The instant the Asura Transformation took shape, Tsuchigumo's fists came crashing down again.
Of its six arms, the two thickest upper ones clenched all ten fingers into fists and hammered down from left and right at once.
But this time, Kōbe Hikaru did not dodge.
The six-meter body of bone, blood, and thunder-flesh raised its arms, and not merely the two of them.
Across the exoskeleton of the Asura Transformation, the strength of the Bone Soul Transformation had already broken past the limits within his body. White bone spikes extended simultaneously from the shoulders, elbows, and forearms of the exoskeleton, building two more auxiliary arms of bone framework beyond his own.
Four arms crossed to block.
Boom!
The shockwave burst from the point of contact. The ground caved in two meters beneath them both, and rubble and dirt were flung high into the air on the blast wind.
Kōbe Hikaru's body was pushed back five steps.
But only five.
Not the earlier ignominy of being kicked airborne and bouncing off the ground three times, but five steps in which his feet plowed furrows into the earth and then held firm.
Standing steady, receiving steady.
Behind Tsuchigumo's bone mask, green light flickered wildly.
"You caught it? You caught it!"
His tone shifted from astonishment to manic joy.
This had been a close-range strike of his. Not his full power, not his strongest, but savage beyond doubt, not something an ordinary yōkai could catch.
Kōbe Hikaru did not answer.
He simply moved again.
The Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body after its qualitative change was no longer just arcs of electricity leaping across the surface of his flesh. The thunder had seeped into his marrow, into every strut of bone in the Asura Transformation.
When he stepped, the ground underfoot was not crushed by his tread. It was punched through by the arcs of lightning.
His speed surged.
It could not reach the pure mutation of speed of a Kibōmaru, but in the instant burst of thunder threading through every bone in his body, even that six-meter colossus of bone and lightning simply vanished from where it stood.
It was a velocity beyond the limit the naked eye could track.
The next moment he appeared on Tsuchigumo's right side.
Muramasa, drawn and cutting!
Yes. Though wrapped on the outside in the Asura Transformation, that Asura form gripped Muramasa too, a blade of colossal size!
The essence of the Asura Transformation was amplification, an increase and decrease of quality and quantity, and yet its manifest form was projection.
Projecting one's own power, projecting what one's own hand held.
On that foundation, Muramasa's shadow could be projected as well.
A thing of full favourability like this would cooperate with all its heart.
An instrument held as by a god, blessing arriving through an inspired mind.
By now the enormous projected blade was wreathed no longer in that surface-clinging purple lightning from before.
The transformed thunder seeped out from within the blade, fusing with the bone edge extended by the Bone Soul Transformation, forming around the original projected edge of Muramasa a semi-translucent blade of thunder and bone.
The edge cut into the middle arm on Tsuchigumo's right side.
With a wet thud, it sliced in.
The ashen-white skin was torn open by the compound thunder-bone edge, and the layer of yōkai aura churned violently wherever the blade passed.
That "phenomenalized" automatic repair kicked in, but its speed of repair was slower than before.
Because of the thunder.
The transformed thunder now possessed substance. It was no longer mere scorching. The yōkai aura it carried had gained the power to disrupt phenomena, and though far weaker than the restraint of spiritual power or the suppression of the power of the gods and buddhas, it was enough to breed a brief disorder at the wound.
An instant.
A single moment's delay in the repair.
For Kōbe Hikaru himself, in a gap this brief, perhaps nothing could be done.
But for Kikyō behind him,
it was enough.
The string sang again.
At the very moment Kōbe Hikaru cut into the right side, Kikyō had already moved to Tsuchigumo's left rear.
Her position formed a straight line running precisely through the wound in Tsuchigumo's right arm and Kōbe Hikaru.
The arrow passed through that rift.
Pale spirit-light shot through the gash, pouring spiritual power straight into the interior of the arm.
Then it detonated.
The purification of spiritual power spread from the inside out, peeling away the layers of yōkai aura that composed the arm one after another.
At the same time, the thunder gnawed inward from the outside, sealing off the channel of repair.
Struck from within and without.
Tsuchigumo's right middle arm, the portion below the elbow joint, began to disintegrate.
Not severed, but with its yōkai aura purified, it had lost the ability to hold its form, sloughing away piece by piece like a sand sculpture washed apart by water.
It recovered swiftly, yet for a short while it would be hard to swing again.
"Worthy! You're worthy!"
Tsuchigumo's voice erupted from behind the bone mask, and the remaining five of its six arms exerted force at once.
The upper two smashed fists together, creating overhead a fan of shockwave that pressed down.
The lower two plunged into the ground and heaved up an entire slab of earth a hundred feet across, hurling it, rubble and dirt and all, at Kōbe Hikaru.
The only intact middle arm on the left opened its palm, and dense spider silk shot out, weaving an ever-spinning curtain of thread around itself.
The existence of that silk curtain made it impossible for Kikyō to loose her shots from the perimeter any longer. Her Sacred Arrow could of course purify the spider silk, but in the process of piercing the curtain it would be greatly weakened.
