Sagami Province. The castle town of Odawara.
The streets after nightfall should have been quiet. But tonight was different.
In a corner of a tavern, a few half-drunk merchants huddled together, their voices lowered to hushed murmurs.
"Did you hear? That little shrine they just built by Shimizu Port, it cracked yesterday."
"Cracked? Wasn't it only finished half a month ago? Did another earthquake hit?"
"Wasn't an earthquake. It cracked from the inside. The stone statue's eyes split in two. Fell to the ground and rolled halfway across the floor."
"…Damn eerie."
An older man in the corner spoke up, his voice even lower. "Eerie's not the half of it. My wife's family lives in a village north of Sagami. Got a letter the day before yesterday, said the Jizō statue at the village entrance grew moss overnight. That thing was freshly carved. Hadn't even been standing ten days."
"Moss is nothing. I heard there's a village where the shrine got its whole roof torn off. The offering table flipped upside down. Incense ash scattered everywhere. Even the floorboards split open."
"Yōkai fighting, probably…"
The last man spoke the words at barely a whisper, as if afraid the walls themselves had ears. But everyone heard. No one argued.
Lately, strange tales had been spreading more and more across the Kantō. First, the legend of the Demon God of Kaede's Village had swept through Musashi and Sagami under the Hōjō clan's promotion.
Shrines had been erected one after another. The people had no choice but to believe, the Hōjō had given the order. A shōshin personally guaranteed by their provincial lord. Even if the certification from Kyōto hadn't arrived yet, the imperial capital was far away, but the Hōjō were right here.
Did you dare not worship? So they worshiped. Shrines went up. Incense burned. Legends were woven. But right on the heels of that, those freshly built shrines began to go wrong.
First, the stone images cracked. Then the offerings rotted at an unnatural speed. Then, people began to see things at night, strange mists drifting around the shrines, mists that shouldn't have been there.
And that mist was certainly no natural vapor. Its color was dark. On the skin, it felt bone-chillingly cold. And it carried a faint, cloying sweetness, like the smell of old blood.
Yōki. Though ordinary folk couldn't identify it, in this age where humans and yōkai lived side by side, the elderly had some experience.
That sensation, it was exactly the same as the demonic winds that blew down from the mountains. Heavy. Oppressive. Wrong.
"Something's not right…"
The merchants in the tavern exchanged glances. None of them knew what was happening. They only knew one thing: after dusk these past few days, it was best not to step outside.
At the same time.
Northern Sagami Province. The main road leading toward Suruga.
The moon was mostly swallowed by clouds. On either side of the road, the cedar groves swayed in the wind, their shadows weaving together and slicing the already dim path into broken fragments. A traveling merchant drove his packhorse along the road through the night.
The horse suddenly stopped. Its front hooves pawed at the ground. Its breath came in heavy snorts. Its ears flattened back, classic signs of a spooked horse. The merchant glanced behind him. Nothing. Only the wind. He yanked the reins, cursed under his breath, and kept walking.
Three steps later, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow. It flashed through the depths of the cedar grove on the right side of the road, so fast he wasn't even sure he'd seen it at all. Like something leaping between the treetops.
The merchant's pace quickened.
Another dozen steps. A dull thunder rolled overhead. No, not just thunder. The sound was too urgent. Too concentrated. Beyond the rumble of thunder, it was mixed with something else, the shock of impact. Collision.
With that single sound, the entire cedar grove was illuminated in the span of half a breath by a blaze of violet light. The light streaked across the sky from the northwest, trailing a dark crimson contrail behind it. Its speed was staggering, so fast that before the merchant's eyes could even track it, the light had already vanished behind the mountain ridges to the southeast. All that remained was that split-second afterglow, searing a ghost image across his retinas.
The packhorse completely lost its nerve. With a shrill whinny, it tore free of its reins and bolted back down the road. The merchant didn't bother chasing. He stood frozen where he was, face pale, staring at the spot where the light had disappeared.
"Wh-what… what the hell was that…"
He would never know.
That violet streak of light was Shinji. Lightning-Muscle Body unleashed to its fullest, violet arcs of electricity detonating from the soles of his feet, every stride shattering the ground beneath him as his form became a bolt of purple-crimson radiance slicing through the night.
After the Ninth Essence Transformation, his base speed already neared the level he'd once only reached at full burst. And right now, he was at full burst. Even faster. Fast enough that, in instantaneous velocity, he could just barely brush against the speed of Kidōmaru, a Twelfth Transformation demon, under normal conditions.
In this land stretched wider and more sparsely populated than before, the distance from Kaede's Village to northern Sagami was roughly 80 Kilometer. An ordinary cavalryman at full gallop would need nearly two days. Shinji covered it in less thanhalf a quarter of an hour.
And the path he traveled was far from smooth.
