Kikyō's fingertips still rested against the back of his hand, the soft, delicate warmth of them seeping through skin and into bone. But right now Kōbe Hikaru had little time to savour that heat.
His crimson oni eyes turned toward the north, his mind racing.
Uesugi Kenshin had come alone, courtesy before force, and after being refused had departed at her leisure.
And her army of three thousand was encamped at a valley pass a hundred li away.
If she walked back—at a normal marching pace, she would reorganize her troops after daybreak, and by tomorrow midday the army could be at the gates of Kaede Village.
Three thousand men.
Not something the one thousand from last time could compare to.
Last time he had cut down Kakizaki Kageie in a single stroke, and that was of course because the gap in strength between them had been vast—but it had also relied on the enemy's carelessness, on them not sending the army charging from the very start; it had relied on the explosive first strike of the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body, and above all on that maiden warrior not knowing the truth of him.
But this time, the enemy already knew his battle strength.
And Uesugi Kenshin had said that next time she came, she would bring all of her divine artifacts.
Which meant that within that army there would surely be several warriors bearing the power of divine artifacts—so-called reincarnations of divine artifacts—taking command.
Once the enemy came with a properly marshalled army, and he and Kikyō held Kaede Village in passive defence, even if they won, the village could not be saved.
Momiji and Botan, the two little shrine maidens, weren't even qualified to set foot on a battlefield—their paper-doll shikigami were fine for exorcising and subduing yōkai, and their individual combat power was not weak, but on a battlefield it simply would not do.
Every craft has its specialty, and this was plainly not theirs.
So—there could be no waiting.
"Kikyō."
"Mm?"
"Guard the village well. I'm going out for a while."
Kikyō's fingers drew back, her jet-black eyes fixed on him.
She did not ask where.
She knew.
"You won't wait for dawn?"
"By dawn it'd be too late."
Kōbe Hikaru settled the crimson oni mask back over his face, his pale long hair lifting in the night wind. "Uesugi Kenshin took the mountain road. She's strong, but in the end she's human—and I can command the thunder. In speed, I'm faster than she is."
"Before she returns to her camp, I mean to arrive first."
"And then—"
He did not finish, but Kikyō had already understood.
She did not stop him.
She only gripped the longbow in her hand a little tighter.
"Be careful."
One word.
"I'll wait for you to come back."
One sentence. Kōbe Hikaru nodded.
The next instant.
[Transformation of the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body], full release.
Violet arcs of electricity burst outward, and his figure became a bolt of purple lightning, springing up from the stone slabs before the torii and streaking away toward the north.
But he did not charge straight at that army.
He first veered off to the west.
Because what he needed—was an army.
His own army.
North of Kaede Village, among the unbroken chain of hills and valleys.
Months ago, this region had been a battlefield.
The frontline friction between the Imagawa and the Hōjō, the sweeping raids when Echigo pushed south, and, earlier still, the route travelled by the yōkai vanguard sent by Kyoto—wherever blade and spear had passed, corpses and bones lay strewn across the land.
Though the bodies on the surface had long since been gnawed by beasts and buried under soil, the things beneath the earth were still there.
Dead spirits.
Lingering, faint fragments of wandering souls that had already lost all self-awareness.
They were not existences revived by fierce obsession like oni warriors—only the last trace of grievance a dying man had felt at his end, seeped into the soil, clinging to broken bones, like words left unfinished and half scattered by the wind.
Under normal circumstances, such things would dissipate entirely within a few months.
But they had not yet fully faded.
Kōbe Hikaru came down upon a hillside.
The soil beneath his feet was soft, and stepping on it gave a feeling that was not quite right—it wasn't the ground itself, but something beneath the earth responding to his presence.
[Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer].
Spirit Affinity.
Soul Summoning.
He pressed his right hand against the ground, and yōkai power poured through his fingertips into the soil.
A dark green phosphorescence spread out from the point of contact, creeping along the invisible cracks and fissures beneath the earth like a vast net being slowly cast open.
Every node of that net hooked a wisp of a lingering dead soul.
Kōbe Hikaru closed his eyes.
Yōkai aura spread out, his perception widening.
One, two, ten, thirty—not only this hillside.
Across the entire hill country, within a radius of five hundred metres, every fragment of a dead soul buried underground, clinging to broken bones, drifting through the ruins of the old battlefield, was touched by his yōkai power.
The range was not large, but the numbers were not small.
In the chaos of the Warring States, far too many had died on this land.
"Rise."
Kōbe Hikaru said in a low voice.
