Modulo Chapter 5

Aged yet formidable, the curse user takes on both Tsurugi and Yuka at once. The instant the siblings go down, the third eye of the senseless Maru flies open.

An opening scene shows a small girl crying out for her mother, who barges in only to discover her daughter transfixed by water hanging in midair after spilling from her cup. Up on a rooftop, the duel between Tsurugi and Masaki Takeda heats up. Desperate to check on Maru, Tsurugi finds no opening as the old man's startling skill, paired with his shikigami's synchronized strikes, leaves a wound on his head. In a lull, Tsurugi wonders aloud whether Masaki ever weighed turning his abilities toward good. The curse user confesses he once did, but holds that such hopes are a privilege of youth, and that past a certain point ending a life and sparing one start to feel the same. What he truly loves, he admits, are the sensations and sights that a first grader knows, and he longs to remain that age forever. As his speech loops back on itself, Tsurugi grasps that the entire mess grew out of the old man's senility.

By unfurling a Simple Domain and switching on Maculation, Tsurugi seizes control, turning aside the combined assault and hurling Masaki crashing down into Shuei Elementary. A curtain then drops over the campus to pen Masaki in, and Yuka strikes from behind with Biting Twist for a critical hit. Once Tsurugi sketches out the curse user's powers, the siblings fight in concert, their flawless coordination overpowering both Masaki and his shikigami. Yet as Yuka heaves for breath, Masaki bursts out from inside his own shikigami, driving a needle through her shoulder before pinning Tsurugi with two more in the side. He explains that Marmalade Boy, his technique, can reshape anything by treating human skin as cloth, his own body and his guardian spirit's included, meaning the siblings had been trading blows with a skin-wrapped fragment of the shikigami the whole time. Just as he readies the killing strike on Tsurugi, debris starts to drift upward around the rooftop. Far off at Masaki's residence, fragments lift into the sky while the eye in Maru's forehead slides open.