This was the cusp of dawn, the moment when the sun and moon traded places. The boundary between day and night. The hour of Ōmagatoki, the time of meeting demons. When the pure and the corrupt of the world shifted places, and yōkai were at their most active. Yōkai settlements that ordinarily hid deep within the mountains would briefly manifest during this hour.
Those temporary gatherings known as "demon markets" rose like bubbles on the surface of water, only to dissipate just as quickly.
Shinji passed through three of them.
The first was in a valley deep in the mountains of western Sagami. The last sliver of sunset still clung to the ridge when he shot past the valley's mouth. His Keen-Eye Change caught what lay below, a dozen or more low-level yōkai gathered around a bonfire, gnawing on livestock snatched from who-knew-where, their bodies seething with grudge-laden miasma.
These were clearly outsiders. The native yōkai, the ones thick with grudges, had mostly been purged by Shinji and Kikyō. But the yōki on these creatures was foul and reeking, yet different from those settlement demons.
They were stragglers. Scattered remnants. No organization. No affiliation. The dregs who had swept south to scavenge what they could in the wake of the Kantō's upheaval.
Shinji did not stop. Only, in the instant he passed overhead, his left hand flicked out. Bone spurs shot from his fingertips, spreading in a fan. The white bone, laced with arcs of violet lightning, punched through the skull of the leading demon.
Before the rest could even react, blood mist had already seeped up from the ground beneath their feet and coiled around their legs. The bone spurs rose again, and the lightning climbed upward from the earth like creeping ivy. Then came the venomous fog from the dragon's scale.
Shinji's silhouette vanished into the east, leaving behind only a chorus of terrified howls.
The second was in an abandoned village beside the main road. A flock of tengu were in the midst of dismantling a newly built shrine, a place of worship the Hōjō had erected for the one-eyed novice monk among the Twenty-Three. The offering table had been overturned.
The stone statue smashed. Even the foundation had been ripped open. Seven lesser tengu. Black wings, black beaks. Their size was comparable to a man's, and their flight speed was exceedingly swift. Their yōki roughly matched that of Fourth or Fifth Transformation demons, not weak by any means.
But violet lightning descended from the heavens. Muramasa left its sheath. A single flash of blade-light. Seven heads. Clean and decisive. The wings and skulls of the seven tengu parted ways with their bodies. The broken carcasses plummeted to the earth, their yōki swept up by Shinji and dragged into uninhabited ground. The shrine itself was already destroyed, but the foundation, at least, still remained.
The one-eyed monk crawled out from beneath the rubble. His single eye, swollen to little more than a slit, was filled with the dazed relief of someone who had just survived disaster.
"M-My lord!"
"Are your wounds severe?"
"Not severe! It's just… my eye's swollen…"
"As long as you can still see the road. Get back to Suruga. Regroup with the tanuki."
"Yes, sir!"
The third was on a mountain pass along the western border of Sagami. The scale was larger, over twenty lesser yōkai had seized a stronghold built from an old mountain shrine. They had severed the flow of osore from three nearby villages, intent on claiming this patch of territory for themselves.
Shinji didn't bother with Muramasa. Instead, he once again drove a forest of bone up from the earth. White bone spurs burst from the ground like bamboo shoots after rain, piercing through the entire stronghold. Twenty-three bone spurs. Pinning twenty-three lesser demons. Symmetry to the point of perfection. Violet lightning coursed along the bone spurs, electrocuting each pinned yōkai one by one until they were nothing but charred husks.
Cleared. From start to finish, no more than thirty seconds.
All along the way, he killed. All along the way, he pushed forward. From western Sagami to the border of Suruga, he plucked out the foreign yōkai strongholds one after another like pulling nails from a board. No survivors. Brutal. But efficient.
If these scattered remnants weren't cleared out completely, even after he dealt with the core threat, they would continue to harass the Twenty-Three's territory. Weeds had to be pulled out by the root. As a transmigrator, he understood that truth better than anyone.
At last, Shinji reached the border of Suruga Province. The earth beneath his feet trembled faintly with yōki, not his own, but surging from up ahead. Dense. Chaotic. Mingled with the cloying, metallic scent of blood.
A battlefield. Just ahead.
He did not stop. The violet lightning flared once more in the night, and that gray figure, wreathed in thunder and blood mist, plunged straight into the direction where the yōki was thickest.
Suruga Province. Twenty-five km west of Shimizu Port.
A desolate riverbank. The river had mostly run dry. The exposed bed was a wasteland of cracked, gray mud, with a few dead, crooked willows leaning at the water's edge. The setting sun was sinking low. The sky had burned into a deep, dark crimson, as though someone had hurled blood across the clouds.
Ōmagatoki. The hour of meeting demons.
On the riverbank, beneath the dead willows, stood three figures. Though calling them "human" was no longer entirely accurate.
The one in the center was tall and towering, his upper body bare. His bronze muscles were etched with deep violet lines, marks left behind where yōki had seeped into his very skin.
The face was still that of a proud, wild young man, but the line of his jaw had grown even sharper over the past few months. Across his back hung a massive weapon. A great war-blade nearly two meters long. Its edge appeared mottled with rust, but it was not rust. It was dried blood.
The weapon was called Banryū. The man, Bankotsu. Leader of the Shichinintai, the Band of Seven.
Months ago, after Shinji had slain four of his comrades in the stone village, Bankotsu had fled north in desperation, taking Jakotsu and Suikotsu with him. From the Kantō to the northeast. From Suruga to Mutsu. They fled, and they killed as they went. Killing humans. Killing yōkai. No distinction.
And deep in the mountains of Mutsu Province, Bankotsu had encountered the yōkai of Tōno. By all logic, when humans stumbled upon a yōkai stronghold, only two outcomes were possible, be eaten, or successfully slaughter the demons and survive.
But Bankotsu had neither been devoured nor managed to wipe them out. He couldn't defeat this horde of yōkai… and yet, he himself was simply too deadly to die.
Before reaching Mutsu, the three remaining members of the Band of Seven had cut down over a hundred humans along the way. And a thousand yōkai. One hundred human kills. One thousand demon kills. These numbers were no exaggeration.
The humans weren't ordinary folk, either, but pampered nobles, a pack of villains steeped in wickedness. Though Bankotsu would have preferred to slaughter men, women, and children alike, he didn't know why, but every time that thought surfaced, he felt a sickening churn of blood within him.
So in the end, he'd settled on humans already rotten with evil. The efficiency had dropped, but he'd still gotten it done. As for the yōkai, they, too, had been no nameless rabble, but well-known demons of at least mid-tier or above, each a terror in its own region.
Bankotsu strung every severed head onto the pommel of Banryū, dragging them behind him as he walked. As if making an offering.
In truth, it was an offering. And through this process, he himself had changed. The blade, soaked again and again in human blood and demon blood alike, had begun to absorb the grudges of the dead.
Across its gray-white edge, fine, dense patterns had emerged, and within those patterns, a dark crimson light now flowed. The terror of a hundred humans. The grudges of a thousand yōkai. All of it poured into this weapon. Banryū had ascended. From a mortal blade, it had become a demon artifact.
And Bankotsu himself, having carried and nurtured this demonic weapon, steeped in its dense yōki, had also begun to mutate. His body had been enhanced. His speed, his strength, his reflexes, all far surpassed what they had been. The deep violet lines seeping across his skin were the proof of yōki's encroachment.
But he had not become a yōkai. At least, not completely. He still retained human consciousness and judgment. Only his body had already half-stepped into an inhuman domain. Half-human. Half-demon. Yet not like Inuyasha, whose half-breed nature came from bloodline. Bankotsu had been forcibly warped by an external force. His body twisted by the backlash of the grudges Banryū had devoured, now existed in a state between man and yōkai.
And then
The yōkai of Tōno took notice. A human who could kill yōkai. Wielding a newly born demon blade. Exuding a thick, murderous intent from every pore. To the Tōno yōkai, who were even now expanding their influence into the Kantō, he was a ready-made weapon.
A blade to test the southern situation. And so, their alliance was struck. Bankotsu received the support of the Tōno yōkai, demonic power, intelligence, forces. In exchange, there was only one thing he had to do. Return to Suruga. Return to the Kantō. And kill the demon warrior called Nakai Shinji. Revenge. It suited him perfectly.
"That demon-masked bastard killed four of my brothers," Bankotsu had said when he began his march south. "I don't care what the hell he is, man or demon or ghost. I'm splitting him in two."
Jakotsu stood behind him to the left. His effeminate face was sickly pale, his narrow eyes half-lidded. At his waist hung the snake-blade, the Jakōtsutō, capable of bending and extending.
Its sheath, too, had begun to show the creeping marks of yōki's permeation. Though it was still far from Banryū's level, still a mere mortal weapon, it had nonetheless been tainted, however slightly.
Suikotsu stood behind him to the right. Tall and gaunt, his face wooden and vacant. His eyes were half-closed, as though he might fall asleep at any moment. Strapped to his back were two small cannons, modified weapons he'd acquired from a smith in Mutsu.
Behind the three of them, scattered across the riverbank, were forty or fifty yōkai of all sizes. Kappa. Mountain spirits. One-legged demons. Flying heads. All manner of lesser yōkai had gathered here.
They were not, of course, the core fighting force of Tōno. They were cannon fodder, pawns meant to encircle and wear down the Twenty-Three. As for the true commanders from Tōno… they were clearly not here. They were hiding somewhere farther away. Waiting to spring the trap.
