Sagami Province, the castle town below Odawara Castle—after nightfall the streets should have been quiet.
But tonight was different.
In the tavern, a few half-drunk merchants sat huddled in a corner, keeping their voices low.
"Have you heard? That newly built little shrine by Shimizu Port cracked yesterday."
"Cracked? Wasn't it only finished half a month ago? Could it be another earthquake?"
"Not an earthquake—it split from the inside. The eyes of the stone statue shattered, split in two, dropped to the ground and rolled a good distance."
"...Sinister."
From the corner, an older man cut in, his voice even lower.
"Sinister doesn't cover it. My wife's family lives in a village in northern Sagami—word came the day before yesterday that the Jizo Bodhisattva statue at the village entrance grew moss overnight. That was a newly carved stone statue, standing less than ten days."
"Moss is nothing. I heard one village's shrine had its whole roof torn clean off, the offering table flipped over, incense ash scattered everywhere, and even the floorboards split open with a crack."
"Yokai brawling, probably..."
The last man dropped his voice to the barest whisper when he said it, as if afraid the walls had ears.
But everyone heard.
No one argued.
Lately, the strange tales spreading across the Kanto had been multiplying.
First came the legend of the Kaede Village Demon God, which under the Hojo clan's promotion had spread through both Musashi and Sagami provinces, shrines rising one after another.
The people had to believe whether they wanted to or not—the Hojo clan had issued the order, a true god personally guaranteed by the lord of the province. Even without a certificate coming down from Kyoto, heaven was high and the emperor far away, while the Hojo clan was so very close at hand—did you dare not worship?
They worshipped.
Shrines were built, incense was burned, legends were woven.
But right after that—those newly built shrines began to have problems.
First the stone statues cracked.
Then the offerings rotted abnormally fast.
And then, some people saw, in the night, mist drifting around the shrines—mist that should not exist.
Those mists could not possibly be natural water vapour.
Because the colour was dark, and where it touched skin it was bone-chillingly cold, and it carried a faint fishy-sweet smell. Yokai aura.
Ordinary people couldn't tell, but in this era of humans and yokai living side by side, the elderly had some experience—that feeling was exactly like the yokai wind that blew out of the mountains.
Heavy with sinking yin energy.
"Something's wrong..."
The merchants in the tavern exchanged glances.
No one knew what was happening.
They only knew—these past few days, once dusk fell, it was best not to go out.
…
Meanwhile.
In northern Sagami Province, on the highway leading toward Suruga.
The moonlight was mostly veiled by cloud, the cedar forests on either side of the road swaying in the wind, tree shadows crossing and cutting the already dim road surface into fragments.
A traveling peddler walking the night road led his packhorse along.
The packhorse stopped short.
Its forehooves pawed the ground, its breathing heavy, its ears flattened back—the signs of a spooked horse.
The peddler looked back.
Nothing at all.
Only wind.
He tugged the reins, cursed, and kept going.
Three steps.
At the edge of his vision, he caught a shadow.
It flashed from deep in the cedar forest on the right side of the highway—extremely fast, so fast he wasn't even sure he'd really seen it.
Like something leaping between the treetops.
The peddler quickened his pace.
Another dozen steps.
A muffled thunderclap sounded overhead.
No—not just thunder.
The sound was too rapid, too concentrated; besides the thunder, it was mixed with the shockwave of a collision.
Along with that sound, the entire cedar forest was lit up within half a breath by a purple radiance.
The radiance streaked across the sky from the northwest, trailing a dark-red tail.
Extremely fast.
So fast that before the peddler's gaze could catch up, the radiance had already vanished behind the mountain ridge to the southeast.
Leaving only that instant's afterglow, burning a residual image onto his retinas.
The packhorse completely lost its nerve, gave a shriek, tore free of the reins and bolted back the way they'd come.
The peddler didn't chase it either.
He stood rooted in place, face gone pale, staring at the direction the light had vanished.
"Wh-what was that..."
He didn't know what it was.
And he would never know...
That purple radiance was Kobe Hikaru.
Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body fully open, purple arcs of lightning bursting from his soles, each stride crushing a stretch of ground apart, his form turning into a streak of purple-red light through the night.
His base speed after the Nine Mutations transmutation had already approached the level of his earlier all-out bursts.
And right now he was going all-out.
Faster.
Fast enough that, in instantaneous speed, he could just barely brush the speed of the twelve-mutation yokai Kidomaru in his normal state.
In this vaster, more sparsely populated world, the distance from Kaede Village to northern Sagami Province was roughly a hundred fifty or sixty li.
Ordinary cavalry, even at full gallop, would need nearly two days.
He'd used less than a quarter-hour.
And the road along the way was hardly smooth.
