Chapter 73: Special Weapons and Childhood Shadows (Patreon)

Chapter 73: Signature Weapon and Childhood Traumas

…

The cursed tool sword, ten centimeters wide, stood before him like a shield and caught both of the blunt axes.

An axe like that landing on his body would bring nothing but pain beyond imagining.

Satoru Anjouin shoved with both hands and drove the two bandaged monsters back. He had no intention of tanking them head-on.

Now that his appearance had returned to normal, he checked his pockets at once and pulled out a handful of tiny screws.

Binding — Rapid Cursed Energy Infusion.

The cost: the screws' durability would drain faster. The payoff: they would turn into cursed tools faster.

He clapped his hands together, and the screws in his palms became cursed tools.

Of all the ways to make a cursed tool, long-term infusion of cursed energy was actually the most common method in this world. Anjouin had simply used a Binding to speed up the process.

Naturally, a tool made this way topped out at Grade 4.

Even so, Anjouin felt like he'd just been handed his signature weapon.

Suddenly he felt the surname Kumagawa suited him better than Anjouin.

Smiling, he flung several cursed tools straight out.

Binding — Pinnacle-Breaking Blade (lol).

The cost: the screws' durability would drain faster. The payoff: the screws would perform far better as cursed tools.

And so the screw-like cursed tools, cashing in on the fact that they would exist for only a few seconds, nailed the two axe-wielding bandaged monsters, plus a third one with a broken arm, to the floor.

It lasted only an instant, but in that instant the screws' power roughly rivaled a Grade 3 cursed tool.

With the bandaged monsters pinned and the screws not yet gone, Anjouin swept his hand along the flat of the sword, triggering the temporary-release condition of the Binding he had set on it.

It wasn't like breaking a Binding with the positive energy of Reverse Cursed Technique. He simply met the Binding's condition, and the Binding paused for a while.

The blunt cursed tool sword suddenly looked consecrated, a cold, dim gleam sliding across its edge.

Without a flicker of hesitation, Anjouin brought it down on the three heads.

"Well, I guess that avenges you too."

The 'deceased,' the skin Anjouin had shed, would end up dismembered by the bandaged monsters, her limbs and torso tossed all over the place.

Even her head would end up hidden in the murderer's bloated belly.

The murderer, disguised as a fat man, had even staged a little drama in which the bandaged monsters carried the deceased off by force.

Three heads flew. The bandaged monsters on the floor kept leaking black vapor, and then no fewer than four more walked in from outside the room.

"…"

Without a word, Anjouin crashed through the window and ran.

When he saw several bandaged monsters coming after him, he flung out more screws and nailed them to the window frame.

The bandaged monsters tore free almost immediately.

But Anjouin, who was good at running away, had already opened up a wide gap and dashed straight into the woods.

Then he saw even more bandaged monsters in the woods, axes in hand, trying to surround him.

His first thought was that this was the bandaged monsters' cursed technique.

But if they had a cursed technique, they would have to be semi-Grade 1 cursed spirits or higher.

Yet the curse aura they gave off was about the same as the Grade 2 cursed spirits he had fought during his internship.

For Anjouin, these were cursed spirits he would have to fight seriously to have any chance of beating.

Of course, the first three had been a sneak attack. They probably hadn't expected Anjouin to fight by treating cursed tools as consumables.

Honestly, it stung a little.

The screw cursed tools he made on the spot were fine… the cost was just a few thousand yen per box of screws. But if he did this with high-quality cursed tools?

The Rapid Cursed Energy Infusion Binding sped up a cursed tool's upgrade. It cost durability, but it let tools that would otherwise need years or decades to level up do so ahead of schedule.

And the Pinnacle-Breaking Blade (lol) Binding made a cursed tool burn through all of its durability, as if burning its own Cosmo and life just to bloom for that one instant.

In short, the two Bindings he had only recently grasped were money furnaces of the highest order.

Honestly, Anjouin wanted to name the latter the "Don't You Still Have Your Life?" Binding.

That template felt like it could be slapped onto a cursed spirit.

He wanted to use the Grade 3 cursed spirit he had captured earlier as ammunition right now.

It would surely burst out with destructive power rivaling a Grade 1 cursed spirit, in a single instant.

By then he'd probably be capturing cursed spirits left and right. But he had no Cursed Spirit Manipulation, so the number he could hold was bound to be limited, unless he caught them with Poké Balls (cursed talismans).

There were simply too many things to spend money on.

And if he wanted Private Points, the fixed salary paid out each month according to Class Points would never be enough. He could only rely on the Exorcism Club.

A regular club had rewards that topped out at a few hundred thousand, maybe a million.

The Exorcism Club, though, set its payouts according to the bounty standards the jujutsu world used for exorcising curses. The more curses he exorcised, the more Private Points he would earn, past counting.

But that also meant spending long stretches outside the school.

And for someone who knew what he knew about the beyond-Special-Grade, it also meant a greater chance of running into those very beings.

