It seemed Mahiko had underestimated the complexity and difficulty of Piercing Blood.
Based on what she'd absorbed from the original story, and the general knowledge floating around in her head, the principle behind Piercing Blood was roughly this: take blood — a liquid — and use the technique Convergence to compress it to a single point, then release it, firing it like a high-pressure water cutter to slice through anything it touched.
So Mahiko had tried compressing some Cursed Energy-laced water using Dagon's technique, then firing it.
It didn't really work.
When she pressurized the water, the increased pressure raised its melting point — which apparently caused the water in her hands to be squeezed into a half-frozen slush.
As a result, what she fired didn't punch clean through the monster's head in an instant. It only punched through a little.
Thud——
The monster howled and crashed to the ground. A blood-red hole had been torn open in its forehead. The blood armor had been fully pierced through, and the skull beneath it shattered.
Not a one-hit kill — but it had dealt a devastating blow. The blood tornado swirling around Mahiko collapsed and dispersed, and the blue-haired girl landed lightly on her feet.
"Guess I still need to study this more..." Mahiko muttered, staring at the faint blue liquid drifting from her fingertip. She puffed out her cheeks. "Maybe I should try..."
She still didn't understand exactly how Blood Manipulation protected blood with Cursed Energy.
If water's melting point was too high — then what if she switched to a different liquid?
A new golden-yellow liquid appeared at her fingertip.
"Girl... little girl..." The monster, meanwhile, was struggling back to its feet. It glared at Mahiko with eyes brimming with feral, seething hatred. "Kill! Kill you!! ——"
The monster had completely lost its mind.
Maybe because it had realized the enemy had mimicked its own technique and still managed to wound it. Maybe because it was humiliating beyond all measure that a creature who looked like prey had left it in such a sorry state. Whatever the reason — it had snapped. It was practically hysterical.
"DIE! DIE!! ——"
Against all expectation, the monster hauled itself upright again and squared off against Mahiko, resuming the stance for Piercing Blood.
"Still going?" Mahiko gave a light laugh. "Give it up already. You've already... lost your appeal."
For Mahiko, killing was joy. Whether it was the process or the result, it was all joy. If you wanted to put it in human physiological terms — the act of killing flooded her system with dopamine. It made her absurdly, genuinely happy.
Killing...
So did the thing in front of her count as a person?
The soul inside it — the one carrying Blood Manipulation — was probably about half a human soul.
For Mahiko, killing this thing wasn't the same as slaughtering a pureblooded human, but it would still give her a fair amount of joy. And killing, as a behavior, had to have both a process and an outcome — and now, it was time for the outcome.
Time to end this.
The monster assumed the stance for Piercing Blood.
Mahiko assumed the stance for Piercing Blood as well.
The monster's Cursed Energy began rapidly condensing.
So did Mahiko's. She channeled her Cursed Energy onto the golden droplet, pressing it, compressing it steadily.
Reality had already proven it: Blood Manipulation was something special. Jujutsu Techniques were not something you could casually imitate.
Mahiko could only meaningfully improve the speed and power of her "fake Piercing Blood" by finding a liquid with a lower melting point than water or blood. And even then, even at maximum output, her version of Piercing Blood still fell slightly short of the monster's.
She should have compressed faster than the monster, accumulated more Cursed Energy first — or switched to one of her more practiced attack methods — and struck before the monster's Piercing Blood reached full power...
——At least, that was how it was supposed to go.
"...I'll kill you...!"
Mahiko met the monster's hysterical glare — and for a moment, she went still.
Centuries of accumulated bloodlust. That feral, savage gleam in the monster's eyes — equal in intensity to its obsession with killing — was slowly bleeding into Mahiko's heart.
After today, she suspected it would be a very long time before she found a sandbag quite this suited to her tastes.
"Strong sense of déjà vu," the blue-haired girl murmured with a quiet laugh. She looked at the monster before her and let the corner of her mouth curl upward. "I'll give you one chance, all right?"
"KILL!! !!" the monster shrieked.
Piercing Blood exploded out.
The golden liquid in Mahiko's hand launched simultaneously.
The vivid crimson and the brilliant gold collided in an instant, and the space between girl and monster erupted in a blinding shower of sparks.
——Plant essential oil.
Mahiko had learned Dagon's technique. She'd learned Jogo's technique. Naturally, she'd learned Hanami's technique as well. And this golden-yellow liquid — it came from Hanami's technique.
The melting point of plant essential oil varied depending on the plant. But essential oils extracted from coniferous trees like pines grown in extreme cold environments had melting points far lower than human blood or ordinary pure water. Combine that with Cursed Energy's protection and the optimization of Hanami's technique — and in this moment, the output of Mahiko's "fake Piercing Blood" had actually pulled level with the real thing.