Now was daybreak—also the changeover of sun and moon.
The changeover of sun and moon was the Hour of Meeting Demons, when the pure and turbid of heaven and earth swapped places, the most active time for yokai.
Yokai settlements normally hidden deep in the mountains would briefly surface during the Hour of Meeting Demons; those temporary settlements called Demon Markets rose and dispersed like bubbles on the water's surface.
Kobe Hikaru passed three of them.
The first was in a valley bottom in the mountains of western Sagami Province.
While the last sliver of setting sun still hung on the ridge, he swept over the airspace at the valley's mouth. His Sharp-Eye Mutation caught what lay below: a dozen or so low-tier yokai gathered around a bonfire, gnawing on livestock plundered from who-knew-where, grudge-rancor writhing all over them.
These were clearly outsiders.
The native yokai, the ones carrying grudge-rancor, had mostly been cleared out once already by Kobe Hikaru and Kikyo.
But the yokai aura on these was murky and foul, yet different from the yokai of those settlements—scattered stragglers, no organization, no belonging.
Trash yokai who'd come south to scavenge scraps of advantage amid the chaos of the Kanto.
Kobe Hikaru didn't stop.
Only, in the instant of passing, his left hand flicked up.
Bone spikes shot from his fingertips, spreading in a fan.
The white bone laced with purple lightning arcs pierced through the lead yokai's head.
The rest hadn't reacted before blood mist was already seeping up from the ground beneath their feet, tangling their legs.
The bone spikes rose again, thunder climbing up from the ground like vines.
And there was the poison mist brought by Dokuko's reverse scale.
Kobe Hikaru's figure vanished to the east, leaving only a chorus of terrified howls behind.
The second was in an abandoned village beside the highway.
A flock of tengu were dismantling a recently built shrine—the offering hall the Hojo clan had built for the one-eyed little monk of the Twenty-Three Demons.
The offering table was flipped, the stone statue smashed, even the foundation dug open.
Seven small tengu.
Black wings, black beaks, roughly human-sized, extremely fast in flight, yokai aura about equal to a four- or five-mutation yokai—not weak.
But purple lightning descended from the sky.
The Muramasa left its sheath.
One flash of the blade, seven heads, sent flying cleanly.
The wings and heads of all seven tengu parted ways with their bodies, the remains crashing down, the yokai aura wrapped up by Kobe Hikaru and carried off into an unpeopled area.
The shrine there was already ruined, but at least the foundation still stood.
The one-eyed little monk crawled out from under the rubble, its single eye swollen to nothing more than a slit, full of the relief of a survivor.
"L-Lord!"
"Are your wounds bad?"
"Not bad! Just... just my eye's swollen."
"As long as you can see the road. Go back to Suruga, link up with the tanuki spirit."
"Yes!"
The third was on a mountain path at the western border of Sagami.
Larger in scale—twenty-odd trash yokai had occupied a stronghold converted from a mountain god's temple, cutting off the power of dread from three nearby villages, trying to seize the whole area as their own.
Kobe Hikaru didn't use the Muramasa.
Only again pulled a bone forest up from the ground, white bone spikes piercing the entire stronghold like bamboo shoots after rain.
Twenty-three bone spikes, pinning twenty-three trash yokai.
Symmetry taken to the extreme.
Purple thunder conducted along the bone spikes, electrocuting the pinned yokai one by one into charcoal.
Cleanup complete.
Start to finish, no more than thirty seconds.
Walking all the way, killing all the way, pushing all the way.
From western Sagami Province to the border of Suruga Province, the outsider yokai strongholds along the route were pulled out one after another like nails.
No survivors left.
Cruel.
But—efficient.
If these scattered stragglers weren't cleared out completely, then even after he dealt with the core threat, they'd keep harassing the territory of the Twenty-Three Demons.
So the grass had to be cut and the roots dug out.
He, the transmigrator, understood this better than anyone.
At last, Kobe Hikaru reached the border of Suruga Province.
The earth beneath his feet trembled faintly in the yokai aura—not his own aura, but one coming from ahead.
Rich, chaotic, laced with the fishy-sweet reek of blood. A battlefield.
Just ahead.
He didn't stop.
Purple arcs lit up again in the night, that grey figure wrapped in thunder and blood mist plunging straight toward the direction of the thickest yokai aura.
Suruga Province, fifty li west of Shimizu Port.
A desolate riverbank.
The river had mostly dried up, the exposed riverbed covered in cracked grey clods of mud, a few withered willows leaning crookedly on the bank.
The setting sun was sinking.
The horizon burned dark red, as if someone had splashed blood across the clouds.
The Hour of Meeting Demons.
On the riverbank, three figures stood beneath the withered willows.
