The rain roaring through the hallway only grew more violent, dense drops hammering the shattered tile with deafening force.
"I get it now!"
The black-haired young man's right hand snapped to his waist, and the ominous Mikazuki Munechika was out of its sheath in an instant.
The blood-red eyeball set in the hilt spun wildly, greedily tracking every trace of malice around it.
The moment Mahito's bone whip lashed toward his throat like a striking viper, Kaede flicked his wrist. The blade carved a harsh arc through the air and slammed precisely into the side of the whip.
"Crack—!"
The sound of splintering bone was brutally sharp beneath the rain.
Using the recoil, Kaede surged forward like a specter. His sword came up in a savage rising slash, its cold gleam cleaving straight through the abdomen and up to the shoulder blade of one of the transfigured humans charging him.
Ink-thick blood burst outward, only to be violently knocked aside by the curtain of rain surrounding him before it could touch his body.
In the same motion, his left leg swept low and hard, his foot crashing into another transfigured human's temple with a sonic snap. The impact launched the hulking body straight through the wall of a nearby classroom.
Mahito's knife-hand passed so close to Kaede's temple it almost grazed his hair.
"Itadori, I've got this one!
Get that kid out of here. I've got history with this bastard, and it's time to settle it. Just clear the area as much as you can…"
Before Kaede could finish, a sly, vicious smile spread across Mahito's stitched face.
Mahito's left palm had swollen grotesquely at some point during the exchange. Exploiting the opening created by Kaede's sidestep, he drove it into Kaede's chest, carrying the soul-warping force of Idle Transfiguration.
"Got you," Mahito whispered.
But what his hand found was not solid flesh.
It was something cold, slick, and without fixed form.
Kaede's chest collapsed without warning at the point of contact, the struck area liquefying into a deep swirling vortex of water.
Mahito's blow, which should have twisted the soul itself, plunged into it like a hand dropped into a bottomless trench, finding no purchase at all.
In the next instant, Kaede lunged forward.
The portion of his body that had become flowing water exploded outward as he collided with Mahito. Countless razor-thin crystalline spikes of water burst from the blurred outline of his form in all directions.
"Ththththth—!"
Mahito's body was riddled as though carved apart by a thousand blades. The dense, compressed water spikes punched through his limbs and torso, driven by highly pressurized cursed energy.
Kaede passed through Mahito's afterimage like a streak of liquid light, rematerializing behind him at once. His sword, hanging low at his side, came back in a sweeping reverse cut that traced a merciless crescent through the rain.
The tip buried itself deep into Mahito's back, then dragged violently downward along the line of his spine.
Black blood sprayed into the storm along with the rasp of splitting bone.
Mahito's entire back was torn open by the cut, exposing the glowing, writhing soul-stuff beneath.
"I said clear the civilians. I'll handle him."
Kaede stood with the blade held across his body in the rising water, long bangs shading his crimson eyes. Only the eyeball at the hilt kept twitching restlessly.
Mahito staggered forward under the chain of blows.
Then he let out a shriek of laughter, half agony, half exhilaration, as the split flesh across his back sealed shut almost instantly.
He twisted his head around, his mismatched eyes fixed on Kaede, battle-lust so intense it was almost visible.
"Haha! So you can avoid direct contact with the soul… Is your soul liquid too?
This is even more interesting than Sukuna!"
Mahito slammed one hand into the floor, and the pooled rainwater at the point of contact began to crystallize and warp in an unnatural pattern.
He had realized that his opponent had extremely high resistance to physical harm and a grotesquely effective movement technique.
A simple melee rush was not going to get to the core of him.
"If I can't grab your soul directly, then I'll just stain all this rain black!"
Mahito clapped both hands together.
His body swelled violently, and countless tiny transfigured humans no bigger than fingers oozed from his pores. Screaming and biting, they tried to latch onto every raindrop in the corridor.
This was contamination at the level of the soul itself. He was trying to disrupt Kaede's absolute control over the water by tainting it.
Off to the side, Yuji Itadori's face tightened.
He looked once at the two figures locked in combat, then at Junpei collapsed on the floor.
"Junpei, get up! We're leaving!"
Yuji crossed the distance in a single stride. The massive jellyfish shikigami, Moon Dregs, instinctively recoiled as it sensed the explosive force in Yuji's cursed energy.
