Your Name Is Long Xi?

Elsewhere, unlike Long Xi, who was locked in fierce combat...

Yuta Okkotsu, who had originally intended to play the heavy truck and flatten every speed bump in his path, instead ran into Chiharu Takayanagi and her group.

Yuta Okkotsu helped the last civilian behind a wall.

The soles of the person's shoes had worn through, blood seeped from their feet, and they held a little girl who had cried herself voiceless.

The surrounding buildings leaned at precarious angles, and broken glass covered half the street.

"Don't look back yet." Yuta Okkotsu took off his coat and draped it over the little girl, keeping his voice very low.

"Follow this road. There's a safe place ahead... I'll protect you when you get there..."

Yuta Okkotsu looked at the filthy, bedraggled group before him. Although they were safe now, his expression still hadn't relaxed.

"Miss Takayanagi..."

"How many people are still back there?"

Chiharu Takayanagi stood behind Yuta Okkotsu. She wasn't in good shape either. Although everyone had managed to escape, they had still encountered cursed spirits along the way.

And because of that... she had lost her left hand...

"Seven. If you can..."

"Please, you have to save them!"

Yuta Okkotsu said nothing. He simply looked at Chiharu Takayanagi before finally turning away, unable to bear it.

If the one hunting them was that Special Grade Sorcerer, then after all this time...

There was no way they were still alive...

Even with his five senses enhanced and every ounce of effort poured into them, Yuta Okkotsu could only sense one source of cursed energy.

Dhruv Lakdawalla's cursed energy.

Long Xi... if you really are the guy who mysteriously disappeared after enrolling...

Then please disappear one more time...

Just don't die...

Yuta Okkotsu looked toward the distant wreckage of the battle. Smoke still rose from multiple spots throughout the scorched neighborhood.

When he had first heard that name, he hadn't been sure.

He couldn't confirm whether this was the person he remembered only by name. There had indeed once been a younger student at Jujutsu High with that name.

That kid had disappeared very suddenly.

Back then, Gojo had kicked the meeting room door to pieces. For several days afterward, he had barely smiled and hardly touched even his desserts.

Whenever Principal Yaga brought it up, he simply told everyone to shut up. But amid everyone's speculation...

The higher-ups had always ended up taking the blame. Poor bastards.

Although Gojo had searched tirelessly, with the principal helping him, that younger student had vanished without a trace.

Everyone had thought he was already dead...

They had never expected to hear that name again in a place like this.

"Please..."

"Please trust me... Miss Takayanagi..."

Chiharu Takayanagi hesitated, looking back at the crowd that had already fully evacuated. She nodded silently and followed them out.

Everyone's gone now...

Yuta Okkotsu tightened his grip on his sword, his knuckles turning white.

His perpetually apologetic expression vanished, leaving only a composure so intent it was almost frightening.

"Please, Long Xi..."

Before his words had faded, a silent ring of cursed energy erupted in the distance.

There were no flames, nor was there any light.

The air had been crushed from within.

With the distant parking lot at its center, everything within dozens of meters first caved inward, then silently disintegrated.

Concrete walls, steel reinforcement bars, billboards, wrecked vehicles-even the dust hanging in midair was compressed into powder too fine to see.

A second later, violent winds rushed back in.

Everyone was blown backward.

Okkotsu raised an arm to block the oncoming wave of dust, his sleeve snapping in the wind. As he looked at the distant neighborhood that had been forcibly wiped flat, he froze for a rare moment.

This kind of destruction...

It wasn't simply an outpouring of cursed energy.

It forced power inside its targets, then made them collapse from the inside out. Even he had rarely seen an attack so clean it was brutal.

Something like this... who on earth had done it?

At the center of the battlefield.

Dhruv Lakdawalla stood before a broken half-wall, his cane still raised. His body didn't fall immediately.

Because Void hadn't blasted him away. It had bloomed inside him.

His chest had collapsed, his ribs shattered into tiny white splinters, and his abdomen had caved inward into a horrific hollow.

The old man's mouth hung open, blood still clinging to the tip of his tongue. He seemed to be trying to utter some ancient cursed speech, but only a broken breath escaped his throat.

