At the foot of the mountain, Rengoku Jinjuro had already gathered the five bodies and covered them with the charred remains of a banner cloth.
He rose to his feet. Torchlight fell across his face — thick brows, wide eyes, a visage covered in scars — but no grief showed there.
Only a calm, hardened resolve that refused to burn out.
He looked up toward the two figures on the slope above.
He let out a small breath of relief. This had been his first real battle using Flame Breathing — if not for those two, he would never have dared face a vengeful Demon with only two lower-ranked swordsmen and a Kakushi support member. In the past, he'd never gone out with fewer than five or six swordsmen.
But it was at that very moment—
A sound came from deep within the camp.
Laughter.
A woman's laughter, crisp and clear.
It came from the one large tent at the camp's deepest point that hadn't fully collapsed, accompanied by the crack of splintering wood.
Jinjuro spun around, his hand snapping back to his hilt.
The burly man, the female swordswoman, and Kakushi Chou drew their blades at the same moment, forming a back-to-back triangle.
The remaining roof of the tent burst open from within.
A figure rose up from inside.
A woman.
Or rather, a female Demon.
She wore crimson ceremonial robes, the style somewhere between a Buddhist nun's and a shrine maiden's, yet fully neither.
The collar was embroidered with the yin-yang pattern unique to the Tachikawa-ryū, and a golden sash was tied at her waist, a thumb-sized skull charm dangling from its end.
Her face was exquisitely beautiful.
That is, if one ignored the murky, slit pupils and the mouth split wide toward her ears.
Her ashen skin gleamed waxy in the firelight, and long black hair spilled from beneath the hood of her robes, its ends stained with dark red.
She tilted her head, looking at Jinjuro.
And smiled.
"My, how impressive — that strike just now was so much stronger than the others who came before you."
Her voice was sickly sweet, like melted sugar, but with a rotten undertone beneath it. "But why would you stop my 'followers' from attaining Buddhahood?"
Jinjuro's pupils contracted.
Followers.
The word, spoken from a vengeful Demon's mouth, turned his stomach.
Those corpses — those ordinary people whose throats the Demon had torn out — were this thing's "followers"?
"You... are the chieftain of this cult?"
Rengoku Jinjuro was genuinely stunned.
He'd assumed a Demon had simply invaded a cult's camp. He hadn't imagined that the camp's own organizer was a Demon itself.
"A cult? How could you call it a cult?"
The female Demon tilted her head further, her mouth splitting wider to reveal two rows of jagged fangs.
"I am Kisshoin, high priestess of the Tachikawa Shinkyo.
They came to train, to seek Buddhahood in this very body.
I'm only helping them."
She spread her arms wide, as though embracing something.
"If not for you, they could have attained Buddhahood — inside our bellies.
'Our,' not 'my.'"
The Demon Jinjuro had already cut down was, without doubt, this one's companion.
Jinjuro tightened his grip on his Sun Blade.
That last strike of Flame Breathing had already drained a great deal of his strength. Whether his body could withstand summoning it again was uncertain.
But he didn't retreat. He raised his blade and took a step forward.
Kisshoin moved first.
She didn't charge. She only raised her right hand.
Her five fingers spread wide.
A dark purple mist welled up.
It wasn't yokai aura, and it certainly wasn't spiritual power — it wasn't even an ordinary Demon's power.
It was something none of them had ever seen from any vengeful Demon before.
The dark purple mist spread from between Kisshoin's fingers, then billowed outward in every direction, like an invisible flower blooming.
Wherever the mist touched, the soil began to change color.
Dark red, deep brown, pitch black — as though something were corroding it.
Corrosion, then growth.
Something began to grow out of the earth.
Flowers.
Dark purple flowers.
They pushed up through cracks in the ground, petals thin as cicada wings, tiny fangs faintly visible within — every flower was a mouth.
A mouth that ate people.
In an instant, the flowers had blanketed a ten-pace radius of the camp.
Two of them sprouted right beneath Jinjuro's feet, petals closing in around his ankles.
"Watch out!"
The burly man slashed through the stems at his feet. Dark purple sap splattered across his hand, and his skin instantly reddened, as though burned.
"It's poisonous!"
The female swordswoman stepped back, her Sun Blade held crosswise before her, its tip aimed at the thickening cluster of flowers.
Kakushi Chou retreated at top speed as well — as a Kakushi member, she was even slightly faster than the others.
Jinjuro gritted his teeth and forced himself to summon Flame Breathing again. His blade blazed with orange-red fire, and a single sweeping cut burned away every flower within a three-pace radius of his feet.
