"Hey, Cursed Spirit. I might be going offline for the next few days."
"Hm?" Mahiko tilted her head, attention drawn by the voice coming through her earring. "What's wrong? Did something happen?"
"No." Mechamaru's voice filtered through the earring. "It's routine school business — the exchange event is coming up, and our school does a health examination beforehand. For the next few days, my main body will be under the staff's watch, so I won't be able to help you anymore."
"Oh." Mahiko nodded. "Alright then, go ahead."
She didn't particularly care whether Mechamaru stayed or left.
Originally, she'd sought out Mechamaru's cooperation for intelligence gathering — and to have him help scour the city for Cursed Spirits she could absorb. But ever since the day before yesterday, when she'd gone shopping with Jogo and the others, she'd been holed up in this abandoned building, single-mindedly studying Domain Expansion.
Kenjaku had taught her a great deal.
The foundational theory of barriers... the principles of construction... and he'd even personally demonstrated several simpler barrier types for her.
Mahiko had been drilling it for two days straight.
Just yesterday she'd managed to deploy a basic barrier that blocked line of sight. And today, she had just barely succeeded in constructing one that could prevent others from entering.
She was already making remarkable progress.
The more time she put into it, the faster she seemed to improve — as if she'd gotten a feel for some underlying knack in barrier technique. Though it was still only a beginner's grasp of the knack. A true Domain Expansion was still a very long way off.
A Domain Expansion was the ultimate understanding and mastery of both barrier technique and one's own Jujutsu Technique — not merely difficult, but absurdly, impossibly, catastrophically difficult. No one in the world could learn a Domain Expansion in a day or two.
She'd already prepared herself to go into total seclusion for days — or even an entire month — to hammer away at it. Her only hope was to make a significant breakthrough, so that by the time the exchange event at Jujutsu Tech began, she would have the ability to hold her own against another person's Domain.
So for the moment, she didn't have much need for Mechamaru's intelligence work.
"Be careful." Mechamaru's voice took on a more serious edge. "You should know — you're already being hunted."
"Oh, that's par for the course." Mahiko didn't pay it much mind.
Cursed Spirits getting hunted by jujutsu sorcerers was just a fact of life. A bounty was a bounty, but nothing too serious usually came of it.
The sorcerers had plenty of things to keep them busy — they couldn't mobilize their entire force just to catch one Cursed Spirit.
And as long as it wasn't some serious, thorough, carpet-sweep-style search operation, she could just lie low. Tokyo was enormous. How could they possibly find her that quickly?
"There's more than that. I've been hearing that something serious happened in Tokyo recently — a significant attack."
"Hm?" Mahiko perked up a little. "What do you mean? An attack? Who attacked who?"
That she hadn't heard about.
It wasn't like there had been any rumbling, thundering explosions going on in Tokyo either.
"I don't know. My teacher's been keeping close tabs on me over here, so I can't pay close attention to what's going on on your end."
Mahiko: "Ah, well then."
Then why even bring it up.
"I'm going offline now. Take care of yourself."
"Sure."
Mechamaru's voice vanished — he'd probably cut the connection. The earring went quiet again, leaving only the hollow moan of wind whistling through the abandoned building.
Mahiko turned her attention back to her hands.
She resumed her hand signs.
Closed her eyes.
Attempted Domain Expansion.
Cursed Energy surged from her palms, weaving itself into the skeleton of a barrier around her body. One pillar. Two. Three — invisible supports rose up through the space around her, and then she tried to draw planes between them, connect those planes into a shell, and seal the shell closed into a complete Domain —
At the same time, she began carving her Technique's markings into the inner wall of the barrier. The inscriptions of her Idle Transfiguration clung to the barrier's surface like fine threads, spiraling outward layer by layer —
Crack.
One of the pillars collapsed.
Chain reaction. The skeleton of what barely even qualified as an embryonic Domain toppled from the inside out like a row of dominoes, Cursed Energy scattering in every direction, the Technique's markings shattering and dissolving along with it.
Nothing left.
Mahiko opened her eyes, let out a sigh, and pulled a face.
How annoying. Failed again.
It felt like she'd grasped the trick of it — and then it slipped away by just that much. Where was the problem?
The step of establishing the Domain itself kept breaking down.
The issue seemed to be... first of all, the embryonic Domain simply wasn't stable.
To construct a complete Domain, she first had to build the outer shell barrier — and that step alone was brutal. It was like trying to pitch a tent in the middle of a windstorm — the tent being the barrier, and the wind being her own Technique.
A barrier needed stability on every side.
Which meant she needed to plant supporting pillars at every point to hold the tent in place.
Every time Mahiko got one pillar upright, the others would fall. She couldn't keep all the pillars stable at once — so of course the barrier would collapse almost immediately.
The step of carving her Technique into the Domain itself, on the other hand, was actually going fairly smoothly.
