Chapter 78: Makomo in Danger
After enjoying a quiet moment by the water, Akira stood up, bringing Kanae with him.
"Let's go," he said softly. "It's getting cold. We should head back to the inn for the night and return tomorrow."
"Okay."
Walking hand-in-hand back toward the town, Akira felt the gentle warmth radiating from Kanae's palm, and the desire to become stronger burned even more fiercely in his heart. He had sworn more than once to protect the people he cherished, but he knew with chilling certainty that his current strength was not enough. It was far from enough.
He had once asked Kagaya if the Demon Slayer Corps had any intelligence on the Upper Ranks of the Twelve Kizuki. The answer he received was grim. In the several hundred years since the title first appeared, there had never been a single recorded instance of a Demon Slayer killing an Upper Rank demon. Not one.
Even the related records were pitifully scarce. The reason was simple.
Everyone who had ever seen one was dead.
Only a handful of Kasugai Crows, lucky enough to escape the carnage, had ever brought back fragmented, terrifying scraps of information.
Combining this dreadful reality with the memories of his past life, Akira was acutely aware of just how monstrous the Upper Ranks—and Muzan himself—truly were. Though his own power had grown significantly since he first became a Hashira, allowing him to easily overwhelm fellow Pillars like Makomo and Shinjuro, he still lacked absolute confidence in a confrontation with an Upper Rank.
This was especially true for the top three.
As Akira mulled over his next steps for self-improvement—whether to focus on developing new forms, enhancing his techniques, or pure physical conditioning—both he and Kanae stopped dead in their tracks. They looked up in unison at the distant night sky.
There, a black dot was rapidly closing in on their position.
It was a Kasugai Crow.
As it drew nearer, Akira recognized it. The crow belonged to Makomo. Its name was Long Night.
"It's Long Night!"
With those words hanging in the air, Akira shot forward, Kanae right behind him. This was Gyomei's patrol area; for Makomo's crow to appear here meant only one thing: a desperate call for reinforcements.
...
Not long before.
After finishing her patrol of the area Akira was responsible for, Makomo had moved on to her own designated territory. While passing by a small, burbling river, her eyes fell upon a strange pot resting on the bank.
It was rounded, almost bulbous, and decorated with complex patterns resembling aquatic plants. For such an ornate, seemingly beautiful object, its presence here was jarringly out of place. More than that, the pot gave Makomo a deeply unsettling feeling, a prickle of danger that crawled up her spine.
Playing it safe, she picked up a nearby stone and hurled it at the vessel.
Crack!
Before the stone could make contact, an arm—so pliable it seemed to have no bones—snaked out from the mouth of the pot. It caught the projectile with unnerving precision and crushed it into dust.
"Oh my, oh my. To be out for a simple stroll and happen upon such a beautiful young lady. What marvelous luck."
The voice was flippant and oily. As it spoke, more hands emerged from the pot's opening. Seeing this, Makomo instantly drew her Nichirin Blade and took several quick steps back, her gaze locked on the pot as the sense of crisis intensified.
The entity within, however, seemed in no hurry at all, continuing to talk to itself at a leisurely pace.
"But, little girl, has no one ever told you that it's quite rude to carelessly damage another's artwork? You really should take better care of my pot."
As the words fell, the hands gripped the rim of the pot in unison, straining as if pulling something heavy from within.
Then, the creature revealed its true form.
Twisted.
The word surfaced instinctively in Makomo's mind the moment she saw it. It was a demon of deeply unnatural appearance. Where its eyes should have been, there were two mouths, their dark green lips perpetually stretched into a grin, revealing rows of sharp fangs. A single, vertical eye grew from the center of its forehead, the kanji for "Upper Rank" engraved into its pupil.
An even larger eye was situated where its mouth should be, and within that pupil was the number "Five."
Its hair was styled like five distinct fish fins. Its body was long and soft like rubber, connected to the pot below it, with several pairs of arms sprouting from its sides, extending and retracting at will.
Upper Rank Five, Gyokko.
"Upper... Rank... Five..."
Seeing the characters etched into the demon's pupils, a deep chill seized Makomo's heart. Akira had warned her and Kanae time and again: with their current strength, if they ever encountered an Upper Rank, they were to do only two things—stay alive and call for help, whatever it took.
The moment Gyokko had appeared, Long Night had already taken to the sky to summon aid.
So, all she had to do now was find a way—any way at all—to hold out until reinforcements arrived.
"Hyo, hyo. A crow flew away. Is it going for help?" Gyokko watched Long Night disappear into the darkness, making no move to stop it. His tone was thick with amusement.
He enjoyed toying with his prey. He loved to play with them like a cat with a mouse while they were still alive, letting them glimpse hope again and again, only to plunge them into ever-deeper despair. He would continue this game until he grew bored, at which point he would finally kill them.
But killing his prey was not the end. He would then use the victims as materials to create his "art."
If there were many victims, he would sew their corpses together into twisted, bizarre, and cruel sculptures. If there were only a few, or if they were particularly good-looking, he would dismantle their heads to create his favorite kind of artwork: pots.
Makomo was, without a doubt, beautiful. An excited, creative spark lit up in Gyokko's mind.
"Since you're so very pretty, I won't hold it against you for trying to damage my artwork," he declared magnanimously.
"However, I will require you to pay a small price as compensation."
"What?" Makomo, intent on stalling for time, was more than willing to engage in conversation. All the while, her eyes darted about, searching for any possible escape route.
"I want that beautiful head of yours," Gyokko chirped. "Such a lovely head will surely make a perfect pot. And once I have a new, beautiful pot, I won't care in the slightest that you almost broke my old one."
He tilted his grotesque form. "How about it? Isn't that a reasonable trade?"
"It is indeed quite reasonable," Makomo said, nodding as if in complete agreement with his demented logic. "In that case, Mr. Demon, since you look so frightening and came out in the middle of the night to scare a little girl like me, shouldn't you give me some compensation as well?"
"Oh? And what compensation do you desire?" Gyokko was in no rush to kill his prey, even if she had already called for help. Over the past few centuries, he had always been calm and composed when facing Demon Slayers. In his view, even if reinforcements did arrive, they would simply become more raw materials for his art.
"Seeing such a scary Mr. Demon in the middle of the night nearly frightened me to death," Makomo said, her voice steady. "So, as compensation... would you mind dying for a bit?"
Before her words had even finished echoing, her figure blurred into motion.
Just as Gyokko thought she was foolishly charging to her doom, he saw that she had only feinted an attack. Her real intention was to retreat at high speed, creating distance. She didn't dare turn her back on an Upper Rank whose mere presence felt oppressive.
"Oh dear. Regarding your proposal for compensation, I can only say with the deepest regret—"
Gyokko watched leisurely as Makomo grew smaller in the distance. Just when she thought she might actually have a chance to escape, his figure instantly vanished, melting back into the pot.
Immediately after, Gyokko's unfinished words whispered directly behind her.
"—that I refuse."
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