This mission was turning into a headache.
Fushiguro Maki stepped onto the grounds of Sugisawa Municipal High School No. 3 and began her sweep.
The last of the evening light had soaked the campus in deep amber-orange. School had already let out; the bell had rung not long ago, and students were trickling out of the classroom buildings in twos and threes, filling the air with noise and chatter.
Maki moved through the crowd, sensing the residual traces of Cursed Energy, following a route she'd mapped in her memory — and traced it all the way to an unremarkable corner on the outer wall of one of the school buildings.
Propped against a wooden post was a dust-covered wooden box. Completely nondescript. Easy to overlook.
And this, according to her briefing, was where Sukuna's finger was supposed to be.
She walked over and opened it.
Empty.
Maki's brow snapped into a hard frown.
What. The finger's gone.
One of Sukuna's fingers — a Special Grade Cursed Object, a relic of the thousand-year cursed spirit known as the King of Curses. Twenty fingers, scattered across Japan. Each one packed with terrifying Cursed Energy. And the seals on those fingers were weakening by the day; once fully broken, the Cursed Energy they radiated would act like a beacon, drawing every cursed spirit in range. Any spirit that devoured a finger would surge in power, transforming into something extraordinarily difficult to deal with.
Recovery was urgent. The sooner the better.
And it seemed she'd arrived too late.
Under normal scheduling, she should have reached Sendai by midday at the latest. But the attack from that blue-haired cursed spirit a few days ago had rewritten her body overnight, and adapting to the new configuration had eaten up the better part of a week. Her timeline had slipped by several critical hours.
Damn it. This is entirely that thing's fault.
Maki pushed the irritation down and moved quickly through her hand signs.
"Jade Dogs."
Two dogs — one black, one white — surged up from the shadows. The white one dipped its head, nostrils working, sniffing at the traces left on the wooden box.
"Track."
Both dogs caught a scent and bolted. Maki ran after them, cutting through the corridors, bursting out through the school gate, and tearing off down the street in the opposite direction from the classroom buildings.
Farther and farther out.
They were heading toward — a hospital.
............
On the rooftop of a tall building in the distance, Mahiko let out a yawn.
She watched Fushiguro Maki charge out of the school gates with her two Jade Dogs in tow, racing further and further away in entirely the wrong direction.
"My, my." Mahiko propped her chin in her hand, clicking her tongue. "Why is this idiot running outside? The finger is still inside the school."
Kenjaku, standing beside her, smiled and offered the explanation. "The dogs most likely picked up the wrong trail. They're following the residual scent from the box the finger was stored in — the box has already been taken off the grounds, so they're tracking that. She doesn't realize the finger itself is still on campus. It's an understandable mistake."
"Ahh——"
"Don't worry. She'll be back soon enough." Kenjaku watched the direction where Maki had disappeared, his smile carrying something unreadable beneath it. "And she'll bring our main character for tonight along with her."
Mahiko yawned again and swung her feet idly over the ledge, radiating supreme disinterest.
She was pretending not to care.
But honestly… she genuinely didn't, all that much.
Obviously. Did she not already know exactly what was about to happen?
This was exactly how the original story went. Fushiguro Maki arrives at the school during the day, finds the finger missing, then spots Yuji Itadori on the athletic field and detects the finger's residual Cursed Energy on him. But Yuji's too fast — Maki can't catch him. She tracks him down later at the hospital, arriving just as Yuji's grandfather has passed away, while Yuji is still raw with grief.
Maki would explain the danger of the Cursed Object. Yuji would tell her the finger was still at school — in the hands of two upperclassmen from the occult research club. Two upperclassmen who were, as of tonight, planning to crack the seal open out of sheer curiosity.
——Yes. Every story like this has exactly those characters. The dangerously curious ones who set things in motion, because without them the plot would never get off the ground.
Because of those two, the seal would be broken, and cursed spirits would come flooding in. To keep them from getting killed, Maki and Yuji would race back to the school. And in the heat of battle — to gain the power he needed — Yuji would swallow Sukuna's finger and become the King of Curses' vessel.
This was where the story of Jujutsu Kaisen truly began.
Mahiko glanced at the sky. The dusk was fading fast, night spilling in from the eastern horizon in a slow, steady tide.
The timing was lining up perfectly. Maki heading to the hospital right now would put her there at exactly the right moment — walking into Yuji Itadori's grief fresh from losing his grandfather.
Everything was running exactly on the original track.
She had no role to play tonight, so Mahiko just sat on the rooftop and dangled her feet, watching the darkness descend with all the enthusiasm of someone waiting for paint to dry.
And then her brain started running off on its own.
Come to think of it…
It'd be kind of great if she turned Yuji into a girl too.
A girl with pink hair, athletic, bright and warm and responsible, the kind who goofs around and makes everyone laugh.
Just imagining it — adorable, honestly.
Too bad. The moment Yuji swallowed Sukuna's finger, the King of Curses would be living inside his soul. Touch Yuji's soul after that and she'd be touching Sukuna at the same time.
She did not have a death wish. The original Mahito had nearly gotten himself half-killed just from brushing against Sukuna's soul once.
Haah. What a shame. Otherwise she'd absolutely have given it a shot — if nothing else, she desperately wanted to see the look on Sukuna's face when he realized he'd taken up residence inside a girl.
The King of Curses, Sukuna — possessing the body of a cheerful, pink-haired girl——
Pfft.
Hahaha.
She let out two laughs before slapping herself across the face.
No. Stop. Why does her brain always end up here.
Honestly, it was getting weird. Ever since she'd transmigrated into Mahito's body, she'd been getting more and more like someone who lived purely for the bit.
This was probably just a built-in character trait of Mahito's body leaking through.
Being influenced by this vessel, huh…
Whatever. It wasn't like she had anything better to do right now.
Mahiko swept the ridiculous thoughts aside and looked down at her own hands.
She remembered something that actually mattered.
Back when she'd been treating Mechamaru, her hands had made contact with the "pattern" of the Heavenly Restriction inscribed on his soul — the precise way it had been carved in, the specific parts of the soul it had rewritten, the exact mechanism by which it traded "a shattered body" for "an incomprehensible range of Cursed Energy." She had made a point of studying and memorizing all of it.
Because she wanted to try replicating it.
On herself.
She could heal a Heavenly Restriction. She could reshape a soul marked by one back into an ordinary soul. So — the reverse? Could she take an ordinary soul… and write a Heavenly Restriction onto it?
In theory, Idle Transfiguration was just working with clay. If she could reshape clay from form A into form B, she could absolutely work it back from B to A.
If she carved the structure of Mechamaru's Heavenly Restriction onto her own soul — even temporarily, even incompletely — could she gain something like his abilities? His talent?
For instance… a range of Cursed Energy that blanketed the entire Japanese archipelago?
That would be extraordinarily useful.
Mahiko closed her eyes and sank her awareness deep into herself, threading her focus down into the very depths of her own soul. With careful, deliberate precision, she inscribed a faint, shallow mark onto one microscopic region — a rough imitation of the Heavenly Restriction's structure.
And then——
"…Oh?"
This was only an experiment.
But the result of that experiment filled Mahiko with joy.
____
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