Chapter 32

  “Come now, dorm captain,” one of the girls, another yukata-wearer, chided Mukai Reiko, folding her arms as she did. She was one of the few people that hadn’t bowed to me in thanks. She had no reason to. Her name was Kamo Sachi, a scion of the Big Three, specifically the Kamo clan. “You shouldn’t encourage people to bow to an underclassman. No offense, of course,” she said to me, “but that isn’t how things are done.”

  Reiko snorted. “Are you hearing yourself? She isn’t just some princess from a big clan that we’re honoring based on status alone, like you.” Kamo Sachi made an expression of shock and hurt at the sudden accusation. “She saved our lives. Nothing else matters.” Then she turned to me. “That being said, I’d be a crappy dorm captain if that meant giving you more privileges than the rest of the students. Not to say I’m ungrateful—“

  “Not at all,” I said. I’d rather just break the rules than ask her for permission anyway. “You also don’t have to mention this ever again. I only did my duty as a Jujutsu Sorcerer.”

  “That’s a good attitude, kouhai,” she said, giving me a nod of approval. “When I heard that we’d be getting a Special Grade, I was fearing the worst—especially after the show you put on outside the building. But it turns out, you’re a reasonable sort after all.”

  “It was Gojo’s fault,” I said.

  “Heh,” she shook her head. “What a rascal, but that’s no surprise. A whole lifetime of being told you’re the strongest will make a rascal out of anyone. Anyway, everyone, find a seat somewhere while I do roll call. Now, for you freshies: roll call is at seven and nine-thirty every day. Lights out at ten. I’ll be doing my rounds to check. Any of you try to get one over on me on this—check the wall over there,” she pointed towards a corkboard, “for the list of disciplinary measures.”

  000

  Kobayashi Jun could think of two ways to make his career as a high school student a manageable one.

  Removing Hibana Teira and Gojo Satoru from the school.

  That wasn’t to say that he hated them. He would never adopt such a doomed position, and what little resentment he could muster up, he could easily force down with nothing but discipline and a healthy amount of fear and respect for who they were. Nothing good would come from aligning himself against them.

  Still, he couldn’t help but fantasize from time to time, how much nicer it would have been.

  Gojo Satoru and Geto Suguru stood in the middle of a pack of angry, buff sorcerers in the common room of Higanbana house—the name of the boy’s dormitory that contained all the high school students.

  Coward’s Dance.

  Jun stood in one random corner of the room. Outwardly, this spot didn’t seem safer than any other, but his power told him that it was the safest place to be.

  It also told him that violence was very, very imminent.

  One of the buff, angry sorcerers, had a clip board in his hand, and a pen of all things. While he glared at Gojo Satoru, he kept reciting names. And each time, some angry sorcerer would say ‘here’.

  Then… “Kobayashi Jun,” the boy—the man said. Nakatani Katsuyuki, the dorm captain for Higanbana house.

  “Here,” Jun said quietly.

  “Gojo Satoru.”

  Gojo grinned. “Here.”

  Katsuyuki paused, as if to size him up, before continuing.

  When it was finally over, Katsuyuki threw the clipboard over his shoulder and glared at Gojo. “Gojo Satoru, then.”

  “So we’ve established,” Gojo said.

  “Before we go any further,” Geto said as he stepped between Gojo and Natsuyuki. “Can you tell me why you’re picking on your junior?”

  “Step aside, kouhai. You’re not a big enough fish for this pond.”

  “Leave ‘em to me, Suguru.”

  Gojo Satoru was many things, in Jun’s estimation, but there was something seriously off about a group of seniors wanting to challenge their junior out of nowhere.

  “You’re confident, huh?” the dorm captain growled.

  Shit, shit, shit, shit.

  “More like impatient to get this day overwith,” Gojo said. “Alright then. Come one, come all—“

  I should do something.

  But… what? Stop them?

  The Coward’s Dance showed him a way out of the room—a circuitous route past the blindspots of several people that would allow him to disappear without incurring social damage in the form of ‘shame’. Registration was over. He didn’t have to be here.

  Still…

  He couldn’t just leave things like this.

  “Gojo-san,” Jun spoke up. Gojo turned to look at him with a raised eyebrow. “Go easy on them. You’re strong, but the rest of us can still benefit from a connection with them. One that would persist past our graduation.”

