Tea at Granny’s House.
On the menu today:
Milk tea and coffee cake.
Rules
- Drink your tea. Eat your cake.
- Don’t be rude. Have manners.
- No fighting at Granny’s House
- If you’re a poor guest, the wolf will get you
I blinked away the sudden barrage of information.
A Domain Expansion, like in the stories of old. This one had rules, like a game.
My broken form appeared in a chair. A chair that I couldn’t move away from even if I wanted to. It was one of the conditions of this Domain. A table was before me. Toji sat across from me, grinning widely. He still wore his worm curse. Just like everything that involved him, reaching it and harming it was easier said than done. The one chance I had to touch him with my Juchū, I had aimed for his body, injecting enough venom and paralytics to kill an elephant.
I should have gone for the worm curse instead, had I known about his healing factor.
Michiko sat on the side between us, grinning warmly as she poured a cup of tea from a western pot, pouring it into Toji’s glass.
In fact, everything in this room looked distinctly Western European. The tea, the cakes, the wood log cottage. Michiko wore a dress instead of a kimono, and hadn’t it been for her ethnicity, she would have looked like a kindly grandmother.
Well, this projection of hers, at least. I knew that this wasn’t the real Michiko, but a form that she inserted into her Innate Domain to interact with me.
“You heard the rules, Toji,” I said as I finally finished regenerating.
“Huh?”
“So… let’s be good guests. And talk.”
“Wonderful idea!” Michiko crooned. She then stood up and summoned a coat for me to wear, from somewhere in her internal storage of clothes, covering up the tattered remains of my kimono.
He took a sip of his tea and hummed in appreciation. “Wow, this is lovely,” he nodded to Michiko, who seemed slightly discomfited. Then he turned to me. “Alright, then. My name is Zen'in Toji. Nice to meet you.”
“I’m… Hibana Teira.”
“How old are you?”
“…Eight,” I said.
“Dang,” he said. “That’s crazy. I almost don’t believe it.”
“You’re from the Zen'in clan?”
“Used to be,” He reached for the cake and took a bite out of it. His eyes widened and he hummed. “Wow, this is nice. Never had an opponent treat me to a mid-battle snack. I give this fight a ten out of ten for that alone.” He gave Michiko a nod. “These are real foods, huh?”
“She can preserve food,” I explained. “So… now you’re a sword for hire.”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“Why don’t we come to an agreement, Zen'in-kun?”
“Call me Toji. Not a fan of my clan.”
“Toji-kun, then.”
“The answer is… unfortunately… nah. I was hired to do a job.”
“I can pay you off,” I said.
He snorted. “If someone offered me a hundred-yen coin to kill the emperor, and I accepted, it wouldn’t matter if the emperor made a counter-offer of a billion yen. I always take the first contract. It’s how you float in this business.”
Rational. Logical.
“What if the benefits of keeping me alive extend past money?” I asked. “You’re just a sellsword. Aren’t you curious to make a change? To be someone important?”
“Work for you?” Toji grinned. “That’s bold of you. Yeah, nah, you’re definitely not eight years old. Are you some kind of reincarnated sorcerer or something? I didn’t know that was possible. And what’s with the sticks in your skull, anyway? You look fucking freaky.”
“Don’t be rude,” Michiko said.
Toji turned to her, and I looked at her as well.
Her eyes had become bigger. Yellow, and black.
“Ahah, I know this story,” Toji grinned. “Oh, granny, what big eyes you’ve got!”
“All the better to see you with, dearie,” Michiko’s teeth took on a deadly glint.
“We can come to an agreement, Toji,” I said, taking a sip of the tea and nibbling on the cake. They were good. “You’ve done nothing that I can’t forgive just yet.”
“Ahahah!” Toji threw his head back and laughed. “I like your attitude, little girl. Maybe you are just a kid. You don’t stay this hopelessly optimistic for very long when you’re an adult. Positive thinking. It’s the key to everything.”
I wondered if anyone had ever accused me of being a ‘positive thinker’. Maybe in a twisted sense, I very much was?
It wasn’t in me to give up, after all.
“Toji, the Mori clan are nothing,” I said. “We could rule it all. The Association, the Society.”
“You think you could beat the Six Eyes and Limitless user?”
“I think we could make a convincing run to the top,” I said.
He nodded. “We could. We definitely could. You’re Special Grade material. You know that? Of course, you’re dogshit at fighting—
“Don’t be rude.”
We turned to look at Michiko.
She had grown black, dog-ears on top of her head.
