Well… how to put it.
The students from Jujutsu Tech were genuinely impressive people — every one of them. Remarkable willpower. Staggering growth potential.
But combat IQ isn't something you can make up for with sheer willpower or raw talent. It's the kind of thing that has to be accumulated over time — built from experience, and from imagination.
Hm…
Not that Mahiko was patting herself on the back for being some kind of genius. Everything she'd used were fairly simple little tricks, combined with flexible application of her own abilities.
Like using her clones to open a Curtain, mislead the enemy, and divide the battlefield.
Or deliberately planting misleading objects inside the Curtain to send the people outside scrambling in the wrong direction.
Or, like just now — layering a second Curtain around the outside of the first, so that both sides misjudged where the Domain's boundary actually was.
In plain terms: if Maki had thrown her blade through the Curtain with raw brute force instead of slashing at it, there was a chance the blade could have punched through both layers — and shifted the odds in the sorcerers' favor.
In that scenario, the encirclement might have still been sixty-forty — sixty for Mahiko, forty for the sorcerers.
But that didn't happen.
So the probability of the sorcerers' encirclement plan failing had climbed to ninety-nine percent.
The outer Curtain was already beginning to collapse.
Once it came down completely, with her mobility, her transfiguration ability, and her clone rabbits scattering in every direction across this abandoned building complex — if she wanted to run, no one was going to stop her.
Bluntly speaking, of everyone outside, the only ones with any real ranged offensive capability were Inumaki's Cursed Speech and Nobara Kugisaki's attacks.
But in this fight, every little rabbit Mahiko had summoned had its soul-link severed afterward — which meant Nobara had no way to use Resonance to strike at her.
So Mahiko could run whenever she felt like it.
She wanted to leave right now, and not even a god could stop her.
Maki ground her teeth, the tip of her cursed tool leveled at Mahiko, the blade trembling faintly with barely contained fury: "You… you actually dared to——!!"
Maki seemed to think Inumaki was dead.
He wasn't dead.
How could Mahiko possibly go for a killing blow.
Knocking him unconscious and disrupting the Curtain was enough. She had only touched his soul with Idle Transfiguration — just enough to temporarily switch his consciousness off.
Though from the perspective of the Jujutsu Tech students, Inumaki probably looked like he was on death's door.
"Alright, alright, relax — I'm not going to do anything to him." Mahiko waved a dismissive hand. "He's not dead yet. What's with the funeral face? That eager to mourn?"
Several rabbits came bounding in from all directions, merging together mid-air. The white, fluffy mass expanded, stretched, and transfigured — until it had become a single enormous white bird. The bird's talons locked around the unconscious Inumaki and lifted him into the air.
"That said — I will be borrowing him for a bit."
Cursed Speech was honestly kind of fascinating, all things considered. She wanted to take a proper look at how it worked.
"Put him down!!" Maki lunged forward.
"I know, I know — I'll put him back when I'm done~"
A pair of wings unfurled from Mahiko's back — pure white, beautiful feathers reshaped by Idle Transfiguration. She beat her wings once, and together with the great white bird, the girl took to the sky.
Maki didn't make it to her in time.
She raised her arm, ready to hurl her cursed tool like a javelin —
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM——!!
The middle section of the entire abandoned building exploded simultaneously.
Rabbits that had been hidden throughout the structure at some unknown point all detonated at once. The chain explosions spread upward and downward from the center — the floors above and below Maki's position were blown apart, steel rebar and concrete raining down in chunks.
The floor beneath her feet cracked, tilted, and gave way. Maki had no choice but to leap, picking out footholds amid the collapsing structure.
By the time she finally found solid ground and looked up, the blue-haired girl and the great white bird were already far, far away.
And it was at that moment that Nanami and Yuji finally arrived.
They caught sight of Mahiko's retreating figure in the sky, and the unconscious Inumaki dangling from the white bird's talons.
"Chase her!!"
They couldn't let Inumaki be taken.
Every last drop of Cursed Energy flooded their bodies as they sprinted with everything they had. The faster ones broke out of the abandoned building complex first. Nobara Kugisaki and Maki, slower, were left behind.
Panda, Maki, and Nanami gave the tightest pursuit, leaping from rooftop to rooftop.
Mahiko turned and scattered rabbit bombs behind her. Detonation.
BOOM BOOM BOOM — the rabbit bombs exploded the moment they drew close, forcing Maki and Nanami to dodge, bleeding off their speed once more.
There was nothing for it. The gap was widening. Even bounding across rooftops, there were still obstacles to clear. And the buildings weren't dense enough to support an unbroken rooftop sprint.
The distance between them and Mahiko kept growing.
"Don't you run——!!" Maki screamed.
But Mahiko banked behind a tall building, and disappeared from Maki's line of sight.
Had Mahiko escaped?
Almost.
She'd already opened up enough of a lead that even if she stopped moving, it would take them at least two minutes to close the gap. The only reason they could keep chasing at all was the clear open sightlines from the sky.
The moment she used this window — while she was out of their view — to slip away, they'd have no idea where she'd gone.
But there was one person Mahiko was still wary of. She couldn't figure out why Fushiguro hadn't joined the chase.
Maki Zenin's physical specs weren't enough to sustain the kind of high-speed rooftop parkour that Nanami and the others were managing over long distances. But she had her own way of moving fast.
The bird Shikigami of the Fushiguro clan — it could carry a rider through the air. That was exactly what Mahiko had been most on guard against: the fear that Maki would come swooping in on that bird and drop Mahoraga on her from above, Pacific Rim-style, like a Jaeger being helicopter-deployed into a fight.
She'd been watching for it the entire time.
But… she really had seen Maki falling further and further behind, unable to keep up, probably only just now clearing the abandoned building zone.
Why, though?
Had she lost the bird, or was there some other reason?
Mahiko let herself breathe — just for a moment.
And then the next second, a sharp cry rang out from her flank, accompanied by the crackling roar of lightning and the wild discharge of Cursed Energy.
Mahiko snapped her head around, blinking.
It was Yuji Itadori — jaw set, teeth clenched — being carried by Maki Zenin's bird from a different direction, rocketing toward her from the side of the building on an intercept trajectory.
So Maki hadn't been absent at all. She'd given her bird to Yuji.
BOOM!!—
Yuji threw a punch.
Mahiko slipped aside lightly.
Yuji's fist slammed into the building and punched a hole clean through the wall.
The area was sparsely populated — this building, too, was temporarily vacant, sitting empty between tenants. As Yuji pressed the attack, Mahiko ducked inside through the hole, pulling Inumaki in with her.
Yuji leapt in after her. Facing the smiling Mahiko, he settled into a fighting stance, eyes blazing: "Give Inumaki-senpai back!!"
"You want to fight me one-on-one? Seriously?" Mahiko smiled pleasantly. "Your friends have maybe two minutes before they catch up. You think you can take me down in two minutes?"
Sixty-eight years from now, when you're the Tiger Emperor laying waste to your whole generation — sure, I'll concede the point.
But right now? You're still just little Yuji.
Cursed vessel or not, I'd rather not fight you — but don't mistake that for fear. I'm genuinely not scared of you, okay?
____
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