  Gojo grinned mockingly. “What are you, forty? Why do you even care about something so far-flung?”

  Jun sighed, and debated saying something provocative. Not enough to have him turn on Jun, but enough to cause Gojo to perhaps reflect. “As a Jujutsu Sorcerer, I can no longer afford to consider myself a child. Everything I do here is with my career in mind.”

  That… seemed to have a disproportionate effect, given the widening of Gojo’s eyes. Then a click of his tongue. “So damn straight-laced. What a bother. Yeah, whatever. I won’t break any bones.” He then turned to the dorm captain, who looked angrier and angrier. “Hear that? You owe my boy Kobayashi big time. He bailed your ass out.”

  Jun didn’t wait to listen as the situation rapidly degraded. He simply disappeared without anyone noticing, using his Coward’s Dance.

  000

  I wondered if, perhaps, my prime motivator for finding all those potential sorcerers after learning that I was to spend four years in high school, was precisely so that an outcome such as this would occur.

  An outcome in which I had monopolized the good will of roughly everyone, by sheer virtue of how I had individually helped everyone.

  After registration, the girls didn’t go down to their rooms. They stuck around and subtly began to congregate around me as I played an exhaustive round of twenty-one questions.

  No one had the nerve to ask me about my appearance, which I personally found to be rather endearing. I also appreciated it. The circumstances surrounding my appearance wasn’t a sensitive issue for me, but I still wouldn’t just go openly blurting to anyone about it. It would affect how people perceived me.

  Maybe one day, Shoko could stomach this information. We’d have to reach a certain level of trust beforehand.

  “Your clan’s founder was a woman?” one girl in the second year asked.

  By now, I was on a couch while pretty much all the girls were surrounding me, having rearranged the couches and grabbed extra chairs to make room while I received this somewhat bizarre interview. “Indeed,” I nodded. “Hibana was a woman. She was scrubbed from history, of course. I would never have learned of her—the Swarm Queen’s existence. If it hadn’t been for these,” I said, pointing at my antennae. “They’re cursed tools, you see. They also go into my brain,” I grinned, bowing down to show them my head of hair. “And they do this.” I made them grow bristles. My range instantly shot up another fifty miles.

  Ooohs and aaahs aplenty. Shoko, especially, seemed fascinated. Where a few of the girls seemed slightly offput, Shoko was entirely too… interested. Perhaps she had a fascination for the morbid? I’d have to ask her.

  “She even met Tengen,” I said. “Who, by the way, is also a woman.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Really?”

  “Wow, that’s crazy! I didn’t know!”

  A fun quirk of Japanese was how ambiguous gender was in terms of pronoun use. Even status and age or the situation you were in could affect your choice of pronoun. No one ever claimed that Tengen wasn’t a woman. I had checked.

  Instead, the few people lucky enough to have gained an audience with that failure of a shut-in, and had chosen to report on her, had simply omitted that detail in favor of her status as a master. She was a master before she was a woman, apparently.

  Kamo Sachi seemed disturbed by the news. She tried not to gaze directly at me as she processed that information, likely so she could reject it or something. I could make out her inner turmoil quite easily.

  I sighed. “There’s a lot that they won’t tell us,” I said. “A lot about what it means to be a woman and a sorcerer at the same time.”

  Reiko blew out. “Some of my upperclassmen were some real assholes. One teacher, especially. He barely wanted to train me. Thought I was too fragile.”

  Fuck him.

  “Yeah…” one girl looked thoroughly disturbed. “I kinda hate the teachers here. Except Yaga, he’s nice. I remember my combat instructor from my third year, and you know what he did for an entire semester? He basically made the classes stupid easy, and gave private lessons to the boys only. When I went to principal Dojima, he thought I was overreacting!”

  The hell?

  “Does he still work here?” I asked.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  She sighed in relief. “Nah. He finally died in some mission.”

  “Aaaaww—“

  “Don’t say that—“

  “Come on, Yuri-san.”

  I raised up a hand, quieting the room. Then I leaned forward towards Yuri-chan. “Good riddance.”

  The whole room seemed stunned by that.

