Honestly, when Mahiko had first started sifting through the shikigami options, she'd genuinely thought every single one of them looked pretty good.
She had to admit it — the Ten Shadows Technique was something else. A truly exceptional piece of jujutsu.
Every shikigami had its own distinct character. Its own strengths. Pick any one of them and you could make a case for it on its own merits — and she had. She'd turned each option over carefully, thought it through from every angle, weighed the pros and cons with real deliberation.
And in the end, she'd crossed them all off the list.
Because every last one of them shared the same fatal flaw.
They only had one life.
Yep. That was it. Dead is dead. Gone is gone. Use it up and it's over.
It was the universal disease of every shikigami in the Ten Shadows Technique — the one problem that applied across the board without exception. Once a shikigami was completely destroyed, it could never be summoned again. Permanent. Gone forever.
Now, for a Ten Shadows practitioner, losing a shikigami wasn't necessarily a catastrophe — because the Technique came with a built-in compensation mechanism. When a shikigami was destroyed, its power merged into the surviving ones, inherited by whatever remained. The fewer shikigami left standing, the stronger each individual one became.
A perfectly reasonable system. On Fushiguro Maki, it worked just fine.
But on Mahiko, it meant absolutely nothing.
She could only learn one shikigami. Just one — which meant there were no other shikigami to inherit anything. The compensation mechanism was worth exactly zero to her. The moment her one and only shikigami got killed, she'd be left with nothing.
Which would mean she'd learned the whole thing for absolutely nothing.
For her specifically, that flaw was too enormous. Enormous enough that it had nearly demolished every option she'd initially considered.
And then she'd gone back through those ten black pearls one more time — and she'd seen it.
The Darting Hare.
And everything clicked. She finally understood exactly which shikigami was made for her.
The Darting Hare was something of an oddity even within the Ten Shadows Technique.
It was a little rabbit. A small, completely harmless little rabbit.
It wasn't strong. No claws. No wings. No energy attacks. Its entire combat repertoire consisted of being small and soft and adorable. A single Darting Hare on its own had fighting power that rounded down to approximately zero.
But this shikigami had one ability that no other shikigami in the Ten Shadows possessed.
It was infinite.
It could be summoned again. And again. And again, endlessly, without limit. One call and dozens — hundreds — of rabbits came pouring out. Rabbits stacked on rabbits, a flood of white fur rolling forward like a tide.
As long as she had enough Cursed Energy to keep calling them, the Darting Hares would pour out like water from an opened valve — effortlessly filling an entire room to capacity, effortlessly blocking every corridor from wall to wall.
And the most important part of all:
Even if one of them died, the rest kept going.
Literally. Inexhaustibly. Infinite in the most literal possible sense.
"And besides..."
Mahiko stood where she was and spread her arms wide.
Rabbits surged from the shadows.
The first one hadn't even hit the floor yet when more came — pouring out of the floorboards, out of the cracks in the walls, out of every shadow that belonged to Mahiko — all at once, like a tap cranked fully open, a white tide rolling outward wave after unstoppable wave.
"So many!" Yuji exclaimed.
Far, far too many.
Rabbits on top of rabbits, rabbits stacked on rabbits — the corridor floor vanished completely beneath a dense carpet of white. The tide surged forward and crashed over the Special Grade Cursed Spirit, which had barely recovered from the previous blast, and swallowed it whole in white once more.
Yuji and Fushiguro Maki had no time to react — the wave caught them too, and both of them ducked their heads, arms thrown up to shield their faces from the flood.
"RAAAGH!" The Special Grade roared.
Submerged beneath the rabbit swarm, shoved outward by sheer mass, it had no choice but to start swinging — golden Cursed Energy wrapping its fists, hammering into the tide.
BOOM —
Rabbit pieces flew in every direction.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM —
The cursed spirit battered at the flood, tearing through the majority of it. The rabbits thinned enough that Fushiguro Maki and Yuji could finally lift their heads.
Eighty percent of the white tide had been obliterated. But what remained was still considerable — rabbits covered the floor in every direction.
And there, at the center of all that white, stood the blue-haired girl — smiling brightly, cradling a brand new little rabbit against her chest, running her thumb down from the base of its ear in long, slow strokes. The rabbit's eyes had narrowed to a blissful slit.
