Chapter 8

  “The truth is… I’m tired.”

  Iemon’s blood froze in his veins at the words of the clan head. He had invited him to his room to share a cup of tea privately, away from the prying eyes of the other elders. There were no Juchū in this room. Sosuke-sama was sedentary for the most part, but he truly was a ruthless talent that could detect even the most cleverly veiled Juchū.

  And he wouldn’t just stop at taking the bug of whosoever had dared to impugn on his privacy. He would make them an example. He already had, several times.

  Sosuke was playing with the Swarm Queen’s Antennae, taking long sips of his cup of green tea. They were both drinking from the same pot, and Iemon had surreptitiously checked his cup for poison as well using his Juchū. His Sense Expansion was strong enough that he could easily detect deadly substances coating his cup, and his scan had come negative.

  Unless Sosuke himself was ingesting poison, then chances were minimal that…

  Iemon took a tiny sip, pretending to drink before spitting the tea back into the cup.

  “Of Teira-chan,” Iemon completed, grinning ingratiatingly. “Of course, Sosuke-sama. You’ve suffered her presence for far too long already.”

  “She will only become a problem, the older she grows.”

  “Of course.”

  Sosuke’s hand tensed around one antenna as he stared into Iemon’s soul. The full weight of a Demon-grade expert pinned him in place. The strongest in the clan had reached the end of his patience.

  Iemon fought to defuse the situation. “She has kept to herself for the past two years, however. And I truly do believe that she will make an excellent betrothed to the next son of yours that you announce as heir.”

  “The six-year-old?” Sosuke scoffed. “He only just awakened his Juchū. Happy days,” he rolled his eyes. “And yet, were I to condemn him to a betrothal to the cursed child, then I would be the worst kind of father there ever was. I wouldn’t condemn my worst enemy to such a humiliation: of having my flesh and blood shown up by a girl!” He roared and stabbed the antenna into the tatami floor.

  Iemon’s heart galloped. “Indeed! A thousand apologies, Sosuke-sama. I said something truly nauseating just now.” Iemon put the cup away and kneeled fully, hands on the floor and forehead pressed down against the tatami mat. “Please, accept my sincerest apologies for my misspoken words. I only meant to appease your disgust.”

  “And in doing so, you magnified it.”

  “I understand, and I apologize.”

  Iemon heard a snort. “Raise your head,” Sosuke said.

  He did.

  “Teira will die,” Sosuke said.

  “Of course. I will assign her to a suicide mission—“

  “No need. Your… help… has proven disappointingly ineffectual as of late.”

  Was there something that Iemon had missed? Teira had done an excellent job of keeping out of the limelight. What could have Sosuke so bothered all of a sudden?

  “Clan head, please enlighten me as to where I failed you, so that I may never—“

  Sosuke clicked his tongue harshly. “I trusted you, Iemon. I did.”

  What the hell was going on?!

  “So much depends… on such isolated cases of excellence,” Sosuke sighed. “Tradition is all we have. All that allows us to hold our heads high in this day and age. We are ancient. Not primitive, but closer to the very source of jujutsu. And you have done nothing but pander to that little bitch. You haven’t broken her. You haven’t even lifted a finger to put her in her place. Not once. She remains defiant, in that tilt of her chin, and those empty, arrogant eyes. Every time I see her, I feel sick to my stomach!” He clutched at his stomach, gnashing his teeth. “She’s an aberration! Born of quintuplets. We shouldn’t have stopped at culling just four of those accursed nieces of yours! All of them should have died that night! But I see now…”

  Iemon prepared for a fight.

  Then he felt something hot on his back. He heard a squelch, felt a tearing.

  What…

  Sosuke’s hand was directed at Iemon. He tilted his eyes upwards, and Iemon looked up as well. Juchū. A swarm of flying types carrying spiders weaving a strong intertwined rope of silk leading down to a knife on his back.

  And not just any knife.

  One of the Hornet Stingers.

  He ripped the knife away, but could already feel himself collapsing. He couldn’t feel his legs. Had the knife hit his spinal column? What about the poison?

  Sosuke was already standing.

  “Your entire branch is rotten,” Sosuke snarled. “You, your brother Seiji, and his whore wife. And your whore wife for that matter, and those whorespawn you call children. Before this night ends… I will slit all their throats. As for Teira? I will just cripple her and let the curses handle her.”

