"You... what are you doing here?"
Satoru Gojo stared at Tengen, who had suddenly appeared, and asked an utterly innocent question. Yet that very innocence made the corners of Tengen's mouth twitch violently.
She had been living peacefully in her own Tombs of the Star Corridor when this man's older sister suddenly stormed up to her. Barely a few words had passed before a knife-hand strike knocked her unconscious and she was stuffed into a sack.
When she woke, she was bound inside a secret chamber in the Gojo Clan estate, surrounded by all manner of barriers and seals.
A dark chamber. Confining barriers.
Even after Tengen threw everything she had into breaking the chamber's barriers and seals, finally escaping to glimpse rays of light that almost seemed like a hallucination, one Gojo Clan guard after another appeared before her.
Had she not happened to run into Yuta Okkotsu and Shoko Ieiri on their way here while she was being escorted back into confinement, and talked her way out with every ounce of persuasion she could muster, she would still be lying in that secret chamber.
Of course, Tengen understood that Chinatsu had confined her for her protection. At first, she had even planned to stay in the chamber until Chinatsu came to collect her.
But as the seconds and minutes passed, Tengen's keen perception of cursed energy told her that the perilous situation throughout the country, despite appearing to ease slightly, was actually growing more dangerous. There was no way she could remain safely in the rear, calm and composed.
Yet the sight before her made her, who had come intending to help, seem so weak and powerless. Merely standing at the edge of this battlefield left her trembling.
"Unlike when my own Immortality Technique forced me to evolve,