Chapter 9

  Mori Tachi had a perfect view of the the fracas from where he sat inside his study in the Mori family mansion, in front of a mirror on his bureau that was currently playing a scene from the Aramata gorge—the Hibana clan stronghold.

  He hadn’t expected for things to kick off so suddenly, but the clan head had been stewing on this decision for months, clearly. The direction of Teira-chan’s development made it all too simple to come to the correct conclusion, that she would only become a bigger and bigger problem over time.

  Thus, Hibana Sosuke had acted decisively, with a ruthlessness befitting the head of an Association clan.

  Mori Tachi itched at his forehead stitches, feeling a swell of irritation that the young girl hadn’t reached out to him after all. Her keen senses were monstrous in their own right. Thus, he didn’t dare to use his surveillance barrier to look into her room.

  As a member of the clan that had set up the Hibana clan’s barriers in the first place, he had access to all the spy backdoors that he had placed inside of them, imperceptible to both his own family and the Hibana clan. It was a breach of trust, but one he had correctly predicted that no one would call him out on: if he didn’t push his luck.

  Losing Teira-chan…

  From the moment Mori Tachi had laid eyes on her, it was like he had been thrown hundreds of years back in time, to an era where Jujutsu Sorcerers had an air of true authenticity to them. An era where sorcerers knew how to curse.

  It was in her eyes. Those hateful eyes of hers, no doubt borne from a lifetime of having known no love or tenderness. A part of him suspected that there was something else to her as well. Perhaps a cursed trait. Either way, she would have made an ideal subordinate and spy.

  Unfortunately, she had chosen to shun his gifts. Of course. What else could he expect from a young child who had grown up under such circumstances?

  Mori Tachi sighed as he watched Teira spasm from being stabbed in the head by two cursed tools. The poison was counteracting her Reverse Cursed Technique. Even under ideal circumstances, the implantation of those ancient cursed tools were risky, to say the least.

  Tachi hovered his hand over the mirror, intent on sending a pulse of energy to cancel his surveillance. This battle was over.

  And then Teira’s spasms grew more spirited.

  000

  “There is no point in risking our lives and dying without a comparatively enticing incentive,” a woman announced.

  A waterfall gushed far behind a group of people, falling into a beautiful river next to a grove of cherry blossom trees, petals falling all around them where they sat

  Two women. One had a shock of white hair and looked bedraggled. She wore drab, antiquated robes, sharing very little in common with the modern kimono.

  The one who had spoken was a black haired woman with eyes of solid black obsidian. Prosthetics, no doubt. But what caught my eyes the most were the two sticks jammed into her skull, poking out of her head like antennae.

  My mouth dried out as I recognized her. The Swarm Queen—

  She looked at me. “Sit down,” she grimaced. “This is an important discussion. No use being standoffish when we’re all in this fight together.

  Two of the men in the circle scooted away, giving me space. Everyone were dressed in rough spun robes that looked like they itched. One of the men was a veritable bear with a shock of spiky, black hair braided into what looked like locs.

  Another man was bald, and he had two columns of dots running down his forehead. A Buddhist monk. I sat down between the two.

  “So,” the white-haired woman scratched her hair. “You want us to become kings and queens, then. Only protecting those in reach of us. Leaving the rest to panic and create more monsters.”

  The Swarm Queen clicked her tongue. “You have an unhealthy habit of taking my words in bad faith, Tengen.”

  Wha—Tengen? She was Tengen?

  …is Tengen?!

  I opened my mouth to give her a piece of my mind, but no words would come out. I couldn’t talk.

  “Wealth is king,” the Swarm Queen spoke evenly. “It moves men to action. It is how we survive. If we do not tax appropriately for our services, there will be no reason for us to risk our lives.”

  “Beyond morals,” the Buddhist monk said, giving the Swarm Queen a disapproving look. “And common decency.”

  “Yes, indeed. Who has need for that?”

  The bear of a man snorted. “She’s right. I refuse to work for free. There would be no reason to.”

  The Swarm Queen nodded.

  She… wasn’t a spirit at all. She was a human being, clearly. I couldn’t sense the same thing that I sensed from curses. Except for her prosthetic eyes made of black glass, and those cursed tools on her head, she was literally just a person.

  The founder of the Hibana clan. A woman.

  I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t even do that. This was a bad joke. I wasn’t amused.

  Tengen was a fucking woman! Tengen!

  The Patriarchs of the Association and the Jujutsu Society—both women.

