Mai Zenin

Aside from her shorter hair, Mai was virtually identical to her twin Maki. The hair fell just to her neck, black in the manga and dark green in the anime, with bangs combed to the right; her eyes were green on the page and dark amber on screen, framed by thin brows.

Her everyday wear was the traditional Jujutsu High uniform. Training called for a long-sleeved tracksuit, white through the body with black sleeves and shoulders, plus black pants. As a girl she dressed in a dark kimono tied with a black sash, and off duty she favored a sleeveless high-collar black shirt paired with black shoes and a long skirt in the same black.

Mai, like Maki, came up enduring the Zenin clan's contempt for a girl who showed little jujutsu talent. Where Maki burned to defy the clan and become a sorcerer, Mai grudgingly settled for a servant's life and would sooner do chores than fight. The backlash from Maki's defiance dragged Mai into sorcery training all the same, a path she despised, and she blamed her sister for forcing the grim trade on them both. Out of that grew a crude, snarky, ego-stroking young woman who unloaded her bitterness on others, above all her rivals and her twin. She put up with Aoi Todo better than anyone and trailed him to look tougher, got on well with Momo Nishimiya and Kasumi Miwa, and showed clear disappointment at Kokichi Muta's betrayal.

Fully conscious of Maki's physical gifts, Mai nonetheless acted as though her sister had none, jabbing at her before the Goodwill Event and needling the Tokyo first-years, even mocking the freshly dead Yuji to wound them. Under the spite sat old hurt: Maki had once promised never to leave her, and when Maki abandoned the clan and broke that word, Mai started branding her a liar, withholding everything from her, even her first crush and her own cursed technique. Beaten by Maki, she asked why her sister had not fallen down the hole alongside her, dissatisfied with the reply and holding tight to her grudge. Only when their father turned on them both, leaving the twins at death's door, did Mai lay her bitterness down and choose to spend her life so Maki might go on, owning that she had merely been a drag on her sister and asking Maki, in an echo of their childhood, to tear everything apart in return.

Mai held the rank of grade 3 with little gift for jujutsu. She came into the world possessing both a cursed technique and a deeper cursed-energy pool than Maki, yet not nearly the amount needed to make that technique work, and she lacked both her sister's inborn physical talent and any drive to fight, pressed into the job solely because Maki walked out on the clan. Even so, she squeezed every bit of use from what she had. As a marksman she excelled and preferred distance, capable of a point-blank hit with cursed-energy rubber rounds or a pinpoint shot from far away; she rescued Momo at the Goodwill Event by striking Nobara's temple across a great gap, and in Shibuya she settled into a sniper's stance to plant telling shots on Kenjaku.

Her reserves sat above what a non-sorcerer carries but under the typical sorcerer's, so she generally charged her gun and loosed reinforced bullets. Construction, her innate technique, conjured matter from nothing but ran terribly inefficient, limiting her to one bullet a day with a backlash bad enough to bring on a nosebleed; near death, she also wrung from it a cursed-tool sword at the price of her life. Her gear centered on a Colt Python .357 Magnum she charged with cursed energy, the revolver letting her bluff her round count and blindside foes with a constructed seventh shot, and she added a marksman's sniper rifle loaded with live rounds during Shibuya.