an attack a Jujutsu Sorcerer of their age group could produce?
She was practically about to burst into tears from fright!!
Even if there were a Cursed Spirit here at Special Grade strength, it would probably get one-shotted, wouldn't it?
I know you're a genius, but with power this monstrous, are you even going to let anyone else play?!
The wild wind still raged. Smoke and dust surged skyward, lingering for a long time.
Utahime and Mei Mei lay flat on the ground, neither daring to move a muscle. Only when the explosion's lingering fury gradually subsided did the two dare to slowly raise their heads.
They found the blue-haired girl—the instigator of it all—standing before them with a smile, half bent over, one hand braced on her knee and the other reaching out to them as if to help them up.
"Uh..." For a moment Utahime didn't know what to say; she could only give a crooked smile, reached out to grasp Mahiru's hand, and was hauled up off the ground in one pull. She was covered head to toe in dust.
Mei Mei got to her feet a step ahead of Utahime.
She gazed at the traces of the explosion not far off, the expression on her face no longer as composed as before.
"Ran-san..." She didn't even know how to put it. "You're... just too far beyond anyone's expectations."
The place Mahiru had bombarded had turned completely into a terrifyingly huge, deep crater. The woods all around had become scorched earth.
The Cursed Spirits had completely vanished, and the surging, filthy aura of Cursed Energy dispersed along with them.
The passage of the Culling Game leading into this world had been blasted to smithereens by a single shot of Mahiru's.
—That passage had never been very stable to begin with; now, having taken such a heavy blow, it naturally collapsed completely.
"Hm-hm? That did make quite a commotion." Mahiru, meanwhile, stood off to the side with a smile, hands clasped behind her back, her tone airy. "But really, it wasn't all that impressive."
Hearing this, Utahime nearly choked from indignation.
If this wasn't impressive, then nothing in this world was.
"Though this time it really was a bit much." Mahiru tapped her lips with a finger, pondering. "The house got blown clean away, and on top of that I forgot to set up a Barrier before the fight—everyone within a radius of tens of kilometers is definitely going to notice this explosion... So does that mean I've caused trouble? Will the principal punish me?"
Mei Mei and Utahime exchanged a glance, both giving crooked smiles.
Whether she'd be punished, who knew—but the Assistant Supervisor coming to clean up the aftermath would definitely have a head-splitting migraine.
And it was right at this moment that Mahiru suddenly went still.
Because a familiar and glaring aura of Cursed Energy had entered her perception.
She lifted her eyes and looked toward the horizon, where in the distance two figures were approaching at extreme speed, evidently drawn over by the explosion.
It was, of all people, Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto.
"Huh? It's you? Why is it you two?" The two figures landed, and Satoru Gojo recognized Utahime and Mei Mei at a glance, his face full of surprise and suspicion. "What are you two doing here? What on earth was that explosion just now?"
That explosion just now had been super over-the-top.
He and Suguru Geto, out on patrol searching for traces of the "Blue Existence," had seen the explosion and rushed straight over.
Had those two caused it? No—how could that be? Satoru Gojo knew Mei Mei and Utahime's power well.
So, if it wasn't the two of them, then the last remaining person here was...
Satoru Gojo's gaze slowly fell upon that beaming blue-haired girl. A head of eye-catching blue hair, a brand-new Kyoto school uniform... he'd never seen her before—a new student?
But in that very instant. On the surface, the other party's power seemed considerably weaker than his. Yet almost the moment their eyes met, every hair on Satoru Gojo's body stood on end.
Because he caught the scent of danger from her.
That aura was so thick that he almost instinctively cranked the Limitless defensive technique's output up to its absolute maximum.
"...Who are you?"
Satoru Gojo's voice was brimming with wariness.
____
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