  A man sneered. He was an older man with a rotund frame and a big round nose that was almost cherry red. “What gives you the right to dictate our direction anyhow? Where is your husband, wench? Confucius was clear about the role that the likes of you should occupy.”

  The only reason I didn’t throw myself at this man bodily was that I physically couldn’t. This space wouldn’t let me. An innate domain?

  The Antennae.

  This was the Innate Domain of the Antennae!

  The Swarm Queen stood up, and from her body, thousands of Juchū flew out. The thousands turned into millions, the Juchū enough to blot out the sky.

  The rotund man’s hands were tied up in a gesture as he glared at her.

  “Peace,” the monk pleaded.

  To the Swarm Queen.

  She sighed.

  In seconds, the insects collected into a vortex of which she was its eye, receding back into her.

  “Good,” Tengen said. “And Hibana speaks the truth. We need funds. We need a position. The non-sorcerers may do as they please, but we should be included in the highest level of government, and be compensated commensurately.”

  The monk sighed. “That way only leads to corruption. This should be our sacred duty. Not an avenue for power. Our successors will lose their way—our way.”

  “Then, we establish rules,” the Swarm Queen, Hibana, announced imperiously. “Binding rules. Edicts that we will obey and adhere to.”

  The scene shifted.

  Hibana was walking into a house next to a river. There were no other houses in this area. She lived entirely alone.

  I followed her inside.

  Seven young boys sat inside, meditating in a circle. The youngest looked like he might have been five or six, and the oldest had already hit something of a growth spurt. “Mother’s home.”

  They stood up and grinned widely. “Mother!”

  Seven.

  The clan founders.

  These fucking brats—

  They hugged her tightly, bunching up around her legs. Hibana smiled warmly at them.

  I blinked, and suddenly, they were ten years older.

  And still, they looked at her with such adoring eyes. They sat cross-legged around her on the floor of this modest house in a semicircle formation while she sat in the middle. “Always remember: you are the founders of this clan. I am irrelevant. Call upon me when you need my strength, but you will represent our interests. You will lead us. I… cannot.”

  “But why, mother?” the oldest—and I recognized him from the paintings as Genmon, the founder—asked, eyes welling with tears.

  “They will not accept my words. They will not take me seriously. It is up to you. Provide for the family. Secure our position today, such that our legacy may yet survive. I am but… a benevolent spirit. Not a human.”

  “That’s not true!” Genmon roared. “You’re our mother! You gave birth to us. You’re just as human as the rest of us!”

  Hibana giggled tearfully. “Thank you. Yet, I must repeat myself: you cannot acknowledge what you owe to me. Not to anyone. Or our clan will not survive. This is a matter of securing our family’s legacy. Don’t let love blind you from that.”

  Genmon wiped his eyes and nodded. “Fine… mother. Swarm Queen.”

  Hibana faced off alone against an ocean of thousands of cursed spirits on its way to a township. I had never seen so many in one place before. The weakest seemed to be the size of the average Bear-grade. And yet, Hibana didn’t hesitate as she jumped into the fray. With superhuman precision, she mowed down the monsters, each singular strike enough to not just kill a spirit, but throw them into others, killing several in one move.

  She summoned her swarm.

  They were not in Totality, though they were still numerous. Tens of thousands began to latch onto spirits, changing their color and turning them into soldiers for her cause.

  I watched in fascination as she utilized Control to win an army powerful enough to repel the influx. And where did she get all this cursed energy from?

  From the cursed spirits, of course. She fought without losing an ounce of spirit. Fought for hours, until every last spirit was dead or drained to a husk.

  Some looked poisoned. The Juchū had poison?

  A corrosive and destructive effect to cursed energy. Condition: Parasitization.

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  The knowledge hit me like a train. So that was how it worked, then…

  Conspicuously, I had not seen Arthropodal Aspect, or Totality.

  What—

  “My creator. She was the first to wear me.”

  I turned around to the voice that spoke behind me. It was the shadow of Hibana, only the Antennae were… longer. And it had many small threads branching from it, making it look like the antennae of a moth of some kind.

  “But not the first to curse me.”

  The world shifted again. The Hibana clan packed the Antennae into a chest. Someone opened it. An inheritor of the Reverse Cursed Technique. The scene shifted. Outside, in a courtyard, he was on his knees, drawing quick breaths and trying to still his nerves as a priest approached him from the front, Antennae in his hands.

  He stabbed.

  The man fell dead, unceremoniously, and the Hibana clan had lost a star.

  But it was fine. Another man took his place moments later. This was the era in which sorcerers with this skill were more plentiful.

