Domain Expansion takes time. Not glacially slow — but enough, usually, to give the opponent a window to think, to formulate a counter, and to act on it.
And in Mahiko's case, her Domain Expansion had a hard requirement: the "crowd propagation" process. It needed to spread through people first. That made hers slower than most — or rather, considerably slower.
But... Kenjaku and his allies genuinely hadn't recognized Mahiko's singing as the prelude to a Domain.
Surrounded by powerful enemies. Hopelessly outmatched. Her body broken. And yet the girl had devised her counter — a desperate, all-or-nothing gambit. She had poured every ounce of understanding she had accumulated about Jujutsu since crossing into this world, and staked it all on a path that any sorcerer she might have described it to would have called flatly impossible —
To create something no one had ever created before. A miracle. An open-air Domain Expansion.
And in the end, she succeeded.
Golden radiance blazed in every direction. White feathers fell like snow. Thousands upon thousands of people surrounded Mahiko, and the girl herself looked, in that moment, like an angel descended from the heavens.
And still the Domain kept expanding.
The sacred song rang out again, reverberating in vast, sweeping waves.
The principle behind Mahiko's Domain was this: she had abandoned the conventional barrier that serves as a Domain's structural foundation. In its place, she used the surrounding humans as her support.
Through Idle Transfiguration, she had reshaped each person into someone capable of channeling Cursed Energy — and of transmitting the manifestation of her Domain. Their bodies became routers. Living, breathing relay nodes that propagated and sustained her innate Domain, allowing it to exist not as a closed space, but as an open field spreading freely across the world.
Wherever the golden light reached. Wherever the sacred song echoed. That was where Mahiko's Domain spread.
Within her Domain, anyone who failed to counter it with a Domain of their own would be caught by the guaranteed-hit effect of Idle Transfiguration. They would be infected by the sacred song — which carried the same force as Cursed Speech — and be [Assimilated] into Mahiko's spiritual kindred, becoming part of her innate Domain itself.
This Assimilation could be temporary or permanent, depending on Mahiko's will.
Simultaneously, the Domain would automatically reshape the assimilated person's brain into that of a sorcerer's, and carve a Jujutsu Technique into them in the form of a router.
In the process, Mahiko could, of course, effortlessly administer targeted healing to each and every person's body.
Perhaps, if she had never been backed into a corner — if there had never been any need to burn every bridge and throw everything on a single bet — she might never have attempted a Domain like this. Not ever.
It was precisely because she wanted both things at once — to fight her enemies and to save the people — that the inspiration had struck. That she had dragged an impossible miracle into reality.
Right now, the girl felt as though she were floating in a gentle breeze she had never felt before.
Even though Cursed Energy was burning away at a terrifying rate, and the girl — who had already been running on fumes — might be able to sustain this Domain for far less time than she imagined...
Even though this was her first time truly manifesting a Domain, and countless details were still rough, the Domain still unstable...
Even though the powerful enemies had not been dealt with, and the danger had not passed.
But... the girl savored this moment, just the same.
The sacred song surrounded her. Thousands gathered in her wake. She had climbed an entire step higher on the ladder of Jujutsu — felt herself close her fist around its very core.
In this moment, the girl felt a joy and a happiness she had never known before.
Mahiko lowered her gaze, looking past the storm of white feathers filling the sky, toward where Kenjaku stood.
"Domain Expansion." In that same moment, Kenjaku, knowing he could no longer afford any arrogance, hardened his expression and wove the seals without hesitation. "[Womb Profusion]."
Not in a thousand years had Kenjaku witnessed a Domain Expansion like Mahiko's. Neither the singing as its wind-up, nor the halo blazing above her head — none of it had his mind leapt to the words "Domain Expansion." By the time he had truly understood what was happening, Mahiko's Domain was already a single touch away from detonating.
He had no time to employ any other countermeasure. No time to run.
He had no leisure now to worry about protecting the intelligence he carried. He had to expand his own Domain, right now, immediately, and meet hers head-on.
And at this point, only his Domain could stand against it.
Ishiryuu had a Domain — but Ishiryuu's was a closed Domain. Against an open-air Domain already spread across this scale, a closed Domain stood no chance whatsoever.
So it had to be Kenjaku.
As Kenjaku completed his seals, a colossal womb-tree rose slowly into being behind him.
Its trunk twisted and coiled on itself. Countless grotesque, howling faces clawed their way out through the bark. Thick, viscous darkness crept along every branch, beginning to push and grind against Mahiko's golden, sacred Domain.
To be clear: Kenjaku's barrier techniques and his Domain were still considerably superior to Mahiko's.
He was, after all, a thousand-year-old monster. Even if Mahiko had expanded an open-air Domain through something approaching a miracle, in a pure Domain-versus-Domain contest, a millennium of accumulated mastery still gave Kenjaku the edge.
But the problem was — Kenjaku had been far, far too late in expanding his Domain.
Too late.
An open-air Domain has no barrier — but it still requires time to spread. Mahiko had expanded first, by a significant margin, because Kenjaku hadn't recognized her Domain for what it was. By the time Kenjaku's Domain had even begun to push outward, Mahiko's had already blanketed more than half the surrounding district.
Not just the airspace above the hotel — even many of the people deep inside the buildings below had been Assimilated by Mahiko, drawn in, made part of the choir.
And there was one more thing.
— Mahiko's Domain grew stronger in direct proportion to the number of people she had Assimilated.
If it had been only Mahiko alone, her Domain would honestly have been less effective than the closed Domain that lasted a fraction of a second — less useful, even, than a single punch saturated with Cursed Energy.
But now, her Domain had swept over tens of thousands of people.
