As it turned out, there was one more advantage to using the Darting Hare — something Mahiko had only fully figured out after the fight had properly begun.
Under normal circumstances, Idle Transfiguration required physical contact to activate. She had to touch someone to reshape their soul. That was the technique's single greatest limitation — and the precise reason she'd been so frustrated when she couldn't close the distance on the Special Grade Cursed Spirit.
But the Darting Hare was different.
These shikigami had been born from her own soul. Between her and every last one of those small white rabbits, there existed a natural, invisible thread of connection — one end anchored to her, the other end tied to each individual rabbit.
As long as the distance wasn't too great, she could manipulate their shapes remotely — no direct contact required whatsoever.
Whether it was a property of the Ten Shadows Technique itself, or simply because these shikigami had originated as extensions of her being — something like the way she could remotely control her own butterfly fragments — she wasn't entirely sure. But the result was the same either way.
Her attack options had just expanded by several orders of magnitude.
"So then! Appear before me — Treasure of the Hare!"
BOOM!
The floor where the cursed spirit stood cracked and buckled under its force.
But Mahiko had already dissolved into butterflies and evaded.
The dust hadn't even begun to settle when her voice rang down from above.
The Special Grade Cursed Spirit lifted its head — and through the rolling clouds of dust and debris it saw them. Countless white shapes. Dozens and dozens of rabbits pouring out of the churning smoke, cascading downward one after another like a waterfall, hurtling through the air at blistering speed.
And then they changed.
Ears stretched long. Bodies elongated. Limbs folded inward, compressing. Plump little balls of fur flattened and sharpened — pulling taut, drawn fine — until they were blades. Straight-edged swords. Slender, silver-white, spinning as they fell, every razor tip aligned on the Special Grade below.
They rained down like a tempest.
Swish — swish — swish —
"RAAAGH —!"
The cursed spirit bellowed and threw itself into motion — wrenching its body through the storm of falling blades by sheer explosive speed, carving a path through the downpour. The swords hit the floor where it had stood a heartbeat before with a series of dense, rhythmic thunks, burying themselves tip-first into the stone until that entire section of floor looked like the hide of a porcupine.
Mahiko beat her wings and hovered in midair, looking down at the result, and rubbed her chin.
"Hm..."
The swords aren't as useful as I thought, are they.
Come on, 'throwing swords does no damage' — did I just get bamboozled by every action manga I've ever read?
She thought about it for two seconds and the reason clicked into place. She was reshaping the rabbits mid-flight — which meant the kinetic energy of the swords equaled the kinetic energy of the rabbits when they'd launched. And the force rabbits could generate when they leaped was, objectively, very small.
Assuming that would deal meaningful damage had been pure wishful thinking on her part.
What if she gave the rabbits wings? Let them build up real speed first, then transform them into blades?
Honestly, that sounded kind of fun to try.
"RAAAGH —!!"
The Special Grade Cursed Spirit did not particularly care what Mahiko was musing about. Golden Cursed Energy erupted across its entire body — it planted its feet, coiled everything it had, and launched itself upward like a cannonball.
"Still think the better option is..."
Mahiko shifted her weight to one side. From the shadow beneath her, a fresh wave of rabbits had already surged out ahead of her — pouring toward the cursed spirit, slamming into it in midair, curling inward all at once and compressing into tight spheres.
BOOM — BOOM — BOOM —!!
One after another they detonated — each blast hammering the cursed spirit as it climbed, tearing ragged screams out of it, knocking its trajectory sideways. Instead of reaching Mahiko, it slammed into a far wall and crunched into the stone.
"...Yeah. Bunnies are just better as bombs."
Mahiko drifted back to the ground, dusted off her hands, and nodded with deep satisfaction.
The logic was actually beautifully simple.
Convert the soul energy of a rabbit into Cursed Energy at a hundred percent, then detonate it on contact. Every joule of energy input comes roaring out at maximum efficiency — no conversion loss, no wasted steps in between.
In the framework of jujutsu, output conversion efficiency was an extremely significant metric. It affected combat power enormously — and it was almost entirely a matter of raw talent. Two sorcerers could each start with a hundred units of Cursed Energy and produce wildly different results: one deals seventy or eighty points of damage, the other barely squeezes out thirty or forty. The difference was conversion efficiency.
The canonical example: in the original story, Satoru Gojo's total Cursed Energy reserves were actually lower than Yuta Okkotsu's — and yet Gojo consistently overpowered Okkotsu in terms of sheer output. A significant part of that gap came from Gojo's near-perfect efficiency. Not a single point of Cursed Energy wasted.
And right now, using rabbits as bombs was effectively doing the same thing — pulling her output efficiency up by a meaningful degree.
