Chapter 5

Driving her cursed nails into the head of a possessed mannequin, Nobara detonates it using cursed energy and appears to have wiped out the final spirit. Then she catches sight of a small boy curled in a corner who will not come out, a reluctance she jokingly chalks up to her own striking looks. Turning to track down Yuji, she hears the child cry out and spins back to a grim scene: a craftier curse is holding him as a shield. Weak though it is, the spirit has the cunning to flip the standoff, so Nobara lowers her weapons. In that moment a single name surfaces in her mind, Saori, and a longing for one final meeting with her.

Yuji crashes through a wall and frees the boy by lopping off the spirit's arm with his new weapon. The curse nearly escapes, but Nobara snares it with her technique and exorcises it, proving to Gojo just how unhinged she can be. Asked why she wants to be a shaman, she explains it was her route out to Tokyo and her shot at living honestly as herself, a choice she traces back to Saori, a girl from the city she once knew in her hometown. Far from the abandoned house, a cursed womb has begun nurturing a special grade cursed spirit.

The final pages leap ahead to an ominous tease: come July 2018, three students are sent to confront that swelling curse, and a single one of them dies. Belonging to the Fearsome Womb Arc and set in Roppongi, Tokyo, this chapter wraps the bout against the cursed spirits, puts Nobara's Straw Doll Technique and its Resonance variant on display, and adapts into Episode 3 of the anime.