But no sooner had the burning finished than new flowers pushed up from the scorched earth.
Faster and denser than before.
Kisshoin stood at the center of the flower bed, the hem of her robes ringed by the dark purple blooms, like a walking flowerbed.
She tilted her head at Jinjuro, her slit pupils full of teasing amusement.
"That cut just now really did hurt — you're the first human to ever make me feel pain."
"Pity... it looks like you can't swing that blade again, can you?"
Jinjuro's breathing grew ragged.
The second activation of Flame Breathing felt like it was tearing his lungs apart — he'd only mastered this breathing style a few days ago, and his body was nowhere near adapted to it.
One full-strength use was already his limit.
The second had come at a sharply reduced intensity.
A third time... there probably wouldn't be one.
"Captain!" The burly man and the female swordswoman charged forward together.
Kisshoin didn't even spare them a glance.
The dark purple flower bed seemed to come alive, turning into vines that lashed out at the two of them. Vines coiled around the burly man's left leg, venom seeping through the gaps in his armor. He roared in pain and dropped to one knee.
The female swordswoman cut through the vine wrapping around her, but two new vines immediately split off from the severed end, coiling even tighter.
In the end, all that remained was — Kakushi Chou.
No one noticed her — in the chaos of Jinjuro and the two swordsmen being caught by the poisonous vines, every eye was fixed on the crimson-robed female Demon.
No one paid attention to a Kakushi.
But she moved.
This was the first time she'd set foot on the front line of a Demon-slaying battle — her chance to prove herself. Though the girl codenamed Chou had a Hashira-ranked sister, the two of them, like everyone else, carried a deep and bitter hatred for vengeful Demons.
Now the chance was right in front of her, and she wasn't about to let it slip.
Nor could she disappoint the one who'd given her that chance.
The girl drew a breath and swung her blade.
That breath was unlike anyone else's — impossibly slow, impossibly even, impossibly fine, hardly resembling breath at all. It was more like... medicine.
She treated the act of inhaling and exhaling as if it were compounding and administering a drug.
This was something she'd worked out over the past few days.
It had no name.
It wasn't even a complete breathing style.
All it could do, at its most basic, was to briefly boost her muscles' reaction speed by controlling the rhythm of her breath.
Three breaths.
That was all she had.
But right now, forget three — even if she had only one, she had to move!
The instant the first breath completed, her body felt lighter.
She pushed off with her toes and rushed toward the burly man, whose left leg was still bound by vines. She wasn't fast — nowhere near as fast as Jinjuro under Flame Breathing.
But it was just barely enough.
Her Sun Blade left its sheath, its edge grazing across the root of the vine wrapped around the burly man's leg — a shallow cut, gleaming with the Sun Blade's characteristic sunlit sheen.
The vine snapped.
It had burned through — the Sun Blade's sunlight properties triggered a faint scorching the instant it cut through the plant tissue. The heat was far too weak to harm a Demon's actual body, but it was just enough to wither and char the poisonous vine.
"Go, now!"
She shouted.
The second breath.
The burly man limped free of the vines, his left leg — corroded by the venom — already beginning to blacken.
But he lived.
The third breath—
never came.
Kakushi Chou's third breath exploded inside her chest.
Her lungs seized with agony as though gripped by a fist, a coppery taste of blood rose in her throat, and her vision blurred for an instant.
Her body, too, hadn't yet adapted to the strain this breathing method placed on flesh — three breaths was her limit, and even that limit could only be reached by overdrawing herself.
What followed was total exhaustion.
Her knees buckled, and she nearly collapsed into the bed of poisonous flowers.
New vines were already pushing up from the scorched earth beneath her feet, thicker and denser than before, petals splitting open to reveal fang-like stamens closing in on her throat—
Kisshoin glanced at her with a tilt of her head, not even a flicker of interest in her slit pupils.
"Oh my, there's a little bug left too."
Her tone was thick with contempt.
Kakushi Chou clenched her teeth, her hand trembling around the hilt, her Sun Blade raised before her in a crooked, unsteady stance.
She knew she couldn't block it.
But she wasn't going to close her eyes, either.
But in the very next second—
the air before her suddenly split open!
An arc of dim violet light, the color of Yomi itself, streaked down from the slope above — silent, weightless, so fast that even Jinjuro, exhausted beside her, couldn't track it with his eyes — and cut straight across the entire field of flowers.
Every dark purple flower, vine, and stamen withered, charred, and crumbled the instant the arc of Yomi-colored light passed over them.
