Yuji, Nobara, and Megumi — all three of them were struck completely speechless by the figure that had just appeared before them.
Megumi especially.
The black-haired girl could forget a lot of things, but she could not forget the creature that had stood on a Shibuya street and rewritten her body from the inside out. The phantom echo of that strange, tingling sensation — the one she'd felt when her flesh was reshaped — prickled through her again now like a ghost pain. The face. The voice. The smile. All of it rose before her eyes as though it were happening again.
She stood frozen where she was, four or five questions detonating in her head all at once.
Why. Why was this cursed spirit here, in the detention center? What was its purpose? Why had it attacked the Special Grade? And — did its appearance here mean she might have a chance to get her original body back?
Nothing made sense. The faster her mind spun, the more tangled it became. Megumi felt as though her brain had simply caught fire.
Meanwhile, on Mahiko's end — she activated Idle Transfiguration.
"...AAAAAUGH!! ——"
The cursed spirit began to scream.
The corridor exploded with light.
BOOM!! ——
Yellow. Eye-searing yellow. Cursed Energy detonated all at once — as if someone had crammed an entire sun into the length of the hallway. Struck dead-on and sensing that its life was genuinely under threat, the Special Grade cursed spirit threw all caution aside and channeled every last reserve of Cursed Energy stored in its body. Terrifying force detonated at terrible magnitude, right there, right then.
Boom——
The shockwave tore outward.
Everyone in the corridor was hurled off their feet. Yuji's back slammed into the wall. Nobara was caught in the current and sent flying a considerable distance. Megumi had the Jade Dogs absorb one layer of the impact, but she was still pushed back several steps, only coming to a stop when her spine hit solid wall.
Mahiko, closest of all, was blown the farthest — flung back a long distance before she finally drifted down and touched the ground, light as a feather.
"...Huh?"
The feedback from the attack felt wrong.
She raised her head, narrowed her eyes, and swept a quick look around — confirming that the other three hadn't taken serious damage — then brought her gaze back to the cursed spirit.
It was still there.
Rolling on the floor. Howling. Its back was warped and twisted — the mark left by her attack. But it was still moving.
"What...?"
Strange. She'd expected her attack to kill it outright. At minimum, cripple it. But for some reason, this cursed spirit seemed to have a natural, innate protection layered onto its soul. The damage she'd actually dealt was... far, far less than she'd anticipated.
Why?
She stared at it, frowning — and then it hit her. Sukuna's finger.
"...Is it the finger? Is that what's doing this?" Mahiko murmured.
If she had to guess, that was the only explanation that fit.
The reason Mahiko's technique carried such overwhelming lethality — and was so difficult to counter — was precisely because ninety-nine percent of cursed spirits and sorcerers never thought to construct any defense on the level of their souls. An ordinary sorcerer, at best, could unconsciously stack Cursed Energy as a buffer and make their soul marginally harder to reach.
So against an ordinary sorcerer, Mahiko only needed a single touch to inflict devastating damage.
But this cursed spirit was different.
Inside this cursed spirit was Sukuna's finger. Kenjaku had placed that finger within it deliberately, using the residual Cursed Energy of the finger to artificially elevate it to Special Grade. And Sukuna — Sukuna possessed an autonomous defense capable of resisting Mahiko's technique. A fragment of that defense lingered in the finger. So when her technique struck dead-on, that finger must have braced from the inside — shielding the cursed spirit from the deepest cut.
"...Ah."
Mahiko felt a pang of genuine helplessness.
The ambush opportunity earlier had been perfect. The cursed spirit's full attention had been on the three students — back turned, Cursed Energy perception aimed entirely forward, barely a thought spared for what was behind it.
Ugh. What a waste.
If she'd known, she wouldn't have held anything back.
Getting an output window that clean again was going to be very, very difficult now...
"Ssss-OWWW..."
The cursed spirit finished rolling around, and slowly dragged itself back upright. Then it fixed Mahiko with a glare — eyes blazing with fury, and with the sharp, new edge of wariness.
Mahiko felt it: the cursed spirit was gathering itself. Building.
She tensed.
The next second, the cursed spirit moved.
But not in the direction Mahiko expected. Not forward.
Up.
Whoosh——
It kicked off the wall with one foot and launched itself upward in a single explosive motion, body flattening against the ceiling — limbs folding in tight — and then it was gone, threading itself into a metal duct overhead, footsteps already receding into the distance.
Mahiko's eyes went wide.
It ran?? It actually ran??
She stood there for a full two seconds, waiting until she couldn't detect its Cursed Energy in that direction anymore before she accepted the fact.
Wait. It ran?
This wasn't in the original story at all.
The cursed spirit from the original had been almost comically reckless — the kind of thing that would pick a straight-up brawl with Sukuna himself, without a single shred of self-preservation instinct.
But this one? After she'd shown it what her technique could do, it made a call. Survival first. Retreat. It was thinking. Strategizing. This was a significantly smarter cursed spirit than the one in the source material.
Was this... the butterfly effect?
Quite possibly. She'd modified Megumi Fushiguro's body, which had pushed the timeline of the trio entering the brain-jar's plan back by a day or two from the original. That extra time meant this cursed spirit had developed further — grown more complete, more cunning.
Mahiko's brow twitched. She clicked her tongue.
You ran off. So what happens to my lunch?
No. Absolutely not. I am not letting you run.
She stepped forward, already moving to give chase.
Then — a tremor, through the soles of her feet.
Faint. A single pulse. But Mahiko stopped dead on the spot.
"This is...?"
Wrong.
The floor was shaking.
The maze — the maze was restructuring.
The walls began to warp. The corridor began to compress. Both sides leaned inward. The ceiling sank. Cracks spidered out from beneath their feet with a series of grinding crack-crack-cracks, the floor splintering into chunks.
And then the ground beneath all of them simply vanished——
Mahiko and the other three began to fall.
"!!"
Oh hell—
It wasn't just its intelligence that had evolved — its Domain had evolved too! In the original, the Special Grade Cursed Spirit could only generate the maze. This one could control it. Could reshape it at will!
"Tch."
Damn it all...
Mahiko clicked her tongue, and the skin of her back began to rebuild itself. A sound like an exhale — hwooo — and in an impossibly short span, her skeleton restructured, bones bending and extending as a pair of wings tore free from her back.
They snapped open. She beat them twice and arrested her fall, steadying herself in midair.
Rumble-rumble-rumble——
"Hff——"
She hadn't even had time to assess the maze's new configuration when her ears caught something.
Wind.
Right rear.
Fast.
Very fast.
The blue-haired girl whipped her head around.
From that direction, golden Cursed Energy was condensing — compressing — as if every ounce of it had been packed into the space of a single fist, coiled tight, spinning, and it was aimed directly at her, coming in hard.
The cursed spirit. The cursed spirit was attacking her.
It hadn't run at all.
It had circled beneath them. Waited for the maze to shift, for Mahiko to fall — and then it had struck from ambush.
——————
____
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