Mahiko's flame Jujutsu Technique was derived from Jogo — the primary attack method being to carve Jogo's Technique into the bodies of her rabbits, converting the rabbits' soul-energy and pre-stored Cursed Energy into raw firepower.
The output was weaker than Jogo's own — but even at a quarter or a fifth of Jogo's firepower, flash-evaporating the moisture in blood should still have been trivially easy.
The monster's only defense was the layer of congealed blood that encased its body. Once the blood was scorched dry, Cursed Energy would no longer flow through the blood-armor. Struck by Mahiko's assault, it should have been burned into a ruined wreck, just like the kidnappers before it — too badly damaged to fight.
That was how it should have gone.
But that wasn't what was happening.
"AAUGH——" The monster howled and flung its arm in a wide arc, scattering a curtain of blood. The droplets solidified mid-air into bead after bead of agate-like spheres, each one pulsing with Cursed Energy.
Fwip — fwip — fwip——
The beads shifted into sharp four-sided pyramids and rocketed toward Mahiko.
Mahiko threw herself backward, dodging fast — and the smile was already spreading across her face. "I see! I understand now — I know exactly what you did!"
Crack. Crack.
The blood-armor that had been scorched into a crust began to split apart. Black scabs of charred blood fell away, revealing fresh armor beneath — gleaming like a new ruby, vivid and red.
"Grrr..." The monster growled low in its throat, like a dog.
At the critical instant of the fire's attack, it had doubled its blood-armor into two layers, forcing the heat to burn through in stages.
The principle behind flame incinerating blood-armor was simple: evaporate the water trapped inside. But with two layers, only the outer shell would be scorched dry and turned to scabs — the inner layer, sealed beneath, couldn't shed its moisture.
Mahiko knew this wasn't the monster being clever enough to devise such a counter on the spot. That response could only have come from the soul inside it — the soul carrying Blood Manipulation. Blood Manipulation was a Jujutsu Technique passed down through a thousand years of tradition. How to fight fire. How to fight water. How to mount an effective defense when facing attacks that specifically targeted blood — veterans of Blood Manipulation might well have burned such accumulated wisdom into their very souls.
Yes.
Two souls tangled together in one brain. It had long since lost its sanity, become a monster.
And yet — it could still fight on the knowledge carved into its soul. Its Blood Manipulation was growing more practiced by the second, as though it were reclaiming lost memory through the act of battle.
"Ha... hahaha..."
The girl laughed.
She was getting excited.
A Blood Manipulation that could strike at soul-properties, wielded with deep combat experience — for the first time in a long while, the girl felt a flicker of something. A genuine sense of threat.
It could hurt her.
It could actually threaten her.
"Don't disappoint me now..." she said, still smiling, and raised her right hand.
White wings spread open behind her. They swept downward, brushing against the kidnappers Mahiko had already neutralized.
[Idle Transfiguration] activated.
Their bodies twisted. Compressed. Reduced to something like pure white rubber — flowing between her fingers, coalescing in her palm into a spinning sphere.
This was what the original Mahito had always done: warp and absorb the human soul.
The instant a soul was transfigured — that person was dead.
The girl was smiling. Her eyes shone with pure delight.
True — Mahiko played around a lot. She goofed off constantly. But the truth was that ever since the Juvenile Detention Center, she had never once been able to fight to her heart's content.
The Cursed Spirits she encountered were all too weak. The humans she met couldn't be killed. She couldn't lay a hand on Kenjaku and the others. And from Jujutsu High — the one she'd run into was Miwa Kasumi. She didn't have the heart.
She had been suppressing herself for far too long.
Want to know why she hadn't casually killed those kidnappers earlier?
Because she didn't want to kill people. In a situation like this one, if she killed — she would feel...
Mahiko raised her hand. The white sphere spun. Black and blue bloomed.
She curled her finger, aimed at the monster, and the most ecstatically gleeful grin split across her face.
"——[Husk]."
— Because if she killed — once she started killing — she would feel that killing people was just absolutely exhilarating.
BOOM!!——
A single Husk — instant-fired, no windup — turned into a white line and detonated toward the monster.
Normally, [Husk] required a charge. Even a standard-output Husk had to be charged. But Mahiko had just ripped the souls from five or six sorcerers and compressed them to her fingertip — the Cursed Energy already contained within needed no further accumulation.
So she fired it directly.
The monster had no hope of reacting.
