Mahito, Again

"Sigh... This was depressing."

Feng walked alone down the deserted, desolate street, both hands tucked into his trouser pockets.

The rain drifting through the air had soaked his clothes through. His steps suddenly faltered beneath the halo of a streetlamp.

"Did walking in the rain without an umbrella make me look like an idiot...?"

He lowered his head slightly, his gaze settling on the ripples spreading across a puddle as cold rain dripped from his slightly overgrown bangs. A few seconds later, he seemed to abandon his internal debate.

"Whatever. I'd better just walk faster."

Feng started moving again, his leather shoes splashing through the standing water at a noticeably quicker pace as he headed toward the school shrouded in darkness at the end of the street.

"My cursed energy was almost back to ninety percent. Heavenly Restriction really was convenient."

As his steps gradually quickened, the rain around him seemed to grow heavier as well.

At the same time, in the third-floor corridor of Satozakura High School.

Large sections of the windows along both sides of the corridor had shattered during the earlier clash, allowing fierce winds and autumn rain to pour freely inside.

"Junpei! Stop! Who's been lying to you?!"

Yuji Itadori planted his feet hard against the waterlogged corridor floor, using the momentum of his slide to narrowly twist aside.

A thick tentacle glowing an eerie blue swept past his uniform jacket. Venom secreted from its surface dripped onto the wooden floor, instantly producing a piercing hiss and plumes of white smoke.

"No one lied to me, Yuji. This is my own will."

Junpei Yoshino stood at the other end of the corridor. A massive jellyfish shikigami, Moon Dregs, hovered in front of him, keeping his slender body safely shielded behind him.

Junpei's hands were clenched into tight fists, his knuckles white from the strain.

His eyes were filled with painful conflict, yet he tried to feign composure with a cold tone.

"Humans have no hearts. And without hearts, there's no such thing as dignity or value to their lives.

I'm just doing what's right. Clearing out those bullies... and the trash who watched without lifting a finger."

Yuji Itadori did not immediately argue. His gaze darted between the narrow corridor and the massive jellyfish shikigami.

Itadori assessed the situation before him.

The jellyfish was not particularly fast. With his reflexes, he could easily evade its physical attacks, but the venom on its tentacles was the real threat.

The corridor's too narrow. If I force my way closer and even get grazed by that venom, it'll definitely impair my body. I can't take it head-on. I need to get around the shikigami and restrain Junpei's hands directly.

"You're wrong! If you really thought none of it mattered, you wouldn't look like you were about to cry!"

Yuji Itadori lowered his center of gravity, his thigh muscles instantly tensing as he prepared to spring off the wall and break through from above and to the side.

At the exact instant he was about to launch himself-

Whoosh!

Without warning, the fine, steady rain outside the windows turned into a torrential downpour.

Cold rain flooded the corridor, and the air inside seemed to plunge to freezing in an instant.

Every hair on Yuji Itadori's body stood on end. He forcibly halted the movement he had been poised to make.

As a vessel who had swallowed Sukuna's Finger, he was exceptionally sensitive to dangerous cursed energy.

He whipped his head around and stared through the shattered windows toward the street outside the school gates.

An unfamiliar mass of cursed energy, suffocatingly vast and like a deep-sea whirlpool, was approaching Satozakura High School one rain-soaked step at a time, with an air that seemed casual yet was unbearably oppressive.

That pure, boundless pressure lent even the moisture in the air a blade-sharp killing edge.

Junpei sensed something was wrong as well.

Moon Dregs in front of him seemed to be suffering the innate suppression of some higher being. His swollen bell began contracting uneasily, and his eerie blue glow flickered.

"What... is that?"

Junpei's voice trembled uncontrollably as he instinctively took half a step back.

The hostility he had directed at Yuji Itadori instantly dissolved into instinctive wariness in the face of that immense, unknown presence.

"Hmm? This cursed energy..."

Out on the empty street, Feng stopped in his tracks.

He tilted his head slightly, his dark red eyes piercing the dense curtain of rain to lock onto the high school campus cloaked in night in the distance.

"Another school? Well... might as well take a look."

Meanwhile, the atmosphere in Satozakura High School's third-floor corridor had turned ice-cold.

"Junpei, run!"

Yuji Itadori roared, his eyes stretched wide with horror. Veins bulged in his thighs from the sheer force he exerted as he shot forward like an arrow loosed from a bow.

But behind Junpei Yoshino, a gray-blue figure covered in stitches had already appeared as silently as a ghost.

