Dust rolled across the training ground in lazy sheets.
Kusakabe stood there, frozen stiff, replaying that absurdly fast exchange over and over in his head. The more he thought about it, the harder his heart slammed against his ribs.
Wait. Did I pull the strike because he was a kid? Did I back off without even noticing?
No. Stupid thought. He killed it before it could grow legs.
Nobody understood his own sword better than Kusakabe did. He had avoided the vitals, sure. This was sparring, not an execution. But the speed, the power, the snap behind that swing? That had been well above the Grade 1 line.
It had been a real strike.
Which made the other possibility even more ridiculous.
Touma's counters, that smooth chain of moves that looked almost like he had known what was coming, had that really been luck? Some blind cat tripping over a dead mouse?
Hold on.
Kusakabe's breath caught.
Was that his Cursed Technique?
A chill ran straight down his spine.
Right. Mei Mei had mentioned it before. The transfer student had some weird ability that let him copy other people's techniques. Kusakabe had been so focused on the clash that he'd nearly forgotten.
But during that exchange, he hadn't sensed even a trace of Residual Cursed Energy from an Innate Technique.
Which was, frankly, worse.
A battle-tested Grade 1 sorcerer had just been taken apart head-on by a first-year who had only been practicing jujutsu for a few months. No Innate Technique. No trick. Just raw physical movement against New Shadow Style.
And New Shadow Style had lost.
What kind of joke is this?
Then another detail hit him.
That burst of strength.
His thoughts scrambled around, desperate to put the world back into a shape that made sense.
When Touma caught his katana with that short blade, the muscles in his arm had snapped tight like something detonating under the skin. That kind of force was not normal. It could not be normal. A human body did not just do that.
It had to be some kind of technique effect. Or maybe Touma had secretly copied a physical enhancement technique. Yes. That had to be it.
It had to be.
Cold sweat soaked Kusakabe's back. He clung to that explanation like it was the last decent plank in a flood. Without it, his whole understanding of jujutsu started looking very stupid.
While Kusakabe was busy patching holes in his worldview, Touma had already walked back to his starting point.
This time, he did not lower himself into that coiled, predatory stance. He held Asakirimaru loosely in one hand and stood straight, almost relaxed, watching Kusakabe with calm eyes.
"Mr. Kusakabe, are you ready? Shall we continue?"
Soft voice. Polite question.
It still hit like a hammer.
Every bit of Kusakabe's earlier let's hurry this up and go home mood vanished. He had already lost once, cleanly. If he went into the next round with that same lazy attitude, he might actually embarrass himself in public.
His brow tightened. His eyes sharpened in a way they had not in a long time. Both hands closed around the long grip of his katana.
"Yeah, kid." His voice dropped, all the joking scraped out of it. "This time, I'm not playing around."
The words had barely left his mouth when cursed energy burst out of him like a furnace kicked to full blast. Under his feet, a crescent-shaped arc of pale light appeared on the ground.
New Shadow Style: Simple Domain: Evening Moon.
Touma's eyes narrowed.
He could tell at once that Kusakabe had changed gears. The first loss had lit a fire under him. He was serious now, properly angry, and the cursed energy rolling off him was on a completely different level from before.
But Touma did not rush in.
He stayed where he was, rooted like a tree, and stretched his cursed energy perception as far as it could go. Every thread of awareness spread outward. Every contour, every ripple, every tiny fluctuation in Kusakabe's Simple Domain was filed away.
This round, Touma was not here to attack.
He was here to learn.
And his body was going to be the notebook.
In the next instant, the edge of Kusakabe's Simple Domain surged outward. The invisible boundary swelled like a clear set of jaws snapping shut, swallowing Touma even though he had been outside the original two-meter range.
That expansion was only the opening move.
The moment Touma entered the domain, Kusakabe blurred.
He crossed the distance in a heartbeat and appeared right in front of Touma's face.
What came next was the full weight of a swordsman who had clawed his way up to Grade 1 without a single Innate Technique. A storm of slashes crashed down, each one boosted by the domain's automatic counterattack protocol, each one moving with the precision of trained reflex burned into bone.
Clang! Clang! Clang! CLANG!
At this distance, the short blade's weakness showed itself immediately.
Against a full-length katana, Asakirimaru simply did not have enough reach. Touma could not step in and cut off the arc before it formed. He was forced to defend.
His wrist became a blur. The short blade whipped back and forth, trying to build a wall of steel in front of him.
It was not enough.
The domain-enhanced slashes came too fast and too thick. Even pushing himself to the limit, Touma could only stop about seventy or eighty percent of them.
The rest got through.
Wet ripping sounds followed one after another.
Red lines opened across his body, some deep enough to flash white bone underneath. His black Jujutsu High uniform split apart. Blood sprayed over grass and broken stone, dotting the training ground like ugly red rain.
The shriek of colliding blades filled the air without pause. It was sharp, metallic, and maddening.
Touma could have ended it whenever he wanted.
One thought, and Phantom Night Parade could call up Gojo's Limitless. The rain of steel would become pointless. Not a single cut would reach him.
Or he could be even more direct. There were several ugly, efficient ways to shut Kusakabe down on the spot. The easiest was to use his technique-stripping ability and tear New Shadow Style: Simple Domain: Evening Moon right out of Kusakabe's hands.
The Grade 1 swordsman would freeze mid-swing, helpless.
Touma did none of it.
His goal was very clear, and beating Kusakabe was not part of it.
Beating Kusakabe would be easy. It would also be worthless.
What Touma wanted was the structure of New Shadow Style's Simple Domain. He wanted to steal the principles behind it without wasting a Phantom Night Parade replication slot. He wanted to learn it the way an ordinary jujutsu sorcerer would.
With his body.
With pain.
With exposure.
