"Team bonding exercises, my favourite!" says an extra mouth showing up on Itadori's left cheek.

Itadori slaps his own face. "Sorry about him, he does that sometimes."

"Maybe we could tag team the new girl and have some fun, if your dick isn't too limp for that."

He slaps the back of his hand, now, where the new mouth appeared. "Just shut up and stay in, okay?"

No new mouths appear.

“Charming.“ She finishes tying her hair up. “Are you sure you’re in control, there, or that he’s not just biding his time or something?”

“Tokan-kun has been pronounced safe-ish by the strongest sorcerer in the world! Speaking of, you’ll need this, my precious student. Just until you actually learn how to use that cursed energy of yours.”

He offers Itadori some kind of dagger.

More like a meat cleaver. Itadori's sure daggers aren't meant to grow this big. Not that he's complaining.

"Cool," he exclaims when he unholsters it. "Magic, somehow, then?"

“Sort of! It’s a cursed object. Any injuries it inflicts on curses can’t be quickly healed, and it’ll permanently kill them if you land a mortal blow.”

“What, he gets a present and I’m left to fend for myself?” sniffs Hayashi. “Thanks, Sensei.”

“You’re here on a scholarship. If you want your own cursed object to kill things with, use that stipend we give you for it!” he replies, cheerfully. “Besides, he doesn’t get to keep it, it’s on loan.”

"Bet I'll learn how to do a magic punch of some kind. Punching is kind of my thing."

"If you want to run up and personally punch each and every curse you fight to death, you go right ahead." She tilts her head towards the abandoned building, spinning her fan through her fingers. It looks more sharp, sturdy, and metallic than fans usually come. "Ready to go?"

"I shall defer to your expertise." He sheathes the enormous dagger and bows to Gojō and Fushiguro.

"Don't die," Fushiguro drawls.

She gives a polite bow to her peer and Sensei, then turns to lead Itadori off to the abandoned building.

"So, we'll start from the bottom and go up, and fan out a bit to prevent any from slipping past us. Some of them go through walls, and a few might be smart enough to try to run. We should stay in each other's sight, though, preferably in easy running distance if one of us gets ambushed by a clever one."

Hayashi seems to be more than a little in her element, and has an air of self-assured efficiency to her.

Oh. Okay.

Kinda hot, too.

"Yes, ma'am," he says, in English, saluting. He throws his sheathed cutlass up and grabs it by the handle easily. Is he trying to show his manual dexterity off? Maybe. Not like he has a lot of other things to show off.

She seems far too mission-oriented to notice, or be impressed, unfortunately.

Outside, their Sensei finds a comfortable place to lounge.

"I was half expecting you to demand to join them," he observes, to Fushiguro.

"And then you would say I am still recovering and also that you want to field test the two of them."

"I already said you were still recovering, actually, I just would have repeated myself more strongly. Otherwise, yes, exactly right! You're too adaptable for a proper field test of either of them. And she's the one I'm curious about."

"Not Itadori?"

"Nah. Kid would happily throw himself into a nest of special-level curses if it looked like it'd be fun. It's not like he hesitated when he didn't know what they were or what was going on. He needs someone to hold his collar and tell him it's aesthetically appropriate to think. Akiho-chan, on the other hand, only has experience with country curses up until now."

"They're different?"

"I need to take you on field trips more often! Of course they are, the people that make them are different. Even if they're not more powerful, which they often are, city curses have much more breadth of consciousness creating them. Which is to say, even at the same level of power, they are more creative. Clever. A curse that is 'smart enough to run,' isn't a particularly smart curse at all."