Mahito brought his smiling face, an intertwining of innocence and cruelty, close to Junpei's ear. His pale hand, carrying lethal cursed energy that warped souls, reached straight for Junpei's unguarded nape.

Time seemed to stretch endlessly at that moment. Junpei turned in bewilderment, his pupils reflecting that hand of death.

"Drip."

An almost imperceptible sound of water rang out abruptly in the corridor charged with tension.

Without warning, a clear drop of rain seeped from the concrete ceiling.

The droplet landed precisely on the back of Mahito's hand, just as it was about to touch Junpei's skin.

Mahito's movement froze for a ten-thousandth of a second.

As a special grade cursed spirit, his perception of souls and cursed energy was extraordinarily keen.

The cold, heavy, intensely invasive cursed residue within that droplet instantly awakened a memory stored deep within his soul.

That interesting prey from the abandoned Nursing Home a few months earlier-the one who had turned into water and escaped between his fingers after he pierced his body.

In the next instant, a phenomenon defying every law of physics and meteorology descended.

The corridor ceiling seemed to be torn open by an invisible force, and torrential rain thundered down inside the enclosed space.

Amid the dense curtain of rain, a tall, slender figure in black appeared in an instant as the water converged.

Feng snapped his arm upward, a transparent Water Blade formed from intensely compressed, high-pressure cursed energy gathering along the edge of his hand.

Without the slightest hesitation, the water blade carved a sharp path through the air and slashed down viciously from above!

Shhk!

A teeth-grating sound of flesh being sliced rang out.

Mahito's right arm, which had been reaching for Junpei, was cleanly severed at its base along with half his shoulder by that sudden water blade!

The gray-blue severed limb tumbled through the air and landed with a wet slap on the rain-flooded corridor floor.

"You bastard again... hurting people here..."

Standing in the rain, Feng furrowed his brows tightly, his dark red eyes fixed coldly on the stitch-faced special grade cursed spirit before him.

Droplets still ran down from his fingertips along the blade formed from flowing water.

Mahito did not cry out in pain. He abruptly leaped several meters backward, putting distance between himself and the water blade.

No blood flowed from his severed shoulder. Instead, nauseating lumps of flesh writhed there amid the faint shimmer of his soul.

He tilted his head to glance at his severed arm on the floor, then looked up. His mismatched eyes locked onto Feng, and the corners of his mouth stretched upward uncontrollably into a fervent, almost distorted grin.

"Ah... long time no see! You actually came right to me!"

Mahito's mind raced as he analyzed the situation.

This is definitely no longer the prey who could only flee in disgrace a few months ago.

No Curtain has been cast, and there's no sense of a barrier's boundary. Yet he forcibly changed the weather indoors and even used water to teleport through space.

At least before, all Feng had been able to do was merge with it.

Had Mahito not instinctively shifted the axis of his soul during that strike, he might have lost more than an arm.

"Still, physical slashes don't work on me."

Mahito chuckled as a spine-chilling sound of growing bone came from his severed shoulder.

Within a single second, his flesh frantically reconstructed itself. A segmented arm, thicker than the previous one and covered in sharp barbs at its tip, burst from his body.

He would not give this unpredictable factor any chance to dictate the pace.

"Since you love rain so much, let's see whether your raindrops can cut through these poor souls!"

Mahito slammed his remaining left hand against the corridor wall.

Several enormous fleshy lumps instantly bulged from the formerly smooth wall. Accompanied by sickening tearing sounds, three transfigured humans compressed to their limits burst through it.

The instant they touched the air, their bodies swelled into deformed monsters over three meters tall, covered in hard blades of bone. Roaring, they lunged at Feng from three separate blind spots.

At the same time, Mahito swung his reconstructed, segmented arm through the air, turning it into a bone whip several meters long. Hidden among the three transfigured humans' attacks, it lashed toward Feng's ankle with a venomous snake's cunning, attempting to disrupt his balance as he moved through the standing water.

"Feng! Watch out for those monsters! They were all humans!"

Not far away, Yuji Itadori finally recovered from the sudden turn of events.

He recognized the familiar figure in the rain, and a flicker of delighted surprise crossed his eyes, only to be immediately replaced by anxiety.

He drove forward with both legs, shattering the puddles underfoot as he charged straight toward the leftmost transfigured human, trying to take some of the pressure off Feng.

Meanwhile, Junpei Yoshino, who had remained protected behind Moon Dregs, stared blankly at the severed arm on the floor, then at the black-haired young man confronting Mahito in the rain. His mind was utterly blank.