“Oh, granny,” Toji chuckled. “What big ears you’ve got!”
“All the better to hear you with.”
The quiet menace in her voice was unmistakable. Keep going, Toji. Just keep going.
“You said I was bad at fighting,” I said.
“Yes. Your martial skill is… lacking to say the least. Which, if you really are just a kid, is excusable. You’d be a real nightmare in ten year’s time. Never seen anyone hit a Black Flash against the ground just for a speed boost. That’s the sort of thing you hear children come up with in the playground.”
“So you see, I’m a prime opportunity for you,” I said. “Clearly, I’ve got potential.”
“Yes. Lots of potential! You’re just… gushing with potential!” he took a sip of his tea. “But you know what I’m into? Heheheh,” he chuckled. “Let’s just say, I’ve always been a fan of kicking down people’s sandcastles while they’re being built.”
He was a psychopath.
And I couldn’t beat him as I was. The only thing I could do was… make him break the rules of this domain.
“There’s no need to aim low,” I said. “We can get things done. You don’t like the Zen'in clan? Let’s crush them. Together.”
Toji shook his head. “I could do that myself if I wanted to.”
One of the Big Three clans, crushed by one single man? How strong was this guy?
“Does that make you Special Grade?” I asked.
He shook his head. “The Special Grade is… more you than me. I’m just really good at killing sorcerers. That’s a special talent, but it doesn’t make me Special Grade.”
So it was a measure of potential? Or was it that I was able to dish out more damage on a mass scale than he was?
“Did the Mori clan hire you for their own protection?” I asked.
“In a way. By taking care of you. But I’m not their bodyguard or nothing. After I finish this job, I’ll head right back to them to collect my cash, and then I’m headed to Tokyo to party.”
“Suppose you don’t finish the job,” I said. “Suppose I finish the Mori clan first. You’d have no reason to finish your job.”
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He shook his head. “Eh. Thing is, I’m working through a broker who helps fix me my clients. If the Mori clan kick it while I’m in the middle of a job for them, that’s a black mark on my name that he’d have to disclose to future clients, which means less money for me. I’m sure you understand.”
Dammit. “I have shikigami stationed around the Mori stronghold,” I said. “I can kill them all right now. You’ll have no one to pay you.” I could still sense them, as was always the case while I was in Michiko’s Domain.
But as per usual, I couldn’t make them do anything. Time was still in the outside world.
“Even if you did kill them all, what, am I supposed to take your word for it?” he chuckled. “And I left my phone and pager at home. I’m incommunicado while I’m working.”
That had to be a lie.
No one could be this nakedly irresponsible in the name of responsibility. It hardly felt like I was even dealing with a real person.
“You just… want this,” I said. “I’m… I’m eight.”
He laughed. “Yeah? Listen. You’ve lived a blessed eight years as it is. You’re strong. You’ve always been strong. And bully for you. But this is the real world. And in the real world, things don’t go your way because you’re just strong. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how strong you are. Life finds a way to humble you. Always. And that’s what I’m here for. The world sensed that you were getting too big for your britches and… tried to course-correct. It’s heaven’s will.”
“That’s convenient,” I growled. “You’re turning down the world itself out of nothing but spite for me. Why? Why do you want to kill me?”
“I was born with no cursed energy,” he said. He chuckled at my incredulous expression. “It’s not a lie. It’s called a Heavenly Restriction. In exchange for my body not being able to produce a single iota of cursed energy, my body is supernaturally powerful. As are my senses. It’s how I’m able to perceive curses. And… as you’ve clearly noticed, I’m strong. That didn’t matter to my clan, however. All they saw was a freak of nature with no cursed energy. An invisible wretch, an abomination, challenging their ideas of normalcy. So try to understand me when I see a heaven-sent little talent like you, revered for your strength, and I want to give it my all in order to prove that my existence is valid.” Toji’s tone became harsher as he went on. “It’s a shame that you’re so young, but I won’t change my mind on that account. This is necessary.”
I clenched my jaws. “You have no idea what I’ve been through.”
“I don’t care.”
“Don’t be rude.”
Michiko had grown a wolf-like snout. Her tight grimace revealed human teeth, still.
“Oh granny,” he said as he reached into the mouth of his worm. “What an ugly-ass nose you’ve got. Wait, hahah! Jackpot!”
He pulled a sword out from his worm just as Michiko’s teeth transformed into sharp wolf teeth. Then, her body transformed. The transformation happened in the span of milliseconds.
The katana was thick, more like a saber than a katana, and it had a thick, fur crossguard.
