Deep in the mountains, far from the noise of Tokyo, the first winds of spring moved through the forest with a low, restless sound.
Touma Hayase stood in a clearing and watched the two Divine Dogs work.
The black one and the white one tore into the packed earth with heavy claws, dirt spraying everywhere as they dug out a grave. They looked almost ridiculous doing something this mundane, huge shikigami built like guardian statues, but they did the job fast.
Beside the pit lay a corpse.
Toji Fushiguro.
The Sorcerer Killer.
Touma crouched beside the body and held one hand over it. A faint shimmer of cursed energy flickered at his fingertips as he tried one last time to use Phantom Night Parade to probe deeper, to pull something, anything, from that absurd body.
Nothing.
Same result as every other time.
It was like dropping a pebble into a bottomless sea and waiting for a sound that never came back.
Still, that was more or less what he'd expected.
Heavenly Restriction wasn't a normal cursed technique to begin with. And Toji's version of it, that complete absence of cursed energy in exchange for a body pushed beyond human limits, made him a total blank to Touma's technique. There was nothing to catch. Nothing to copy. Toji's strength had never come from some trick or hidden formula. It was just his body, forced to an insane extreme by the rules of the world.
Touma let his hand fall and opened his eyes.
He looked down at the man he'd killed himself.
Before bringing the body here, he'd taken the time to reattach the severed head, stitch things up, clean away the worst of it. It hadn't mattered in any practical sense. The man was dead. Long dead. But Touma still hadn't wanted to bury him in pieces.
It was the least he could do.
No matter how filthy Toji's reputation was, no matter how many people he'd butchered for money, he was still Megumi Fushiguro's father.
Touma was quiet for a long moment.
So. Is this what revenge is supposed to feel like?
In all those brutal simulation runs, Toji had killed him over and over without hesitation. If Touma hadn't had Linked False Bodies in that last round, none of his planning would have meant a damn thing. Toji would have found him and killed him anyway. That monster instinct of his had been that bad.
And in the original timeline, this same man would have stabbed Satoru Gojo through the throat, shot Riko Amanai in the head without even blinking, and left Suguru Geto broken in the aftermath. From there, the whole future would start curdling into disaster.
So yeah, Touma had reasons. More than enough.
But standing here in front of the fresh grave, he didn't feel satisfied.
Not even close.
What he felt instead was tired. Bone-deep tired. Sad, too, in a way that sat ugly in his chest.
He looked at Toji's face one last time at the bottom of the pit. Eyes closed. Mouth still carrying that same faint, mocking slant, like death hadn't managed to fully erase the attitude.
It made Touma think of a child born with absurd talent who got twisted little by little by the jujutsu world until there was nothing decent left. One wrong turn after another. One rotten hand dealt after another. And eventually the bill came due.
The whole thing just felt... lousy.
I really do have limits.
There were too many moments where his hands couldn't reach far enough.
This wasn't the Simulator. This wasn't a fake world where failure meant hitting reset and trying again.
This was real. One way only.
People he couldn't save were dying every day in this world, dragged under by curses, and there was no magical rollback waiting for him after the fact.
At the same time, he couldn't play saint. He couldn't throw innocent people onto the scale just so he could pat himself on the back for showing mercy. He couldn't stand on some fake moral high ground and forgive a man drenched in blood.
So this was it.
Death. A clean stop. The end of Toji Fushiguro as a curse user, and the end of the path that would have led to something far worse.
It was cruel.
It was also, in Touma's mind, the last bit of mercy he could offer.
"Bury him."
At the quiet command, the Divine Dogs immediately got to work, shoving the loose dirt back into the pit with their noses and paws. A few minutes later, the grave was nothing more than a plain mound in the mountain soil.
Touma picked up a flat stone, ran cursed energy through Asakirimaru, and carved two shallow characters into the surface.
[Fushiguro]
That was all.
No full name. No epitaph. No attempt to dress it up.
Whatever unfinished business still clung to this man could wait until later, until everything else was over, until the world had finally dragged itself to dawn.
With that done, Touma turned and looked at the patch of open ground nearby.
Something there was trembling hard enough to shake the grass.
