Three days. Gone in the blink of an eye.
The night sky stretched vast and deep overhead, and the full moon hung at its zenith — enormous, pale as a bone-white disc.
The moonlight was a sickly, bleached white. The shadows it cast on the ground were so dark they looked like ink still wet from the brush, thick and suffocating.
Kōbe Hikaru sat on the wooden sleeping platform in the guest room. He hadn't lit a lamp.
He didn't need to.
The light spilling in through the window was almost painfully bright — but it carried a bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with warmth. And it wasn't moonlight. It was qi, so dense it had nearly solidified, bleeding outward from the direction of the shrine.
Purple edging into black. Black edging into luminescence.
The light of the Shikon Jewel.
The malevolent force of Magatsuhi — murky, frigid — the accumulated demon-qi of hundreds of high-ranking demons lurking within.
According to what the Naohi had conveyed in the days since.
From the very moment the Shikon Jewel had taken form, the soul of Tsukiko — the most powerful shrine maiden who had ever lived — had been locked in eternal combat within it, pitted against the vengeful spirits of hundreds, even thousands, of high-ranking demons and great-demon-class entities.
In ordinary times, Tsukiko's soul held the upper hand.
So in most circumstances, it was the Naohi that stirred and moved, and the Shikon Jewel appeared to the world as a clear, luminous white orb — pure and unblemished.
But when the Shikon Jewel fell into the hands of a demon with a corrupted heart — or when the full moon rose and the yin energy of the world reached its peak —
Magatsuhi would gain the upper hand.
And the malevolence coiled within would pour free, rampant and unchecked.
That was now.
This night.
Kōbe Hikaru reached down and pressed a hand against the blade at his hip.
Muramasa hummed inside its sheath — low and restless, the sound of a starving dog that had just caught the scent of blood.
"Easy."
He patted the hilt.
"You'll eat your fill tonight."
He pushed open the door and stepped outside.
The village that greeted him was unnervingly silent.
No insects. No dogs barking. Not even the whisper of wind through leaves.
The air felt like hardened glue.
Kōbe Hikaru raised his head and looked up. Three feet overhead, a thin, transparent membrane of light curved over everything — like an enormous bowl set upside-down — sealing the village off from the outside world. Or more precisely: sealing off this mountain peak, where the shrine stood, from whatever lay beyond.
A barrier. Again.
Kōbe Hikaru was well acquainted with them by now. But he could immediately see the difference between this one and the barrier Kikyō had used before.
It didn't cover the whole village. It covered only the residential quarters — the homes where people slept — while deliberately leaving the shrine at the center exposed.
And its purpose wasn't defense. Not primarily. What it was, was silence.
She had made the village, and every house in it, perfectly, utterly quiet. The people inside wouldn't hear a sound from outside. Wouldn't feel a breath of the energy raging beyond their walls.
That young woman wanted the villagers to sleep through the night in peace.
And then stand alone, inside the shrine she had left unprotected, to face every threat herself.
"What a stubborn fool," Kōbe Hikaru muttered.
He let the demon-qi within him surge outward, transforming it into the dense, dark force of ghost-qi — and from that ghost-qi, forged his armor. He lifted the crimson demon mask and pressed it back into place over his face.
…
The shrine platform.
The wind here was fierce.
Different from the air below — it carried a metallic, blood-tinged edge. The smell of demon-qi concentrated to its limit.
Kikyō stood before the main hall.
No Kagura Bell in her hands. No prayers on her lips.
She held her longbow, quiver slung across her back, white kosode and red hakama snapping and cracking in the gale — a paper kite straining at its line, threatening to tear apart at any moment.
Before her, suspended in midair, the Shikon Jewel floated.
Pitch black.
Ink-dark energy erupted from within it in rolling torrents — Magatsuhi, the concentrated resentment of hundreds of powerful demons, howling and thrashing against the net of spiritual power that held them bound.
Sssss——
ROAAARRR——
In the darkness all around, countless pairs of eyes ignited.
Every direction. Every shadow.
Atop tree branches. Perched on the torii gate. Crouched behind stone lanterns. Pressing up from the soil itself.
The feast-goers drawn by the eruption of demonic energy had arrived.
This time, it wasn't a few hundred low-ranking demons.
Their numbers were fewer — a hundred or so. But their quality was staggering.
Directly ahead, an Earth Spider the height of a three-story building planted all eight of its legs into the ground like iron spears, the shell plating its back glinting with a cold, metallic sheen.
To the left, a pair of conjoined Big-Head Oni dragged rusted iron chains behind them, carving deep furrows into the earth with every step.
To the right, a massive moth covered entirely in human faces beat its wings and sent cascades of luminous powder drifting downward — the scales hissing and smoking wherever they touched stone.
Every single one of them had completed six Changes of Physical Transformation, or were brushing up against the threshold of Corporeal Sublimation. High-ranking demons, each and every one.
Kikyō's expression didn't change.
She drew an arrow and nocked it to the string.
The arrowhead trained on the Earth Spider's compound eyes.
Spiritual power gathered. White light blazed at the tip.
And then — from behind her, a faint sound.
Straw sandals on stone.
Light. Almost nothing. But in a silence drawn this taut, it rang louder than thunder.
