Over the next few days, Kobe Hikaru's life settled back into its old rhythm, cycling through strategy and interaction.
The favourability of Sakasagami no Yura and Dokuko's reverse scale in his hands kept climbing, and Tsubaki's prayer beads had only just cracked open a sliver of favourability too. There were also the Black Pearl won from Inuyasha, the Shikon Jewel, the Goshinboku, and so on.
But calm like this, in this chaotic age, was as ever unable to last.
Several days later, night again.
Their tender moment with one another finished, Kobe Hikaru sat cross-legged in the very center. Set before him was not the demon blade Muramasa, but a bamboo basin brimming with clear water.
Night wind poured in through the gaps in the paper door, carrying the particular chill of late autumn.
Kikyo sat across from him, white robe and red hakama.
Momiji and Botan were already asleep.
Naoe Kanetsugu was asleep too—she was no longer tied to the pillar now, but confined to a room in the side hall, its doorway sealed with a sacred sutra written in Kikyo's own hand.
No running.
They were still here as well.
Though they hadn't crossed that final line—only the occasional shared gaze, the occasional held hand, the occasional touch of skin—for each of them, this seemed to be enough already.
Mm… enough for now.
Until Kobe Hikaru had truly returned from death, they would halt here for the time being.
Save the finest experience for the perfect moment.
It was a quiet night.
And then—it stopped being quiet.
In the water basin before Kobe Hikaru, though there was plainly no wind, the surface abruptly lost its calm. Ring after ring of ripples shook violently, as if the water were boiling, yet not a single drop spilled over.
It was dread.
The collective force-field of twenty-three demons gathered across the lands of three provinces, connected through the yokai aura, had suddenly begun to convulse.
Like someone frantically striking a bell.
"My lord! General!"
The image in the rippling water broke apart and reformed.
The tanuki spirit's voice burst out from the depths of the water, shrill and rapid, its panic entirely undisguised.
Kikyo paused ever so slightly.
Kobe Hikaru raised his eyes a fraction, gave her a nod, then touched his hand to the water's surface, closed his eyes, and sank his consciousness into it.
A moment that felt both drawn-out and vanishingly brief.
In the dark field of vision behind his closed eyes, twenty-three crooked, contorted faces surfaced.
There was no doubt about it—they were the members of his Night Parade of Twenty-Three Demons.
But this was different from usual.
Most of these faces bore wounds.
The tanuki spirit's round face now had a claw mark running from forehead to chin, its fur scorched black, its mung-bean eyes shot through with blood.
The kappa's shell had split, layered with the traces of crack after mended crack.
The one-eyed little monk's single eye was swollen to nothing more than a slit.
As for the other small yokai, there was no need to even say it—some missing arms and legs, some with half their bodies frozen into ice, some with half an ear shaved away by an unknown power.
Even the half-yokai little fox looked utterly drained. It wasn't wounded, but it seemed to have burned through an enormous amount, its yokai power all but exhausted. Were it not for the outside supply of dread, it would surely have fainted away by now.
Twenty-three of them, and seventeen wounded.
The remaining six unharmed ones seemed spared not because they were fine, but only because they'd run fast.
"What happened."
Kobe Hikaru's voice carried through the darkness, his expression grave, and as it fell on the ears of the twenty-three demons, it bore a fuller weight of authority—and, of reassurance.
"Mutsu! It's yokai that came from Mutsu!"
The tanuki spirit's voice broke into a sob.
"They came from the northeast! A huge swarm of them! They hit Sagami Province's yokai shrine first, tore the roof clean off the one-eyed little monk's shrine, then charged on toward Suruga—the kappa's shrine got smashed too!"
"How many?"
"I don't know! At least forty or fifty! Big ones and small ones both!"
Kobe Hikaru's brow twitched.
Forty or fifty yokai, if they were all low-tier, wouldn't be much of a problem.
After absorbing dread over this stretch of time, the strongest, the tanuki spirit, had grown from the First-and-a-half Mutation to the Third Mutation, and the others had reached the Second Mutation level too—not exactly strong, but with the support of dread, facing small yokai of comparable or even slightly greater yokai aura, they'd have more than enough to spare.
Rallied together, they could handle most yokai as well.
And yet they'd still taken this many wounds.
"There were high-tier yokai?"
Kobe Hikaru made his judgment.
"There were!"
The tanuki spirit nodded hard—so hard its wound split open again, making it bare its teeth in pain.
"The few that led them… master, I felt it, at least three especially strong strands of yokai aura, far stronger than me. I didn't even dare get close…"
Three high-tier yokai.
By Kobe Hikaru's classification, they should fall into the Qualitative Transformation tier of the Seven Mutations and above.
"Did they say anything?"
"They did! They did!"
The tanuki spirit strained to recall. "There was one in that pack that looked like a weasel, terribly fast. It said—it said this land is their Tono territory, that no outside riffraff is allowed to build any shrines here, and it told us to get lost."
Tono.
The Tono region of Mutsu Province.
In this land, in this age, throughout the yokai legends that spread everywhere, Tono was one of the largest yokai settlements in the northeast.
Kappa, Kamaitachi, snow women, zashiki-warashi, tengu—every kind of yokai had lived and multiplied for centuries on that land shrouded in deep mountains and mist.
It had its own order, its own rules.
When Kobe Hikaru had earlier spread the sphere of influence of his Twenty-Three Demons across the Kanto, he had not reached north into the northeast—he naturally knew of Tono's existence, and had deliberately steered clear.
But now the yokai of Tono had struck at him first.
Was it that, seeing the unbroken turmoil this region had just been through, they'd decided there was an opening to exploit?
Fair enough.
After all, the yokai large and small who had once held sway here had, near enough, been swept clean by him and Kikyo.
Setting himself aside, the yokai aura across the Kanto region had indeed thinned a great deal.
It looked, by all appearances, a good deal 'weaker' too.
Still.
"And the Hojo clan and the Imagawa clan? They didn't help you?"
In battles between yokai, humans couldn't take part directly, but they could still 'assist.'
Through offerings.
"They're helping. A few villages in Sagami held rites through the night, and the Imagawa side added offerings at the Suruga shrine too—the dread really is increasing, but…"
The tanuki spirit's voice shrank away.
"It's not enough."
"Nowhere near enough. Far, far from enough."
Dread could let small yokai recover from their wounds, could speed their growth.
But against high-tier yokai who had achieved transmutation at the Seven Mutations and above, no matter how much dread a Second- or Third-Mutation small yokai absorbed, it would only make the difference of one more blow endured.
A gap in quality can't be bridged by quantity.
Not by ordinary yokai, at least.
Kobe Hikaru opened his eyes.
The ripples on the water's surface stilled, and the twenty-three faces in the darkness scattered all at once.
The main hall returned to quiet.
But it was a quiet that felt wrong.
Kikyo watched Kobe Hikaru. She did not ask what had happened—from the moment he closed his eyes, she had sensed the strange fluctuations in the force-field within him.
Her jet-black eyes caught a bright, clear light from the candle flame, gazing straight at him.
Waiting for him to speak.
Kobe Hikaru lifted his head and met those eyes.
"Something's happened in Sagami and Suruga," he said.
"Yokai from Tono in Mutsu Province have moved south and attacked the Twenty-Three Demons' territory."
"At least three high-tier yokai leading them, with forty or fifty small fry in support."
"I may need to go there myself."
Kikyo's fingers slid lightly across the bowstring, drawing a thread-fine hum.
She did not answer at once.
The candle flame wavered once between them.
The shadow cast on the paper door swayed.
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