The Rain Technique

"Bang-boom!"

The massive hammer of flesh swept across like a collapsing wall, carrying an overwhelming force.

The left leg bracing his body as he pushed backward offered no defense at all the instant it met the hammer.

Instead, a dull burst rang out, and his entire lower leg exploded into a scattered cloud of mist.

With the support on his left side gone, his body, already reduced to the size of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy, lurched sideways. He planted one hand on the dust-covered floor, his dark red eyes fixed on the figure ahead.

The water knocked away did not disappear. As though drawn by some magnetic force, it quickly writhed back together and gathered into his body.

But as this reconstruction finished, his already shrunken body contracted again. His shoulders grew even thinner, and the outline of his exposed ribs became starkly visible.

His tattered trousers could no longer stay on his waist. They hung loosely on the floor, pooling around his ankles.

"Damn it, my dignity..." With no time to lament running around naked, Feng quickly considered what came next.

My Cursed Technique has something to do with water... so I should be able to sense the flow of cursed energy in my own technique.

It's...

The next instant, Feng snapped his gaze toward the ceiling.

"There!"

Something unknown changed within Feng in that instant.

Under this crushing pressure, with him almost at rock bottom, a strange stillness suddenly settled over the air, which the fierce battle had left dry and scorching.

Mahito held his hammer-swinging pose, the dense tumors on his right arm rising and falling slightly with his breathing.

He did not rush to attack again. Instead, he keenly noticed the faint, incongruous chill in the air.

He tilted his head slightly. On his stitched face, his mismatched eyes reflected a sight he had never seen before.

"The flow of cursed energy changed?"

Mahito lowered his heavy right arm, letting the flesh hammer drag across the floor with an ear-piercing scrape.

He slowly raised his left hand and opened his palm.

"Drip."

A clear bead of water fell through a crack in the sanatorium's shattered ceiling, struck his palm precisely, and burst apart.

Then came a second, a third. In an instant, the dust kicked up by the fighting was forcibly driven down by a dense curtain of rain that all but washed the air clean.

"Now that really startled me."

Mahito looked up at the raindrops falling steadily through the cracks in the building.

The rain was cold and pure, completely free of the nauseating accumulation of negative emotions that usually accompanied the activation of a cursed technique.

He tried to analyze the raindrops' composition with cursed energy, only to find that the instant his perception touched the rain, it felt as though a hazy film had been drawn over it.

The rain was silently neutralizing and diluting the cursed residue he had spread through the air.

"Is this your cursed technique? Not a simple attack, but some embryonic form of a domain?"

Mahito's expression turned unusually grave. He could feel the raindrops landing on his skin, trying to seep inside through the gaps in his stitches.

The cursed energy within him instinctively rejected them, attempting to stop these foreign substances from entering.

"To achieve a second awakening of your cursed technique when you're practically running on fumes...

"It seems my judgment was right. You really are the sort of 'wild card' most worth studying."

Mahito jerked both shoulders. His heavy flesh hammer rapidly collapsed in a mass of writhing flesh, transforming into countless long, slender black needles like sea urchin spines, shielding his body.

He stood at the very center of the rain, his gaze burning, and began using the needles' vibrations to sense the shrinking prey within it.

The rain intensified in an instant, countless transparent silver needles stabbing diagonally into the deathly silent ruins.

No time to worry about all that. Run first.

The next instant, Feng hauled up his trousers and bolted backward.

Amid the erupting curtain of rain, his battered, slender body pushed off the floor. Now that he had shrunk to the size of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, the ragged waistband he had just pulled up hung so loosely that it nearly slipped over his hips.

As the small figure tightened his grip on his waistband and plunged into the shadows deep in the corridor without looking back, the rain inside the hallway displayed an eerie sense of direction.

The drops landing on the boy's back did not slide down his skin. Instead, they rapidly seeped into his translucent flesh, as though absorbed by a sponge.

His limbs, which had looked somewhat withered from depleted energy, regained the luster of polished jade the instant they touched the liquid.

Feng's figure flickered and reconstructed itself amid the dense rain. With every step, his outline, almost merged with the mist, grew a little clearer.

This profound synchronization between his body and the environment meant that he did not lose his balance on the slick floor. Instead, like a fish swimming into the deep sea, he accelerated sharply.

Mahito stood amid the rain, letting the cold liquid soak through his loose robe.

He did not immediately give chase. Instead, he lowered his head slightly and studied the water rapidly pooling beneath his feet.

The standing water was trying to climb up his ankles, carrying an intensely suppressive, neutralizing effect.

"With yourself practically 'dried out,' you turned the surroundings straight into your own 'supply pool'?"

Mahito extended his left hand and clenched it sharply. The long black needles shielding his body retracted, covering his palm in a thick layer of black keratin.

