Night fell quickly. There was no moon tonight—only a thick layer of storm clouds piled on top of one another like mountains heaped upon mountains, dense and low along the horizon, looking as if they might come crashing down at any moment.
It was going to rain.
Junpei hated rain.
He didn't own anything suitable to wear for mourning, so he'd opened his mother's closet and put on the first thing he saw. He boarded the train the way he always did, moved through the crowd the way he always did. He hadn't brought an umbrella, so he hated rain.
People tend to lack something, and then take it out on something else entirely. He thought about that often.
He didn't know what he himself lacked. But lately he hated everything: hated that day, hated the sky that looked ready to fall, hated the rain, hated the cold droplets, hated the face of every person walking toward him, hated their easy laughter, hated their nauseating smiles.
It's precisely because life is ordinary that you should live it earnestly—meticulously, without cutting corners.
Who had said that again?
He despised that line from the bottom of his heart. Despised ordinary life. Despised his own unremarkable self.
The rain that had been building across half the sky finally came down—an ocean dumped from above. Transparent curtains of water engulfed all of Tokyo in an instant. Neon lights bled into vague, ambiguous colors behind the downpour. Pedestrians quickened their pace, hurrying home.
Only Junpei remained on the street. The rain soaked him through, plastering his hair to his face. He didn't know where to go.
"Hey there."
He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned reflexively. A strange man stood behind him.
The man's skin was pale—not the pale of poor health, but the bleached white of something pickled in formaldehyde. His face looked stitched together, seams running in every direction.
"My name is Mahito. And yours... hmm, let me think." The stitched-faced man scratched the back of his head, then snapped his fingers. "Junpei, right?"
Under Junpei's bewildered gaze, Mahito smiled cheerfully.
"Nice to meet you. I hope we get along."
Raindrops struck the corner of a wall and burst into white ripples like tiny blossoming flowers. Ten thousand drops fell together, ten thousand ripples spread at once, ten thousand little flowers blooming.
This sudden downpour had turned the cold, narrow alley into a sea of flowers.
Third person on the left is a Window... roughly two hundred meters ahead, a faint Cursed Energy fluctuation—likely a Grade 2 sorcerer. Inside the café at the street corner, two Grade 3 sorcerers are sitting around, clearly slacking off on the job.
This was everything Nanami Kira observed through Killer Queen's vantage point.
He wholeheartedly admired the latter two.
Their resolve put him in a good mood.
He wouldn't use the Standard Infiltration Method this time. He'd take the unorthodox route.
Standard Infiltration Method: kill every witness.
Unorthodox Infiltration Method: carefully slip past everyone.
Kira suppressed his Cursed Energy, smoothing it down until it was nearly imperceptible, and walked forward calmly. As he passed a shop corner, he plucked a black straight-handled umbrella from a stand, opened it, and shielded himself from the rain.
Drops pattered against the umbrella, trickled along the rim, and gathered into a single heavy bead at the tip. It hung there, swelling, then finally fell with a crisp plip.
Kira liked the sound of rain hitting the ground. It reminded him of the steady click-click of clipping his nails—the same satisfying regularity. It calmed him.
Hoshino Ei's goal was now perfectly clear.
Destroy his quiet life. A fugitive's life was anything but quiet.
There was only one way to break through: find Cursed Spirit X. Those monsters were Cursed Spirit X's creations, and wherever the spirit went, there would likely be more of them in tow. Catch one, hand it over to the school.
Combined with the reputation he'd carefully built over the years and his role in saving Kyoto, shaking off suspicion wasn't impossible. That was his thinking.
Cursed Spirit X's trail could be guessed at.
It had crossed paths with Kira in only two places: the cinema and Crow Town.
Junpei's mother had been killed. That detail caught Kira's interest.
Why was it Junpei's mother who died, and not Junpei himself?
If the aim was intimidation—or framing someone—killing Junpei would have been the better choice. That could be spun as silencing a witness. So why the mother?
As established earlier, Junpei had talent.
But whether it was jujutsu or the Arrow, both required intense emotion and willpower as fuel. And hatred—hatred gave a person the most burning passion and the most unwavering purpose.
Cursed Spirit X wanted to indulge its twisted sense of amusement. It wanted to use hatred to turn Junpei into a Curse User.
So monitoring Junpei was the best approach.
But for some reason, Kira was already growing tired of this.
The tangled thoughts in his head piled up like loose straw heaped together—higher and higher. Sooner or later, a stray spark from who-knew-where would set the whole thing ablaze.
And not even Kira himself knew what he would do on the day he finally ignited.
Irritation.
Irritation.
Can only killing solve this?
Only killing can solve this.
Cursed Spirit X. Cursed Spirit X.
The umbrella tilted upward, revealing Kira's calm face and a smile so flat it was unsettling.
"Cursed Spirit X... heh. I hope you're a beautiful girl with beautiful hands."
Fate, it seemed, was on Nanami Kira's side.
Right there in front of him, beneath the torrential rain, a white-haired man tapped Junpei on the shoulder. The aura radiating from him made Kira's skin crawl on instinct. But what disgusted him most were those hands—covered in stitching scars.
Everything Hoshino Ei had predicted came true. Kira despised Mahito on sight.
To Nanami Kira, those grotesque stitch marks, that bizarre patchwork, that corpse-white skin—they formed a pair of revolting hands. Worse than Sukuna's, by several degrees.
His expression twisted with distaste, contorting the way Stray Cat's face did after being fed his special homemade cat food.
Endure it.
Endure it.
He watched Mahito and Junpei talking. The distance was too great, the rain too loud—the words came through as nothing but muffled noise.
He saw Mahito pat Junpei's shoulder, murmur something consoling, then turn and walk into a dark alley.
Junpei followed, step for step. The shadows of the alley crept over his face.
Once they'd gone far enough, Kira walked calmly to the mouth of the alley. Killer Queen materialized beside him, left arm raised. A small, pale-blue tank launched forward.
"Cursed Spirit X... Mahito, is it."
Kira smiled faintly. Darkness fell across half his face, giving him an eerie look.