  He did not survive either.

  Only the third did.

  After however many centuries had passed, I saw the Antennae be used as hair-pins.

  As less and less people unlocked the Reverse Cursed Technique, the more the clan became less and less willing to risk the life of their most important curse expert.

  The more the clan began to curse the Antennae. The strongest feared it. Each clan head that wore it bore it not as a mark of remembrance, but of shame. The oral tradition kept them in the loop about the tool’s activation condition. They knew what it took, but they could not justify the risk.

  Hibana Kenzo of the Edo period could not justify the risk, and he had the Reverse Cursed Technique.

  And his curse weighed heavily on the Antennae. Almost too heavily. I wondered if this constant cursing had been a self-fulfilling prophecy, that the Antennae had brought the clan to the brink.

  It should have been sealed. Not worn. Decried as a lost cause. And yet, they had kept it. They had cursed it. Cursed themselves.

  For failing their mother, the Swarm Queen.

  Endless shame and self-recrimination had turned the Hibana clan into despicable monsters.

  Michiko.

  I grabbed at my face, feeling an ugly sound bubble forth from my gut like vomit. A sob. The most pathetic woman I knew with a face so poignant that it caused my eyes to sting a little, every time I looked at her.

  A broken wretch who had barely ever spared me a word outside of her duties.

  She’d brought me a birthday cake.

  I fell to my knees on the floor of this innate domain that was rapidly turning into a void and choked back another sob.

  All I’d wanted was to help her.

  I hadn’t expected much. I hadn’t expected to be able to give her back the smile that the clan had taken from her. But I had wanted to try at least.

  The brightest glowing figure in the entire clan, made brighter in contrast to the pitch blackness of every member of the Hibana clan. My only bastion of comfort.

  Murdered.

  I smashed my cursed energy together, like two stones creating sparks.

  Again.

  Again.

  As many times as it took. The Reverse Cursed Technique could not destroy poison, but it could heal the body, and the body would metabolize the poison, one way or another.

  Blood moved through my veins like jello. A hemotoxin. And a neurotoxin.

  The solution was obvious. Bleed.

  000

  Hibana Sosuke had been grateful that the carnage had ended with just three fatalities. Two, really. A couple dozen people had lost their Juchū, and one random woman had been slain, but her ilk was replaceable.

  Unfortunately, the soldiers that he had tasked with assassinating Teira had lost their lives—quite brutally, in fact. Just the fact that an eight-year-old had been able to use the Black Flash not once, twice, or even thrice, but seven times in less than a minute—using it to run faster. That was unheard of. It was absurd was what it was.

  She spat on everything it meant to be a curse expert. She was an aberration, and he was glad that she would never again darken his hallways again. He looked through the hole that she had thrown him through, his new direction. After all, he still needed to cull Iemon’s entire family—

  The bitch stirred.

  Sosuke’s remaining Juchū—he had thankfully not used all of them against Teira—had eyes on her, but he turned around to see it with his own eyes, this… impossibility.

  Teira was… having a seizure.

  Sosuke grinned. Of course, the bloody pint-size whore wouldn’t even know how to die properly. Did she even know the meaning of propriety?

  She hugged her arms. Grabbed her arms by her shoulders.

  Black Lightning flashed from where she gripped, and Sosuke’s eyes widened in abject shock as he took the sight in.

  She had severed both arms at the shoulder.

  Gelatinous blood oozed out from the wounds and Teira kept breathing, eyes glassy and reddened from burst capillaries.

  And the Antennae, improperly placed as they were, vibrated rapidly before—snapping into a symmetrical arrangement.

  Sosuke’s mouth grew dry at the sight. Heavens, no. Please, heavens, no! How much more can I be expected to tolerate?!

  Teira bent her knees, planting her feet flat on the ground.

  Then she got up to her feet, shakily, by purely using her legs. She was still bleeding out from her shoulders, but the blood had gone from jelly-like to fluid, and it spurted out without slowing down. Her blood pressure wasn’t dropping.

  Do something, dammit! Why am I just standing here?!

  The building was already being mobbed by almost a hundred curse experts—not just the Juchū users, but the Outsider unit. Unlike the enforcers, these were curse experts with cursed techniques that weren’t the Juchū technique. They were quickly taken away from the general population and trained in secrecy, meant to be disposable slave soldiers sent in to do the bidding of the clan in an untraceable manner.

  They were standing on top of the roof of the courtyard building, and as more warriors, Juchū experts, filed into the courtyard, Sosuke found himself backtracking.