At this moment, Bankotsu stood on the riverbank, facing southeast, where the last remnants of the Twenty-Three, their main gathering point in Suruga, lay. The final ray of sunset sank beneath the horizon. Only the blood-red afterglow remained. Ōmagatoki had truly descended.
"Move."
Bankotsu hefted Banryū and slung it over his shoulder. The massive axe-blade traced a dark arc through the twilight. The forty-some yōkai stirred all at once, surging southeast like a tide.
Two km south of Shimizu Port.
The Twenty-Three's temporary stronghold, an abandoned fishing village commandeered by the Imagawa clan.
The tanuki crouched on the rooftop, its great fluffy tail tucked tight between its stubby legs. Its tiny bean-like eyes were locked dead onto the northwest. It could feel it. Yōki. Drawing closer. A lot of it.
"They're coming, they're coming, they're coming—!"
Its voice quivered uncontrollably. Inside the ruined shack behind it, over a dozen wounded lesser yōkai huddled together in a mass. Some were missing ears. Some had lost their tails. One's entire arm was still frozen solid in a block of ice that hadn't yet thawed.
They, the surviving remnants of the Hyakki Yakō, the ones who hadn't been scattered, had been beaten badly over the past few days by the yōkai of Tōno. Not because they couldn't win one-on-one.
But because the enemy had simply overwhelmed them with sheer numbers, sealing off the perimeter and cutting off all communication and the flow of osore between them. Picking them apart one by one.
"Is the master not here yet…" The kappa clutched its cracked shell, its voice muffled and low.
"He's on his way! The master said he's on his way!" The tanuki desperately reassured its comrades and just as desperately, itself.
And then,
From the northwest, through the deepening twilight, a tide of yōki surged forward. Dozens of demonic silhouettes poured out from the withered forest, a dark, seething mass.
At their head, three human figures strode in front. Bankotsu, Banryū propped on his shoulder. Jakotsu, the snake-blade gripped in his hand. Suikotsu, his cannons braced for firing.
"Found 'em." Bankotsu's lips split into a savage grin, made all the more grotesque by the failing light. "Just a bunch of little pests. Wipe 'em out, and that demon-masked bastard will come crawling on his own."
Banryū rose. A dark, ominous light bloomed from the blade's edge, yōki. A single strike from that weapon held enough power to flatten this entire abandoned fishing village and every lesser demon huddled inside it. Bankotsu's muscles tensed. Banryū began its descent—
And in that very second—that very instant—
"I heard you're looking for revenge against me?"
The voice dropped from the sky without warning. No foreshock. No approaching presence. As though it had materialized from the void itself.
Banryū froze in midair. Not because Bankotsu willed it to stop. But because his body, in the moment that voice fell, had gone rigid on pure instinct.
Blood mist. A dark crimson haze had risen from the ground at some unknown point and already blanketed the entire riverbank. It covered his ankles, his calves, creeping higher.
Bone forest. White bone spurs erupted upward from the blood mist, stabbing out behind Bankotsu, to his left, to his right, not attacking him directly, but sealing off every path of retreat behind him.
Thunder. Violet arcs of lightning exploded overhead, illuminating the entire riverbank.
Bankotsu lifted his head. A gray figure hung suspended in the air above. white, flowing hair whipped backward by the surging currents of air.
A crimson demon mask, beneath which a pair of scarlet demon eyes stared down from on high. The full weight of yōki unleashed, the corruption of the flesh brought by nine transformations, saturated to its peak.
Bankotsu's pupils dilated. He recognized that demon mask. How could he not? It was the face he dreamed of tearing apart, night after night. But he hadn't expected it to come this fast. And what he expected even less—
A coldness bloomed in his chest. Bankotsu looked down. There, in his torso, was a hole. A perfect, fist-sized circle punched clean through from front to back. The edges were smooth and scorched black, cauterized by lightning.
A bone spur. A bone spur wreathed in thunder, launched from the blood mist, had pierced through his body in the very instant he'd raised his head.
He hadn't even felt pain. Only cold. A bitter, spreading cold that crept outward from the hole to every part of his body.
"Y-you—!"
Blood froth bubbled from his mouth. His voice grew garbled and indistinct.
Three paces away, Jakotsu reacted faster, the snake-blade shot outward, its curved, undulating edge slicing toward Shinji. But it never reached. A bone spur stabbed through Jakotsu's right shoulder from the side, pinning his entire body to the trunk of a dead willow behind him. Suikotsu spun to flee. A third bone spur pierced through his calf.
From start to finish, it took less than a single breath.
Shinji descended from the air. His feet touched down on the cracked riverbed, the lingering arcs of thunder radiating outward from his soles.
Behind him, the forty or fifty lesser demons still hadn't grasped what had happened. The blood mist had already swallowed them whole.
And then, in an instant—total annihilation.