Fushiguro Maki had been a girl for two days now.
Those two days had filled her life with a suffocating, soul-crushing, please-just-let-me-die level of awkwardness that she had never experienced before.
For starters, the fact that everyone now referred to Fushiguro Megumi as "she" instead of "he" was already bad enough on its own.
After her body had been remade by the cursed spirit's technique, even her ID had to be changed.
But the single most unbearable thing was using the bathroom.
She didn't even know how to use the bathroom anymore!!!
She had actually gone online and searched "how do girls use public restrooms" — and found precisely nothing useful, because who the hell puts a tutorial on that on the internet? After a fruitless search, she'd had no choice but to figure it out on her own in the privacy of her room. At least she had her own room.
Being out in public was a genuine ordeal.
Which bathroom was she even supposed to use?
She'd stand there in the corridor between the men's room and the women's room, completely paralyzed.
Men's room? Absolutely not. She'd either be mistaken for a pervert, or worse — encounter one.
Women's room?
Then she was the pervert.
So every single time, she waited. Waited until the area was completely deserted, confirmed no one was looking in any direction, and then slipped inside like a thief — in, done, out — craning her neck left and right on the way out to make sure no one had seen her.
She had to repeat this ritual several times a day. It was exhausting beyond all reason. Anyone who knew what she was doing knew she was just using the bathroom. Anyone who didn't would've assumed she was in there stealing the faucets.
"Hey there♪ ...Little Megumi-weeee..." One day, Satoru Gojo had appeared at the door of her room — dressed in an absolutely insufferable suit, wearing absolutely insufferable sunglasses, speaking in an absolutely insufferable soft-bubble voice, striking an absolutely insufferable pose — and presented her with an absolutely insufferable rose while blowing her an absolutely insufferable flying kiss. "My princess... care to go for a drive with me?"
Panda and Inumaki, the two upperclassmen who happened to be standing right beside him, were doing the exact same thing.
All three of them posing. All three of them presenting flowers.
Under the noble academic banner of "testing whether sexual orientation changes along with the body."
Gojo even lifted his shirt to show off his abs and asked if she wanted to touch them.
"All of you, GET OUT OF HERE!!!——"
God almighty — was there a single normal person left in this entire school?!
But the thing that Fushiguro Maki found truly intolerable was the gaze of strangers.
She'd gotten a taste of it on the streets of Shibuya, but that had been a fleeting glimpse. The full weight of it hadn't hit her until these past few days, moving around outside the school grounds.
Walk down the street, and eyes would stick to her. The double-take rate was, conservatively speaking, one hundred percent. One time she'd run into a rude punk whose gaze had... drifted from her face down to her body, then slid back up to her face again, carrying a warmth that made her skin crawl all the way down her spine.
Ugh...
Just thinking about it now made her hair stand on end.
She'd been approached by strangers trying to talk to her. More than once.
Oh right, and talent scouts.
"Have you ever thought about becoming the next Marilyn Monroe?"
Marilyn Monroe your grandmother!
In short, the past few days of her life could be summed up in four words: worse than being dead.
Sneak around to use the bathroom. Endure the staring while walking. Stay vigilant against hidden cameras while shopping. Get accosted by strangers at random intervals. Even just wandering around drew pedestrians craning their necks to look. Her original daily life had already been exhausting enough — now she had to carry this entire extra layer of absurd nonsense on top of it.
But the thing that Fushiguro Maki genuinely could not wrap her head around was that blue-haired cursed spirit.
Why?
Why had that cursed spirit done this to her? (She was so aggrieved she could cry.)
It hadn't killed her. Hadn't seriously injured her. Hadn't weakened her Cursed Energy or her Technique. It had just — turned her into a girl.
What a completely unhinged thing to do. What was that even supposed to mean?
Was it just trying to mess with her life for fun?!
If the goal had been to neutralize a threat or shake a pursuer, wouldn't just killing her or crippling her have been the more efficient choice? If this was some kind of special binding or curse, then a curse that "changes a person's sex" was the most baffling, illogical binding she had ever heard of. She couldn't make sense of it at all.
And it wasn't only about what had happened to her personally.
Afterward, Jujutsu High had conducted an investigation into what had happened in Shibuya that day. The results were strange. That blue-haired cursed spirit had made contact with a large number of pedestrians while moving through the crowd — and not a single person had been injured because of it. Not one.
Not only had no one been harmed — quite a few people were saying their physical condition had actually improved.
Someone said their chronic lower back pain had vanished overnight.
Someone said the nearsightedness they'd lived with for over a decade had inexplicably cleared up.
Someone said their hair loss had mysteriously gotten better.
There was even a couple who had reportedly been unable to conceive for years — and after that day, they were pregnant.
It was like some kind of miracle cure had swept through the district. An urban legend had even begun to spread through that part of Shibuya because of it.
The story went like this: at a certain hour of dusk, an invisible angel walks the streets of Shibuya. She is clothed in white, crowned with a golden halo, wings spread at her back, drifting through the crowd. Anyone she touches receives a blessing from heaven — their ailments and suffering dissolving away as if by miracle.
People had started calling it the "Shibuya Angel."
Some had even gone back to stake out that same street, hoping to encounter her again.
Hah. A cursed spirit. Being called an angel.
...Genuinely absurd.
Whether that cursed spirit had carried out any actual attacks or additional operations on people still required further investigation. Whether it harbored any genuine malicious intent still needed ongoing observation. But at minimum — for now — the evidence indicated that people had not been harmed.
And Fushiguro Maki's own physical condition bore that out.
Aside from the change in sex, every other aspect of her body had not deteriorated — it had actually improved. Her skin was smoother. Her mental clarity was sharper. Her flexibility and stamina had both increased. The loss of muscle mass had dropped her raw strength output by one tier, but her physical agility and coordination were actually better than before.
Except for being turned into a girl — everything that cursed spirit had done to her was... harmless?
This was nothing like the behavioral pattern of a cursed spirit.
Cursed spirits killed. Cursed spirits hurt people. Cursed spirits found joy in tormenting humans — that was normal.
A cursed spirit that turned its enemy into a girl without causing any other harm — what the hell even was that? Was it purely here to mess around? To use her as its personal entertainment? What kind of bizarre creature was this?
Fushiguro Maki could not figure it out.
That blue-haired cursed spirit was an enigma wrapped in enigmas.
............
Anyway.
Now wasn't the time to dwell on all of that.
Fushiguro Maki lifted her head and looked at the building before her.
Sugisawa Municipal High School No. 3.
The fading light of dusk had painted the school's outer wall a deep amber-orange. On the distant athletic field, the last few students who'd stayed behind were packing up to leave. Clouds at the edge of the sky burned scarlet where the setting sun had scorched them — layer upon layer of thin flame spread across the heavens. It would be fully dark before long.
This was the mission Gojo-sensei had given her.
Even though she was a girl now, Gojo-sensei had clearly decided this was not relevant to the functioning of her professional responsibilities. He'd clapped her on the shoulder with that easy grin of his and said: "Sure, you've turned into a girl, but I've still got a little mission here I was hoping to trouble you with."
What an utterly irresponsible excuse for a teacher...
The mission was a retrieval operation. The objective: recover a Special Grade Cursed Object that had appeared somewhere inside this high school — one of Sukuna's fingers.
That was an extraordinarily dangerous Cursed Object... and he was treating a mission this critical this casually...
Tch.
Fushiguro Maki clicked her tongue, and stepped through the school gate into the last glow of the evening light.
____
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