The Kaede standing ten paces away collapsed without warning into a puddle of water.
A second later, a harsh metallic snap rang out from the washbasin area at the edge of the field.
A thick galvanized pipe had been sliced clean through by a blade that seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Pressurized tap water burst from the break like a fountain, but instead of spilling into the drain, it was seized in midair by an invisible vortex of cursed energy and devoured.
The cursed residue that had been on the verge of running dry suddenly began swelling again at a speed that defied common sense.
Kaede was under a Heavenly Restriction. From the very first battle he had fought, against Mahito, he had already noticed something peculiar about himself.
He could absorb the cursed energy carried within naturally occurring water to rapidly replenish his own reserves.
Naturally, that did not apply to rainwater he himself created.
At that moment, the roar of the downpour vanished.
Countless raindrops froze dead in midair. Their edges stretched and sharpened under an invisible law, and each soft bead of water instantly became a suspended blade.
In the blink of an eye, the entire training field had turned into a three-dimensional killing zone with no blind spots at all.
And yet the sword-bearing clones formed from water were completely unaffected by this law of suspension.
They moved through the dense curtain of floating blades like fish through the sea, without the slightest delay, tightening the circle around Gojo once again.
His blue eyes shifted slightly. The Six Eyes pierced through the layers of water blades and caught the disturbance of energy at the edge of the field with perfect accuracy.
"You're using naturally flowing water to fill the cursed-energy gap in a Heavenly Restriction body?"
The dark red glow gathered at Gojo's fingertips did not stop swelling. If anything, it pulsed even more violently.
He looked at the suspended sea of blades all around him, and the curve of his mouth sharpened into open admiration.
"So once you realized a battle of attrition would put you at a disadvantage, you immediately changed the operating conditions of the domain.
You gave up the kinetic force of the rain itself and fixed it into an environmental trap that restricts movement, while allowing only the products of your own technique to move freely inside it."
He lifted his chin, his face no less heated with battle-lust than before.
"Smart. You've taken away my room to dodge and found yourself a cheat-code supply route.
Against anyone else, without Infinity protecting them, this kind of endless killing field would grind them down alive."
The repulsive force at his fingertips compressed to the critical point.
Gojo swept his arm across his chest in a casual arc and aimed directly ahead, where the floating blades were densest and the clones attacked most fiercely.
"But cleaning out a room full of obstacles only takes one strong enough gust of wind.
Cursed Technique Reversal: Red."
A blinding crimson light swallowed the dark field whole.
Pure repulsive force exploded outward with overwhelming violence. The air screamed as it was torn apart.
Every floating blade in the fan-shaped zone ahead was crushed and vaporized the instant it touched the red light.
The water clones weaving between them didn't even have time to swing their swords before the shockwave turned them to steam.
The crimson blast carved through the turf, gouging a massive trench so deep that the bottom could not be seen.
Its aftershock, mixed with boiling vapor, kept surging all the way to the edge of the field, blasting the still-gushing pipe and half a nearby brick wall into dust.
Huge clouds of white steam rose violently into the air from the intense heat, blotting out everything ahead.
Gojo slowly lowered his right hand, one shoe resting on scorched, cracked earth as he waited for the steam to clear.
The white vapor had not even begun to fully lift when the pressure over the field plunged again.
The black clouds that had just been torn apart by Red forced themselves back together with savage disregard for natural law, gathering and sinking lower.
All the moisture that had been evaporated recondensed overhead at impossible speed, and before there was even a second to breathe, torrential rain crashed down again, turning the blackened crater back into a mire.
Gojo stood at the center of it, rain landing on his hair and shoulders.
He tilted his chin up slightly. Through the lenses, the blue of the Six Eyes fixed on the space around him as its laws reassembled, and for once there was a visible flicker of surprise in his pupils.
"A second expansion with no interruption? No cooldown from technique burnout at all?"
He did not strike again right away. Instead, his mind raced to dissect the impossible.
For an ordinary sorcerer, a domain expansion was always followed by burnout from overloading the engraved technique, but the environment here was so stable it carried no noise at all.
"So that's it. If the body itself is made of cursed energy, then this shell remade by Heavenly Restriction is already a perpetually active law by default.
Which means there is no such weakness as 'the brain overloading the technique.' What an excellent body for breaking common sense."
Gojo had known from the beginning that Kaede was immune to burnout. That conclusion had come from Shoko's earliest examinations.
But even so, seeing it demonstrated on this scale still forced a small measure of surprise out of him.
Before his words had even finished, the boiling rain around him responded.
Dozens of dark figures rose straight out of the muddy puddles.
The moment these high-density water clones took shape, they lowered their centers of gravity in perfect unison.
It was a stance born entirely for attack.
Dozens of Mikazuki Munechika Replicas flashed in the dark light, their silver edges weaving a net of death as the clones rushed him from all sides, footsteps splashing through the flooded ground.
The smile on Gojo's face deepened. He twisted his waist sharply and lashed out with a brutal side kick that ripped the rain apart.
His long leg, wrapped in dense cursed energy like a battle axe, slammed into the blade of the lead clone.
A massive metallic crack rang out. Water and sparks of cursed energy exploded together, and both clone and sword were kicked apart into a spray.
But the assault had only just begun.
Two cold blades swept low from left and right, silent against the muddy ground, cutting straight for his ankles.
Gojo bent his knees and sprang backward as if gravity had ceased to apply to him.
In midair, a third clone had already leapt high above him, sword raised in both hands, using the force of its descent to cleave down at his skull.
Infinity was still being neutralized.
The light in Gojo's eyes went cold. Midair, he forcefully twisted his spine and threw his right fist upward, dense blue cursed energy wrapped around it, straight into the falling blade.