So he made a choice that would have looked completely insane to anyone watching.
He endured it.
Every slash he failed to parry, he took with his flesh. At the same time, he pushed Reverse Cursed Technique to maximum output, stitching himself back together in real time.
White steam hissed from his wounds.
Through the frantic clash of blades, Kusakabe watched in horror as a shoulder he had just cut open, flesh peeled back to muscle, sealed itself shut a second later. Positive cursed energy flooded the injury, fusing tissue and rebuilding skin.
And then, a fraction of a second later, his katana tore that same fresh skin open again.
Healed.
Cut open.
Healed again.
Cut open again.
Touma's expression did not change.
Not once.
Kusakabe's thoughts stalled.
He had expected a lot of things from an all-out assault. A desperate counterattack. A sloppy retreat. Maybe panic, maybe anger. Not this. Not someone choosing to stand in the kill zone and regenerate through it, holding a losing position through sheer, disgusting endurance.
He did not even have the room in his head to properly appreciate how terrifying the technique control was. Running precise Reverse Cursed Technique while parrying in a close-range knife fight was insane on its own.
But the decision itself was worse.
Has he lost his mind?
Kusakabe's pupils trembled. His sword hand was already starting to ache.
Is his nervous system broken? Reverse Cursed Technique heals flesh, yeah, but the pain still gets to the brain. A blade cuts through muscle, severs nerves, all of that still registers. Can he not feel any of this?
Seconds dragged by.
One minute.
Two.
Three.
Five full minutes.
The sustained assault tore Kusakabe's breathing to pieces. Sweat gathered across his forehead, and with every swing, the dread in his stomach twisted tighter.
A question he badly did not want to ask kept crawling back up.
The blood-soaked boy in front of him, the one being ripped apart and repaired over and over, was he still human? Did he feel pain? Did he understand exhaustion? Or was this some higher-order curse wearing a very convincing human skin, something that had never learned what suffering meant?
Could someone who had only been a jujutsu sorcerer for a few months really have a mind and will forged to this point?
Kusakabe was practically screaming inside.
What kind of deranged Spartan education is Tokyo Jujutsu High running now? What the hell kind of monsters has Masamichi Yaga been raising?
By the fifth minute, numbness had settled in completely.
And then Kusakabe noticed something that hammered the final nail into his disbelief.
Touma had no intention of calling for a stop.
Worse, he had been adjusting the entire time.
The kid had read him. He had figured out the one thing Kusakabe could not hide: in a spar like this, there was no chance Kusakabe would aim for the head or heart.
So Touma stopped healing the non-lethal cuts.
He let them bleed. He saved the cursed energy that would have gone into Reverse Cursed Technique and spent it only on the wounds that actually mattered.
The tactical sense behind that choice was bad enough. The calm needed to execute it mid-combat was worse.
From the moment he accepted Mei Mei's commission, Kusakabe had had a rough guess about Touma's plan.
A rich kid with too much money and no proper lineage, trying to work around New Shadow Style's strict rules by hiring a sparring partner and "teaching himself" through live combat. Get hit enough times, watch closely enough, and steal the secret.
Kusakabe had almost laughed at the idea back then.
Easier said than done.
If New Shadow Style could be cracked by watching a few swings and eating a few cuts, the school would have become useless centuries ago.
But now, watching this lunatic stand in a widening pool of his own blood, eyes tracking every slash like a researcher studying a specimen, Kusakabe felt his certainty start to crack.
Maybe with someone this far gone, someone willing to wreck himself for the answer, the stupid plan might actually work.
For one shameful second, he even wondered whether Touma was a real masochist. Not as an insult. Literally. Did the kid actually believe a few more cuts and a few more liters of blood would be enough to unlock New Shadow Style?
Then Kusakabe's focus slipped.
Just a little.
Fatigue had built up in his arm, and for one heartbeat, his blade's path gained a tiny hitch.
That was when he heard it.
Between Touma's blood-flecked lips came a quiet murmur, so low it sounded like it had crawled up from somewhere deep and dark.
"I see. So that's how the cursed energy conducts..."
Touma's eyes snapped open.
Each word that followed landed clear and heavy, one after another. Kusakabe felt his soul try to evacuate his body.
"New... Shadow Style... Simple Domain..."
Hummmmm.
A pulse of cursed energy erupted from Touma.
Kusakabe felt it in his bones.
And horrifyingly familiar.
Beneath Touma's feet, without a stance, without a wind-up, without any visible trigger, a perfect circular domain bloomed into existence. It shone with a cold blue light.
Then it expanded.
It hit Kusakabe's own domain with brute force, like a battering ram slamming into a gate.
Two domains.
The same nature.
Different owners.
The moment they overlapped, the air screamed.
A harsh electric crackle tore through the space between them as the barriers collided and began chewing each other apart.
And with that collapse came the thing Kusakabe feared most.
His automatic counterattack protocol, the engine that locked onto intruders and moved his blade by reflex, stuttered.
Sputtered.
Died.
Like someone had yanked the power cord out of the wall.
The domain feeding it dissolved in real time.
His katana, still mid-swing, turned into dead weight in his hands. The precision was gone. The supernatural guidance was gone. All of it, gone.
Kusakabe stared at the boy in front of him.
Blood still ran from a dozen open wounds. A perfect, functioning Simple Domain spun beneath his feet. Kusakabe's own signature technique had been copied cleanly and turned back on him.
Every muscle in Kusakabe's face twitched.
He looked like a man who had just seen a ghost. His jaw dropped. His eyes went wide.
And from the bottom of his lungs, with perfect pronunciation and a lifetime's worth of shock packed into one breath, he delivered his verdict.
"What... the... FUCK?!"
---
Join my Patreon for early access to chapters: patreon.com/rivyura
Next Target 600PS :)