"Oh my."
Mahiko broke into a sudden, bright smile. "Sorry, sorry — I only just recognized you. How terribly rude of me."
She clapped her hands together, her tone pivoting without a single beat of warning.
"So how have you been lately? Anything feeling off? If something's bothering you, I can always make some adjustments~"
Fushiguro Maki's brow twitched hard. The hand-seals her fingers were forming tightened further, and when she spoke, her voice was strung taut as a wire stretched to its absolute limit.
"What are you doing here? What is your purpose? Why are you here?"
Three questions, every single syllable bitten down hard.
Then the black-haired girl clenched her jaw.
"——And you! Back then! What did you do to me?!"
"Hmm... if you're asking that particular question..." Mahiko planted one hand on her hip and raised the other, idly brushing aside a strand of blue fringe that had fallen across her face. Then she let the worst kind of grin spread across her features — the grin of someone who has just pulled off a perfect prank.
"Why don't you take a guess? Maybe I came here specifically to save you all~"
"Tch."
Fushiguro Maki clicked her tongue and didn't take the bait. But her eyes flicked sideways and slightly back — Yuji Itadori was directly behind her, watching, a question written plainly in his gaze.
She dropped her voice low. "Yuji. Work with me. Her speed isn't that fast — I'll use a shikigami to pin her down, and we split up and run. Whoever makes it out calls for backup from outside."
It was abundantly clear where Fushiguro Maki stood on the matter: this blue-haired cursed spirit had never had good intentions. Not from the very first second.
She was already prepared to fight.
Mahiko looked at the two of them and couldn't help it — she burst out laughing, the sound bouncing back and forth off the corridor walls, ringing with genuine delight.
"Oh, oh, relax, relax — you're so tense, you're making me feel embarrassed——"
Then she straightened up. The smile didn't move, but the edge in her eyes sharpened into something a little worse.
"That said, I'd advise against doing anything rash."
She snapped her fingers.
From the far end of the corridor — from the direction Mahiko had entered — something was dragged out of the darkness.
It was a small, grotesque thing, limbs twisted at wrong angles, stumbling as it walked. Behind it, it was hauling a person — unconscious, limp.
The corridor was dim. The distance was considerable. Only the outline was visible — height, hairstyle——
Yuji's breath stopped completely.
Fushiguro Maki's pupils snapped tight: "Nobara——!"
Damn it. Had this blue-haired cursed spirit captured Nobara?
Damn it all!
"Whoa, whoa, whoa — hold on, hold on."
Mahiko raised her hand, one finger pointing — and the creature stopped, dragging the 'unconscious figure' one step further back, retreating a little deeper into the dark.
"If you want your companion walking out of here alive, don't do anything rash. Don't resist. Don't run. Don't worry — I have no intention of doing anything that would endanger your lives. All I want to do is..."
She spread her hands wide and smiled — a smile of extraordinary gentleness, and extraordinary ability to make the back of your neck go cold.
"Just a little experiment. Something very small, very modest, and terribly interesting..."
...Oh dear.
She'd gotten a little too into it.
Even Mahiko herself had to admit — that little speech, the accompanying laughter, the dim corridor lighting — it had all come together into something genuinely, impressively diabolical. She'd almost lost it listening to herself.
Of course, what the two people across from her didn't know was——
The thing that creature was dragging was not Nobara Kugisaki.
Not even close.
Mahiko had improvised it on the spot — a humanoid shape, pinched together from fragments of her own soul. The silhouette was roughly right. The proportions, barely passable. In truth it looked nothing like Nobara at all. But with the corridor this dark and the distance this far, it had been just enough to fool these two idiots.
Fushiguro Maki held her jaw clamped shut. She was silent for a few seconds before she forced the words out in a low, flat voice: "What do you want us to do."
"Simple."
Mahiko extended one finger, pointing at Yuji. "You — step back. Over by that wall, over there. Crouch down, hands behind your head. Stay at least ten meters away from me."
Then the finger swung to Fushiguro Maki. "You — come here. Sit down wherever you like."
Yuji and Fushiguro Maki exchanged a look.
What choice did they have.
Nobara was still in that thing's hands.