  But that was alright! It wasn’t his job to kill this cretin!

  “W-why are you all just standing around?!” he roared. “K—“

  Flesh bubbled forth from the bleeding stumps on Teira’s shoulders. Her Juchū took to the air—hundreds of them—and those bleeding red eyes finally focused, the sclera whitening as the blood disappeared.

  “Mother’s home,” she whispered.

  000

  I was running extremely low on cursed energy.

  That was a novelty for me. I couldn’t remember a time when I had actually been on the verge of running out. I didn’t have any illusions about my stores of cursed energy, but I had always prided myself on how efficiently I recruited and coordinated said energy.

  The Reverse Cursed Technique was an energy guzzler, however. The reason for that was because I still wasn’t at the exact proficiency that I wanted. And having to regenerate gallons upon gallons of blood just to get rid of the toxins from the Hornet Stingers was about the least efficient way to use the technique.

  But that was to be expected. Poison was a counter to the Reverse Cursed Technique, and I had been a fool to not have seen that earlier.

  Instantly, my Juchū fanned out and slaughtered the swarm, subsuming it into my own. That was when the experts mobbed me, fists raised as they were ready to pummel me to the ground and kill me.

  They moved like snails.

  As did I. One man in the crowd had a bad hip. Another’s leg hadn’t healed properly. A childhood injury, perhaps. One that he had worked around for all these years.

  And most of them had Juchū to spare.

  I could sense them, inactive, inside their spirits.

  Come.

  I dragged them out, adding to my swarm. One-thousand five-hundred. They all resonated with my Antennae and obeyed without hesitation.

  Perfect. Saved me the effort of having to torture them into releasing them.

  Then I turned the swarm on the incoming crowd, and activated Parasitization.

  I had them crawl inside clothes and hard-to-reach places before latching. And the latching was a spike of agony that instantly caused them to halt their advance. Some continued while others stopped to trying and destroy the Juchū underneath their clothes.

  One enterprising young man, perhaps a teenager, still saw fit to try and fight me.

  But he was not a man. Or a human.

  He was an object to me.

  I understood him inside and out. I just waited for my turn, for the world to give me permission to—

  I punched him in his chest. Black Flash.

  He flew backwards, vomiting blood as he did. I dodged the stream before it even began, having expected this exact outcome. It was like I existed ten seconds into the future.

  I ducked under the blow of someone approaching me from behind. My antennae felt every wisp and curl of displaced air from the movements of my foes.

  And I saw the Hornet Stingers on the ground. I dove to them in a roll, picked them up, and waved my arms. The moment I did, I sliced through two throats at once.

  I closed my eyes—they had started getting blurrier and blurrier in the last two years, and I heavily suspected that I would need to start wearing glasses soon anyway. My eyes were my least powerful sensory organ at the moment anyhow.

  I suspected that the Swarm Queen had created the Antennae because she was blind. Given that she wore obsidian eyes—or some other type of black, glass-like substance—I had to assume that to be the case.

  Upon experiencing this tiny fraction of her story, I had found myself in an overwhelmingly empathetic and charitable mood.

  I shoved one Hornet Stinger through someone’s eye, hitting his brain, before pulling it out, throwing my other knife towards an incoming belligerent, burying the knife into his heart before climbing atop his collapsing form, pulling the knife out, and jumping towards two more combatants.

  The Hibana clan had cursed itself to uselessness. Hibana would hate to see what the spawn of her children had become.

  I owed nothing to that woman, or her sons. I didn’t have to adopt this intent to do this in order to better the clan for her sake.

  I had, however, been touched by the fact that once upon a time, the Hibana clan had a mother that loved her children.

  Boys that could look up to a woman.

  I wasn’t a part of this clan. My name was, is, Taylor Hebert. An American woman.

  But if I rejected this clan, then I would reject my second chance to do some good…

  Even as I tried to muster up my passion, I felt the hollowness of those words. With each man I slaughtered, each time I dodged some random cursed technique from curse experts whose techniques I didn’t recognize, I didn’t feel a particular urge to do anything.

  I was just going through the motions.

  Michiko was dead. And I was going to kill every able-bodied man in this clan. And this would not make things better. It would weaken us to our rivals, make us prime targets for conquest. The Jujutsu Society would put the final nail in our coffin, and if not them, it would be the other Association clans, eager to breed us Hibana for our spying capabilities.

  My Parasitizing Juchū had reached the threshold, and I sensed it. A chance.