Enough that Kenjaku felt danger.
— Felt the threat of death.
Only now did Kenjaku understand just how catastrophically foolish his casual dismissal of Mahiko had been — and how deeply that carelessness had dropped him into this dire, precarious situation.
"You absolute monster!" Kenjaku snarled, laughing through his teeth, and began pulling Cursed Spirits from the shadows in a continuous stream, burning them down into raw Cursed Energy to help sustain his Domain. "Get ready, all of you!"
He wasn't telling them to expand their own Domains. He was telling Ishiryuu and Rime to form up and protect him.
Because in the distance, Mahiko had already raised a finger, aimed directly at Kenjaku.
A Domain doesn't only grant a guaranteed-hit effect to Techniques — it also amplifies the raw power of Mahiko's Technique itself.
Kenjaku was terrifying.
Mahiko had caught Kenjaku completely off guard. She had expanded an open-air Domain that should never have been possible. And yet even so, Kenjaku was holding her — an output nearly at her theoretical maximum — at bay with his own Domain.
He truly was the greatest villain lurking in the shadows of this entire story.
Mahiko raised her hand. Extended one finger.
And then thousands of followers raised their hands, and extended their fingers alongside her.
Mahiko's fingertip grazed a feather. The feather transformed into a pristine, gleaming longsword.
And thousands of followers tore feathers from their own wings and shaped them into longswords in kind.
Once a Domain Expansion runs its full course, Mahiko's Technique will burn out — a total fuse-blow — and her Cursed Energy will be scraped to the very bottom. She will no longer be capable of fighting at all.
So this Domain clash was, inevitably, the final opportunity to decide everything.
The girl had to give absolutely everything she had.
"[Cleave]."
The word fell — and ten thousand swords flew.
The white swords in the hands of thousands of followers blazed with sacred light, cascading like a monsoon downpour toward Kenjaku, plunging into the darkness of the womb-tree Domain.
These swords would be disrupted by Kenjaku's guaranteed-hit effect — but to prevent himself from being distracted during the Domain clash, Kenjaku urgently called Ishiryuu and Rime forward to intercept the blades.
But Mahiko's assault was unrelenting, like a curtain of endless rain that simply refused to stop.
As she Assimilated others, she could also draw a portion of their Cursed Energy back in return — a form of replenishment, siphoned from the followers whose bodies had been remade into sorcerers' bodies. This meant she could sustain this barrage for a while longer yet.
The golden world and the pitch-black abyss of chaos began pushing against each other in earnest.
The Domain edges began to fluctuate, trading ground back and forth.
Kenjaku's eyes began to tremble.
And Mahiko felt her Cursed Energy drawing near its absolute limit.
Truthfully, that she had fought her way this far in this battle was already a miracle.
Even if anyone else from Jujutsu Kaisen had been in her place, none of them could have arrived at this point — not in a battle this close to unwinnable from the start.
Kenjaku's thousand years of accumulated Jujutsu ran too deep to measure. Rime, Ishiryuu — if they recovered to their peak, every single one of them would surpass the current Mahiko by leagues upon leagues.
Overcoming the weak against the strong was brutally hard.
Taking on many enemies at once was brutally hard.
Layering complex feints, flexible tactics, exploiting the enemy's deliberate restraint, exploiting their arrogance — and then, at the very end, pulling off a miracle, expanding the open-air Domain that no one could have anticipated — the girl had spent every last card she held, exhausted every last drop of her potential, to reach this point. And still she could feel Kenjaku's Domain like the deepest abyss imaginable, its bottom impossible to see.
A flicker of anxiety stirred in the girl's chest.
Her goal was to save people and get out. In theory, Jujutsu High personnel were already on their way — if she could toss Nobara Kugisaki and these followers toward the incoming Jujutsu High team, Kenjaku's frame-up scheme would collapse, everyone would be saved, and she would win.
But she could no longer simply pause the Domain and turn to run. If she released the Domain, her Technique would blow out — and then it would all be over.
So she had no choice but to push through to the end.
On the brink of her absolute limit.
Every part of her — Cursed Energy core, the soul itself — was screaming.
That was the most dangerous state.
That was the final burst of flame before the fire died.
Mahiko smiled. Her right arm shot upward — and in an instant, her entire arm erupted into flame.
The smile earlier, when she had first expanded the Domain — that had been the ease of someone who had climbed a higher step and turned the tide. But this smile, now, was because she had suddenly realized her own worrying had been excessive.
She had always kept herself wary of the powerful figures in Jujutsu Kaisen. She had always believed that Kenjaku, Yuta, and the rest were formidably strong — that she should never face them head-on.
Because somewhere in her instincts, she assumed her ceiling was simply lower than many of the top-tier fighters in the original story.
Instinctively, she had placed those who exceeded even ordinary Special Grades — Kenjaku and his ilk — at a height so extreme she could barely look up at it.
But...
If she thought about it carefully — who could actually say with certainty that her ceiling was truly limited?
It wasn't.
She was far, far stronger than even she herself had predicted.
The miracle she had just achieved — the open-air Domain Expansion — was the best proof of that.
So there was nothing left to worry about.
Mahiko raised her arm. The burning arm blazed like a torch held aloft.
Tens of thousands of longswords converged into one single colossal greatsword — and it ignited, wreathed in roaring, crimson holy flame.
The blue-haired girl broke into a radiant, sweeping smile.
"Come on then!" she cried out loud.
"You're the challenger here!"
Her arm swung down — and the blazing holy greatsword swung with it.
The final, all-out strike.
Cleaving straight toward Kenjaku's womb-tree, with its countless howling, grotesque faces.
—
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