Kikyō didn't turn.
She already knew who it was. That scent — human reason threaded through the cold stillness of a dead man's body — was unlike anything else in the world.
"Go back," she said.
Her voice was low. The wind tore at the edges of her words and scattered them.
"Go back where?"
Kōbe Hikaru stepped up to her side — precisely half a step behind and to her flank. Far enough not to obstruct her line of fire. Close enough to step in front of any blade aimed at her in an instant.
His armor shifted around him, demon-qi rolling off it in waves — not foul, not murky, but dense in a way that Kikyō found, inexplicably, solid. Grounding.
"The soundproofing in that room was too good," he said. "Felt like being buried alive."
He pushed the demon mask halfway up his face, revealing the lower half — pale skin, clean lines — while his crimson eyes locked onto the horde ahead with the flat, calculating interest of a man surveying a banquet table.
"Besides. Leaving me out of a party this lively?"
"That's just rude."
Kikyō's fingers stayed on the bowstring.
"This is my duty," she said.
"The impurity of the Shikon Jewel must be purified by its guardian shrine maiden."
"I know," Kōbe Hikaru said.
He drew the blade.
Shhiiing——
Muramasa cleared the sheath. The bright steel caught the moonlight and bent it into something wrong — something alive — and the grain running along the blade's edge pulsed like a blood vessel gone feverish.
[Cursed Blade Muramasa: Mood — 'Extreme Frenzy.' It wants to consume everything in sight.]
Kōbe Hikaru ignored the system notifications flooding his vision and angled the tip of the blade toward the ground.
"You need to purify the jewel and hold off this entire horde at the same time. That's too much for one person."
"These things are tough. Your arrows hit hard, but they're single-target — you can't aim at a crowd, and your quiver isn't bottomless."
He turned his head and looked at Kikyō from the side.
That cool, composed profile, lit by the radiance of spiritual power — breathtaking in its beauty, and so profoundly, painfully alone.
"Same as before."
Kōbe Hikaru said it simply.
"You cover range, I handle melee."
"I take the heads. You finish what I miss."
"Anything that slips past is yours. Anything that gets in my face is mine."
Simple.
Direct.
He hadn't asked about the details of tonight. Hadn't asked Kikyō why she hadn't said anything. He simply arrived, and made it sound like the most natural thing in the world — as though of course he would be here, as though there had never been any other possibility.
He had made up his mind already. Kikyō needed him tonight.
This shrine maiden was powerful — undeniably so. But after the battle days ago, and three days of close observation, Kōbe Hikaru had been able to sense it plainly: compared to the version of her he knew from the source material, the girl standing beside him now hadn't yet reached her peak.
People grew. When a work of fiction became real, that too was simply the nature of things.
At her strongest — as he remembered it — Kikyō's spiritual power itself might not have increased much; that was something innate, and she had likely already reached its limit. But her mastery of her abilities, her command in combat, was far beyond what he was seeing now.
And beyond that — he had no intention of letting this opportunity pass him by.
Fighting with Kikyō's support was essentially fighting with a safety net. A chance to raise Muramasa's Affection and the Shikon Jewel's Affection in the same engagement.
Opportunities like this didn't come twice.
Benefit others. Benefit himself. Why in the world would he refuse?
So.
Kikyō was silent.
She had things she wanted to say, and no idea where to begin.
In that silence.
The young shrine maiden's fingers loosened on the bowstring — just for a fraction of a second — then tightened again.
The presence behind her was steady.
She could feel it. The existence of this demon who wore a young man's face — this Ghost Warrior — standing at her side.
He felt like a wall.
A wall she could turn her back on.
She had never experienced anything like this.
As a shrine maiden, she had always been the one standing at the front. Behind her were the villagers. The ones who needed protecting. The weak.
No one had ever stood beside her.
No one had ever fought alongside her.
This was the first time.
"…"
The wind swept her long hair outward. The tips of it brushed across Kōbe Hikaru's arm.
"Alright."
One word.
Light as air. Heavy as stone.
[Shikon Jewel — Naohi: Affection +2]
[Current Affection: 8 (Trust)]
[It conveys a message: 'She is no longer alone.']
Kōbe Hikaru's mouth curved.
That was enough.
"Here we go!"
The stone tiles beneath his feet exploded outward.
A grey blur — moving like lightning — launched straight at the largest Earth Spider.
The hardest bone on the whole plate.
The Earth Spider shrieked and drove two of its front legs downward like battering rams.
Kōbe Hikaru didn't dodge.
The blade swept upward, and black sword-qi carved a half-arc through the air.
CLANG!
Sparks cascaded.
Blocked.
In the same instant, the air split behind him.
CRACK!
A streak of white light grazed past Kōbe Hikaru's temple and buried itself precisely into the Earth Spider's gaping maw.
A demon-breaking arrow.
The Earth Spider screamed and reeled backward.
Kōbe Hikaru used the recoil to launch himself skyward, blade driving straight down toward the compound eyes.
"Thanks!"
He shouted it mid-air.
He didn't look back.
He didn't need to.
He knew that figure in white kosode and red hakama was right there, exactly where she should be.
He was in front of her. She was at his back.
That was enough.
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