"So you and I are in the sa tier?"
"No, no, no, don't get the wrong idea. Barring a few outliers, Jujutsu Sorcerers generally edge out Cursed Spirits."
"And ..."
Gojo paused, the corner of his mouth lifting into a cocky, unapologetic grin.
"Nobody's a match for ."
Betty fell silent for a beat, then looked at him with complete seriousness. "So can I beat you up?"
"Nope."
The answer ca out almost singsong, insufferably pleased with itself.
"Then what's the deal with Domains?"
"Domains, right."
"Speaking of. How's your grip on your Innate Technique? The Prison, I an. Where are you with it?"
"I'm not sure what you're asking. There's no issue using it, though."
"Using it is the floor. What I'm talking about, with 'grip,' ans breaking it apart from the inside out. Understanding every piece. Being able to invent new applications from scratch."
"None of that."
She shook her head, flat and direct.
"Then a Domain's nowhere close to you yet."
"Put simply, a Domain burns an enormous amount of Cursed Energy to build a space of your own making around you, one laced with your technique. Inside, you get a boost. And any technique tied to the Domain is guaranteed to connect."
"Of course, whether you can even manifest one also cos down to the kind of technique you've got."
"So you don't need to fixate on it yet. Work on your technique. Really chew through it. When that's done, then you can start thinking about Domains."
"Oh."
A small cube materialized in Betty's hand again.
She stared at it, sothing vague and unsettled passing behind her eyes.
Chew through it. Master it.
Was there really more to develop in her technique?
It already felt pretty familiar to her.
"These things work themselves out through thinking and fighting. Plenty of both."
"Not everyone's a prodigy like , after all."
Betty rolled her eyes with theatrical force to make her opinion known.
The Dragon Carriage didn't take long to reach the knights' stronghold.
"What are we doing here? You're not actually planning to challenge the knight order, are you?"
"Wrong framing. They're the challengers."
The knights inside the stronghold were already prepped and waiting.
Sa setup as the previous loop. One Holy Gold Coin per head, and Betty got tossed in the ring to "do her thing."
The whole bit ran on persuasion.
Persuade Betty into fighting, because through fighting she'd deepen her Cursed Energy and tighten her hold on her own technique.
Betty, bless her, was too earnest for her own good. A few well-placed words from Gojo and she was out there, grinding through match after match with dead-serious diligence.
Hundreds of knights.
Even if none of them stood a chance, grinding through that many bodies still burned up a chunk of the evening.
By the ti the last one was handled and they rolled back, the night had gone deep.
Felt hadn't turned in either. She'd just wrapped up her own work and was in the dining hall, picking at a late-night al.
"How'd it go? Smooth sailing?"
Her eyes lit up the mont she spotted them.
"Not bad."
Gojo tossed a coin pouch onto the table in front of her.
She snatched it up, yanked it open, and the mont she saw the hundreds of Holy Gold Coins inside, her whole face split into a grin.
"Nice work!"
"Tomorrow I'll go have another chat with the knight order. Let's keep the montum."
"Lady Felt, we're going again tomorrow?"
Reinhard's expression knotted. "Do we really need to?"
"Yes. Of course."
"Those knights didn't actually get to challenge Gojo tonight. They'll be stewing about it. Let's give them what they want tomorrow. It's not like any of them are his match anyway."
"A few hundred Holy Gold Coins, one round trip, practically money off the ground. Can't skip that."
"Gojo, guess how much we pulled in today."
Her voice dropped into sothing conspiratorial.
"Three thousand?"
He glanced at her, reading the smug curl of her mouth, and took a stab.
"Close."
"Really close."
"Including what you just brought back, three thousand three hundred!!!"
She shot to her feet on the last word, announcing it like a headline.
Three thousand three hundred?
Even Gojo raised his eyebrows a fraction at that.
In terms of buying power in Lugunica, the number was substantial. You could drop that figure into a modern economy and it'd still turn heads.
"So you really didn't sit still today, huh. Hustling the whole ti."
"Obviously. What, you thought coins just appeared in the purse by themselves?"
Her chin tilted up, full of swagger.
"Between this and what we already had saved, we're not far off ten thousand Holy Gold Coins total."
"Push a little harder and thirty thousand might not even be out of reach."
"Don't get carried away. This is front-loaded investnt. Once this wave runs dry, who knows when more money actually cos in."
"Thirty thousand's not happening that easily. Don't aim for the moon."
The pair of them batted the numbers around in front of Reinhard, trading half of it in a register he couldn't fully follow.
He took it as simple household finance talk.
"The knight order thing. One more round tomorrow and that well's tapped."
"But this is my dream, you know. Can't roll over and quit just because it's hard, reachable or not."
Felt ticked items off on her fingers as she went.
"The White Whale at went on sale today too."
"Word is business has been brisk. It's one of the Three Great Mabeasts. A lot of people want a taste."
"All that at stacked together, it should clear a decent sum."
"See? My idea panned out. Without it, a lifeti of work and you wouldn't just be short of this kind of money, you'd never even get near it."
"Yeah, yeah. Fine. I'll give you that one. A little credit."
Coming from Felt, that was almost a confession.
"Good. You get to count. I'm going to bed. Still more work tomorrow."
Gojo waved a hand at her, yawned through half of it, and drifted off toward his room.
The next day.
It took only a handful of days.
News of Felt handling the White Whale, and then picking off two Sin Archbishops on top of it, started fernting through the Royal Capital at speed.
The noble rchants who kept showing up at her door were the sort who lived by information. They'd known first.
