"Alright, everyone. Practice freely for the rest of the session."
Hasegumo believed that even as a teacher, there was no need to cram knowledge down a student's throat all at once. As the saying goes, a blank canvas is filled with infinite possibilities. Only by allowing students to exercise their own imagination can they find the path to strength that suits them best. He was merely there to provide a bit of guidance whenever they hit a wall.
Unsurprisingly, Yuta Okkotsu remained utterly baffled after the lecture. His eyes held that clear, "unpolluted" look of someone completely untouched by the weight of knowledge as he stared at his peers in a daze.
"Didn't catch a word of that, did you?" Panda was a natural at reading people, and he didn't dislike the new kid.
Friendly as ever, Panda pulled Yuta into a corner and began whispering, taking it upon himself to handle the "Jujutsu 101" education that Hasegumo—who considered himself reliable but was actually anything but—had skipped over.
Meanwhile, Maki Zen'in was still replaying that last punch in her mind. Even after his fist lost contact, there was still a force suppressing me. Was that cursed energy...?
Thinking this, she stepped back in front of Hasegumo. "Gumo-sensei, I want more."
"?" Both Toge and Hasegumo stared at her in shock. That is some seriously questionable phrasing.
"I mean, hit me again." Maki didn't have a single lewd thought in her head, nor did she understand what was going through their minds. She simply wanted to experience that force one more time.
"Oh! Haha, no problem." Hasegumo rubbed the back of his head. He knew exactly what she was trying to feel. And then...
A sneak attack! A sudden punch with zero warning. Before Maki could even register the movement, she was already flying through the air.
Unlike before, this punch carried absolutely no cursed energy. It was pure, unadulterated physical control.
As she soared, she focused every sense on her body. It wasn't air resistance; it was something else—something pinning her down, making it impossible to move until the moment before she hit the ground.
"So it doesn't even require cursed energy... that feeling..." Maki crawled out of the grass, deep in thought. She immediately walked over to a wooden training post and began striking it, attempting to translate that experience into her own technique.
"Inumaki-kun, do you have a moment?"
Hasegumo sat on the steps and patted the empty spot beside him, gesturing for the boy to sit. "There's something I want to ask you."
"Dried bonito?" Toge was a bit stiff. He pointed toward Panda and Yuta. "Tuna?"
"No, just the two of us. You don't need to call them over."
Toge sat down quietly. He couldn't help but wonder: Panda and Maki had spent over six months together just to barely understand his speech, yet this man understood him perfectly on the very first try. Is this just what it means to be the 'Strongest'?
"Katsuobushi!" Toge sat up straight beside Hasegumo, eyes fixed forward. He looked exactly like a student in the back row who had been about to doze off, only to realize the person sitting next to him wasn't his best friend, but a member of the school board.
"No need to be so tense." Hasegumo lacked any real sense of being an "elder." He asked in a casual tone, "You're Grade 2 right now, aren't you?"
"Salmon. Mayonnaise?"
"Just a guess based on your cursed energy control."
Manda and Maki were outliers even among the eccentric crowd of sorcerers. Without a technique to use, they only had to focus on close-quarters combat—and combat isn't something you can improve with words; it requires constant practice and real battle. Since they had no interest in traditional martial arts, Hasegumo didn't have many ways to help them grow quickly other than acting as a sparring partner.
As for Yuta, he was a total novice who didn't even understand his own technique yet. He just needed to figure out what cursed energy was.
Toge, however, was a standard sorcerer. Guiding him was as much about satisfying Hasegumo's curiosity as it was about teaching.
Hasegumo stretched his arms and sat cross-legged. "Listen close. My question is: What is the essence of Cursed Speech?"
"The essence of Cursed Speech is using cursed energy to act as a proxy for the self to accomplish a goal."
In a quiet room, a spoon stirred coffee. A man with a pattern of circles and lines on his cheeks—Kenjaku—lowered his head. His white hair parted to reveal a line of jagged stitches across his forehead.
He stuck out his tongue to test the temperature of the coffee, revealing the sigils of the Inumaki clan's technique engraved upon it.
"If it can only do what the body can already do, then what's the point of the technique?"
The room appeared empty save for Kenjaku, but the voice came from the figure sitting opposite him. Jogo—a cursed spirit born from humanity's fear of the earth, with a miniature volcano for a head and a yellow-spotted vest—sat there, invisible to ordinary humans.
Jogo was a Special Grade from birth, possessing a mind as sharp as any human's. "In the end, that technique is only good for bullying the weak. Against an opponent even slightly stronger, you can't win. Even using a command to restrict movement damages the throat, making it impossible to use consecutively." Jogo twisted the corks in his ears, adjusting them for comfort. "Can a weak technique like that really handle those two?"
