The vengeful Demon wasn't fully dead yet.
Her body, cleaved in two by a single stroke of Yomikiri, lay sprawled amid the scorched ruins. Black-violet frost crept steadily along the cut, freezing every cell that tried to regenerate.
But a vengeful Demon's vitality was far tougher than one might expect.
Especially one that had already awakened a Blood Demon Art.
Her upper body was still moving.
Ashen fingers clawed deep gouges into the scorched earth. Half her face pressed against the ground, and her one unbroken slit-pupil eye stared fixedly at the gray figure standing before her—
Reflected in that pupil were pale hair, blood-red demon eyes, and the strange Sun Blade that had just slid back into its sheath.
Fear.
Fear distilled to its purest form.
Not fear of death—vengeful Demons had only the haziest grasp of death to begin with; their regeneration let them treat bodily damage as routine.
This was fear of the thing standing before her.
One stroke.
Just one.
Her Blood Demon Art, her poison blossoms, her vines—none of it had even qualified to exist in the face of that arc of silver-white light.
Kobe Hikaru crouched down.
The oni mask covered his face, his blood-red demon eyes looking down through the slit at the mess of flesh still clinging to life on the ground.
"Talk."
His voice was calm.
Calm enough that the Demon's slit pupil suddenly contracted—because that calm held no anger, no disgust, not even interest.
Calm enough to remind her of the being who had granted her demon blood and its terrible power.
And then there was the name he'd just spoken... the name he'd uttered...
"How could you possibly know the true Sect Master's name?!"
Kisshoin—no, Sesshouin.
This woman, this she-Demon, wasn't the true head of the Tachikawa-ryū at all. She was an impostor.
Kobe Hikaru's demon eyes lowered, waiting for her to speak on her own.
That name bothered him.
This one... Sesshouin.
Sesshouin Kiara.
That was a character from another work entirely.
A being deeply entangled with Buddhism, with heretical cults, with human desire—with the darkest side of humanity as a whole.
And the name of the cult in front of him—Tachikawa Shinkyo—along with the layout of this stronghold, had already given him an uneasy hunch.
If even Sesshouin existed in this blended world...
...then things were more complicated than he'd expected.
Still, Kobe Hikaru didn't ask outright.
The vengeful Demon before him clearly had no idea what was churning in his mind. Fear alone kept dragging the words out of her.
Yes—the Demon was afraid.
As afraid as if she stood before the progenitor of the Demons himself.
In her instincts, this Demon-slaying swordsman was even more terrifying than the progenitor.
"I'll talk, I'll tell you everything... just don't kill me..."
"I... I really am not the Sect Master..."
The mouth of the false Kisshoin—the impostor—twitched, its slit stretching back toward her ears.
A hoarse voice kept forcing its way out of her ruined throat:
"I... I only borrowed that name."
The Demon's voice grew weaker and weaker. Yomi-colored frost had already crept up to her neck, sealing her regeneration completely—true death was only moments away.
But fear was real enough to make her willing to say anything.
"I... I only pretended to be her... Lady Sesshouin isn't a Demon. She's human... a real esoteric practitioner..."
The slit pupil in her half-ruined face turned toward Kobe Hikaru, a last desperate plea swimming in its clouded depths.
"But she... she made a deal with Lord Muzan... I don't know what it was..."
Kobe Hikaru didn't interrupt.
"And I... I was assigned here... to use her name, to run this branch temple... and, on the side... gather food."
Food.
The believers this cult had lured in.
The five corpses lying on the ground.
"I'm... a candidate for the Twelve Kizuki."
Those words snapped Kobe Hikaru's attention into sharp focus.
The Twelve Kizuki.
He knew the concept, of course—the twelve strongest Demons under Kibutsuji Muzan, split into the Upper Ranks and the Lower Ranks, the core fighting strength of the Demon faction second only to Muzan himself.
But in this era, at this point in the blended world, he could confirm the Twelve Kizuki hadn't formed yet.
After all, that rank was only created after Muzan nearly perished at the hands of Tsugikuni Yoriichi, the swordsman of the Breath of the Sun—specifically to counter the Demon Slayer Corps, whose strength had exploded with the emergence of Breathing Styles.
So was this... appearing ahead of schedule?
But Muzan hadn't even crossed paths with Yoriichi yet.
Another butterfly effect?
Kisshoin's voice kept fading, Yomi's demon-qi spreading from the wound across what was left of her body—the carbonization was already irreversible.
"The Twelve Kizuki... just formed... not even full yet... but Upper Rank One... I know who that is!"
Her slit pupil suddenly dilated in her final moment.
As though she'd remembered something truly horrifying.
"Upper Rank One, codename... Onigumo."
