"Boom! Crash!"
The massive hammer of flesh swept across like a collapsing wall, carrying the force of a tidal wave.
The left leg he had braced to push himself backward never got the chance to support any kind of defense. The instant it touched the hammer's surface, it let out a muffled blast, and his entire lower leg exploded into a cloud of scattered mist.
With the support on his left side gone, the body, already reduced to the size of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy, toppled hard to one side. One hand slammed against the dust-covered floor as those dark red eyes locked on the figure ahead.
The water blasted away by the impact did not vanish. It wriggled back as if pulled by some magnetic force, quickly gathering again into his body.
But with this latest reconstruction, the shriveled frame caved in even more. His shoulders became thinner still, and the outline of his bare ribs stood out with disturbing clarity.
Those ruined pants could no longer stay on his waist at all. They slipped loose and sagged to the floor, bunching around his ankles.
"Damn it, my reputation is finished..." Kaede did not even have time to be outraged about practically ending up naked. He was already thinking furiously about what came next.
"My technique is connected to water... then I should be able to feel the cursed energy flowing through my own technique.
It's..."
In the next instant, Kaede suddenly looked up at the ceiling.
"It's there!"
Something unknown shifted inside him.
Under that pressure, with his body nearly at its limit, the air around them, which had been dry and scorched from the fierce fight, suddenly took on a strange stillness.
Mahito held his swinging pose, the dense growths along his right arm rising and falling faintly with his breathing.
He did not rush to launch another attack. Instead, he sharply noticed the faint chill that had crept into the air.
He tilted his head slightly, and in those mismatched eyes set in that stitched-together face, a sight he had never seen before was reflected.
"The flow of cursed energy changed?"
Mahito lowered his heavy right arm and let the huge flesh hammer drag across the floor with a grating screech.
He slowly raised his left hand and opened his palm.
Drip.
A clear droplet of water fell from a crack in the sanatorium's broken ceiling, landing squarely in his palm before breaking apart.
Then came a second. And a third. The dust that had only been hanging in the air from the fight was instantly crushed down by a dense curtain of rain, as if the whole corridor were being washed clean.
"Well now, that really startled me."
Mahito tipped his head back and watched the rain continue to fall through the cracks in the building.
This rain was cold and pure. It carried none of the nauseating sediment of negative emotion that usually accompanied a cursed technique in motion.
He tried to analyze the rain with cursed energy, but the moment his senses touched the downpour, it was as if a hazy veil had been thrown over them.
This rain was quietly neutralizing and diluting the lingering impurity he had spread through the air.
"So this is your technique? Not a simple attack, but the beginnings of some kind of domain?"
Mahito's expression turned unusually grave. He could feel the raindrops hitting his skin, trying to seep inward through the cracks of his stitched seams.
The cursed energy inside him responded on instinct, resisting the intrusion and trying to keep the foreign substance out.
"To manage a second awakening of your technique when you were already almost completely drained.
Looks like I was right. You really are the kind of variable worth studying."
Mahito suddenly jerked his shoulders. The heavy hammer of flesh rapidly collapsed in a writhing motion, transforming into countless slender black needles like sea urchin spines, all hovering protectively around him.
Standing at the center of the rainfall, eyes blazing, he began using the vibrations of those thin needles to sense the shrinking prey somewhere in the rain.
The downpour intensified in an instant, like countless transparent silver needles slanting into the dead ruins.
"Forget it, just run first."
In the next second, Kaede grabbed his pants and bolted in the opposite direction.
Inside the burst of rain, the frail, battered body shoved itself upright. Since his frame had shrunk to that of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, the shredded waistband he had just yanked up was already hanging loose enough to slip right back off his hips.
As that small figure clutched his waistband and plunged headlong into the darkness deeper in the corridor without once looking back, the rain inside the hallway began behaving in a strange, directed way.
The drops that landed on the boy's back did not slide down his skin. Instead, they sank straight into the half-transparent flesh like water soaking into a sponge.
His limbs, which had looked withered from drained energy only moments ago, immediately regained a sheen like polished jade the instant they touched that liquid.
Kaede's body kept flashing and reforming inside the dense rain. With every step, the outline that had nearly dissolved into mist became a little clearer.
That extreme synchronization between body and environment meant he not only kept his footing on the slick floor, but moved faster, like a fish plunging into the deep sea.
Mahito stood beneath the endless rain and let the cold water soak through his loose robe.
He still did not immediately give chase. Instead, he lowered his eyes slightly and watched the water rapidly gathering into puddles at his feet.
Those puddles were trying to climb up his ankles, carrying an intensely suppressive, neutralizing pressure.
"So even in a state where you were practically dried out, you directly turned the environment around you into a supply pool?"
Mahito thrust out his left hand and clenched it sharply. The black needles hovering around him all drew back at once, layering over his palm into a thick black membrane of hardened tissue.
