The mountains of Kozuke Province were not especially steep, but they ran on and on, deep and folded into one another.
Dawn had only just begun to grey the sky, and the morning mist had not lifted; it clung wet to the surface of the earth.
Along the gravel path at the foot of the mountain came a young man.
Very young. Twenty or so, at a guess.
He wore an old red outer robe patched in several places, with a rather unremarkable nata — a woodcutter's blade — thrust through his belt, and an empty bamboo basket on his back.
His hair was deep crimson, bound up high, the ends curling.
The most arresting thing about him was his forehead.
At the left temple lay a dark red mark, shaped like burning flame.
A pair of ornaments hung from his earlobes, earrings painted with the pattern of the sun, swaying gently with each step he took.
He walked steadily.
Not the deliberate, low-centred steadiness of a proper samurai, nor the weightless soundlessness of a ninja, but something that seemed to melt entirely into its surroundings.
His feet came down on dead branches, and the branches gave no brittle snap.
The hem of his robe brushed dew-laden grass, and the beads of dew did not fall.
His breathing was long and even, his heartbeat slow. The whole of him was like a thread of wind drifting through the hills, or a shaft of light slipping past the treetops — nothing in him jarred, nothing announced a living man.
And then, in that instant, in that single second, the young man stopped.
He raised his head, and those deep crimson eyes looked ahead.
There stood a nameless hill.
Not tall, but the view from it would be excellent — it looked down over the castle town, still asleep in the distance.
"...Strange."
The young man said it quietly.
He called it strange, but his voice was flat, without inflection, without any audible surprise.
It was only that, to his eyes, that hill ahead was very wrong indeed.
Not the wrongness of thick, bristling yokai aura. Not the wrongness of spiritual power churning.
It was a change he could not name.
The wind that morning came out of the southeast.
Grass and trees on the slopes should have bowed northwest with it; leaves should have swung to one side; even the dawn mist should have drifted along the wind's channels.
Everywhere in the young man's field of vision, that was exactly what happened.
But that hill was different.
The grass had not bent downwind. Every blade stood perfectly upright, curving faintly inward, pointing toward the crown of the hill.
The trunks and boughs of the trees hung motionless, as though pinned in place, every branch straining with all it had toward that highest point.
The loose stones on the ground, which ought to have lain scattered at random, looked now as if someone had arranged them with great care.
Even the mist had stalled there, drawn into a vast ring that neither dispersed nor lost its shape.
All things stood silent.
Not out of fear, but out of devotion. They were gathering close.
The way retainers gather about a sovereign. The way believers press toward a god.
It defied all reason.
Grass and trees and stones have no minds; they obey wind and gravity and nothing else.
And yet they also possess a spark of spirit — a spark that is very hard to wake.
Right now, beyond any doubt, it had woken.
And a scene like this could mean only one thing: at the top of that hill was something they found more worth drawing near to than wind or gravity.
The young man did not retreat.
Those eyes of his, which could see through to the essence of things, found no malice there.
Only a will — pure, immense, and still condensing.
He started up the slope.
His pace stayed even, each footfall landing in the gaps the grass and branches opened for him.
The higher he climbed, the stronger the sensation grew.
Wildflowers by the path forced their petals wide, though this was not remotely their blooming season.
The soil underfoot was firmer and more level than anywhere else, as though it had tamped itself down of its own accord to better bear the figure above.
And so, here and now.
The young man took a few more steps and then stopped walking.
Because he realized this hill was pushing him away.
Or more precisely, it was pushing away everything that was not part of the gathering.
Which naturally included him.
But he did not need to climb any further.
Halting there at the foot of the slope and lifting his head, he could already see the summit — see the presence they had gathered around, the figure they had drawn near to.
A figure seated on the grass at the hilltop, beneath a tree, sitting as though enthroned between carpet and canopy.
A Demon. Something not human.
It wore grey robes; its skin was pale almost to transparency, its white hair loosely bound at the back of the head.
It sat cross-legged, spine straight as a spear.
Across its knees lay a sword, still sheathed.
Its eyes stayed shut the entire time. It did not move.
