A great peal of laughter rose from the bottom of the pit, rattling the petrified ground for miles around into a droning resonance.
The Tsuchigumo stood there.
Its twelve-meter gray-white body was indeed missing an arm now. At the severed stump of its upper left shoulder, dark gray yōkai blood still dripped, and every drop that struck the earth ate a small pit into the petrified ground.
But still it laughed.
Laughed with delight.
Behind the seams of the bone face, the ghostly green eyes curved into two arcs, and the white bone mask sprouted even more fine cracks from the sheer force of that grin.
"Exhilarating!"
Its voice shook the very air. "So damn exhilarating!"
One arm severed clean, one arm grown back, five arms once more, and all of them spread wide, as if to embrace this battlefield it had turned upside down with its own yōkai aura.
"Four hundred years! Four hundred years since I fought anyone like this! The last time was when I brawled with that bastard, the master of the demons and spirits!"
"Even if my current state is nothing compared to back then, to pull this off—you two are impressive enough!"
It lowered its head, and the ghostly green light fell upon the pair of figures standing shoulder to shoulder at the pit's edge.
The six-meter-tall bone-thunder Asura was wounded too—its right arm shattered, its left leg split open, purple arcs of lightning flickering in and out.
But beneath the oni mask, those crimson eyes were still fixed on it.
And the shrine maiden beside it needed no mention at all—white spiritual power gathered at the arrowhead, the bowstring drawn to full, ready to loose at any instant.
The Tsuchigumo looked them over.
Then, all at once, it drew its five arms back in.
The intact upper-right arm settled back onto its knee, the two lower arms drooped back to the ground, and the middle-left arm that had been struck by the soul-hunting force folded slowly back against its chest.
A curled, hunched posture.
Exactly as it had been before it came crashing down from the sky.
It sat down, bending its knees and crossing its legs.
Kōbe Hikaru froze.
Kikyō was startled too.
But that fully drawn arrow did not slacken on the string—she couldn't be sure whether this was a ploy to lure them in.
"I'm done fighting."
The Tsuchigumo said it casually.
So casually it was like a man too full to bother moving.
"…?"
Kōbe Hikaru's voice came from beneath the oni mask, still edged with obvious wariness.
In a sense he did understand this great yōkai before him—he knew that by nature it was battle-hungry and blunt, too proud to bother hiding anything. And yet this world was far too tangled and chaotic; he could never fully trust even the things he thought he knew.
"Done means done."
The Tsuchigumo dug at the edge of its bone face with the index finger of an upper-right arm—with more than a touch of a back-alley ruffian about it.
"I only came out to stretch my bones. Slept a few hundred years, and they'd gone and rusted."
"Everything else was just incidental!"
It looked at Kōbe Hikaru.
The ghostly green light danced behind the seams of the bone face.
"Little Demon, what was your name again?"
"…Kōbe Hikaru."
"Kōbe Hikaru."
It repeated the name, its tone carrying a thrill. "An interesting name. An interesting power."
"But not enough!"
Its tone suddenly sank, the green glow behind the bone face condensing solid. "You're still not strong enough."
"At your level right now, if I got serious, I could crush you with two hands."
"Even counting the cover of that shrine maiden at your side, three hands would be enough to squeeze you to death!"
It was stating a fact.
Kōbe Hikaru knew it well.
The reason that single blade-and-arrow combination had managed to sever its arm was the rapport between him and Kikyō, his breakthrough mid-battle, and a single instant of vulnerability engineered through the soul-hunting force under cover of an information gap.
And even more because Kikyō was there.
Not because he had the strength to defeat, head-on, a phenomenon-class great yōkai beyond the thirteenth mutation.
On his own, he was still a long way off.
"The shrine maiden at your side, now she's worthy."
The Tsuchigumo's gaze shifted to Kikyō.
"The density and purity of your spiritual power—among all the shrine maidens I've ever seen, you'd rank in the top three. Back in the Heian era, Midoriko, that madwoman, was about your equal—no, Midoriko was a touch fiercer. Your spiritual power is purer, but your arrows aren't ruthless enough, while that woman fought like she truly didn't care whether she lived or died."
"But whether it's you or Midoriko, that's not the kind of fight I want. Fighting you two is no fun—too much trouble, one slip and I'd get sealed away for a few decades, unable to fight at all."
Midoriko again.
The strongest shrine maiden who, centuries ago, had perished together with countless powerful yōkai and given birth to the Shikon Jewel.
Kikyō did not lower her bow, but a faint ripple passed through the depths of her eyes.
"Still, you've got talent, kid. That form of yours just now wasn't bad—every punch landing on flesh, real satisfying—only a pity you haven't grown to your peak yet."
The Tsuchigumo looked back to Kōbe Hikaru. "So I've decided to wait."
"Wait for you to become a true great yōkai."
"Once you reach that level—I'll have another good, satisfying fight with you."
"Not this half-baked probing, but the real thing—the kind that can level mountains and punch through the sky. This age is too dull. The ones who could give me a fight have either gone into hiding, or run off wandering somewhere, or are simply dead."
"Ōtakemaru, the Great Tengu, Shuten-dōji, Itsumade… even counting that fellow Tōga… every one of them, in the blink of an eye, gone for centuries now!"
