"Huh? Then I'll call you Little Ume!"
Alluka tilted her head slightly, trying to grow closer to her new acquaintance with a touch of childish sweetness.
"Time to eat."
The white-haired boy turned away coldly. His lips moved a few times, his warm breath turning into thin, cold mist the moment it left them.
He hesitated for a few seconds, but gave no answer to the wealthy young girl rescued from a pile of corpses.
In the center of the temple's main hall, Sugawara Kazukazu and his men had built a small fire from dry branches.
The flames lit a corner of the darkness and drove away some of the winter chill.
"Here."
Seeing Uraume and Alluka approach one after the other, their captain, Sugawara Kazukazu, handed each of them a toasted flatbread.
The flatbread was very dry. Even toasted, it was difficult to swallow, but no one there complained.
In the firelight, Uraume lowered his eyes and took bite after bite of the food in his hands.
Unlike the others, who were older and had been conscripted before being shoved into this unit, he had awakened a cursed technique called Ice Formation while his family was moving some time ago.
Sugawara Kazukazu had happened to pass through their village. After hearing that a child with special abilities could fetch a great deal of money, his parents had sold him to Sugawara Kazukazu.
Someone with a cursed technique was different from an ordinary foot soldier. Sugawara Kazukazu had once spoken to him privately, saying that once this mission was over, he would recommend Uraume for a position with the main family.
But Uraume was not particularly happy.
He was still a child, yet he had seen far too many corpses along the way, more than half of them belonging to his companions. How long could any of them live?
As he gnawed on his flatbread, Uraume felt someone's gaze on him. He looked up and saw Alluka's eyes curve as she gave him a soft, thoroughly childish smile.
He froze for a moment, then lowered his head.
The fire kept crackling. The white-haired boy with no surname sat in a daze for a long time, unable to put his feelings into words.
In the latter half of the night, a cold wind blew through a hole in the shutter. Alluka lay sound asleep not far from the fire.
A piercing howl lent a sinister weight to the moonlit night.
An enormous dark shape gradually approached their resting place.
Rustling broke out in the hall, and everyone who heard the disturbance scrambled up.
Uraume grabbed Alluka, who had no ability to fight, and hoisted her up. The black-haired girl rubbed her sleepy eyes in confusion.
The next second, an enormous monster burst through the door.
Countless holes pitted the monster's purplish-black skin. Its four thick arms held several white human bones speckled with blood, and its nostrils flared violently, as though searching for living people.
Once it found them, the monster reached toward the crowd with its sharp claws.
"Blood... flesh..."
It drooled, eager to swallow the delicious humans before it.
A nauseating stench spread through the space with its movements. The Sugawara Clan's soldiers hurriedly grabbed their weapons and began hurling them at the monster.
In the Heian Era, curses ran rampant.
They were already familiar with scenes like this.
The thing before them was a curse born from ordinary people's negative emotions.
Apart from a jujutsu sorcerer's cursed energy, only weapons imbued with cursed energy could exorcise a curse.
But very few people in their unit could use cursed energy.
Hiding behind Uraume, Alluka stared blankly as a group of men charged forward with katanas. In a single instant, an enormous bluish-black hand pierced their bodies one after another.
Those men had been laughing and joking with her only hours ago.
"Hide behind the cabinet. No matter what you hear, don't come out."
"Little Ume, I..."
Before Alluka could finish, Uraume hurriedly pushed her toward the back of the main hall.
Uraume's slender fingers moved. With a sweep of his sleeve, he formed a hand sign, gathering shards of ice in his palm before flinging them at the monster.
The ice struck the curse's bluish-purple skin, raising a cloud of white vapor.
The curse slowed a little, but never stopped. It opened its bloody maw, seized the nearest man, and tossed him into its mouth.
Crunch, crunch.
The spine-chilling sound of chewing was especially grating in the dark of night.
The curse flung the headless corpse onto the ground. A large pool of thick blood slowly spread toward Sugawara Kazukazu.
He stood frozen for a few seconds, then flew into a towering rage.
"Damn you!"
Unlike the others, he was a true member of the Sugawara Clan, a jujutsu sorcerer whose strength ranked around the middle of the family.
The fact that he had been sent on this mission meant his father's branch was not the one that held power in the clan. But he could not bear to watch a curse devour his subordinates before his eyes.
He tightened his grip on his cursed tool and shot toward the curse like an arrow.
His cursed tool had been made by one of the clan's cursed tool smiths. Its added effect was "bleeding." Even the smallest cut from it would bleed endlessly unless treated by a Reverse Cursed Technique User.
The cursed tool's effect might have been useful against jujutsu sorcerers, but against curses, it was of little use.
Veins bulged beneath Sugawara Kazukazu's skin, yet his blade could not cut through the curse's hide.
The cursed energy scattering from him and the curse blasted the main hall's blue bricks into a ring of craters.
When the curse knocked him down again, sending him crashing through a pillar and coughing up a mouthful of blood, Sugawara Kazukazu seized the moment when Uraume attacked with his cursed technique to unleash his own.
Jujutsu sorcerers' cursed techniques took several forms. His released the restraints on his own body, greatly enhancing his physical abilities, but each use consumed his future lifespan and health.
Sugawara Kazukazu normally disliked using his cursed technique. But in this situation, every one of them would die here if he did not.
The clan's unit of jujutsu sorcerers would not catch up with them for another three days. Perhaps they really were cannon fodder.
With his restraints released, his physical abilities rose by more than one level. Yet things did not go quite as he had expected.
The curse before him was far stronger than any opponent he had fought before.
As the seconds ticked by, Sugawara Kazukazu's body began to give out. His chest collapsed like a deflating balloon, and his consciousness began to blur.
When he used the last of his strength to crush the curse's skull, great sheets of purplish-black blood rained down onto him and Uraume.
It was like a grotesque shower of blood.
Sugawara Kazukazu fell from high in the air, landing amid a jumble of rubble.
His exhausted body was like that of an old man on the brink of death. Even his breath carried a faint scent of blood.
Trembling, he clasped Uraume's hand.
"I'm sorry. I may not be able to take you to the Sugawara Clan."
He struggled to breathe, his throat burning with pain.
If a Reverse Cursed Technique User were here, his body might still have been saved. But Reverse Cursed Technique Users were far too precious. A unit of expendable soldiers like theirs did not deserve one.
Looking at Sugawara Kazukazu in this state, Uraume did not know what to say.
Everything had happened so suddenly that he had not had time to react.
Seeing Sugawara Kazukazu's breathing weaken, Alluka hurried over and knelt before him, asking softly:
"Sugawara Kazukazu, could you hold my hand?"
The instant she spoke, a thick, cold, sinister presence settled over Sugawara Kazukazu.
Uraume looked up uneasily.
The child with those innocent eyes had lost all her earlier softness. Now she seemed like an eerie, sinister monster.