After all, the precision and control she'd achieved over her own cursed technique had already reached an extraordinary level of refinement. Drawing the Technique's markings along the inner wall of the barrier wasn't particularly hard for her — it was actually almost easy.
The hard part was that the shell itself couldn't hold together.
And then there was another problem: she simply didn't have enough Cursed Energy.
Even if the barrier managed to hold, her reserves weren't sufficient to sustain a complete Domain for any meaningful length of time.
Mahiko tried a few more times.
Over and over, she formed her hand signs. Over and over, she wove the skeleton together. Over and over, she watched it collapse. Each collapse came a second or two later than the last — proof that she was improving — but success was still a long way off.
Time passed quickly when you were in the middle of training.
She looked up. Somehow, an entire day had gone by.
The sun was about to go down.
The night wind poured in through the empty window frames of the abandoned building, glass long since gone.
She'd been training all day. Her body ached all over, and she'd burned through a significant amount of Cursed Energy.
Mahiko rubbed her lower back, pressed her hands against her knees, and pushed herself to her feet.
And then — suddenly —
Something went off inside her head.
The girl froze. Her pupils contracted.
One of the perimeter alarm devices she'd set up around the abandoned building had been triggered.
Who was it?
This was an abandoned building complex on the outskirts of the city — long derelict. It sometimes attracted drifters or bored delinquents, so the odds weren't low that it was just an ordinary person setting off the alarm.
"..." The girl frowned.
She closed her eyes and directed her attention through the network of "clone cameras" she'd dispersed throughout the area to check the situation.
Then she saw two people.
A young man with short silver hair, two snake-eye-like markings plastered across his mouth, wearing a Jujutsu Tech uniform, moving carefully with his eyes scanning left and right, clearly searching for something.
That was Inumaki Toge — a second-year student at Jujutsu Tech, a sorcerer who wielded the power of Cursed Speech.
And the other person... was even more familiar.
— Maki Zenin, long blade in hand.
"Huh?" Mahiko's eyes went wide.
What was going on? Why were these two here?
Were they just passing through by coincidence?
Inumaki Toge and Maki Zenin didn't seem to realize they'd already been spotted by the clone cameras. The two of them continued their search in quiet, guarded silence.
They definitely didn't look like they were out for a stroll. It was obvious they knew there was an enemy somewhere in this area.
...Were there only the two of them?
A bad feeling stirred in Mahiko's chest.
Her eyes shifted. She applied the same kind of Heavenly Restriction-style amplification boost to herself that Mechamaru used — sharply expanding her perception range — and then activated every camera and clone drone she'd planted in the surrounding area.
In an instant, the entire abandoned building complex came into her field of view.
And she found — there were far more than just Inumaki and Maki in the vicinity.
On the rooftop of a building in the distance, a large, fluffy silhouette was crouching at the edge of the terrace, peering downward — that was Panda, the second-year student at Jujutsu Tech.
There appeared to be someone else alongside it, but the angle made it difficult to tell.
In another direction, a pink-haired boy and a dark-haired girl were searching along the outer perimeter wall — Yuji Itadori and Fushiguro Maki.
They were spread across three different sides of the abandoned building complex.
Mahiko looked toward the last direction.
There were people there too.
Nanami. And Nobara Kugisaki.
Oh no...
A cold sweat broke out down Mahiko's spine.
Satoru Gojo was nowhere to be seen.
That was the one good thing.
But — how had all of these people shown up here at once??
These sorcerers were clearly operating as a coordinated unit. And from their individual positions, they were spread across all four sides of the abandoned building complex — forming a complete encirclement.
An encirclement around her location.
The entire complex.
Why?
Mahiko was stunned.
What were they here for? Were they surrounding her to take her down?
But how did they know she was here?
Or — was this actually about something else entirely, and they just happened to have set up their formation in this area?
She didn't understand.
But she needed to run.
The other side had come in force — not only several students with powerful Techniques, but also a Grade 1 sorcerer. Whether or not she could fight her way through that many people was one thing, but mainly Mahiko simply did not want to get into a brawl with this group.
Given her nature, she absolutely refused to let herself be caught in an encirclement — as unfavorable a position as that was.
They were tightening the net.
Mahiko had to find a way to slip through the gaps before the encirclement closed in too far.
Not that it should be too hard, actually. They were in pairs, which looked tight on the surface — but the abandoned building complex was enormous, and the actual distances between each pair were quite wide.
Escaping should be genuinely simple.
"...Hm?"
But the next second, Mahiko went still.
She looked up.
In the sky above, a great black curtain was descending.
A Curtain.
A massive Curtain — vast enough to blanket the entire abandoned building complex — was falling from above like an enormous inverted bowl, sealing the entire area shut, airtight and complete.
Mahiko stared.
It looked like she was trapped.
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Group chat of the Dead
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 Bonus Chapter for everyone