A commander. In the world of yōkai, that title carried a weight far heavier than what humans understood by the word. Human daimyō maintained power through territory, military force, and the loyalty of their retainers. But a yōkai commander relied on osore.
Osore was the crystallization of fear. The direction of whispered rumor. The proof of a yōkai's existence, precipitated over centuries through word of mouth among humans. It was the nourishment upon which all demons fed.
The kappa commander bore the weight of a taboo spanning hundreds of years along some river basin in Tōno, do not draw near the water's edge. Not just him alone, but the many river yōkai beneath his rule unified under that singular dread.
The kamaitachi commander likewise bore the strange tales of winds in the mountains that could cut a man to pieces. The Yuki-onna commander carried the legend of the lone traveler on a snowy night who would never return.
They were not merely powerful individuals. Their very power was built upon the foundation of countless human tales passed down through generations. Every commander was a living, walking ghost story.
This was, in truth, exactly what Shinji had been doing all along, seeding his Twenty-Three Demons across the land, building shrines, weaving legends, letting them take root in human society to gather their own osore, and ultimately channeling it all back to himself, making himself the "higher power" above those many tales of terror.
Except, what he had been doing for months, these three from Tōno had been doing for a hundred years. The gap in osore was evident.
And yet. As Shinji now looked upon the three figures before him, the expression beneath his demon mask was not one of grim concern. It was understanding.
He had traveled all the way here from Kaede's Village, clearing out three yōkai strongholds along the path. The lesser demons in those strongholds, though varied in species, all shared a single common trait, chaos. Not organizational chaos. Chaos of origin. Kappa, Mountain spirits, One-legged demons, Flying heads.
The types of yōkai were a motley assortment. The first two were understandable, but the latter several looked nothing like they'd come from the same place. They weren't part of a single system. They looked more like scattered stragglers, scraped together from all directions.
And Tōno, as one of the largest yōkai strongholds in the northeastern reaches of this island realm, if it truly intended to expand southward, it would have sent organized, elite forces of the same tribe. Not this patchwork army.
What's more, the three surviving remnants of the Shichinintai. Especially Bankotsu. A human. A man who had slaughtered a hundred humans and a thousand demons. Taken in by the Tōno yōkai as their vanguard. That in itself defied all logic.
From what Shinji knew, the yōkai of Tōno were xenophobic to the marrow of their bones. Their territorial instinct was ferociously strong. Let alone a human, even an outsider yōkai who wanted to take one step into Tōno's mountain forests had to measure whether their neck was hard enough.
A group that insular… suddenly accepting a human mass-murderer as their spearhead? It didn't fit. It didn't fit at all.
And if it wasn't expansion, then only one possibility remained,
"You're not here to seize territory," Shinji spoke. His voice came from beneath the crimson mask, carried far by the night wind. "You were driven out."
A beat of silence fell over the riverbank. The massive jade-green kappa's bulbous frog-eyes widened fractionally. Amid the treetops, the flickering silver-white blur, the kamaitachi, the surging wind around it seemed to stutter.
The Yuki-onna at the center remained expressionless. Her ice-blue eyes fixed on him. Outwardly, nothing seemed to change but the temperature around her… shifted. Infinitesimally. But Shinji caught it. He hadn't been deliberately trying to sense it, it was the thin film of yōki permeating his body after the Essence Transformation, enhanced by the lingering properties of the Soul-Chasing Transformation.
It had captured the change and fed it back. The shift in temperature. The slightest stir of air currents. Even that nearly imperceptible ripple in the enemy's yōki, all of it faithfully recorded by that invisible layer of skin.
Shinji continued, unhurried. "Three commander-class yōkai like you, fleeing south. Patching together a ragtag band of stragglers along the way to pad your numbers. Snatching up a man like Bankotsu to use as a probe. That's not a force sent to invade my territory."
"You're looking for a place to settle."
It turned out Shinji's initial fears had been overblown. They had not come for the Shikon no Tama.
Silence. Long, protracted silence.
In the end, it was the Yuki-onna who broke it.
"You know too much."
Her voice was very soft, like the sound of wind blowing across a sheet of ice.
"But so what?" she said. "We have no path left to retreat."
Deep within her ice-blue pupils, those pale white streams of light swirled faster.
"Tōno… we can't return to. Those driven out. Those who died on the road. It wasn't just our three tribes."
The Yuki-onna's voice held no inflection, but Shinji could hear something beneath that calm. The desperate craving for survival.
