Curse Return: Demon Void Girl Doesn't Want to Be a Weakling

Gojo Satoru called Ichiji, and soon the car arrived.

Mashiro and Gojo Satoru got into the car and asked Ijichi to drive to the administrative building.

Ichi gripped the steering wheel, his eyes fixed on the mountain road ahead, illuminated by the car headlights.

The car drove along a rugged mountain road, experiencing some bumps.

In the back seat, Gojo Satoru pulled up his eye mask to cover his eyes, leaned back in his seat, and breathed evenly; it was hard to tell if he had fallen asleep.

Mashiro glanced at him, and sighed softly, thinking that he didn't have much time to rest.

She silently activated her spell and used sound wave control to make all the noise coming from inside and outside the car disappear.

A short while later, Gojo Satoru woke up again and straightened his clothes.

Mashiro silently stopped the spell and asked him, "Have you seen the data Nanami found?"

"I've looked at it. The resigned account, the backup terminal, and the section chief's medical records—all three clues point to the same group of people." Gojo Satoru flipped his phone over. "But he didn't have time to access the physical server's backup logs. I'll add those tonight."

The administrative building is located on the east side of the main campus of the Magic Academy. It is a three-story concrete building with ivy covering the exterior walls.

At this time, all the windows are dark, except for a motion-sensor light in the foyer.

Gojo Satoru swiped his card at the door, and the glass door slid open.

The server room on the third floor is at the end of the corridor. The room is not big, with four server racks placed side by side, and the buzzing sound of fans fills the entire space.

There was a table against the wall with three terminals on it, one of which had a thin layer of dust on its screen.

Mashiro walked up to the terminal and ran her finger along the edge of the table. A trail of dust was left behind.

"No one has used this machine recently. The dust just settled naturally; it hasn't been wiped."

"Backup terminal." Gojo Satoru stood in front of the server rack, took off his sunglasses, and his six eyes gleamed faintly in the darkness.

His gaze swept across the metal casing of the server rack, lingering on the side of one of the servers. "This server has remnants of cursed energy. Very faint, and the residual time is over forty-eight hours; it wasn't left today."

Mashiro sat in front of the backup terminal and pressed the power button.

The screen lit up, and the system startup progress bar slowly advanced. She brought up the system log interface.

The data previously sent by Nanami had already marked a suspicious time point: twelve hours before the Juvenile Academy mission was assigned, the resigned account was activated.

Three hours before the task is assigned, the backup terminal is started from hibernation.

The operation log was overwritten one hour after the task was assigned.

The backup logs are not connected to the internet. The records on the server can be deleted, but there is a backup on the local machine that cannot be deleted.

"Found it."

The screen displays a copy of the operation log, which records the complete execution process of two instructions.

The first task is to assign a juvenile academy mission to the window system. The mission is rated level two and does not display the existence of a special-grade cursed spirit.

The second order was to issue an emergency mission to the Second Branch of Tokyo through the auxiliary monitoring system, with the designated recipient being the first-class sorcerer Kujo Mashiro.

The two commands were issued four minutes apart from each other, both from the same terminal, and the login account belonged to Takashi Yamada, an employee who left the company two years ago.

But Mashiro continued scrolling down and found a record in the log that hadn't been completely overwritten: three different administrator accounts had logged in one after another in the early morning.

"Three accounts," Mashiro said. She pointed out the line of text to Gojo Satoru.

"Section Chief Shigeru Sakakibara logged in at 2:31 AM and set up automatic task assignment."

"Deputy Section Chief Yoshio Tanaka logged in at 2:33 PM and activated the permissions of the departed account, Takashi Yamada."

"Sato Hikaru from the Technical Supervision Bureau logged in at 2:37, executed the dispatch order, and set it to automatically overwrite in six hours."

Three accounts, three logins, with intervals of two minutes and four minutes respectively, clearly indicate that the operator was the same person using three accounts with different permissions to complete the entire process step by step.

Gojo Satoru put away his sunglasses, looked at the three names on the screen, and there was no smile on his lips.

"The section chief was responsible for sending out meeting room notifications and also prepared medical records in advance to provide an alibi. His permissions were used to call up templates, but he wasn't the one actually performing the operations; he only needed to provide the account. The deputy section chief was responsible for activating the accounts of employees who had already left the company, so that the instructions couldn't be traced back to living people. Sato Hikaru was responsible for the final distribution and erasure of traces. Three people, three steps."

Mashiro took a picture of the operation log. "The section chief and deputy section chief are both clerical positions, but they also have spells. Sato Hikaru, the technical director of the window system, is a level three sorcerer."

Gojo Satoru walked up to the server and pointed his finger at the spot on the metal casing where the filth was most concentrated.

"Here. Sato Hikaru left behind remnants of his cursed power during the operation. I can sense the type of his technique; it's a low-level cursed power sensing technique. I've already memorized the characteristics of his cursed power."

"So it was Hikaru Sato who did the trick. Shigeru Sakakibara provided the account and the leave request. Yoshio Tanaka was responsible for activating the account after the employee left."

Mashiro stood up and tapped her fingers lightly on the keyboard twice. "Two clerical staff, one technical staff member, and they have superiors."

"Sakakibara Shigeru's former section chief, the one who got promoted to the director's department." Gojo Satoru put his sunglasses back on. "The section chief's account was remotely logged out in the early morning. The logout record shows that the IP address came from a certain address in Kyoto. But this address went through three redirects, and the final location still needs further analysis."

"That's enough." Mashiro put her phone in her pocket. "You've memorized Sato Hikaru's curse characteristics, so all that's left is to find them."

Gojo Satoru looked at her. Mashiro's face was expressionless, but her fingers were typing on the phone screen much faster than usual.

The expression he had when he rushed back from Saitama overnight and saw Itadori's corpse was gone; it had been replaced by this calm and focused look.

Mashiro put away her phone and said to Gojo Satoru, "Tell me the address once you find the person."

Gojo Satoru nodded and left the room.

Mashiro followed and left, then closed the server room door. The motion-sensor lights in the corridor automatically turned off, plunging the entire floor back into darkness.

As they walked out of the administrative building, Ijichi lowered the car window and watched the two approach.

"Mr. Gojo, are you done investigating?"

"The investigation is complete."

Iji didn't dare to ask directly who they had found, and simply nodded.

Mashiro sat in the back seat, took out her phone, and opened LINE.

Nanami's chat window was still stuck on the last message. She typed a few words and sent it.

"Mashiro": Three people. Shigeru Sakakibara, Yoshio Tanaka, and Hikaru Sato.

Nanami's reply came quickly.

"Nanami": Hikaru Sato submitted his annual leave application a week ago and will begin his vacation the day after tomorrow. If you need to contact him, tomorrow night is the best time.

"Mashiro": I understand.

The phone screen went dark, and the car fell silent again.

Mashiro leaned back in her seat, slowly drawing two circles on her knee with her fingers before stopping.

Those three people were executors, not planners, but even executors have to die.

The remaining person is still in the director's office in Kyoto.

------------

I woke up to find that the number of novel readers worldwide had decreased by 1000 times, but my number remained unchanged!

Waaaaah, so many people are watching! Thank you everyone, meow~

If you, dear readers, find any issues with the setting, please comment below. I genuinely didn't have time to meticulously check against the original work while writing.

I've tried my best to fix what I can, but if it's too difficult to fix, then please be lenient and consider it a mutation caused by the world adapting to Mashiro.

That's all, meow!