The three students pressed forward, tense with every step.
The black-haired girl had already summoned the shikigami Jade Dogs, using their keen noses to navigate the corridors as they hunted for a way out.
"Speaking of which..." someone began. "There's something I wanted to ask about."
The black-haired girl tilted her head toward the speaker.
Yuji Itadori was scratching the back of his head, brow low, clearly turning something over. "Maki... oh wait, right, it's Megumi... from your experience, are there any cursed spirits that can actually get along with humans?"
Fushiguro Maki blinked.
"...Hah?"
"It's just..." Yuji dropped his hand from his head, his tone cautious. "Think about it — that cursed spirit that attacked you, it seemed like it was just messing around, right? It had the power to actually... to just..." He glanced at Fushiguro Maki, chose his words carefully. "Anyway. The point is, I was wondering — what if that cursed spirit isn't actually all that bad? What if it's the kind of thing you could actually talk to?"
Fushiguro Maki's brow twitched.
"Tell me," she said, pulling in a slow breath. "Do you actually understand what you are?"
"I..."
"There is no such thing as a cursed spirit without malice toward humans. There never has been — not once, not in all of history." Fushiguro Maki exhaled hard. "And even if one existed — if you walked up to a cursed spirit and opened your mouth to ask whether it meant you harm, you'd be dead before the first word left your lips. And don't forget: cursed spirits lie."
Yuji frowned, thought it over, then nodded. "That's... fair, actually."
"The one that attacked me..." The black-haired girl paused. She sighed — a long, resigned exhale. "Just — if you ever encounter a cursed spirit that looks roughly human, with blue hair, attack it immediately. Betting your life on whether an enemy that will deceive you ninety-nine percent of the time is actually deceiving you right now... you'll only regret it in the end."
Blue hair?
Nobara Kugisaki caught the words and tilted her head slightly. She'd seen that particular shade recently, she thought — that unusual, striking blue. Rare enough that it stuck in the memory.
Only the one she'd met hadn't been a cursed spirit. Just a very cute little girl.
Well.
People really do have wildly different luck, don't they.
Nobara thought to herself.
The corridor bent around a corner. The air grew heavier.
All three of them sharpened their attention.
It was the smell of Cursed Energy concentrating inside the Domain — dense, pressurized, carrying a crawling wrongness in it. The deeper they went, the more pronounced it became, like a hand pressing softly but insistently against the backs of their necks.
The Jade Dogs stopped.
They planted themselves in the middle of the corridor, ears pricked forward, noses working, and let out a single low sound — not quite a bark, more like a warning growl.
Fushiguro Maki's eyes went sharp. Her feet stopped.
Ahead, the corridor opened into a wider space — a common room or dormitory lounge of some kind, the door long gone, nothing left but an open gap in the wall. Far enough away that the distance mattered, but close enough that their eyes could reach through it.
There was someone sitting in the corner.
Someone?
The black-haired girl's brow creased.
A man in a prison uniform. Back against the wall. Head bowed. Shoulders rising and falling — the slow, hitching rhythm of someone weeping.
Yuji's feet came to a dead stop.
"Hold on," he breathed. "There's someone ahead."
"I see him," the black-haired girl said, voice quiet. "A survivor...?"
"Looks like it." Yuji turned to her. There was something restrained in his eyes — an urgent, barely-contained impulse. "I'll go—"
"Wait."
Fushiguro Maki's arm crossed in front of him.
She couldn't have named what was wrong. Not yet.
Maybe it was how clean the man was. Maybe it was the complete absence of wounds on his body. Maybe it was because they were close enough now to hear him clearly — his crying was audible, distinct — and yet he still hadn't looked up, still hadn't seemed to register that three people had just walked down his corridor.
Whatever it was, something cold was climbing her spine, slow and steady, refusing to let her dismiss it.
"Hold on," she said. Her voice came out flat and controlled. "Let me check first."
She stepped forward one pace and stopped at the mouth of the corridor. She raised her voice:
"Hey! You! What's your name!"
The man's body jerked.
Then, slowly, he raised his head.
The face was pale — paper-pale. Eyes swollen and red from crying. Mouth trembling. The kind of expression that belongs only to someone fear has completely hollowed out. He saw them, and he started to drag himself upright against the wall, swaying, staggering forward on unsteady legs, something moving on his lips.
Fushiguro Maki's eyes narrowed.
"Behind..." The man's lips were moving, the words coming out broken, ragged, like he was gasping. "Behind... behind..."
