On the mountain road several li away, Kobe Hikaru was only just sliding his blade home.
A soft click. Clean, precise, finished.
In the instant Onikiri settled into its scabbard, the invisible fissure spanning the distant night sky had still not faded — the sundered storm clouds were drifting slowly back together, but moonlight went on pouring through the gap while it lasted, lighting up half the ridge.
He looked down at his palm.
A stroke delivered across several li left no blood, naturally.
But he knew. That Demon no longer existed.
And this was the sword intent he had grasped.
The exact opposite of Kamiizumi Nobutsuna's. Fullness.
Put everything inside. All of it.
Every implement he had courted to full favourability, every mutation he had folded into himself, every shard he had fished out of a scrap-iron heap and fed, piece by patient piece, until it learned to feel — all of it crammed into this blade, into this body, into the very existence of this oni warrior who had crawled out of a heap of corpses.
Crammed until it overflowed.
Crammed until the blade could no longer hold it, until he himself was the vessel that could contain anything, and then let it bloom and burst out of its own accord.
The utmost. The extreme.
The ultimate intent.
And that, too, was his sword intent.
It was nothing like the simple, unalloyed faith of a human. It was something far more direct — a yokai's stance toward the world. The hunger to possess everything, and the greater hunger to cut apart everything that stood in the way.
The proof was in front of him: a yokai could truly hold intent as well.
Harder than for a human, certainly.
And yes, even Kobe Hikaru had only come this far by leaning on the system.
But it could be had. Truly had.
That stroke a moment ago had been the first time he ever cut anything with sword intent, and it had already been strong enough.
The split cloud layer, the vengeful Demon scattered into dust — hard evidence, both.
Evidence that he could cut down a Demon from several li away.
This technique, then, could be named… Ultimate Intent: Cloud Cleaver.
The Onikiri forged upon that same principle had gained the same thing — a perfect demon blade capable of bearing the whole of Kobe Hikaru's yokai power. Not an evolution. Simply this: whatever belonged to Kobe Hikaru, the blade could hold entire, and then show back to him.
In a sense, it truly was a peerless demon blade of no lesser grade than something like Tessaiga.
No wonder so many great yokai kept a human shape and longed to have a demon blade of their own forged.
A blade that carried intent as its vessel really could bring the entirety of one's yokai aura into perfect bloom.
The demon blade in Kobe Hikaru's hand was such a weapon.
And Tessaiga, perhaps, was another.
Ahead of him, Tsugikuni Yoriichi jerked to a stop in the middle of his sprint and looked back at Kobe Hikaru.
The red-haired young man's face rarely shifted at all. But now those deep crimson eyes were shaking with it.
Of course he had seen.
Within his Transparent World, in that single instant, Kobe Hikaru's intent had broken past the constraints of flesh and crossed the barrier of distance itself.
That was a realm even he had not yet fully set foot in.
The tier of that intent was not, in truth, especially high; its realm was not especially deep. In depth it still fell short of a seasoned swordmaster and sword saint like Kamiizumi Nobutsuna.
But in height, it did not fall a hair's breadth behind.
And Kobe Hikaru's foundation was extraordinarily high, which lent the whole thing a far more sweeping breadth.
As a yokai, as a monstrous Demon of the Ninth Mutation, what he drove had never been sword intent alone. It was the aura and the power of a yokai of Nine Mutations.
Only when intent and aura and power all bloomed at once, filled to the point of spilling over, could it be called ultimate.
The ultimate of the utmost, the ultimate of the outermost limit.
"Sir…"
"That Demon is dead," Kobe Hikaru said, straightening a rumpled cuff.
His face stayed calm and his words came out mild, though he was thoroughly pleased with himself. Tsugikuni Yoriichi — the man who fully earned his reputation as the ceiling of combat power in Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. To work a miracle in front of a being like that carried an enormous satisfaction.
"Your house didn't survive, though."
"But your wife is fine."
Those last few words emptied the tension out of Yoriichi's body all at once — and filled it right back up with something far more urgent.