"To finally find one interesting little Demon like you—I'd best treasure it properly."
Its tone carried an anticipation it made no effort to conceal.
Like an old hunter waiting for a cub to grow into a fierce tiger.
Hearing those names, one illustrious great yōkai after another, Kōbe Hikaru said nothing.
Neither did Kikyō.
Neither of them brought up the Shikon Jewel.
No one moved to remind this great yōkai—
because there was no need at all.
Though it had lost an arm, the Tsuchigumo still had five. If the fight went on, the Asura Mutation would not hold much longer. Kikyō's spiritual power could still endure, and with her abilities self-preservation would be no problem—but to force the enemy back would still have cost them dearly.
To sever one of its arms at such a cost had come down to opportunity.
And opportunity would not come every time.
The silence stretched for several breaths.
Then the Tsuchigumo spoke again.
Its tone had changed.
No longer that wild, jeering laughter, but carrying a rare gravity.
"That's right—little Demon, and you, shrine maiden."
"There's something I'll warn you about."
It jabbed at its own severed stump with the index finger of a lower-right hand.
"There's a thing that's come looking for me several times."
"Not a yōkai, not a human, not any god or buddha either—I can't even say what the hell it is. But that thing's blood is disgusting; it can turn ordinary humans into deathless, undying monsters."
"I beat it to a pulp seventeen times, left its flesh and blood scattered all over the ground, and all seventeen times it came crawling back."
"A thing like that—shouldn't exist."
"And though that fellow hid it well, I could feel it—toward you two, it holds a thick, seething malice."
"You'd best be careful."
"That thing has ties to the Hagoromo-Gitsune of Kyoto."
Kōbe Hikaru and Kikyō both went still for an instant.
Kibutsuji Muzan.
That name surfaced in both their minds.
They had encountered an undying demon before, at the demon-slaying village, and destroyed the evil demons drawn in by yōkai blood at Kaede Village.
Tsubaki had even drunk yōkai blood and undergone the half-demon transformation, only to crumble to ash in the sunlight in the end.
The source of all those events—the progenitor of the Demons.
Without a doubt, that was exactly the existence the Tsuchigumo spoke of, the one it had beaten to death seventeen times only to see it grow back.
By the sound of it, Muzan too seemed to have moved the Tsuchigumo in the name of the Hagoromo-Gitsune, and in the course of it had been beaten to death seventeen times—and though this great yōkai was bloodthirsty and volatile, it had still remembered the wrongness of a thing that couldn't be killed.
The Tsuchigumo added one last line.
"As for the Hagoromo-Gitsune sending me to fetch some Shikon Jewel—"
It paused.
The green glow behind the seams of the bone face narrowed, brimming with pure disdain.
"Who cares about her. I fight whoever I want, whenever I want. Never mind the Hagoromo-Gitsune—not even the thing in her belly has the right to give me orders!"
"Now, I've fought my fill. Time to go—this place is no fit spot for me to linger!"
With that, it stood.
Its five arms drew in, its reverse-jointed knees bending down and coiling.
The twelve-meter body crouched low, like a bow pulled to full draw.
And then—
it jumped.
Just jumped.
But that single leap tore up a wave of air that blasted the petrified ground for dozens of yards into fragments, the shockwave spreading in every direction, nearly toppling the half-kneeling Asura Mutation all over again.
Its figure tore up from the earth and plunged into the gray-white murk of the clouds.
When the dust and smoke cleared, all that remained in the vault of the sky was a hole punched straight through it, sunlight leaking down from the gap to spill across the ravaged land.
The Tsuchigumo had come falling from the heavens.
It left shooting skyward.
It came with brute arrogance.
It left with brute arrogance too.
However it came, so it went.
It consulted no one.
And it needed to consult no one.
The exoskeleton of the Asura Mutation finally gave out.
The frame began to collapse from the shoulders, white bone spikes snapping and falling away one after another, purple thunder escaping from the fissures, and that six-meter bone-thunder colossus disintegrated entirely within a dozen breaths.
Kōbe Hikaru walked out of it.
His gray robe was more than half in tatters, his pale long hair clinging in disarray to his face and neck, and the crimson oni mask now bore a crack running from brow to jaw.
He stood amid the rubble and looked down at his own hands.
On the backs of his hands were several patches of gray-white frost—the marks of petrification's corrosion—but they were slowly fading, forced out of his body bit by bit by the yōkai aura that had transformed in quality.
"It's gone. It's over."
He said.
Kikyō lowered her bow and put away the arrow.
She watched the hole in the sky as it began to close, the last thread of leaking sunlight mirrored in her jet-black eyes.
"Kibutsuji Muzan."
She repeated, low, the information the Tsuchigumo had just given.
"The Hagoromo-Gitsune of Kyoto."
Kōbe Hikaru nodded.
Two threads, pointing in the same direction.
But that was a matter for later.
For now—
he was exhausted.
The mental strain of dealing with Uesugi Kenshin, the physical toll of dealing with the Tsuchigumo, the two stacked together—even a surging leap in strength could not offset the immense drain on spirit and yōkai power.
He needed rest.
He needed to digest everything this transformation in quality had brought.
Kikyō stepped to his side, reached out, and steadied his hand.
Her fingertips were faintly cool.
As they were every time.
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