  “We’re not here to pick flowers and bake cookies. Girls—we’re here to put our lives on the line. Anyone that tries to sabotage that by refusing to give us all the tools we need deserves worse than death. So again, I say good riddance. The curses couldn’t have chosen a better sorcerer to eat.” I hoped there wasn’t enough left of him for even his family to identify him. Human trash like him deserved nothing but a slow, slow death.

  “I don’t know, Hibana-san,” Reiko looked unsure. “Right, he’s a bad teacher. No one’s arguing against that. But dying…”

  “You heard Dojima’s speech,” I said. “It’s what all the teachers keep drilling into us ceaselessly: to be a Jujutsu Sorcerer is to likely end up dying an accursed death. We’ve taken on the most thankless and dangerous job in the world. And still, we must fear not being prepared adequately by idiotic teachers who cannot see our value past our genders.”

  “I get it. But a man died.”

  “And ten women would have died from his instruction,” I said. “He was a traitor. A traitor to the cause of Jujutsu Society. Us. Would it be better if he had simply chosen, out of the kindness of his own heart, to renounce his prejudices and make active efforts to change? Yes. And would it be even better if all cursed spirits spontaneously chose to combust and disappear? Indeed.”

  “You’re acting like it’s not possible,” Reiko said. “And that’s wrong.”

  “It’s possible. But it’s not a solution that can be counted on. Yuri went to the principal, asking for change. She received nothing. Was she at fault for not stalking this teacher at every hour of the day to engage him in debate in order to slowly and gradually change his mind? In the meanwhile, time goes on, and her likelihood of being sent to exorcise a cursed spirit while ill-prepared rises.”

  I swept my head over the crowd of girls. I didn’t need eyes to see them, but it was a good rhetorical device. “They want us to think that working within the system is our only way of achieving change. They want us to use the system’s functions and wait our turn in an orderly fashion. They want to vilify the very act of protesting the system. Well? I’m here to tell you all that you are being lied to. Every single one of you are being lied to. The system will not change if we use its functions as intended. Going to the principal, entreating him one-to-one, relying on his in-born humanity of all things.” How na?ve can one be? “No. That’s not only nonsensical, but it’s entirely unnecessary at this point.”

  “Unnecessary?” Reiko asked. “The hell do you mean by that?”

  “You have me,” I said. “That’s what I mean by that. I’m here now,” I said softly. So softly, that the girls leaned closer to me to hear what I had to say. “You don’t have to fight to be heard anymore. You don’t have to beg to be taken seriously anymore. You want to know why? The sad, sad truth of how this world operates?”

  I paused, letting anticipation build up.

  “It’s just power,” I said. “All the way down. Always has been, always will be. Power above all.”

  The room was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop.

  Shoko looked at me with…

  Sad eyes. Wide open, brows bent in concern. A small, sad frown. Directed at me. Pity? For me? Why?

  Whatever. I’ll figure that out later.

  “Let me tell you girls a story,” I said. “A story about my life. It won’t be a very nice story to hear. In fact, if you don’t have the stomach for it, I suggest you leave the room, for this story… begins with death. From the first moment of my birth, it began with death.”

  I waited patiently. No one took me up on the offer.

  “I was born in a set of quintuplets. The last-born child to Hibana Himeko and Seiji…”

  I told them about the infanticide. I told them about the deaths of my parents. Then, I told them about the grueling days following my awakening of the Juchū technique.

  The abuse.

  The lack of love.

  The all-encompassing hostility around every corner.

  My limited means as a mere child.

  I told them about Hanako, my first caretaker.

  Mezuko, the old hag.

  And… Taniko. After her dismissal from her position of caring for me, someone had apparently murdered her within a few weeks. Three guesses as to why. She must have molested the wrong child.

  I told them about Hibana Sosuke. Curse his name. To this day, I still required all my clan members to include that suffix every time his name was mentioned, at the cost of a steep penalty. I had worked hard to dig through the morass of misogyny, but I had worked even harder to bury the legacy of the old guard once and for all. By the time I left this mortal coil, his name would be synonymous with ignorance.

  I told them about Michiko. Her sad, sad life, my attachment to her, and her dog’s death at the hands of Sosuke.

  I told them about how Sosuke had stabbed me with the antennae, expecting me to die. He had spited me with the curse of the antennae—a burden that few users of the Reverse Cursed Technique could bear. And yet, I had borne it. I had borne it well.

