The gray-white spider-silk hell was expanding.
Hundreds of threads shot out at once from six arms.
The moment the threads touched the ground, the soil turned gray, hardened, became stone slabs; grass and trees lost all vitality the instant they were touched, their branches and leaves frozen in their outstretched poses, turned into gray-white sculptures.
Miles, tens of miles, until the range spanned over a hundred miles!
The whole world seemed to be devoured by the Tsuchigumo's yōkai aura.
This was the domain of a Gasification-level great yōkai achieved beyond the thirteenth mutation—existence itself rewriting the world around it.
Kikyō, seeing such an astonishing scene, furrowed her brow, unable to find a moment to aim again.
Dust surged, wild winds gathered.
Those non-yōkai things devoured by the yōkai aura were obstructing her sight, blocking her aim.
Kōbe Hikaru stood on a patch of ground not yet petrified, Muramasa held before him, thunder coiling around the blade.
He was moving.
Always moving.
Not daring to stop.
The second he stopped, the ground beneath his feet would become part of it.
But the problem wasn't whether he could dodge—the problem was that he couldn't cut through.
Muramasa struck the middle arm of the Tsuchigumo; thunder burst, purple light scattered.
A scorch mark appeared on the crimson skin.
That was all.
The scorch mark was filled in by fresh yōkai aura in the blink of an eye, not even a scar left behind.
It looked wounded, but in truth it was not at all.
This was the automatic repair, at the material level, of the very essence of the Gasification great yōkai's phenomenon—like the surface of water closing naturally after being cut open.
This was not the healing of flesh at all. It was the return of a phenomenon.
And in stark contrast to him—
Whshh.
Kikyō's arrow finally found its chance and struck the Tsuchigumo's right shoulder dead-on.
White spiritual power burst upon the gray-white skin, its purifying power sinking deep into the yōkai aura layer, stripping away a layer of yōkai aura from the point of contact.
A fist-sized dent appeared on the shoulder—that was the true body of the world revealed once the phenomenon presented by the yōkai aura was stripped away, like the raw, natural undertone that surfaces when fabric is torn open.
For a great yōkai, this was nearly equal to piercing through its very shell.
Effective.
Very effective.
Spiritual power naturally restrains yōkai aura; even Gasification-level yōkai aura would be purified and dissolved before spiritual power strong enough.
And as it happened, Kikyō's spiritual power was strong enough.
She had already reached the level where she could easily crush any demonic fiend below a great yōkai; even an extreme yōkai like Kibōmaru wouldn't dare take her arrow head-on.
Any existence that was not a great yōkai, no matter how strong, would die if it took it.
Even a graze would cripple.
During this time, having confirmed her relationship with Kōbe Hikaru, the steadiness of her heart had brought her yet another surge in growth.
Even a great yōkai like the Tsuchigumo, so plainly wild and battle-hungry, could not—would not—take her Sacred Arrow head-on, and instead used its yōkai aura outright to block it.
Taking it would wound it just the same.
But Kōbe Hikaru, yōkai against yōkai, yōkai aura against yōkai aura—
there was no restraint between them.
Indeed, because of the gulf in their levels, his yōkai aura was instead suppressed before the Tsuchigumo.
Thunder could deal physical damage, but physical damage would be repaired by the Gasification phenomenon; bone spikes could pierce the skin, but the parts that pierced through would be swallowed by petrification.
Blood mist, drawing near the opponent's body, would be eroded by the phenomenon and lose its potency, turning into gray-white dust.
Because he was a yōkai.
And yet, to achieve this much with a yōkai aura that not even high-level yōkai possessed—that truly made the Tsuchigumo see him in a new light.
As a true thousand-year great yōkai who had endured from before the Heian era to now, it had never seen such a little yōkai!
"Interesting, brat."
The Tsuchigumo's top two arms suddenly withdrew, its shoulder torn by the Sacred Arrow, all ten fingers clenched into fists.
Then—they slammed down.
No silk spat.
No yōkai aura released.
It was pure violence, unleashed at the level of flesh.
Before the wind of the fists even arrived, the ground had already cracked layer by layer, shattering into dust.
Kōbe Hikaru's body was lifted by the blast of air; he twisted in midair, Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body driven to its limit, barely steadying his form aloft.
