A dull tearing sound exploded through the tatami room.
With enough force to snap a human neck outright, Hippo-maru's thick hooked claws swept cleanly across the neck that looked even more fragile beneath the deep blue coat.
But the expected burst of blood and crunch of broken bone never came.
Under the force of the blow, Kaede's oversized coat snapped violently backward, yet his feet stayed planted in the doorway, his posture unchanged.
Only the part of his neck struck by the claws collapsed on contact, flesh and bone breaking apart into a spray of clear liquid.
"Tch..." Kaede frowned slightly. He felt no pain, but that did not mean he was about to just stand there and let himself get hit for free.
The droplets splashing through the dim room caught the light with a cold gleam.
In the next instant, the scattered liquid defied every law of physics. Under the pull of cursed energy, it abruptly condensed and stretched.
Dozens of soft droplets became dozens of dense, razor-sharp translucent water blades, slashing back at terrifying speed straight toward Hippo-maru's face from point-blank range.
Yaga's pupils contracted sharply.
For a fraction of a second, that near-decapitation scene had made even his heart miss a beat. But what happened next instantly forced the battle-hardened principal into a tactical response.
The thick fingers holding his sewing needle flicked hard, yanking at the invisible threads of cursed energy connected to the cursed corpse.
Faced with the water blades shooting straight at it, Hippo-maru's lunging body twisted in midair under that immense pull.
Its huge, violent form compressed all at once, crossing both thick plush arms in front of its vulnerable compound eyes.
Thk-thk-rip!
The room filled with rapid slicing sounds. The water blades carved through the specially reinforced fabric of Hippo-maru's arms with brutal force.
Green stuffing, torn cloth, and powdery cursed-energy crystals packed inside its body burst from the gashes in a spray.
The impact sent the rampaging cursed corpse tumbling twice through the air before it crashed back onto the tatami and slid several yards, gouging two deep furrows into the floor before it barely steadied itself.
Yaga remained seated cross-legged, but his upper body had already leaned forward and every muscle in his body was drawn tight.
Behind his sunglasses, he stared fixedly at the figure in the doorway, where the severed neck was already being rebuilt by surging currents of water.
"There was no startup fluctuation from reverse cursed technique..."
Yaga spoke under his breath. The anger in his voice had faded, replaced by hard-edged scrutiny and analysis.
As a master creator of cursed corpses, he understood the structure of body and soul better than most.
"The part of your body struck by physical force liquefies to disperse the impact, then turns straight into a counterattack.
Your body... is it built from cursed energy and water?"
He rested a hand on his knee. He did not order the damaged Hippo-maru to continue attacking right away, instead carefully weighing the situation in front of him.
"To counterattack like that while completely unprepared, with instincts that ruthless and no wasted movement...
Looks like when you said you didn't want to die at the hands of monsters, it wasn't just talk."
Leaning against the doorway, Gojo let out a completely insincere whistle and pushed his slipping sunglasses back up with one long finger.
Gojo already knew the basics of Kaede's defenses. The Six Eyes were not just for show, and he had personally seen Kaede rebuild his body from liquid.
"The rough gemstone I picked up was never going to be disappointing.
Principal, a trait like this, treating cursed energy as the body itself, would be rare even across the entire history of the jujutsu world.
And that strike just now, if it had landed on an ordinary sorcerer without a defensive measure like his, their throat would already be ripped open."
Gojo tucked both hands back into his pockets and strode past Kaede into the room, stepping casually onto the stuffing sliced from Hippo-maru.
"So, does that count as passing your little 'resolve test,' Principal Yaga?
I mean, he's the kind who can keep fighting even after losing his head."
Yaga watched Gojo coldly, then shifted his gaze back to Kaede.
The oppressive cursed pressure filling the room had not disappeared, but its sharp hostility had noticeably lessened.
Behind the sunglasses, Yaga's eyes narrowed slightly. Instead of feeling anger over that potentially lethal counterattack, he had fallen into a calm, professional mode of judgment.
He looked down at Hippo-maru, one arm torn open and still spilling stuffing, then back up at the boy in the doorway as his body finished reforming.
The room's humidity had risen sharply after that burst of large-scale water blades. In the candlelight, faint threads of white mist were already beginning to rise between them.
"Cursed energy is the body, and the body is cursed energy... This isn't a secondary effect of some technique. It's a rewrite of what it means to be human at the root."
Yaga's voice was low and powerful, half musing to himself, half delivering a verdict to Kaede.
He suddenly pulled tight on the invisible cursed-energy thread in his right hand, forcibly halting Hippo-maru's backward retreat.
The cursed corpse slammed both feet into the floor with a heavy crash. Using that burst of force, it twisted strangely in midair and shot out its remaining intact claw again. This time, however, it was not attacking. Instead, it swung in a wide locking arc to cut off Kaede's retreat.
"What people call a Heavenly Restriction usually means losing one gift in exchange for another power pushed to its limit.
And you... Kaede. Was the price you paid your biological structure as a living thing, in exchange for this abnormal body that can ignore fatal physical damage?"
A trace of complexity surfaced in Yaga's gaze.
As someone who gave souls to lifeless things through artificial means, he understood better than anyone what a structural change like that truly meant.
It meant that once this boy's cursed energy ran dry, he would vanish like rootless water in the air, beyond saving.
