"What a depressing night."
With both hands in his trouser pockets, Kaede walked alone down the deserted street.
The rain was coming down hard enough to soak him through. Under the halo of a streetlamp, his steps suddenly slowed.
"Walking around in the rain without an umbrella really does make you look like an idiot…"
He lowered his head slightly, eyes drifting to the puddles rippling across the pavement while cold rainwater dripped from his longer bangs. After a few seconds, he seemed to give up on the thought.
"Whatever. I'll just walk faster."
He picked up his pace, shoes splashing more rapidly through the standing water as he headed for the school swallowed up by darkness at the end of the street.
"My cursed energy's back to about ninety percent. Heavenly Restriction really is convenient."
As his pace quickened, the rain around him seemed to thicken with it.
…
At the same time, on the third-floor hallway of Satozakura High.
Most of the windows lining the corridor had already been shattered in the earlier clash, and wind mixed with autumn rain poured into the building without restraint.
"Junpei! Stop! Who fed you this lie?!"
Yuji Itadori's shoes screeched through the water pooling on the hallway floor as he twisted his body at the last moment.
A thick tentacle glowing with a faint blue light swept past his uniform jacket by inches. The toxin dripping from its surface hit the wooden floor with a vicious hiss, sending up white steam.
"Nobody lied to me, Yuji. This is my own will."
Yoshino Junpei stood at the far end of the corridor. His jellyfish shikigami, Moon Dregs, hovered in front of him, shielding his thin frame.
Junpei's hands were clenched so tightly his knuckles had gone white.
There was pain and conflict all over his face, but he forced his voice into something cold and steady.
"People don't have hearts. If they don't have hearts, then dignity and life don't mean anything either.
I'm just doing the right thing. Getting rid of the people who bully others… and the trash who stand there and watch."
Yuji didn't answer right away. His eyes moved quickly between the narrow corridor and the enormous jellyfish shikigami.
He was assessing the battlefield.
The jellyfish itself wasn't all that fast. With his athletic reflexes, he could avoid the physical strikes. The real danger was the toxin coating those tentacles.
The hallway was too cramped. If he forced his way in and even got brushed by that poison, his body would slow down immediately. He couldn't charge head-on. He had to get past the shikigami and pin Junpei's hands.
"No! If you really believed none of this mattered, you wouldn't be making a face like you're about to cry!"
Yuji dropped his center of gravity, his thigh muscles tightening in preparation to rebound off the wall and break through from above and to the side.
Then, just as he was about to move—
"Splash—!"
The fine rain outside suddenly turned into a torrential downpour without warning.
Cold water crashed through the corridor, and the air pressure inside seemed to plunge to freezing in an instant.
Every hair on Yuji's body stood on end. His body, which had been on the verge of exploding into motion, stopped dead.
As the vessel who had swallowed Sukuna's finger, his sensitivity to dangerous cursed energy was abnormally sharp.
He whipped his head around, staring past the shattered windows toward the street outside the school gates.
A massive, suffocating presence—strange cursed energy as deep and crushing as an undersea whirlpool—was approaching Satozakura High one step at a time through the rain, seemingly casual and yet horribly restrained.
It was so pure, so immense, that even the moisture in the air felt edged like blades.
Junpei sensed it too.
Moon Dregs seemed to recoil beneath the pressure of some superior being. Its swollen bell began shrinking in uneasy pulses, and its blue glow flickered unstably.
"What… is that?"
Junpei's voice shook in a way he couldn't hide. He took half a step back on instinct.
The hostility that had been aimed at Yuji dissolved at once in the face of that unknown, overwhelming presence, replaced by pure defensive fear.
"Hm? That cursed energy…"
Out on the empty street, Kaede stopped where he was.
He turned his head slightly, crimson eyes fixing through the rain on the dark shape of the school grounds in the distance.
"A school again? Fine… I'll take a look."
And inside the third-floor hallway of Satozakura High, the tension had already frozen solid.
"Junpei, run—!"
Yuji roared, eyes wide with panic. The muscles in his legs knotted with force as he launched himself forward like an arrow.
But behind Yoshino Junpei, a gray-blue figure stitched all over with seams had already appeared soundlessly, like a ghost.
