Jujutsu Kaisen: How Did Nobara injure Mahito? Her Cursed Technique, explained

In the latest episode of the second season of Jujutsu Kaisen's television anime series, fans saw the fight between Nobara Kugisaki and one of Mahito’s two bodies underway. More specifically, Kugisaki was revealed to be fighting Mahito’s double, while series protagonist Yuji Itadori continued his fight against Mahito’s main body.

While many Jujutsu Kaisen fans admired Nobara’s willingness to fight such a dangerous enemy, essentially every viewer was skeptical of how she could actually damage Mahito’s body. This stems from the fact that traditional techniques cannot injure Mahito’s soul, with the general consensus being that Nobara’s would also be ineffective.

However, as fans saw in Jujutsu Kaisen anime’s latest outing, that is far from the case, with Nobara being able to inflict severe damage on Mahito, thanks to a unique aspect of her Technique. While some fans were confused by this turn of events and how Nobara was actually able to injure Mahito, there is a relatively simple explanation as to how she was able to do so.

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Jujutsu Kaisen’s Nobara Kugisaki uses a technique first seen in season 1 to deal severe damage to Mahito

How did Nobara injure Mahito? Explained

Nobara Kugisaki’s Cursed Technique in Jujutsu Kaisen is known as the Straw Doll Technique, which sees her utilize sorcery through a set of tools including a hammer, nails, and a straw doll. By channeling her Cursed Energy through the tools in various ways, Nobara can utilize a number of different techniques, such as (but not limited to) splitting damage between her straw doll and her target.

One of the ways in which her Cursed Energy can be used through her Cursed Technique is known as the Resonance attack. Resonance sees Nobara’s Cursed Energy applied to her target by using a straw doll as an effigy, or by using a severed body part of her target to establish a link, which attacks more critical areas of her target’s body.

Nobara can also use her Cursed Technique in the form of Hairpin, which allows her to detonate her nails with explosive force by overloading them with Cursed Energy. This can turn them into large area-of-effect weapons with a larger reach than what Nobara can normally achieve. However, they can also be used in conjunction with Resonance to set up the latter move on stronger Cursed Spirits.

In any of the above cases, activation of Resonance, following its setup, causes large black and almost nail-like spikes to protrude from the target’s body, as seen in the latest Jujutsu Kaisen episode. In the case of Mahito’s double, Nobara used the double’s body as an effigy for Resonance by hammering a nail into its forehead, which allowed her to attack Mahito’s soul directly.

Likewise, attacking Mahito’s soul directly (which applies to both of the Mahitos) allowed her to attack his main body, which is confirmed via the appearance of black spikes in the main body. To reiterate, the activation of Resonance on Mahito’s double allowed damage to travel to his soul and main body, with the damage then rebounding back to the double, resulting in both being severely injured.

The use of Resonance also led Nobara to realize her Cursed Energy was appearing elsewhere in Shibuya. She also understood that Mahito chose to claw her during their fight rather than grab her and use his Cursed Technique. This led her to the revelation that the Mahito she was fighting was actually a double rather than the original.

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