Bone spikes like a forest.
White pillars of bone thrust up out of the cracked, dried mud of the riverbank, dense and countless, staggered high and low, nailing an area dozens of yards across into a woodland.
Every bone spike had something hung upon it.
Kappa, mountain spirits, one-legged oni, flying-head demons — forty or fifty assorted yokai in all, every one of them pinned within the forest of bone.
None were dead.
Kobe Hikaru had not killed them.
It was certainly not out of softheartedness. Toward anyone who set themselves against him, be they human or yokai, Kobe Hikaru could never be softhearted.
He simply disliked pointless slaughter — which did not mean he lacked the nerve to kill.
He spared them only because they were still useful alive.
A living yokai offered more information than a dead one.
Their fear would ripple outward through the fluctuations of the yokai aura; their very presence told those hidden things lurking in the distant dark that here, in this place, dwelt something not to be trifled with.
But Bankotsu and his two companions were already dead.
This time there was no reason left to spare them.
A bone spike had run clean through Bankotsu's chest, driven from front to back, and the charred black edges seared by the lightning still hissed with thin wisps of grey smoke.
Across the surface of his bronze-toned muscle, the deep purple veins of yokai aura pulsed frantically, trying to knit the wound shut — the half-yokai body Banryu had granted him did possess a measure of self-healing, but nothing like that of a true yokai.
Blood welled at once from the corner of his mouth, from his chest, from his back.
Even in death his hand was still stretched toward Banryu.
That enormous war-sword lay on the ground three paces away, and he could never quite reach it.
Jakotsu was likewise pinned to a withered willow, his right shoulder run through and fixed by a bone spike. His snake-belly sword had fallen at his feet, its curved edge twitching feebly twice in the mud like a snake with a broken spine.
Cold sweat covered his effeminate, pallid face, and with narrow eyes gone white he glared fixedly at Kobe Hikaru, his lips trembling as if to say something — but nothing came out.
Suikotsu was the quietest of all.
His shin pinned fast, he had slumped back against the bone spike, eyes half-closed. Even meeting death, his dull face betrayed little emotion.
The fuses of the two small cannons on his back had snapped in the impact just now; they would not light.
The men were dead, and their weapons ruined.
Kobe Hikaru did not spare them a glance.
He walked over to Banryu, crouched down, and reached out to grip the hilt of the massive war-sword.
Heavy.
More than a hundred times heavier than the Muramasa.
The two-meter blade gave off a dull crimson sheen in the twilight — a sheen that was no reflection of the sunset, but something seeping out from within the edge itself.
It was yokai aura, congealed from the rancor and terror of a hundred human lives and a thousand yokai.
Dried rust-red blood coated the whole length of the blade.
The panel sprang up.
[Banryu] [Banryu]
[Quality: Yokai Weapon]
[Description: Originally a massive war-sword forged of common iron. Through its bearer Bankotsu's killing rites of the hundred-man slaughter and the thousand-yokai slaughter, it was steeped in human blood and yokai blood, and after absorbing the grudges of the dead, it was elevated to a yokai weapon.]
[Current Favourability: 0]
Kobe Hikaru studied the information on the panel, and beneath the oni mask the corner of his mouth twitched.
Just as he had thought.
His earlier choice had not been wrong.
Back then, after cutting down four of the Band of Seven — when he was still only at the Six Mutations, far from overwhelming, and had not yet mastered the mutation of lightning — he had failed to catch Bankotsu and the other two as they fled. But he had, at least, left behind his blood mist in time to exert long-range control and the barest measure of influence.
Even then, he had already seen Banryu's potential.
A weapon of common iron, steeped in a great deal of slaughter, was only one final step away from ascending into a yokai weapon — and that step was not one for him to deliver. It was one Bankotsu had to take himself.
Let the prey fatten the prey on his behalf.
So though he had failed to catch him, he had left his own blood on him, blood mingled with his own yokai aura, and by that means constrained the man's conduct to a certain degree.
It kept him from freely slaughtering the innocent — those who carried no great grudge-rancor upon them.
Otherwise the yokai aura belonging to Kobe Hikaru would drive the blood mist into reverse flow, and send all the blood in Bankotsu's body flowing backward with it.
The underlying principle was the same as what Kobe Hikaru had already done to Naoe Kanetsugu.
Only, against a genuine mortal like Naoe Kanetsugu, it could burst her open outright into grave injury, while against the likes of Bankotsu it could inflict no real harm — merely make him deeply uncomfortable.
