Sherlock’s slash landed cleanly.
Unfortunately, that was the only clean hit he was going to get.
The curse recovered almost immediately.
The disposable medical instruments embedded in its head suddenly came alive, launching themselves toward Sherlock from every direction.
Needles.
Scalpels.
Broken surgical tools.
Many of them still carried dark, dried stains.
Sherlock had absolutely no intention of blocking that mess head-on.
He activated Flying Thunder God and vanished, reappearing where he had landed earlier.
Sayafushi rose in front of him as he watched the curse carefully.
The attack had clearly angered it.
Its entire head suddenly burst apart.
The cluster of medical instruments that had once formed its skull separated, each piece sprouting strands of writhing flesh.
They squirmed through the air like grotesque parasites before swarming toward Sherlock from every direction.
Meanwhile, the headless nurse’s body collapsed onto the ground.
It looked as though someone had simply switched it off.
“A technique that controls corpses?” Sherlock’s expression hardened.
He cut several incoming instruments apart, then immediately teleported away from the swarm and appeared beside the fallen nurse.
The flying instruments themselves weren’t especially difficult to handle.
The body they had been controlling was the real problem.
So Sherlock decided to destroy that first.
The instant he appeared beside it, however, the nurse’s corpse suddenly moved.
One hand snapped upward.
Its fingers twisted and fused into a scalpel-shaped blade before stabbing directly toward Sherlock’s chest.
The attack came too quickly.
Sherlock barely had time to bring Sayafushi across his body.
He managed to deflect the worst of it, but the improvised scalpel still tore across his chest.
At the same time, Sherlock finally saw what had made the corpse move.
There was another small curse buried in the flesh near its neck.
It resembled a scalpel embedded beneath the skin, its body parasitically fused with the corpse.
A trap.
Sherlock immediately understood.
Without hesitation, he activated Flying Thunder God and teleported back into the hospital corridor.
His feet had barely touched the floor when dizziness washed over him.
His limbs suddenly felt weak.
Heat spread through his body, almost like the onset of a high fever.
Sherlock’s face changed.
Damn it.
Poison.
He understood almost immediately what had happened.
And just as quickly, he began weighing his options.
Leave?
Or keep fighting?
The curse was clearly far more dangerous than expected.
Worse, the nurse he had fought probably wasn’t even its true body.
Most likely, it was only a puppet.
Or perhaps some kind of independent extension of the main curse.
If Sherlock wanted to exorcise the real thing, he would first have to locate its actual body somewhere inside this hospital.
Almost as though responding to his realization, the entire building suddenly came alive.
Sounds erupted from every direction.
Dragging feet.
Scraping metal.
Wet flesh striking against walls.
Then headless corpses began flooding into the corridors.
Dozens of them.
They poured from rooms, stairwells, and darkened hallways, converging on Sherlock.
Every corpse had been altered.
Aside from all of them missing their heads, each possessed some kind of medical instrument fused into its hands.
Some had syringes.
Others had scalpels.
Several had rubber tubes stretched into whip-like weapons.
Others dragged long strips of bloodstained bandages behind them.
And the bodies themselves came from every age.
Children.
Teenagers.
Adults.
Elderly patients.
Men.
Women.
The scene looked like the beginning of a zombie outbreak.
Sherlock’s scalp went numb.
Every survival instinct in his body screamed at him to leave.
Run.
Get out.
Yaga had explicitly told him to retreat if something felt wrong.
And this had gone very, very wrong.
Yet the moment Sherlock seriously considered escaping, other memories surfaced instead.
Yaga standing at the front of the classroom, calmly telling him something that directly contradicted the official textbooks.
Your life comes first.
Then came half a month of training with Gojo.
Countless sparring sessions.
That damned white-haired cat grinning whenever Sherlock managed to improve even slightly.
The rare flashes of genuine expectation hidden beneath all the teasing.
Then Shoko.
Every time Gojo beat Sherlock into the floor during training, Sherlock would wake up in the infirmary and see that familiar expression on her face.
Half annoyed.
Half concerned.
And finally…
His thoughts stopped on that day in Tokyo.
The arcade.
The dessert shops.
Yakiniku.
The most carefree day Sherlock had experienced since arriving in this world.
He closed his eyes for a moment.
Then cursed.
“Damn it.” His fingers tightened around Sayafushi.
“Screw it.” Sherlock stopped suppressing his cursed energy.
The response was immediate.
A vast wave of cursed energy erupted from his body and swept through the hospital like a tidal surge.
The air itself seemed to tremble.
Then Sherlock disappeared.
Flying Thunder God activated at full output.
For a fraction of a second, it looked as though there were dozens of Sherlocks scattered throughout the hospital.
One appeared beside a corpse.
Then another.
Then another.
Blade raised.
Blade falling.
Teleport.
Slash.
Teleport.
Slash.
In less than a second, the entire horde was decapitated.
For the first time in the world of jujutsu, Sherlock’s Flying Thunder God truly lived up to the legend that had inspired it.
A flash moving faster than the eye could follow.
Not quite the Yellow Flash of another world.
But close enough to make the comparison obvious.
Then, just as abruptly as he’d disappeared, Sherlock returned to his original position.
He immediately bent over.
“Ugh…” His stomach lurched.
Then he started throwing up.
Sherlock had always maintained a habit of leaving marks wherever he went.
Hallways.
Rooms.
Stairwells.
Corners.
Any place he might someday need to return to.
Until now, it had mostly been paranoia.
Today, that paranoia had saved his life.
With marks spread throughout the hospital, Sherlock had been able to teleport from one location to another with almost no delay, appearing beside every corpse before any of them could react.
The result had been overwhelming.
Every puppet had been destroyed almost instantly.
So had the parasite curses controlling them.
But the cost was worse than Sherlock had expected.
Running Flying Thunder God at maximum output placed an enormous burden on his brain.
He had processed too many locations at once.
Too many angles.
Too many images.
Too many spatial changes happening in fractions of a second.
His vision seemed to fracture into overlapping pieces.
And with poison already spreading through his body, the nausea became unbearable.
“Ugh…” Sherlock gagged again.
“I swear…” Another wave hit him.
“If I ever use that move like this again…” He barely managed to breathe.
“I’m an idiot…” Sherlock emptied what felt like the last remaining contents of his stomach before his head finally stopped feeling as though it were about to split open.
Still dizzy, he placed one hand against the wall and slowly straightened.
Then he looked downward.
That burst of cursed energy had given him something unexpected.
For a moment, Sherlock had sensed the source.
The real curse.
And it wasn’t anywhere on the hospital’s visible floors.
It was below him.
Hidden underground.
More surprisingly, none of the mission documents had mentioned a basement.
Sherlock’s eyes narrowed.
“Found you.” His voice turned cold.
“You bastard.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the mint candies Gojo constantly complained about.
Sherlock shoved it into his mouth.
The sharp burst of mint helped clear some of the fog from his head.
Sayafushi still in hand, he started toward the lower floors.
What surprised him was that there appeared to be only one route into the hidden basement.
The elevator shaft.
Sherlock cut through the elevator doors with Sayafushi.
Beyond them was nothing but darkness.
A black shaft dropping beneath the building.
Sherlock stared down for a moment.
Then jumped.
He fell several floors before using his cursed technique to control his descent.
Once he reached the hidden level, he drove Sayafushi through another set of elevator doors and cut them apart.
Then he stepped through.
The moment Sherlock saw what waited on the other side…
His stomach nearly turned over all over again.