An icy wind slipped through the shattered window frame and poured into the dust-choked hallway. The cold rising off the concrete floor seeped through his clothes and pressed against his back.
"What is this...?"
Kaede slowly opened his eyes. He was sitting on the ground with his back against the wall, sensation gradually returning to his body.
In his memory, he had just finished a lazy day off and crawled into a warm, comfortable bed, which obviously had nothing to do with this damp corridor.
"No way... it feels way too real..." Kaede pressed a hand to his forehead and tried to stand.
"Am I dreaming? No... did I get isekai'd? That doesn't seem possible... sleepwalking?"
At the far end of the hall, the emergency light gave off a weak, flickering green glow, throwing shifting shadows across the stained walls.
Then, from the darkness around the corner, a tall, slender figure slowly stepped out.
He wore a loose dark hoodie, and his gray-blue hair had been casually tied into two bunches that hung over his chest.
But the thing no one could ignore was his face, crisscrossed with stitched seams. The dark lines looked like grotesque centipedes, running over the bridge of his nose and past the corners of his eyes, forcibly patching together skin with different textures.
His mismatched eyes gleamed with warped delight in the darkness. One was pale and translucent, like the wing of a cicada. The other was sunken and dark.
"Ah... found you."
Mahito tilted his head. Under the moonlight, the stitches on his face looked even darker. He raised one long finger and lightly touched it to his chin, letting out a bright, airy laugh that held no warmth at all.
"Why does this guy look so familiar...?" Kaede muttered, pressing a hand to his forehead as he slowly got to his feet, his body and mind both steadily sharpening.
"How strange. This cursed energy... You don't feel like a vessel with a soul. You feel more like... a pool of flowing, beautiful water."
"Uh... who even are you, man?"
Kaede was baffled, though at the same time the man in front of him stirred a dangerous sense of recognition.
Mahito did not approach right away. He stopped about three steps away, his upper body leaning forward slightly with curiosity.
His eyes stayed fixed on Kaede without blinking, like a child who had just found a beautifully made toy he had never seen before.
That pure malice, woven together with naked curiosity, made the air around them feel heavy.
"Hey, can you hear me? Where exactly did you crawl out from?"
Mahito ran his tongue over the dry seam of his lips, his fingers unconsciously clenching once in the air.
"I don't know who you are, but if I crush you... I bet I'll get to see some very interesting colors."
Above the hallway, a bank of clouds quietly swallowed the moon. In the dry air, the faintest trace of dampness seemed to emerge.
"This guy..." Kaede thought hard, while at the same time feeling an overwhelming sense of danger.
"Holy shit, Mahito! Run!"
The curse flew out of his mouth before he could stop it. Kaede shoved himself off the dusty concrete floor and, without the slightest hesitation, spun around and sprinted into the bottomless dark at the other end of the corridor.
Broken glass and discarded syringes skidded across the ruined floor under his hurried footsteps, clattering sharply through the empty building.
Mahito, who had been standing there lazily a second ago, froze the instant he heard those two words.
His mismatched pupils contracted under the dim green light, then widened in disbelief.
The playful amusement in his eyes, the look of someone inspecting a novel toy, was instantly replaced by a feverish excitement mixed with shock and absurdity.
A stranger with no trace of the known jujutsu world on him, someone whose cursed energy moved like a pool of dead water, had taken one look at him and called him by name.
"Huh?"
Mahito let out a short, clipped sound, as if something had jammed in his throat. His tilted head slowly straightened as his gaze locked onto the figure racing farther away.
"Haha... hahahahaha!"
The next second, wild laughter exploded through the narrow hallway, thick with a kind of sticky madness that made the skin crawl.
"What is this? Why do you know my name?
Hey, what exactly are you?"
Mahito did not chase after him on foot. Instead, he stood where he was and abruptly raised his right arm.
With a sickening sound of flesh and bone tearing apart and rearranging themselves, his originally pale, slender arm swelled and stretched in an instant, like rubber melting under heat.
