At that moment, Katsuo stopped hiding his physical strength and moved with all that he could.

His movement of preparing to defend himself forcibly broke through the invisible restraints. He adjusted the knife angle and deflected the bullet with his knife, and with his other hand, he parried the blade coated with cursed energy.

This left an opening on the swordsman which he planned to take to incapacitate him but before he could do it, the marksman fired multiple shots.

He could only retreat as he moved his knife in a Z motion to deflect the bullets

'This marksman is good!'

Katsuo wasn't afraid of the bullets themselves, even if they hit, his dense muscles would prevent them from penetrating too deeply, and his [Reverse Cursed Technique] would heal his body and force the bullets out. In a few seconds, he would be alright.

What he was alarmed about was the fact that being hit by a bullet could be the condition to activate his opponent's innate technique, if he had one.

Those exchanges were done in the blink of an eye, the confrontation between Panda and the other two vanguards hadn't even begun.

Katsuo quickly analyzed his opponents, the one whose innate technique restrained him was bleeding from one eye, most likely it was the consequence of his innate technique being broken through, but he still didn't take his eyes of Katsuo, the marksman had also just finished reloading.

'They are all professional.'

Katsuo recognized.

Suddenly the eyes of Shikamaru look-alike on the rearguard turned white for a second and he calmly grabbed the hand of the woman next to him as they started to run.

At that moment, the opponent team all started to retreat out of nowhere, even the two who Panda was already fighting were trying to disengage and run away.

The battle had just begun but they already wanted to retreat, Katsuo was perplexed, to say the least, but the mission objective and the fact that a [Curtain] barrier had not been raised, which could cause their fight to alarm and potentially injure civilians, made Katsuo decide to not pursue them.

'Well, with those gunshots they are probably already alarmed.'

"Panda it's better to let them go, facing them is not the mission."

Panda retreated to Katsuo's side and the vanguards that fought him, whose guy already had a broken arm, also started to run.

After they disappeared, Panda talked to Katsuo.

"Hmm~, they were very experienced Katsuo and two of them seemed to have an innate technique."

"Three. Three of them showed their innate techniques, the one whose eyes turned white, the one who restrained me, and the woman in the rearguard probably had one with telepathic effects. Noticed how they retreated when nobody ordered them, it happened after the ones in rearguard grabbed hands, so it's possible."

(AN: I only remembered now that Ino was also kind of a telepath, XD, I swear it's a coincidence)

"Hmm, they probably belong to a powerful organization, let's ask Gojo-sensei when we return."

Suddenly, Katsuo felt people he recognized running towards them, and soon they were visible and approaching.

"Maki and Toge."

Katsuo whispered as he started thinking about the earlier encounter from the beginning to the end and some hypothesis formed in his mind.

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'That Shikamaru guy timely alerts, those white eyes, their retreat, and Maki and Toge appearance, could his innate technique allow him to see a little of the future?'

Katsuo continued to think about it and concluded that it was possible.

'Was it a mistake to let those guys go?'

Katsuo regretted his earlier decision a bit but he could think about it more in the future, now he had to complete the mission.

He filled in his late classmates with what happened as they followed the compass and soon found what they were looking for behind one of the residential buildings.

A small, unattractive, and terrified teenager clutching to a cracked circular hand mirror with pitch-black borders that was saturated with cursed energy, a cursed item.

'So the mirror already has an owner, as expected.'

Katsuo and his teammates looked at each other and Katsuo approached the boy alone while the rest stayed a few steps behind, ready to act and surveilling the surroundings at the same time.

He came close to the boy who noticed the footsteps and became more fearful.

Katsuo, carefully and apprehensive of the possibility of it being a trap, called out kindly to the teen.

"Hello, can you tell us how you got that mirror?"

The boy flinched and looked up. His eyes behind the unkempt hair peeked at them but he buried his head on his chest again, trembling even harder.

Katsuo was helpless, communication wasn't his strong suit.

He sensed carefully the mirror and noticed that it was bound to the boy. Well it was called a bond but it was more like a curse (not cursed spirit), they were completely linked, if one is destroyed, the other follows the same fate.

Then Katsuo remembered that if the boy was the owner of the mirror, he was responsible for the incidents that occurred in those high schools so he asked again after reformulating the question and his kind tone became colder.

"That mirror you are holding is very precious, a lot of people are after it and they don't care what happens to you. I can feel your bond to it, if one dies, the other follows. When those lawless people discover this, they won't treat you as kindly as me, so I will ask again. Who are you? How did you find the mirror? Why did you do that to those girls?"

The boy looked up, tears streaming down his face and he, choking on sobs, told us his story.

His name is Oogami Masao, he was a small, unattractive, and shy individual and his home situation wasn't the best, his mother died when he was young, so he lived alone with his alcoholic father. Because of all that, he was bullied during primary and middle school but he thought that it would be different in high school, people would be more mature, and he would have a new beginning, but it was almost all flights of fancy.

The number of classmates bullying him had indeed reduced a lot, but the ones that did it were numerous times crueler than before and so he spent two months experiencing various forms of humiliation and threats that wore down his spirit.

Then, three weeks ago, he was getting tired of it all and was hiding in a rarely used school bathroom, looking at his reflection in the mirror.

He hated it.

Why was he born ugly?

Why was his only family like that?

The questions were endless, he was getting engulfed in a storm of self-hatred, and in an act of anger, he punched the bathroom mirror.

The mirror shattered and his negative feelings vanished as if being sucked by something, and he felt that that something was a strange mirror in the ground, so he picked it up.

The mirror was called [Thousand Shattered Reflection Mirror].

At first, Masao knew that it was special, but he didn't know how special it was until he was being humiliated by one of his worst bullies, a pretty but pretentious girl.

He wouldn't go into details about what happened but when it was happening, the cursed mirror made a connection to her smartphone screen which he noticed when he arrived home.

Then he began to experiment with it and discovered various powers.

He could create new connections if he fulfilled some conditions, connect to any mirror near the thing that it's connected to, spy through them, and the most miraculous one in his opinion, he could travel through them.

So he stopped going to school and began to terrorize his female bully, to have his revenge. He also tried it on the boys but some didn't even notice, and those that did notice something, didn't care. It seemed that the girls were a lot more sensitive in that situation than boys.

Then, Masao began to investigate and target beautiful girls who were mean to others.

"Then, why did you grab their intimate personal items?"

"The f-first time, I-I was planning to grab something important to her, then I heard a noise! I panicked and grabbed the closest thing! Then when I saw through the mirror how much it terrified her, I began to do it to the other bullies."

(AN: When I was writing "thing", I mistakenly wrote "thong", no cap, XD)

Katsuo could see that happening based on his profiling of Masao, and unless Masao was a professional liar, everything sounded legit to Katsuo, he even found him a little pitiful, not just because of what happened but because of what's going to happen to him in the future.

"From now on, you better stick with us, for your safety."

'I guess I will have to ask Gojo-sensei for help regarding Masao.'

He approached his friends and they began to discuss, their next steps now that the mirror is in "their" possession.