[Sunlight blasted through the huge hole where the concrete wall used to be, turning the dim corridor white in an instant. Dust hung thick in the air. Blood and pulverized cement mixed into one nasty smell.]

[Riko Amanai sat collapsed on the cold floor.]

[Everything in front of her looked painfully similar to what she had seen on the twentieth floor of the hotel not long ago: red everywhere, body parts scattered around, and what was left of a person no longer looking much like a person.]

[The middle-aged Curse User who had been barking threats just moments earlier had been turned into a mess of flesh and broken bone.]

[But this time, unlike at the hotel, fear did not swallow her whole. It did not even manage to grab the edge of her heart.]

[What filled her instead was the pounding in her chest, wild enough to hurt, and a rush of joy so strong it almost made her dizzy. She was alive.]

[That was it. That was everything. The ugly, desperate gratitude of someone who had just felt death brush past their cheek and somehow missed.]

[So Panda’s rough voice did not scare her. The ridiculous destructive power he had just unleashed did not scare her either. None of it mattered as much as the simple fact that he had protected her.]

[Riko threw herself forward, tear tracks still wet on her face, and hugged the fuzzy creature with all the strength her thin arms had.]

[She buried her face in his soft fur. When she spoke, her voice shook, but the feeling in it was painfully real.]

["Thank you... really. Thank you for protecting me..."]

["KA-BOOOOM!"]

[Hurried footsteps came from the far end of the corridor, mixed with the sound of debris clattering down.]

[The shockwave from Panda’s New Shadow Style iai strike had torn through the outer wall and carried far across the campus. Suguru Geto, who had been searching the opposite side of the school and had not found the infiltrating Curse Users as quickly as Gojo, locked onto the burst of Cursed Energy and rushed over at once.]

[His tall figure appeared in the shattered opening. One hand pressed against a jagged piece of rebar that was still dropping dust, and his usually calm face was pulled tight with alarm. He did not even stop to breathe before shouting into the wreckage.]

["Riko! Are you all...!?"]

[Before Riko could lift her head from Panda’s arms to answer, Geto’s narrow eyes shrank hard.]

[The scene hit him all at once.]

[He saw the middle-aged Curse User scattered across the corridor in cleanly severed pieces. He saw the deep cut carved through the wall, still leaking traces of dense Residual Cursed Energy. Then his gaze moved to the masked Curse User’s body nearby, split cleanly in two.]

[Strangely, the paper-bagged corpse had not bled much. Instead, it was dissolving right in front of him, melting like ice under brutal sunlight and breaking apart into dirty flecks of residual cursed matter. Those flecks drifted up, scattered, and vanished.]

[Geto’s mind put it together almost immediately. This had to be a side effect of the masked Curse User’s Innate Technique.]

[That slippery bastard. In the last instant before the slash landed, right when he sensed certain death, he must have ripped his main consciousness away and forced it into one of the clones hidden elsewhere in the school. He had sacrificed a body to barely crawl out from under the killing blow.]

[But that was not what left Geto standing there speechless.]

[He froze where he was, staring at the small panda sitting in Riko Amanai’s arms.]

[There were no other Residual Cursed Energy signatures at the scene. As absurd as it sounded, the conclusion was right there in front of him: that toy-like Cursed Corpse Touma had left behind had done all of this by himself.]

[Geto knew neither Touma nor Yaga-sensei had told them Panda’s core secrets. All they had been told was that Panda possessed self-awareness, making him a "special existence" different from ordinary Cursed Corpses that could only follow simple commands.]

[Since Panda was Touma’s personal creation and constant companion, Geto had always assumed the little guy could provide some tactical support or basic self-defense.]

[Sure, they had never seen Panda fight seriously. With Touma, Gojo, and Geto around, when would a Cursed Corpse even need to step up? But Geto had never, not once, imagined that this walking mascot was hiding enough power to instantly wipe out two veteran Curse Users.]

[He took a slow breath, closed his eyes, and focused on the flow of Residual Cursed Energy around the corridor.]

[The result made his scalp prickle.]

[Every trace pointed straight to Panda. No outside help. No hidden trick. Just Panda, acting entirely under his own power.]

[A stray thought popped into Geto’s head, ridiculous enough that even now it carried a bit of dark humor.]

[People say pets take after their owners... does that apply to Cursed Corpses too? Touma was ice-cold at the hotel, cutting people down without blinking. And this panda fights the same way. No mercy. One strike, one kill.]

[Panda had been created through the combined efforts of Touma and Yaga-sensei. Technically, both of them were responsible for him. But after thinking that far, Geto’s expression only grew stranger.]