He raised his head, his mismatched eyes reflecting the retreating figure disappearing at the end of the corridor, still clutching his waistband. His desire to dissect what he saw had grown almost twisted.

"This isn't just a simple cursed technique. A power that can change the environment's fundamental rules... it really is the embryonic form of an innate domain. What an admirable survival instinct."

Mahito's back suddenly bulged violently. With the dull sound of tearing flesh, four enormous fleshy limbs, like spider spears, burst from his shoulder blades, each tipped with a barb that sank deep into the floor.

Like a gigantic humanoid insect, he used those four limbs to launch himself wildly between the corridor's walls and ceiling.

Each leap avoided the interference of the standing water, closing the distance to the boy at a speed that almost resembled teleportation.

"What a freak show!"

Feng cursed and kept running. He still had not figured out the full workings of his cursed technique, but Mahito's technique could kill instantly. No one in his right mind would trade blows with him.

"But if this 'rain' is you yourself, then-if I bring this entire building down and bury you beneath dry rubble, how much of your 'ocean' will be left?"

The tips of Mahito's transformed, jointed limbs stabbed into a load-bearing wall as cursed energy gathered in them.

Moving at high speed, he wound all the muscles in his body tight like a spring.

"To keep you from escaping, I'll tear down this 'nursery' first!"

As he sprinted, Mahito's right arm rapidly swelled into a giant drill covered in spiral grooves. With a shrill vibration of cursed energy, it slammed into the already unstable beam above the corridor.

"Rumble-!"

A deafening collapse erupted behind Feng as tons of concrete mixed with steel reinforcement crashed down from overhead.

At that critical instant, the slender figure sharply bent his knees. Using the slippery water on the floor, he threw himself backward into a low slide, barely slipping through the gap between two falling slabs.

As he slid, his back scraped fiercely against sharp rubble, but no skin or flesh tore open.

Instead, ripples spread like waves across water. The parts of his torso that had fully absorbed the rain drew moisture from the floor the instant they were damaged, reconstructing and healing in a blink without leaving even a scar.

Using the slide's remaining momentum, his shrunken, unusually light body abruptly flipped over and sprang up.

Feng planted his feet on the newly fallen rubble, which formed a natural slope. With several quick steps, he charged straight up onto the precarious second-floor corridor.

Without the slightest hesitation, Feng stepped onto a shattered window frame and leaped out of the building.

"Thud!"

Both feet slammed into the muddy water in the courtyard outside, sending a murky splash half his height into the air.

Looks like I can restore my body as long as I touch water... but what is my sure-hit effect? Is this a domain that specializes in keeping me alive and nothing else?

Feng crouched slightly upon landing to absorb the impact. With his shirt gone, his back, washed pale by the rain, curved into a taut arc beneath the moonlight.

Then he shot off like an arrow, sprinting toward the hospital's rusty iron gate several dozen meters away.

"Crash-"

In the collapsed ruins behind him, a deathly pale arm abruptly shoved aside a heavy slab.

Mahito rose from the rubble, fully exposed beneath the open night sky.

The torrential rain instantly soaked him through, plastering his gray-blue hair against his stitch-covered cheeks.

He did not immediately pursue. Instead, he lowered his head and looked at his palm.

"The flow of cursed energy... is being disrupted."

Mahito tried clenching his fist. The flesh in his palm writhed, attempting to transform into sharp bone spurs.

Yet beneath the relentless rain, the transformations of flesh that had once come as naturally as moving his own fingers now stalled perceptibly, like rusted gears.

Every drop of rain clinging to his skin silently eroded and neutralized the cursed energy he tried to release.

It left him with a sense of difficulty he had not felt in a long time.

"If this is a domain, then what exactly is its sure-hit effect? Just suppression and self-restoration... no, something's wrong."

Mahito's mismatched eyes locked onto the small figure retreating across the courtyard.

His opponent moved through the rain like a fish in water, using the environment to reconstruct himself instantly whenever he was injured.

If Mahito continued trying to crush him with wide-area physical attacks or engage him in close combat, it would not only be inefficient, but the strange rain would steadily drain his reserves of cursed energy.

He could not let the boy escape this area. He had to cut off his retreat with faster, more penetrating long-range attacks.

"Since your body can turn into water, if I riddle your entire body with holes in an instant, can your 'recovery' still keep up with the rate of depletion?"

Mahito abruptly drew a deep breath, forcing the cursed energy within him through the suppressive rain on his skin.

His throat and chest instantly distorted, swelling like inflated balloons. Then he opened his mouth wide.

"Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh-!"

Dozens of slender white bone spikes, highly compressed and hardened like steel, sprayed from his mouth in a fan, shrieking as they pierced the rain.

Far faster than the earlier chains, the bone spikes wove an impenetrable web of death in midair, precisely covering every foothold and avenue of evasion along Feng's path to the iron gate.