A forest of bone. White bone pillars erupted from the cracked mud of the riverbed, dense, jagged, rising high and low, transforming the space of several dozen kms into a petrified grove.
Upon every bone spur, something hung impaled. Kappa. Mountain spirits. One-legged demons. Flying heads. Forty-some lesser yōkai, every last one of them pinned within that forest of bone.
They were not dead. Shinji had not killed them. It was certainly not out of mercy, toward anything, human or yōkai, that chose to stand as his enemy, Shinji had no mercy to give. He simply had no taste for wanton slaughter. That did not mean he was afraid to kill. He had left them alive because they were more useful that way.
Living yōkai provided far more information than dead ones. Their terror would ripple outward through the fluctuations of their yōki. Their very existence would broadcast a message to those lurking in the shadows far away: Here. Here there is something you do not provoke.
But Bankotsu and his two companions were already dead. This time, there was no reason to spare them. The bone spur had punched clean through Bankotsu's chest, front to back and the scorched black edges left by the lightning still sizzled with faint wisps of smoke.
The deep violet lines of yōki that had snaked across his bronze muscles pulsed frantically, trying to mend the wound. The half-demon body Banryū had granted him did possess some measure of self-regeneration but it was far, far inferior to a true yōkai's.
Blood poured simultaneously from his mouth, his chest, and his back. Even in death, his hand still stretched toward Banryū. The massive war-blade lay on the ground just three paces away. He never reached it.
Jakotsu was still pinned to the dead willow. The bone spur had pierced through his right shoulder and anchored him fast. His snake-blade lay fallen at his feet, the curved blade twitching feebly in the mud like a serpent with a snapped spine.
That pale, effeminate face was drenched in cold sweat. His narrowed, bloodshot eyes locked onto Shinji. His lips trembled, trying to form words, none came out.
Suikotsu was the quietest. With his calf impaled, he had slumped back against the bone spur, eyes half-closed. Even facing death, that wooden, vacant face showed little emotion.
The fuses of the two small cannons on his back had snapped in the shockwave. They would not ignite. The man was dead. His weapons, useless.
Shinji did not look at them. He walked over to Banryū, crouched down, and reached out to grip the massive war-blade's hilt. Heavy. Far, far heavier than Muramasa, by more than a hundredfold.
The two-meter-long blade gleamed with a dark crimson light in the twilight. That light was not the reflection of the setting sun. It seeped from within the blade itself. It was the yōki condensed from the terror and grudges of a hundred human lives, and a thousand yōkai. Dried, caked blood-rust coated the entire blade.
The System panel flickered into view.
[Banryū]
[Quality: Demon Artifact]
[Description: Originally a giant war-blade forged of mundane iron. Through its wielder Bankotsu's ritual of slaughter, the Hundred-Man Slaying and the Thousand-Demon Slaying, it was soaked in human blood and yōkai blood. Having absorbed the grudges of the dead, it has ascended to become a demon artifact.]
[Current Affection: 0]
Shinji looked at the information on the panel. Beneath his demon mask, the corner of his mouth tugged. As expected. His previous choice… had not been wrong.
Back then, after slaying four members of the Shichinintai, when he was still only at the Sixth Transformation, not yet truly formidable, and had not yet grasped the Lightning Transformation, he had been unable to pursue the fleeing Bankotsu and his two companions.
But he had possessed the foresight to leave behind blood mist for long-range tracking and minimal influence. Even then, he had seen Banryū's potential. A mundane iron weapon steeped in massive slaughter, it had been just one step away from ascending to a demon artifact. And that final step… did not need to be kicked by him. It needed Bankotsu himself. Let the prey fatten the prey for you.
So he had not been able to catch them, but he had left his own blood upon them. Blood mixed with his own yōki. Through that, to a certain degree, he had restricted their actions. They could no longer wantonly slaughter the innocent, those who bore no heavy weight of grudges.
If they tried, Shinji's yōki would trigger a reversal flow in the blood mist, dragging Bankotsu's own blood backward with it. The core principle was the same as what he had done to Naoe Kanetsugu earlier. For a true ordinary mortal like her, it could make her blood detonate outright, causing severe injury.
Against Bankotsu and his ilk, it could not deal real damage but it would be deeply, deeply uncomfortable. And for men like Bankotsu… what they pursued, above all, was comfort.