There was no doubt.
As an intensely battle-loving great yōkai, Tsuchigumo had already found an excellent way to counter Kikyō's Sacred Arrow.
"Adapting fast."
Kōbe Hikaru murmured from within the colossus of bone and thunder.
But he was adapting too.
The transformed Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer had granted him new means.
He did not charge in again.
The left hand of the Asura Transformation lifted, five fingers spread, and from the center of the palm a dark green phosphorescence spilled out between the gaps of the fingers.
Soul-Seizing Never-Missing Hand.
Lock onto the soul, and once loosed it cannot miss.
He had no need to pierce the spider silk.
What he needed to pierce was something more essential.
Yōkai power gathered at his fingertip, condensing into a point of dark green light, and flicked out.
The point of light did not fly toward Tsuchigumo's body.
It passed through the spinning curtain of silk. The spider threads gave no reaction, because it was not an attack on the physical plane but a force aimed straight at the soul.
The point of light struck the inner side of the elbow joint of Tsuchigumo's left middle arm.
That was the joint's surface of movement, a weak spot within the "phenomenon."
The instant the point of light bored in, Tsuchigumo's left arm froze in its motion for a moment.
Only a moment.
The soul-seizing force could not wound the soul of a great yōkai. The gap in tiers was too vast.
But that single moment's stall was enough to open a seam in the spinning silk curtain.
The string sang.
This single moment was what Kikyō had been waiting for.
She did not know what Kōbe Hikaru meant to do, but she knew he would surely create an opening.
The arrow threaded through the seam.
White spiritual power drove straight for the spot the point of light had marked.
At the same moment.
The giant Muramasa of the Asura Transformation cut in from the right, and the thunder-bone edge bit into the other side.
Struck from within and without, a second time!
But this time the target was not a middle arm.
It was one of the two thickest upper arms, the upper-left arm.
After Kikyō's spiritual power poured in through the left arm, it crept upward along the veins of yōkai aura and invaded the shoulder of the left arm.
The purification began.
Tsuchigumo felt it.
"—brat!"
Five of its six arms contracted at once, folding inward, trying to squeeze the invading spiritual power out of its body.
The yōkai aura surged.
The ground for tens, for hundreds of feet all around petrified in an instant, ashen-white spreading outward from beneath its feet, faster than before by several degrees, and at last utterly surpassing even Kibōmaru's ultimate mutation of speed.
This was its full power.
At least the full power of its current state.
Ashen-white frost began to appear on the surface of the Asura Transformation's bone framework. The petrification was spreading.
The ground beneath Kōbe Hikaru was hardening too.
But he did not retreat. Instead he took a step forward.
"Kikyō!"
He shouted only a single name.
Kikyō raised her bow.
The spiritual power she had honed over seven days of secluded training gathered into a white orb of light at her arrowtip, swelling to a size never seen before, a sphere three feet in diameter, so clear one could almost see the paths of spiritual power turning within it.
This was, beyond all question, her maximum output.
Loosed.
Kōbe Hikaru at the same instant gathered all the thunder of the Asura Transformation into the blade of Muramasa.
Purple radiance dyed that enormous projected blade into a single dazzling pillar of lightning.
The instant he cut down, the arrow of spiritual power struck the same spot.
Tsuchigumo's upper-left arm.
Two forces erupted at the same point at the same time.
The air roared and blasted apart!
Dust surged in every direction.
Blood, dark gray, the blood of a great yōkai, splashed across the shattered earth.
The spattered yōkai blood fell on the petrified ground and hissed, like a branding iron pressed to ice.
Amid the churning dust and smoke.
A massive arm fell down out of the air.
It slammed into the ground.
It smashed out a pit more than ten feet deep.
The ashen-white severed limb twitched twice at the bottom of the pit, its knuckles clenching and spreading as if in spasm, and then the yōkai aura scattered from the cut face. The vast arm began to disintegrate, to weather away, dissolving into ashen-white dust that drifted across the sky, returning directly to the grander phenomenon of nature.
Of Tsuchigumo's six arms.
One was severed.
And unlike the earlier disintegrations and recoveries, this was a true grievous wound, torn off almost by the root, one that could not recover in any short time.
And on the exoskeleton of Kōbe Hikaru's Asura Transformation, the "frost" had already covered most of the surface. The auxiliary arm structure on the right had cracked and fallen away, and the bone framework of the left leg showed spiderweb fractures.
He retreated.
The body of the Asura Transformation withdrew from Tsuchigumo's range of attack, its steps dragging across the petrified ground, leaving two scorched trails burned by the thunder.
He retreated to stand before Kikyō.
He stopped.
On the bone-and-thunder body of the Asura Transformation, purple arcs flickered on and off within the cracks, like a lamp about to burn out.
But beneath the oni mask, the crimson eyes still burned.
He raised his head.
He looked at the colossus before him, one arm severed, yet still standing at the bottom of the pit and laughing up at the sky.
Tsuchigumo truly was laughing.
Laughing that in this age there was, at last, someone who could truly wound him!
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