After giving up on looking for the Akatsus, Maru sat down on a riverside bank and began to sulk.
A few moments later, Yuka came back and told him not to cry, since then the two of them would really look like jerks for what they had done. To make it up to the foreign dignitary, Yuka took him out for some takoyaki, which he found delicious. So delicious that he started crying over it.
Yuka found that odd, since food like this could be bought anywhere in town. She even let him know that the food was better in places like Kyoto, which surprised him, because he did not think it could get much better than what he was holding.
Sitting back down alongside the river, the two of them had a friendly chat. Yuka explained the rivalry that had grown between her and Sudugi, and how it had started with the ring being suddenly handed over to her brother.
Maru asked whether her brother was a great sorcerer, since he had been given the ring first. According to Yuka, the two of them were pretty much the same. The only real difference between them was age. One thing was certain, though. Sudugi was an insanely hard worker, and anybody could tell when someone was constantly training. She thought he was doing all of it to beg for attention from the family, because in her eyes all he wanted was to keep the ring out of her grasp.
Calming herself down again, Yuka got up and noted that it was not as if he even had memories with Yuta. And besides, she was working just as hard as he was.
Seeing her change in mood, Maru jumped up and put forward the idea of completing this mission together, to show everybody just how good she was. He was an inspector, after all. If the two of them did it together, it would still look like she had completed the mission on her own.
Yuka brought up the fact that sorcerers were forbidden to work alone. However, it was not as though she had said she would not do it.
Pleased that it looked like they were heading out together, Maru reminded Yuka that he could not help at all. Nobody would find out that he had gone with her, as long as he did not end up using cursed energy.
The pair then headed out into the city in search of the perpetrator. After what only seemed like a few minutes, Maru collapsed back onto the ground, unable to find anything at all. Telling him to get up, Yuka joked that of course it would look like nothing to an amateur, before asking him which way he wanted to turn at the end of the road.
Once they reached the end and turned right, Yuka asked him which way again. He gave her the signal to turn left, and then she headed straight down the alley.
A curious Maru asked what she was doing. Yuka flicked him a piece of paper. Maru read the exact same directions he had already given her, written down in advance on that piece of paper. Confused, he threw it back at her and joked that this was no time for games.
Getting him to be quiet for a moment, Yuka explained that it was the road. It had physical gaze manipulation and a curse cast onto it. That allowed the sorcerer responsible to lead stray wanderers or curious children down whatever path they had intended for them. If you followed the path that was laid out for you after you got lost, it activated a barrier technique that trapped you inside.
Realising that this was how the perpetrator had been kidnapping children, Maru told Yuka that she was amazing and that everyone would see it soon enough. She brushed that off, because her brother chose exactly that moment to walk onto the scene.
Having found the place a little earlier himself, Sudugi clarified for them both that if they kept letting the road guide them down the path, they would eventually be caught themselves. Turning to walk off, he told them to wait one second, since he just needed to grab his blade.
Watching him stroll away as though none of it mattered, Maru apologised to Yuka. She only asked him why he was letting it get to him so much.
It turned out that Maru had a brother as well, a twin. Sadly, the two of them did not get along, even though he had tried patching things up with him a number of times. Yuka asked what had ended up happening between them, and he admitted that it was really nothing. His brother simply found him embarrassing, and it annoyed him to no end. Maru hated the fact that they could not understand each other, and the thought of it going on forever genuinely saddened him. He would hate for Yuka and Sudugi to end up in a similar situation, so he had really wanted to try to help fix the whole business with the ring.
Giving him some pointers, Yuka said that maybe he should stop projecting how he thought siblings ought to act just because of his own situation. Besides, most siblings ended up arguing in one way or another.
She was not at that stage herself, though. Yuka turned away from Maru and muttered that she really did not care about her brother, as long as she got Yuta's ring back.
While all of this was being said, the three of them had made their way to what they assumed was where the path started. Sudugi pulled out some tape, ready to close off the entrance and make sure nobody else went down that alley. He said that even if they did not block every path, it should still prevent the conditions for the barrier technique from being fulfilled, and that way nobody else could be caught.
Once they had finished their taping, the group was left utterly gobsmacked as a boy, selling his life away without knowing it, strolled straight down the taped alley.
All three of them reacted at once, turning and running after the kid.
They were too late. Out of the darkness, two large hands reached out and snatched the boy away before any of them could grab him.
Coming to an immediate stop as the hands vanished, Sudugi could tell they were up against a top-tier curse user, if he was able to work spatial transference into a barrier technique. Unsheathing his blade, he yelled back to his sister that he was going in after the boy, and that she needed to report back to Usami.
She refused immediately, wanting to go in with him, but he shut her down, because he wanted to prove to her that he was the strongest. In the end, the two of them came to a kind of agreement and moved to go in together.
However, as the hands reached out, they only snatched away Sudugi. On top of that, they took only him, and not his cursed-energy-infused blade.