Modulo Chapter 3

Forest hills in Gifu become a hunting ground when Yuka, Tsurugi, and Maru chase a predator that the locals describe as a shark slipping through the trees.

Usami hands the Okkotsu siblings their next job: track down and exorcise a man-eating shark, and he sends Maru along as backup. Because Gifu has no coastline, the pair find the assignment puzzling, but their handler points out that the creature has been seen moving through woodland instead of the sea. The train ride sets off a debate, with Tsurugi insisting curses only crop up in Tokyo, Yuka stepping in to explain to Maru what cursed spirits really are, and Tsurugi floating the theory that anything surfacing beyond the Inhuman Makyo might trace back to the Simurians. Maru shoots the idea down, swaying only Yuka. Two people are already dead, and since no water turned up at either scene, the team splits, with Yuka chasing witness accounts and the boys combing the trees. Their bickering over aliens and Simurian motives breaks off the instant a shark hurls itself at them. Reaching for Honoyagi, Tsurugi is stopped by Maru's warning that the cursed tool might set the forest ablaze, so Maru seizes the shark himself and shouts at him to strike without fire. A weathered man's face then pushes out of the shark's flank, and both boys gawk at how old he looks.

The stranger turns out to be Osada, a Jujutsu High graduate and former sorcerer, who denies being the man-eater. The genuine threat, he explains, is a tiger called Toranosuke, descended from animals trafficked into Japan over twenty-five years ago that settled in the Gifu peaks. After a rebuilt solar plant baked the local river dry, the parched tiger came down to feed on villagers, and the costumed Osada was blamed for the attacks by mistake. He intends to capture rather than slay Toranosuke and shelter him far from people, a vision of coexistence that wins Maru over but earns Tsurugi's flat refusal, since any creature that has tasted human flesh, in his view, has to die. A séance-style technique tied to costumes grants Osada the powers of whatever he dons, so the shark suit lets him glide through the air and catch the scent of blood. Chasing that trail straight into an ambush, he is gashed open when Toranosuke pounces. Tsurugi hurls the tiger off him while Maru treats the bleeding sorcerer, and Osada, grasping that his old companion is gone for good, weeps and asks Tsurugi to end its agony. With the tiger dead, Maru shares his real errand: collecting data so the Simurians can decide whether living alongside humans is feasible, and noting his technique is tied to his twin Cross, off-limits except in dire moments. A cub then appears, and rather than kill it Tsurugi entrusts it to Osada to raise well, his remark about an unforeseeable future drawing a smile from Maru. Yuka, all the while, is held captive by three old women drowning her in hospitality.