The setting sun grew murkier by the moment, and the yokai aura thicker with it. In that instant the towering, austere Asura, by the sheer purity of its yokai aura alone, crushed down the force-field that the twenty-one yokai opposite had gathered together out of dread.
The moment the Asura Mutation took shape, Kobe Hikaru was already moving.
The six-meter-tall colossus of bone and lightning took one step, and the riverbank beneath that foot split open in cracks that ran out dozens of zhang.
His target was clear: the great kappa among the Tono chieftains.
Of the three chieftains, the kappa was the largest in frame and the slowest, and it was also one of the main anchor points of the force-field of dread.
Pull it out, and one corner of the field would collapse.
The Asura Mutation's right arm lifted.
Purple arcs of lightning coiled around the enormous fist built of bone, and the air ahead of the knuckles compressed into a visible warp.
The great kappa was not slow to react — the ghostly blue yokai power in the dish-shaped hollow atop its head poured out all at once, congealing before it into a wall of water more than a zhang thick.
The density of that wall was extreme, and countless small vortices spun inside it, each one an independent node of yokai power.
This was the ultimate art of the Tono Kappa Clan, refined over centuries: the manifestation of the whirl-eye of a river. In the legends of Tono, when a strong swimmer drowned, more often than not it was the spinning of such a whirl-eye that had killed him.
It was a formidable yokai technique, far stronger than Kobe Hikaru's ghost-fire.
But.
The Asura Mutation's fist came down on it.
A thunderous boom.
No pause at all.
The fist punched straight through the water wall.
Three zhang of water evaporated in the instant of contact, and the whirling knots of yokai aura inside collapsed one after another under the purple arcs driving through them — and that lightning did not spray from the face of the fist. It welled out simultaneously from every seam in the skeleton that formed the fist. Bone and lightning were one body: where the fist went, the lightning went, with no first and no second.
The wall burst outward from its center — burned through from the inside out.
And then the wind of the punch arrived.
The great kappa's frog-eyes went round. Its thick arms crossed before its chest, a last layer of yokai power surging up over the ink-green scales, slick mucus welling to the surface as it tried to bleed off the force.
A pity. It did nothing.
The Asura Mutation's fist struck that barrier, the lightning detonated, and barrier and scale-plating shattered together.
The impact hurled the two-meter-tall bulk off the riverbank, sent it tumbling through the air and slammed it into the mud, gouging out a crater several zhang across.
At the bottom of the crater, the great kappa lay motionless.
Half the ghostly blue liquid in the dish atop its head had spilled away.
Not dead — the vitality of the kappa clan ran deep — but it would not be standing again any time soon.
One blow.
A Tono chieftain whose yokai aura already equaled the Eight Mutations, and which under the reinforcement of dread stood closer to the Nine Mutations, had been put down in a single blow.
The snow woman's ice-blue pupils contracted violently.
Both her hands rose together, ten fingers spread — and wind and snow erupted from her palms.
It was nothing like the scattering ice crystals from before.
This was everything she had, potential wrung dry, her whole self spent.
Within the space of one breath, the air for a dozen zhang around plunged below freezing. Vapor crystallized into blades of ice that filled the sky, each one thin as a cicada's wing and sharp enough to slice stone.
The Breath of Ice.
This too was a yokai art.
Thousands upon thousands of ice blades came swarming at the Asura Mutation's body, wrapped in a howling frozen gale, blotting out everything.
Kobe Hikaru's answer was direct in the extreme. He simply swept the Asura Mutation's left arm across.
The enormous skeletal forearm carved an arc through the air, and lightning burst from its surface, weaving into a shining, interlocking net.
The ice blades struck that net.
The sound of shattering ran together into one unbroken roar.
Endless blades became vapor under the scorching lightning, and the vapor boiled away in the heat, forming a white curtain of mist.
The snow woman bit her lip until it purpled.
Kobe Hikaru had already come through the mist, the Asura Mutation's right hand reaching toward her.
The snow woman swept backward — her speed was far below the Kamaitachi's, but as the incarnation of wind and snow her strength lay in how elusive her movement was. The hem of her deep blue kimono trailed an arc through the air, ice crystals scattering from its edge.
The Asura Mutation's palm closed on empty air… and yet it did not.
"—!?"
It was as though, after a single instant of blankness, she was simply already caught in his grip.
The snow woman had been seized in one hand, that slender, willowy figure crushed into a narrow space by the Asura Mutation's fingers.
Fast. No — it could not even be called fast.
Because there had been no swing, no process at all.
The membrane of yokai aura covering the outermost layer of the Asura Mutation had locked onto the position of her soul in the very first instant she began to retreat —
that invisible skin, overflowed from the Eighth Mutation and then cast outward by the Ninth, had shortened the locking-on to something quicker than instinct.