Yuji Itadori actually turned around to look.
Nothing there.
"Is he just... scared out of his mind...?" Yuji muttered.
The man kept coming. Stumbling. Repeating those two syllables over and over, unable to form anything else. He was getting closer — less than two room-lengths away now —
The black-haired girl's brow knotted hard. Her fingers wove into a seal.
"Great Serpent!"
Black shadow poured out of the floor. The enormous serpentine shikigami rose from the corridor's surface and coiled toward the man in a single flowing motion.
This wasn't meant as an attack. It was a test.
And then —
Pch—
The man raised his hand.
Flesh and blood exploded outward.
The Great Serpent's head detonated. Gore blasted in every direction. The shikigami's body came apart in the air.
All three students' pupils shrank to pinpoints at the same instant.
"Watch out!" Fushiguro Maki's mouth opened. "That's—"
The words didn't finish.
The man was gone.
The speed of it was obscene — the Great Serpent's shattered remains hadn't even hit the floor yet, flesh and blood still arcing through the air in a red shower, and already his silhouette had ceased to exist.
And then — all three of them felt it at once.
Something behind them.
The pressure hit like a wall.
Cursed Energy.
Concentrated. Dense. Carrying a weight that wasn't just physical — something primal and crushing in it. It slammed against all three of their backs like a slab of stone rising behind them, a wall slamming up from nothing.
They spun as one.
The man was standing three paces behind them.
Fast. Impossibly fast.
He — no. It. It had its head bowed, and the face that had once been a man's face had split open — blown apart from within — revealing what lay underneath. White. Pale as a snake's underbelly. The skin of something that had never been human.
The man had never been a man at all.
It was a cursed spirit wearing a human mask.
They'd been tricked.
This cursed spirit had disguised itself as a human to draw them in.
They were done.
The pressure from a Special Grade Cursed Spirit hit like a physical force — a terror so total and immediate that their bodies simply stopped. Not a decision. Not a choice. Their cells went silent. Every instinct screamed that movement meant death. All three of them were frozen where they stood, locked in place, and even breathing had ceased.
Move. Come on, move—
The black-haired girl had her jaw clamped shut hard enough to ache. She was trying to reach for the Cursed Energy in her body and finding nothing — it wouldn't answer. The signal wasn't getting through.
Damn it. Move—
All three of them were screaming internally, throwing everything they had at the simple act of making their bodies move — but survival instinct had locked them out. Some ancient part of them knew: one motion and they would die. So not one of them could move so much as a finger.
And the cursed spirit looked at all three of them, and it laughed.
A gloating, delighted laugh.
"Weak," it said. The voice was layered with a strange resonant doubling, like two sounds living in the same word. It started to move — an ecstatic little jig, right there in the corridor, arms swinging. "Weak, weak, weak... gah-gah-gah-gah..."
It held their gaze, savoring the sensation of its own laughter rippling down the corridor and echoing back. It savored their faces — those pale, utterly broken faces, crushed flat by fear — and the pleasure it felt was something close to instinct. Deep. Bone-level.
Cursed spirits were born from the negative emotions of humanity.
Human fear, arrayed before it like this, was sweeter than honey.
That fear nourished it. Fed it the way food feeds the body, the way sunlight feeds a plant. Its mind hadn't matured enough to understand why the terror radiating from these three filled it with such giddy, overflowing joy — it didn't need to understand. It only knew that it wanted more. Wanted their fear thicker. Wanted them to bleed it out further.
Tear their bodies apart.
Rip their limbs from their sockets.
Make them scream.
Make the blood fly.
Then their fear and their agony would become the finest feast it had ever tasted.
The cursed spirit grinned its grotesque grin and reached out a hand toward them.
And indeed — just as it had anticipated — their expressions shattered further. All three of them stared at it, pupils trembling, as though they were watching something that should have been impossible.
The cursed spirit was pleased. Deeply, satisfyingly pleased.
But in the next instant, it noticed something was off.
Because these three — shocked as they were, terrified as they were — were not actually looking at it. Their eyes were aimed past it. Past its shoulder. Whatever had drained the color from their faces wasn't it — it was something behind it.
"...Hm?"
The cursed spirit frowned.
It began to turn — neck twisting back, barely a fraction of the way around —
A cold palm pressed flat against its back.
From behind.
"...So then," came a light, airy girl's voice at its shoulder, "why don't you take a look behind you now?"
It heard the words.
But before it could process them —
Mahiko smiled softly.
Idle Transfiguration.
Activate.
____
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