The night wind howled through the wreckage, scattering the last of the dust that hung between the fallen beams.
Firelight came on from the distance, closing fast, and in the space of a few breaths the three lantern-carrying figures broke clear of the treeline.
They were quick.
The man at their head, wearing a lacquer-black crow mask, hit the ground and stamped a shallow crater into the soft earth. There was no pause to absorb the landing, no wasted motion at all, and the sword in his hand was already half out of its sheath.
That was the instinct of a man who had spent years walking the edge between living and dying.
His black haori flared open behind him, answering the mask, the two of them like a matched pair of crow's feathers.
The man and woman behind him were a shade slower, but no less clean about it.
The man was broad and heavily built, veins standing out along the hand that gripped his sword, the steel already bright under the lantern light.
The woman was smaller and slighter, and her long blade had likewise cleared the mouth of its sheath.
One in front, two behind, they swept their eyes across the ruins.
And then locked, hard, onto Kobe Hikaru.
Even though Kobe Hikaru was releasing no yokai aura at that moment. Even though he was only standing there, quiet.
But that bloodless, chalk-white face, and those oni eyes with their pitch-black whites and crimson pupils, were far too conspicuous on a night with the moon shut away behind cloud.
That was... a Demon.
The crow-masked man had not yet said a word, but the man and woman at his back were already moving.
No need to confirm it.
No need to question anything.
What they saw was this: a scene of total wreckage, and huddled in the middle of it a young pregnant woman, shaking, blood on her clothes, and a red-haired youth holding her who looked like an ordinary hunter and nothing more.
And apart from those two, a creature standing there with oni eyes, radiating something that was plainly not human.
Anyone with working senses would take one look and know he was no simple thing.
Let alone the Demon Slayer Corps.
A unit that had followed a vengeful Demon's scent the whole way here. A unit whose entire purpose was cutting vengeful Demons down!
But in the very instant the big swordsman drove off his toes and his edge slid half an inch toward Kobe Hikaru—
"Stop!"
The crow-masked man, who had said nothing until now, threw an arm out across the two behind him, barring their path.
The movement was fast. Reflex-fast.
Not because he had seen something.
Because he had felt something.
More precisely: something coming from an entirely different direction.
From the spot where the red-haired youth crouched beside the young pregnant woman.
Tsugikuni Yoriichi stood up.
That was all. He stood up.
He did not draw. He did not so much as lay a hand on the hatchet at his belt.
He only set his wife's hand gently down, rose out of his crouch, turned, and looked at the three Demon Slayer Corps swordsmen with calm, deep-red eyes.
And then—
The air changed.
Something pure to the point of transparency, formless, and heavy enough to flatten a roof.
Sword intent.
Sword intent gathered and not yet loosed.
Like a sword still in its scabbard, not a finger's width of the blade showing, and yet the single small click of the tsuba coming loose was enough to run cold up a man's spine from his tailbone to the back of his skull.
The crow-masked man's breathing stopped.
He was one of the most seasoned veterans in the Demon Slayer Corps. He had cut down more than twenty vengeful Demons, large and small. He had rolled through heaps of the dead. He had bargained his life back out from under a vengeful Demon's claws—
His experience was anything but shallow.
But never, not once, had he seen anything like this.
There was not even killing intent in it.
It was still, drawn inward, empty of any wish to attack.
If anything, it brimmed with gentleness.
And that gentleness was precisely the most terrifying part of it.
It was like standing at the lip of a cliff and having someone tap you lightly on the shoulder.
You know he means you no harm.
You know he probably will not push.
And your body shakes anyway, because you understand with perfect clarity that if he ever did decide to push, you would have no means of resisting whatsoever.
This was being outclassed on an entirely different tier.
An overwhelming victory already completed without a single blow being struck.
"Don't. Don't move—"
The crow-masked man forced the words out between his teeth. Not at Kobe Hikaru. At the two young comrades behind him.
The big man's feet had already rooted where they stood, his half-raised Sun Blade locked partway through its arc. He did not even know when he had stopped. His body had refused, on pure instinct, to advance another step.
The swordswoman was worse. Somewhere along the way her fingers had gone slack on the hilt, and the Sun Blade had slid half an inch through her palm, nearly falling from her grip.