No—they could no longer entirely be called "human."
The one in the center was tall, his upper body bare, ancient-bronze muscle covered in deep-purple veining—the marks left after yokai aura seeped into skin.
His face was still that arrogant young one, the line of his jaw sharper than a few months ago.
Across his back lay a huge weapon.
A giant war-sword nearly two meters long.
The blade's edge looked rust-stained—but it wasn't rust; it was dried blood.
The weapon: Banryu.
The man's name: Bankotsu.
Leader of the Band of Seven.
A few months ago, after Kobe Hikaru cut down four of his companions in Ishimura, he'd fled north in a panic with Jakotsu and Suikotsu.
From the Kanto to the northeast, from Suruga to Mutsu.
Fleeing all the way, killing all the way.
Killing people, killing yokai.
Without discrimination.
And in the deep old forests of Mutsu Province, Bankotsu encountered the yokai of Tono.
By all reason, a human meeting a yokai settlement had only two outcomes—being eaten, or successfully killing the yokai in return.
But Bankotsu was neither eaten nor able to kill them back.
Because he couldn't beat this pack of yokai, and he himself was simply too good at fighting.
Before reaching Mutsu, the three surviving members of the Band of Seven had, along the way, slain over a hundred humans and a thousand yokai.
A hundred men cut down, a thousand yokai slain.
The number wasn't inflated, and those people were no ordinary folk either—all were pampered nobles, a pack of thoroughly wicked sorts—
Though Bankotsu would rather have slaughtered everyone, men and women, old and young, for some reason each time this thought surfaced he felt the blood in his body surge backward, deeply uncomfortable, so in the end he settled for the wicked humans. Efficiency dropped considerably, but it still worked.
—And those yokai were likewise all named, notorious creatures, at least middling tier or above, who had ravaged their regions.
Bankotsu strung every single head onto the pommel-tail of Banryu, dragging them along, as if performing a sacrifice.
In fact, it really was a sacrifice.
And in the process, he too had changed.
The blade, steeped over and over in human and yokai blood, began to absorb the grudges of the dead. Fine veining grew across the grey-white edge, dark-red light flowing within the veins.
The fear of a hundred men, the grudges of a thousand yokai, all poured into this weapon.
Banryu rose from an ordinary weapon to a yokai weapon.
And Bankotsu himself, because he held a yokai weapon, nurtured a yokai weapon, steeped in thick yokai aura—also began to mutate.
His body was strengthened, his speed, strength, and reflexes all far beyond before.
The deep-purple veining seeping across his skin was proof of the yokai aura's corrosion.
But he hadn't become a yokai.
At least not entirely.
He still retained human consciousness and judgment.
Only his body had already stepped half a step into the non-human realm.
Half-human, half-yokai—only not a bloodline half-yokai like Inuyasha; Bankotsu had been forcibly twisted by an external force.
It was the backlash of the grudges devoured by Banryu that had remade his flesh into an existence between human and yokai.
After that.
The yokai of Tono took a liking to this trait of his.
A human who could kill yokai, wielding a newborn yokai weapon, his whole body radiating intense killing intent—to the Tono yokai, who were expanding their power into the Kanto, this was a ready-made blade.
A blade to probe the situation in the south.
So the alliance was struck.
Bankotsu gained the Tono yokai's support: yokai power, intelligence, troops.
In exchange, he had to do only one thing—return to Suruga, return to the Kanto.
Kill that oni warrior called Kobe Hikaru.
Revenge.
And this suited him just fine.
"Killed four of your master's brothers, that oni-masked bastard—whatever he is, man or Demon, this master's going to cleave him in two."
These were Bankotsu's words as he set off south.
Jakotsu stood at his left rear.
A sickly pallor on his effeminate face, his narrow eyes half-lidded.
At his waist hung that bendable, extending snake-belly sword, its sheath likewise showing veins of yokai-aura seepage—though far less pronounced than Banryu's, still just an ordinary weapon, yet it too had taken on a faint touch of yokai aura.
Suikotsu stood at the right rear.
Tall and gaunt, his face wooden, his eyes half-shut as if he might drop off to sleep at any moment.
On his back he carried two small cannons—remade goods obtained from a blacksmith in Mutsu Province.
Behind the three, four or five dozen yokai of varying sizes were scattered.
Kappa, mountain spirits, one-legged oni, flying-head demons—all sorts of low-tier yokai gathered on the riverbank. They naturally weren't Tono's core fighting force, only cannon fodder, pawns for surrounding and grinding down the Twenty-Three Demons.
And the true commanders of Tono—clearly, were not here.
They were hidden somewhere farther off.
Waiting to draw in the net.
