Chapter 71: Acting as the Killer (Patreon)

Chapter 71: Playing the Murderer

…

In short, to sum it all up: this world was a cesspit.

Thanks to his Binding, Satoru Anjouin couldn't remember what those rumors in the intel had said. But instinct told him the original plan wouldn't work.

Steadily climb to Grade 2, buy Black Flash, wait until he got used to the qualitative change in his cursed energy, then buy a domain…

Whatever. The moment the Special Grade Cursed Spirit "Detective" had tossed him into Beika Town, it was clear he couldn't count on the plot for anything.

Especially in this world, where his childhood little detective seemed to have truly gone cold.

"Excuse me, student. Sorry to trouble you, but could you unwrap the bandages on that thing?"

A man in a police uniform had walked up to him.

He pointed at the sword-shaped object wrapped in bandages on Anjouin's back.

"No problem."

Anjouin played the cooperative kid perfectly and unwound the bandages from the cursed tool sword.

"It's a sword?"

"Yep. A cosplay prop."

As he spoke, Anjouin showed him the blade. The officer ran a finger along it and found it was dull, nowhere near sharp enough to cut anyone.

It was metal, so swinging it at someone would still be dangerous, but it was definitely no sharp weapon.

"Sorry for the bother."

"Thanks for your hard work." Anjouin rewrapped the sword in its bandages and watched the officer's retreating back.

The man looked a little familiar.

Right, Takagi, old buddy.

He hung the rewrapped cursed tool sword from the belt buckle behind him, sat down on the bench, and thought it through carefully.

He hadn't been sitting here like an idiot, either. He'd already done some investigating and made some preparations like this.

For instance, he'd turned the cursed tool's nature around by removing the edge on both sides, which made the sword itself much sturdier.

Plenty of cursed objects carried similar Bindings that lowered their ability to harm their surroundings in exchange for becoming indestructible. That was also why so many of them couldn't be exorcised and could only be kept in the forbidden vault at Jujutsu High.

After that, he'd gone into a stationery store and bought something with yen, which proved the yen he carried could be spent.

He had no idea when he might die, but he gathered as much intel as he could.

For example, Beika Town had a population of two or three million.

That struck Anjouin as absurd.

In the island nation, a "machi" meant a street, a neighborhood, or a town, and usually referred to a settlement of fewer than fifty thousand people.

Yet this Beika Town had not only a huge population but a huge area as well.

Of course, Anjouin had tried leaving. But no matter how many times he tried, he was still stuck in Beika Town.

According to the Intel System, Beika Town was the domain of a cursed spirit above Special Grade.

"But rather than a sure-hit, sure-kill domain, this place is more like a more complete little world."

Anjouin lowered his head, pondering ways to escape, while stealing glances at the faces of passersby from the corner of his eye. Most looked normal, yet each wore a faint trace of fear.

Many people took one look at the bandage-wrapped sword on his back and hurried away as if dodging a plague god. The uniformed officer who had come to talk to him earlier had probably been wary for the same reason.

He'd spent over an hour here and still hadn't found any pattern.

By comparison, Advanced Nurturing High School had mostly kept its original logic of ability above all and points above all.

Frankly, this type of question was harder to solve.

"…Or maybe it's just not time yet?"

Anjouin studied the clock on a signpost by the road, its second hand ticking along with a click-clack.

Everything before his eyes was far too peaceful. Patrol officers walked the streets, elementary school kids crossed the road in neat lines, and high school girls in casual clothes chatted along the sidewalk, talking about the beauty of youth.

In the famous Beika Park, young couples gathered in groups.

Among them was a brand-new couple. The girl looked different from usual in her casual clothes, so she blushed shyly with her head down. The boy, on his first date, had slicked his hair back like an adult, and he held his stiff body at an awkward distance from her, close but not too close.

An idol in glasses, keeping a low profile, played with her cute puppy in the dog park and chatted with other owners about their dogs.

Here, she didn't have to face the pressures of work, and she could talk about her private life as much as she liked.

Even an idol was perfectly ordinary in private.

It was so peaceful it hardly seemed like the crime capital Beika Town. Of course, "crime capital" was just a joke.

The real problem was that Anjouin was out of options.

He sat on the bench a while longer. Then a rather meddlesome Takagi—ahem, Officer Takagi—came over again and asked whether he was in some kind of trouble.

He even pulled five thousand yen out of his wallet and offered it to him, hoping to help.

"Everyone runs into trouble sometimes."

"Tch."

Anjouin clicked his tongue.

Was this just Officer Takagi being Officer Takagi?

His personality hadn't changed: honest, upright, considerate, easygoing, with a powerful sense of responsibility.

But his appearing in this Beika Town meant only one thing: he had already become a "victim."

And his childhood little detective was undoubtedly a vengeful-spirit type of cursed spirit, just like the idol vengeful spirit.

The cursed spirit above Special Grade: "Remorse."

That codename alone practically spelled out the high school detective's ending.

Anjouin felt a little sympathy for him. Maybe none of this was his intention, but who told this world to be such a cesspit?