To the left, the great kappa let out a low, rumbling croak. Its thick, webbed claws clenched and unclenched. To the right, the kamaitachi dropped down from the treetops. Its long, lithe form alighted on a withered branch, the bloodthirsty fervor in its crimson slit-pupils now largely banked. What remained was wariness.
Their yōki churned. In quality and quantity alike, all three were indeed above the Eighth Transformation, brushing against the Ninth. Three head-commander-class yōkai of Tōno, standing on a riverbank beneath the night sky. And behind them, it seemed, there truly was no road back.
"Struggling for survival is the norm in this age. I understand that," Shinji said. "But that doesn't give you the right to lay a hand on my people."
The words fell. Yōki detonated.
The Yuki-onna moved first, not because she wanted to, but because her instinct told her this demon warrior would not grant them a second chance to speak. Ice-blue frost exploded from her fingertips. White crystals of ice blanketed the ground for dozens of paces in an instant.
The kappa struck at the same time. The yōki gathered in the dish-like depression atop its head transformed into a column of deep blue water, laced with silt and shattered stone, crashing toward Shinji's flank.
The kamaitachi, though the last to stir, was beyond any doubt the fastest. Its silver-white afterimage vanished from where it stood. Wind-blades sliced inward from three directions, spreading like a vortex, sealing off every path of evasion above, below, left, and right.
Three Eighth Transformation yōkai attacking simultaneously. Three directions. Three attributes. Three elemental transformations, ice, water, and wind. Their coordination was flawless. Not some hasty improvisation, but instinct honed over centuries of coexisting in Tōno.
They struck from three sides. No probing. Full strength from the very first move. Because they could see, this demon warrior standing before them was not an opponent to be tested.
A human who had reached the level of a high-ranking yōkai, Bankotsu, had been obliterated before him in a single instant. Forty or fifty lesser demons had been impaled into specimens by a forest of bone in the span of a single breath. If they didn't go all out from the start, they would be the ones who died.
But against this,
Shinji did not retreat. He simply took one step forward. And then the Soul-Chasing Bow Arm roared to life.
The speed of that step came without any buildup, any process of gathering power. After the Essence Transformation's reforging, the velocity that had once required his full burst was now as natural as breathing. A thought, and his body was already there.
He merely bent his knee, threw a single punch, and shattered the oncoming vortex of wind. Before his fist even landed, the lightning had already erupted from his very bones. Not arcs clinging to the surface of his knuckles, but violet light surging simultaneously from the gaps between his finger bones, his metacarpals, his wrist bones.
As if the bones themselves were glowing. Bone was thunder. Thunder was bone. The fruits of the Seventh Transformation's reforging were made starkly manifest with every strike.
At the same time, bone extensions spread, weaving around his body into an ever-thickening cage. Those bone spurs did not grow from within him, they extended naturally from the already-existing external bone structures at his elbows, his shoulder blades, his spine.
Like branches dividing, and dividing again, weaving into a white prison so dense no gap remained. The overflow product of the Eighth Transformation. His Bone-Essence Transformation no longer needed the step of generating bone internally, then firing it outward.
Now it simply grew, spread, and constructed on the outside. It blocked the water. It hemmed in the ice.
And within that cage, thunder roared.
He surged forward.
"—?!"
The three great yōkai recoiled as one. Ice crystals smashed against the bone shield, shattered. The water column was vaporized into white mist by the lightning.
Wind blades surged in again, slicing in at extreme speed. The sharpest of them shaved off a single corner of the outermost layer of bone. But only a corner.
Shinji's right hand had already thrust through the white mist, fingers spread wide. A dark green, phosphorescent light ignited in his palm. He didn't even need to deliberately lock on.
The thin film of yōki permeating his body had automatically tagged the kamaitachi's soul location the instant those wind blades cut in. A process that had once required multiple steps, now reduced to pure instinct.
The blood mist had long since, unnoticed, mixed itself into the icy fog. And then, it was ignited. Ghostfire bloomed.
A thunderous roar erupted, and the mist-light detonated outward, transforming everything into a chaotic maelstrom of blood, fire, and lightning.
Behind Shinji, the lesser yōkai had already withdrawn far from the combat zone.
Faced with such a horrifying sight, the three Tōno commanders could only push their power to its absolute limit. Beyond full strength, they forced out more.
"FREEZE!"
The Yuki-onna's voice rang from deep within the ice fog. Ice-blue light expanded around her, freezing the blood mist in a radius of over hundred meter beneath her feet, gaining a momentary respite.
At the same time, the kappa slammed both palms against the ground. Walls of deep blue water surged up from the earth, carving out a pocket of safety for itself and its companions. The kamaitachi dropped back onto the treetops, its crimson eyes sweeping the surroundings.