"Go!"
Kobe Hikaru wasted no more breath on talk. Thunder cracked underfoot, Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body opened to its full extent, and he became a streak of purple afterimage — a shade faster, even, than Yoriichi with all his mastery of the Breathing Style.
The two of them tore through the wooded mountains.
A road that would cost an ordinary man several hours was crushed down to less than half a minute.
And when they reached the little mountain hollow, what they found was exactly what Kobe Hikaru had promised. Wreckage.
The wooden hut was ruins. The roof had gone somewhere unknown, three of the four walls had come down, and only a few lonely posts still stood, stubborn as teeth.
The charred black trench gouged into the ground was a terrible thing to look at.
The smell of burning hung in the air.
"Uta!"
Yoriichi threw himself into the ruins.
In the corner beneath the single remaining wall, Uta sat huddled with a dust-caked quilt over her shoulders. Her hair was a wreck, her face bloodless, her eyes still brimming with terror — but—
She was alive.
Not a smear of blood on her. Barely even a scrape.
"Yoriichi…"
The moment she saw her husband, the woman who had not broken, had not sobbed or screamed with a vengeful Demon standing over her — a strong woman by any measure — finally broke, and the tears came pouring out.
Yoriichi rushed to her and pulled his wife hard against his chest.
His hands were shaking. The swordsman who by daylight could see through all things, calm as still water, looked now like nothing more than an ordinary husband who had come within a breath of losing everything.
Kobe Hikaru stood at the edge of the wreckage and did not go in to intrude.
He looked at the trench instead — at the scar his one stroke had left behind.
'Master… I did it…'
The thought reached him without passing through the panel at all. It came from the soul of the blade itself.
Not spoken aloud, not yet. But it meant the blade soul had taken shape.
Kobe Hikaru ran his hand over the hilt.
This was his demon blade. It still could not take on a form of its own, but it had a soul now, a will of its own, and it could bear the whole of his power.
And this was his sword intent.
Numbers that made no sense. Range that made no sense. Logic that made no sense either.
This was… a yokai's ultimate intent.
Overhead, the torn seam of cloud finally drew closed again.
The moonlight went out.
And yet the night, which should have dropped straight into pitch black, brightened once more.
Kobe Hikaru had kept it spread around him the entire time — a film so thin it was all but invisible to the eye, his blood became his eyes — and through that sense he caught the approach of figures.
The next instant. The next breath.
Hurried footsteps came out of the trees around them.
Many of them, and quick.
More than one person's feet.
Kobe Hikaru turned his head, crimson oni eyes narrowing.
They wore matching black uniforms, with lanterns of middling size hanging at their hips, a white character stamped across the back — destroy — and Sun Blades at their waists, every one of them dusty and worn from a long hard run.
The Demon Slayer Corps.
They had come at last.
Chasing the vengeful Demon's shadow…
One step too late.
But if Kobe Hikaru had not been here — well, arriving late was still better than never arriving at all.
The figures broke into view a moment later, stepping out beneath the rustling leaves.
At the front ran a man in a crow mask, dressed in a close-fitted haori of deep black with a sword at his hip. He moved fast, and the mountain forest slowed him not in the slightest.
Behind him came two more swordsmen in the same uniform.
One man, one woman, neither of them old — around twenty — yet they carried themselves ramrod straight and their feet came down without a sound.
The material of those blades was unusual. Kobe Hikaru's crimson oni eyes swept across them from beneath the brim of his sedge hat. Their colour held a distinctly strange lustre.
Kobe Hikaru had spent days working iron at Totosai's forge, and he knew: no ordinary ironwork could be polished to a colour like that. It was the particular sheen ore took on only after years upon years of exposure to sunlight.
Forged from Scarlet Crimson Ore, bathed in daylight the whole year round, the sun's power quenched into the edge — this was the first time Kobe Hikaru had ever laid eyes on one outside of a story, but he knew precisely what he was looking at.
The Sun Blade.
The thing he had been hunting for so long had walked right up to him.
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