As though some force from the depths of the earth had drained all life from them in a single stroke — skipping the withering entirely and reducing them straight to dust.
Kisshoin's smile froze.
She looked down at her own chest to see a hair-thin cut running from her left shoulder to her right hip, its surface as smooth as if shaved by a razor.
The cut's edge bore a dim, unsettling color like Yomi itself, cold and dreadful, and it would not regenerate.
"Wha—"
Her upper body slid off.
There was no blood at the cut — only a chill mist the color of Yomi, spreading outward.
A blossom of death spread from the wound through her entire body.
Kisshoin's regeneration didn't even have time to activate — that Yomi-colored chill snuffed out all vitality in the flesh around the wound instantly, tearing the very power of regeneration out by its roots.
But she didn't die immediately.
A Demon's vitality kept her breathing even with her body split in two — the mouth of her severed head still moved, her slit pupils spinning wildly, searching for the source of the attack.
Up on the slope.
A gray figure had already landed at the edge of the camp.
Pale long hair drifted in the night wind, an oni mask covering his face, crimson Demon eyes gazing down through the gaps of the mask at the split, still-living Demon on the ground.
Yomikiri returned to its sheath.
Click.
The crisp sound of the blade sliding home echoed through the night.
Yoriichi landed right behind him, hand resting on his sword hilt, his deep red eyes fixed on Kisshoin, cut clean in two.
He too had moved a moment ago, Breath of the Sun already coiled and ready within him.
But Kobe Hikaru had been one step faster.
Jinjuro crouched on the ground, gasping for breath, looking up at the gray figure.
"Hi... Hikaru-san..."
Kobe Hikaru paid him no mind, glancing instead at Kakushi Chou, whose condition was far worse. Half her face bared, the girl was on the verge of fainting, yet she still forced her eyes up to look at him.
"Hikaru-san... I... I swung my blade..."
There was no relief of survival in her eyes — only genuine joy.
Her first swing of the blade. Her first strike against a Demon.
Even though she hadn't landed the cut.
But she had taken the step.
She hadn't disappointed the blade in her hand, or the chance given to her by the figure before her.
Kobe Hikaru gave her a nod. She wasn't his disciple, but even setting aside her "reincarnation," his impression of her wasn't a bad one.
Unfortunately, Kakushi Chou fainted before she could see Kobe Hikaru's nod.
She was carried off by another masked female Kakushi member of the Demon Slayer Corps who had followed close behind Kobe Hikaru and Tsugikuni Yoriichi.
Rengoku Jinjuro, the only one still standing, staggered unsteadily to his feet.
Kobe Hikaru crouched back down, looking at Kisshoin still struggling on the ground.
In his Demon eyes was reflected that face, split in two yet still exquisitely beautiful.
"A Blood Demon Art."
He spoke, his voice quiet.
Quiet enough that only he and the half-dead Demon at his feet could hear it.
Before today, none of the Demons he'd known — from the ones he'd personally killed to the cases recorded by the Demon Slayer Corps — had ever displayed this kind of ability.
Those Demons had superhuman strength, speed, and regeneration, but at their core they were just enhanced, violent monsters.
Kisshoin was different.
She could create poisonous flowers.
It wasn't simple bodily toxin — she was converting her own blood into an independent, self-growing, self-attacking supernatural creation.
This kind of thing, according to the stories Kobe Hikaru knew, was called a Blood Demon Art.
It was a superpower-like technique that awakened only once the blood Kibutsuji Muzan granted a Demon reached a certain concentration.
Different Demons possessed different Blood Demon Arts — some could manipulate threads, some could alter space, some could unleash frost, some could cultivate poison.
But in this era — at least in the months since Kobe Hikaru had arrived in this world — he had genuinely never seen one.
Never had he encountered a Demon capable of using a Blood Demon Art.
Not a single one.
The reason, most likely, was singular.
Kibutsuji Muzan hadn't yet, in this era, granted Blood Demon Arts to his Demons on a large scale.
Or perhaps, only a very small handful of Demons had earned that privilege.
Kobe Hikaru looked down at Kisshoin, still clinging to her last breaths on the ground.
"Talk."
His voice was calm.
"What are you?"
He'd thought tonight was just a quick outing — tag along, cut down a couple of Demons, bump up Yomikiri's favourability. He hadn't expected... a surprise on top of it.
And—
the name Kisshoin — something about it nagged at him as familiar.
Kisshoin, or was it...
"Sesshoin?"
"!?"
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