  “I killed them,” I said to the girls. “Every single last one of those wretched curse users, I slaughtered them to a man, and I enjoyed every minute. I had my Juchū scour their bones. They didn’t even have whole corpses once I was done with them. All that remained were bones, and I used those to create cursed tools. When I was done, I had two options: to leave, and seek freedom. Or… to stay behind. And do something good. Make changes. Help rather than hurt.”

  I was standing now. The girls had given me a wide berth in the room, a stage for which I could pace back and forth. “My pain is the only significant thing I have to my name. Without it, I have nothing which animates me. The principles that cause my cursed energy to stir—the mental levers that I use to manipulate it—are so intertwined with this pain. And this pain is telling me… no, it’s forcing me to do something to offset the pain that I have caused.”

  Before I knew it, I had already confided my sincerest truths to a room of complete strangers. And yet, it didn’t feel wrong at all. No, it felt all too right. It felt like the toll that had to be paid, for myself to earn their trust. Or for them to reach my position of understanding.

  “I come from a clan of curse users,” I said. “The lowest of the low. Real scumbags who’ve operated for centuries, doing nothing but lining their own pockets at the cost of society. But society isn’t much better. Certainly not the so-called Jujutsu Society,” I sneered. “Here, we exorcise curses. We save people. We help. And yet here we are, getting the short end of the stick, no matter what. Good, evil, curse user, sorcerer—in the end, we are women before we are sorcerers. And it shows.”

  000

  Satoru still couldn’t quite fathom the last five minutes that had occurred.

  “Sit this one out, Satoru,” Suguru said as he stepped up to the big senior of the dorm. “I’ll handle this.”

  “Huh? You sure? I mean—you’re barely even a sorcerer at this point,” Satoru said. The guy hadn’t come from a sorcerer’s background.

  “I know,” Suguru said as he walked up to the guy and stared him down. “I don’t care. I just can’t stand to see bullies putting down juniors.”

  “You wanna die, punk?”

  “I can say the same to you, punk.”

  Suguru didn’t wait for a bell or anything.

  He just moved.

  One punch flew into the dorm captain’s abdominals, folding him.

  The rest attacked.

  Suguru was a whirl of movements. Rough and wide, but nonetheless powerful. His output was sky high. And his cursed energy felt even more cursed than usual.

  Satoru knew that Suguru’s technique involved somehow enslaving cursed spirits to do his bidding.

  Until now, Satoru hadn’t known what that truly meant. As Suguru moved, he could sense a deep wellspring of power bursting forth from within. Suguru’s pool of cursed energy was massive. And not all of it was his.

  There was a discontinuity, an imbalance, in how he used his overwhelming power. Still, for the purposes of these riff-raff, it was enough.

  Geto Suguru was a Grade Two sorcerer. Satoru had checked. In fact, he had checked the cards of all the students in his year, using information channels granted to him by his clan. Geto Suguru, with the exception to himself and Teira, was the strongest student in this year.

  Seeing him in action, however…?

  I see so many curses. Hundreds. Maybe even a thousand. Does he even have an upper limit?

  So many curses floating around somewhere in a separate dimension, which Satoru could only look into from a tiny peephole.

  Perhaps two thousand.

  All this informed Satoru’s growing certainty that Geto Suguru, too, was a Special Grade sorcerer. And one that had hidden his own proficiency for some reason.

  Why?

  Satoru felt an unease grow as he watched Suguru fight.

  He really, desperately, didn’t want for Suguru to turn out to be some kind of curse user spy. He really, really didn’t want that.

  What was he supposed to do, now? Shake him down for information? Was that… okay? Or would it just reveal a level of cowardice that didn’t become Satoru at all? He didn’t want to appear overly cautious, and yet in this particular instance, it burned him to not look into this any closer.

  Still, he could take a moment to appreciate the spectacle.

  Geto Suguru was strong.

  And that was…

  Really frigging cool.

  000

  “Jujutsu Headquarters will operate more liberally,” I said. “That’s their place as an organization tied so closely to the government. It has the prime minister’s endorsement after all. But Jujutsu Headquarters was never the sole seat of Jujutsu Society’s culture. That would have been the Big Three and the minor clans besides.” I kept a proverbial ‘eye’ on Kamo Sachi to gauge her reaction. She looked aghast. “And you know what they think of us? You know what separates them from my clan? They just wouldn’t murder babies. That’s all.”

