—"I was afraid more people would die. No ulterior motive."
Those last words from Nanami Kira were the final thing Todo heard before the exhaustion swallowed him whole.
Fatigue surged from the depths of his brain and dragged him under—into a dark, bottomless sea. Sensation ceased.
BOOM.
He collapsed.
Perfect timing. Saves me the trouble of knocking him out.
Kira glanced at his watch. Nine o'clock sharp. The sorcerers should be returning any minute—they'd be at the foot of the mountain by now.
Which meant they weren't here yet.
The entire school belonged to Nanami Kira alone.
A grey drizzle fell on the ancient eaves, and what bounced back wasn't water but mist—thin, endlessly rising, as though welling up from some hidden source, wrapping the empty campus in a world of haze.
Kira walked into the fog.
Passing Gakuganji's body, he glanced down. Still breathing.
Both arms blown off. His chest badly caved in. But alive.
Kira suppressed the urge to finish him off and applied basic first aid to the wounds.
This is what makes sense. This is what won't raise suspicion.
He noticed an antique box resting against Gakuganji's chest—layers of black curse-marks stacked into dense, interlocking seals.
Beside the body lay a finger. Deep purple, faintly mottled with lividity.
Sukuna's Finger—the same one Kira had handed to Hasegawa Kaede.
Kira bent to pick it up, but the instant his fingertip brushed it, a chill lanced through his chest.
Something materialized behind him. No—inside him. Four arms. Two faces. An aura of pure malice, as though every drop of ill will in the world had condensed into a single being.
A monster.
"You're interesting. It's been a long time since I've met anyone this interesting. Though 'person' isn't quite right—'a curse wearing human skin' is more accurate."
"I'm starting to take a liking to you."
The frigid presence clung to him like a second skin. Undisguised malevolence and nauseating evil engulfed Kira in an instant. He saw a mountain of corpses stretching to the sky, saw the underworld and the realm of the dead, black sulfur flowing between ridges of bleached bone—bones upon bones, overgrown graves, the barren earth gorged on human flesh. And atop that infinite cairn sat a man.
Blond hair. Salaryman attire. Eyes glinting with amusement.
Nanami Kira.
"Eat it. Go on, eat it. Holding yourself back like this must be so tedious."
"Eat it..."
"Piss off."
Kira placed the finger inside the box and snapped the lock shut.
No time to waste.
He tucked the box into his coat and continued forward.
Through pavilions, through the courtyard, through corridors woven of fog and rain, past the narrow alleys with their trailing curtains of water, past the windswept crabapple blossoms—until at last he stood before a temple.
An ancient bell tower crowned the entrance, bearing a great iron bell crusted with rust. The temple was old beyond reckoning. Dim lanterns hung inside—bells at dawn, drums at dusk, ancient walls, dying light. The feeble yellow glow burned a small hole in the black curtain of the storm.
Ivy had scaled the outer walls. Ginkgo leaves blanketed the stone steps, gold dusted with grey—clearly no one had come this way in a long time. But on the far side of the staircase the leaves lay scattered and trampled. Someone had passed through in a hurry.
That someone was Hasegawa Kaede. This temple was the Shrine Repository.
Sealed inside were more cursed spirits and cursed tools than could be counted, behind a thousand shifting doors shrouded in barriers that only a Special Grade—and only with considerable time—could hope to breach.
Hasegawa Kaede was a Special Grade curse user, and she'd been embedded in the school for a full ten days posing as the principal.
She could absolutely have dismantled the barriers. The only reason she hadn't was the fear of attracting attention, which was why she'd manufactured a false catastrophe to lure everyone away.
Kira could see it all in his mind:
Kaede working through the seals, nearly finished, when her detection wards tripped—someone had returned to the school.
Unable to abandon her progress, she'd stepped out in Gakuganji's skin, intending to silence the intruder.
That "coincidental" return was anything but. Kira had timed it to the second.
He could have used Todo's technique to return at any point, but he'd deliberately waited—counting the minutes, estimating how long it would take Kaede to crack the barriers. He'd even sandbagged during the fight against Hanami to buy her more time.
He needed to arrive at the precise moment she was about to finish. That demanded an extraordinary sensitivity to time—and that happened to be Kira's forte.
Kira pulled open the dust-covered doors, stepped over the high threshold, and walked out of the storm into the silent temple. Like crossing into another world.