Honestly? The improvement was massive.
Still...
Mahiko tilted her head, watching the cursed spirit drag itself back upright in the distance — soaked in blood, roaring with fury, Cursed Energy seething around its body like a corona of golden fire.
She tapped her chin, thinking.
I'm still missing a finishing move...
Each individual rabbit was still a small animal. The volume of soul energy each one carried was what it was — nowhere close to a human, nowhere close to a cursed spirit. Small was small, and there was no getting around that.
That last volley had managed to inflict those injuries on a Special Grade Cursed Spirit purely through volume — dozens of rabbits detonating in sequence, stacking the damage through sheer quantity.
But what if she stopped chasing area saturation — and aimed instead for a single decisive strike?
What if she compressed all of the soul energy from every rabbit... into a single point?
"Hmm... that's going to be tricky..." Mahiko murmured, touching down onto the ground.
The shadows around her began to stir.
One rabbit emerged. Two. Ten. Fifty. One hundred — pouring out of the shadows beneath her feet like water from a spring, a relentless outward surge, more and more and more, until a mountain of rabbits had risen up behind her, white and enormous and quietly rustling.
Mahiko snapped her fingers.
The mountain reversed.
Instead of expanding outward, it began to collapse inward — Idle Transfiguration unfolding in full, compressing each rabbit one by one toward a single central point.
The mountain shrank. The white mass contracted, tightening, losing volume by the second.
In the span of a few seconds, that entire sprawling white mountain simply ceased to exist — replaced by a single sphere the size of a ping-pong ball.
The sphere was white threaded through with blue light, drifting quietly above her open palm, spinning in slow, silent rotation.
Mahiko stared at it, and something in her eyes began to quietly gleam.
There it is.
But she couldn't fire it yet.
On one hand, she could keep feeding it — compress more soul energy in, push the yield higher. On the other hand, there was a far more serious problem that needed resolving before she could even think about releasing it.
Without solving this problem, she could not attack.
"A finishing move..." Mahiko pressed her free hand to her chin, brow furrowed, sinking into a deep and solemn contemplation. "...What should I call it?"
Yes. This was a very serious problem indeed.
A technique without a name couldn't be shouted. And a technique that couldn't be shouted lacked presence. And a finishing move without presence — no matter how devastating the actual power behind it — always felt like it was missing something crucial at the moment of release.
Hmm...
Thinking. Considering.
The great techniques in Jujutsu Kaisen — Blue, Red, Diverge, Open — they were all single characters. Single syllables, clean and absolute.
She'd go with one character too, then.
But which one...
While she thought, Mahiko idly rested her other hand on the spinning sphere.
The sphere turned.
The shadows around her began to stir — coiling like serpents, wrapping themselves around the white sphere, spinning with it. Rabbits born from those coiled shadows surged toward the ball but, pressed tight against its surface, were swallowed by it before they could fully emerge into the air.
And so it fed on itself. The sphere spun faster. Faster. The compression of Cursed Energy forced the surface to ignite — tiny, shivering tongues of blue-white flame licking outward from the sphere's skin, weaving through the encircling shadows, spinning alongside them.
Flame and shadow intertwined. Rings of luminance rippled outward in slow pulses. The power contained within — building, building — began to climb toward something genuinely frightening.
Up in the rubble above, Yuji Itadori and Fushiguro Maki both felt the weight of the light rising from below at the exact same moment. Without a word between them, both looked down — and saw the spinning sphere — and both went still for a single, suspended instant.
"Is that..." Fushiguro Maki's voice came out faintly unsteady.
Even through the floor. Even across the distance. The sheer magnitude of the Cursed Energy packed inside that sphere was unmistakable — it pressed against the senses like a physical weight, clear and undeniable.
The air itself was trembling. The room had entered the fight.
The white sphere shuddered — straining against its own surface, crammed to the absolute threshold.
"Hmm..."
Got it.
Mahiko extended her hand. The sphere compressed down to its smallest possible point at her fingertip.
The corner of her mouth curved upward.
"Husk.」
She flicked her finger.
Silver-blue light erupted at the tip. In the same instant, that single infinitesimal point detonated completely — every ounce of energy within it driven outward in one direction, perfectly straight, without deflection, without deviation —
BOOM —!!
— and it fired.
The entire building shook.
Light blazed — white light and blue light, two colors slamming together, blinding, absolute — and Fushiguro Maki and Yuji both squeezed their eyes shut at the same instant, heads twisting away, unable to look directly at it.
Cursed Energy and smoke detonated across the sky in every direction.
The Cursed Energy moved as though it had punched a hole through the world itself.
____
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