It seemed utterly unremarkable — no breath, not the slightest motion.
Call it a Demon, and it looked more like an ordinary statue.
But in the young man's eyes it was not unremarkable at all. It was a vast whirlpool.
All the wind, all the light, every current of air, even the vitality of the grass and trees — all of it was being drawn into that body. A thing like a black hole. And yet, while it swallowed, it also radiated outward a will of unbearable sharpness.
Full, and overflowing.
That was a sword.
Inside that person's body, a sword was taking shape.
Not the iron in the hand, but the intent in the heart.
The young man simply stood there and watched.
He made no attempt to come closer.
Because he could feel it: one more step forward and he would disturb that delicate balance.
Time seemed to lose all meaning as a thing that flowed.
Until the first true ray of sunlight pierced the cloud and fell across that face.
The figure opened his eyes.
Sclera of pure black. Pupils of blood scarlet.
In their depths, purple veining and orange light wove together and gathered, at last, into a single point of absolute edge.
Hmmmm—
The uchigatana across his knees gave out a clear, ringing tremor.
All around, the inward-curving grass, the frozen branches, the congealed mist — in that instant it was as though they had been granted a pardon, and everything slackened at once.
The wind began to move again.
The grass began to sway again.
The world returned to its proper order.
Kobe Hikaru let out a long breath of foul aura — of yokai aura.
Then he looked down, past the slope, to the red-haired young man standing a good hundred feet away in a straight line below.
Their eyes met.
Scarlet Demon eyes against deep crimson ones.
Kobe Hikaru's fingers rested on the hilt. He did not move.
He had not yet had time to properly savour the sword intent that had just finished taking form inside him, nor the effect of pouring it into the demon blade in his hand, into Onikiri.
Nor time to reflect on how all that favourability he had casually accumulated along the road had not been wasted after all.
Only a few points here, a dozen there — but the ten thousand things of heaven and earth could genuinely help, when he needed them to.
This grass, these trees, these stones, this soil, this whole mountain — all of it had just been guarding Kobe Hikaru's path. Useless against a strong enemy, perhaps, but perfectly capable of serving as a warning.
Looking at the young man below, something in him gave a small jolt.
He recognized him.
More precisely, he recognized the manner of dress, and the unmistakable red mark on that forehead.
And the earrings. And the birthmark.
That was... Tsugikuni Yoriichi.
The man called the ceiling of combat power in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.
In the world of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, apart from the Nichirin Blade, the Demon Slayer Corps' other great support against vengeful Demons was the breathing method that granted its users tremendous physique and fighting strength — and this man was the progenitor of that Breathing Style. The progenitor of all of them.
Which was to say, the swordsman of Sun Breathing.
He had never imagined he would meet him here, and like this.
Kobe Hikaru rose from the hilltop.
At his waist, Onikiri sang one last note and fell silent.
The blade soul had taken shape.
Complete. No longer a half-finished thing, but a soul approaching perfection.
He could feel it — there was a wholly different weight in that sword now. Not the weight of piled-up yokai aura. The weight of condensed will.
Blood and fire cutting Demons, sword intent brought to Unity: at this moment, the soul of that blade had finally caught up with his own stride.
It still could not take a human shape — not even a false, illusory human shape, let alone a real body — but if it wished, it could already move on its own, enough now to be called a Tsukumogami.
After this, change by change, it would be able to conjure a form.
Through all of it, Kobe Hikaru's gaze stayed fixed on the foot of the hill.
The red-haired young man was still there.
He had not left, and he had not come closer. He simply stood, watching him with those two deep crimson eyes.
No panic. No flinching. Not even a change in how he held his weapon — that hand rested on the hilt of the nata at his waist, light and unstudied, merely hanging there, merely propped against it, not gripping.
But Kobe Hikaru knew that if he himself so much as moved, that hand could complete a draw in the space of a breath.
The reason was simple.
The four syllables of the name Tsugikuni Yoriichi were proof enough that he had that capability.
And so.
Face calm, cold features silent the whole way down, Kobe Hikaru walked the slope.
Unhurried. When he reached the bottom, he stopped three paces away.
