Meanwhile.
At the source of that blazing thunder, at the far end of the skyline.
Suruga Province, the Imagawa clan's main castle, the topmost floor of the castle keep — a place higher even than the hall where Yoshimoto, head of the Imagawa clan, ordinarily resided.
A small room.
Strictly speaking it was not a room at all, but something closer to a miniature shrine, set into the uppermost attic of the castle keep. Sacred sutras papered all four walls, purified sand covered the floor, and at the center stood a plain sword rack.
The rack was empty.
Yet only seconds ago a long, slender tachi had lain across it — that same Raikiri that had torn through the air and gone, Soza Samonji.
Now nothing remained but two scorch marks burned into the surface of the rack by lightning.
The smell of charring still lingered in the air.
Directly facing the rack hung a painting.
On it was a blurred figure — a crimson oni mask, long white hair, grey robes.
The features were crudely done. The Imagawa clan's painter had worked from rumor and secondhand description, and his skill was limited; the likeness caught neither the form nor the spirit.
But beneath the painting, four characters had been written out neatly.
Thunder-Slaying Demon God.
That was the name the people of the Imagawa domain had given Kobe Hikaru.
The shrine was cramped, incense smoke drifting through the small space, and one person sat cross-legged in its doorway.
A monk.
A woman.
She wore white monastic robes beneath a grey kasaya, the collar crossed and drawn tight, though lower the cloth of the front was pulled taut over a full curve and cinched close at either side.
Her stomach was flat, gathered in by the sash, but the long robe fell open at the slit, the line of her hips parting slightly into shadow, and her legs, sheathed in black stockings, were folded one over the other in a cross-legged seat.
Her face was young.
She looked barely past twenty, her skin pale to the point of translucence, her features neat and delicate, though not especially striking.
What truly could not be ignored were her eyes.
Deep, weathered, weighted with something that did not match that young face at all.
What had settled in those eyes seemed to outweigh everything the successive heads of the Imagawa clan had accumulated across several hundred years, all of them together.
Her hands rested folded on her knees, prayer beads wound between her fingers, one thumb turning a single bead without thought.
On the empty rack before her, the residue of the lightning still flickered faintly.
She watched that faint flickering, and the corner of her mouth tugged upward.
"He's come," she said quietly, as though to herself. Or as though reporting to someone who was not there.
…
The riverbank.
The same moment.
Raikiri bloomed with indigo light in the palm of the Asura Mutation, and that light spread outward along the enormous blade until the entire riverbank was lit as bright as noon.
The instant Kobe Hikaru closed his grip on Raikiri, a long-absent feeling welled up in him.
"So it was right after all."
Beneath the oni mask, his mouth split into a grin.
"Giving this sword back, back then — that was the right call."
If he hadn't, he would never have been able to stand here now and borrow it a second time.
The Asura Mutation's massive frame turned back toward the center of the battlefield.
Six meters of bone and thunder, gripping an indigo Raikiri, the light of faith and the lightning of yokai power braiding together along the edge.
Facing the field of dread that the eighteen yokai on the perimeter had built.
As stated before.
That field was a collective dread sustained jointly by three chieftains and eighteen subordinates — twenty-one strands of dread condensing the yokai auras of twenty-one yokai into a net that covered the whole stretch of riverbank. They meant to use it to suppress his own yokai aura, and though they could not succeed, it still fed a ceaseless stream of recovery to those three chieftains.
As long as the field held, the three chieftains could not be killed.
Without a suitable weapon, Kobe Hikaru would have found it hard to break as well. He could only have ground it down with the Asura Mutation, wearing away at it until every last thread of dread failed to hold.
Possible, but slow and costly.
And the drain on the Asura Mutation would have been enormous.
Now, though, things were different.
Because faith is aimed squarely at dread.
And because lightning is enough to break through anything in its way.
If he could not tear it open himself.
Then he would cut it apart — with a divine artifact.
The Asura Mutation raised the blade.
And then brought it straight down.
From crown to sole, one vertical stroke running through heaven and earth.
Indigo light burst from the edge and became a curtain three feet wide and a hundred feet tall, slicing forward from the Asura Mutation into the vast night sky.
The curtain was not fast.
It was slow, in fact — slow enough that every yokai present could follow its path clearly.
But it was not yokai aura. It was no ordinary slash.
It was the power of faith given the shape of a cut.
Faith and dread: two faces of one thing.
Faith reaches upward. Dread presses down.