Oh boy~

At this moment, he had almost no choice but to gamble everything—

Anjouin ran through the woods for a while, fighting the bandaged monsters he met without pause, and the cursed energy in his body grew more and more active.

His understanding of cursed technique rose again with the fighting.

Combat really was the fastest way for a jujutsu sorcerer to get stronger.

He also discovered that he had a certain talent for manipulating objects with cursed energy.

The screws he flung flew straight, under his control, toward several bandaged monsters leaping down from the trees. The moment they were about to hit, the Pinnacle-Breaking Blade (lol) Binding kicked in.

The tiny screws suddenly became Grade 3 cursed tools more than a meter long.

Even if it lasted only seconds, the burst of a Grade 3 cursed tool was enough to pierce a Grade 2 cursed spirit's body.

They weren't killed instantly, but they were nailed to the trees all the same.

Before long he reached the edge of a cliff and stared at the broken suspension bridge.

"Come to think of it, this kind of story is a blizzard-villa closed-circle setup to begin with."

Anjouin turned and looked back. Ten-odd bandaged monsters had emerged from the woods behind him, then a few dozen, then a hundred.

Clearly he had no retreat left.

Then again, the moment he'd been assigned the identity of the 'deceased,' things had been bound to head in this direction.

Anjouin glanced up at the sky.

Cursed energy gathered beneath his feet. He took a run-up along a relatively flat stretch of the cliff edge, then planted a foot on the lip and made a huge leap.

At almost the same moment, the bandaged monsters caught up.

And then, totally unreasonably, they took off flying…

Flying. Just like that.

Looking at the hundred-plus bandaged monsters behind him, Anjouin gritted his teeth and pulled out that low-grade cursed talisman.

He made a Binding with the spirit he had captured and sealed inside it.

Then he let it consume its own life to boost the power of the next attack.

He fired a cursed-energy cannon blast of densely packed cursed energy at the pursuing bandaged monsters. To catch as many of them as possible in range, he spread the blast wide, so its overall power dropped, but it still rivaled a Grade 1 in quality.

One shot wiped out every last bandaged monster.

The enormous recoil carried Anjouin's body straight across the gap between the cliffs.

He had meant to use screw cursed tools as climbing gear, so it saved him a lot of effort. But before he could catch his breath,

he suddenly found himself in a pitch-black library.

"You are the deceased."

The world had assigned him the role of the deceased again.

Anjouin's eyebrow twitched. He more or less guessed that this 'deceased' identity, like the earlier role of the murderer, would have to be gone through a dozen-odd times.

He just didn't know whether playing along as the deceased would trap him in Beika Town forever.

"Play the murderer, play the deceased… and then comes regret."

He felt he was gradually working out the mechanism of this domain.

"But isn't this a bit too simple?"

Luring out the regret in people's hearts, magnifying it without limit, and then making them want to die was a formidable mechanism in its own right. But this opponent was a being beyond Special Grade.

The result left Anjouin somewhat baffled.

Then he looked at the book he had opened in his hands, and the flashlight in his other hand lit up what was inside.

Inside the box-like book was hidden a small bag of white powder.

A chill shot through Anjouin as something rushed at him fast from behind. He rolled with it, dodging an iron pipe that came crashing down.

Clang—

The pipe hit the floor, and the sound echoed on and on through the eerie, terrifying library.

He'd been so busy dodging that he lost his grip on the flashlight. It flew out, spun a few times on the floor, and came to rest upright, lighting a face from below that looked like a demon's.

A drug smuggler is usually a user himself, and people like that are often devils in human skin.

They lost their normal morals and humanity long ago.

Even if someone like that felt regret, it was never an awakening. It was regret that he hadn't spent all his money and hadn't gotten to use more.

Looking at that face, which belonged to his childhood traumas, Anjouin silently clenched his fist.

Then, completely naturally, he drove the fist into that snarling face.

"Ahh, that felt good."

He'd wanted to hit this face for ages.

With that one punch, his cursed energy circulated so smoothly it was almost unreasonable.

It felt as fresh as putting on brand-new underwear on New Year's Day.

As Anjouin punched the Library Director flying, the skin on his own body began to shed, and the Director, who flew several meters and crashed through a few bookshelves, started leaking black vapor.

"So you're like this too?"

Defying the identity of the deceased meant facing the murderer turned cursed spirit.

This had been one of the most deeply imprinted murderers of his childhood, and against the backdrop of the curse aura he became even more terrifying.

Then screws pinned the Director's limbs in place.

Having been chased by a mob of bandaged monsters, Anjouin didn't use much strength this time. He simply slipped away into the darkness.

Binding — Presence Erasure.

The cost: his presence and aura for a period of time. The payoff: speed and efficiency in setting Bindings.

Anjouin glanced at the Library Director, who was already struggling to his feet.

Then he set himself one more Binding, one that let him see in the dark.