Feng vs. Mahito

The torrential rain in the corridor grew fiercer, dense droplets hammering the shattered tiles with a deafening roar.

"Got it!"

The black-haired young man's right hand snapped to his waist, and Mikazuki Munechika, radiating an ominous aura, flashed free of its sheath.

The crimson eyeball on its hilt spun wildly, greedily seeking out the malice around it.

Just as Mahito's bone whip lashed toward his throat like a venomous snake, Feng flicked his wrist. The blade traced a vicious arc and struck the side of the whip with pinpoint precision.

Crack!

The sound of splintering bone rang out sharply through the rain.

Using the recoil, Feng surged forward like a phantom. His long blade swept upward, its icy arc cleaving an oncoming transfigured human diagonally from its abdomen to its shoulder blade.

Blood as thick as ink gushed out, only to be forcibly repelled by the curtain of rain surrounding him before it could reach his body.

Then his left leg swept sideways. His foot whistled through the air and slammed into another transfigured human's temple, the tremendous impact sending its hulking body straight into a nearby classroom.

A knife-hand strike from Mahito skimmed past his temple.

"Itadori, leave this to me!

Get that young man out of here. This guy and I have a score to settle, and it's time to collect. Don't worry. Just do everything you can to clear the surrounding..."

Before Feng could finish, a cunning, cruel smile spread across Mahito's stitch-covered face.

At some point, Mahito's left palm had swollen grotesquely. Taking advantage of the opening as the young man dodged sideways, he drove it toward Feng's chest, carrying the soul-warping fluctuations of Idle Transfiguration.

"Got you," Mahito whispered.

But his palm touched neither firm flesh nor blood. Instead, it met something cold, slick, and fluid, without any fixed shape.

The young man's chest collapsed without warning. The spot Mahito touched liquefied into a deep, swirling vortex of water.

Mahito's soul-warping strike felt as though it had plunged into a bottomless ocean trench, finding nothing to push against.

The next instant, Feng lunged forward.

As his flowing body collided with Mahito, countless crystalline water spikes, sharp as needles, burst outward from his afterimage!

Shhk, shhk, shhk, shhk!

Mahito's body was riddled as though by a thousand blades. The fine water spikes carried highly compressed cursed energy, piercing straight through his limbs and torso.

Feng became a streak of light and passed through Mahito's afterimage, swiftly reforming behind him. As he turned, his lowered blade swept up in a savage crescent.

The tip plunged deep into Mahito's back, then ripped downward along his spine.

Black blood sprayed through the rain to the sound of scraping bone.

The slash split Mahito's entire back open, exposing the curling, faintly glowing soul matter within.

"Clear everyone out of the area. I'll handle him."

Feng stood in the pooled water with his blade held across him. His long bangs concealed his dark red eyes, leaving only the eyeball on the hilt restlessly turning.

The barrage sent Mahito staggering forward.

He let out a shrill laugh mingling pain and ecstasy, and his split back healed in an instant.

He whipped his head around, his mismatched eyes fixed on the young man. The hunger for battle in them was almost tangible.

"Haha! You actually avoided contact with your soul... Is your soul liquid?

This feels even more interesting than Sukuna!"

Mahito braced one hand against the floor. The instant his palm touched the pooled water, it began to crystallize and twist unnaturally.

He realized that his opponent possessed an extremely high resistance to physical attacks and a bizarre ability to move.

Simple clashes of flesh would hardly do any lasting damage.

"If I can't catch your soul, I'll stain this whole 'rain' black!"

Mahito slammed his palms together.

His body began to swell violently. Countless tiny transfigured humans, each no bigger than a finger, seeped from his pores. Screaming and biting, they tried to cling to every raindrop around them.

It was contamination on the level of the soul. Through it, he sought to disrupt the young man's absolute control over the water.

Not far away, Yuji Itadori's face was taut.

He glanced at the two locked in battle, then at Junpei Yoshino, who lay collapsed on the floor.

"Junpei, get up! We're leaving!"

Itadori stepped over to Junpei. Sensing his explosively powerful cursed energy, the giant jellyfish shikigami, Moon Dregs, instinctively retracted his tentacles.

Without waiting for a response, Itadori grabbed Junpei by the shoulder and hoisted him onto his back.

He considered Feng's instructions.

Feng was right. Mahito's cursed technique was terrifyingly lethal in a crowd. If he escaped into the city, the consequences would be unimaginable.

