Nobara Kugisaki swept the room in a slow circuit.
She moved with deliberate care, each step placed lightly, her peripheral vision scanning every corner as she went. Her hand had already drifted to the tool pouch at her hip, hovering there, ready. Her expression was composed, brows drawn into a slight furrow. She was on high alert.
She was ready for a fight that might come from any direction at any moment.
In the shadows, Mahiko held perfectly still.
...What is she doing here?
This was completely unexpected.
Nobara Kugisaki. First-year at Jujutsu High. Classmate of Yuji Itadori and Megumi Fushiguro — and the final piece of their trio.
The trio, of course, was an institution. There's a deeply mysterious tradition in Japanese shonen manga — authors have always loved assembling a three-person protagonist group, almost always two boys and one girl.
Take Naruto: Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura. Or Sakamoto Days, where even the young Sakamoto Taro had his little three-man crew back in the day. It shows up everywhere, in every series you can name — the iconic little trios, each one with its own flavor.
One lead, two partners. Three people growing up together, going through hell together, pulling each other back from the edge. It was a formula as old as the medium itself.
Jujutsu Kaisen was no exception.
Yuji Itadori, Megumi Fushiguro, Nobara Kugisaki — a textbook trio, fated from their very first day of enrollment to barrel headlong through everything the world could throw at them, side by side.
Nobara's Technique was the Straw Doll Technique — nails, a hammer, voodoo effigies. Its roots were in folk sorcery.
A mechanism-type Jujutsu Technique. And a devastatingly effective one.
Here for a mission, maybe?... Mahiko speculated silently.
Jujutsu High students ran assignments on a regular rotation. Coming to clear a cursed spirit out of an abandoned building like this one was entirely routine. So Mahiko had more or less concluded: Nobara was here to work. She wasn't tracking Mahiko specifically. This was a coincidence — just bad luck that the two of them had ended up in the same place at the same time.
She'd stay still. Let Nobara finish her sweep and leave.
Just as that thought settled——
Mahiko went rigid.
Wait.
A cold sweat broke out across her skin all at once.
She hadn't retrieved one of her soul fragments.
When she'd been fighting those cursed spirits earlier, the little spheres she'd rolled out had mostly been reabsorbed back into her along with the cursed spirits' souls once they made contact. But——
One was still out there.
One of the spheres had gone wide when she fired it. It had just rolled into the corner of the room — a small, flattened, deflated scrap of soul matter. She hadn't paid it any mind at the time, figured she'd collect it later. Then she'd been distracted by the sound of footsteps and scrambled to hide.
And that fragment was still sitting out there in the open.
Mahiko's breath locked in her throat.
Oh no.
Nobara Kugisaki's Straw Doll Technique operated on nails and a hammer — a cursed binding system. Her standard attack was driving a nail with the hammer and sending it flying as a projectile. But she had one trick that was genuinely insidious: a sub-technique modeled on voodoo dolls, called Resonance.
All Nobara needed was any piece of her target — a scrap of flesh, a fragment of bone, anything that had ever been part of them. She could fix that piece to a straw effigy, drive a nail into it, and through the natural soul-resonance between the fragment and its original host, transmit the damage directly into the target's body.
True damage. A strike that hit the soul itself.
For an ordinary cursed spirit, this Technique was a nightmare. And for Mahiko——
It was also an absolute goddamn nightmare.
This was a hard counter. A pure, complete, natural predator to everything she was.
If Nobara picked up that fragment, recognized it as a piece of a cursed spirit's soul, and casually fired off a Resonance——
Nobara's Cursed Energy would hit her body directly.
Mahiko's eye started twitching.
No. No, no, no. She had to get that fragment back.
Now. Immediately. Right now.
——————
"Gone... but there are signs of a fight..."
Nobara stood in the corridor, her internal alertness cranked up to maximum.
Something was off.
Intel had indicated multiple cursed spirits active in this building. But she'd come all the way up here and hadn't run into a single one. All that was left were traces of Cursed Energy on the floor — residue from intense cursed activity, which meant they'd definitely been here not long ago.