  Iemon gnashed his teeth, closing his eyes, and hoping for a quick death so that he wouldn’t have to suffer through such a profound loss.

  Sosuke, ever the ruthless bastard, merely walked out of the room, leaving him to bleed out.

  000

  One moment, I was eating dinner in my room, Michiko seated across from me.

  The next, someone opened my sliding door and threw two grenades into my room.

  I reacted as quickly as I could, releasing all my Juchū in order to sharpen my senses, such that I could handle the situation better—

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  BOOOOM.

  I felt my body rip apart, and instantly, I gave up on anything else but the Reverse Cursed Technique. I slammed my energy against itself violently, creating a surge that healed the dozens of holes going through my chest and limbs.

  When I finally recovered, it was to find Michiko spasming while laying prone on the floor, bleeding out from her throat.

  No.

  No!

  I crawled up to her as quickly as I could.

  If I could heal myself, then I could heal her, too! This was just cursed energy, but different. It could be output!

  I tried it.

  The moment my positive energy left the bounds of my body, it fizzled into nothing—oh God, oh no, please, please, please don’t—

  I tried again, screaming as I did.

  But it was over.

  And in Michiko’s wake?

  An apparition rose from her corpse. Not a creature. More like… a fetus, enclosed within a womb of some sort—

  A cursed womb.

  The embryonic stage of Michiko’s vengeful spirit.

  One of the biggest rules of doing combat against another curse expert: to use cursed energy to kill them. As long as they died to a cursed spirit, a technique, energy, or even a cursed tool imbued with cursed energy, their spirits would ‘pass on’, or more likely than not, simply dissolve.

  For if not, then this would happen.

  I swallowed my grief and stood up. Michiko’s cursed womb would continue to gestate for a while longer.

  It didn’t matter—

  I had one Juchū still alive.

  It was the one that was bloated with energy, the one I had withheld inside of my spirit. All the rest had been destroyed.

  Did not fucking matter. I might have relied too much on Sense Expansion in the past, but I knew that no one could beat me in a Juchū battle.

  My room was a wreck.

  The rice paper walls were blown wide open, and down the hall, I could see my would-be assassin, gazing at me, mouths wide with disbelief.

  Then, their brows furrowed as those same mouths became portals from which their Juchū spewed out.

  They were old, in their forties or fifties. And my eyes instantly counted how many they had. Sixty each. A hundred and twenty.

  I shot my singular Juchū at the swarm.

  It instantly destroyed one of them, doubling my swarm. Within half a second, it doubled again. Within a quarter of a second, again.

  A tenth of a second, again.

  I didn’t even give a few of them time to reach me.

  Within moments, the entire swarm were black, and I walked over towards the people that had killed Michiko.

  They tried to run.

  I stomped.

  Black lightning exploded from the ground, and I shot towards one of the assassins, aiming a punch at his back.

  Black Flash.

  The strike hollowed his entire torso out, killing him instantly.

  I threw myself at the other one.

  I clapped my hands around his head.

  Black Flash.

  It exploded into gore.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go down.

  I was supposed to be the one to make the first move.

  But they killed Michiko!

  …It’s all my fault.

  I’d had the Reverse Cursed Technique for weeks. I had been steadily and quietly mastering it in preparation for when I would take all two-thousand Juchū and square all two thousand into four million.

  I spread all one-hundred and twenty Juchū throughout the clan compound. Some loose Juchū flying around that belonged to others, I stole on the way. Gradually, as I extended my reach, my swarm count ticked up. Two hundred.

  Two hundred and fifty.

  Three hundred.

  I screamed.

  Where the fuck are you, Sosuke?!

  There.

  Two buildings away. Nothing but paper and wood separated me from him.

  I stomped.

  Black Flash.

  Every single one…

  I burst through a wall and stomped again.

  Black Flash.

  Every last one.

  Black Flash.

  Every man. Every single man.

  Black Flash.

  Every single fucking one.

  Black Flash.

  As I burst through a wall with a kick, Sosuke-sama blocked it with crossed arms. I expected to hit another Black Flash at the moment of contact, but the world had denied me.

  I saw why an instant later, and understood the assignment: I had to invalidate Sosuke’s relevance. The Black Flash was between me and the world. Sosuke should not count as a person, but as an object. An object like those cursed spirits I had slaughtered. An object like the cliff faces and the metal poles.