As Michiko’s wolf form pounced over the table, Toji swung his sword, cutting it in half.
“IMPOSSIBLE!” The entire room shrieked. “YOU CANNOT FIGHT HERE! IT’S AGAINST THE RULES!”
“I don’t follow rules.”
I tried to push myself away from my chair as Toji stood up, leering at me, but I couldn’t. I was fastened to it, almost surgically so.
Toji swung for my throat.
Then, again, this time with a frown on his face. Two long and deep gouges dug into my throat, spilling blood everywhere, and I fought to regenerate—
It was barely working. The damage was too deep on a metaphysical level. Too profound.
No, Toji hadn’t just sliced my throat.
He had sliced my soul.
As I felt the beginnings of low blood pressure causing me to black out, I overcharged my Reverse Cursed Technique to focus it on oxygenating my brain. As it happened, the barrier collapsed. We were back in the middle of the gorge.
And Michiko no longer wore her robes. She had thrown them off, and grown into a titanic size of fifty feet.
Her form was that of an ancient hag, entirely naked from the waist up. Her breasts were sagging all the way to her waist, and the vortexes that once covered her features had detached from her face, becoming worms and snakes that writhed in the air.
All of her body were covered in such worms and snakes, and from their unfurling—
I had to look away, to her lower body. Spider legs. Snakes. Worms. Her entire lower mass was a confusing tangle of flesh.
She teleported away, and into Toji, grabbing him and throwing him at the wall.
No. She hadn’t teleported. She had just moved faster than I could detect.
As the battle disappeared from my field of view, I focused on my healing instead.
And my Juchū.
I was going to kill Zen'in Toji whether it was the last thing I did.
000
The cursed spirit was a fucking monster. Toji laughed as it tossed him around like he weighed nothing. To it, he really didn’t. It was massive, and it seemed to use some kind of ability to magnify its own speed. Like Projection sorcery, almost.
It was time related.
The speed at which it hurried to obey gravity was magnified, almost as if it was heavier than it should be—but that wasn’t quite the case. No, from everything Toji could sense as it dragged him through the gorge, returning the same favor he had given to that little girl, he knew that this was a time-related ability. Temporal manipulation.
That wolf really would have menaced him if it hadn’t been for his sword. He’d gotten lucky at that moment. He wouldn’t have been able to dodge the wolf’s pounce with how fast it was. It had been between the Inverted Spear of Heaven and the Split Soul Katana—and Abortion-chan had finally pulled its weight by giving him what he needed.
Speaking of, where was the little monster?
In between one of the tumbles through the gorge, it must have slipped away from him. That was fine. It knew to always follow its master.
Welp.
Enough fucking around.
Toji cut the hand off the curse. The technique speeding it up failed as it screamed in horror. Still, the sword slid through its wrist easily, proving that his technique hadn’t faltered.
Then why hadn’t he been able to decapitate the little girl? Even after two strokes?
No matter. The kid was dead, Reverse Cursed Technique or not. It wasn’t possible to use that power to heal the soul, or so the ancient texts claimed. To do that, you had to be aware of the contours of your own soul, and he highly doubted that the little girl was that accomplished in Jujutsu.
Of course, he’d go back and confirm whether he got the job done or not. He just first had to finish up with this monster.
Blood gushed from its wrist as it screamed. “You wretch!”
A vengeful cursed spirit, no doubt. It was more common for those to know how to talk. And its cursed energy was off the charts. Just like the little girl’s, who seemed to be able to endlessly replenish her stores and heal herself without an end in sight.
Was she getting it from this creature, perhaps?
Whatever.
Toji pulled back his sword arm, and dashed.
He cut through five of its twenty-eight legs in one passing. Then five more. Six more.
He jumped up at the creature, ripping through its body, separating it from its lower half, before then going for the final strike.
A decapitation.
He sliced the creature’s head off—
Just as he felt its core shift into its head. Didn’t matter. Where it that he had used a regular cursed tool, the monster would simply use its endless stores of cursed energy to regenerate.
He had severed its soul, however. And cursed spirits could not regrow their souls so easily.
He kicked the monster’s head away and raised his Split Soul Katana, about to stab its head.
Instead, he felt his body constricted by a creature clambering on his back, holding back his limbs.
Black carapace. Antennae on her head.
A host of mantis shikigami did the same, locking him in place.
To the point that he couldn’t move at all.
She was back.
How the fuck?!
000
Sixteen daughter bugs stacked to the edge of their reach gave me an effective range of almost fifty miles.