Did they just... die on their own?
Right. Sure. Obviously not.
That left two possibilities. Either another sorcerer had arrived first and cleared them out — or a larger cursed spirit had devoured all the weaker ones to feed itself.
The second scenario wasn't without precedent. Large-class cursed spirits occasionally absorbed smaller ones to grow stronger.
The first scenario wasn't impossible either, but honestly the odds felt lower than the second. After all, unregistered sorcerers and dark practitioners were rare compared to the sheer number of cursed spirits running around out there.
Either way — both scenarios pointed to the same conclusion. Whatever had cleared this floor was stronger than the entire collection of cursed spirits that had been here before.
Something was wrong with this place.
Nobara's frown deepened. She kept moving, her perception sweeping steadily across every shadow and corner as she walked.
Then she noticed something strange on the floor.
Small. Flat. Crumpled. At a glance it looked like a piece of trash that had been stepped on — but the Cursed Energy rippling off it——
Was strange.
Not like ordinary cursed spirit remains.
What is that?
Nobara crouched down and reached for it——
"Big sis..."
A small, trembling voice, threaded with the very edge of tears, drifted out from the corner of the room.
Nobara's head snapped up. She spun around.
In the corner, a little girl with blue hair was huddled against the wall. One of her knees was scraped raw — red and angry — and she was clutching it to her chest, curled up small, staring at Nobara with an expression of absolute, pitiable despair.
"Big sis... help..." The girl's voice was barely a whisper. "There were monsters... I was so scared..."
Huh?
A kid?
Nobara's eyes went wide. Her attention snapped entirely to the girl. She stopped thinking about the thing on the floor — she stood up, turned, and crossed the room in quick, long strides, dropping into a crouch in front of the girl to check her over first.
The knee was scraped, nothing serious — just the skin rubbed off, a little blood, nothing deep.
"How did you end up in here?" Nobara asked, and didn't notice that her voice had gone softer than usual, the volume dropping by half a register on its own. Her hands were already moving — digging through her tool pouch, pulling out a bandage, tearing the wrapper, pressing it cleanly into place. "This kind of place isn't somewhere you just wander into, you know? Got it?"
The little girl sniffled and gave a small nod, her eyes still glassy with unshed tears.
"Mm..."
"All patched up. Can you walk on your own?"
"I can... thank you, big sis..."
Nobara stood up, dusted her hands off, and turned back toward the spot on the floor. She walked over and bent down to look——
On the floor was a crinkled, transparent plastic bag. Probably blown in from some corner by a draft — pressed flat against the ground, indistinguishable from any piece of trash.
Nobara stared at the plastic bag for two full seconds.
...Huh?
Just... ordinary garbage?
Had she seen it wrong?
"..."
Nobara stood there in silence for a moment, frowning hard.
That can't be right...
What, was her perception just completely off today?
She nudged the plastic bag with her toe. No reaction whatsoever.
She pressed her lips together, frown still fixed in place, and stood where she was without moving.
——————
Behind Nobara's back, the little girl who had been performing her most pitiful wounded-sparrow act quietly let out a long, slow breath of relief.
...Phew.
Safe.
The soul fragment had been quietly shuffled away during the distraction — courtesy of a tiny extension, slipped out while Nobara's head was bowed over her knee applying the bandage.
Those few seconds were all it had taken.
If Nobara had realized the significance of that fragment — if she'd understood what it actually was — Mahiko would have had no choice but to fight her.
And she genuinely, completely did not want to fight Nobara.
One good hit from that hammer and she'd be hurting for days. And if she accidentally left any piece of herself behind, she'd be getting hammered for the rest of her life. If she slipped up and accidentally killed Nobara on top of that, she'd have Satoru Gojo hunting her personally — fast-tracking her way to a very brilliant, very brief cursed spirit career.
Holy crap. When it came down to it, among the Thirty-Six Stratagems, playing cute was clearly the supreme option.
-----
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