Mahiru was confident she could keep Kenjaku from associating her with a "Cursed Spirit born from humanity's negative emotions toward humanity."
As long as she didn't blatantly display her Technique to Kenjaku—say, by directly attacking her with "Idle Transfiguration"…
The truth was, Kenjaku was now completely unable to see through Mahiru's true nature. Mahiru knew that Kenjaku was also putting on an act right now. She was still playing Kaori Itadori in front of Mahiru, pretending to be someone who had hidden her jujutsu talent and only wanted to live as an ordinary person.
It didn't matter. Kenjaku was an extremely deep-thinking and highly vigilant person. Mahiru had to make everything unfold naturally.
And so Mahiru left.
Under the moonlight, she first had a stunning encounter with Kenjaku, leaving her with a thoroughly striking first impression—and then, just like a heartbreaker who flirts and then bolts, she turned on her heel and walked off, leaving Kenjaku standing there alone, dumbfounded and at a loss.
Huh?
The woman watched Mahiru turn and leave as if she'd lost all interest in her, vanishing in the blink of an eye, and was left utterly stunned.
Wait—who does that?
Coming and going as she pleased—what are you, some kind of stray cat? So willful?
And what made Kenjaku even more frustrated, with nowhere to vent it, was that she truly didn't dare fall out with the girl—didn't dare use outright violence to make her stay—since she still hadn't been able to gauge the girl's depth.
So all she could do was watch helplessly as the girl drifted lightly away, disappearing across the lake.
Then she turned to look at the crowd of people collapsed by the lakeside, feeling deeply that this was one enormous mess.
Kenjaku currently couldn't use Cursed Spirit Manipulation, so she had no way to constantly monitor her surroundings with a swarm of surveillance Cursed Spirits—which was why she hadn't noticed that Mahiru hadn't actually left.
Mahiru had only pretended to leave; in reality she was watching from afar—watching how Kenjaku shifted the unconscious people around by the lake to clear a space for herself, and then how she adjusted her posture, lay face-down, and pretended to be unconscious.
Honestly, Mahiru nearly laughed herself breathless.
The people from Jujutsu High arrived an hour later, and the ambulances carted everyone here away, telling the public it had been gas poisoning.
Truly an all-purpose excuse.
Kenjaku was hauled off to the hospital too, hypocritically feigning frailty, and didn't get discharged until the third day.
After being discharged and returning to her single apartment, the woman lay in bed that night and, honestly, felt a little melancholy.
She suddenly regretted not having taken forceful action against Mahiru back then.
The more she treasured this opportunity, the more indecisive she became… and that only ended up wasting it.
How was she supposed to find her again?
Kenjaku racked her brains but couldn't find an answer, and finally closed her eyes to rest.
And Mahiru, watching from far away as Kenjaku settled down to rest, gave a sly little chuckle.
And so the next day, Kenjaku was jolted awake by an absolutely enormous explosion inside her home.
???!
What's going on?
She rushed frantically to the scene of the blast, and there she saw the blue-haired girl who had "encountered" her under the moon before, standing in front of the exploded microwave, stroking her chin, a faintly "puzzled" expression surfacing on her doll-like, indifferent face.
"...?" The woman's eyes went wide. "How are you here?"
And what are you doing to my microwave??
Mimicking Kenjaku's expression, Mahiru parroted right back: "How are you here."
Kenjaku's eyebrows twitched violently.
Damn it… she really couldn't figure it out!
What on earth was the deal with this creature in front of her!
Who just barges into someone else's house at the slightest disagreement!
Sure, the girl showing up uninvited was a good thing for her… but she did not appreciate this kind of sudden fright one bit!
This creature was way too willful!
Completely uncontrollable!
For the first time in a thousand years, Kenjaku was experiencing someone causing her this much trouble.
And Mahiru, seeing Kenjaku's expression, was fiercely stifling her laughter inside.
"This." Mahiru pointed at the microwave. "Garbage."
Garbage where?! You're obviously the one who used it wrong!
Kenjaku turned to look at the microwave, her expression pained.
Inside the miserable little appliance sat a teacup filled to the brim with water… doing that, it'd be a miracle if it didn't explode!
This microwave of mine was expensive!
No, wait, that's not the point… did she just speak human words a moment ago?
Kenjaku looked at Mahiru. Mahiru looked back, indifferent.
Mahiru knew that Kenjaku's head was surely working by every possible means to analyze the logic behind her behavior.
She strung together short sentences a few words at a time precisely to show Kenjaku that she was "rapidly learning the knowledge of human society."
If she were one hundred percent unable to communicate with humans, then it would be hard to go any deeper afterward, wouldn't it?
Kenjaku had clearly arrived at exactly the conclusion Mahiru wanted to steer her toward. Her eyes were still wide with surprise. She was astonished at the learning speed of this girl who had only just been born, and evidently already believed Mahiru's "newly born" premise.