And then, they sounded the whistle.
Not sound. Not the stirring of yōki or demonic power. But osore. Dense, concentrated osore, released simultaneously by all three commanders, radiating outward in every direction.
The response was nearly instantaneous. From deep within the mountain forests, eighteen yōki signatures flared to life at once. Not the motley trash impaled on the bone forest, these were the true fighting force they had brought with them. The remnants that belonged to Tōno. Eighteen demons, ranging from the Fifth to the Sixth Transformation, surged forth from the shadows.
River kappa, great and small. Mountain kamaitachi and tengu. Snow serpents and ice demons crawling from the frozen drifts. Far stronger than the rabble from before. And every single one of them carried osore that seamlessly merged into the three commanders.
These—these were the true remnants of the three tribes that the commanders had led here. Eighteen mid-tier demons. Three high commanders. Twenty-one strands of osore interweaving through the air, layering, resonating. Forming a force-field of osore that blanketed a hundred paces in every direction.
Shinji felt it. That osore was binding the yōki of all twenty-one demons together, trying to resist his own. That osore was also clashing directly against the osore he had gathered from the Twenty-Three across three provinces.
The collective power of fear condensed by twenty-one demons was attempting to overwrite the core of his force-field, the center that marked him as the ruler of the Hyakki Yakō. In numbers, they held the advantage. In quality, the three Eighth Transformation commanders far surpassed any single one of his subordinates.
Behind him, his dozen-some lesser yōkai huddled together. The tanuki's tail bristled. Its tiny bean-eyes were filled with terror. The scene looked, precarious in the extreme.
And yet. Shinji stood between the blood mist and the bone forest. He lifted his head. His crimson demon eyes swept across the approaching demon silhouettes on all sides.
He smiled. Beneath the demon mask, the corner of his mouth split wide. A grin that had no business appearing on a face in such a dire situation.
"So that's it. Looks like these are your true subordinates."
He spoke. His voice was not loud, yet within the force-field of osore, it reached every yōkai's ears with perfect clarity.
"Not bad," he said. "Looks like you're worth me putting in a little effort."
Yes. The earlier exchange had been brief but fierce, yet it was nowhere near Shinji's full strength. He was a Ninth Transformation yōkai. What he possessed was never simply the Lightning Transformation, the Bone Body, the Blood-Shifted Flesh, or even the mere reforging and overflow of his previous transformations.
He still held, stronger than anything before him now, the ultimate construct built atop all that had come before… the Ninth Transformation.
His voice fell.
The bone forest collapsed inward. The external bone structures folded like living limbs, the white frameworks across dozens of meters all retracting toward his body simultaneously, becoming a swirling vortex of bone dust that encircled him.
The blood mist followed, the dark crimson haze blanketing the battlefield pulling back as though time itself had reversed, gathering from all directions and flowing back to his form. Thunder roared into full manifestation.
Violet arcs of lightning no longer merely danced along his skin, they erupted outward from deep within his marrow, from the thunder-source that had fused with his very bones since the Seventh Transformation's reforging. Each arc thick as an arm, blazing simultaneously from every bone-node at his elbows, shoulders, and spine where the Eighth Transformation had overflowed.
Bone as the frame. Thunder as the flesh.
The returning bone dust coalesced half a meter from his body. Projected. Expanded.
A thunderous roar,
BOOM!
A six-meter-tall Bone Thunder Shura grew outward from his physical form. White bone wove into a skeleton. Violet lightning condensed into muscle. An invisible sensory film stretched over it as skin. A colossal humanoid figure rose against the night sky, its violet radiance illuminating everything within a hundred paces.
This—this was Shinji's true apex. The Shura Transformation. Asura Form.
In that instant, his yōki surged, and surged again. The overwhelming force of a Ninth Transformation Essence-level great yōkai poured from the Shura body, crashing like a landslide into the osore force-field the twenty-one demons had constructed. Collision. Crushing weight.
The eighteen Fifth and Sixth Transformation demons all staggered backward in unison. The faces of the three Eighth Transformation commanders turned ashen.
They felt it. His yōki wasn't just surpassing them in quantity. It surpassed them in quality. The gap was vast, nearly as vast as what Bankotsu had faced against Shinji moments ago. This was no longer the difference of a single tier. It was two tiers. Perhaps even three.
The titanic silhouette of the Shura Form cast a monstrous shadow in the moonlight, swallowing the entire riverbank. Upon the crimson demon mask, those scarlet demon eyes stared down from on high, looking upon every single yōkai present. His yōki spread outward. Like the tide. Like a force of nature.