But for men like Bankotsu, what they sought was, precisely, comfort.
So Bankotsu and the others would still kill — yet they could only kill wicked men, even wicked yokai.
And the moment they drew close again, he would sense it.
He truly had sensed it just now.
That was why he had dared to rush the whole way in a headlong charge, and still pause to cut down yokai along the road.
He knew that, for all Bankotsu and his men blazed so menacingly, the little yokai under his own command would not truly come to grief.
Wounded at most. Damaged at most.
In a way, this was also the very reason his twenty-three Demons — every one of them nothing but small yokai — had held on to this day.
It counted as a tempering for them.
Now the enemies who had once slipped away had delivered themselves back to his door.
And Banryu, the thing he had valued, had at last come into his hands in its metamorphosed form.
All of this was good news.
After all, Banryu's quality was far, far better than the Muramasa he already held.
The difficulty of its yokai transformation was considerably lower, too.
Its spirit was not strong enough, of course — but a yokai weapon was a yokai weapon, and once conquered it ought to grant some interesting ability.
With that, Kobe Hikaru casually thrust Banryu into the mud beside Bankotsu — the blade sinking three feet into the ground, only the hilt and half the edge left showing.
Side by side with Bankotsu.
Like two pillars.
He turned around.
Behind him, in the direction of the abandoned fishing village, a dozen or so small yokai were poking their heads out from the ruined huts.
Dread.
The core of that collective force-field within him, the one connecting the lands of three provinces, began to turn. Thick power of dread surged up from inside him, spreading outward along invisible bonds.
Those wounded little yokai — the claw marks on the tanuki spirit's brow, the cracks in the kappa's shell, the one eye of the one-eyed little monk swollen to a mere slit — under the infusion of dread, began to mend at an accelerated pace.
Claw marks scabbed over, cracks knit closed, swelling receded.
No instant healing, but the speed of recovery was visible to the naked eye.
One after another the dozen or so small yokai emerged from the ruined huts and gathered behind Kobe Hikaru.
The tanuki spirit ran out in front, its bushy tail bristling out full, its mung-bean eyes brimming with the excitement of one who has survived a brush with death.
"My lord!"
"Stand properly."
Kobe Hikaru's voice came from beneath the oni mask, calm, but very heavy.
Bolstered by dread, and bolstered by his own yokai aura, it weighed down like a mountain range.
The dozen or so small yokai straightened their bodies on reflex.
Though the strongest among them, the tanuki spirit, was no more than Third Mutation, and the rest at Second-Mutation level — in the world of yokai they were truly the old, the weak, the women and children.
But in this moment, under the unifying command of Kobe Hikaru's Nine Mutations yokai aura fully unleashed, in the state where the force-field of dread bound them tightly into a single whole —
The presence they gave off far surpassed the sum of their individual strength.
A collective force-field.
The station of a sovereign ruler.
The Night Parade of Twenty-Three Demons — though only a dozen or so had come, that momentum gathered together, there in the twilight of the Hour of Meeting Demons, truly took on a few shades of the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.
Had they been able to reach this state earlier, then even without Kobe Hikaru, they could very nearly have held out against a Bankotsu wielding Seven-Mutation power — a power Kobe Hikaru had already reined in.
Yes. Seven Mutations.
After being remade by Banryu's yokai aura, Bankotsu's bodily strength had already reached the level of a normal Seven Mutations yokai — speed, force, reaction, all beyond the human limit across the board.
A month ago, an opponent of this rank would have taken Kobe Hikaru half a day to fight.
But now he was at the Nine Mutations.
The chain transmutation that had followed three Overload Transformations bursting their dams at once, the Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body seeping into the marrow — his baseline speed had already reached the level of his earlier all-out eruption, and at instantaneous top speed he could match Kibomaru.
Seven Mutations against Nine Mutations.
A gap of two whole tiers.
Even without unleashing his full strength, he could kill instantly.
Instantly, in the literal sense.
From the blood mist rising to Bankotsu and both his companions being pinned fast, less than two seconds had passed.
Bankotsu had not even managed to swing Banryu before a hole had already opened in his chest.
This was the meaning of Qualitative Transformation.
Each transmutation was not a simple gain in strength — it was a crushing of one tier over another.
Kobe Hikaru drew back his gaze, no longer concerned with the trash pinned in the forest of bone.
His eyes turned toward the farther distance.
The northwest.
The sun had sunk entirely below the horizon, and the last thread of dim crimson afterglow at the edge of the sky was fading.
The tail end of the Hour of Meeting Demons.
