Pointing at Fushiguro, who seems to have managed to insert his entire hand... into the ground? Except no, there's no hole nor anything, it's... in his shadow.

"Ooooo." Akiho heads over to look more closely, looking delighted. "Did you figure out a new thing, Inori-san?"

He hisses and quickly pulls his hand out, shaking it like it's been burnt or something, as soon as she calls him 'Inori-san'.

"Yes," he says, playing it off. "I can... store things. In my shadows."

(Maki raises an eyebrow.)

"Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to throw you off. But! You know what this means, don't you?"

"...I can use weapons in combat without worrying about my hands being free?"

"Yes, yes, that, but also!" She leans closer, with a vulpine smile. "It means you get to carry my things, too!"

He rolls his eyes. "Maybe if you ask nicely."

"But Inori-san! What would happen if I ran out of needles on a mission! Isn't it wise to have a case of spares for me in case I run out?"

"That doesn't sound like asking nicely to me."

"Fish flakes."

"Hmmmm. Maybe later!" And then she cheerfully bounces back over to Panda. "Right now I'm working on how to slice limbs off!"

"Terrifying," he says, shaking his head.

(But hot.)

"Salmon."

"It'll also expand her nonlethal options, since with a slightly different technique it could be used for binding, as well."

"But mostly slicing limbs off," says Akiho, in a stage whisper.

"Yeah yeah, you're very scary. Now stop talking about it and start doing it. So! Which weapon do you want to try out first?"

"...the bo staff."

She tosses him the staff, grinning. And then she gets to walking him through how to use it properly.

It hurts a bit to remember Itadori's lessons but they do in fact help him get what she's saying quicker than he otherwise would.

Maki is a competent teacher, if not as much of one as his fallen friend. She is definitely a fan of ‘tough love.’ Learning from her involves a lot of bruising.

Regardless, the next few days are a whirlwind of training progress. Both first years improve in cursed technique finesse. Akiho manages to reliably channel enough cursed energy through fishing line to bind, if not yet thinly and precisely enough to slice like she dreams. Inori gets a better feel for how his shadow storage works and what its limits are, and gets faster at adding or removing objects to it. And of course, they both get a crash course in close combat, which is very instructive, if also often painful. The second years do make them run errands as a sort of payment for their tutoring services, but going to fetch drinks and snacks from the school vending machines is a small price to pay for the quick progress.

“You’d think with how few people are on campus they’d have a poll about what we actually want in our vending machines,” sighs Akiho to Inori, on one of these errand runs. “Who’d even want some of these?”

She’s looking at you, butterscotch soda. Why do you exist, and why are you taking up important real estate in the vending machine.

It is an important part of the senpai-kōhai system that the kōhai run errands for the senpai. It's only fair, Inori thinks.

"Very few people are allowed in to work on these so we only get a handful of choices."

Then he blinks and looks to the left, where two people seem to have arrived, quietly enough to be almost completely silent. "What are you doing here, Zen'in-senpai?"

One of the two does indeed look like Maki... But she's definitely not Maki.

"Don't call me that, Inori-kun... You make me sound the same as Maki." She winks. "Just call me Mai."