"Heavenly Restriction...?"
Kaede was still in a tightly wound combat stance. His center of gravity was low, the dark blue uniform coat pressed against his back by the night wind from the corridor, and his dark red eyes had locked onto every tiny movement Hippo-maru made.
As the cursed corpse closed in again, bright droplets were already gathering at his fingertips.
"If that trait gives you a natural immunity to what people normally call technique burnout, then your weakness is just as fatal."
Yaga analyzed him coldly. He did not soften just because he had identified part of Kaede's nature. If anything, he directed Hippo-maru into an even denser suppressive assault.
Hippo-maru moved deftly through the air, using the mountain of cursed corpses piled around the room as springboards. It kept probing from blind spots with slashing and heavy-impact strikes, trying to wear down the cursed energy reserves inside Kaede.
"My weakness?"
Kaede paid it little mind. Water blades kept automatically countering Hippo-maru's attacks.
"If you face someone who can attack the soul directly, or someone with large-scale evaporation or sealing techniques, then this so-called Heavenly Restriction of yours will only become a cage that speeds up your death."
Gojo lounged against the wall, idly brushing white hair away from his ear with one hand, while the Six Eyes never once left the blue point of light that kept liquefying, reforming, and striking back under the barrage.
"The principal's right. A balance this fragile, built entirely from cursed energy, is basically dancing on top of a powder keg."
Gojo's lips curved faintly, his tone light but cold with insight.
"Still, that inhuman quality also makes you exactly the kind of uncertainty those old fossils hate most.
Kaede, the 'limit' you want to show the principal can't just be this little survival trick, can it?"
"Mm..."
Kaede's thoughts raced, and at the same time he began adjusting the cursed energy moving through his body.
"He's right. Fighting like this forever is meaningless. If I can figure out how that domain activates...
My domain seems to have a neutralizing effect. It suppresses the other side's technique. So if I compress the rain inside the domain into a smaller range, could that make the neutralization stronger?"
His eyes sharpened. In the next instant, cursed energy began flowing according to the image already taking shape in his mind.
All the water blades screaming through the air suddenly collapsed, breaking apart into countless tiny droplets that scattered aimlessly in the current.
That abrupt interruption of the offensive made Yaga's pupils tighten behind his glasses.
But before his combat instincts could fully judge the shift, Kaede had already changed his footing.
His right hand dropped sharply, and an intensely condensed blue cursed energy, heavy as pressure from the deep sea, instantly covered his entire right arm.
It was not simple reinforcement. It was something formed by compressing the neutralizing and repelling properties of the domain itself into a highly concentrated state.
As that thin film of water wrapped over his arm, even the air around him seemed to sink into a strange, swamp-like density. Even the candlelight bent slightly as it passed near that arm.
Hippo-maru was still in the gap between old momentum fading and new force not yet born. Its left claw was only inches from Kaede's chest.
At the instant contact should have happened, Kaede's right foot crushed through the tatami beneath him.
His whole body shot forward like a fully drawn bow released, and that right arm wrapped in condensed domain energy slipped through the gap in the claw's path with brutal precision. His fingers clamped around Hippo-maru's plush neck like iron hooks.
Vmmmm!
A low, grating hum burst from the point of contact. The cursed energy rushing through Hippo-maru, the force sustaining its life and movement under Yaga's control, met the remnant of Kaede's "Rainfall" domain and reacted as if snow had been dropped into boiling oil. It was stripped away and neutralized with savage speed.
The blood-red madness in Hippo-maru's compound eyes went out like a cut power line.
In less than a second, the terrifying killing machine had become nothing more than an enormous green stuffed toy hanging lifelessly from Kaede's hand.
Half crouched on the floor with one hand gripping the heavy cursed corpse, his right knee nearly touching the tatami, Kaede looked up through strands of hair at Yaga. His dark red eyes stayed mostly calm, but a trace of surprise and delight had crept into them.
"So it actually worked...?"
Yaga's right hand, still holding the sewing needle, froze in midair from sheer shock.
He could still feel that his soul-link to the cursed corpse had not been severed, but every command he sent vanished like a stone dropped into the sea, intercepted by some higher-level operation of a cursed technique.
"Domain Amplification? No... You coated yourself in the unfinished shell of your domain like armor?"
Yaga's voice carried a tremor he could not fully hide. He slowly rose to his feet, his towering shadow stretching across the wall behind him and making him seem even more imposing.
"By immersing yourself in a reduced domain and using it to neutralize the effects of the enemy's technique... That is not something a complete novice with no formal training should be able to do.
What kind of terrifying instincts did that Heavenly Restriction body of yours give you?"
Gojo burst into a short, delighted laugh.
He ran a hand through his messy white hair, and the pale blue Six Eyes gleamed with the same feverish intensity he showed when discovering a once-in-a-lifetime treasure.
"That was gorgeous. Absolute textbook dirty tactics. Using a partial domain to erase the principal's control privileges... wow, now even I'm getting curious what kind of hell your domain, Rainfall, will become once it's fully spread open."
Gojo took a few long steps toward Kaede. With each one, the cursed energy around him seemed to clash and resonate subtly with the thin layer of domain energy still wrapped around Kaede.
"Principal, with this much resolve and this much technique, if you don't admit him, those old fossils are going to regret it so badly they won't be able to sleep."