It tried to run, but it was nowhere near fast enough. In desperation, it summoned every drop of blood in its body and shaped it into a shield before it, bracing against the impact.
An enormous explosion thundered to the ceiling.
The monster went flying like a kite with a snapped string.
It didn't even have time to hit the ground before Mahiko was already there — a massive hammer, formed from a dense cluster of rabbits, hoisted high overhead.
"Oh, come on — this is all you've got?" Mahiko laughed, her eyes alight with a sadistic, gleeful hunger. "Don't disappoint me, you defective little reject!"
BANG!!
The flame Technique ignited along the hammer's body, fire jetting from its base like a thruster. The rocket-hammer came crashing down from above and cratered the floor beneath it.
Mahiko chased it, hammered it, slammed it relentlessly — grinning that wicked grin the whole time. The monster scrambled desperately to dodge, blow after blow, but it couldn't shake her — and in the end had no choice but to detonate its own blood-armor, using the blast of the blood-jet to throw some distance between itself and Mahiko.
Clap.
The monster pressed both palms together, leveling them at Mahiko.
There it was again.
Piercing Blood.
"PIERCE!!"
It shrieked — Cursed Energy and blood compressed together once more, condensing between the palms, firing at Mahiko. Faster than before. More accurate than before. It had reclaimed its former mastery of Blood Manipulation.
Mahiko's shoulder was struck again. The searing pain that struck straight at her soul was ferocious in its intensity.
So the girl's smile got even wider.
BOOM!
The flame Technique swallowed the monster again.
Then came the bombardment — rabbit bombs, detonating in sequence.
Once the smoke cleared, Mahiko was already inside its guard — she drove her foot into it and sent it sprawling, then a rabbit morphed in her palm and condensed into a spinning drill, which she pressed directly against the blood-armor and ground in. Blood and sparks flew together.
Joyful. Genuinely joyful.
Beating the hell out of someone really is the most cathartic thing in the world.
As a Cursed Spirit, Mahiko always carried a current of ferocity deep in her soul — a tide of pure destructive urge. She kept it forcibly suppressed at all times. She had her own limits and convictions, after all; she would not inflict irreversible damage on innocent people.
Which made people who weren't innocent such a rare and precious thing.
Hahaha...
Crack——
The blood-armor fractured.
But at the same moment, Mahiko felt a faint numbness spreading through her body.
The poison of Blood Manipulation. The blood of a sorcerer who wielded Blood Manipulation contained a toxin. Even though Mahiko had taken care to expel the foreign blood from her body just moments ago, she had apparently still been hit.
Because this poison seemed to operate more like a curse than a conventional toxin.
It hadn't damaged Mahiko's soul the way Piercing Blood had — but it still loosened her suppression by a degree.
The monster kicked out with both legs, sending Mahiko airborne, and at the same time it snarled — and heaved its arms wide. The thin film of blood that had been left across the floor, sprayed earlier from the fire hydrant, answered the call of the monster's own blood and rose into the air.
It had blended its own blood with the highly corrosive blood on the floor, and was now commanding them together.
Mahiko plummeted from above — and falling toward her was a blood tornado, spiraling up to meet her from all sides.
Every direction was covered. There was nowhere to dodge. She was above the vortex; the monster was at its base. The tornado was contracting — compressing her space at terrifying speed.
Mahiko looked down and locked eyes with the monster.
"...Huh...?"
Then the monster made a sound of confusion.
Because it saw Mahiko raise both hands — both palms facing inward, beginning to press together — in exactly the same posture as Piercing Blood.
Between the girl's palms, something was compressing. Not blood — a droplet of water, blue as a sapphire.
——Before today, after the day Jogo challenged Satoru Gojo, Mahiko had also helped Dagon undergo body modification. And in the process, she had picked up certain elements of Dagon's water-based Technique.
Dagon's Technique wasn't purely water manipulation — not exactly.
But that was the one piece Mahiko had chosen to learn.
The reason was simple enough. In the original story, Sukuna had once used the elephant shikigami's water-jetting ability from the Ten Shadows Technique to replicate Piercing Blood — achieving the exact same effect.
And Mahiko wanted to try it for herself.
"Let's find out, then..." The girl pressed her palms together, one eye squinting along the line of aim, lips curving into a smile. "——Piercing Blood. Ⅱ"
Shrrk——
A line of blue crossed the distance between Mahiko and the monster in an instant, and struck the monster square between the eyes.
____
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