Nor had Kobe Hikaru chased her down. In the moment his palm opened he already knew where she would be. He arrived early and waited for her to run into it.
This was the Transformation of the Spirit-Chasing Archer, magnified by the Asura Mutation's projection: loosed, and it never missed.
And in that same beat, that same breath —
the Kamaitachi struck again at last.
A silver-white afterimage cut in from behind the Asura Mutation. As the fastest of the three chieftains, it sent vast mountain-wind blades slashing in from four angles at once.
But the wind blades landed on the Asura Mutation's spinal frame.
Sparks sprayed.
Not a scratch. Not the slightest use.
The bone-and-lightning structure of the Qualitative Transformation and the Nine Mutations held a natural hardness advantage over Eight Mutation wind blades —
after the Recasting of the Seventh Mutation, thunder had soaked into the bone and fused with it. Not one strut of that frame was mere bone any longer; each was an alloy of bone and lightning, denser and more rigid than any steel.
Shock flickered through the Kamaitachi's crimson slit pupils. Its speed was its pride, and its wind blades could slice open the flesh of most yokai.
Even yokai of a higher rank than itself.
This, beyond any doubt, was not what it had expected.
It could not cut that skeleton at all!
Kobe Hikaru did not even turn his head.
Dense bone spikes erupted across the Asura Mutation's back — the natural extension of the external skeletal structure that had overflowed with the Eighth Mutation, springing outward from the surface of the frame like a hedgehog bristling.
The Kamaitachi was forced to break away, but that rodent-shaped body of congealed wind still had a corner torn open, spraying a wide spatter of pale blood.
More than half its surface was ripped apart. Gravely wounded, all at once.
Three Eight Mutation chieftains, and in under ten seconds Kobe Hikaru alone had pinned them down with no room to fight back.
The kappa was down.
The snow woman was caught.
The Kamaitachi was too badly hurt to close in — and if Kobe Hikaru had not been holding the snow woman in one hand, it likely could not have escaped either.
The snow woman panted, feeling the pressure grow more terrible by the moment, pale blood seeping from the corner of her mouth.
Horror showed on their faces. None of them, it seemed, could have imagined this outcome.
Their opponent was strong, true. But they were high-ranking yokai as well, transmuted as he was.
Even reckoning by the count of Kobe Hikaru's mutations, with a single mutation's gap between them, in theory it should not have gone like this.
Unfortunately, Kobe Hikaru's Ninth, the Asura Mutation, was total.
What the Asura projection magnified was every mutation that had come before it.
The high-density yokai aura compressed and condensed after the Seventh Mutation's Recasting, and the extended construction ability that had broken past the surface of the body after the Eighth Mutation's overflow — all of it cast up onto a six-meter scale.
In other words, in raw numbers of yokai aura and yokai power, he now stood at fully twice the Eight Mutations — not at the Ninth's usual margin of being merely one notch above the Eighth.
Kobe Hikaru stood where he was, seeming to look down on it all.
The force-field of dread still held.
Eighteen yokai of the fifth and sixth mutations had not joined the fight. They were spread along the far edges of the battlefield, sustaining the collective field that blanketed the whole stretch of riverbank.
The power of dread was pouring without pause into the bodies of the three chieftains.
Their own forms were hidden inside that dread as well, half-seen and half-lost in the yellowing dusk, all but invisible.
This was the anchoring and the release of dread, a unique ability the Tono yokai had mastered.
Without dealing with that swarm, the three chieftains would go on recovering.
But without dealing with the three chieftains, the swarm would be very hard to root out — at least, not by ordinary yokai.
At the bottom of the crater, the great kappa stirred again.
The ghostly blue liquid in the dish atop its head was slowly rising back. Dread was healing it.
The snow woman kept coughing blood, and yet she too was mending.
Fervor rekindled in the Kamaitachi's crimson slit pupils.
Dread could not raise their power directly. It served only as an accelerant to ordinary growth, a way to unify the strength of the swarm, and a means of recovery.
But so long as the force-field of dread was not broken, they truly could keep recovering, keep entangling him.
A war of attrition.
That was exactly what they were counting on.
Their opponent was indeed strong, his yokai aura astonishing, but his dread was thin by comparison, and crudely wielded — he could hardly sustain that kind of endless recovery.
As one side waned and the other waxed, in the end victory would come to them.
Kobe Hikaru understood this perfectly well, and he had seen through their intent.
He had never planned to grind it out in the Asura Mutation.
He had only ever planned to force out every scrap of their dread. That was all.
The body of the Asura Mutation went still.
The six-meter colossus of bone and lightning stood at the center of the riverbank, purple arcs leaping in the seams of its frame, lighting the pair of crimson demon-eyes in the oni mask.
His right hand — the Asura Mutation's vast right hand — opened.
