Faced with that look, Zenitsu's survival instinct did what it did best.
Plonk!
Perfect dogeza. Forehead against the ground, and he explained while trembling:
"I'm sorry, Senpai! I didn't know Tanjiro's sister was your wife! If I was disrespectful, please for-give-me! I won't look at her again! Not even out of the corner of my eye! I swear!"
"..."
Silence.
Marcus stared at him with his mouth slightly open. Nezuko tilted her little head, blinking.
Two seconds passed.
"...Pfft." Marcus tried to hold it in, but the laugh escaped anyway. "Forget it, forget it. Just... next time be more careful where you put your eyes, yeah?"
Boom
Zenitsu nodded against the ground with force.
Then, looking at the back of his head, Marcus warned him in passing: "Oh, by the way. The demons in this forest are spiders, and they're venomous. So watch out for bites."
"Huh?" Zenitsu lifted his head off the ground, confused. "Spid—?"
But nothing.
There was no one in front of him.
He blinked. Looked left. Looked right. Jumped to his feet and spun around like a top, eyes bulging out of his head.
"S-Senpai?? Marcus!?? Nezuko??"
"..."
The forest echoed his own voice back at him, and nothing else.
Just dark trees, shadows, and the whisper of wind through the canopy. Marcus and Nezuko had vanished as if they'd never been there.
There was absolutely nothing…
The breeze blew through the trees and brushed the back of his neck, and a chill ran through his entire body.
"No... no no no no no..." He was on the verge of breaking. "They abandoned me AGAIN?! What is wrong with everyone today?! Is it National Abandon Zenitsu Day?!" He grabbed his head with both hands. "At least... AT LEAST TAKE ME WITH YOU!! Don't leave me alone with the venomous spiders!! HE JUST TOLD ME THERE ARE VENOMOUS SPIDERS AND LEFT!!"
…
About a hundred meters away, Marcus walked unhurried along the forest trail, holding Nezuko by the hand. She trotted beside him taking short little steps, gripping two of his fingers with her whole tiny hand.
Behind them, muffled by the trees but still perfectly audible, Zenitsu's screams reached them.
Shaking his head, Marcus kept walking.
He wasn't angry. Not one bit. The whole gawking-at-Nezuko thing had actually been funny, and Zenitsu hadn't really done anything wrong.
The reason he'd left without him was something else entirely, and it was the same reason he hadn't carried Tanjiro during his training, the same reason he never solved fights for them that they could win on their own.
Zenitsu was stronger than he himself believed. Much stronger. In the future he'd be a key piece, a real combat force, and the experiences he needed to get there couldn't be handed to him by anyone.
Besides, a moment ago, while the kid had been whining nonstop, Marcus had noticed something Zenitsu probably didn't even know about himself: his breathing was powerful, even, constant.
That was the foundation of Total Concentration!
Tanjiro had surely taught it to him during these two months of rest, and Zenitsu had absorbed it without even realizing.
That, plus the warning about the spiders, should be enough. And if with all that he still couldn't survive... well. There wouldn't be much more to say.
Putting Zenitsu out of his mind, he focused on what lay ahead. He narrowed his eyes, studying the ground of the trail, the marks between the dirt and the fallen leaves. And then, little by little, something began to change.
His pupils started to ignite. The green dissolved like ink in water, giving way to an intense gold that lit up his irises from within. In the center of each eye, red arrows appeared—thin and sharp, like compass needles pointing in several directions at once.
And the world transformed.
The scattered footprints on the ground, which before had been nothing but confused marks in the dirt, snapped into sharp focus all at once.
Each footstep was distinct from the rest: size, depth, weight, direction. The trajectories of every person who'd passed through there sorted themselves out before his eyes, like colored threads untangling themselves.
And among all of them, the most striking were Tanjiro's.
That line of familiar prints glowed with a warm radiance, like flames pressed to the ground, and red arrows pointed in the exact direction he'd gone.
"How handy these eyes are~"
?
Nezuko looked up at him without understanding, but squeezed his fingers a little tighter, as if to say let's go.