But the yokai aura had not scattered.
If anything, it had grown thicker.
Three currents.
Three stronger, utterly distinct currents of yokai aura seeped out from deep in the mountain forests to the northwest.
The first was damp, cold, and astringent with the reek of blood, carrying the muddy stench peculiar to freshwater rivers — beyond doubt a yokai of the river attribute.
But its concentration far outstripped that of an ordinary river yokai, bearing the heavy, dense texture of riverbed silt compacted by centuries of sediment.
The second was sharp, high-speed, its aura fluctuating with extreme rapidity, as if something were slicing the air over and over in the briefest span of time — that was wind-blades, so densely packed that even the wind itself was shredded to pieces.
The third was cold.
Pure cold.
Not merely the cold of a winter wind, but a cold that seeped out from between the bones, that slowed the very flow of the blood.
Beneath Kobe Hikaru's oni mask, the crimson demon-pupils narrowed slightly.
These were, without doubt, the three Qualitative-Transformation-tier high yokai from Tanuki Juzaburo's severed head earlier.
They had been waiting all along.
Waiting for Bankotsu and the other two to spend the twenty-three Demons as their vanguard, waiting for Kobe Hikaru to arrive and expose his strength, waiting for the yokai aura of the Hour of Meeting Demons to reach its thickest —
And then, to show themselves.
"Come out."
Kobe Hikaru spoke.
His voice was not loud, yet it was carried by the Nine Mutations yokai aura a hundred paces out, nearly a full ri across.
"Those three good-for-nothings, Bankotsu and the rest, have already talked. You've watched the show from behind long enough."
Bankotsu had confessed nothing.
But the ones across the way did not know that.
The silence held for five mortal breaths.
Then —
At the edge of the mountain forest, three figures surfaced at once.
At their head was an enormous kappa, its build far beyond the ordinary.
Not the palm-sized little kappa among the Twenty-Three Demons, but a full two-meter-tall kappa that walked upright.
Ink-green scaled plating covered all its skin from neck to ankle, and the dish-shaped hollow atop its head, made to hold water, brimmed with a ghostly blue liquid — not water, but concentrated yokai power.
Its arms were thick and burly, semi-transparent membranes stretched between its webbed fingers, each membrane etched with intricate water patterns.
A chieftain-class being of the Tono kappa clan.
Qualitative Transformation.
Then a silver-white afterimage flickered among the treetops.
Extremely fast.
So fast that Kobe Hikaru's Sharp-Eye Mutation had to run at full capacity to make it out — that long, slender frame, those sharp claws, and the pair of crimson vertical pupils that flashed by within the blur, alight with a bloodthirsty frenzy.
A Kamaitachi.
Unlike the one Kikyo had once cut down, this one was larger in build, thicker in yokai aura, and faster still.
A stronger Kamaitachi, come from Tono.
The last to appear was the figure of a woman, stepping slowly out of the twilight.
Her skin was extremely white — so white that even in the dim light of the sky the texture of every inch of it was plain to see.
A deep-blue kimono bound her tightly, its collar drawn up a little, leaving bare only the long, slender neck and collarbones.
The sash of the kimono was tied low, cinched at the narrowest point of her waist, dividing the curve above and below with utmost clarity — the swell at her chest, wrapped in the fabric yet its outline impossible to hide, rose and fell with her breath.
The deep-blue cloth clung down along her flanks, drew in past the line of her hips, then flared open again, the hem trailing on the ground; as she moved, a stretch of calf showed through the slit at the side, pale as snow.
Her long hair, streaked with deep blue, hung to her ankles, fine ice crystals gathered at the tips, refracting tiny points of light in the air.
Her features were exquisite and coldly striking, the lines of them sharp, her lips tinged purple as if frozen, yet still full.
Her eyes were the palest ice-blue, white light drifting deep within the pupils; when she looked at someone, she would send a chill up their spine from the very base.
A snow woman.
One of the most famous yokai of Tono.
These, strikingly, were all yokai of transmutation.
And more — Eight Mutations and above.
Three commander-class yokai of Tono, in the last dim thread of light of the Hour of Meeting Demons, revealing themselves upon the soil of Suruga Province.
Kobe Hikaru stood before the forest of bone, a dozen or so small yokai ranked behind him.
His pale long hair streamed in the night wind, and upon the crimson oni mask the pair of crimson demon-pupils swept across the three directions.
The kappa on the left.
The Kamaitachi on the right.
The snow woman in the middle.
And these, strikingly, were…
"The commanders of Tono."
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