Bone burst through the skin at the wrist and twisted into a thick whip lined with jagged barbs.
The dark red bone whip lashed out with a speed and force that defied common sense, scraping along the stained wall as it tore toward the fleeing figure ahead.
"Boom!"
As the whip swept through, a huge chunk of plaster was ripped from one side of the wall. Broken stone and white dust exploded violently into the air, filling the hallway in an instant.
The blood-scented strike cut sideways through the tight space, completely sealing off any path to dodge left or right, its shrill rush of wind driving straight at Kaede's running legs.
"Hey, don't run. Stop and answer my question properly."
Mahito's voice cut through the crash of falling debris with eerie clarity, as if he were speaking right beside Kaede's ear, brimming with twisted excitement and cruel warning.
"Otherwise, if your legs get chopped off, it'll hurt so much you won't be able to walk anymore."
The gale raised by the bone whip was already at his ankles. Dust curled up from the floor and struck his skin in tiny stinging bursts.
"No way!"
The dark red bone whip tore through the air with a shriek sharp enough to make his ears ache.
"Slash!"
The moment that cry left his mouth, the thick, barbed shadow of the whip had already swept across with a speed too fast for the naked eye to follow.
The sharpened bone blade sliced cleanly through Kaede's legs as he ran.
And yet, instead of the dull crack of shattered bone, there came a strange resistance, like a blade cutting through a pressurized water pouch.
Deprived of the support of his legs, his body pitched forward under the force of its own momentum and slammed toward the rickety glass window at the end of the hall.
"Crash! Boom!"
The wooden frame gave way completely under the impact, and countless shards of broken glass flashed cold white in the pale moonlight like exploding hail.
Amid that spray of shattered crystal, Kaede's body lost all balance and dropped straight down toward the dark, cluttered courtyard below the third floor.
Inside the corridor, the rushing wind abruptly died.
Mahito stood still, the manic smile on his face stiffening for the briefest moment.
The barbed bone whip rapidly shrank back like a receding tide. Bone grated against bone with a teeth-aching sound before reforming into a pale, slender human hand.
He slowly raised that hand before his eyes.
In the dim emergency lighting, Mahito's mismatched pupils narrowed slightly.
There was no sticky red blood on his fingers. Instead, a few drops of clear liquid gathered at his pale fingertips, then fell with a soft pat onto the dusty concrete, spreading into a dark wet stain.
"...Water?"
He slowly rubbed the dampness left on his index finger with his thumb, his brow creasing slightly as a trace of rational scrutiny flickered through his eyes.
He was certain that strike had cleanly severed the target's legs, but the feedback had been completely wrong.
There had been none of the drag of sliced muscle fibers, none of the hardness of severed bone and tendon, not even the faint outline of a soul.
It had felt like cutting through a rushing stream.
"That's not right. If an ordinary human body were cut apart, it would never react like that.
And... there's no sweet scent of blood at all."
Mahito lowered his hand. The confusion on his face vanished in an instant, replaced by an even stronger, nearly pathological urge to investigate.
He started walking, ignoring the rubble scattered across the floor, and went straight to the window frame where a large hole had been blasted open.
The cold night wind poured in through the gap, stirring his gray-blue hair.
Bracing both hands against the splintered sill, Mahito leaned out and looked down into the courtyard below, choked with weeds and abandoned medical equipment.
From a third-floor fall, with both legs severed, even an average Grade 2 sorcerer would have hit the ground badly injured after losing any chance to absorb the impact.
And yet his sharp senses picked up no sound of a human body smashing into the ground, no bones breaking, no scream of pain.
"Not an illusion. Not a simple trick of the eye, either..."
Mahito muttered under his breath, his tongue brushing the edge of a seam.
"He knows my name, has no touch of a soul, and his body flows like water.
I see. So is this some kind of special technique... or something completely unknown?"
Without a moment's hesitation, Mahito pushed off the windowsill with one hand, his long body leaping into the night like a hunting bird.
Following the path of Kaede's fall, he dropped straight down toward the deep black courtyard below.