But it still wasn't enough.
Output still wasn't enough.
The monster was screaming. The contact point between blood and oil was creeping toward Mahiko. A crude imitation was, in the end, still just an imitation — the monster's Piercing Blood was stronger.
And Mahiko wore an expression that said she had expected exactly this.
"Time to light it up," she said with a smile.
A rabbit hopped onto Mahiko's shoulder and breathed a tongue of flame directly onto the golden beam in her hand. The fire caught the flammable liquid instantly — and in the blink of an eye, the golden Piercing Blood became a blazing crimson laser of pure flame.
Fssssssss——
Extreme heat, in the end, countered Blood Manipulation. The monster's Piercing Blood was reversed in an instant, driven back by Mahiko's counter. The two beams detonated in midair — steam and sparks sprayed in every direction — and both Piercing Bloods ended simultaneously.
"AAAGHHH——!!" the monster howled in disbelief.
It gathered Piercing Blood in its palms again.
But the next second, the smoke was swept aside by the wind.
Mahiko had already burst through from the other side of the smoke at blinding speed. Both hands pressed together, still holding the Piercing Blood stance, aimed directly at the monster.
The monster whipped around and leveled its own Piercing Blood-charged hands at Mahiko in return.
But in the next instant — it felt Cursed Energy condensing behind it.
The monster glanced back, and saw that Mahiko's shadow had, at some unknown point in time, stretched all the way around to its rear.
From within the shadow, a white rabbit surfaced. It was etched with golden-red markings — the mark of Jogo's technique, carved into its form.
The rabbit had its head raised, aiming from below and from behind, targeting the monster's back.
Trying to hit the monster's backside with a fire attack.
——Stupid.
That was the monster's first thought. It decided the opponent was being profoundly, almost insultingly stupid.
That fire couldn't hurt it. This had already been proven.
And yet this idiot wanted to try the same trick again? What was that if not stupidity?
"RAAAGH! ——"
It kept its Piercing Blood aimed at Mahiko, while simultaneously activating its blood armor, forming a double-layered defense over its own back.
The plan: the moment Mahiko launched the fire attack, it would fire Piercing Blood straight through her skull. This time, thanks to the enemy's stupidity, it absolutely could not miss.
This was its last defensive move. And its last attack.
This monster's Blood Manipulation had never reached the highest tier. It had no Reverse Cursed Technique. It couldn't generate new blood. Its blood reserves came entirely from the blood armor it had worn from the start, and throughout the battle that armor had grown thinner and thinner. It had no reserves left to keep fighting.
This would decide everything. One final exchange.
——I've already won!
The monster let out a sharp, grating laugh.
Then it froze — because it noticed the girl across from it was smiling.
Even after seeing the change in the blood armor on its body, the girl was smiling.
"Oh my, going for that move again...? But it won't work, you know." The girl's smile was sunny and untroubled. She opened her mouth gently, and the cursed seal on the tip of her tongue glimmered with faint light. "[Spread 'em yourself.]"
"Wh — huh?!"
As the Cursed Speech bored into the monster's mind, its body gave a violent shudder and it let out a sound of bewildered, horrified confusion.
It never launched its attack. Instead, its hands dropped out of the Piercing Blood stance without its permission. It squatted down involuntarily — rear end pointed at the small rabbit — reached both hands behind itself, and in an absolutely mortifying posture, used its own hands to peel open the blood armor covering its backside.
"EEEAAAUGHHHHH?!?!"
BOOM!!
The flames erupted — scorching upward from below, the extreme heat ripping through the monster's body — and the monster let out a howl of absolute, despairing agony.
Tap.
Mahiko stopped walking. The hand condensing her "fake Piercing Blood" aimed directly at the monster's skull and came to a halt at point-blank range.
The girl smiled, eyes curved into crescents.
"Time to finish reducing the sauce~"
Piercing Blood fired.
It punched clean through the lower half of the monster's face — entering from the front, exiting from the back, leaving a gaping hole.
A truly gruesome sight.
...
Slap.
Mahiko's hand came down on the monster's face.
The monster was dead. Undeniably, irreversibly dead. Whatever Cursed Energy it had left was nowhere near enough to defend against Mahiko's sudden Cursed Speech attack.
Because really — who could possibly survive the ultimate super-cool "Spread 'em yourself" flaming rear-end ambush?
Anyone watching would have wet themselves on the spot.
And now Mahiko was tidying up the corpse.
