[Kiyotaka Ijichi led Jujutsu High's logistical and medical personnel to the rooftop with unprecedented efficiency.]
[After briefly and quickly briefing Ijichi on the situation and watching the medical personnel carefully wrap the two transfigured humans in barriers of highly concentrated cursed energy, barely sustaining their rapidly fading vital signs, you did not waste another second.]
[You leaped off the building like a ghost, weaving through the shadows of Tokyo's dark alleys as you followed a faint trail of "cursed residue" in the air, imperceptible to ordinary people and carrying a nauseating sense of sliminess.]
[Eventually, the cursed residue led you to a foul-smelling sewer entrance on the edge of an abandoned industrial district.]
[You stopped, standing silently outside the rusty iron bars.]
[The sewer entrance resembled the gaping, abyssal maw of a monstrous beast, devouring all the surrounding light.]
[Even without venturing inside, merely standing at the entrance, your extraordinary senses, passively amplified through "bone conduction" far beyond those of ordinary people, still conveyed the faintest movements deep within the sewer to your brain with perfect clarity through vibrations in the surface rock.]
[Those were exceedingly strange, distorted "footsteps."]
[One set sounded wet and erratic, unmistakably the sound of a "four-legged" creature crawling through sewage; the other was extremely heavy and slow, as though each step required dragging an immense weight.]
[It was not just footsteps.]
[Amid those eerie scraping and splashing sounds, even standing outside, you could clearly hear intermittent murmurs coming from the darkness below.]
[They were indistinct human words forced through severely distorted vocal cords. Though you could not make out the exact words, the despair and numbness within them pierced your ears like steel needles.]
[You were all too familiar with those sounds.]
[The instant you heard them, your meticulous reasoning had already reached a conclusion: