Kikyō's fingertips were still pressed against the back of his hand, soft and delicate, the sensation seeping through his skin and into his bones. But Shinji didn't have much time to enjoy that warmth.
His crimson demon eyes looked north, his mind racing.
Uesugi Kenshin had come alone, observed the rituals of courtesy before force, and after being refused, had withdrawn calmly.
Behind her, three thousand soldiers were camped in a mountain pass a hundred miles away.
If he waited for her to return, at normal marching speed, they would reorganize at dawn and be at Kaede Village by noon tomorrow.
Three thousand people.
Not comparable to the thousand from last time.
He had been able to cut down Kakizaki Kageie in one stroke because of the vast difference in their strength, because she had underestimated him and hadn't ordered a charge from the start, because he had struck first with the explosiveness of his Lightning-Muscle Sharp Body, and because that warrior maiden hadn't known his true capabilities.
But this time, the enemy already knew his fighting strength.
And Uesugi Kenshin had said that next time, she would bring all her divine artifacts.
That meant there were surely multiple warrior maidens bearing the power of divine artifacts, so-called reincarnations of such artifacts within that army.
If he waited for them to approach in formation and fought a defensive battle at Kaede Village with Kikyō, even if they won, the village wouldn't survive.
Momiji and Botan, the two young shrine maidens, weren't even qualified to step onto the battlefield. Their paper shikigami were decent for exorcising demons, and their individual combat ability wasn't weak, but they were no good on a battlefield.
Different skills for different trades. They clearly weren't suited for this.
So
He couldn't wait.
"Kikyō."
"Yes?"
"Protect the village. I'm going."
Kikyō withdrew her fingers. Her dark eyes looked at him.
She didn't ask where.
She knew.
"Not waiting until dawn?"
"Waiting until dawn is too late."
Shinji pulled his crimson demon mask back over his face. His pale hair lifted in the night wind. "Uesugi Kenshin is taking the mountain path. She's strong, but she's still human. I can control lightning, I'm faster than her."
"I'll get there before she returns to camp."
"Then…"
He didn't finish. Kikyō already understood.
She didn't stop him.
She just gripped her longbow a little tighter.
"Be careful." One word.
"Come back." One sentence.
Shinji nodded.
The next instant.
[Lightning-Muscle Sharp Body], fully activated.
Purple electric arcs exploded. His form turned into a bolt of purple lightning, rising from the stone slabs before the torii gate and hurtling northward.
But he didn't head straight for that army.
First, he veered west.
Because he needed..... an army.
His own army.
…
North of Kaede Village, amidst the rolling hills and valleys.
Months ago, this area had been a battlefield.
The front-line clashes between Imagawa and Hōjō, the sweep of the Echigo invasion from the south, and the routes taken by the demon vanguards sent by Kyoto earlier, wherever weapons passed, corpses littered the land.
Though the surface bodies had long been eaten by beasts or buried in the earth, what was underground remained.
Departed souls.
Fragments of lingering spirits, faint, having lost all sense of self.
They were not like the demon warrior, reborn by powerful obsession. They were merely the last traces of dying unwillingness, seeping into the soil, clinging to broken bones, like half-finished sentences scattered by the wind.
Under normal circumstances, these things would completely dissipate within months.
But not yet.
Shinji landed on a hillside.
The soil beneath his feet was soft, giving a strange sensation, not from the ground itself, but from something underground responding to his presence.
[Spirit-Seeking Bow Arm ].
Undead Affinity.
Soul Summoning.
He pressed his right hand to the ground, demonic aura seeping through his fingertips into the soil.
Dark green phosphorescence spread from the point of contact, threading through the invisible cracks and gaps beneath the earth, like a vast net slowly cast out.
Each node of the net hooked a lingering wisp of a departed soul.
Shinji closed his eyes.
Demonic aura spread; perception expanded.
One, two, ten, thirty not just this hillside.
Within five hundred meters, throughout the entire hilly area, every fragment of a lingering soul buried in the earth, clinging to broken bones, or drifting among the ruins of old battlefields was touched by his demonic aura.
