The heavy impact did not bring the dull crack of breaking bones. Instead, there came a muffled sploosh, like something massive plunging into a deep pool.
Kaede's body slammed into the muddy ground and instantly lost its fixed shape, most of it splashing apart into a clear, transparent stream that scattered in every direction.
"Huh... that didn't hurt?"
Under the moonlight, the puddle rapidly contracted and writhed, as if alive, climbing back upward to rebuild the outline of a human body.
But when that body stood again, it was clearly leaner than it had been in the hallway. Clothes that had fit him before now hung loosely from his frame, giving him the weak, hollow look of something that had lost its support.
"What the hell is going on? Did I really get isekai'd?" Kaede's voice carried shock, unease, and confusion all at once.
Broken stone and dead grass floated in the standing water. Before that quiet murmur could vanish into the wind, the air above him was violently torn open by a crushing pressure.
"Boom!"
Mahito dropped like a meteor. The instant his feet hit the ground, his right hand had already transformed into a long, razor-sharp spike. With a sonic crack, it drove straight down through the freshly reformed body.
The spike pierced through the crown of Kaede's head, followed the line of his spine, and nailed his whole body into the wet earth.
No blood sprayed. No scream of pain followed.
The instant the spike touched the pierced area, the tight flesh-tone surface turned transparent, becoming a rapid whirlpool spinning around the spike.
Then the body split and stretched apart from the point of impact, like silk being torn down the middle.
What had seemed like his pinned-down "physical core" broke itself apart and reassembled in an instant, slipping free from Mahito's blind spot like a slick silver fish.
The body re-formed several yards away. Kaede's dark red eyes were full of shock and uncertainty, but his feet were already moving again, driven by pure survival instinct.
"Definitely not a dream! Run!"
Mahito stayed crouched with one hand planted in the dirt and slowly lifted his head.
His long hair whipped in the wind as he stared at the figure fleeing wildly through the weeds, his mismatched eyes shining with almost sick excitement.
He dug his fingers lightly into the soil, bringing up a trace of cool dampness.
"Wow. This is incredible."
Mahito rose from the crater and brushed dirt from his hands, his body trembling faintly from sheer excitement.
"Your brain and heart were both pierced, and not even the flow of your soul was disturbed...
No, maybe I should say that your 'body' itself is some kind of flowing cursed energy wrapped around consciousness? Even I'm jealous of a structure like that."
He started walking again, seemingly casual, but every step was warped by grotesque changes in form.
His ankles sprouted tough insect-like hind legs. Each kick off the ground left deep cracks behind as he launched himself forward like an arrow shot from a bow.
"If you can't die, then let's play a little rougher, okay?
I want to see whether, if this whole pool of yours gets completely evaporated, or poured into different containers, you'll still make that...
Mm. That wonderfully entertaining 'losing your shit' face."
Mahito's arm twisted again. This time, each fingertip grew into a long chain tipped with vicious hooks, slicing shrill arcs through the air as they shot toward the slimmer body from behind.
The barbed hook at the end of one chain flashed with a dark blue gleam under the moonlight and sank into Kaede's left shoulder at a wicked angle.
"Thunk!"
The dull sound of it punching into flesh came with the bizarre noise of liquid gushing out in volume.
There was no red blood where the hook tore through him. Instead, what spilled out was a bright, clear stream.
When the chain yanked hard, a large chunk of "flesh" was ripped straight from Kaede's shoulder.
But the instant it separated from his body, it collapsed fully into sparkling droplets, traced an arc through the air, and then gathered back into the staggering body thrown off balance by the pull.
Kaede's footsteps left a trail of uneven wet prints in the grass.
His body now seemed to be getting thinner and thinner from the violent drain on his cursed energy. The clothes hanging from him, once oversized but manageable, now snapped sharply in the wind as he ran, as though the frame supporting them was steadily shrinking.
"I'm just going to assume I really transmigrated, then that thing just now has to be my cursed technique... think, damn it..."
As he ran, constantly adjusting his balance, Kaede's brow furrowed hard. His knuckles had gone white from clenching his fists too tightly.
"Water... never heard of anything like this. What is cursed energy even supposed to feel like? I can't sense a thing!
Wait... emotions. Focus on emotions... feel what's inside me."
As he tried to grasp that vague emotional current, wisps of cold vapor began seeping from the surface of his body.
The muddy ground under his feet suddenly seemed even wetter, and fine beads of moisture started clinging to the dead grass around him.
Mahito landed lightly on an abandoned bench less than fifteen feet from Kaede, one hand resting on the backrest as his gray-blue hair lashed across the seams on his face in the bitter wind.
"Oh, that expression is good."
His mismatched eyes reflected the body ahead of him, constantly reforming, constantly shrinking. His tone carried the feverish thrill of someone uncovering a great truth.
"Are you trying to find that? Fear, hatred, or maybe the trembling that comes from staring into the unknown?"