Ignoring that completely, Yuji grabbed Junpei by the shoulder and hauled him onto his back.
He had already figured out what Kaede meant.
Mahito's technique was too dangerous in a crowded area. If he got away and reached the city, the damage would be unimaginable.
And Kaede's natural compatibility against Mahito's technique made him the best person here to keep him pinned down.
"Kaede! He's slippery as hell, so don't die on me! I'll get the people outside clear and come back for you!"
Yuji didn't hesitate. He drove off with both legs, smashing through the rainwater underfoot, and leapt out the shattered window with Junpei on his back, vanishing into the soaked night.
Inside the school building, only the pounding rain remained, along with two killing gazes, one red and one blue-gray, clashing across the storm.
"He mentioned Sukuna's soul just now… which means Mahito's already touched Sukuna's soul. That doesn't line up with the original timeline…"
Kaede thought as he kept his eyes locked on Mahito.
"So more things have shifted in ways I didn't expect. In that case, Mahito probably also knows by now that Itadori can damage his soul…"
"Your soul technique is a pain, but it isn't invincible. If I force you to keep using it and burn through your cursed energy, you die."
Kaede's voice cut through the rain, cold and certain. Before the last word had even fully landed, he was already moving, streaking across the flooded floor as a black blur.
Mahito's freshly regenerated arm, reshaped into a segmented blade lined with vicious barbs, shot out like a striking serpent, shrieking through the air as it went for Kaede's throat.
"Clang—!"
Sparks flashed briefly in the dark corridor.
Kaede rolled his wrist, bringing up that Three-Day Moon Munechika with its turning eye in the hilt. The blade rose from below and caught the side of the arm-blade at exactly the right angle.
With a scream of steel and bone grinding together, the killing thrust was forced wide.
Using the opening created by that deflection, Kaede drove off his hips and hammered a brutal kick toward Mahito's abdomen.
Mahito's mismatched pupils tightened sharply.
At the last instant, he manipulated the shape of his abdomen, folding his upper body backward in a way no human skeleton should have allowed, barely letting the kick miss.
The missed strike did not break Kaede's rhythm for even an instant. He pressed forward, his weight dropping low, and his left fist drove for Mahito's stitched face.
But at the moment he punched, the rain around him resonated.
He moved like a fish cutting through deep water, making one swift swimming motion.
His body slid along the dense strands of rain hanging in the air and vanished from directly in front of Mahito, appearing instead at his left-side blind spot in a movement that ignored physical inertia.
"Bang—!"
His fist landed cleanly on Mahito's cheek, carrying the crushing force of high-pressure water.
Mahito's gray-blue face caved inward. Broken teeth and black blood burst from his mouth.
The impact launched him into the air, and with a tremendous crash he slammed through the outer concrete wall of the corridor, dropping from the third floor and smashing into the muddy athletic field below hard enough to leave a crater full of rainwater.
Kaede gave him no time to breathe.
He took one step forward and jumped straight through the hole in the wall.
Wind and rain whipped through his black hair as he dropped fast through open air, gripping the sword in both hands in reverse.
Using gravity itself, the cursed blade cut through the rain and drove straight for Mahito's chest in the crater below.
Down in the mud, Mahito's eyes flew open. He spat out a mouthful of blood and dirt.
His mind was already racing.
Kaede's last comment had hit the truth exactly: maintaining the shape of his soul and rebuilding himself did consume an enormous amount of cursed energy.
And Kaede's ability to turn into water whenever necessary, dodging both physical and soul-based attacks, was dragging the battle deeper and deeper into a war of attrition.
He could not afford to take this descending strike head-on.
"Nice analysis! But if you want to drain me dry, you'll need to live long enough to do it!"
Mahito slammed both hands into the muddy water around him. The tiny transfigured humans he had sent out to pollute the rain instantly changed orders.
They rushed together over his chest, and amid a revolting blend of bone and flesh knitting together, formed a massive tower shield of white bone made from countless shrieking faces.
At the same time, Mahito reshaped his legs in the mud. The muscles of his thighs and calves twisted into spring-like structures, compacting hard against the ground.
The moment Kaede's blade hit that shield, Mahito intended to use the downward force of the strike itself to trigger those legs and launch himself backward in one tremendous burst, putting distance between them and refusing to let Kaede keep him under close-range pressure.