The most ridiculous part was his expression.

A moment earlier, he had still been fleeing for his life, calculating, using his shikigami to buy time.

A moment later, nothing remained on his face but bewilderment.

It was the bewilderment of someone who had lived far too long, discovering for the first time that he, too, could die.

His dark pupils dilated slightly, and his lips trembled twice, as though he refused to accept that a seventeen-year-old junior had caught him, that a young man he should have been able to crush effortlessly had crushed him instead.

Long Xi stood a short distance away, his hand still held in a closing gesture.

"Old bastard."

He lowered his hand, his chest heaving heavily. Blood and burns overlapped across his body, yet his voice was frighteningly steady.

"In your next life, remember to run faster when you see me..."

Dhruv Lakdawalla's knees finally buckled.

Even as he fell, his face remained turned toward Long Xi.

Dust covered half of that aged face. On the other half, resentment, terror, and incomprehension had frozen in place.

If there were one way to describe his expression now, it would probably be Jogo facing Satoru Gojo...

Did it feel good?

Killing his enemy, winning this battle?

Did it feel satisfying?

Long Xi thought it felt pretty good. Killing an enemy he knew really did put him at ease, no matter when it happened.

But once the satisfaction passed, the heaviness in his chest remained.

Kawahara and the others weren't coming back.

That was the shittiest part.

So shitty that he didn't even have the energy to complain, "System, the after-sales support for this instance is fucking dead."

Footsteps came from beyond the dust cloud.

Long Xi looked up.

A white uniform, a long sword, and that ring on his hand.

Yuta Okkotsu stopped several dozen meters away. He first looked at Dhruv Lakdawalla's corpse, then at the neighborhood that had been all but erased.

He didn't approach immediately.

That distance wasn't hostility, but the instinctive caution of a Special Grade Sorcerer facing an unknown powerhouse.

"You're..."

Long Xi spoke first.

"Did you get those people out?"

Yuta Okkotsu hadn't expected that to be his first question.

He paused for half a second, then slowly nodded.

"Everyone who was alive has evacuated to safety. A few Assistant Supervisors are there to receive them, too. The civilians are safe for now..."

Long Xi's shoulders relaxed.

He reversed his grip on his broken sword and drove it into the ground, then sat on a chunk of rubble, letting out a blood-tinged breath.

"That's good."

Yuta Okkotsu looked at him, dropped his guard completely, and slowly walked toward him.

"You're Long Xi, right?"

Long Xi looked up, a rare trace of genuine bewilderment appearing in his eyes.

"You know me?"

"I heard Gojo mention you before," Okkotsu said gently. "After you disappeared, he searched for a long time. It's been half a year now, hasn't it...?"

Long Xi fell silent.

Disappeared? Half a year?

That couldn't be right. Wasn't this supposed to be an instance?

If what he said was true, and Long Xi had already been missing for half a year...

Then that meant...

This instance was actually connected to things I'd done before?

The system never said anything about that!!!

When would this thing become even a little reliable?

In a certain sense, probably not in this lifetime.

Long Xi wiped the blood from his chin with the back of his hand and tugged at the corner of his mouth.

His mind raced. What excuse should he make up? Or should he not bother making one up at all?

"It's a long story, and it'll really sound like I'm making it up... If you're not in a hurry to cut me down, can we find somewhere safer to talk?"

Okkotsu glanced at Dhruv Lakdawalla's corpse, then at the wounds on Long Xi's body that were healing.

"I won't cut you down."

Yuta Okkotsu paused, then added,

"At least, not right now."

Long Xi: "..."

"In a certain sense, you really are pretty similar to Satoru Gojo."

"When it comes to having 'no' emotional intelligence..."

Yuta Okkotsu was left momentarily speechless.

Only after confirming that Long Xi still had the strength to joke did his tense shoulders relax a little.

But looking at the circle of death cleared out by Void, he still couldn't fully calm down.

Gojo had once said that Long Xi was strange.

Now, it seemed that strange no longer covered it.

He was absurd.

With the parking lot at its center, almost everything within a radius of dozens of meters had been ground to powder, save for the few meters immediately surrounding Long Xi.