After half an hour on the road, the busy city scenery disappeared completely. In its place stood an abandoned half-finished building ringed by rusted wire fencing, with most of its outer walls peeled bare.
Right beside it lay a silent cemetery. A cold draft swept across the weed-choked lot, carrying with it a chill that sank straight into the skin.
Kaede tipped his head up slightly, dark red eyes studying the concrete structure ahead, which practically radiated danger.
"So where exactly is the sightseeing part? This place has nothing to do with sightseeing."
Beside him, Nobara Kugisaki nodded in fierce agreement.
She had originally assumed they were heading for some high-end shopping district in Roppongi. Instead she was standing in front of what looked like a haunted ruin. The whiplash was so severe that she dropped her shopping bags onto the ground with a heavy thud and pointed accusingly at the entrance.
"Exactly. This doesn't even count as the edge of Roppongi.
There's a cemetery right next to it. What happened to the Tokyo sightseeing tour, you lying blindfolded idiot?"
Yuji Itadori looked just as devastated. Clutching his head with both hands, he stared at the crumbling entrance as though the color had drained out of the world.
"So where are the Roppongi skyscrapers... my big city dream..."
Faced with the collective outrage of his students, Gojo Satoru not only failed to reflect on himself, he actually spread his hands with a cheerful look of total innocence.
"What's the problem? This is technically in the Roppongi area.
And besides, the darker side of a city always gathers more negative emotion. There's a pretty lively curse hanging around inside that building."
The smile faded from Gojo's face as he looked through the black blindfold at the three first-years standing in front of him.
He pointed in a loose circle at Yuji Itadori, Nobara Kugisaki, and the quietly standing Kaede.
"So this is your field test. Yuji, Nobara, and Kaede, the three of you are going in together and exorcising the curse inside."
Megumi Fushiguro stood with both hands in his pockets, leaning against a broken section of wall a short distance away.
His green eyes swept over the three of them as they prepared to enter together, already analyzing the situation at speed.
He knew Yuji Itadori's physical ability was monstrous, but he lacked basic knowledge of how to use cursed energy. Nobara Kugisaki had experience fighting curses, but country curses and Tokyo curses were not even close to the same level when it came to cunning.
As for the new student called Kaede... Megumi's gaze lingered on the black-haired boy's back for a moment, his brow tightening.
Up to now, Kaede had been far too quiet and composed, and there was no openly aggressive cursed energy coming off him at all.
Megumi had no idea what kind of fighting style he specialized in, and in a real fight, that sort of unknown was often the most dangerous thing there was.
Nobara drew in a breath and forced down her irritation.
With a sharp click, she pulled her weapon from the strap at her waist, a hammer with a heart-shaped charm tied to it, along with several long nails.
Then she turned, looked between Yuji Itadori and Kaede, and started assigning the team in a hard, no-nonsense tone.
"Listen up. If this is a test, I'm not interested in getting dragged down by either of you.
Popcorn boy, you take the curses on the lower floors. Pretty boy, you're coming with me upstairs.
And don't tell me the only thing you do in danger is scream."
"I..." Kaede went a little blank, though when he thought about last night, that really was more or less what had happened.
Come on. Try getting chased by Mahito right out of the gate and see if you don't scream.
Yuji immediately clenched his fists. Since swallowing Sukuna's finger, he could now damage curses even without a cursed tool.
He thumped his own chest with lively confidence.
"Leave it to me. I'll punch every last one of them flying. You be careful too, Kaede."
"I understand. You too," Kaede answered quietly.
Gojo leaned against the wire fence, watching the three of them about to disappear into the dark stairwell, a smile of amused curiosity touching his mouth.
"Oh, and one more thing. Yuji, no letting Sukuna out.
If that guy comes out, everyone nearby dies. So then, good luck."
Inside the building, it was pitch black. Sunlight was completely blocked by the thick concrete walls.
And the air only grew fouler the closer they got.
"Should I expand my domain here? There's no real need... if I rely on hand-to-hand combat alone, that probably won't go well. I never trained in martial arts in my last life either.
Then I'll use Domain Amplification."
That was Kaede's thought as he followed behind Nobara Kugisaki.
Inside the building, the light was dim. Only a few weak threads of sunlight forced their way through the dust-caked broken windows, throwing pale patches across the cracked concrete floor.