So Bankotsu and his men could still kill. But only the wicked. Even wicked yōkai. And if they drew near again, he would sense it. He had, in fact, sensed it just earlier. That was why he had dared to rush all this way, yet still take pauses to purge the yōkai along the path.
He had known that, despite Bankotsu's seemingly relentless aggression, his own lesser demons would not truly come to mortal harm. Injured, at most. Damaged, at worst. In a way, this had been tempering for them. It was also the reason his Hyakki Yako, despite being a band of weaklings, had managed to hold on until now.
And now, the enemies who had once fled… had delivered themselves back to his door.
Banryū, the blade he had set his sights on, had at last fallen into his hands in its fully transformed state. This was all to the good. Its quality far surpassed even Muramasa's, and the difficulty of cultivating it to full demonic awakening was considerably lower.
Its innate spirit was not especially strong, of course but it was a demon artifact nonetheless. Once properly conquered, it ought to yield some intriguing abilities.
Shinji casually thrust Banryū into the mud beside Bankotsu's body. The blade sank three shaku into the earth, leaving only the hilt and a half-length of the cutting edge exposed. Standing side by side. Like two pillars.
He turned. Behind him, from the direction of the abandoned fishing village, over a dozen little yōkai were poking their heads out of the crumbling shacks.
Osore. The core of the collective force-field within him, the one that connected the three provinces, began to churn. A dense tide of osore surged from his body and spread outward along invisible tethers. The wounded lesser demons, the claw mark splitting the tanuki's forehead, the cracks webbing the kappa's shell, the one-eyed monk's lone eye swollen to a slit, all began to heal at an accelerated pace under the infusion of osore.
Wounds scabbed over. Cracks knit together. Swelling subsided. They could not recover completely in an instant, but the speed of their regeneration was visible to the naked eye.
One by one, the dozen-some lesser yōkai emerged from the ruined huts and gathered behind Shinji. The tanuki ran to the very front, its great fluffy tail fluffed out, its bean-like eyes brimming with the raw, overwhelming emotion of having barely survived catastrophe.
"Master!"
"Stand steady."
Shinji's voice came from beneath the demon mask. Calm. But heavy. Heavy as a mountain, weighted by the osore and by his own yōki. The dozen-some lesser demons instinctively straightened their bodies. Though the strongest among them, the tanuki, was only at the Third Transformation, and the rest hovered around the Second. But now, united under Shinji's fully unleashed Ninth Transformation yōki, bound into a single entity by the force-field of osore, the aura they radiated far surpassed the sum of their individual strengths.
A collective force-field. The presence of a ruler. The Hyakki Yako, though only a fraction of them were here, held a gathered momentum in the twilight of Ōmagatoki that truly carried the faint shadow of a full demon night parade.
If they had been capable of this before… then even without Shinji, they could have nearly held their own against the Seventh Transformation Bankotsu, whose power he had deliberately restrained.
Yes. Seventh Transformation. After being remolded by Banryū's yōki, Bankotsu's physical strength had reached the level of a standard Seventh Transformation yōkai. Speed, power, reflexes, all had transcended the limits of humanity. A month ago, an opponent of that caliber would have taken Shinji half a day to defeat.
But he was now Ninth Transformation. A chain-reaction Essence Shift, triggered when three overloaded transformations burst their dams simultaneously. Lightning-Muscle Body sunk deep into the marrow. His base speed now matched his former full-burst levels. In instantaneous velocity, he could chase Kidōmaru.
Seventh Transformation against Ninth Transformation. Two full tiers of difference. Even without fully unleashing his power, he could still kill in an instant. Literal seconds. From the rising of the blood mist to all three of Bankotsu's group pinned, no more than two breaths. Bankotsu had not even managed to swing Banryū before a hole had bloomed in his chest.
This was the meaning of Essence Transformation. Every shift was not simply an increase in raw power. It was a crushing transcendence of hierarchy itself.
Shinji withdrew his gaze, no longer paying any mind to the trash impaled in the forest of bone behind him. His eyes swept further out. To the northwest. The sun had fully sunk beneath the horizon. The last traces of dark crimson afterglow were fading from the sky. The tail end of Ōmagatoki.
But the yōki had not dispersed. It had only grown denser. Three presences. Three stronger, entirely distinct yōki, seeping out from the depths of the mountain forests to the northwest.
