Blessings for Dear Friends

Kyoto afternoons were supposed to be peaceful.

Yet in the corridor leading to Mechamaru's secret compartment, the air had frozen into an icy mosaic.

Mizuki Makoto walked at the front with a stiff expression fit for a funeral. Beside him, Utahime Iori supported her forehead with one hand, wearing the speechless look of someone wondering what sins she had committed in a past life to deserve teaching this bunch of students. Her steps were as heavy as if she were heading off to defuse a bomb.

Behind them lay the real battlefield.

"Mizuki is an idiot... I'm an idiot... Mai is a huge idiot..."

Miwa Kasumi's face was far beyond merely red at this point. She was an overheating nuclear tomato ready to explode at any moment. She hung her head, wishing she could bury it in her chest. Her shame had nearly sent her soul flying out of her body, and her only outlet was to mechanically ram her elbow into the person beside her over and over.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

"Ow... that hurts, Miwa. Go a little easier on me."

Zenin Mai made meaningless, perfunctory cries while tightly covering her mouth. The smug delight of her prank succeeding was practically spilling through her fingers. Even as the elbow strikes made her stagger, her foxlike eyes still gleamed with unmistakable pleasure.

The door opened, and a strong smell of medicine and machine oil rushed out.

In the bathtub, Kokichi Muta slowly turned his bloodshot eyes toward them.

The instant he saw Mizuki Makoto, his cursed energy nearly surged exponentially, and the mechanical parts around him screeched with harsh metallic friction.

"Mizuki Makoto... you bastard..." Mechamaru's voice was hoarse with overwhelming resentment. "Did you come here on purpose... to laugh at a failure hiding in a dark corner? Miwa... she actually did that for me..."

He had clearly seen the blurry scene from last night, when she had been "dragged into the room," and had likely filled in an entire three-hundred-thousand-word tragic romance in his head.

"W-Wait! Mechamaru! It's not what you think!" At the doorway, Miwa Kasumi's brain, already at its limit from blushing so hard, completely crashed after hearing that.

The last shred of her sanity snapped at that moment. Amid a burst of steam-like white smoke, Miwa Kasumi let out a mournful cry:

"Mechamaru is an idiot—! A complete idiot—!!"

Then, covering her face, the girl vanished in a whirlwind down the end of the corridor at a speed worthy of the Olympic hundred-meter dash.

"Had enough?" Mizuki Makoto walked expressionlessly to the bathtub, hands in his pockets, his tone as calm as an insurance salesman's. "Listen, Kokichi Muta. I don't owe you any favors. You didn't even show your face the last time. The reason I'm here is because you should thank Todo, Utahime-sensei, Kamo Noritoshi, Nishimiya Momo, Miwa, Mai, and the others."

Mizuki Makoto raised his right hand, and pale blue technique patterns surfaced in his palm.

—This was the technique he had "devoured" from Ashiya Dōman: Soul-Flesh Separation.

"Using this technique, I examined your soul. Now I have two options for you. Choose one yourself."

Mizuki Makoto held up two fingers.

Option one: I remove the excessive "something" from your soul, cutting off the foundation of your Heavenly Restriction. With Utahime-sensei's help, at one treatment per week, it would probably take around ten years. You'd have a healthy body—or perhaps not quite so healthy—but you'd be able to stand in the sun and embrace others. The price is that your cursed energy would drop to Mai's level, or even lower.

Option two: completely accept your Heavenly Restriction. I'll remove the burden of this useless flesh and completely solidify your soul within the cursed corpse. You'll gain even greater cursed energy, but I can't guarantee what will happen afterward.

The room fell into deathly silence.

—A healthy body. It was the dream he had pursued for over a decade while hiding in darkness, even going so far as to make deals with curses.

More importantly, after hearing that cry of "idiot" just now, he wanted more than ever to use warm hands to hold onto the girl who had run away.

"...I choose the first one." Mechamaru's voice trembled with a relieved sort of "selfishness." "I want to be an ordinary person... I want to personally... put a coat around her shoulders."

"So you mean you want to strip off Miwa's clothes one piece at a time first, then slowly lick every inch of her body, and finally ■■ her, then ■■, maybe even ■■, right? What a desperate pervert—got it. I'll pass that along to Miwa and Kusakabe-sensei."

"Wait, no! That's not it!"

After the first treatment ended, Mizuki Makoto pushed open the door and let out a long breath.

Mai was leaning against the corridor wall, casually playing with a voice recorder in her hand.

"Well?" The vicious woman glanced sideways at him, her tone as cutting as ever. "Doctor Mizuki, did you feel the holy light of saving a life?"

"I didn't see any holy light. I only saw someone's conscience get carried off by a dog." Mizuki Makoto rolled his eyes at her, then changed the subject and leaned closer, lowering his voice. "Hey, you recorded Mechamaru's little 'loser speech' and Miwa's 'idiot confession' just now, right?"

Mai's lips instantly curved upward, revealing a sly expression that said, You get me.

"Of course. You know, right?"

"Yeah, I know." He nodded, displaying an exceptionally rotten grin. "Keep it. At their wedding, we'll play it on loop as the background music."

"My thoughts exactly."

The two shameless conspirators exchanged a look, then simultaneously let out the low, sinister laughter unique to villainous characters.

—You really couldn't get two kinds of people from the same bed. Whether it was the "selfish" idiot in the bathtub and the innocent tomato outside, or Mai and me, two utterly hopelessly immoral sorcerers.

"...You two, don't you think you've gone far enough?!!!"

Behind them, Utahime Iori, who had witnessed the entire treatment—and the conspiracy—finally couldn't take it anymore.

She frantically ruffled her hair and let out the most despairing roar Kyoto Jujutsu High had heard since its founding. Striding forward, she grabbed Mai by the back of her collar like a kitten and forcibly pulled her away from Mizuki Makoto.

"Mai! Didn't I tell you to stay away from that bastard Gojo Satoru's student?" As Utahime dragged the "obedient" Mai away, she turned back and shot him a vicious glare. "Look at this! That scumbag teacher has turned perfectly good children into what? Rotten personalities like this are contagious!"

Mizuki Makoto shrugged. Watching Utahime-sensei's retreating figure as she angrily dumped the blame on Gojo Satoru, he found his mood inexplicably lighter.

Back in his room, he opened the slightly worn sketchbook.

A light rain had begun to fall over Kyoto outside the window, washing the dust from the ancient land. Mizuki Makoto sat at the desk, his pen moving across the slightly rough paper. First, he casually drew a simple dog head in the corner, adding several lines representing markers beside it. Then he drew a chibi figure with a ponytail, waving a long sword.

He remembered the warmth of Maki's foot on his face, Miwa's blush that had nearly set the air ablaze, Mechamaru's almost humble longing for sunlight beneath his bandages, and the voice recorder in Mai's hand, filled with "malicious amusement."

In this twisted world of jujutsu, talent was a shackle, and giftedness was a curse—the higher one stood, the more one lived like a cold statue of a god, stripped away layer by layer by responsibility, solitude, and fate. Life itself seemed to be a grand and painful practice filled with deprivation and loss.

But Mizuki Makoto slowly lifted his pen and wrote the final note at the bottom of the blank page.

[Life is a pilgrimage of suffering.]

[But this is by no means a story of death and severance.]

[It is a tale of love and hope.]

[Therefore, my friends, I offer you my blessings.]

Volume Two: Tokyo-Kyoto Sister School Exchange Event, Complete.

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