And the natural counter Feng had demonstrated against Mahito's cursed technique really did make him their best option for holding him back.

"Feng! This guy's slippery as hell, so make sure you stay alive! I'll come back to help once I've dealt with things outside!"

Itadori hesitated no longer. Driving through his legs, he stomped through the pooled water and leaped out of the shattered window with Junpei on his back, disappearing into the vast darkness.

Inside the school building, only the pounding rain remained, along with two murderous gazes, one red and one blue, fiercely clashing through its curtain.

He just mentioned Sukuna's soul... So Mahito has already touched it. That doesn't line up with the original timeline at this point... Feng watched Mahito as he thought.

Something else has changed unexpectedly. In that case, Mahito probably already knows Itadori can attack his soul, too, doesn't he?

"Your soul technique is certainly troublesome, but it isn't invincible. I just have to make you use it over and over. The moment you run out of cursed energy, you die."

Feng's voice was cold and certain amid the rain. Before he had finished speaking, he stepped onto the pooled water and charged forward as a pitch-black blur.

Mahito's segmented arm blade, freshly reconstructed from flesh and studded with sharp barbs, stabbed out like a hunting snake. It shrieked through the air, heading straight for Feng's throat.

Clang!

Sparks flickered briefly in the dim corridor.

Feng rolled his wrist, sweeping Mikazuki Munechika upward. The eyeball embedded in its hilt spun as the blade caught the side of the arm blade at a precise angle.

With an ear-piercing scrape, he forced the lethal thrust aside.

Seizing the opening as his blade knocked Mahito's guard away, Feng twisted at the waist. His long right leg whipped through the air, driving toward Mahito's abdomen with all his strength.

Mahito's mismatched eyes contracted sharply.

At the last possible moment, he manipulated the shape of the soul in his abdomen. His entire upper body folded backward in complete defiance of human skeletal structure, narrowly evading a kick powerful enough to shatter his internal organs.

Though his kick missed, Feng's assault never paused. He lowered his center of gravity as he pressed forward, clenched his left fist, and drove it straight at Mahito's stitch-covered cheek.

But the instant he threw the punch, the rain surrounding Feng began to resonate strangely.

Like a nimble fish swimming through the deep sea, he made a swift paddling motion.

His body slid along the dense strands of rain in the air. Defying inertia, he vanished eerily from directly in front of Mahito and appeared in the blind spot to his left.

Bam!

The punch landed squarely, slamming into the side of Mahito's face with the crushing force of high-pressure water.

His gray-blue cheek caved in and twisted. Several shattered teeth sprayed from his mouth, mixed with black blood.

The enormous impact hurled his entire body away with a thunderous crash.

Mahito smashed through the remaining concrete wall along the outside of the corridor and tumbled out of the school building's third floor like a ragged meteor. He slammed into the muddy school grounds below, gouging out a huge waterlogged crater.

Feng gave his opponent no time to catch his breath.

He stepped forward and leaped straight through the hole in the third-floor wall.

Gales swept torrential rain through Feng's black hair as his slender body plummeted through the air, both hands holding the long blade in a reverse grip.

Driven by the force of his fall, the sinister blade's tip tore through the curtain of rain, aimed straight at Mahito's chest in the muddy crater.

In the crater, Mahito snapped his eyes open and spat out a mouthful of bloody foam mixed with grit.

His mind raced.

His opponent's words had struck precisely at his weakness-maintaining and reconstructing the shape of his soul did indeed require a constant, enormous expenditure of cursed energy.

And his opponent's ability to turn into water at any moment to evade both physical and soul attacks was dragging this battle into a war of attrition.

I can't take this plunging strike head-on!

"That's a pretty thorough analysis! But if you want to wear me down, you'll have to live long enough first!"

Mahito slammed both hands into the muddy water at his sides. The miniature transfigured humans he had released to contaminate the rain instantly received a new command.

They frantically converged over Mahito's chest. Amid a teeth-grating chorus of intertwining flesh and bone, they formed a thick bone tower shield composed of countless wailing human faces.

At the same time, Mahito's legs rapidly transformed in the muddy water. The muscles in his thighs and calves twisted into powerful spring structures, compressed tightly against the mud.

He planned to activate his legs the instant the blade struck the bone shield, using the impact of the falling strike to catapult himself far backward. He would give his opponent no opportunity to keep pinning him down at close range.