"Heh heh heh... you're pretty lively for a dinner, aren't you. Not bad, not bad at all..."
As she'd noted before — these shikigami rabbits were indeed a little stronger and a little faster than ordinary rabbits, but they were still extremely weak. There was no way Mahiko could deal meaningful damage to a Special Grade Cursed Spirit through sheer rabbit pressure and scrambling alone.
But then again...
"But then again...," Mahiko raised her head and met the gaze of the battered, disheveled Special Grade a short distance away. The corner of her mouth curved upward. "These little guys do have one truly spectacular quality about them."
"Sure, they have no offensive power on their own — they can only block and swarm and disrupt an enemy's movement through sheer numbers. But in my hands..."
Cursed Energy gathered into her palm.
Idle Transfiguration — activate. Mahiko touched the soul of the small rabbit in her arms — gently, precisely — and began reshaping its form into something new.
Like clay. The rabbit sat perfectly still in her arms, docile and unbothered, as its shape began to shift. In the blink of an eye — ears shortening, limbs retracting, the overall form stretching outward, the front end tapering to a point, the rear end widening — until it settled into a smooth, heavy cylindrical structure, a metallic sheen catching the dim corridor light.
Mahiko hoisted the rocket launcher — made entirely from a rabbit — onto her shoulder.
She raised her head and broke into a grin so wide it practically split her face, Cursed Energy flooding in, her voice carrying the pure, unconstrained joy of someone who has just discovered their favorite thing in the world:
"Because shikigami have souls too——!"
BOOM!!
A searing jet of gold-white flame erupted from the front of the launcher. The shell screamed through the air at a speed that was nearly impossible to track.
And in that same instant, the mass of rabbits still surrounding her all began to move at once.
They curled inward.
One. Two. Ten. A hundred. Every last rabbit that hadn't already scattered began compressing simultaneously — folding their bodies inward, driving every scrap of soul energy they possessed into a single concentrated core point. Mahiko's technique crackled between them like a current running through wire — one loop, two loops — and the entire white tide still filling the corridor transformed in one single, simultaneous instant.
Every rabbit became a dense, soul-energy-packed cannonball.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM —!!
All of them fired at the Special Grade Cursed Spirit at once.
The entire corridor was swallowed in a storm of detonating Cursed Energy.
"Geh?" The Special Grade went completely blank.
Countless bouncing spheres hammered it from every direction, soul-energy shockwaves punching through from outside to inside. The walls shuddered under the chain of detonations. Floor tiles cracked and shattered. Dust and debris erupted in every direction.
The devastation swept the entire length of the corridor. Load-bearing walls groaned with deep, heavy sounds. Cracks raced outward across the floor, spreading one after another after another.
The whole building trembled.
This was nothing less than an artillery barrage.
Dust and smoke billowed outward, swallowing Fushiguro Maki and Yuji's line of sight entirely.
"This... this is..." In the middle of the thundering, the black-haired girl stared with her mouth hanging open.
What in the world is happening?!
Is that still her Darting Hare?? Her Darting Hare??
Crack.
The stairwell finally gave up. It could no longer support the structural punishment of that sustained barrage. The ceiling above and the corridor to the right began to fracture.
Everything dropped.
Yuji and Fushiguro Maki fell.
After the storm of destruction, silence fell for roughly three full seconds.
"..."
Yuji pulled himself out of the rubble with one hand pressed to his head, took one look at the scene around him, and stood there for a long moment without being able to produce a single word.
Fushiguro Maki crawled out beside him, blood running down her forehead along the line of her brow.
They'd fallen through into a much larger interior space — a broad open area below, far more expansive than the corridor above.
Above them, the blue-haired girl beat her wings and glided slowly downward, discarding the now-spent "rocket launcher" and brushing the dust off her shoulder.
She let out a long, deeply satisfied breath.
Holy — that felt absolutely incredible.
Yes. Exactly right.
If she were to rate shikigami compatibility on a scale — Max Elephant might score an eighty-five. Jade Dogs, maybe fifty.
But the Darting Hare?
One. Hundred. Points. (Insert dramatic pop-sound effect.)
In anyone else's hands, the Darting Hare was a pile of fluffy toys that could run around — good for blocking a path, obscuring vision, disrupting movement, and nothing more.