Fist and edge collided in the air with a shrill explosive scream of compressed space.
The blade sliced open the skin across Gojo's knuckles, sending a few drops of blood into the rain.
But the next instant, white light from reverse cursed technique flared there, crushing the crescent-shaped residue trying to spread inward and stitching the flesh shut on the spot.
At the same time, the cursed energy in his fist detonated and shattered the airborne clone and its sword into a cloud of water.
Gojo landed cleanly, though his shoes skidded almost two feet through the mud. He flicked water off his right hand, his breathing a fraction heavier than before.
Through the Six Eyes, he saw that the shattered clones, once they fell into the puddles, had already begun writhing and reforming.
"Not only are the close-quarters chains getting more lethal, even the attack intent in melee is getting more oppressive.
Did you absorb that much from the last exchange, or are you already calculating how to crack my reversed technique?"
He reached up and loosened the tie plastered to his neck by the rain, then tossed it casually into the mud.
There was no elaborate cursed-technique windup at all. Gojo simply crossed his fists and settled into the purest possible hand-to-hand stance.
Gone was the untouchable ease that kept everyone else at a distance.
What remained was only the bloodthirsty ferocity of a top predator.
"If you want to settle this with pure close-quarters combat in a pit of mud, then let me see how long that body of yours, the one that ignores burnout, can survive a kill-range brawl like this!"
Boom!
Mud and water exploded outward.
Gojo's body blurred into a streak as he charged straight into the thickest cluster of blades.
His fists and kicks, each carrying a miniature Blue, whipped up a devastating storm through the water clones. Every collision between flesh and blade came with the teeth-grating shriek of cursed energy grinding together and the blinding flare of reverse cursed technique.
Then, all at once, the muddy battlefield froze.
The water clones lunging in with murderous force locked in place without warning.
The rain overhead seemed to reverse, and dozens of water bodies rushed inward at a speed too fast for the eye to follow, stacking and merging at the center.
Behind the lenses, Gojo's blue pupils shrank.
Within the vision of the Six Eyes, the formerly steady flow of cursed energy underwent a complete and violent transformation.
"Positive energy?! Wait... all those dense physical chains weren't just for suppression. They were buying time?"
His mind tore through the phenomenon in an instant.
"You kept the strain on the real body to a minimum, used dozens of clones inside the domain as separate containers, and had each of them refine a tiny amount of positive energy during the fight.
Then fused everything at once and forced the total output past what one person could normally generate... This is a lunatic's distributed calculation tactic!"
But by the time he understood it, there was no time left to react.
The puddle beneath his feet reflected Kaede's silhouette, and with a single ripple, that figure rose straight up from the water at point-blank range.
A tiny sphere, compressed to the absolute limit, was shoved directly into the center of Gojo's vision.
"Technique Reversal... still haven't named it yet!"
It was a force completely opposed to Rainfall.
When the sphere detonated, there was no deafening roar. Only a heat so intense it stole the breath.
It was as if a miniature sun had been ignited at ground zero on the field.
This was not simple drought. It was the absolute law of clear skies.
The violent wave of heat swept outward with total annihilating force. The thick storm clouds overhead and all the suspended blades of water disappeared instantly, like dirty snow beneath a summer sun.
Gojo crossed both arms over his chest a tenth of a second before the blast fully went off, layering his whole body in a barrier of dense cursed energy.
Even so, the explosion hurled him backward.
His shoes tore two deep trenches into the blackened ground, and he slid dozens of feet before managing to stop.
The upper half of his uniform had nearly burned away completely, exposing hard muscle beneath.
His forearms, neck, and the side of his face were all badly scorched, the air around them carrying the faint smell of burned flesh.
By instinct, he drew on positive energy to heal the burns, but his brow tightened sharply.
"...Not only did it blow the domain apart, it branded this whole space with the law of 'sunlight' too, didn't it..."
He could feel the positive energy inside him moving as if trapped in mud.
Reverse cursed technique was being shackled by an invisible pressure. The white light that normally stitched flesh together in an instant now flickered only weakly, like fireflies.
Even trying to gather Blue again came with obvious resistance.
The steam and dust finally began to clear.
At the center of the explosion, the field had been transformed into a glassy crystallized crater.
Kaede crashed down hard at its edge. His body, forced out of its liquid state by the overload of energy, had reassembled itself into solid form.
The heated air had curled his black hair, and red burns marked multiple places across his pale skin.
He braced himself with one hand against the scorched ground, back rising and falling violently, coughing hard. It was obvious that detonating it from such close range had cost him dearly too.
"Not bad, right?"
Gojo lowered his smoking arms and wiped a thin trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth with long fingers.
He stared at Kaede lying there, battered, burned, and forced out of liquefaction, and froze for half a second.
Then a wild laugh burst out of him, hot and uncontrollable.
"Ha... hahahahaha! Not just passing! That was far beyond the passing line! That was a masterpiece!"
Ignoring the burning pain still pulsing through the wounds that were slowly closing, he strode toward the crater and looked down at Kaede from above.
There was no anger in those blue eyes. Only the excitement of someone who had just found a perfect work of art, and the thrill of battle burning brighter than ever.
"You split the calculation load among the clones, then used a point-blank suicidal detonation to smash through my defense.
You didn't just blow apart your own domain. Your Heavenly Restriction body itself almost came apart because it couldn't withstand that force... That was self-destruction in its purest form."
Gojo slowly crouched, lowering himself until his eyes were level with Kaede's as he coughed there, and the dangerous delight in his grin sharpened.
"But you did land it.
A law that suppresses the enemy's reverse cursed technique and even their normal cursed-technique output... It's basically a custom-made poison for killing monsters on the rebound.
So for this training match, you won one round."