The cursed spirit came straight at her — golden Cursed Energy wrapped around its fist, body moving in an almost perfectly straight line, no wasted arc, no telegraphing.
Fast.
Faster than Mahiko's wings could carry her. If she tried to dodge cleanly, she wouldn't make it in time.
Well then.
— Fine. Don't dodge.
Mahiko tilted her body slightly, pivoted her left shoulder forward, and met the punch head-on.
BOOM.
The fist connected squarely with her shoulder — and on impact, that shoulder detonated. It shattered into countless tiny blue butterflies that burst outward in every direction, scattering through the air like a spray of broken glass.
The cursed spirit's momentum carried it straight through the swarm, punching through that cloud of wings and hurtling out the other side.
Mahiko spun. The butterflies reversed, streaming back from every direction at once, converging on her shoulder — bone and muscle knitting back together in under a second.
Zero damage. Full recovery.
Just as she'd said before: ordinary attacks, the kind that couldn't reach the soul, had essentially no way of hurting her.
Still.
Fast. It's really fast.
She narrowed her eyes.
In both raw power and raw speed, this cursed spirit outclassed her by more than a little. That was going to be a problem.
A straight slug-fest wasn't a good idea. Yes, it couldn't hurt her either — but that meant she couldn't get a clean hit on it, and grinding through a stalemate like that would burn through enormous amounts of Cursed Energy, which was annoying. On top of that, this Domain was its turf. Terrain, spatial layout, every inch of it under its control.
It couldn't touch her. But she was starting to realize she couldn't easily touch it either.
She needed a plan.
Mahiko flicked her gaze downward to check on the three below.
The black-haired girl's hands were already flying through seals. She called out — "Nue!" — and the shikigami erupted from the shadows, enormous orange wings snapping open, electric arcs crackling along their span. Nue caught hold of the black-haired girl. Nobara grabbed Megumi Fushiguro's feet. Yuji grabbed Nobara's feet. All three of them hung there in a chain, strung together like some bizarre cluster of gourds, swinging through the air.
Okay. They wouldn't die from the fall. Not her problem.
Mahiko brought her attention back.
The cursed spirit had already found its footing on a vertical wall across the gap.
They locked eyes.
It bared its teeth in that grotesque grin — bent its knees, loaded the power — then kicked off and launched itself directly at her again. Another straight-line charge. Another punch with the Cursed Energy condensed into the fist. Same trajectory as the last one, almost to the millimeter.
"Ha," Mahiko said softly. "The same trick? That's not going to work on me."
Thud.
This time, she didn't move.
The fist hit her dead in the chest.
Splat——
The impact was destructive. The punch punched through — tearing straight into her chest, blood spraying outward in a wide arc —
And then the blood turned. Mid-air, every drop of it shifted to blue, became butterflies, and the hole in her chest simply emptied. Mahiko's hands had already clamped down on the cursed spirit's arm, locking on with both hands.
Idle Transfiguration — activate.
Soul alteration, beginning now.
In Mahiko's mind, the plan was clean: her fingers would crawl up the Special Grade's arm, spread past the shoulder, and reach deeper. Under full output, best case, she could tear and twist and shred a solid half of its body outright.
Even accounting for the autonomous protection of Sukuna's finger, she should at minimum be able to destroy the arm — and carry the damage into one of its legs as well, crippling its speed and balance.
But in the next second, she felt something wrong.
Her fingers made contact with something.
"...Huh?"
Not flesh.
Metal.
Cold. Hard. Mahiko looked closer — and there it was. A sheath of steel, wrapped around the outside of the arm, wedged between her hands and the actual body underneath.
She went rigid.
"What the —"
For once, genuine surprise.
This cursed spirit... when— damn it. In that small window when it had moved out of her sightline, it had bent and crumpled the metal walls of the Domain's interior, hammering them into armor plating around its own arm, pressed flush against its skin.
Her Idle Transfiguration required direct contact with flesh to function. That layer of metal had locked her out completely.
Just how intelligent was this thing? It was leagues beyond the cursed spirit from the source material. Leagues.
"Damn it!"
Mahiko's fingers warped instantly — reshaping into razor-edged claws — and she ripped through the metal plating. But that split second was all the cursed spirit needed. It wrenched its arm back, tore free from her grip, and flung itself away, putting distance between them, a contrail of Cursed Energy blasting out behind it as it went.
Second exchange. Neither of them had managed to put the other down.
Tricky. This was genuinely, infuriatingly tricky.
Mahiko clenched her jaw, eyes tracking the direction it had gone, the frustration settling deep.
But this time something was different — this time, the cursed spirit seemed to have realized it, too. That it had no reliable way to deal effective damage to her.
And so it did something she hadn't expected: it stopped fighting.
It turned.
It ran.
She wanted to give chase — but the maze was shifting too fast, and the geometry was a nightmare to navigate.
The walls around her had developed a clear intention. From all four sides, from above, they were pressing inward — slow, continuous, relentless — closing in on her position.
Mahiko balled her fist, drove Cursed Energy into it.
BOOM.
The wall cracked. She punched through.
Another wall ahead.
BOOM.
Through that one too.
Space warping. Doors disappearing. Corridors dissolving and reforming. She smashed through walls as she moved, navigating by feel and brute force, rounding corners, pressing forward — and at some point she glanced down and realized she could no longer detect the Cursed Energy signatures of the other three. The restructuring must have funneled them into a completely different sector.
Mahiko stopped. Pressed her back against the wall. Waited.
This kind of wide-scale spatial distortion couldn't run indefinitely. Even a Special Grade had finite Cursed Energy — and operating a restructuring at this scale burned through it by the second. All she needed to do was outlast it. Wait for the Domain to buckle under its own cost, wait for the movement to stop, then move.
Sure enough.
After a while, the walls went still.
Silence settled in.
"Tch."
Mahiko straightened up slowly, turning to survey her surroundings.
Four walls. Some unknown room, somewhere in the maze. No windows. Lights dead. The floor scattered with fragments of broken concrete. The local Cursed Energy distribution was a chaotic mess — she couldn't read direction from it at all.
No choice. She'd have to feel her way.
She closed her eyes.
Tiny blue butterflies began to drift from her body — smaller than any real butterfly, small enough to filter through wall cracks, through gaps in doors, through the Domain's warped internal geometry. They spread out in every direction like scattered sparks, probing outward.
One direction: nothing.
Another direction: sound. Voices. Footsteps. The Cursed Energy pulse of a shikigami.
Not a cursed spirit's signature.
More like... Megumi Fushiguro and the others?
Mahiko's gaze shifted slightly. She recalled the butterflies, compressed Cursed Energy into her fist.
BOOM.
The entire wall fell apart, crumbling into chunks that hit the floor in a cascade. Behind it: a corridor. Dim. Half the ceiling lights on, the other half flickering with a low, intermittent hum.
At the far end of the corridor, two figures stood.
The black-haired girl — blood seeping from her sleeve, seal-weaving hands frozen mid-sign, eyes sharp with wariness. Beside her, the pink-haired boy — his left arm carried at a slightly different angle than his right, clearly injured — holding a dagger in his hand, a cursed tool by the look of it.
Megumi Fushiguro and Yuji Itadori.
Mahiko stood at the edge of the shattered wall. Across the dim corridor, her gaze found theirs.
____
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