And when the strength of faith takes the form of a blade stroke, an ordinary field of dread becomes as fragile as paper.
The curtain of light swept across the field the eighteen yokai had raised.
No explosion. No sound.
Only —
a severing.
The field of dread split as though invisible shears had cut it down the middle, the yokai aura along the cut collapsing into smoke and rolling away to both sides.
Eighteen Five-to-Six Mutation yokai grunted as one. The backlash of the shattered field surged along the bonds of dread and into their bodies, hurling each of them back.
Several dropped unconscious where they stood.
The rest could not keep their footing, legs gone soft, yokai auras in disarray.
The three chieftains took the worst of it.
The great kappa had just dragged itself out of the crater and was healing — and the moment the field broke, the dread pouring into it stopped dead. Its recovery cut out, and the ghost-blue liquid in the dish atop its skull spilled again.
The Kamaitachi's speed collapsed. Stripped of the field's reinforcement, it fell from its extreme velocity back down to its own native level — still fast, but no longer able to hold that wrung-out, potential-squeezing peak from moment to moment.
The snow woman's regeneration finally failed. Held in the grip of Kobe Hikaru's other Asura hand, she coughed up mouthfuls of white blood, and her hair, black before, blanched through to white, as though that had been its true color all along and the black had been nothing but an illusion propped up by dread.
One stroke.
It had cut apart the collective dread of twenty-one yokai.
The Asura Mutation stood at the center of the riverbank.
The indigo Raikiri hung at his side, the light of faith along its edge fading slowly. This half-divine artifact could only hold so much charge, and that single cut had all but drained the faith stored inside it.
It was, after all, only a half-divine artifact. It lacked the endless flow of faith a true divine artifact possessed. It would need more offerings, more time to recover.
More metamorphosis.
But it was enough.
The purpose had been served.
The Asura Mutation's crimson demon eyes swept over every yokai present.
The great kappa sat slumped on the lip of the crater, its frog eyes full of horror.
The Kamaitachi perched on a withered willow, the bloodthirsty fever in its slit crimson pupils snuffed out entirely, replaced by pure instinctive cringing.
The snow woman had already been thrown aside by Kobe Hikaru and had landed hard on the melting ice, the hem of her deep blue kimono soaked through. She pushed her upper body up with effort, ice-blue eyes fixed on the blade in the Asura Mutation's hand —
that blade which carried faith within it.
What this oni warrior held was not yokai power alone.
He commanded the faith of humans as well.
Dread and faith, both at once.
Such an existence — in her hundred-odd years in Tono, she had never seen one.
And so, here.
Silence fell over everything.
The hundred demons, all of them, were struck with terror.
The Asura Mutation's voice came out from under the oni mask.
He did not wipe them out. A moment's worth of calculation had turned over in his mind, and he arrived at the best possible disposal for this band of homeless foreign yokai.
"Submit." Two words.
A pause. Then he spoke again.
"Or die."
There was no third option.
On the riverbank, twenty-one yokai — plus the forty or fifty lesser yokai pinned up in the bone forest — nearly seventy yokai in all, sank into a dead stillness under the twin weight of the Asura Mutation's yokai aura and the indigo thunder-light.
None of them moved. None of them ran.
Not because they could not run — though they could not — but because they had seen it.
They had seen that stroke.
They had seen the instant dread was cut in two, seen how fragile the thing they had staked their survival on turned out to be in front of him.
They had no choice.
The snow woman moved first.
Her knees bent.
The deep blue skirts of her kimono spread across the sodden ground.
She knelt.
White hair trailing to the earth, ice-blue pupils lowered to the meltwater at her feet.
"I am willing to serve you, Lord."
Her voice was very soft.
The great kappa followed at once, its bulk sprawling flat on the crater's rim, frog eyes squeezed shut.
The Kamaitachi was last.
Its crimson slit pupils struggled for three breaths — then the silver-white shape dropped from the treetop and pressed all four claws to the ground.
On the perimeter, the eighteen Five-to-Six Mutation yokai — those still conscious — went down one after another as well.
The lesser yokai in the bone forest hardly need mentioning.
On that riverbank, more than seventy yokai lay prostrate in obeisance.
The last of the sunset dimmed further, until only a red afterimage hung at the edge of the sky.
And from the other side, moonlight poured down bright in its place.
The Asura Mutation's vast shadow stretched slowly across them all.
Majestic as a sovereign. Crushing as hell itself.
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