But the Tsuchigumo's second fist had already caught up.
The middle two arms swept in from the flanks, one from the left, one from the right, forming a pincer.
The motion of its punches was fluid to an infuriating degree—the coordination of six arms was nothing like a simple movement, but like six independent existences striking at once, each arm with its own rhythm and angle of attack.
Left fist a straight thrust, right palm a horizontal slap, the two lower arms raising their knees at the same time—
it even threw in a kick.
That thick thigh, its knee joint bending backward, whipped out like a lash, carrying force enough to crush a stone wall as it swept toward Kōbe Hikaru's waist.
Too strong.
Not that its speed was fast—the Tsuchigumo's speed was in fact slightly inferior to Kibōmaru's within his own domain.
It was that its attack surface was too wide.
Six arms plus two legs, eight points of attack operating at once, covering nearly every angle.
No blind spots at all.
Even in the midst of swinging its fists and kicking its legs, it perfectly evaded the Sacred Arrows Kikyō kept pouring down.
Every arrow only grazed past.
No ultimate speed, yet astonishingly sharp.
Isn't this thing supposed to be all about melee? How is it so good at dodging?!
Kōbe Hikaru cursed under his breath and barely blocked that kick with his bone spikes, but the impact blasted his whole body flying off to the left, bouncing four or five times across the ground before it finally, barely, stopped.
Ash-gray blood seeped from the corner of his mouth.
His ribs had cracked; Bone Soul Transformation was repairing them automatically, but the speed of repair couldn't keep pace with the toll.
Kōbe Hikaru swayed to his feet, Muramasa braced against the ground, teeth clenched beneath the oni mask, the blade in his hand trembling too.
The air around him was viscous as dried cement.
The Gasification yōkai aura the Tsuchigumo gave off, that phenomenalized domain belonging to a twelve-mutation great yōkai, was crushing him from every angle.
Whump!
One of the Tsuchigumo's palms seized the chance and slammed down.
Kōbe Hikaru raised his blade to block.
[Bone Soul Transformation]fully open, layer upon layer of bone shields forming above his head.
But the instant of contact, the bone shields shattered layer by layer like paper.
That irresistible monstrous strength conducted down along the blade; Kōbe Hikaru's legs sank into the ground up to the knees at once, the air in his chest forced brutally out.
"Too weak!"
The Tsuchigumo lowered its head, that enormous bone face drawing close to Kōbe Hikaru, its faint-green eye-slits full of disappointment and cruelty.
"Brat, is this the whole extent of your capacity?"
"A worthless thing that can't even breathe in the open air—and you think you're fit to stand before me?"
It bore down harder, its legs still moving all the while.
Crack.
Kōbe Hikaru heard the arrows Kikyō kept loosing, the sound of that bowstring drawn back carrying its own urgency and worry—and, louder still, he heard the sound of his own arm bone splitting apart.
He would die.
He truly would die.
This giant spider was not joking; it truly meant to crush him to a pulp like squashing an ant.
The breath of death rushed into his face.
Thick, rank, and yet… intimately familiar.
Kōbe Hikaru raised his head; there was no fear in his crimson demon eyes—he was a man who had already died once, so how could he ever dread death?
In that instant, something suddenly came to him, an epiphany.
In the depths of desperation, under boundless pressure.
He
had touched at last where his own turning point lay.
Deep in his chest, something seemed to be loosening.
Not bone, not wound.
Something deeper.
That membrane, thin as a cicada's wing, which he had deliberately kept intact for so long.
Yes.
The door-crack of his Qualitative Transformation Mutation, long since arrived at its absolute critical point, split open of its own accord in this instant, under this extreme pressure.
The Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer was trembling, the power that fused Nekomata's Claw with the Archer Transformation spilling over, like an overstuffed bag whose bottom had finally burst.
The Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body roared, the thunder fused from Thunder Horn and Razor-Body Mutation spreading outward along the bones, no longer content to stay only between muscle and skin.
The Bone Soul Transformation was growing, the bone-control ability fused from Hiraikotsu no longer confined within the body, but reaching, creeping outward beyond it.
Three mutations arrived at their limits, in this one moment, all burst the dam at once.
He was not the one who pushed it.
The battle itself had become the final straw.
Yes—the summons of death drawing near!
