Chapter 154

Megumi joins forces with Panda to break into the fight club from outside. The two craft a plan to keep Yuji's conversation with Hakari from being interrupted, but Kirara Hoshi looms as a wild card whose cursed technique could ruin everything at any moment.

Meeting Megumi in the woods, Panda explains why he never approached Hakari himself: Kirara's technique makes the rooftop monitor room unreachable, the distance refusing to close no matter how he moves, an effect he likens to Satoru Gojo's Infinity. Since Kirara stays glued to Hakari, neither can tell whether the barrier depends on Kirara's position. Rather than provoke their host, Panda chose to draw a crowd, and he reads Yuji's odds as decent given his charm, even if he is a poor liar.

Panda knows the camera blind spots and the lookouts' placements, so the two aim to secure a path and watch the door, agreeing to abandon the mission entirely if Kirara or extra muscle drags Yuji outside. At 12:58 Yuji texts that his meeting starts at one o'clock, and Megumi deletes it at once. While Kirara escorts Yuji, chatting cheerfully and noting Hakari is feverish again, Megumi slides through the guards' shadows, choking out two lookouts and binding them in the cameras' blind spots. Panda flattens two more, swipes a fish sausage, and climbs the emergency stairs.

The pair regroup on the roof, only for Kirara to emerge unexpectedly and recognize Megumi from the feed, realizing he and Yuji both belong to Jujutsu High. As Kirara reaches for a phone to warn Hakari, Megumi summons Divine Dog: Totality, but the shikigami is hurled back into him. Megumi finds he cannot close on Kirara and, worse, cannot separate from his own Divine Dog, while a mark reading "★Imai" sits unnoticed on Panda's back. Inside, Hakari finally faces Yuji, opening with a baited pitch about earning a fortune for an hour of work a day, leaving Yuji bewildered.

Spanning nineteen pages in Volume 18, this chapter starts the Megumi and Panda versus Kirara Hoshi confrontation and is split across anime Episodes 52 and 53. The mysterious star marks, ★Imai on Panda and others later assigned, begin laying out the rules of Kirara's Love Rendezvous without yet naming it.