  This extension technique had only been hinted at in the novel that Mori Tachi had sent me, though I had assumed that the protagonist had been poisoned in some other way. But the Antennae’s Innate Domain had shown me that it was possible.

  All I had to do.

  Lead a wisp of positive energy through our radio signal tether, turning power into poison, and parasitization into injection.

  Knock, knock, knock. Nail driving into wood.

  And the last nail that stuck out? Hammered down.

  And thus, the Hibana clan’s coffin was complete.

  I clapped my hands.

  Inflow became outflow. Power became poison.

  And all the combatants still standing became afflicted with this deadly poison, immediately collapsing and filling the air with agonized howls.

  I grinned and took a deep breath. “Ah, ah, awooooooooooo!” I howled into the darkly lit, moonless sky.

  I walked over the writhing bodies, on my way to Sosuke, who was running away. Into the forest, outside the clan compound.

  That just won’t do.

  I ran after him, caught up within seconds, and stopped in front of him. The night was dark, but my Juchū lit our surroundings up. For his benefit. I didn’t need light to see, not with these Antennae.

  “W-wait!” Sosuke shouted, holding his hands in front of him. I stabbed the Hornet Stingers into a nearby tree. I wasn’t going to kill Sosuke with poison. What would be the fun in that? “You-you need me! You’ve probably killed all the secret historians by now! I’m the only one who knows the mechanism of multiplying your Juchū! You need me!”

  I chuckled humorlessly. “Your best case scenario, if you were optimizing for, say, continued living, would be that I dragged you into a dungeon and tortured you for this information for days before killing you. Is that your choice?”

  Sosuke fell on his knees. “Please!”

  I shook my head. “I’ll figure it out. As for that secret history you’re hoarding… better it just remain a secret, don’t you think? Let us start over from scratch.”

  As far as the Juchū multiplication technique went, I had already figured it out.

  My bloated Juchū, the one I had overfilled with cursed energy, had turned fertile. I hadn’t been able to intuit exactly what its state meant at a glance until I had it interact with one of the corpses down at the clan compound.

  I let it enter the corpse through its nose, along with an entire elder’s worth of Juchū, and something had changed with that.

  The Juchū began feasting, and in their wake, they left eggs.

  “It was never a technique that demanded positive energy,” I said. “It was a Maximum Output technique, one condition requiring a corpse. A human corpse, no doubt. And where does the Reverse Cursed Technique fit into all this?”

  Survivability. The raising of one’s human limit, exactly as Iemon had first noted. Positive energy was insurance to mitigate the backlash of such a powerful technique that anyone skilled enough could learn without the Reverse Cursed Technique, which was why it was such a heavily guarded secret.

  But why guard it? Why prevent more Juchū from spawning? What made this technique so risky that—

  Within seconds, the corpse I had infested had disappeared, all of it cannibalized and leaving behind an ugly, fat clump of insectile eggs. Instantly, I could feel a connection to tens of thousands of new Juchū at the same time. Instantly, I understood, and debunked, some aspects of the Hibana clan’s teachings.

  “Please, spare me!”

  The reproductive cycle was psychologically straining. Even by limiting the number of Juchū being reproduced, the process itself was too much for most to handle. Most, surely, though not all. I couldn’t believe that in the entire clan, no one would be able to handle this. Still, the Hibana were averse to risk.

  “The reproduction is straining,” I said. “Is that the entire story? The entire reason behind why you can’t use this technique without the Reverse Cursed Technique? Answer me, and I’ll let you live,” I lied.

  Sosuke actually bought it. “It strains the soul! Even with the Reverse Cursed Technique, this strain is difficult to recover from, and almost impossible in some cases.”

  The soul? Another aspect of this new world. I assumed that the soul and the spirit were two entirely different things. Or maybe not. I put a pin on that avenue of research.

  My soul, huh? I didn’t think that was the relevant factor. Clearly, the Queen Administrator was lifting its weight here.

  From the spare energy from Parasitization, I rerouted cursed energy to ten Juchū, turning them into mother bugs. I had each of them, along with a procession of Juchū, enter into some corpses. I could do this as many times as I wanted to.

  The Hibana clan had lied to me. All this time.

  I looked down at Sosuke. “You know. I never saw the appeal of pulling legs from bugs when I was a child. I always thought it was a barbaric thing to do. And I couldn’t see the satisfaction.”

  I looked at Sosuke’s pleading hands. His fingers.

  “I think I will make an exception for you, my little fly.” Then, I cracked a grin. “My son.”

  Hibana. If you’re watching—this one’s for you. And I hope it hurts to watch.