The first was damp and cold. Fishy and acrid. Carrying the distinct muddy scent of freshwater rivers. Unquestionably, a yōkai of riverine nature.
But its density far surpassed that of any common river yōkai. It carried the heavy, compressed weight of silt that had been settling at the bottom of a riverbed for centuries.
The second was sharp. High-speed. Its yōki fluctuations came in rapid, erratic bursts, as though something were repeatedly slicing through the air in impossibly short intervals. Wind blades. But so densely packed that the wind itself had been torn to shreds.
The third was cold. Pure, absolute cold. Not the biting chill of a winter wind, but the kind of cold that seeped out from the very cracks of your bones, slowing the flow of your blood.
Behind his demon mask, Shinji's crimson eyes narrowed. Without a doubt, these were the three Essence-level high-ranking yōkai the tanuki had spoken of. They had been waiting all along. Waiting for Bankotsu and his two lackeys to wear down the Twenty-Three as the vanguard. Waiting for Shinji to arrive and reveal his full strength. Waiting for the yōki of Ōmagatoki to reach its peak density.
And then, they showed themselves.
"Come out."
Shinji spoke. His voice was not loud, but the yōki of the Ninth Transformation carried it a hundred paces outward, blanketing nearly a full km in every direction.
"Those three wastes of yours, Bankotsu and his lot, they've already spilled everything. You've had your fun watching from the shadows."
Bankotsu had not spilled anything. But the enemy did not know that.
Silence stretched for five mortal breaths.
And then, at the edge of the mountain forest, three figures emerged simultaneously.
The one leading them was a colossal kappa, far surpassing the norm. Not the palm-sized little kappa of the Twenty-Three, but a towering, bipedal creature standing a full two meters tall. Scales of deep green armored its entire body from neck to ankles.
The dish-like depression atop its head, meant to hold water, was instead filled with a pool of deep blue liquid. Not water. Concentrated yōki. Its arms were thick and powerful, and translucent webbing stretched between its fingers, each membrane etched with intricate water-glyphs. A clan-head level existence of the Tōno kappa. Essence-level.
Then, a streak of silvery-white flickered through the treetops. Incredible speed. So fast that Shinji had to bring his Keen-Eye Change to full operation just to see it clearly, a long, lithe body. Razor-sharp claws. And a pair of crimson, slit-pupiled eyes that flashed through the afterimages, burning with bloodthirsty fervor.
A kamaitachi. But unlike the one Kikyō had slain before, this one was larger. Its yōki denser. Its speed even greater. A far stronger kamaitachi, hailing from Tōno.
The last to appear was a woman's figure, drifting slowly out of the twilight. Her skin was impossibly pale, so pale that even in the dim, fading light, every inch of its texture was clearly visible.
A kimono of deep blue was bound tight around her, the collar raised just enough to reveal only the long line of her neck and the sweep of her collarbones. The obi was tied low, cinched at the narrowest point of her waist, sharply dividing the curves above and below. The swell of her chest, though wrapped in fabric, could not hide its outline, rising and falling gently with each breath.
The dark blue cloth clung along her hips, then loosened past them, the hem trailing along the ground. As she walked, a slit at the side revealed a glimpse of her calf, pale as snow. Her long hair, shot through with deep blue, hung down to her ankles. The tips were laced with fine crystals of ice, refracting tiny flecks of light in the air. Her face was coldly, exquisitely beautiful. The lines of her features were sharp.
Her lips were tinged purple, as though frozen, yet still full. Her eyes were the palest ice-blue, and deep within her pupils, a white light swirled. When she looked at someone, that person would feel a chill crawling up from the base of their spine.
A Yuki-onna. One of the most famed yōkai of Tōno.
These three, without a doubt, were Essence-level demons. Eighth Transformation or above, even. Three commander-class yōkai of Tōno, manifesting upon the land of Suruga in the last dark light of Ōmagatoki.
Shinji stood before the forest of bone. Behind him, the dozen-some lesser yōkai had formed up in ranks. His white hair churned in the night wind. The crimson demon eyes behind his mask swept across all three directions. The kappa on the left. The kamaitachi on the right. The Yuki-onna at the center.
This was, unmistakably,
"The commanders of Tōno."