Forty-eight miles sideways was far.
Forty-eight miles upwards was well into the mesosphere.
Atop this range was the latest Totality shikigami I had designed.
An arrow-shaped creature of black carapace, its back end spewing out a hot, noxious acid that combusted. I couldn’t directly create jet fuel, but this, coupled with my effectively infinite ability to generate more liquid using Cursed Technique: Reversal, was enough for my purposes.
I called it Khepri’s Judgment.
And today, I would die.
That was fine.
I was done cursing. Done running away from the awfulness of my life. I should have been more grateful. I shouldn’t have cursed my final moments.
I was… sorry.
Michiko’s head was right next to me. She would finally find rest. With me.
And yet, I felt not an ounce of hatred in my heart.
“The hell are you doing?”
Holding his feet down were over a dozen shikigami. So many of them were grabbing his limbs, holding him still. A binding vow had given them the strength to do so. Toji grunted. “The fuck?”
“Let’s just die,” I said to him. My voice was raspy. I hadn’t fully regenerated yet. I never would, at this rate, since I was going to die soon.
That katana had done a number on my soul.
“Ohohohoh, you crazy bitch.”
He flexed.
The air above us started to burn.
He roared.
“It’s fine,” I said to him.
“Fuck! This!” he roared, breaking out from our holds.
Khepri’s Judgment was one mile above our heads.
Its descent could be measured in dozens of yards every millisecond.
And in this infinitesimal moment, several things happened.
Toji screamed, bleeding as he broke out from our holds—shattering all of my shikigami, including my own arms.
He darted away.
Michiko’s head flew towards me, mouth opened wide as if to swallow me.
I looked besides her, to where Toji was running. He was already thirty feet away, his entire body wracked with stress.
Khepri’s Judgment was right above our heads.
A split second later, we were hundreds of feet away, high in the air, Michiko’s head falling down with me.
Had we teleported?
There was still so much that I didn’t understand about Michiko’s cursed technique, or innate domain. It seemed to relate to space and time—
Focus.
Khepri’s Judgment fell. An explosion racked the entire gorge, causing Toji to fly. It was all I could do to track him through the air using sound and sight alone.
Still, I managed it.
I had him locked on.
The second orbital hit him square in his body, shooting him down to the ground in a fiery explosion of earth and dust.
The third projectile hit the middle of the dust cloud.
I finally landed on the hard stone ground. My regeneration was working overtime, but I could feel the technique burning out. I had endless cursed energy, so it wasn’t a matter of capacity. I was like an overheating machine, liable to fall apart.
“Teira… chan,” Michiko’s severed head besides me whispered. I closed my eyes, holding back tears. She had fought well. She had almost died for me.
But she wouldn’t die. She was a cursed spirit, and her core hadn’t been damaged. I could sense it, inside her head. She could regain her strength after this.
“You insane bitch!”
My stomach fell.
Through the dust, he walked.
He was bleeding, stumbling over towards me, as though he was on his last legs, and his grin was manic. His entire face was covered in blood, his haori was missing, and he was entirely barechested, revealing wide, savage gashes across his chest and stomach. I even spied an exposed rib.
And on one hand… the saber with the fur cross-guard.
“I gotta hand it to you!”
I ran through my options mentally.
Toji didn’t wait for me to figure something out. He just stabbed the sword through my heart.
“I never expected to have to work for this check,” he wheezed. “Good job, Teira-chan. You really fucked me up.”
The same katana that managed to wound the ‘soul’ on my throat, creating a nigh-unhealable injury, had just pierced through my heart.
I gave up on the organ entirely. I wouldn’t be able to regenerate it in time to stop myself from going hypoxic. I funneled the positive energy directly into the brain, converting energy into oxygen at a wildly inefficient pace. My Reverse Cursed Technique was burning out.
I couldn’t keep this up forever.
“But all good things come to an end,” He sighed. “Any last words? Oh, what am I saying?”
Any last words?
I thought about the last time I was in this situation.
I felt shame.
“Spare… them…” I said to him.
“Your clan? Alright. Wasn’t like I was getting paid to kill them, so I don’t care. Matter of fact, I’ll drag your corpse over to them myself. On the house. Wow, you really are holding on like a champion. What a monster you are. Reverse Cursed Technique before puberty, not to mention all the other crap. Did the world a favor in my book.”
I felt the edges of my vision darken.
“You wanna see something cool?”
He pulled back his blade and thrust his hand into my chest.
Then he pulled.
“Now you know how your heart looks like.”