Onigumo.
The instant that name fell.
Killing intent surged up in Kobe Hikaru without warning.
Yokai aura burst outward from his body all at once, crushing the air within three paces flat—the ground cracked, dry grass turned to char, and even the half-dead Demon accelerated toward disintegration under the pressure.
Spider. Demon.
Taken apart, neither word was anything rare on its own.
But put together—
they were directly tied to the being called Naraku in the world of Inuyasha.
The ultimate boss who ran through the entire story, forever chasing after and scheming to seize the Shikon Jewel.
Before he became Naraku, he'd been a human bandit devoured by a swarm of yokai and fused with them.
And beyond that, a demonic fiend that only kept growing stronger.
Before that bandit ever fell into the swarm of yokai—he had been nothing more than an ordinary, burned, crippled man lying in a cave.
A man named Onigumo.
If the 'Onigumo' in this world wasn't merely sharing a name—
if Kibutsuji Muzan's Upper Rank One really was the being who would one day become Naraku, once again knocked off his original path by the divergence of this blended world—
then things were about to get very, very bad.
By comparison, Sesshouin Kiara's existence, terrifying as it was, still remained at a distance. The dark side of humanity tied to her was unlikely to be all that powerful in an age when most people were still struggling half-blind just to survive.
Naraku—Onigumo—was the threat closest to Kobe Hikaru right now.
The false Kisshoin shattered completely in her terror, not even leaving ash behind.
Kobe Hikaru rose to his feet, his blood-red demon eyes glacial under the moonlight.
His killing intent hadn't faded—if anything, it had thickened.
He turned to look at Jinjuro.
"Any other leads on vengeful Demons in this area?"
Jinjuro staggered half a step back under the sudden shift in Kobe Hikaru's presence, but he held his footing.
"There are—"
He swallowed hard. "Earlier reports suggested at least three more strongholds like this one in the region, but their exact locations are unknown."
"No need to look for them."
Kobe Hikaru's gaze had already swept past Jinjuro, past the hillside, past the distant treeline.
He was looking somewhere much farther away.
Toward Kyoto.
Onigumo.
Muzan.
Sesshouin.
The names arranged and rearranged themselves in his mind, forming a web he couldn't yet see the whole of.
But one thing was certain.
—he needed to move faster.
Before that thing grew into a true monster.
...
Yoriichi walked up from behind, his Sun Blade resting on his shoulder, his deep red eyes glancing once at the scorched patch of ground now empty of anything at all.
"That name it said..."
"It's bothering you."
Kobe Hikaru didn't deny it.
"Onigumo."
He repeated the name:
"If I'm not wrong—that thing is more dangerous than Kibutsuji Muzan."
Yoriichi tilted his head, and a rare gravity surfaced in those eyes that held the Transparent World.
He didn't understand what Kobe Hikaru's judgment was based on, but he trusted the yokai gentleman's instincts.
Because out of everyone he knew—including Demon Slayer Corps veterans who'd survived decades in the field—not one of them understood vengeful Demons better than the yokai standing in front of him.
"What do you need me to do?" Yoriichi asked. Simple and direct.
Kobe Hikaru glanced at him.
"Nothing, for now."
He reined in his killing intent, his blood-red demon eyes settling back into their usual cool composure. "But I need to head back first."
He'd been away nearly a month now.
He and Kikyo had kept in close contact every day, seeing each other daily... he'd even been watching over things back home constantly through the blood mist.
But now that Onigumo had entered the picture—
—Kobe Hikaru knew he couldn't afford to stay out here any longer.
...
Kyoto. Kyoto again.
Deep within a long corridor, on the way to an audience with Hagoromo-Gitsune, Onigumo—walking behind Kibutsuji Muzan—paused mid-step. The pale, elegant face of the former woman bandit let out a soft, startled sound.
Muzan paused as well, glancing back over his shoulder.
Onigumo didn't bother hiding it.
"One of the Twelve Kizuki candidates I'd picked out was just wiped out. The last image that came through looked like a Demon Slayer Corps Sun Blade."
Hearing this, Muzan looked away without interest, his reply cold: "Dying at the Demon Slayer Corps' hands just proves it lacked the qualification. Find another one."
What Muzan didn't know was that Onigumo hadn't told him the truth.
As the progenitor of the Demons, his ability to instantly read the memories of any Demon—had, without his even noticing, stopped working.
But Kibutsuji Muzan had no interest in dwelling on it right now anyway.
Lately, Hagoromo-Gitsune's rate of gathering grudge-rancor had noticeably sped up.
And he... had also just happened to receive word of the whereabouts of the thing he'd been searching for all along.
That gave him a faint, indefinable premonition.
Good.
And also very bad!
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