In the night sky, the rain hung like an enormous overturned bowl, the moving domain clamped tight around the black shape fleeing ahead.
"So what is it? Are you fast... or just terrified of dying?"
"I remember now. You're one of the special grades in the school records. Codename: Kurourushi, the cockroach curse... Which means that blade earlier must've been the Festering Life Sword, the one that can alter its attack path freely. No wonder it was so hard to defend against."
Kaede's figure flashed into existence in midair. Without the slightest pause, his long right leg, wrapped in highly compressed water, came down with mountain-splitting force and slammed into Kurourushi's bloated back.
A thunderous, muffled impact rang out. The special-grade curse's massive body stalled in the air for a split second, then veered off its original path toward the city like a kite with its string cut, dropping diagonally instead.
Below it was a huge school campus, already dark and abandoned for the night.
Boom!
Kurourushi hit the roof of the indoor gymnasium like a black meteor, punching straight through the alloy dome.
Dust, shattered building materials, and rainwater exploded in every direction. The polished wood floor below caved in under the impact, forming a crater several meters deep.
"You've run five or six kilometers already. If you keep going, even I'm going to start getting annoyed."
Kaede landed lightly on the edge of a school building rooftop not far from the gym.
His posture was straight, his coat snapping in the storm wind, his dark red eyes lowered coldly toward the wreckage below.
"Good thing it's a day off. No students around. Otherwise this would be a nightmare to clean up."
From deep inside the rubble came the grating scrape of chitin and the wet noise of flesh shifting.
Kurourushi slowly dragged itself upright from the smashed wood and broken stone.
The portion of its body that had been blown apart by positive energy was being forcibly filled and stitched back together by swarms of newborn cockroaches.
Its regeneration was sluggish from the positive energy still lingering in the wound, but as a special-grade curse, its vitality was still horrifying to watch.
It did not try to flee again.
Its beastlike instincts and limited intelligence had already grasped one thing: the strange storm cloud above, which moved with Kaede, could not be escaped with speed alone.
As long as it remained inside this rain, those razor-sharp water blades with their unavoidable sure-hit law would keep carving it apart, little by little.
If it wanted to live, or rather, if it wanted to feed, it had only one option. Kill the source standing on that rooftop.
Savage killing intent flared inside Kurourushi's compound eyes. It hunched its ruined body low, and its abdomen convulsed violently.
"Gwaaaah!"
With a disgusting wet churn, a torrent of black filth blasted from its abyssal mouthparts.
This was no ordinary poison. It was a foul mixture of half-digested curse-user flesh and highly concentrated negative energy fermented inside its stomach into specialized flying insects.
The black stream shot upward like a pressurized cannon, driving through the descending rain blades and climbing straight toward Kaede on the rooftop.
The insects mixed into the acid lit up with a dangerous red glow midair. They were clearly designed to detonate on contact.
And that was only the first layer of the kill.
At the exact moment it spat the acid torrent, Kurourushi's powerful hind legs exploded with force and shattered the gymnasium's remaining foundation.
Its huge body shot up the side of the school building at terrifying speed, its sharpened limbs gouging deep furrows into the brick exterior.
It had timed everything perfectly. The acid torrent would seal off Kaede's upward and forward escape routes. At the same time, the damaged Festering Life Blade warped again in a nauseating transformation.
Twisted flesh and egg clusters stretched outward, turning the short blade into a grotesque meat-whip several meters long.
The whip was covered in barbs and wrapped in dense black cursed energy.
With a scream that tore through the rain, Kurourushi leapt from the side of the building and swept the flesh-whip across the rooftop edge.
This strike was meant to do more than just cut Kaede in half with the railing. It was a broad physical sweep designed to force him airborne, where he would fall straight into the next stage of Kurourushi's insect slaughter net.
It was the desperate last stand of a cornered beast.
The acidic black torrent chewed through swathes of rain, hissing violently as it struck the steel framework near the rooftop edge. Smoke rose as the metal dissolved into twisted slag.
But the dark figure was already gone beneath the cover of the rain, as if he had never been there at all.
"So you've got a beast's kind of basic intelligence after all.
If you had a domain, this would be a headache. But right now, you're inside mine. A kill box at this level won't be enough."
Suddenly, thunder exploded across the sky.
In a blind spot Kurourushi's eyes could not possibly track, space itself warped.
A fist wrapped in black sparks drove into the special-grade curse's spine within one ten-thousandth of a second.
Black Flash.
With a crack like reality itself splitting, dark red lightning detonated at the impact point. The shockwave shattered the falling raindrops into mist.
Kurourushi's carapace, hard enough to tank heavy weapons, burst apart on the spot. Dark green fluid and charred shell fragments sprayed everywhere.
Its huge body flew like an out-of-control shell, smashed through the school building's drainage system, and crashed into the campus courtyard.
Marble paving exploded on impact. Dirt and stone blasted upward, leaving a meteor crater more than ten meters wide at the center of the school grounds.
On a distant rooftop, Kenjaku's tapping fingers stopped cold.
For the first time, true caution entered his usually unreadable eyes.
"Even while maintaining Domain Expansion at that level of load, he still caught that one-in-a-million margin and triggered a space-distorting Black Flash..."
He leaned forward, staring at the figure rising through the dust.
"That sort of battle instinct can't be explained by a Heavenly Restriction alone anymore.
Gojo Satoru... what exactly have you been hiding all this time?"
Kaede dropped lightly from the rooftop edge, the sound of his shoes touching the ground unnaturally crisp in the silent campus.
He casually wiped a streak of foul green slime from his cheek.
"Oh? You really don't look so good."
"That's nasty. How long has it been since you brushed your teeth? Then again, cockroaches probably don't bother with that."
"You're so cold. I've been talking to you this whole time and you still haven't answered me once."
At the center of the crater, Kurourushi let out a scream more shrill than anything before.
Nearly half its body had been reduced to char by Black Flash, and the wound's cross section, twisted by space itself, had stalled even its monstrous regenerative power.
The pain drove it fully insane. Its one remaining intact arm plunged into its own shattered abdomen.
Crack.
With the sound of flesh being ripped open, it yanked out the Mikazuki Munechika Replica it had swallowed earlier, still slick with stomach acid and black pus-blood.
Instead of discarding the sword, it poured every last drop of cursed energy into the cracked blade.
The writhing flesh and eggs generated by the Festering Life Sword crawled up from its arm and spread across the sword, trying to corrupt the elegant weapon into some grotesque meat-grown executioner's tool.
Kurourushi crouched low, its broken wings vibrating furiously, producing shrill ultrasonic screams.
Then it abandoned all ranged attacks entirely.
In a frenzy of pure bloodlust, it transformed into a black gale and lunged straight at Kaede.
It meant to use the half-ruined blade, now infested and transformed by curse-flesh, to tear apart and devour the human who had made it feel fear of death.