"So you've really stopped caring how you look."
Kaede did not slow down for even a second. He stepped straight into the foul spray gushing from the curse's severed arm.
His long-fingered hand flashed through the air and closed around the hilt of the warped, twisting blade that had once resembled Mikazuki Munechika.
The instant he touched it, the terrifying corrosive force carried by Festering Life Sword erupted.
Dense black cursed energy slithered up his fingers like living venom, racing across the back of his pale hand and up his forearm until the skin was stained a lifeless black. It was a vicious curse potent enough to melt the flesh off an ordinary sorcerer.
Kaede did not so much as flinch. He twisted his waist with the momentum of his forward step and swept out one long leg with a shriek of compressed air, planting the sole of his shoe squarely into the ruined join between Kurourushi's chest and abdomen.
"Boom!"
The massive special-grade curse was kicked backward several steps by sheer force, its bulk gouging two deep trenches through the mud.
Kaede used the recoil to drift lightly back a single step.
"So my sword got contaminated by your technique. A bit like Nanami's dull blade, a weapon that stores a cursed technique."
He lowered his eyes and examined the grotesque thing now in his hand.
The once elegant, archaic Mikazuki Munechika now radiated a nauseating evil.
Its curve had become sharper, more distorted. Worst of all, at the guard near the hilt, split flesh had peeled back and a blood-red eyeball bulged out from inside.
Its pupil dilated like an insect's, spinning frantically inside its wet socket as it greedily stared at everything around it.
"So the appearance changed. It's carrying a technique now, but not completely…"
Kaede gave the hilt a couple of casual swings through the air.
With the blade's low hum came a spray of black blood, thick and rank, like burnt herbal sludge.
The black blood splashed onto the concrete planter nearby. The stone gave off a vicious hiss, and its hardened surface immediately melted into a pitted mess.
"I see. It corrodes whatever it touches. Then I'll take this gift."
As soon as he finished speaking, he casually let go.
The embryonic special-grade cursed tool dropped straight into the deep pool of water at his feet.
A faint ripple spread across the surface, then the weapon vanished beneath it.
In an instant, the water within the domain formed a high-density sealing vortex, burying the blade's presence deep underground and cutting it off completely.
Disarmed, Kaede gave his opponent no time to breathe.
His leg muscles tensed, and his whole body became a black bolt ripping through the rain as he instantly closed the distance with Kurourushi.
There was no flourish to it. He simply clenched his right fist and drove it into the armor plating on Kurourushi's abdomen, right where he had just caved it in, with enough force to punch through a steel plate.
"Crash!"
Kurourushi's enormous body was launched off the ground again, like it had just been hit head-on by a truck, and sent hurtling toward the heavy load-bearing wall of the school building.
From the unfinished building in the distance, Kenjaku's probing look finally turned cold.
Mimicking Sukuna's slashes with water pressure, resisting the toxicity of a special-grade cursed tool barehanded, even repurposing the remnants of an enemy's technique for himself.
That kind of wild, almost impossible application of cursed energy and cursed techniques completely shattered every fixed assumption Kenjaku had ever built around Heavenly Restriction.
And even then, in the ruins below, Kurourushi did not die.
A special-grade curse's survival instinct forced it into a desperate response mid-flight.
Its abdomen, which had nearly been punched clean through, suddenly folded outward in an unnatural twist.
Hundreds of hard, fleshy tendrils as thick as wrists burst from its organs.
Each tendril ended in rows of fine serrated teeth. They lashed through the air like octopus limbs, stabbing deep into the walls and ground on both sides and forcibly canceling out its momentum.
Then those tendrils snapped tight like springs, hurling Kurourushi's ruined body back toward Kaede at unprecedented speed, while another net of countless flying insects and venom crashed down over him.
It was a final, desperate counterattack, heedless of the cost, as if it meant to rip away at least one piece of him before it went down.
Venom and self-detonating insects wove together into an airtight killing net, carrying the special-grade curse's full desperation as they swallowed the rooftop whole.
