Fearsome Womb

An urgent dispatch sends the trio toward West Tokyo, where the Eishu Juvenile Detention Center has spawned a cursed womb. Their orders are to extract any survivors while avoiding contact with special grade curses. Waiting outside is a distraught mother who begs the students to bring her son out safely if it is at all possible. Wanting to grant her plea, Yuji wins Nobara's agreement, and once Kiyotaka Ijichi wraps up the briefing the three enter as he lowers a curtain to wall the scene off from the outside world. The space they step into, though, proves to be no plain hallway but the interior of a curse's domain.

To track anyone still breathing, Megumi calls forth a Divine Dog. The lighthearted mood shatters the instant the shikigami guides them into a massacre, with the corpses of many inmates scattered around and the mother's boy among them. Yuji is set on hauling the body back outside, but Megumi sharply declines to endanger himself for a detention-center inmate, contending that sorcerers cannot rescue everyone, least of all those who might harm others later. Cut deep, Yuji fires back, demanding to know why Megumi rescued him to begin with. Nobara moves to break up the quarrel right before the floor gives way beneath her, dropping her into a black pit.

A grim discovery hits Megumi: his white Divine Dog lies destroyed, and he barks at Yuji to flee just as the special grade curse takes form right between the two of them. Both are paralyzed by dread until Yuji wills himself to attack, only for the curse to lop off his Slaughter Demon weapon and his hand in a single motion. Trapped in the dark below, Nobara meanwhile finds herself ringed by lesser curses. This chapter brings in Kiyotaka Ijichi, Tadashi's mother, and the dead Tadashi Okazaki, and it sets off both Nobara's fight with the cursed spirits and Yuji's bout with the Finger Bearer. The events line up with the anime's fourth episode.