The pressure of the Tsuchigumo's yōkai aura, the erosion of the Gasification domain, the crushing weight of hand-to-hand combat—pressure from every direction, beyond the limit of what he could bear, finally crushed that membrane from the outside.
Like the pressure of the deep sea, crushing a bottle from without.
The turning point he had waited so long for.
This was it.
Not a quiet, cultivated breakthrough in a safe place, but on the battlefield, between life and death, under extreme pressure, letting the body choose the direction of its own evolution.
A qualitative change like this would not be gentle.
It would be violent.
It would be a chain-reaction… a leaping, headlong surge!
—The Seventh Mutation.
Crack, crack, crack.
The sound of bones shattering rose up.
All two hundred and six bones in his body, in the same instant, sprouted spiderweb cracks—from skull to toe, from spine to knuckle, every bone like porcelain split apart from within.
Then, rebirth.
What seeped from the cracks was not marrow, but thunder.
Purple arcs of electricity surged out from the gaps in the bone, flooding the shattered fissures, linking the once-separate Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body and Bone Soul Transformation together at their most fundamental level.
Thunder no longer flowed only between muscle and skin.
It seeped into the marrow.
It seeped into the bone matter itself.
Inside every re-healed bone there was now an added layer of purple veining, like an ore vein embedded in rock—no, like the ore vein itself becoming a part of the rock.
Bone was thunder, thunder was bone.
The limit of the six-mutation Corporeal Transformation was six pockets, each holding its own; overload was stuffing those six pockets into six mountains, using quantitative change to shake qualitative change.
And now, the boundaries between mountain and mountain collapsed.
No longer six pockets.
It was a towering flood breaking the dam and pouring together into a sea.
This was Qualitative Transformation—
Corporeal Transformation changes how a thing is used; Qualitative Transformation changes whether it exists at all.
And the first answer to that question of existence was that his very base attributes were being rewritten.
The concentration of his yōkai aura surged.
The yōkai power once bound within the six mutations, each fighting its own corner, merged in the instant the three overloaded mutations broke the dam at once; the total did not increase, but the density soared—like scattered sparks compressed into a single, scorching drop of magma.
The speed once reachable only in a full-power burst before the qualitative change was now the ordinary state between breaths—the so-called Qualitative Transformation Mutation was change made eternal, made constant.
The thunder that once had to be deliberately driven before the qualitative change now moved with his very thought, needing no step of mobilizing, guiding, releasing.
This was Kōbe Hikaru's Seventh Mutation…
Recasting.
Shattering all that already existed, fusing it, condensing it anew at a higher density.
Not gaining a new ability, but making an ability he already had go from something he could use to something that simply was himself.
His outward appearance did not change.
But his legs, driven into the ground to the knees, in this moment—held.
The Tsuchigumo's palm-pressure remained, that irresistible monstrous strength still conducting down along the blade, only now the force it conducted no longer drove him deeper.
Purple arcs climbed from his knees up along the leg bones, ran through his spine, reached the arms holding Muramasa aloft; the whole skeleton like a metal frame run through with current, its rigidity abruptly soaring.
Not that his strength had grown greater.
It was that the vessel bearing the strength had grown harder.
But this—had not stopped yet!
The threshold of the Seventh Mutation was only a corner crushed underfoot; the change released by that overloaded quantity was far more than a single surge.
The Eighth Mutation.
If Kōbe Hikaru's Seventh Mutation was an inward recasting, then the Eighth Mutation was an outward overflow.
Yōkai aura began to seep out from his body.
Not the earlier kind of active release in battle—blood mist, thunder, bone spikes were all outputs he commanded his body to make.
This time was different.
Yōkai aura seeped from the pores of his skin, spilled from the gaps in his bones, spread outward from the walls of his blood vessels.
Uncontrolled.
Or rather, needing no control.
Because the yōkai aura had grown so vast the body could no longer hold it.
The Seventh Mutation had recast the interior, compressed the density, but the aftershock the compression itself produced needed an outlet.
The body was a finite vessel, and the yōkai aura's concentration after Qualitative Transformation had already exceeded that vessel's limit.
The excess could only go outward.
The Bone Soul Transformation was the first to answer this overflow.