Up close, the young man's features were clearer than they had been from the summit.
Early twenties, on the lean side, the red outer robe patched in several places. That dark red mark at the left of his forehead had a peculiar shape, like flame frozen into skin.
His face could not be called especially handsome. Only regular, well-arranged.
The strangest thing about him was his breath.
He was breathing, and yet that breath matched the wind of the mountain so exactly that he hardly seemed like a living creature at all — more like a piece the mountain had always had, a tree grown here, a stone set into the earth.
Kobe Hikaru narrowed his focus, and a word came to him.
Or rather, the thing that, in the world of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, the swordsmen of the Demon Slayer Corps trained in — the Breathing Style.
Lungs for a furnace, breath for a blade, driving muscle and bone and blood to the utter limit of their function, and thereby making up for humanity's natural disadvantage in raw physical power.
But in truth, this business of using focused breathing to strengthen the body had never belonged solely to the swordsmen of the Demon Slayer Corps.
It was, in fact, common practice among most samurai, most swordsmen, most warriors.
Jigen-ryu, which built its momentum by drawing and expelling great lungfuls of air, and Tenko-ryu, which used changes of breath to shift rapidly between upper, middle and lower stances — both had breathing at work within them.
And yet never, in any school's training hall, in any human swordsman he had met to this day, had he felt a breath like this.
A breath so perfectly fitted to the natural world.
This was what it meant, truly, to take breathing — a property every living thing possesses — and train it to its absolute extremity.
Only breathing at this level deserved to be called a Breathing Style.
He was worthy of the title after all: the progenitor of the Breathing Styles, the swordsman of the Breath of the Sun.
All the while, the young man had not spoken either. He only studied Kobe Hikaru, his gaze pausing a moment on that pale face where the oni mask had gone, dropping to the Onikiri at his waist, then returning to his eyes.
Black sclera. Scarlet pupils.
Like a man, and not a man.
"...Forgive the intrusion, sir."
He spoke first, his voice low, his tone level.
Kobe Hikaru heard it for what it was: both a greeting and a confirmation. He had not drawn steel at the sight of a yokai. He had simply said hello, like anyone would.
"No intrusion to speak of," Kobe Hikaru answered, and nothing more — neither warm nor cold, but with no anger at being disturbed, and no hint of wanting him gone.
The red-haired young man's expression stayed calm, and something in him seemed to settle.
"You've been sitting up there all night, by the look of it?"
"Mm. Isn't that what yokai are supposed to do?"
A moment of silence.
The young man's gaze fell to Onikiri, then slid away again without any change in his face.
He had seen from the start that the figure before him was yokai and not human, and clearly it did not trouble him. He only asked:
"...The grass and trees, just now?"
"That was my doing," Kobe Hikaru admitted at once, sparing him the guesswork.
The young man did not press. He only nodded, as though to say: understood, no harm done.
That degree of composure was frankly not a normal human reaction.
Then again, Tsugikuni Yoriichi had never been an ordinary man.
From what Kobe Hikaru knew, Tsugikuni Yoriichi had been born into a well-known landholding noble house of the Sengoku era, and had come into the world already possessing an ability that saw through everything — the Transparent World.
Called sight, though it functioned more like prediction.
A power strong enough to observe every movement an enemy made, inside and out, and construct the corresponding image in the mind; to read at a glance the rise and fall of an opponent's lungs, the flow and constriction of his blood vessels; and, turned inward, to command every motion of his own body.
He was born extraordinary. And because he was a second son and therefore of no account, and because he feared being a burden to others, he never spoke at all, and everyone took him for a mute.
Later, having shown only the barest sliver of his outrageous talent for the sword — defeating, the first time he ever held a blade, a family swordsman with decades of battlefield experience — he grew afraid of unsettling his elder brother's position as heir, and left the house of his own accord to live in seclusion and marry a commoner.
Powerful, and content with an ordinary life.
That was Tsugikuni Yoriichi.
Which was why he could tell Kobe Hikaru was a yokai.
And why, with that power called the Transparent World, he had already witnessed no small number of strange things.
Nothing surprising in it.
Although.