The corridor stank of mold and something else, something harder to name.
Kaede walked in silence on the right side of the hallway, about half a step behind Nobara.
A thin, almost transparent liquid was clinging tightly to both his arms.
It was a water membrane constructed purely from cursed energy. In the low light, it occasionally shimmered faintly, like a layer of moving glass armor.
Walking ahead, Nobara held her hammer in one hand and several nails in the other, her steps cautious.
From the corner of her eye, she caught the strange movement on Kaede's arms.
Her light brown eyes narrowed slightly, pausing for a second on the flowing film of water.
As a sorcerer with at least some practical experience, she immediately recognized it as a reinforcement method, cursed energy densely layered across the surface of the body, but the liquid quality of it was clearly different from normal reinforcement.
Lacking enough information, Nobara did not ask outright. She simply revised her private evaluation of him: at the very least, he was not some useless decorative extra.
Just as the two of them were about to pass an abandoned elevator shaft, everything changed.
Rrrrip!
The crumbling ventilation duct overhead suddenly exploded apart, and rusted metal sheets and dust came raining down.
A huge, twisted shadow dropped from the opening with a wave of thick, rotten stench.
It was a curse that looked like a centipede stitched onto a human torso.
Several segmented limbs lined with vicious barbs cut through the air like reaper's scythes, slashing straight down at Nobara Kugisaki, who was walking in front.
Nobara's pupils tightened sharply, but her body moved faster than thought.
She did not scream uselessly. Instead, she dropped her weight at once and shoved backward with both legs.
At the same time, her right wrist snapped, and the hammer in her hand howled through the air, striking one of the incoming limb joints with perfect timing.
Clang!
The metallic impact rang through the corridor, sparks flying.
The force of the rebound numbed the web of Nobara's thumb slightly.
That curse's shell was much harder than she had expected. The blow had not shattered the joint, only knocked the limb off course by a few inches.
The curse let out a shrill cry that sounded almost like a baby screaming. Using the redirected force, its huge body twisted at an unnatural angle in midair.
Then another thick limb cut sideways through the air with a sharp tearing sound, like a steel whip, slamming toward Kaede, who stood slightly behind and to the side.
"Fast...!"
Kaede did not dodge. In his dark red eyes, the barbs swelled rapidly larger as he crossed both arms before his chest at the final instant.
Bang!
A heavy crash thundered through the hallway.
The spiked limb smashed into Kaede's crossed arms.
The amplified water membrane coating them exploded into violent ripples, the liquid churning under the sheer force and producing a grinding sound sharp enough to hurt the teeth.
The water membrane successfully neutralized the cutting force that could have carved open flesh, but the raw physical impact, heavy as a landslide, still came through in full.
"Compared to Mahito, this really isn't that heavy. If I could use cursed energy reinforcement on my body properly, I probably could have blocked this a lot more easily."
Kaede's body shuddered hard under the force. His feet were pushed backward across the dust-covered concrete floor against his will.
His soles scraped over the ground, carving two deep marks, and he slid nearly six feet before finally stabilizing.
When the curse saw that a single strike had failed to tear its prey apart, it grew even more violent.
Its many limbs scraped restlessly against the floor, and its huge body drew back like a fully bent bowstring, clearly building force for a second, deadlier lunge.
Nobara Kugisaki had already used the one or two seconds Kaede bought her by blocking that hit to put real distance between herself and the curse.
Her mind moved fast, coolly breaking down the situation in front of her.
"This thing's shell is way too hard. Straight physical attacks aren't going to work fast enough.
And it moves too quickly. In a hallway this narrow, going head-to-head is bad for us."
Her voice carried clearly through the empty corridor, quick but never panicked.
"Her combat experience is solid... no, maybe that's talent."
That was Kaede's thought as he subtly adjusted both his position and posture.
Nobara smoothly switched the hammer to her left hand. With her right, she pulled a palm-sized straw doll from her pouch, eyes locking onto the curse like knife points.
"Hey, pretty boy. If you can tank its attacks, then use that.
Hold it in place somehow. If you can get any piece off it, even just one barb, I can curse its real body directly."
Nobara gripped the end of a nail tightly and pressed it against the straw doll's chest, taking up the opening posture of Straw Doll Technique, and with absolutely no hesitation threw the pressure of attack, teamwork, and timing straight at Kaede.