Anjouin toyed with the screws in his hand.

He'd just bought two boxes at a hardware-store-like shop on the street, to serve as a stockpile of weapons, more or less.

As the sun sank and dusk drew near, the atmosphere on the street slowly grew heavier.

That finally let Anjouin, who had been watching the pedestrians the whole time, breathe out.

Honestly, if this world really were this peaceful, he might well have drowned in it.

Then, in the next instant, a corner of the dusk spread across the horizon.

Every pedestrian on the road stopped. The expressions on their faces froze all at once.

It was like a stage play halted mid-performance. Anjouin put on a blank face too and played along with the sudden change.

Inwardly, he sighed: finally, something was happening.

A question, but better than no question at all.

If there'd really been no question at all, Anjouin felt he would have started attacking passersby himself, since that might trigger some kind of condition.

Of course, the likelier outcome was getting shot dead on the spot by an armed detective for attacking people at random.

Then a strange thought surfaced in his mind.

"…I'm the murderer?"

That thought, so completely unlike his own, hit the Binding he'd set the instant it rose.

The Binding templates the Intel System had offered earlier were plentiful, but they only suited his situation back then. As his understanding of his cursed technique deepened, he'd found new ways to apply Bindings.

It also showed him that the Binding templates had quite a few flaws.

Take a normal early-bloomer growth Binding. Even if he staked fifty or sixty years on it, the growth rate gained in that one year would only be a bit higher than what a late-bloomer growth Binding yielded each year after fifty or sixty years, and not by much.

When it came to one Satoru Gojo per year, or one Tiger Heavenly Emperor per year, the growth surpassed the arc of an ordinary jujutsu sorcerer's fifty years.

Of course, Anjouin wasn't too ordinary himself, but he was nowhere near as outrageous as a certain lawyer.

That man came with a domain and a shikigami, worked out Barrier Technique and cursed energy reinforcement through sheer insight, and grasped the principle of Reverse Cursed Technique just by watching.

That lawyer was a genius to begin with, and his talent as a jujutsu sorcerer was top-tier.

So Anjouin had come up with an idea: set a late-bloomer Binding, then layer an early-bloomer Binding on top of it.

It was like compressing the growth arcs of a whole row of Satoru Gojos and a whole row of Tiger Heavenly Emperors into a single year.

Honestly, given how much of a cesspit this world was, if he couldn't grow within a year, he might just be finished.

He wasn't in the mood right now to worry about how he'd later break a Binding that outrageous with the contract-breaking effect of his reversed technique.

The stronger the Binding, the heavier the price.

Even if the reversed technique could break every Binding there was.

Once he'd set a Binding like that, breaking it would be about as hard as dismantling a J-16 with a screwdriver.

Then again, without that kind of growth speed, he'd probably face something similar down the line and be left with nothing but remorse.

The thoughts in his head were cut off, and when he came back to himself, Anjouin was already standing in an apartment, and his chest had somehow swelled.

He walked into the bathroom and saw the mirror, which reflected his face at that moment.

It was a woman with a fairly pretty face. Inside the bathroom, a woman who looked somewhat like his current self lay slumped over the edge of the tub in the pose of a wrist-slashing suicide.

This case looked a bit familiar.

The bathroom door was covered in strips of tape.

Of course, those strips of tape must carry the victim's fingerprints, which was how the scene would be staged to look like a suicide.

Anjouin could feel emotions unlike his own surging up nonstop.

Remorse, jealousy, hatred, sorrow, all kinds of feelings.

The woman slumped over the tub was his "sister," a sister with the same tastes, who even liked the same man.

That was why he had done it.

"Yeah, right. What's that got to do with me?"

Anjouin was like a bystander watching the scene before him.

That churning remorse had nothing to do with him.

It couldn't even stir any remorse of his own, though the murderer's remorse kept trying to resonate with his feelings.

Anjouin immediately set a temporary Binding and put up his own feelings of remorse as collateral.

As for regret, even remorse, it wasn't that Anjouin had none.

His past life, in particular, hadn't been a success.

Back then, he'd always been full of regret.

He'd regretted his naivety and indulgence, regretted his own stupidity, which had caused his suffering later on.

But this world had no pill for regret.

And there was no chance to start life over.

Although he'd been given a second life,

it was a new story.

In this world, Anjouin played his role very well.

He was a dutiful child in his parents' eyes, a gentle older brother in his sister's eyes, a diligent student in his classmates' eyes, a polite role model in the neighbors' eyes…

Playing the right person for each position was more or less how he lived this life.

There was nothing to regret.

And he had already given it his utmost effort.

Attacking him with feelings of remorse was, in a way, the least suitable approach.

"The question is, now that I'm playing the murderer, am I supposed to cleverly fake evidence next?"

Anjouin didn't try to recall this episode's case.

Generally, in early cases like this, the more you do, the more mistakes you make.

Because the island nation valued privacy, its cameras weren't set up like they were in the Eastern Nation, so a crime of passion was the hardest kind of murder to investigate.