But her ability was Idle Transfiguration. She could touch and reshape souls. Soul energy and Cursed Energy could freely convert between each other — a mechanism unique to her within the entire framework of jujutsu. A mechanic that belonged to no one else in this world.
And what the Darting Hare gave her was an inexhaustible, infinitely replenishable supply of soul material, available on demand at any moment.
The original Mahito had needed to stockpile ordinary human souls in advance just to fuel his combat options. Mahiko, with this shikigami, could skip that entire step — the most tedious, most logistically painful part of the whole process.
Raw material on tap. As long as she had enough Cursed Energy to keep summoning rabbits, she could bombard indefinitely.
It was so broken it felt like she'd found an exploit.
Every single little rabbit had a soul. Every single one was material she could reshape, transform, compress, and detonate.
Not enough of them? Summon more.
Quality too low? Make up for it with quantity. Keep throwing them until it's enough.
This was genuinely, absurdly satisfying.
Case in point — just now.
"RAAAAGH!!——"
The Special Grade's roar.
Golden Cursed Energy tore out of the settling dust and shot straight at the girl — fast as a falling star. Furious. Arm already swinging. The cursed spirit screamed at the top of its lungs as it charged Mahiko head-on with a punch, its whole face a mask of wounded rage and burning, desperate refusal to accept what had just happened to it — its body covered in ragged, blown-open wounds.
Mahiko snapped her fingers.
The rabbits still scattered around the corridor all raised their heads at once. The next second — they locked on. Each one bit down on the tail of the rabbit in front of it. They stretched, stiffened, end linked to end, wrapping in a circle — forming a living chain that cinched around the Special Grade from every direction simultaneously, closing like a net and locking it in midair.
"Whoosh—"
"RAAAGH!!——!"
The cursed spirit's fist swung through empty air. It missed Mahiko by nearly half a meter.
It thrashed. It twisted. It flung its arms wildly, fighting to break free. The chain yanked and pulled with every movement. A few links snapped — but fresh rabbits immediately poured out of the shadows to replace them, sealing the gaps. The rabbit chain only tightened further, coiling in more and more, until it held the cursed spirit completely immobilized.
Mahiko stood with her hands clasped behind her back. She looked at it. One eyebrow raised.
She surveyed the ragged wounds torn across its body, glanced at the walls with fresh craters blown clean through them, and smiled again.
"The damage is actually pretty impressive," she remarked.
More than she'd anticipated, honestly.
She'd initially assumed that attack power derived purely from converting small animals' soul energy would be fairly limited — after all, these were tiny creatures. Even as shikigami, the volume and density of their souls was nowhere close to a human's, let alone a cursed spirit's.
But the result in front of her told a different story. Quantity really could compensate for quality. That last volley — a full-coverage barrage of cannonball impacts — had dealt genuinely respectable damage to a Special Grade Cursed Spirit.
Visibly, unambiguously respectable.
Mahiko stared at the cursed spirit struggling in its chains, watching the fury burning in its eyes, and felt the curve of her own smile growing wider and wider.
Still smiling, she raised one finger, the tip aimed directly at the center of the cursed spirit's forehead.
"How about this," she said — her voice bright, ringing clear off the walls of the enclosed space — "I'll make you a promise. For the rest of this fight, I won't use Idle Transfiguration."
She paused.
Her smile widened further.
"So grab your last chance at survival, sweetheart~"
"RAAAAGH——!!"
Every reserve of Cursed Energy the Special Grade possessed detonated at once. Golden light exploded outward from its body in every direction, shredding the rabbit chain binding it — every link blasted apart in a single instant.
The remaining rabbits nearby were caught in the shockwave and sent flying, ricocheting off the walls in every direction — thump thump thump thump — bouncing chaotically around the corridor like a pot of boiling dumplings.
The cursed spirit hit the ground. The broken stone beneath its feet crumbled further. It bent forward at the waist — Cursed Energy roaring into its fist, golden light leaking out between its fingers — and the sheer force of what was building there cracked the floor beneath it in radiating rings, spreading outward from its feet.
It was furious.
It could not accept being looked down upon. The reality of it was intolerable, and its rage had reached a pitch beyond anything prior.
And so it threw a punch.
A punch more powerful than anything it had thrown before.
BOOM——!!
The earth shook.
____
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