During the two months he'd spent with Tamayo, Marcus's routine had been split into three things: training his body, assisting Tamayo with her experiments, and dedicating every spare moment to thoroughly studying his new ability, [Koketsu Arrow].
And he'd learned quite a bit.
Each arrow he generated had a pulling force equivalent to roughly half his own strength.
That didn't sound impressive. If he tried to use it head-on against someone at his level, the effect would be pretty mediocre—almost like trying to push someone who pushes just as hard as you, but with only one hand.
That's why Yahaba always did the same thing: first, he'd launch his victim into the air.
It was simple but brilliant, because a person suspended in midair has nothing to brace against, no ground to push off of, and then even half of someone's strength was enough to ragdoll them from side to side like a puppet.
But Marcus had squeezed a lot more out of it than that.
Because the arrows stacked. A single one equaled half a person. But two? Two already matched his full strength. Three surpassed it. Four, five... he'd tested it with Yushiro as his guinea pig—though "guinea pig" was being generous, since Yushiro had complained the entire time—and discovered that up to five stacked arrows, meaning the combined force of two and a half people, the cumulative effect worked cleanly.
Beyond that it started losing efficiency, but it still added up.
AND HE COULD GENERATE THIRTY-SIX!
If one day he decided to stop holding back and slammed every arrow he could into a single target, he wouldn't even need to draw his swords. Just dragging it against the ground would be enough to turn it into a puddle nobody would want to clean up.
That said, the ability had a blind spot: the arrows only worked within his line of sight.
The moment the target left his vision, they dissipated instantly. It was an annoying limitation, but manageable—especially now that his eyes could see considerably more than before.
…
He'd been following the tracks for about three minutes when the sounds reached him through the trees.
"Hey! Ha!"
Blows, metal, struggling. And they were coming from exactly the direction Tanjiro's footprints pointed. Marcus picked up the pace without thinking, with Nezuko trotting beside him.
But when he emerged from the trees into a small clearing where the vegetation thinned out, what he found was not Tanjiro.
It was a guy... A guy who from a distance looked completely ordinary, and up close was even more ordinary. The kind of person you could pass on the street ten times and not remember his face once. And this utterly unremarkable guy was fighting for his life against several slayers who were moving in a strange way: blank stares, rigid bodies, choppy and mechanical movements, like marionettes dangling from strings. Because they were literally dangling from strings.
Thin filaments, nearly invisible, wrapped around their arms and torsos, forcing them to attack their own comrade.
And the poor bastard was dodging as best he could—badly, clumsily, barely—while trying to cut the threads with his sword without hurting them.
Marcus's face lit up.
N-No way… Was it really him?
The king of extras. The immortal background character. The man whose talent for survival was so absurd it rivaled the protagonist's own. The one, the only…
"Pathway Pillar" Murata!
"NO FREAKING WAY!"
Murata, drenched in sweat and on the verge of collapse, whipped his head around when he heard the voice.
"Who?!"
Seeing Marcus emerge from the forest with a small girl behind him, he first went blank. Then he muttered without any filter whatsoever: "Are you backup? You're not another Mizunoto-ranked swordsman, are you?"
'Nice touch with that "another"'
So he'd already seen Tanjiro and the others… And apparently, the impression they'd left hadn't been exactly inspiring.
"Who teaches these people to judge others by their rank?" muttered Marcus, Mizunoto-ranked swordsman, shaking his head in resignation.
And without waiting for Murata to open his mouth, Marcus had already drawn his sword.
Swish
His silhouette blurred from where he stood and the next instant he appeared behind the first controlled slayer.
The blade flashed once. The threads were cut.
Before the body had even started to fall, he was already behind the second. Flash. Cut. Third. Fourth.
The sword moved so fast that the arcs of light overlapped one another.
And then he gave each of the newly freed slayers a kick, sending them rolling to Murata's feet, where they landed on top of each other in a pile of groaning, confused bodies.
By the time Murata blinked, Marcus had already sheathed his sword and was standing in the middle of the clearing with his hands relaxed and a radiant smile.
"..."