The process that once could only manipulate bone within the body first—extending, growing, restructuring, then reaching outside—at this moment underwent a change.
Bone grew beneath Kōbe Hikaru's feet, and rose up out of the ground as well.
And it no longer needed the earth's support or active response; even bone severed from its link to him could still grow under his will, unfurling like a flower.
At the same time, the yōkai aura seeping from his surface did not spread in disorder—the Spirit Affinity of the Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer was guiding it.
That yōkai aura, carrying Kōbe Hikaru's will, formed a thin membrane within a half-inch of the body's surface.
A membrane of perception.
The soul-seizing never-missing hand, before the qualitative change, had needed to deliberately lock onto a target, had needed a process.
And now, this membrane of yōkai aura had shortened that locking-on to near instinct—any living body that entered the range would have the location of its soul marked automatically.
Which meant that every attack, before it could reach him, would be intercepted and blocked in an instant!
And so.
The perception of the Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer overflowed outward, the substance of the Bone Soul Transformation extended outward, and the arcs of the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body leaped and linked between the two.
Thereupon.
The three overloaded mutations were no longer merely crammed together after each had filled its pocket, but began, outside the body, to cross, overlap, and weave of their own accord.
This was the essence of the Eighth Mutation: overflow.
Yōkai aura broke through the body's boundary, beginning to build a second layer of existence outward, with the body as its center.
The line between inner and outer blurred.
The very concept of "body" began to expand toward a far greater scope.
The Seventh Mutation had turned his interior from six pockets into a river.
The Eighth Mutation made that river overflow its banks.
And after that, and further after that, came… the Ninth Mutation—
raising a new riverbed beyond the banks.
The crossing and overlapping of the three mutations outside the body, at this moment, found their own shape.
The Bone Soul Transformation provided the frame.
Those bone structures extending from shoulder, elbow, and spine were no longer scattered spikes—they began to connect.
Between one bone spike and another grew lateral bone bridges; upon the bridges rose bone beams; the beams layered into bone walls.
A complete skeletal structure rose up on the outside of his body.
From foot to knee, from knee to hip, from hip to shoulder, from shoulder to skull.
The white skeleton was like a tower still growing.
The Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body filled the frame, purple thunder pouring in from the bone gaps—not arcs clinging to the surface, but flooding the spaces between the bones, condensing into substance.
Thunder and bone meshed together, every bolt of lightning joined to many bones, contracting to drive the frame's motion, like true muscle and sinew pulling taut.
With bone as frame, with thunder as flesh.
Constructed outside the body, a—
complete, second body.
Six meters tall.
The perception membrane of the Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer wrapped its outermost layer, becoming the skin of this body—offering no defense, but giving this six-meter existence perception synchronized with the main body.
What the main body saw, it saw.
What the main body felt, it felt.
And the reverse as well.
This was a projection.
An enlargement.
It was the projection of one's own power onto a greater scale.
It was the Ninth Mutation after the Seventh's recasting and the Eighth's overflow—creating, beyond oneself, another self.
Gathering thunder into bone, merging into—
the Asura Mutation.
With a thunderous roar!
A colossal figure heaved itself up.
Six meters tall.
Not so very large.
Even a little laughable, set against the Tsuchigumo's twelve-meter frame.
But on that six-meter body of bone and thunder, the concentration of yōkai aura was no longer anything an ordinary yōkai could match.
Kōbe Hikaru's true body stood at the inner core of this giant of bone and thunder, raised his head, and gazed at the gray-white colossus before him, still twice his height.
Seeing this, Kikyō ceased loosing arrows to pin the Tsuchigumo down and keep it from fully suppressing Kōbe Hikaru, and let out a small breath of relief.
Her arrows were already few.
She knew Kōbe Hikaru was on the verge of breaking through, but had he made no move a moment longer, the shrine maiden might have had to go up and fight it hand-to-hand herself.
Behind the gaps of the Tsuchigumo's bone face, that green light suddenly blazed brighter.
"Ho?"
All six arms stopped at once.
It lowered its head, looking at the little brat it had just kicked flying a moment before.
Looking at the exoskeleton of bone and thunder woven around him.
Then—it laughed.
Louder, wilder.
"Good! Very good! You're worthy!"
"Come, brat!"
"Let me see—whether this new shell of yours is hard enough!"
____
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