Yuji closed his fist, kept his face stone-still, and walked to the far end of the corridor. He crouched in the corner, hands laced behind his head, eyes locked on this end without blinking.
The black-haired girl crossed to Mahiko's side and sat down against the wall. Her spine was perfectly straight. Her eyes never left Mahiko for a single instant.
Mahiko crouched down, resting a finger against her chin, studying the black-haired girl sitting on the floor.
The black-haired girl stared back.
Mahiko bent forward. Her fingers caught the hem of the girl's shirt and lifted it slightly — just a few centimetres — then she slid her hand underneath, pressing her palm flat against the girl's abdomen.
The black-haired girl's entire body jolted.
A sound she couldn't suppress escaped from her throat — a soft, involuntary noise — and color flooded her face all at once. It was as if someone had reached inside her and given her organs the gentlest squeeze. A tingling, numbing sensation bloomed from her abdomen and spread outward along her nerves, branching to her every extremity, electric — and just like that, every ounce of strength she had dissolved all at once.
"You——" She crushed her fist tight. She locked her jaw. She held herself upright through sheer force of will. "What are you——"
Mahiko's eyelids dropped slightly. She didn't answer. Her attention had already sunk entirely inward.
Idle Transfiguration — unfold.
She reached for the center of the girl's soul. In physical terms, that corresponded to the brain.
In a jujutsu sorcerer's soul — or brain — there existed a dedicated region where their innate technique was inscribed.
And then she saw it.
Like black pearls. A series of marks, carved deep.
Ten of them in total, hanging quietly in the depths of the soul, still and settled as ten pieces of ink-black jade resting at the bottom of water — arranged in the loose suggestion of a circle. The surface of each one was covered in lines of extraordinary density and intricacy, the engraved patterns of a Technique.
Ten Shadows Technique. Ten shadow shikigami.
A few of the pearls were turning slowly, their inscriptions faintly luminous — those were the shikigami that had already been tamed and bound. The others lay completely inert, dark and silent — the ones not yet subjugated.
Which meant...
Mahiko pressed her awareness deeper, feeling past those ten pearls, and behind them she found something else — something at a greater depth, carrying so much information that it gave her pause for a moment.
This pearl was different from the other ten. It was larger than any of them. Its inscriptions were absurdly, unreasonably complex — layer upon layer, dense and interlocking, so tangled that the underlying structure was completely indecipherable at a glance.
Like a gemstone of pure black.
Mahoraga.
There was no question. That was Mahoraga's mark.
Ugh... If she'd thought the dense cluster of ten marks ahead might somehow be learnable, Mahoraga was... well. That one was simply out of the question. Not even close to a possibility.
Far too complex. The will was there; the capacity wasn't.
Let's look at the ten in front, then.
Pick one.
Honestly, even those ten were significantly more complex than she'd initially anticipated — by a wide margin. Far more difficult than imitating Mechamaru's Heavenly Restriction had been. By several orders of magnitude.
If she was going to learn any of them, she could manage at most one.
So which shikigami was worth taking?
Mahiko lowered her eyelids and began running through the options in her head.
Jade Dogs? Just two dogs. Actually fairly versatile. And comparatively learnable.
Max Elephant and Piercing Ox... Those were the Ten Shadows' highest-output offensive tools. Absolute ceiling on destructive power. That part felt perfect for her — she was desperately short on exactly that kind of punch. But honestly? Kind of hard to learn.
Round Deer — a deer that could heal others using Reverse Cursed Technique. Useful in the abstract, but she could already heal herself. Wasn't that redundant? Nobody healed better than she did.
"How about... that bird?"
The Nue — the one that could conduct electricity. Electric discharge was a form of attack. Not a bad option.
Mahiko's eyes narrowed slightly.
Which one, then?
Hmm... actually, it has to be this one, doesn't it.
She settled on her choice quickly, somewhere in her mind.
She began carefully tracing the inscription — committing the lines of the Technique to memory, learning it from the inside out.
And as she did, the black-haired girl's abdomen shuddered again with the motion — the tingling sensation went deeper — and all she could do was grind her teeth until they creaked, fighting to hold on to consciousness through sheer stubbornness alone, fingers scrabbling at the cracks in the floor, knuckles gone completely white.
____
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