The common folk on the lower rungs were slower on the uptake.
Two days of that quiet spread, and suddenly everyone had heard.
Once the story was loose in the capital, Felt's standing climbed in people's minds at a pace that almost alard her backers.
In short order.
Among the Royal Candidates, she'd pulled ahead by a full length, leaving the rest sowhere behind her in the dust.
What actually matters for a Royal Candidate trying to claim the throne?
Raw strength mattered. So did the skill to govern. But prestige, the weight of your na in people's mouths, carried just as much.
And on that front.
Felt had already opened a gap that looked hard to close.
The volu of patronage flooding in these past days traced back to exactly that.
So were thrilled. Others, less so.
The one taking it hardest was, without question, Crusch Karsten, head of House Karsten.
Since the White Whale had first shown itself in Lugunica, she'd been keeping close tabs on it. She'd had information coming in from the first day.
She'd spent that stretch gathering every detail available about the beast. Its patterns. Its routes.
After long reconnaissance, she'd locked in one near-certainty.
Its next passage through the region would carry it near the outskirts of the Royal Capital.
The mont that conclusion was solid, she moved.
Assembling a force. Outfitting them with weapons and gear. Stockpiling healing supplies.
Taking down the White Whale wasn't only about honoring the old promise to Wilhelm. It was her shot at a leap in standing.
Felling a beast that had survived unchallenged for hundreds of years, that would vault her past her rivals on the candidate stage in a single stroke.
Except.
She hadn't seen this coming.
All of that preparation, all of those weeks of planning, and Felt had stumbled into the harvest by accident and walked off with the prize.
Which left her bleeding on multiple fronts.
Ti and energy sunk into nothing.
Worse, all the equipnt she'd amassed now sat idle on her hands.
Granted, gear like that held its value. It wasn't the kind of inventory that lost worth overnight.
But capital tied up in goods was capital she couldn't deploy.
Had she been the one to bring down the White Whale, the numbers would have balanced themselves out. New backers would have rushed in to ease the pressure.
Felt's current windfall, essentially.
As it stood now...
"Lady Crusch, the knight order had a rough ti of it last night, ow."
In the Karsten estate study.
Crusch, head down over a pile of correspondence, lifted her eyes a fraction at Felix's voice.
"Last night?"
"What happened?"
Her hand kept moving over the papers. House head or not, candidate or not, the daily load didn't shrink.
"It was the Great Spirit called Betty."
Felix shrugged, continuing. "I got called over to the stronghold this morning to patch up so of my fellow knights. From what I gathered, Lady Felt paid the order a special visit during the day yesterday."
"Not sure what was discussed exactly, but the upshot is she promised the knights a chance to prove themselves. A shot at challenging Gojo."
"One challenger per round, one Holy Gold Coin per challenge."
"So last night Gojo shows up. Except, because he's a Spirit Arts User, he didn't lift a finger. The Great Spirit handled every single challenger herself."
Crusch's pen paused.
"A Great Spirit."
She let out a soft breath. "Now there's a dark horse. Who could have imagined a pickpocket out of the Slums, only half a month back, climbing this high this fast."
"It's true. Lady Felt's na is spreading through every district of the capital."
"A sha. If we'd pinpointed the White Whale's location with more precision, all of this would have been ours."
Felix's voice carried real regret. He knew exactly how much Crusch had poured into that plan.
"Gone is gone. No use mourning it."
She shook her head, her voice steady.
"Better to spend the energy on how we catch up."
"First the White Whale. Then two Sin Archbishops."
"Now she's carving into the knight order. Not a step wasted, everything linked, every move pressing forward."
"There's a strategist at her shoulder. Soone who knows how to run a campaign."
"So what do we do now, ow?"
Felix tilted his head, curious.
"We stick to our plan. Don't let them set the tempo."
"But we start pulling intelligence in earnest. Especially on the people around her."
"This Satoru Gojo, and this Natsuki Subaru. Both of them only surfaced in the capital recently."
"They ca out of nowhere. Their origins are suspect, and I want to know more."
Felix tapped a finger against his chin, thoughtful. "In that case..."
"There might be a window today."
"Word is Gojo's going back tonight. And this ti he'll actually step in. If we want to take a closer look, it's our chance."
"Gojo."
At the na, a single image rose in Crusch's mind. That brash, unbearably cocky figure from the conference.
"Understood."
This sa conversation, give or take, was happening in more than one place.
Setting Emilia aside, the other three candidates had their attention fixed on the sa events.
No surprise there. Felt had gone incandescent almost overnight.
A slum pickpocket not long ago. Now, the gap between her and the rest was no longer sothing you could asure honestly.
Copying her wasn't even on the table.
Setting aside whether any of them had the strength for it.
Even just tracking down those slippery Sin Archbishops was basically impossible.
Which ant.
From the mont Felt had ridden back into the capital with the White Whale in tow, she'd taken a lead nobody else could realistically close.
Unless one of the others stumbled into a feat of the sa caliber.
And the odds of that? You could count them on your toes.
Felt, for her part, hadn't the faintest idea how the other candidates were reacting.
Or rather, if she had known, she still wouldn't have cared.
Because.
She was here for the money.
Other people's opinions, their scheming, their calculations, she had no interest in any of it.
The knights' stronghold. Training grounds.
"We agreed. My job is done for tonight. You're handling this one yourself, right?"
Betty stood in the middle of the wide arena, looking up at Gojo, the doubt written plain across her small face.
"Trust . Even if I could pull the wool over your eyes, am I really going to pull it over the whole knight order?"
...
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