At this moment, Bankotsu stood on the riverbank, facing southeast—the last portion of the Twenty-Three Demons, their main gathering place in Suruga, lay in that direction.
The last trace of the setting sun's light sank below the horizon.
Only afterglow remained to shine.
The Hour of Meeting Demons had officially arrived.
"Move."
Bankotsu hoisted Banryu and shouldered it.
The huge axe-blade drew a dark arc through the twilight.
The four or five dozen yokai moved as one, surging toward the southeast like a tide.
Three li south of Shimizu Port.
The temporary stronghold of the Twenty-Three Demons—an abandoned fishing village requisitioned by the Imagawa clan.
The tanuki spirit crouched on the rooftop, its bushy tail tucked between its stubby legs, its mung-bean eyes fixed on the northwest.
It could feel it.
Yokai aura approaching.
A great deal of it.
"They're coming, they're coming, they're coming—"
Its voice shook badly.
In the ruined house behind it, a dozen or so wounded small yokai huddled together in a mass.
Some missing ears, some with broken tails, some with a whole arm frozen into ice that hadn't yet thawed.
They—the surviving members of the Night Parade of Twenty-Three Demons who hadn't been scattered—had been thrashed thoroughly these past days by the Tono yokai.
It wasn't that they couldn't win one-on-one.
It was that the enemy simply crushed them with sheer numbers, blockading from the outer edge, cutting off the communication between them and the transmission channels of dread.
Breaking each one down separately.
"Isn't the Lord here yet..."
The kappa clutched its split shell, its voice muffled.
"He's on the way! The Lord said he's on the way!"
The tanuki spirit desperately comforted its companions, and desperately comforted itself.
Then—
In the northwest, through the twilight, yokai aura came surging like a tide.
The figures of dozens of yokai poured out from between the withered trees, a black seething mass.
Among them, three figures walked at the very front.
Bankotsu shouldering Banryu, Jakotsu gripping the snake-belly sword.
Suikotsu hefting the cannons.
"Found them."
Bankotsu bared his teeth in a grin, the smile especially savage in the twilight. "It's these little things—wipe them out, and that oni-masked bastard will come on his own."
Banryu rose.
Dark radiance bloomed from the blade's edge—that was yokai aura.
Yokai aura that, in a single strike, was enough to flatten this abandoned fishing village along with the dozen-odd small yokai inside it!
Bankotsu's muscles tensed.
And Banryu, just so, was about to come slicing down—
However,
in that very second, that very instant.
"I hear you're looking to take revenge on me?"
The voice fell abruptly from the air.
No warning, no approaching presence, as if it had appeared out of thin air from the void itself.
Bankotsu's Banryu stopped midair.
He hadn't stopped it himself.
It was—his body had instinctively frozen the instant that voice fell.
Blood mist.
Dark-red mist rising from the ground had, at some unnoticed moment, spread across the entire riverbank, covering his ankles, his calves, creeping upward.
Bone forest.
White bone spikes pulled up from the blood mist, thrusting out simultaneously behind Bankotsu, to his left, to his right—not attacking him, but already sealing off his retreat.
Thunder.
Purple arcs burst from overhead, lighting the entire riverbank.
Bankotsu looked up.
A grey figure hung in midair, pale long hair blown streaming backward by the airflow, the crimson pupils on the crimson oni mask looking down from on high.
The bodily turbid-energy brought on by nine mutations, his normal-state yokai power fully open.
Bankotsu's pupils dilated.
He recognized that oni mask.
How could he not—this face, he'd dreamed of tearing it apart.
But he hadn't expected it to come this fast.
Even less had he expected—
A chill in his chest.
Bankotsu looked down.
His chest now had a hole in it.
A fist-sized round hole, punched from front to back, its edges neat and smooth, scorched black by the thunder.
That was a bone spike.
The bone spike shot from the blood mist, wrapped in thunder, had already run him through in the instant he looked up.
Bankotsu didn't even feel the pain.
Only very cold.
Cold spreading from the hole through his whole body.
"You—"
Blood froth welled from his mouth, his voice going blurred.
Three steps away, Jakotsu reacted faster—the snake-belly sword sprang out, its curving blade slicing toward Kobe Hikaru.
But it didn't reach.
A bone spike pierced through Jakotsu's right shoulder from the side, pinning his whole body to the withered willow trunk behind him.
Suikotsu turned to run.
The third bone spike pierced through his calf.
The whole thing took no more than one breath.
From the blood mist rising to all three being pinned—two breaths.
Kobe Hikaru descended from the air.
His feet landed on the cracked riverbed, the lingering echo of thunder spreading out from his soles.
The four or five dozen trash yokai behind hadn't reacted yet.
The blood mist had already enveloped them all.
And then.
In an instant, all annihilated.
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