"Awww, who are some good puppies that will dismember our enemies for us," coos Hayashi, charmed. Can she give the demon dogs scritches? She would like to!

"Mind you, I have plans for tying fishing line through the holes in my needles and figuring out dismemberment on my own that way, because I'd like to be at least somewhat self reliant. But since I can't pull with much force, I need to figure out how to channel cursed energy to make it sharp instead. And my control is not good enough for that kind of fiddly detail. ... Yet."

The white dog sits and looks up at her with a goofy expression, tongue lolling to the side. Yes it wants pets.

"How could you have beaten me with what you do have?"

"Without sending needles through your eye sockets and out of the back of your head?" she wonders, a little wryly. She gives the dogs their pets and thinks.

"Your demon dogs are a pair. You didn't summon them both, and I think that was actually to my detriment instead of my benefit. They are alike enough that I could mirror whatever I do to one to the other. I think I had a decent idea by cutting to the chase and just directly tackling you, but I got too hung up on your cursed technique needing you to make shadow puppets instead of how I could quickly subdue you, and that made the actual execution garbage. Uh. I think if I were to try it again I'd go with attrition and just try to stay away from you while raining small pie weights on you from unexpected angles. Directly beating you..." She makes a bit of a face. "I'm not sure that's realistic right now, honestly. You have been hanging out with other sorcerers for years, I have been in the countryside exorcising curses on my own. You just honestly dwarf me in sorcerer to sorcerer tactical thinking and experience."

"What are my weaknesses that you could have exploited?"

"You need shadows and the ability to make shadow puppets with your hands in order to summon shikigami. You don't have any weaponry besides your shikigami that I can see, so I think if an actual close combat specialist did what I did that probably would have been game, set, match. Uh. ... I didn't really have time to observe many weaknesses, honestly. There is probably something about your shikigami needing direction or orders from you in order to act, but I don't quite know what. I bet you can't summon all of the ones you have at the same time, but I don't actually know how many is your limit. You.... are easily embarrassed by social situations and I could probably leverage that somehow?"

Okay now Fushiguro's blushing for real. "I would not let that stop me during combat," he says, you know, like a liar.

"Stop you, no, absolutely not. Throw you off your game and get me an opening, though, probably."

He furrows his eyebrows and shuts his eyes. "Yes, probably, all of those are true," he continues. "Entirely getting rid of all shadows everywhere is very difficult, but the fewer or smaller ones I have to work with, and the farther from me they are, the longer it takes for my shikigami to form. The ones I have right now are all smart enough and we have fought together for long enough that they mostly take nonverbal cues for me, although I do sometimes give them instructions with hand signs. Number of simultaneous shikigami I can summon is limited by having to do it sequentially and each summon consumes cursed energy, but I have practice with it and can keep all of the ones I have contracted with up at the same time."

“Oh. I see. You have to physically give them instructions. I thought it was some kind of mental connection or something. And… contracted? How does that work?”

"There is a ritual. I can summon a shikigami I have yet to contract and, should I defeat it in single combat, I will be able to summon it to my side to fight with me. The ritual does not end until one of us dies, though, so I need to be very sure I can take a shikigami on before trying to contract it."

“Wow. That is really involved and specific. Uh. … I know you said single combat, but can you, I don’t know. Rig the arena with land mines beforehand, and summon it in the middle of them?”

“Hello, my precious students!” says a returning Gojo. “…. Have you two not started yet? Did the pie weights throw you off that much?”

Hayashi crosses her arms and grumbles something about how if she ever takes up assassination as an alternative source of revenue, she knows who goes first.

"I don't think it's been tried," he replies to Hayashi's question, completely ignoring Gojō. "I don't know what would happen."

Yes they can just ignore their terrible Sensei that absolutely set her up for failure, mhm.

“Huh. And what happens if someone helps you out?”

“Oh I see,” says Gojo, failing to conceal a laugh. “Well then, pay no attention to me, I’ll just be over here if you want any wisdom.”

And then he starts fiddling with his phone.

"Then even if the shikigami should be defeated I will not be able to summon it. It needs to be one versus one."

“Does that lose you the shikigami forever? Or can you try again?”

"I can try again, but if I succeed I can't try to contract it again. Which is important because I also cannot summon a shikigami anymore if it is completely destroyed in combat."

“Oh. Uh.” She glances at Gojo and decides not to say that she’s glad to have had her sharp things taken away from her. Even though she is. “That is probably information that should be told up front to sparring partners. To prevent accidents that permanently lose you your charming animal companions.”

"I can dismiss them reasonably quickly," shrugs Fushiguro. "It is only a problem if they are killed so fast I cannot react to it or if it happens without me noticing it."

"Mm. All right. Well, I am perfectly happy to be on standby for killing a shikigami that you're trying to contract, if it turns out harder than you'd expected. And it sounds like we can just test how ridiculously unfair we can be about setting up the arena to screw over the critter. It'd be a risk, but not much more of one, if you used the right sorts of traps."

"Cursed ones, they would have to be," he agrees. "...but then again, all of the shikigami I have not contracted yet are ones I am not powerful enough to face, so I would need a lot of help. —ah, a thought occurs to me, how would your cursed technique interact with bullets?"

“I have not had access to firearms to experiment with, so I don’t actually know. At a guess, the bullets move so fast that I’d have trouble steering them. I could probably curve trajectories? I don’t expect I could stop them, especially not from someone else’s gun.”

"I was thinking curving the paths, yeah, or maybe shooting with the gun in a direction and then having another bullet come from somewhere else for misdirection. Many of them, even, if you can."