A cursed spirit lay curled up on itself, looking like some disgusting mix between a giant caterpillar and a human infant's face stitched onto the front.
The Inventory Curse.
Toji's old storage spirit.
It had clearly tried to run. Didn't work.
The white Divine Dog had its tail clenched between its jaws, while the black one stood over its face with bared teeth and a low growl that basically said one more move and you're dead.
Touma walked over and looked down at it.
He had zero intention of keeping the thing for himself.
For one, going into battle with an ugly worm wrapped around his body was not happening. He had standards.
For another, the concealment effect from system skills like Natural only applied to him. Not to extra equipment. Not to a cursed spirit hanging off him. Carrying this thing around would just create exposure problems for no real gain.
And more importantly, with how Phantom Night Parade worked, there was no chance he was going to waste ongoing effort on Cursed Spirit Manipulation or keep stuffing the thing into the Ten Shadows Technique just so he could use it as a glorified walking storage box.
That was backward thinking.
Empty it out and hand it to Geto later, Touma decided. A utility-type cursed spirit like this is basically catnip for him.
Unfortunately, this one was another dead end for analysis.
Just like Toji's body, the Inventory Curse's storage wasn't really a cursed technique in the usual sense. It was closer to a biological trait. Phantom Night Parade couldn't pull apart its internal structure any more than it could copy Heavenly Restriction.
Touma gestured, and the Divine Dogs finally let go.
Then he leaned down and gave the spirit's grotesque baby-face head a light pat.
Maybe it sensed the killing intent coming off him, colder and heavier than anything Toji had ever directed at it. Maybe it was just smart enough to know when it had already lost. Either way, the curse cooperated immediately.
It opened its huge toothless mouth and started retching things up.
Touma watched the pile grow and started taking stock.
There were four cursed tools giving off especially nasty waves of cursed energy, each one valuable enough to make most sorcerers lose their minds.
First was a short blade with a strange forked tip.
The special grade cursed tool, Inverted Spear of Heaven.
That one didn't need much introduction. It forcibly canceled active cursed techniques. In the simulation timelines, it had come very close to sending even Satoru Gojo straight to hell.
Second was a black chain that seemed to go on forever.
The Chain of a Thousand Miles.
As long as one end stayed out of sight, the other end could keep extending almost without limit. Logic not included.
Third came a three-section staff made of dark red segments.
Playful Cloud.
Another special grade cursed tool, but unlike the others, there was no trick to it. No built-in technique. No special effect. It was just raw physical destruction pushed to the extreme. Its power scaled with the user. In Toji's hands, it had basically been a portable wrecking bar.
Last was a slim katana that gave off a chill just from looking at it.
The Split Soul Katana.
Its effect was disgusting. It ignored physical toughness and cut the soul directly, which made most conventional defenses pretty much meaningless.
Those were bad enough.
What gave Touma an actual headache was everything else the Inventory Curse coughed up after them.
Guns.
Modern firearms, all of them reeking of oil and gunpowder. Several customized handguns. A large-caliber sniper rifle. A ridiculous amount of ammunition.
Cursed tools, he could maybe explain away if somebody from the school spotted them. Not easily, but maybe.
Walking around with enough firepower to equip a small mercenary team was a lot harder to hand-wave.
Still, Touma's eyes narrowed a little.
These things mattered too.
As props, if nothing else.
They were solid proof that the professional killer called Toji Fushiguro had really existed in this world.
After counting everything, Touma didn't take any of it for himself.
Instead, he told the Inventory Curse to open up again and swallow the whole pile back down, cursed tools, guns, ammo, all of it.
When it finished, he crouched in front of it and met its eyes.
"Behave," he said flatly. "I'll find you a new home soon. Until then, don't try anything stupid. Not once. Got it?"
Whether the low-grade cursed spirit truly understood human speech or just understood death standing right in front of it, the outcome was the same.
It obeyed.
The thing opened its mouth, bit down on its own tail, and started swallowing itself piece by piece. Its huge body shrank smaller and smaller until all that was left was a gray-brown ball about the size of a ping-pong ball.
Touma picked it up, dropped it into his coat pocket, and started walking off beneath the darkening sky.