  I kept silent. They looked disturbed.

  “But they’d still turn you into broodmares without question. I bet, to them, you are nothing but opportunities for their sons to birth stronger sorcerers. Sorcerers and potential broodmares and political chips to spend on sociopolitical capital gained from other families. That’s why they won’t train you seriously. It’s why they don’t take your efforts seriously. They don’t want you to become sorcerers. They want you to become wives. Or die so that the men can succeed in our stead. And why shouldn’t they feel that way? Over a thousand years spent marinating in the rot of Confucianism has taught them that our place is three steps behind a man! We should be servants to our fathers, then our husbands, and then our sons should our husbands die! Can you even imagine the humiliation of being enslaved by your own son?! This is how they think! They want us beholden to them! But if it was only that, if all they wanted was to make us into their servants, that would almost approach something that could remotely be considered fine. But no. Listen, and listen closely. They hate us.”

  I forced myself to calm down. “They hate us. Either we birth to them children that can use jujutsu, or we fail. If we fail, it’s our fault. If we succeed, it’s because their seed was strong enough. Their worthless fucking sperm only makes a difference when they’ve succeeded. If it doesn’t, we are the ones to blame. Always. Our best bet is to live our lives in silence, without being harmed by our spouses. Worst case scenario? They take their anger at their own inadequacy out on us. Why? Because we, as women, are a necessary evil.”

  I balled my fists. “Take this to heart, girls. We are a necessary evil. A deviation of god’s plan. By all accounts, whether you look at Christianity, or Confucianism, it’s the same story. We are the seed of evil. We are the temptresses. The succubi. The demons waiting to corrupt the hearts of good, young men. This is how they see us. Engrave it into your hearts, the words: necessary evil. If they could get away with it, they would strip us of our personhood and turn us into puppets for their own amusement in a heartbeat. Their little playthings. This is how they see us!”

  I sat back down in my seat, intertwined my fingers, and growled. “I am anger incarnate.”

  I let those words sink in again.

  “I am an instrument of hatred and rage.”

  I nodded, finding those words to be satisfactory.

  “One day, when my work is done, there will no longer be a need for a human curse like me to take the helm. When that day has come, our sun will shine brightly on our faces and we won’t…”

  I lost my train of thought as I considered my words. The mortality within. Hatred and rage could only take a movement so far before it poisoned it. I was yet to poison this movement. In two more generations, I could win—provided Gojo didn’t kill me or something. He couldn’t. I knew how to make sure of that now.

  No. He couldn’t kill me. I wouldn’t let him.

  But when the day came, I had to step aside. For the good of the future. I would become a relic of harsher days. I would take on all the hatred, and I would isolate it.

  I would disappear.

  I clapped my hands.

  “I’ve been meaning to bring this up at a certain point,” I said. “But right now seems like the best time to do this. I wish to create the Jujutsu Women’s Union. It’s an official club which will allow us to join our voices together and advocate for our rights with the power of numbers on our side. There will be no leaders. No heads. I will not lead our way. I am a human weapon. That is all I am; power incarnate. Power with the power to choose. And I choose this. I don’t mean to force any of you into this, but I truly believe, from the bottom of my heart, that we need this.” I stood up, and bowed at the waist. “Join the Women’s Union. Let us join hands. I beg you.”

  I could terrorize men into no longer victimize me, but what could I say to a group of girls that hadn’t known what I had known, hadn’t experienced what I had experienced? They would view me as an extremist, no doubt. A rabble-rouser that just wanted to upset a precarious societal balance. I was strong, but would that strength, in their heads, translate into an ability to truly change the world?

  If they didn’t believe it could, then it was over already. I had failed where it had truly counted.

  Reiko approached me and dragged me up from my bow bodily. Then she hugged me. “Stop doing that. Just… stop it!”

  More girls approached me. Just to hug me.

  “I’ll join,” Reiko said softly, into my ear. Then louder as she turned her mouth away from my ear. “I’ll join!”

  The other girls that had come to hug me said the same. “I’ll join!”

  “I’ll join!”

  “I’ll join!”

  “I’ll join!”

  I closed my eyes.

  In relief.

  Please. Please, let’s… accomplish something good.