Murata looked at the pile of slayers at his feet. Looked at Marcus. Looked at the pile again. Opened his mouth. Closed it.
What... just happened?
He'd been fighting for his life, dodging by a hair, sweating, on the verge of running out of strength—and this guy had just resolved the whole thing in... how long? Three seconds? Two?
...And that was it?
"What's wrong?" Marcus tilted his head, smiling. "Still looking down on Mizunoto-ranked swordsmen?"
"Gulp!"
Murata swallowed so hard it probably echoed through the entire forest.
"N-No! Not at all! Wouldn't even cross my mind!"
And he meant it. First Tanjiro and his boar-helmet partner, who were Mizunoto and fought like they were Kinoe.
And now this guy, who was also Mizunoto and had just done in two seconds what had cost him half an hour of sweating blood.
He was starting to seriously suspect that the higher-ups had redesigned the ranking system while he wasn't looking.
Were they reversed now? Was Mizunoto the highest rank?
"I'm Marcus. I'm Tanjiro's senpai." Marcus nodded, satisfied. "Did he already head deeper into the forest?"
Murata nodded at full speed. "Yes! Tanjiro and his partner went toward the center to take care of the demon controlling all of this!"
"Good." Marcus took Nezuko's hand again and jerked his chin toward the pile of fallen slayers, who were starting to come to and groaning among themselves. "I already got the spiders off them. You don't have to do anything complicated—just stay with them and make sure no small spiders get near them."
"Yes, sir!"
Because Marcus's presence was far too imposing, Murata snapped to attention on the spot—back straight, heels together.
And only when the words left his mouth did he realize what he'd just said.
Wait... Did he just snap to attention? For a Mizunoto? Him, who technically had more seniority?
But when he looked up, Marcus and Nezuko were already gone. They'd vanished.
Murata scratched his head.
"...Who was that guy?"
Wait…
And then, a few seconds late, something clicked in his head. His eyes flew wide open.
WAIT, WAIT, WAIT.
Those two weren't normal!
That guy's eyes weren't normal! That wasn't even remotely normal. And the girl with him... That was…
...a demon?
A slayer walking hand in hand with a demon?!
He shook his head hard, trying to reset his brain.
No. No, no. Impossible. I'm exhausted, that's all.
My eyes are playing tricks on me. I've been fighting for hours and I'm seeing things now.
...
As soon as they left the clearing behind, Marcus stopped walking and started running. Nezuko, holding his hand, didn't complain—her feet kept up with the pace effortlessly.
Murata had piqued his curiosity, honestly.
A completely ordinary guy surrounded by demons, without any special talent, and still alive. His luck was supernatural.
But curiosity could wait. Time couldn't.
As he ran, the pieces were fitting together in his head, and he didn't like the picture they formed.
He'd assumed Tanjiro had just entered the mountain, because Zenitsu was still outside. In the normal course of events, Zenitsu should have gone in shortly after Tanjiro, pushed forward by Nezuko, and by the time he reached the forest, Tanjiro would have barely been running into Murata.
But this time Nezuko was with him, not with Zenitsu, so the blond coward had stayed squatting at the edge of the road muttering his miseries with nobody to push him to move. And that had made him miscalculate the timing.
Finding Murata fighting alone meant Tanjiro had been inside for a while now. Considerably longer than he'd assumed.
And if Tanjiro had been in there that long…
Tanjiro wasn't what worried him. What worried him was her…
THE SPIDER MOTHER!
Gritting his teeth, he accelerated.
He hadn't run at full speed, hadn't dropped everything, hadn't run until he nearly burst to reach this damn mountain just so that, by arriving one step too late, she'd turn to ash.
NOT A FUCKING CHANCE!
______
Thank you for reading! 🙏
Marcus is finally getting serious, but the clock is ticking for the Spider Mother. Let me know what you thought of the chapter and drop your Power Stones below!
________
Craving more? (I know you are! 😏) Support my writing on Patreon and get early access to upcoming chapters, plus bonus content, behind-the-scenes, and a cozy community of fellow readers.
👉 [patreon.com/Athome790]
Your support fuels me. Thank you for the support!