  To win this battle, I had to objectify him.

  Even after blocking, he still shot out from the hallway, blowing several holes through the building until he came to a skidding stop at a grand courtyard with packed sand for a floor.

  He pulled out two knives from inside his inner robes. From the clan archives, I recognized them easily: the Hornet Stingers. They were two long and thin double-edged daggers that ended in narrow, razor-sharp tips. They were imbued with a cursed technique of poison, marking them as cursed tools of the highest pedigree.

  “How are you still alive?!” he roared.

  “The Reverse Cursed Technique,” I spat, revealing my hand. “I have it. You couldn’t kill me even if you tried. But today, I will make sure that your last moments are spent in agony for what you took from me.”

  One of my Juchū filled me in on Iemon’s situation. He was bleeding badly. He might die, too. I had mixed feelings about that.

  On the one hand, I didn’t want him to die.

  On the other…

  …keeping him alive was a mercy that I couldn’t foresee myself being able to summon forth. Not right now.

  Today was a day of cleansing.

  “You lie!” he roared. “You rotten bitch!”

  He sent his Juchū after me.

  I had one arrive quickly. A dragonfly that once belonged to someone else.

  Sosuke didn’t intend on keeping things non-contact, of course. He rushed me along with his bugs.

  “You’re dead!” He laughed as he cocked his fist back for a strike.

  I blocked and countered, striking his gut. Already, half his swarm was mine. “You’re losing your Juchū!” I snarled, grinning as I did.

  He didn’t care.

  He made to swipe me with his dagger.

  I jumped back.

  And just like that, his swarm was gone, like it never even belonged to him.

  Of course, it never did. It had all been mine.

  Once the Juchū battle ended, I approached him in close quarters again, carefully reserving some positive energy in case he managed to land a hit.

  I struck his shoulder.

  He made to cut me. I ducked away in the nick of time, turning a deadly wound into a shallow gash across my clavicle that I healed away as quickly as it came.

  And then I struck again.

  This time in his stomach.

  He crumpled, flying back and rolling over the ground.

  Excellent. I ran towards him, intent on stomping his skull to the ground, killing him once and—

  Guh!

  My healed wound still burned. That… that couldn’t be right. I had healed it!

  In my distraction, Sosuke had managed to get up to one foot, resting his arms on his knee as he panted at me, grinning widely. “Finally starting to feel it, aren’t you?”

  He threw them then. Both Hornet Stingers. I was too slow to dodge away, so I had to try and deflect them.

  Despite my enforcement, they still managed to score thin lines across my arms as they flew. I healed them with positive energy, but the burn remained.

  And then Sosuke punched me in the face.

  Try as I could, I couldn’t recover my footing in my flight. It became all too clear to me how little I understood about cursed martial arts. I knew how to move my cursed energy optimally, and that had been enough for most opponents.

  I even had the Reverse Cursed Technique.

  Was this what it meant to be a Demon-grade?

  I couldn’t move. My muscles felt stiff, and they were screaming at me in agony. Couldn’t breathe.

  Couldn’t… think.

  All I could do was keep pumping my body full of positive energy. Keep trying to keep myself alive.

  It’s the poison. Positive energy’s no good against poison.

  Not for the last time, I cursed the worthlessness of the clan’s archives.

  I cursed myself as well. Once again, on the brink of death, I cursed myself.

  And I laughed.

  What, God, the devil, whoever put me in this place? You gonna take me someplace worse? Hell itself, maybe?! Force me to be a baby to a bunch of immortal sociopaths for a thousand years, this time?

  I had nothing but hatred to spare to the entirety of the universe in this moment as Sosuke walked up to me, grinning. In his hands, he held the Swarm Queen’s Antennae in reverse grip, the sharp points aimed downwards.

  “You really do have it,” Sosuke grinned maniacally. “The heavens meant to curse us!”

  He sat down on my stomach, straddling me, holding the Antennae close to my face.

  “Alright then, blessed child. Inheritor of the Reverse Cursed Technique. Clan heir!” He giggled maniacally. “Let the Swarm Queen decide your fate! These are, after all, your rightful inheritance!”

  Was he… giving them to me?

  “Normally, this would be a monumental risk. The chance to waste a generational talent is too high. This is why Kenzo never activated these. But for you? I don’t quite mind the risk, heheheh.”

  What was he getting at—

  He stabbed the antennae into my skull.