"I only avoided dragging this out because you're disgusting. Don't tell me you actually thought I couldn't beat you."
Kaede's brow twitched faintly. His crimson eyes remained utterly calm.
Faced with an attack powerful enough to flatten the building, he merely stepped half a pace to the right.
His shoulder tilted at an angle that defied reason, and his entire body slipped through the gap between the venom jet and the insect swarm, cutting precisely into the dead zone of Kurourushi's final defense.
There was no extra wind-up at all. His right fist shot out like a shell from a cannon, tearing through the air and smashing straight into the curse's chest, exposed while it spat venom.
"Crunch!"
The sound of bone and flesh breaking was enough to make the skin crawl.
Kaede's entire right arm punched clean through Kurourushi's armored shell and buried itself deep inside its writhing organs.
Kurourushi shrieked in mad despair at the thing now lodged inside its body.
Its remaining fleshy tendrils whipped back at once, trying to shred both the arm and Kaede's body together.
Then, in the next instant, the arm buried inside the curse lost its shape completely.
Flesh and bone dissolved in a blink, becoming a mass of high-pressure, high-density water.
That liquid, compressed to the limit with cursed energy, flooded into Kurourushi's veins and organ gaps like a breached dam, filling every corner of its enormous body in an instant.
Kurourushi's compound eyes bulged violently. It tried to mobilize its vast negative cursed energy to assimilate the water, to repel it.
It was too late.
With a dull, heavy blast, the bloated special-grade curse burst from the inside like a cheap balloon pumped far past its limit.
Chunks of black flesh and shattered carapace blasted outward in every direction, then dissolved into black mist and vanished in the air.
The raging domain collapsed at that same moment.
The heavy storm clouds and impossible, crushing rain within the sealed space gradually faded, replaced by the real, steady autumn rainfall of the night.
Fine rain drifted down from the sky, washing over Kaede. The filthy blood splashed across his face and clothes rinsed away at once.
As the rain soaked into him, the minor cuts across his body, along with the wear caused by overexertion, healed at a speed visible to the naked eye until he returned to perfect condition.
"Good. That should let me recover a little cursed energy…"
On the rooftop of the unfinished building in the distance, Kenjaku stood in shadow and watched the entire exchange.
The wariness in his narrow eyes deepened further.
"So he can turn his own substance fluid and detonate from the inside on a purely physical level…"
He murmured the words under his breath, fingers absently brushing the edge of his sleeve.
Even after a thousand years, he had rarely encountered a method that ignored external defenses so completely, and was so difficult to guard against.
If he had engaged this opponent in close combat without knowing that mechanic in advance, even he would have paid a price.
Even more troublesome was the fact that Kaede could restore himself and replenish his cursed energy with almost no loss simply by coming into contact with natural water.
At that very moment, in the middle of the pouring rain, Kaede's condition was climbing back toward full. This was absolutely not the time to make a move.
"He's a major variable, but as long as the mechanism is understood, he remains within manageable limits."
Kenjaku's mouth curved into a cold smile.
"Until the so-called strongest is sealed away, you can keep moving freely a little longer."
He raised a hand slightly. Ripples spread through the empty space behind him.
A massive flying curse shaped like some monstrous bird emerged without a sound.
Kenjaku stepped onto its back and soon disappeared into the deep rain-filled night, leaving not the slightest trace behind.
...
The streets of Kawasaki on that rainy night were unnaturally quiet.
Dim yellow streetlamps cast long reflections over the wet pavement.
Rainwater dripped from roadside signs with a dull, rhythmic tap.
Kaede's shoes splashed through shallow puddles as he walked lazily down the empty street, letting the rain patter over his shoulders.
"Hmm… Gojo said someone was here, right? Guess I'll take a look."
At the corner at the far end of the street, the old neon sign of a run-down movie theater blinked weakly through the rain.
And in the dark alley beside it, several faint but deeply twisted traces of cursed residue were slowly seeping out, mixing with the cold rainwater.