It was clear enough that he could not see through Kobe Hikaru's nature. Otherwise he would not have asked.
Kobe Hikaru said, "You live somewhere nearby?"
Though he hardly needed to ask. This was surely where the man had gone to ground.
The young man nodded. "In the hills outside the town. Three years now."
"A trapper?"
"A hunter."
He paused. "My wife's near her time. I'm going into town to find a midwife."
He said it flatly, but the instant Kobe Hikaru heard it, something in his mind lurched hard.
His wife was near her time.
He was going into town to find a midwife.
Kobe Hikaru remembered — yet again!—
As has already been said.
He knew Tsugikuni Yoriichi's background from Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba.
And Tsugikuni Yoriichi's wife and child were an absolutely critical link in the life of the man named Tsugikuni Yoriichi.
Because while he was away, they would be attacked by a vengeful Demon of Kibutsuji Muzan's making, and both of them would die.
It was precisely that event that brought Tsugikuni Yoriichi to the notice of the Demon Slayer Corps, and made him, in the end, the strongest swordsman in the Corps' history.
And that event happened exactly then — with his wife on the verge of labour, while he was out searching for a midwife and coming home.
He was standing here now. Which meant it was about to happen.
This was truly...
Better to arrive at the right moment than to arrive early.
He had been chasing his own will along the road, and looking for the Demon Slayer Corps as he went.
He had not found the Demon Slayer Corps. Instead he had found the progenitor of the Breathing Styles first — a Tsugikuni Yoriichi who, by the look of it, had already mastered the breathing but had not yet joined the Corps, had not yet codified the Breathing Styles, taught them, spread them outward.
Thoughts began turning in him again.
"Your wife's alone at home?"
"The neighbours will look in on her."
"How long have you been out?"
"Left before dawn. About four hours."
Kobe Hikaru worked out the timing.
He knew the thing had not happened yet. But the window was finite.
Given that vengeful Demons feared the sun, the man would have to be back before nightfall.
He asked, calmly, "Did you find the midwife?"
"Not yet."
"Which quarter of the town have you been looking in?"
The young man tilted his head and glanced at him, a trace of puzzlement in those deep crimson eyes — puzzlement that a yokai should care whether he had found a midwife or not.
But he answered all the same.
After all, he was the one who had been drawn here and had done the disturbing.
"The physician's hall in the north. They said the midwife was called out on an emergency yesterday and won't be back till today."
Kobe Hikaru nodded, then said, "There's another one on the south side of the castle town."
He had seen her when he entered the town the day before.
The young man fell silent again, watching him, as though weighing whether the words were true.
Then he turned and set off toward the southern quarter.
The movement was entirely natural, as though he had always meant to go that way and had merely taken a longer route.
Two steps on, he looked back.
Those deep crimson eyes rested on Kobe Hikaru.
"You're just passing through, sir?"
"More or less."
"Headed which way?"
"Nowhere fixed. Wandering."
The young man nodded, asked nothing further, and turned back toward the town.
His figure faded gradually into the morning mist, his stride so steady it made almost no sound.
Kobe Hikaru stayed where he was, watching that receding back, fingers resting lightly on Onikiri's scabbard.
There was a great deal he had not said.
That he had recognized who the man was, for one.
That he had not forgotten, for another, how the surname Tsugikuni carried weight among the branch houses of the Hojo clan — and yet the man in front of him had left the Tsugikuni house long ago to stand on his own and live as a hunter.
And that he had a fair idea of what would happen before this day was out.
However he turned it over, Kobe Hikaru understood one thing: follow Tsugikuni Yoriichi, and he would find the Demon Slayer Corps — and through them, the Sun Blade.
And even setting the Sun Blade aside, Kobe Hikaru was genuinely interested in Tsugikuni Yoriichi, in a being born so far outside the ordinary.
In a world stitched together out of so many different elements.
What did an existence like that represent?
Kobe Hikaru really was interested.
So he followed.
He did not say he was following, and he offered no reason. He simply kept three paces back and walked in the same direction.
The young man did not turn to ask.
Two of them, one ahead and one behind, vanishing into the morning mist.
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