…To be honest, under normal circumstances, an ordinary jujutsu sorcerer couldn't beat Mahiko.
Well — forget 'beat.'
It would be pretty difficult for an ordinary jujutsu sorcerer to hurt her at all.
Because Mahiko's Idle Transfiguration was genuinely special.
Idle Transfiguration allowed her to freely reshape her own body and the bodies of others at will.
At its core, this was manipulation of the soul. Reshape the soul, and the body followed.
For anyone else — anyone without a defense layered directly onto their own soul — a single touch from Mahiko was enough to kill them.
And as for Mahiko herself: any physical attack directed at her body simply didn't do much. Unless an opponent could strike her soul directly, they couldn't actually hurt her — she wouldn't even feel pain. She could stand completely still and let people hit her, and the hits would just... slide off. Pure mechanical immunity.
Under normal conditions, there were roughly a handful of ways to actually damage Mahiko.
The first: the enemy possessed a method of attacking the soul directly, capable of striking her soul without going through the body. Nobara's techniques fell into exactly this category — she attacked the soul, which meant she was a genuine threat to Mahiko.
The second: certain mechanical counters — Kenjaku's Cursed Spirit Manipulation, for instance.
That wasn't even really 'damage' in the conventional sense. It was pure hard-counter suppression.
Which was exactly why Mahiko had no intention of slamming headfirst into that brain-jar's toolkit.
The third: a Domain — specifically one with a guaranteed-hit effect. A guaranteed-hit effect targeted the very existence of whatever was inside the Domain, and therefore could reach Mahiko's soul as well.
Those were the only three methods capable of dealing meaningful damage in an instant. There was a fourth option, but it was the slow route: grinding Mahiko down through sheer volume of ordinary attacks.
Ordinary attacks couldn't deal effective damage to Mahiko, but they weren't completely without effect either.
The soul wasn't a consumable resource like Cursed Energy — but every time Mahiko took a hit and then used her ability to restore herself, her own soul sustained some degree of wear. However small.
Think of it like modeling clay. You knead it and knead it, shape it into one form, press it into another — it always looks like roughly the same lump. But at a level you can't see, tiny particles of clay are constantly flaking away, sticking to your palms and the table. Play with it long enough, and the ball in your hands will be noticeably smaller than when you started.
Mahiko's soul was the same.
Unless she could bring her technique to absolute perfection — a frictionless, zero-loss state of 100% mastery — there would always be some degree of wear. Always.
To put it in concrete terms: say Mahiko had one thousand HP.
A soul-attacking technique could deal her a hundred points of true damage in one hit.
Ordinary Cursed Energy strikes, or physical attacks? Somewhere between 0.1 and 1 damage per hit. Laughably small. In a short fight with few exchanges, negligible — Mahiko could probably recover those losses just by catching her breath, or laying a hand on some random passerby on the street.
This was why, in the original story, characters who weren't specifically counters to Mahito landed virtually nothing on him.
But there was a fact people consistently overlooked: the Mahito of the original story — and Mahiko right now — was still an embryo.
She was still fragile.
Yes. Truly fragile.
Right now, she was like an infant wrapped in swaddling cloth — outwardly insulated, but actually paper-thin underneath. She walked around benefiting from massive passive damage reduction, but the moment someone punched through to deal true damage, her actual HP bar was brutally short. Later was different — by the time Mahito fully matured, his HP climbed accordingly. But in the early stages? Early-stage Mahito had taken a few of Yuji Itadori's soul-touching punches and was already struggling to hold himself together.
…Which meant Mahiko's current HP bar was very, very short.
She could not tank multiple hits of Nobara's Resonance.
She could not afford to get hammered.
So there were two options.
Option one: start the fight herself, strike first, smack Nobara into the floor before she could react — Nobara could hurt her, yes, but she couldn't beat her, not in a straight fight.
Option two: find a way to run a diversion. Deflect attention, recover the soul fragment quietly while Nobara was looking the other way.
She chose the second option.
Slowly, carefully, she reeled every trace of Cursed Energy back into herself — compressing every flickering ripple, every outward pulse, driving it deeper and deeper until it was barely detectable, pressing it down until she registered from a Cursed Energy perception standpoint as nothing more than an ordinary little human child.
