The Shibuya Incident, Part 42

With Mahito's soul wounded by Resonance, Yuji regains his confidence and pummels the curse, while Nobara presses the double in the alley. Recognizing his trouble on both ends, Mahito decides it is time for his twin selves to trade opponents, setting up a strike that lands squarely on Nobara.

Reading Nobara's technique, Yuji unloads rapid cursed-energy punches while the lingering effect of Resonance keeps Mahito from moving well. As he bashes the curse into a pillar, Yuji thanks Nobara for reminding him he is not alone, having believed he had saved no one and wasted everyone's efforts. In the alley, the nail falls from the double's forehead and he flees into a subway entrance rather than continue. Nobara could ignore him but follows on a bad feeling, intending to exorcise him on the way to a lower platform. Before Yuji can finish Mahito's main body, the curse splits into many small spherical selves that scatter, flaring one up as a feint so Yuji smashes the wrong one, then reforms and runs.

Both Mahito selves enter the same corridor with a student chasing from each side. Yuji thinks Mahito is trying to heal until he spots Nobara and screams for her to run. Mahito's real body had masked the switch as a blind spot, and her fight with the double had lowered her guard against his hands. He lands a direct touch on Nobara's face, possibly fatal. Yuji kills the double with a single strike and rushes to her, while Mahito waits to see whether one touch is enough, recalling that it was not enough to finish Nanami in their first meeting. Holding her face, Nobara drifts into a memory of herself in 2009 as a spirited six-year-old playing Smash Bros, certain back then that everyone in her hometown was strange and she was the only normal one.

This chapter introduces a flashback glimpse of a young Nobara and continues the joint battle against Mahito. It corresponds to Episode 43 of the anime and ran in Weekly Shonen Jump issue 44 of 2020. The character Fumi debuts here in flashback, leading into Nobara's backstory in the chapters that follow.