If that idiot Suguru Geto hadn't suddenly run off to America and won a Nobel Prize, and if I didn't still need to maintain a relationship with the government, Cursed Speech wouldn't be my first choice. Cursed Spirit Manipulation would have been much better, Kenjaku thought privately. Still, Cursed Speech will suffice to reach the goal.
"To be precise, we only need to deal with one of them," Kenjaku said aloud. "The other can be left to the King of Curses, the strongest of the last millennium."
The coffee was finally at the right temperature. Despite the stitches on his forehead, his face remained handsome under his white hair. He picked up the cup with the grace of a nobleman, savoring the smoothness of the latte.
"Cursed Speech originates from the Inumaki clan, but every successor who has inherited it has been nothing but a mediocre talent."
This wasn't an exaggeration. Given that Kenjaku could speak normally without triggering the technique, his mastery over Cursed Speech far exceeded that of Toge Inumaki, the sole surviving practitioner of this generation. Moreover, for Kenjaku, the significance of Cursed Speech wasn't just for combat; it was an indispensable link in his grand plan—though he had no intention of telling the cursed spirits that.
"Aside from commands that kill the enemy instantly, do you know under what conditions Cursed Speech takes effect?" As an ancient monster who had been active in the jujutsu world for over a thousand years, Kenjaku's understanding of the nature of cursed energy was peerless. Even so, it had taken him over a decade to truly master the essence of Cursed Speech.
"Obviously, it works when used against an opponent weaker than yourself."
"Is that so? And who decides who is 'strong' and who is 'weak'?"
"Of course, the..." Jogo started to say that the sorcerer decides, but he stopped. If a person firmly believed they were invincible, would that mean they could kill anyone with a word? That didn't fit the fundamental logic of jujutsu.
"The activation of Cursed Speech isn't a simple judgment of strength."
"Then what is it?"
"Raw power, imagination, and status."
Seeing smoke begin to puff from the three holes in Jogo's head—and seeing that Hanami, who had remained silent, also looked perplexed—Kenjaku realized he was likely overloading their CPUs. He decided to put it in simpler terms.
"I see. So, an instant-kill command only works if the enemy's cursed energy is extremely low and they have no resistance to curses."
Hasegumo stroked his chin, muttering to himself. "To make it work, you have to simulate a real battle in your mind. Cursed Speech only succeeds if you, yourself, could actually achieve that result."
"Which means the greater the gap between the target's actual strength and your mental simulation, the greater the backlash. And if it's something physically impossible for you to achieve, it won't just cause backlash—it won't work at all. Is that right?"
"Salmon," Toge Inumaki confirmed.
"Then I have another question. Can you use Cursed Speech during the simulation process?" Hasegumo had a sudden flash of inspiration. "For example, if you could normally break an enemy's arm with a punch, you could use Cursed Speech to 'Shatter' it. But what if you used Cursed Speech within the simulation?"
"An infinite sequence," Hasegumo said, tracing circles with two fingers to convey the concept through gestures. "Like recursion in a function. You take the result of the last Cursed Speech and stack it into the next simulation, repeating the loop until the final calculation results in the enemy's death."
"Skipjack tuna?" Toge replied. "Dried bonito..."
"It takes time to think, so you can only simulate it once or twice at most... which is why it can affect people stronger than you..." Hasegumo stared at Toge in shock. "Wait, so you're saying you can do that?"
If I had this technique, Hasegumo thought, I would have been invincible ten years ago.
"Salmon roe... Natto." Toge didn't know what the man was thinking; he just offered an embarrassed smile.
Hasegumo stared at him. If this kid found the right direction, he might actually become stronger than anyone else.
With that thought, Hasegumo stood up and fell into a casual fighting stance. The faint image of the Guanyin statue flickered behind him. He clasped his hands in prayer, then extended his right palm forward.
"So... want to try learning some martial arts?"
"Tuna?" Toge stood up as well, though he didn't quite understand what Hasegumo was doing.
The training ground, which had only just been repaired following the "Battle of the Strongest" a few months ago, was about to be devastated once again.
"Simply boosting your technique and cursed energy will, at best, slightly increase the probability of your command working against a strong enemy."
Hasegumo threw a palm strike into the air. It swept past Toge's shoulder with such intense wind pressure that the boy found himself paralyzed. Toge slowly turned his head to look behind him. In the spectator stands, a clear, multi-story-high palm print had been blasted through the concrete.
"But if you can actually kill an enemy with a single punch, you can activate your technique without paying any price at all."
"Natto on rice? (What kind of palm technique is this?)"
"Want to learn? I'll teach you."
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