He leaped again. Midair, his shape warped, both arms swelling into gigantic fan-shaped nets of twisted muscle, trying to cast themselves over the prey ahead and trap him completely.
"Cursed energy is the filthiest and most honest sediment there is, the stuff that pours out from the hollows in a soul.
But for something as clear and transparent as you, can you really produce emotions that heavy?"
Mahito moved with terrifying speed now. He had reshaped his feet into powerful hoof-like structures, and every step blasted a crater into the ground.
He rapidly closed the distance on the fleeing figure under the moonlight, his mismatched eyes brimming with a pathological need to dissect and understand.
"If you can't find it, then why don't I help you?
If I knead your 'soul' into pieces, then the cursed energy called 'despair' ought to burst out like a fountain!"
A blade of protruding bone suddenly burst from the earth, skimming low along the ground as it stabbed straight for the foot Kaede was planting for his next step.
Crack!
"Will you give it a rest already?!" Kaede shouted, furious, and hurled himself hard to the side.
The sharp bone blade erupted from the dirt and barely missed him, grazing the fading afterimage of his sidestep before stabbing uselessly into the night air.
At this point, he might actually be the unluckiest transmigrator in history. What kind of messed-up start was it to get dropped into Jujutsu Kaisen with no system, only to be hunted by a special grade curse right out of the gate?
Still, at least he had a cursed technique, and from the look of it, a pretty broken one at that.
Riding the momentum of that desperate sideways dive, his rapidly shrinking body smashed straight through a shattered first-floor corridor window.
"Damn it... why is that emotion getting burned up so fast?"
With the crash of breaking glass, pale moonlight lit up Kaede's condition.
After several violent rounds of liquefying and reforming, the clothes that had fit him before had clearly not survived whatever this unknown technique was doing to him.
His shirt was gone completely, exposing the thin back and pale skin of a teenage boy. His pants looked as though they had been eaten away by acid, hanging in shredded, soaked strips against legs that had visibly shrunk another size.
"I'm probably immune to physical attacks, and the price is that cursed energy... so for now, let's assume my technique is tied to water... water..."
Kaede kept thinking as he forced himself to run faster.
His battered figure, bare from the waist up, rolled across the floor to bleed off the impact. Then he scrambled up without hesitation and sprinted for the main doors leading out of the hospital.
Out in the courtyard, Mahito stopped chasing.
He did not leap through the broken window after him. Instead, he stood still, eyes narrowing slightly as he calmly watched that frail silhouette disappear farther down the dim corridor.
The wild grin on his stitched face gradually faded, replaced by something far more unnerving: the cold, rational scrutiny of a scholar.
"His clothes vanished... and his volume is visibly shrinking too."
Mahito ran his tongue slowly across the seam at the corner of his mouth, a cold light of comprehension rising in his eyes.
"I see. Every time he turns into water to avoid a fatal injury, it isn't some perfect defense without cost.
Some kind of 'energy' supporting his existence is draining rapidly, and the shrinking of his body is the physical sign that his 'container' is drying up."
He murmured to himself, rapidly reconstructing a tactical model in his head.
If the target's defense depended on consuming a finite reserve, then simple pursuit and piercing attacks were too inefficient.
He needed something with a much wider area and far greater destructive force, something that could force the largest possible expenditure of "water" in a single blow.
"If you want to run outside, then I'll just take the shortcut and wait for you at the finish line."
With a series of teeth-grinding bone shifts, Mahito's legs mutated into thick, reverse-jointed limbs like those of some arthropod.
He bent his knees sharply. Two deep craters exploded beneath his feet, and he launched himself into the sky like a shell, vaulting straight past the height of the third floor and landing on the sanatorium roof.
Then he tore across the rooftop in a dead sprint at impossible speed, taking the direct route to a point right above the first-floor entrance.
Inside the corridor, the glass doors to the outside were already close enough to touch.
Then, without warning, the ceiling directly in front of them let out a violent cracking groan.
"Boom!"
A mass of concrete and twisted rebar came crashing down from overhead, sealing the exit completely.
"Oh, come on!" Kaede cursed.
In the cloud of dust and flying rubble, Mahito dropped from the second floor and landed squarely between the doors and the corridor.
He gave Kaede no time to catch his breath.
The moment he landed, Mahito's right arm transformed yet again.
This time it was not a sharp bone whip or hooked chain. His entire arm swelled dozens of times over, turning into a gigantic hammer of flesh, its surface covered with irregular bulges of meat and hardened bone.
The sheer weight of it dragged half his body sideways.
"So if cutting and piercing don't work..."
The smile spread across Mahito's face again, full of absolute violence.
That gigantic flesh hammer swept toward Kaede's running, fragile frame with enough force to tear the air apart, crashing forward like a landslide and nearly filling the entire narrow hallway.
"Then if I use a pure blunt weapon and smash your whole body flat against the wall, how much of that miraculous 'water' will get squeezed out of you then?"