Yes, that was roughly the process.
Through acting, she crafted a persona; and through the persona she'd set up for herself, she subtly conveyed information to Kenjaku—until, in the end, she could even "guide" Kenjaku's behavior.
All of Mahiru's seemingly ridiculous antics actually carried these deeper meanings.
It had been so on that moonlit night, so just now, and would be so again later on.
For instance, right now, in the face of Kenjaku's complaints, Mahiru paid her no mind whatsoever, drifting airily into the living room, casually plucking a leaf off a nearby potted plant, stuffing it into her mouth, and then spitting it out with a "ptooey"—the girl was crafting an image of herself as willful, reckless, and lacking common sense.
A willful, reckless personality would make Kenjaku, when working through her plans, do her utmost to avoid "forcibly demanding that Mahiru do something."
Lacking common sense would make Kenjaku more inclined to sweet-talk and deceive Mahiru—which in turn gave Mahiru more room to maneuver.
All of this design followed a discernible logic.
Faced with a television she'd never seen before, Mahiru would take it apart with her own hands.
Faced with recipes tacked on the wall like "miso soup" and "baked pizza," Mahiru would put a teacup in the microwave and try to run an experiment.
Like a little terror of a child, the girl turned Kenjaku's home upside down, leaving it a sight too wretched to behold.
She held a curious urge to dismantle everything, which further cemented her "newborn" persona and continuously fed the message—"this blue-haired girl absolutely cannot be easily manipulated, and one misstep in manipulating her would invite terrible consequences"—into Kenjaku's subconscious.
At the same time, the fact that the girl had chosen to appear at Kenjaku's home today and refused to leave demonstrated the girl's special attention toward Kenjaku… even a kind of fondness. This, in turn, gave Kenjaku confidence, keeping her from doing anything desperate.
Yes—Mahiru's persona hadn't been dreamed up on a whim, and her script of actions hadn't been thrown together at random either.
Without even noticing it herself, Kenjaku's view of the short-haired girl, and her strategy for dealing with her, had already quietly shifted.
You have to understand, Kenjaku was the most vicious of villains. Don't be fooled by her currently young and gorgeous appearance… even if you described Kenjaku by the impression of Kaori Itadori's current looks, she was a terrifying witch who devoured people whole without spitting out the bones.
Without all of Mahiru's sweet-talk and maneuvering, Kenjaku might well have made her move again long ago.
That said, although all of Mahiru's various acts of destruction carried deeper meaning, a large part of the reason was actually that she simply wanted to make life difficult for Kenjaku.
As mentioned before, Kenjaku was someone with a strong desire to role-play, and who threw herself deeply into character.
When she lived as Kaori Itadori, she really did immerse herself in the role.
So she treasured her little home.
So she was genuinely getting frantic.
The microwave had blown up, the television had been taken apart, the clothes had all been bundled into a hammock—the little home that Kenjaku, as Kaori Itadori, prized so highly had been reduced to a pitiful sight… Kenjaku was truly both furious and helpless.
In the end, it took handing the girl a radio to finally get her to settle down.
From the look of it, the girl would probably keep clinging to her home after this too… which was obviously a good thing, but why on earth was it so headache-inducing!
Kenjaku tidied up the room.
Once she was done, to her surprise, the girl seemed to have picked up more vocabulary through the radio broadcasts.
She could now express complete thoughts using certain words.
And the very first thing the girl expressed was—
"Why, not assimilate together?" The girl's limpid eyes gazed at Kenjaku, her expression deeply uncomprehending. "Why, refuse?"
She was referring to how, that night, everyone in the restaurant had been assimilated by Mahiru except Kenjaku—which was why the girl was asking why Kenjaku hadn't joined in the assimilation.
…But really, surely no one actually wanted to be assimilated, right?
Weren't all the others assimilated simply because they couldn't resist?
In the face of the girl's question, she countered with one of her own: "What is assimilation?"
"Assimilation is going home." At the mention of this topic, Mahiru fittingly shifted her tone to something livelier. "And also, the tastiest bed…"
The word choice wasn't deliberate, and the phrasing was somewhat muddled, but the information that reached Kenjaku's ears was pinpoint precise—the girl believed assimilation to be humanity's most ideal, most beautiful state.
The girl held a positive attitude toward assimilation, and her tone even carried a sense of mission.
Kenjaku pressed further: "Do you want to assimilate everyone in the whole world?"
"Yes," the girl nodded. "Go home together."
Kenjaku's heartbeat quickened once again.
The girl's answer let Kenjaku know that she and Mahiru stood on the same front.
The odds of the two of them cooperating had now climbed as high as ninety percent.
"Then, may I ask your name, and where you come from?…" Since the communication had been so fruitful, Kenjaku fired off several more questions in a row.