A thousand doors turned in unison, but he could see that Kaede had already broken the vast majority.
Right on schedule...
He didn't need every door open. He only needed to enter the one door he was meant to enter—the one fate had chosen for him.
Following an impulse buried deep in his soul, Kira stepped through.
Something ahead was calling to him.
He trusted his luck.
Time was short. He had to move.
In truth, he'd deliberately left himself only this narrow window. He and Kaede had talked at length, and from Todo's perspective the stalling was meant to buy time for the sorcerers' return.
In reality, it was to clear his own name. For a thief, more time at the scene is always better. No one deliberately stalls while committing a crime.
That was the blind spot.
There was one more thing: he had let Kaede go.
Kaede's goal had been to infiltrate the Shrine Repository. She'd failed—but Kira could make it look as though she'd succeeded.
Because no one knew whether she'd actually gotten in or not.
Kira would infiltrate the Repository himself.
Later, when the sorcerers discovered something missing, they'd pin it on the escaped Hasegawa Kaede.
Todo had seen her flee with his own eyes. He would serve as witness.
Between the enemy who'd engineered a cursed plague and the hero who'd stopped it, people would always believe the hero. Between the curse user and the jujutsu sorcerer, people would always believe the sorcerer. That, too, was why Kira chose to be a sorcerer.
Down the dim corridor he went, unhurried, walking through the feeble candlelight. His goal was within arm's reach, yet his heart grew calmer with every step.
Each stride measured the same as the last—precisely, mechanically identical. As described before, Kira loved that regularity, that sense of routine.
Slow as his pace was, every step fell within his calculations, and step by step they would carry him to the end.
And he would be happy for the rest of his life.
Nanami Kira had never been a good person—as Hasegawa Kaede had said, as Sukuna had said. He wore a mask.
From the very beginning, his reason for accepting the assignment to Kyoto was impure. From the very beginning, he had been playing the role of a hero struggling to save the world. From the very beginning, he had been pretending.
Suppressing his nature. Burying his impulses. Striving to be an ordinary salaryman, diligently completing every task.
In a way, he and Kaede were the same—both monsters lurking within the school, both actors on a stage.
They were the same kind of monster.
The reason he'd deduced Kaede's objective so quickly had one more explanation he'd never shared:
Their goals were identical. Both wanted the Shrine Repository.
It was simply that Kira's performance was more convincing. He'd seen through Kaede's act, while she never saw through his.
That was why he'd mocked her as an actor fooled by the audience.
He arrived.
The thing was right in front of him.
Nanami Kira smiled. Calm as always.
After seeing through Kaede's scheme, Kira had decided to use her.
The Repository's barriers required a Special Grade to break, and Kaede conveniently was one.
Kaede created the cursed plague—so Kira led the search team. Kaede laid her trap—so Kira marched everyone right into it. Kaede needed Hanami and the others to stall for time—so Kira fought them and gave her all the time she needed.
He'd claimed it was to avoid tipping her off, but the truth was that Kaede's plan could never have succeeded without Kira doing half the work.
Then, calculating the timing, he'd returned via Todo's technique just as she was about to finish—and stolen her prize. And framed her for it.
Kira smoothed the last wrinkle from his coat, brushed the rain from his shoulders, and channeled a thin stream of cursed energy to dry himself. Only when he was fully dry did he allow himself a satisfied smile.
Where candlelight crossed, a shadow fell. Kira stepped forward and plunged into it.
A dark storeroom.
The light was faint—flickering, as though about to die at any moment—casting shallow shadows across a crimson carpet. Damp. Dark.
At the center of the room sat a black casket, ringed with layer upon layer of seals, and in the corner, a small line of text:
Special Grade cursed tool. Extremely dangerous.
Closer. Closer still. The voice from the depths of his soul grew louder—the one that had echoed since childhood, that had accompanied him through boyhood and adolescence alike.
Long ago, from the first time he'd set foot on Kyoto's soil, from the first time he'd entered Kyoto Prefectural Jujutsu High, from the first time he'd gazed toward the Repository—
He'd known something inside was calling to him. Waiting for him. Yearning for him. Gathering dust, until the day he came to brush it clean.
One seal after another, Kira undid them. The black casket opened, revealing what lay within—
A golden luster. A slender shaft. Strange, arcane engravings. A razor-sharp tip that glinted in the dark.
A dark-gold
Arrow.