He raised his head. Reflected in his mismatched eyes was the figure at the far end of the corridor, one hand clutching his pants, vanishing into the distance. The urge to dissect and understand had reached a completely twisted level.
"This isn't just a simple technique. A power that changes the basic rules of the environment like this... it really is the embryonic form of an innate domain. What an astonishing survival instinct."
Mahito's back suddenly bulged outward. With a wet tearing sound, four enormous flesh limbs, like giant spider spears, burst out through his shoulder blades, each tipped with hooks that bit deep into the surfaces around him.
Like some huge humanoid insect, he ricocheted wildly between the corridor walls and ceiling using those four limbs.
Each leap avoided the interference of the standing water below and closed the gap with the boy at almost teleporting speed.
"That's nightmare fuel!"
Kaede swore and kept running. He still had not figured out the finer details of his technique, but Mahito's ability could kill in one touch. No sane person would try to clash head-on.
"But if this 'rain' is you, then... if I collapse this whole building and bury you under dry rubble, how much of your 'ocean' will be left?"
Mahito's arthropod-like foot dug sharply into a load-bearing wall as cursed energy gathered through all four limbs.
As he moved at high speed, he wound the muscles of his whole body tight like a spring.
"To make sure you don't get away, I'll tear down this little 'nursery' first!"
As he sprinted, Mahito's right arm rapidly swelled and transformed into a massive drill covered in spiral grooves. With a harsh vibration of cursed energy, it smashed straight into the already unstable beam overhead.
"Rumble!"
The deafening collapse exploded behind him as tons of concrete and steel reinforcement came crashing down from above.
At that final split second, the thin figure bent both knees sharply. Using the slick water spread across the floor, he dropped backward into a sliding sweep, barely slipping through the narrow gap between two huge slabs of falling concrete.
As he slid, his back scraped violently against jagged debris, yet torn flesh never appeared.
Instead, ripples spread across him like water, and the parts of his body that had been fully soaked by the rain drew in moisture from the floor the instant they were damaged, reforming and healing in the blink of an eye without leaving even a trace of a scar.
Using the last momentum of the slide, that shrunken, unnaturally light body flipped up in one motion.
Kaede planted both feet on the newly fallen rubble, which had formed a natural slope, and after several quick steps, he charged straight onto the collapsing second-floor hallway.
Then, without a single moment of hesitation, he stepped onto a shattered window frame and hurled himself out of the building.
Bang!
His feet slammed into the muddy water of the outer courtyard, kicking up a murky splash half his height.
"So as long as I touch water, I can restore my body... but what's my guaranteed-hit effect supposed to be? Is this some weird domain built entirely for survival?"
When Kaede landed, his body crouched low to absorb the impact. With his shirt already gone, his pale back, washed clean by the rain, arched tight under the moonlight.
Then he shot forward like an arrow loosed from a bow, sprinting toward the rusted iron gate of the hospital grounds dozens of yards away.
Crash.
From the collapsed rubble behind him, a pale arm suddenly shoved aside a massive slab of stone.
Mahito rose from the wreckage, completely exposed beneath the open night sky.
The torrential rain drenched him instantly. His gray-blue hair clung wetly to the stitched skin of his face.
He did not give chase at once. Instead, he lowered his head and looked at his own hand.
"The flow of cursed energy... is being disrupted."
Mahito tried clenching his fist. The flesh in his palm writhed, attempting to mutate into sharp bone spines.
But under the constant pounding of the rain, those transformations, once as natural as moving his own fingers, now felt like rusted gears catching and dragging.
Every drop of rain stuck to his skin was silently corroding and neutralizing the cursed energy he was trying to release.
For the first time in a while, he felt something close to difficulty.
"If this is a domain, then what exactly is its guaranteed-hit effect? Just suppression and self-restoration...? No, something's off."
Mahito's mismatched eyes locked on the small figure running farther and farther across the courtyard.
In the rain, the other boy moved like a fish in water, every injury instantly reformed with help from the environment itself.
If he kept using wide-area physical destruction or close-range brawling, not only would it be inefficient, the strange rain would keep wearing down his own cursed energy reserves.
He could not let him escape this area. He needed a faster, sharper long-range attack, something that would seal off every route of retreat.
"If your body can become water, then what if I turn your whole body into a sieve in an instant? Will your recovery still keep up with the rate of consumption?"
Mahito drew in a sudden deep breath, forcing the cursed energy inside him to push through the suppression of the rain coating his body.
His throat and chest instantly warped and swelled like an overinflated balloon, then he snapped his mouth wide open.
"Shoo! Shoo! Shoo! Shoo!"
Dozens of slender white bone spikes, compressed to a steel-like hardness, blasted out from his mouth in a fan-shaped spray with shrill cries that tore through the rain curtain.
They were far faster than the chains from before. In midair they wove together into a dense net of death, perfectly covering every foothold and every possible dodge point on Kaede's path to the iron gate.