This time, however, the girl gave no answer; instead she let her attention wander, started fiddling with the throw pillows on the sofa, and smeared ice cream onto the nose of a cat-shaped cushion.
Kenjaku grimaced, feeling both awkward and at her wit's end.
The reason Mahiru dodged these questions and refused to answer them was the principle that the more you say, the more you slip up.
And because the girl's image—someone hard to communicate with, scatterbrained, and willful—had long since sunk deep into Kenjaku's heart, Kenjaku failed to realize that the girl was deliberately evading the questions.
Kenjaku had completely underestimated the girl's true nature.
Right now she was frantically thinking about how to coax the girl and keep her in her own camp… and, on top of that, how to fold the girl's power into her own plans.
Should she rely on the girl's power to create a brand-new Culling Game? It felt feasible.
But first she had to figure out the girl's abilities…
She mulled it over for a moment, then raised both hands and constructed a miniature Barrier in her palms—precisely the prototype model of the Culling Game.
"Assimilation—something like that, I can do too." Cradling the model, the woman sat down beside the girl and smiled gently. "Assimilating all of humanity—I want to do that too, so shall we work together?"
Hearing Kenjaku say this, Mahiru knew that this question could no longer be dodged.
This time, in seeking out Kenjaku, she had two unbreakable rules.
One was the objective: she absolutely had to obtain the design blueprint of the Culling Game's Barrier from Kenjaku.
The other was that she must not truly become complicit with Kenjaku.
Kenjaku had now extended an invitation to Mahiru, and if Mahiru agreed for the sake of intelligence, then in all likelihood, a few minutes later Kenjaku would drag her off to go ravage the world together.
So she couldn't agree.
But she also couldn't refuse outright. How was she to resolve this contradiction?
In an instant, countless thoughts flashed through Mahiru's mind.
To avoid creating conflict while also not actually carrying out the Culling Game plan, the only way was to make Kenjaku give up on the Culling Game of her own accord.
That sounded difficult.
After all, Kenjaku was someone who had persevered for a thousand years purely out of interest—how could she possibly be so easily led astray by Mahiru?
But that was not the case.
If Kenjaku would persist for a thousand years over a mere sliver of interest, then by the same token she would abandon her thousand-year perseverance the moment that interest shifted.
So how Mahiru ought to respond now was, in fact, already all but obvious.
"Gathering great Cursed Spirits? Slaughtering one another—rituals?" Mahiru tilted her head as if utterly uninterested. "These things, I know."
"You know?" The woman was taken aback.
"I know." Mahiru let out a yawn. "It's not assimilation at all. Garbage."
Kenjaku's actions were driven by interest.
So to reverse those actions, one had to negate the "interestingness" of the whole affair.
[Your assimilation isn't assimilation at all.]
[The ultimate possibility of humanity you long to witness has nothing to do with humanity whatsoever.]
"You, assimilate corpses. I, assimilate humans." With a bored face, Mahiru pointed at Kenjaku, and the words she spoke left the woman frozen where she stood. "You, deceive yourself. Laughable."
Did Mahiru assimilate humans? You could indeed put it that way, because what Mahiru assimilated was souls—and the soul is the essence of a human being.
Did Kenjaku assimilate corpses?
Putting it that way wasn't actually wrong either. Because the people assimilated into a great Cursed Spirit would lose their own free will and become part of that great Cursed Spirit—which was essentially death—so Mahiru calling it "assimilating corpses" didn't really amount to a sleight-of-hand of concepts.
It was, in truth, sophistry.
It was, in truth, a con.
What "assimilation" truly looked like—no one had the right to define.
And if the one across from her had been the modern, normal Kenjaku, these words of Mahiru's probably wouldn't have had much effect.
But the Kenjaku of the present was different.
The woman as she was now—thanks to all of Mahiru's embellishments and all of her deliberate guidance… her thinking had long since been led astray.
Regarded by Kenjaku as a "nascent prototype of a deity" who was "too frank and willful to ever lie," Mahiru's words carried enormous weight in Kenjaku's heart at this moment.
And now, when Mahiru—in airy yet unshakable words—declared that Kenjaku's "great Cursed Spirit ideal" was merely "assimilating corpses" rather than "assimilating humans"—these words would violently shake Kenjaku's convictions, causing her to form an entirely different understanding of her own ideal.
In short, Mahiru was exploiting every available condition to deconstruct Kenjaku's very objective.
Add to that all the other conditions Mahiru could still engineer….
Kenjaku, in this very moment, finally began to grow disenchanted with her own "great Cursed Spirit" plan.
And naturally, Mahiru seized this thread of loosening in Kenjaku's thinking at just the right time—
"My assimilation is better after all." Mahiru said, looking at Kenjaku. "You—join me."
—Slipping in through the opening while her guard was down.
____
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