Mahito's face—wearing that same childish, vicious smile—leaned close to Junpei's ear. His pale hand, carrying cursed power that could twist the soul itself, reached straight for the back of Junpei's neck.
For a single stretched-out instant, time seemed to slow.
Junpei turned in stunned horror, his pupils reflecting that hand like it belonged to death itself.
Drip.
A tiny sound of water rang out inside the razor-taut hallway.
On the concrete ceiling overhead, a single clear drop of rain seeped through without warning.
It fell with perfect precision onto the back of Mahito's hand, just as he was about to touch Junpei's skin.
Mahito's movement froze for a fraction of a fraction of a second.
As a special-grade curse, his sensitivity to souls and cursed energy was razor sharp.
The cold, heavy, deeply invasive cursed residue contained in that single drop woke a buried memory inside his soul.
Months ago, at that abandoned sanatorium, the interesting prey he had pierced straight through—only for it to slip through his fingers as running water.
Then the impossible arrived.
It broke every law of weather and common sense at once.
The ceiling of the hallway seemed to tear open under some invisible force, and torrential rain came crashing down inside the sealed corridor.
Within that dense curtain of rain, a tall black figure took shape in an instant as the water gathered.
Kaede's arm whipped up. Along the edge of his hand, a transparent blade of water—compressed to the limit by high-pressure cursed energy—had already formed.
He didn't hesitate for even a heartbeat. The blade came down in a sharp arc, slicing through the air from above.
"Slash!"
A harsh cutting sound tore through the corridor.
Mahito's right arm, along with half his shoulder, was severed cleanly from the root by that impossible water blade before it could touch Junpei.
The gray-blue limb spun through the air and slapped onto the rain-slick floor.
"You again, you bastard… ruining people's lives here…"
Kaede stood in the rain, brow drawn tight, crimson eyes fixed coldly on the special-grade curse covered in seams.
The blade of flowing water still dripped from his fingertips.
Mahito didn't scream.
He leapt backward several meters in one bound, widening the gap between himself and that blade.
No blood came from the severed shoulder—only writhing meat and flickers of soul-light, nauseating to watch.
He tilted his head, glanced at his arm lying on the floor, then raised his gaze again. One mismatched eye locked onto Kaede, and his mouth stretched into a frantic grin, feverishly delighted.
"Ah… long time no see! And you came right to me!"
Mahito's mind was racing.
This was not the same quarry that had barely escaped him months ago.
There was no curtain, no closed boundary, yet he was forcibly altering the weather inside a building. He had even used water itself to accomplish something close to spatial movement.
Back then, Kaede had only been able to melt into the surroundings.
If Mahito hadn't instinctively shifted the axis of his soul just now, it wouldn't have been only an arm that got cut off.
"But physical attacks don't work on me."
Mahito laughed lightly. Bone crackled from the stump of his shoulder as flesh and structure rapidly regrew. In less than a second, a new arm burst forth—thicker than before, jointed like an insect limb and lined with vicious barbs.
He had no intention of giving this variable any chance to control the flow of the fight.
"If you like rain that much, let's see whether your raindrops can cut through these poor souls!"
Mahito slammed his remaining left hand into the wall.
The smooth surface swelled into several huge bulges of flesh. With a wet, revolting tearing sound, three compressed transfigured humans burst from the wall.
The instant they hit open air, their bodies swelled into grotesque monsters over ten feet tall, bristling with hard bone blades. Roaring, they lunged at Kaede from three different blind spots.
At the same time, Mahito's newly formed segmented arm lashed through the air, stretching into a bone whip several yards long. Hidden amid the charge of the three transfigured humans, it whipped low and viciously at Kaede's ankle, aiming to break his footing in the pooled water.
"Kaede! Watch those things—they used to be human!"
At the far end of the corridor, Yuji finally snapped out of his shock.
He recognized the familiar figure standing in the rain. Relief flashed in his eyes, only to vanish beneath urgency.
His legs exploded into motion, splashing through the flood on the floor as he charged straight toward the leftmost transfigured human, trying to take some of the pressure off Kaede.
And behind Moon Dregs, Yoshino Junpei could only stand there frozen.
His gaze moved from the severed arm on the floor to the black-haired young man facing Mahito in the rain.
His mind had gone completely blank.