Because her body was telling her: no.
Absolutely not.
To raise a hand against this man would be suicide.
Tsugikuni Yoriichi simply went on standing there, deep-red eyes passing calmly across the three of them, without a wasted movement, without the faintest trace of aggression.
He was only conveying one thing.
This gentleman is my guest.
More than that, he is the man I owe my thanks to.
Do not move.
And in the middle of all this.
Kobe Hikaru, leaning against a broken pillar, narrowed his crimson oni eyes at the thin line of Tsugikuni Yoriichi's back.
No attack. Only standing up.
One movement, and three elite Demon Slayer Corps swordsmen, every one of them far stronger than any ordinary samurai, had been frozen stiff on the spot.
That, beyond any doubt, was sword intent.
Sword intent at the level of a swordmaster. Of a great swordmaster, even.
Yoriichi already stood close to the rank of a sword saint. Close to... Kamiizumi Nobutsuna.
Perhaps somewhat past him.
And this was absolutely not a realm anyone could grind out with a few decades of bitter training. It was closer to something innate, inborn, cut into the bone as instinct.
The utmost that a human being could become.
Kobe Hikaru quietly admitted something to himself.
In a certain sense, Yoriichi's formless suppression was more finely made than his own cut through the cloud layer. That cut had been a display of ultimate technique, true, but it could never have happened without yokai aura holding it up.
What Yoriichi had just done used nothing but pure human will.
Tsugikuni Yoriichi, indeed.
Nothing about him belonged to the common world.
So it was, exactly as expected.
The crow-masked man finally shook himself free of that invisible pressure. The cold sweat on his forehead had already soaked through the lining of the mask.
Slowly, he drew back the arm barring his two teammates, and just as slowly pressed his half-drawn Sun Blade back down into its sheath.
Then he took one deep breath, and another.
He had not finished the third before he turned his head and studied the pale figure by the broken pillar again.
Being rather less rash than the two youngsters behind him, he had already made up his mind.
That was no vengeful Demon.
They had spent three days and three nights on the trail of the vengeful Demon that came here, and he could pick out the rotten, bloody reek of Kibutsuji Muzan's bloodline with his eyes shut. Whatever this man in front of him gave off was certainly not human, but it carried nothing of that stench.
A yokai.
Another kind of Demon altogether, one from outside humankind.
The Demons that were yokai stood opposed to humanity, yes, but most of them did not feed on killing people.
Every member of the Demon Slayer Corps was expected to be able to tell those two apart.
Add to that the attitude of the red-haired youth shielding the young pregnant woman. He was plainly shielding this yokai as well.
A misunderstanding.
This was a misunderstanding.
Once he was certain of it, the crow-masked man lifted the mask away, revealing the scarred face of a middle-aged man with heavy brows and wide eyes.
He bowed deeply toward Yoriichi, then, a little awkwardly, cupped his hands in salute toward Kobe Hikaru.
"My apologies. We were reckless."
"Demon Slayer Corps. Rengoku Jinjuro offers his apologies to you both."
Rengoku.
Kobe Hikaru raised an eyebrow.
That surname was familiar.
Going by the current timeline, this would be the ancestor of that yellow-and-red-haired, permanently over-energetic Flame Hashira from the main storyline of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba?
No wonder.
Subordinates raised by a man of that line really would run a little hot.
The man himself, though, was cautious enough.
"If it's a misunderstanding, then it's easily settled. After all, none of you managed to get your swords out."
Kobe Hikaru straightened and brushed the dust off his hem. "As it happens, your timing is good. There's something I need to do, and I can't finish it without finding the Demon Slayer Corps."
He pulled the scrap of cloth Totosai had given him out of his robe and waggled it between his fingers.
"You recognize this, don't you?"
Rengoku Jinjuro's gaze fell on the cloth.
The crooked little stick-drawing of a mountain peak on it. The handwriting that crawled across it like chicken scratches.
His pupils contracted, very slightly.
Not because the drawing was hideous. Though it certainly was hideous.
It was the seal beneath the signature. Blurred, but in the upper-level records of the Demon Slayer Corps, that mark belonged to one man alone: the legendary master smith who had withdrawn from the world.
They said the forging techniques behind the very first Sun Blades had come from him.
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