It was not a command.
It was more like—an invitation.
In that moment the gift of Spirit Affinity took effect.
Those lingering fragments of consciousness bore him no hostility, and even revealed an instinctive closeness—because of the gift of Nekomata resonance and fusion, and because he himself was a kind of dead spirit, an oni warrior, a corpse that had crawled up out of a heap of bodies.
He was, of their kind.
They recognized him.
The ground began to tremble.
And then something came drilling up from beneath the soil.
The first hand reached out from the side of the hillside.
A greyish-white skeletal hand, its knuckles broken, half a length of rotted armour still hanging from it.
Then came a second, and a third.
A skull bored up out of the ground, only half a face remaining, dark green corpse-fire flickering in its hollow sockets.
Most were not whole corpses, only fragments of remains—half an arm, a single leg bone, a torso pieced together from a few ribs.
But driven by the Soul Summoning art, those lingering fragments of consciousness attached themselves anew to these bones, granting them a brief existence.
They could not stand steady.
Crooked and lopsided, swaying and tottering.
Some had only an upper half, crawling along the ground on two hands.
Some had heads lolling to one side, half a rusted helmet hanging from them.
Some still gripped a blade snapped in two.
But they all looked toward the same direction—toward Kōbe Hikaru.
Dark green corpse-fire danced in their hollow sockets; that was their answer to him.
Obedience, and following.
Kōbe Hikaru rose to his feet and looked around.
On the hillside, down in the valley bottom, within the trees—remains crawled up from underground one after another, gathering around him.
Their numbers grew.
Fifty, eighty, a hundred—
until at last it stopped at around two hundred.
Not many, truly.
But for his purpose, it was enough.
He did not need these dead spirits to fight.
They could not fight anyway.
These remains couldn't so much as best an ordinary ashigaru; one stroke would cleave them to pieces.
But what he needed was not battle strength.
It was—a spectacle.
It was dread.
More than two hundred broken skeletons of the dead, dragging crooked shadows beneath the moonlight, trailing behind an oni warrior wearing a crimson oni mask.
Blood mist seeped out from Kōbe Hikaru's body, shrouding the entire army.
The thin red mist made those broken bones all the more eerie—a severed arm became the outline of a claw within the mist, half a torso swelled into a huge shadow amid the blood-red.
It was cut from exactly the same cloth as the method he had used that day at Yadaihara, painting twenty-three lesser yōkai with blood mist.
Only this time the scale was—tenfold greater.
"Move."
Kōbe Hikaru stepped forward, toward the north.
More than two hundred dead spirits followed.
The sound of colliding bones rustled faintly in the night, like a dense swarm of insects gnawing at something.
Corpse-fire drifted through the blood mist, the green glow flaring and fading, lighting up the hollow face of every set of remains.
Seen from afar, this too was plainly an army of demon soldiers.
A ghost army.
The marching column of the dead that, in legend, appears only in the depths of night.
It was the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.
A true Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.
Not the daytime kind—the twenty-three demons paraded by day to frighten the soldiers of two armies.
It was an army of the dead, in the dark of night, beneath the moonlight, within the blood mist.
And the figure leading this army: grey-robed, pale-haired, crimson oni mask.
Violet arcs of electricity leapt about his body, the Muramasa's hilt swaying faintly at his waist.
He walked at the very front.
Behind him were two hundred dead spirits.
Beneath his feet was the earth of the Kantō.
Above his head was the setting moon.
This day, in the end, was no longer like the days before.
He was no longer that lone wandering ghost who had crawled up out of a heap of battlefield corpses.
No longer the squatter who could only run wild by relying on Kikyō.
He had twenty-three demons rooted in Suruga, the official endorsement of the Imagawa clan, and the recognition of the Kantō land's favourability at level two.
He had the never-missing hand of the Spirit-Chasing Archer transformation, the extreme speed of the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body, and the iron wall of the Bone Soul transformation.
And he also had—an army of the dead.
Though these dead spirits were all weak.
Weak enough that any random samurai could scatter them.
But that did not matter.
What mattered was—that three thousand living men, in the depths of night, seeing two hundred skeletons crawl up from beneath the earth, form into ranks, and come marching toward them behind a Demon God, would be afraid.
A chill would rise from the marrow of their bones.
This kind of fear could not be overcome by courage.
This kind of fear—was dread.
And dread was precisely the weapon he could wield.
The violet arcs of electricity left a winding trail of light across the night sky.
The Demon King led the hundred demons, marching north.
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