The palm was empty.
The Muramasa still rested in its sheath at his waist. He had not drawn it.
Because cracks had appeared in the Muramasa's blade during its awakening. It could not bear the magnification of the Asura Mutation's projection — forcing it would shatter the sword outright.
He would not let the Muramasa break.
Before he came, he had already settled on an alternative.
With the two great yokai chieftains rising and pressing forward again, and the snow woman in his hand steadily knitting herself back together —
the Asura Mutation's right hand lifted higher, wider.
Palm turned to the sky.
And then.
He spoke.
Two words, each syllable rising and falling with weight.
"Lightning, come."
His voice was not loud.
But the yokai aura wrapped those two words and carried them out along an invisible cord — the cord that linked the lands of three provinces, that linked the Twenty-Three Demons, that linked all dread and all faith — southeast, away into the distance.
Toward Suruga.
Toward…
the Imagawa clan's main castle.
A humming resonance!
The world seemed to halt, to stop dead.
On the horizon, in a gap between the clouds, a light kindled.
Not the afterglow that lingers when the sun has gone.
Not the half-hidden light of the moon.
Nor starlight.
It was the majesty of thunder, descending from the heavens.
Rumble. Rumble.
Heavy thunder rolled in from the southeastern sky, as though something were tearing across the night at tremendous speed.
The snow woman went still, raising her head in terror.
The Kamaitachi was aghast.
And the great kappa, struggling up from the bottom of its crater, wore an expression of pure horror.
In that second, in that moment.
Not only they saw it.
The Eighteen Demons behind them, and the dozen-odd small yokai and small Demons behind Kobe Hikaru.
They all saw it too.
They saw a blue-white radiance rise from the horizon, trailing a wake of thunder, streaking toward the riverbank at a speed the eye could just follow.
That was no natural lightning.
Because within that light there was the outline of a sword.
A long, slender blade, a plain guard, and an edge sheathed in lightning —
Raikiri.
Soza Samonji.
The famed blade handed down through the generations of the Imagawa clan.
The sword with which Kobe Hikaru had cut down the Thunder Beast and cleaved the lightning itself.
And a sword that had been venerated by the faith of a castle and a province for three whole months.
Months ago he had slain the Thunder Beast with it, and yet, faced with such a famous blade, he had done the unexpected and not taken it for himself. He had returned it to the Imagawa clan's main castle — leaving behind the legend of the thunder-cutting, and the thunder-cutting sword along with it, so that it might receive offerings and take in faith.
All of it for this day.
Back then he had not yet known this world held the concept of a divine artifact.
But he knew the power of dread, and he knew the power of faith.
Dread could make a yokai grow mighty. Faith could raise a blade to a higher order.
He was no god himself and could not wield the power of faith directly — so he had left that sword with the Imagawa, and let the faith of a whole castle's people water it.
And now,
months had passed.
Raikiri had not yet become a true divine artifact — that would take far longer, and far deeper faith.
But it had already crossed the threshold of a mortal weapon.
It had become… a half-divine artifact.
A thing standing between mortal blade and divine artifact.
It bore the weight of a castle's and a province's faith. It had not yet condensed the so-called Name and Precept unique to divine artifacts, but it already carried a divine artifact's ground color.
Compared with the likes of Uesugi Kenshin or Takeda Shingen — true gods and buddhas descended in mortal form, who need only bestow a name to make something bear the weight of faith — Kobe Hikaru's method was laborious beyond comparison.
And yet it had genuinely worked!
The blue-white lightning split the night sky, and hundreds of paces out it wheeled sharply in the upper air — plunging straight down toward the Asura Mutation's open palm.
Kobe Hikaru caught it.
The Asura Mutation's vast right hand closed, gripping that sword wrapped in lightning.
At the instant of contact, the panel sprang up.
[Raikiri (Soza Samonji)]
[Quality: Half-Divine Artifact (in metamorphosis)]
[It is excited. It is happy. It can finally fight at your side once again.]
[Current favourability: 26 (Excited)]
The blade trembled in his palm.
— a delighted, impatient shiver.
Like a dog left home alone too long, finally hearing its master at the door.
On Raikiri's edge, the blue-white glow blended with the Asura Mutation's purple thunder.
Two lightnings — the lightning of yokai power and the lightning of faith — collided along the blade, tangled, and at last melted into one light, deeper, brighter, more solid.
Indigo.
The light of a half-divine artifact.
That light did not burn hot.
But every yokai there — the three chieftains and the eighteen on the perimeter alike — felt something uneasy in the very same instant.
It was not yokai aura.
It was faith.
The prayers of a castle's people, months of incense and offerings, gathered on a single blade — a weight belonging to the "positive" side of things.
Dread makes yokai grow mighty.
Faith makes yokai — afraid.
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