[If pets really do take after their masters, where did Yaga-sensei’s part go? Aside from the cuddly stuffed-animal look, where is the stern, fatherly guidance? I don’t see a single trace of it.]

[Geto shook his head hard and forced those stupid thoughts out before they could settle in.]

[The evidence had already confirmed what he understood to be the truth, but his common sense was still putting up one last useless fight. In the end, he looked at the panda tucked in Riko’s arms and asked in a dry voice he did not even notice.]

["This... everything in this corridor. You did this?"]

[At the question, Panda poked his round black-and-white head out from Riko’s embrace with an almost disturbingly human little movement.]

[His button eyes curved into crescents. He tilted his head and answered in a voice so innocent and matter-of-fact that it made the blood around them seem even more absurd.]

["Yep! Some bad guys were trying to hurt Riko. What about it? Is there a problem, Suguru?"]

[That childish innocence, paired with the slaughterhouse around them, made the corner of Geto’s mouth twitch.]

["...No. Nothing at all."]

[In the end, all Geto could do was give a bitter smile, shake his head, and let out a helpless sigh, swallowing every question and every bit of shock for now.]

---

[Meanwhile, on the outer perimeter of Renchoku Girls’ Junior High, behind a pile of junk in a dark, secluded equipment shed.]

[The body carrying his main consciousness had been cut down in an instant by Panda’s Chain of a Thousand Miles. The paper-bagged Curse User had survived through Linked False Bodies by the thinnest margin possible, but tearing his soul out of one body and forcing it into another had burned through a frightening amount of Cursed Energy. It had also damaged his soul more than a little.]

[He crouched in the shadows and ripped the bag off his head, revealing a face slick with cold sweat and pale as paper. His chest heaved as he sucked in ragged breaths. In his eyes, the afterimage of that all-devouring slash still refused to fade.]

["Hah... hah... what the hell was that!"]

[He ground his teeth and muttered through the fear still crawling under his skin.]

["I knew it! Ordinary middle schooler, my ass. How does a bounty climb that high for no reason? This whole job was rigged from the start! What kind of monsters does Jujutsu High keep hidden? What lunatic builds a Cursed Corpse that can use New Shadow Style’s Simple Domain at that level? And why has something that dangerous never shown up in any black market intelligence network...?"]

[He sagged against the cold wall, wanting just a moment to catch his breath and let his battered soul stabilize.]

[The plan was simple enough. Rest until he could function again, reconnect to the clones he still had scattered across the school grounds, reassess the situation, and find another opening.]

[As long as his clones survived, he still had a way to turn this around.]

[But the moment he closed his eyes and reached out to link his consciousness with the others, something wrong crawled through his senses.]

[Wrong in a way that made his skin tighten.]

[His eyes snapped open. His pupils shook violently.]

[Every single clone had been severed from him, cut off by some invisible barrier he could neither see nor understand.]

[This should not have been possible. His Innate Technique created an absolute private network. It was not connected to anything external, so there should have been no third party capable of cutting in and severing it by force.]

[And yet, like a system hit by a fatal bug, the impossible was happening right in front of him.]

[He had lost all perception of his clones. He was alone now, stranded from both information and Cursed Energy.]

["What’s going on... my technique failed?!"]

[The thought had barely formed when, a tenth of a second later, it was already too late.]

[He heard no footsteps. He sensed no ripple of Cursed Energy. Nothing.]

["Squelch."]

[The wet sound of a blade entering flesh split the silence.]

[Cold pain erupted through the left side of his chest. He looked down stiffly and saw a short pitch-black blade gleaming with lethal cold light, driven through his back at a cruel, precise angle. It had punched clean through his heart. The tip jutted out of his chest, dripping warm blood.]

["Wh... at...!?"]

[Blood flooded his windpipe. His eyes bulged, but his throat could only produce a rasping, leaking wheeze.]

[Only then did Touma’s voice drift beside his ear, quiet as a ghost and edged with cold amusement.]

["Looks like Panda did a fine job with the task I gave him. As for you..."]

[But the Curse User would never hear the rest. He would never learn what kind of phantom had appeared behind him, or who the boy really was.]

[Because the instant he tried to turn his head, the cold blade still buried in his heart was wrenched free with merciless force, disappearing from his blind spot.]

[The next second, it was over.]

["Thunk."]

[The blade flashed like a black streak of lightning and drove into the base of his skull without hesitation. It pierced through, shredded his brain, and crushed the last spark of life he might have used to activate his technique one final time.]

[Touma pulled the short blade free without expression, flicked the blood away with a casual snap of his wrist, and looked down at the body at his feet as if he had stepped on some bug that barely deserved a glance.]

---

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