From experience, Mahiko knew that for roughly thirty seconds after death — whether human or Cursed Spirit — a soul would linger in the same state it had been in at the moment of near-death.
The exact duration depended on the severity of the injuries. And a Cursed Spirit's soul dissipated far faster than a human's.
Right now, the soul inside this corpse was still intact.
Mahiko reached out. Using Idle Transfiguration, she bleached and absorbed the monster's soul — and simultaneously devoured both Jujutsu Techniques stored within the monster's body.
One was a technique capable of directly attacking the soul. The other was Blood Manipulation.
Mahiko stood up and gave both a quick trial run.
The latter — Blood Manipulation — was freshly acquired. Her proficiency with it was near zero. She'd essentially have to grind it up from scratch.
The former — the so-called soul-attacking technique — appeared to be something she could layer onto her other attack methods. But studying it more carefully, it seemed it could only be attached to Blood Manipulation and physical strikes — probably because blood was categorized as part of the body, which meant blood attacks and fist attacks fell into the same classification under this technique.
Honestly, most of the time it was less useful than Idle Transfiguration.
When she thought about it, it was really more of a technique that specifically countered her.
Mahiko extended her palm. A blood droplet — red as a ruby — floated in the center of her hand.
The most valuable, the strongest technique she'd gained from this harvest — was, as expected, Piercing Blood.
Piercing Blood was an extraordinarily powerful technique.
Its strength wasn't in how high its ceiling could go — it was in its capacity to punch above its weight class and kill enemies beyond its tier.
In the original story, a Grade 1 sorcerer who had traded blows back and forth with Megumi Fushiguro managed to punch through Hanami's heavily-armored defenses using Piercing Blood alone.
A Grade 1 sorcerer's Piercing Blood was something that even Special Grade-level fighters had no choice but to dodge.
A true can-opener. An armor-breaker of the highest order.
Mahiko began toying with the blood droplet in her hand.
And then — at that moment — through one of her clones far away, she suddenly caught the faint sound of soft, shuffling rustling.
The girl blinked, then turned her head in that direction.
"Oh?" The girl raised an eyebrow with distinct interest. A memory resurfaced — back in the warehouse just now, she had noticed a familiar face. Someone who had appeared in the original story.
——Junpei Yoshino.
Anyone who had read the original Jujutsu Kaisen would remember this character clearly, because this character had it absolutely terrible.
He was, essentially, the perfect victim the author had designed.
Other characters were pitiful and frustrating in equal measure — but Junpei? Junpei was pitiful. Just... pitiful, all the way through.
At school, Junpei was a high schooler who kept fighting back against bullying and kept getting bullied anyway. In the original story, Mahito had used him as a pawn — nudging him and Yuji Itadori into becoming friends, then poisoning his mind with twisted logic, then murdering his mother — which sent Junpei spiraling into darkness and drove him to storm his school for revenge.
And Yuji had to fight him because of it.
But Junpei was kind-hearted. Even in the depths of his breakdown, he never killed any innocent bystanders — and in the end, Yuji even managed to talk him back.
But of course, that wasn't enough to save him. In the end, Mahito killed Junpei right in front of Yuji — right at the moment when Junpei had just pulled back from the edge — and that was what turned the feud between Yuji and Mahito into a war to the death.
When Mahiko had first crossed over into this world, she had thought about the atrocities that "Mahito" had committed. And the death that had stuck with her most vividly — was Junpei's.
After arriving here, she'd never made any particular effort to seek Junpei out.
After all, Junpei's tragic death in the original story was eighty percent the work of Mahito pulling strings behind the scenes. Without Mahito, Junpei would most likely have spent his high school years grinding through countless brutal bouts of bullying — a miserable life, sure, but at least not one that ended in death quite so horrifically.
As long as she didn't go looking for him, it was as good as handing this character a second chance at life.
But...
This character, through sheer bad luck, had been grabbed by those kidnappers — and now, by some twist of fate, was crouching in the bushes over there, peeking at her from the shadows.
What to do?
Mahiko started to fret.
Fate was a strange thing, when you thought about it.
Junpei had the potential to become a sorcerer. He had a Jujutsu Technique lurking in his mind — which meant he could see Cursed Spirits, and naturally he would have been able to see the fight she'd just had.
Mahiko could turn around and walk away right now. That was an option. One she could take without a second thought.
But now that she'd actually seen the boy — that dull, smothering weight she'd felt in her previous life when she'd watched Junpei get killed by Mahito came welling back up in her chest.
So she hesitated.
Should she turn a blind eye?
Or... maybe do something a little interesting?
"Heheh." Mahiko suddenly let out a mischievous little laugh.
Yeah. Definitely do something a little interesting.
____
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