Girl of Steel

The final first-year joins Gojo's class. Sharp-tongued and called the Girl of Steel, Nobara is unmoved by her peers right up until a curse-clearing job ties her to Yuji. With a stranger's survival hinging on her decision, she finds herself turning back to her own past.

Arriving in Tokyo to honor a promise once made with her friend Saori, Nobara meets the boys in Harajuku and bluntly dismisses both Yuji and Megumi. The trio expects a flashy outing across the city; instead Gojo marches them to a curse-infested ruin beside a graveyard. He frames the outing as an evaluation for the pair of recruits, hands Yuji the cursed knife Slaughter Demon, and bars him from tapping Sukuna's strength. Megumi is benched, since the whole exercise exists to measure Nobara.

Sent upstairs alone, Nobara meets a possessed mannequin and drives her nails into its face, shattering it as cursed energy courses through the strikes. She then stumbles on a hidden child, whom a lurking curse grabs as a hostage to flaunt its intelligence. Putting the boy first, she lays down her weapon, and Yuji smashes through the wall to lop off the curse's arm and free the child. Nobara seals the kill using Straw Doll Technique: Resonance on the severed limb. A look back shows she enrolled at Jujutsu Tech specifically to reach Tokyo, driven by how her hometown shunned Saori for being an outsider.

Drawing from chapters four and five of the Fearsome Womb Arc, the episode reached Japan on October 17, 2020. Gojo treats the trial as a gauge of the particular madness a sorcerer needs, the same edge Yuji already displays. A report at the close warns that within a month the three are dispatched against a cursed womb where one of them perishes. Several anime-only touches stretch Nobara's backstory into about three minutes of footage, and this entry debuts the post-credits Juju Stroll. From this point on, Nobara and Yaga also appear in the opening's group shot.