The impact wasn't a clean crack of bone, but a wet, dense thud that spoke of transferred kinetic energy doing deep, internal damage. Toji's head snapped to the side, but his body, trained by a lifetime of absorbing and redistributing force, rode the blow, spinning with it to create distance. Blood and a single, sharp tooth flew from his mouth.
He touched his jaw, testing the alignment. Broken, but not shattered. He spat a glob of crimson onto the stone floor, his eyes never leaving Kamo. The question hung between them, more potent than any curse.
"Why?" Toji rasped, the word mangled by his injured mouth. "You had me. You finished me. Then you brought me back. Just to do it again?" It made no tactical sense. It was a waste of energy, a risk. Sorcerers didn't operate this way.
Kamo Itsuki didn't lower his guard, his blood-gauntleted fists still raised. "I told you. You're useful. A single data point from a dying man is a snapshot. A data stream from a living, fighting subject under continuous stress… that's a blueprint."
He took a step forward, the air around him humming with controlled power. "Your Heavenly Restriction isn't just a static condition. It's a dynamic adaptation. Your body learns, compensates, optimizes under threat. I saw it in our first exchange. Your tendons tightened 0.3 seconds faster after the third blood needle strike. Your pupils dilated to capture more light in the mist after the first five seconds. You are a living engine of evolution, and death stops the experiment."
Toji stared, a slow, grim understanding dawning. This wasn't about mercy or honor. It was about ownership. Kamo Itsuki hadn't saved a life; he had rebooted a valuable test subject.
"So I'm a lab rat," Toji stated, his voice flat.
"You're the control group," Kamo corrected. "The one that proves the rules for everyone else. And I need to see how far the control group can be pushed before it breaks permanently. Not just physically. Mentally. Spiritually, for lack of a better word."
He launched himself forward again, not with the overwhelming finality of the Black Flash, but with a relentless, probing series of strikes—high-low combinations, feints targeting old injuries, attacks designed not just to harm, but to elicit specific physiological responses.
Toji blocked, parried, countered. The fight resumed, but its nature had changed. It was no longer a duel to the death. It was a grueling, brutal physical examination conducted with fists and blades. Every time Toji adapted, found a new angle or rhythm, Kamo would shift his own pattern, forcing another adaptation. He was mapping the limits of the Heavenly Restriction in real-time, studying the firmware of a human weapon.
Toji fought, not for victory anymore, but for a different kind of survival—the survival of his own autonomy against being fully quantified and understood. He landed blows of his own, opening cuts on Kamo's arms and torso, but the sorcerer's Reverse Cursed Technique closed them with dispassionate efficiency, like a machine recalibrating.
The passage became a brutal gymnasium. The sound was not of a battle, but of relentless, impact-heavy research.
Finally, after what felt like an hour but was likely only minutes, Kamo disengaged with a graceful leap backward. He was breathing heavily, sweat mixing with the blood on his skin. Toji leaned against the wall, his body a tapestry of fresh bruises and half-healed wounds, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He was exhausted in a way he had never been—not just physically, but existentially drained.
"I have enough for now," Kamo said, his voice clinical. "The initial stress-response curves, the neuro-muscular compensation rates, the pain threshold data… it's a robust dataset."
He looked at Toji, who met his gaze with weary, defiant eyes. "You can go."
Toji didn't move. "Go where?"
"Wherever you want. Your mission is irrelevant. The merger will happen with my construct. The girl will live. Your employers have failed." Kamo waved a dismissive hand. "Consider this a… severance package. Your life, in exchange for the data you've provided. A fair trade."
Toji pushed himself off the wall, every muscle protesting. The offer was an insult, but it was also freedom. He was alive, when by all rights he should be a corpse cooling in this tunnel. He looked at the young sorcerer, this collector of miracles, and saw not an enemy, but a force of nature as inevitable and impersonal as a tsunami.
Without another word, Fushiguro Toji turned and limped into the darkness of the passage, away from the Hoshigami Estate, away from the mission, and into an uncertain future, forever marked by the knowledge that he had been measured, tested, and deemed more valuable alive than dead.
Kamo Itsuki watched him go, then turned toward the main hall. He had a ritual to oversee, a friend to check on, and a vast amount of new biological data to integrate. The sample had been acquired. The experiment, for now, was a resounding success.
The dust settled, revealing the grim reality of the passage. Fushiguro Toji pushed himself up, his body a symphony of freshly knitted pain. The arms that had been pulverized moments ago now bore only the memory of agony and faint, pink scars. He stared at Kamo Itsuki, not with the hate of a defeated foe, but with the stark, clinical horror of a natural predator confronted by something that defied its ecosystem.
"What kind of monster are you?" Toji's voice was a raw scrape. "How can you… choose to use it?" The Black Flash wasn't a technique to be summoned; it was a cosmic coincidence, a fleeting spark born from perfect, unconscious synchronicity. This sorcerer treated it like a tool in his belt.
Kamo looked at his own fist, where the last vestiges of spatial distortion still crackled like dying static. "It's not a matter of choice," he said, his tone analytical, almost detached. "It's a matter of control. Most sorcerers strive for the perfect alignment of physical strike and cursed energy impact by feel, by instinct. They hope for the spark."
He flexed his fingers, and a new, subtle web of crimson light—microscopic veins of his own blood—became visible for a moment across his knuckles and forearm. "I don't hope. I engineer. My Blood Manipulation gives me perfect, autonomic control over every cubic millimeter of my own biology. I can regulate my muscle fiber tension, my nerve impulse speed, my cursed energy output down to the millisecond and the millijoule. The 'error' of 0.000001 seconds isn't luck for me. It's a setting."
The explanation was more terrifying than any boast. He had reduced the divine accident of the Black Flash to a repeatable, mechanical process. He hadn't achieved a state of no-self; he had constructed it.
Toji understood then the true depth of the gulf between them. His own power was a gift of absence—a void where cursed energy should be, filled with physical perfection. Kamo Itsuki's power was one of absolute, oppressive presence—a dominion over the very substance of life and energy that left no room for accident or miracle. He didn't perform techniques; he authored physical laws within the sphere of his own body.
"You're not a sorcerer," Toji muttered, the fight finally leaving his posture, replaced by a weary, profound resignation. "You're a fact."
Kamo acknowledged this with a slight nod. "And you," he said, "are a unique set of conditions. A fact of a different kind. Your mission is void. Your employer's goal is null. But your existence… has intrinsic value."
He took a step closer, not threateningly, but with the focus of a scholar examining a rare text. "You asked why I brought you back. It's simple. A dead specimen tells me about structure. A living, resisting specimen tells me about potential. About limits. About what happens to a system engineered for optimal physicality when it is stressed, broken, and forced to rebuild under observation. The data from your recovery just now—the rate of cell regeneration, the neural recalibration—is more valuable than any scan of your corpse."
He finally lowered his hands, the blood constructs dissolving. "You can leave. The fight is over. But understand this: you are no longer just Fushiguro Toji, the assassin. You are a documented phenomenon. Your children you mentioned… they are part of that data set now, variables in your equation. If you seek a life after this, know that I will be watching. Not as a hunter, but as an observer. Your continued existence… interests me."
It was a dismissal, but also a life sentence of a different kind. Toji was free to go, but he would never again be unseen, unknown. He had been measured, cataloged, and deemed worthy of ongoing study.
With one last, inscrutable look at the young man who had turned miracle into mechanics, Fushiguro Toji turned. He did not run. He walked, each step heavy with the weight of this new, clinical reality, and vanished into the shadows of the passage, leaving Kamo Itsuki alone amidst the settling dust and the silent, humming truth of his own perfected power.
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