Against a sorcerer significantly stronger than her, this illusion might not hold up for a second. But Nobara wasn't there yet — her perception hadn't reached that level. It would probably be enough to fool her. Barely, but enough.
And so Mahiko quietly shuffled forward in the shadows, arranging herself into the posture of a small girl — curled against the wall, knee scraped and stinging, absolutely, heartrendingly pitiful — eyes brimming just enough to catch the light.
'Big sis…'
And then she turned on the charm.
Full power. Maximum cute.
............
Nobara was still standing there, frowning down at the plastic bag on the floor.
That Cursed Energy fluctuation just now…
She had sensed it. Something had been there — something faintly wrong — but now there was nothing but a crumpled garbage bag, Cursed Energy completely clean, not even a residual trace——
Had she just been having a bad perception day? Was she this off because she hadn't been sleeping well lately?
'Big sis… don't leave… please don't leave me here alone…'
Nobara's head whipped around.
The little blue-haired girl was still curled in the corner, still hugging her knees, eyes red-rimmed and glassy with tears, crying harder than before — not dramatic, messy crying, but the small, hitching, please-don't-go kind that was somehow far worse.
'Big sis…' The girl's voice came out thin and slightly choked. 'Please don't leave me here all alone…'
She looked absolutely terrified.
Nobara's chest gave a strange lurch.
Something short-circuited in her brain. Every other concern she'd had — the Cursed Energy reading, the plastic bag, the cleared floor — evaporated completely. She crossed the room in quick strides and crouched down in front of the girl, her voice coming out softer than usual without her even choosing it.
'How did you end up in here? Where are your parents?'
The girl sniffled.
'I… I came out to explore, I wanted to adventure around this area…' Her voice was very small. 'And then, then I found the monsters, they were so scary, and I just ran, I ran into this room…'
She looked up. Her eyes were wet, lashes dotted with two fat tears on the verge of falling, and the look she aimed at Nobara carried equal parts tentative trust and nervous uncertainty.
'If big sis hadn't scared the monsters away, I would have… uu…'
She didn't finish the sentence. The tears finished it for her — one dropped and hit the bandage on her knee with a small, soft plink.
'Thank you, big sis… uuu…'
Nobara Kugisaki's brain crashed.
Full three seconds of blue screen.
This girl——
This blue-haired, tear-streaked, lash-dotted, tiny, corner-huddled girl——
Look, this was objectively not the right time for these thoughts, but — she was criminally adorable.
Nobara had always considered herself the type who didn't particularly like kids. She had zero patience for the clingy, whiny, always-causing-disasters-and-expecting-cleanup variety of small child. But this one——
Blue hair. Big eyes. Long lashes. A face so pretty it practically wasn't real, like some tiny angel had gotten lost and confused and wandered into an abandoned building——
And even when she cried, she didn't cry ugly. There was something about it — something inexplicably, infuriatingly delicate about it — that only made it worse.
Just — just — just——
Every single cell in Nobara's body was screaming at her to lean down and hug this child immediately and say you're okay now, you're safe, I've got you with every ounce of reassurance she possessed.
This kid was cheating. She was physically cheating.
Something was happening inside Nobara's chest that had genuinely never happened before — some warm, directionless, completely unfamiliar impulse she couldn't name, the overwhelming urge to scoop this little creature up right now and not put her down.
So cute so cute so cute——
She screamed internally, then forcibly muffled the scream, maintaining her outward composure through sheer willpower — but her voice came out a full register softer than usual, and there was nothing she could do about that.
'You're okay, stop crying,' Nobara said, her tone roughly one full level gentler than she ever voluntarily went. 'The monsters are gone. I'm here. You're safe.'
SO CUTE——
____
👻🔥Heey! Walnut-chan for more chapters!🔥👻
🔥 New history: Group chat of the Dead
✅ Unlock a 40-chapter backlog for ALL my series.
✅ Receive exclusive content and regular updates!
Help us reach these goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 universal bonus chapter
🚀 140 MEMBERS = +5 extra chapters for ALL STORIES!
👻 P - Walnut-chan