The range wasn't large, but the number was considerable.
In this chaotic Sengoku era, too many people had died on this land.
"Rise." Shinji spoke softly.
Not a command.
More like an invitation.
The Undead Affinity talent took effect at this moment.
Those residual consciousness fragments bore him no hostility, even showing an instinctive closeness, because of the talent from the cat demon's paw resonance fusion, and because he himself was a form of undead, a demon warrior, a corpse who had crawled out of a pile of dead.
One of their kind.
They recognized him.
The ground began to tremble.
Then, things started pushing up from beneath the soil.
The first hand emerged from the side of the hillside.
A grey-white bone hand, missing several fingers, still holding a fragment of rotten armor.
Then the second, the third.
A skull surfaced, only half a face remaining, hollow eye sockets flickering with dark green phosphorescence.
Most were not complete bodies, only fragments of remains, half an arm, a leg bone, a torso pieced together from a few ribs.
But driven by the Soul Summoning art, those residual consciousness fragments reattached to these bones, granting them a brief 'existence.'
They couldn't stand steady.
They swayed, teetered.
Some had only upper bodies, crawling on their hands.
Some had their heads tilted to one side, still wearing half a rusty helmet.
Some still gripped broken blades, snapped in two.
But they all looked in the same direction, toward Shinji.
Dark green phosphorescence flickered in their hollow eye sockets, a response to him.
Obedience. And following.
Shinji stood and surveyed his surroundings.
On the hillside, in the valley, among the trees, one after another, remains crawled out from the earth, gathering around him.
The number grew.
Fifty, eighty, a hundred....
Finally settling around two hundred.
Not many, indeed.
But for his purpose, it was enough.
He didn't need these spirits to fight.
They couldn't fight.
These remains couldn't even handle an ordinary ashigaru; one slash would shatter them.
But he didn't need combat power.
He needed a spectacle.
He needed 'Fear.'
Over two hundred shattered undead remains, dragging their crooked shadows under the moonlight, following behind a demon warrior in a crimson mask.
Blood mist seeped from Shinji's skin, enveloping the entire 'army.'
The red haze made those broken bones look even more eerie, severed arms became outlines of claws, half-torsos swelled into massive shadows in the blood-red light.
The same trick he had used at Yajirōgen to render the twenty-three little demons, but this time on a scale ten times larger.
"March." Shinji stepped north.
Over two hundred spirits followed.
The clatter of bones sounded in the night, like countless insects gnawing at something.
Phosphorescence drifted in the blood mist, green light flickering, illuminating the hollow faces of each skeleton.
From a distance, it was unmistakably an army of ghosts.
Ghost soldiers.
The legendary marching column of the dead that only appears in the dead of night.
A Hyakki Yakō.
A true Hyakki Yakō.
Not the daytime, twenty-three-demon, scare-the-armies display.
But an army of the dead, in the dark night, under the moonlight, within the blood mist.
And leading this army was a figure in grey robes, white hair, a crimson demon mask.
Purple arcs jumped around him. Muramasa's hilt swayed gently at his waist.
He walked at the front.
Behind him, two hundred spirits.
Beneath him, the Kantō land.
Above him, the moon about to set.
Now was different from before.
He was no longer the lone ghost crawling from the battlefield's pile of corpses.
No longer a dependent, acting recklessly only with Kikyō.
He had twenty-three demons taking root in Suruga, official sanction from the Imagawa, and the recognition of the Kantō land at affection two.
He had the inevitable hand of Spirit-Seeking Bow Arm, the extreme speed of Lightning-Muscle Sharp Body, the iron wall of Bone Soul.
He also had an army of departed souls.
Though these spirits were weak.
So weak that any samurai could scatter them.
That didn't matter.
What mattered was that three thousand living people, seeing two hundred skeletons crawl from the earth, form ranks, and march toward them behind a demon god in the dead of night, would be afraid.
A chill would crawl up from their very bones.
This fear couldn't be overcome by courage.
This fear was Fear.
And Fear was a weapon he could wield.
Purple electric arcs left a curved trail of light in the night sky.
The demon king led the hundred demons, marching north.