The setting sun grew ever dimmer, the yōki ever denser. In that moment, the towering, grim Shura that had risen up pressed down with its sheer demonic presence, overwhelming in an instant the force-field the twenty-one yōkai had woven together with their osore.
The very instant the Shura Form finished materializing, Shinji moved.
The six-meter-tall Bone Thunder colossus took a single step forward. The riverbed beneath its feet fractured and split for dozens of meters in every direction. Its target: the great kappa among the Tōno commanders.
Of the three, the kappa was the largest in stature and the slowest in speed. It was also one of the primary anchors holding the osore force-field together. Rip it out and one corner of that field would collapse.
The Shura Form raised its right arm. The colossal fist, woven of bone framework, was wreathed in violet arcs of lightning. The air before its knuckles compressed into visible distortion. The great kappa's reaction was not slow. The deep blue yōki in the dish atop its head poured forth in an instant, condensing into a wall of water over two meter thick before its body.
The water wall was impossibly dense, countless tiny vortices churning within, each one an independent node of yōki. This was the secret ultimate technique of the Tōno kappa clan, cultivated over centuries: the materialization of the river's drowning eye.
In Tōno legend, skilled swimmers who met their deaths in the water often perished within the spinning grasp of just such an eye. It was a formidable demon art. Far stronger than Shinji's ghostfire.
And yet,
The Shura Form's fist slammed into it. BOOM. There was no pause. The fist punched straight through the water wall. The two-meter-thick barrier was vaporized by lightning the instant contact was made.
The yōki vortices within collapsed one by one under the piercing onslaught of violet arcs and that lightning did not simply burst from the fist's surface. It surged simultaneously from every gap in every bone that made up that fist.
Bone and thunder were one. Fist and lightning arrived together. No before. No after. The water wall exploded outward from its center, burned through from the inside.
Then the shockwave hit.
The kappa's frog-eyes bulged wide. Its thick arms crossed defensively before its chest. A final layer of yōki surged up through its jade-green scales, a slick, viscous slime coating its skin, an attempt to disperse and deflect the force. It was useless.
The Shura Form's fist collided with that barrier. Thunder detonated. Barrier and scales alike shattered. The impact hurled the two-meter-tall, massive body off the riverbank.
It tumbled through the air and smashed into the mud, carving out a crater several meters wide. At the bottom of that crater, the great kappa lay motionless. Half the deep blue fluid in its cranial dish had spilled out.
Not dead, the kappa clan's vitality was extraordinarily tenacious, but it would not be standing again anytime soon.
One strike. A Tōno commander, a kappa whose yōki already rivaled the Eighth Transformation, bolstered by osore to near the Ninth, felled in a single blow.
The Yuki-onna's ice-blue pupils contracted violently. Both her hands rose, fingers spread wide. A blizzard erupted from her palms. Unlike the scattered ice crystals from before, this was everything. Desperation. Squeezing every last reserve.
Pressing her very potential to its breaking point. The air temperature for over a dozen meter plummeted below freezing in the span of a single breath. Moisture condensed into a sky-filling storm of ice blades, each one thin as a cicada's wing, sharp enough to shear through stone.
Breath of Ice, Yet another demon art. Thousands, tens of thousands—of ice blades came howling on the freezing gale, rushing toward the Shura Form in a shroud of death.
Shinji's response was direct to the extreme. He simply swept the Shura Form's left arm horizontally. The massive forearm, built of bone framework, carved an arc through the air.
Thunder erupted from its surface, forming a blinding, interlocking web of lightning. The ice blades crashed against that web. The sound of shattering merged into a single continuous roar.
The endless blades dissolved into vapor under the lightning's searing heat. The vapor evaporated in the inferno. A curtain of white mist bloomed.
The Yuki-onna bit her purpled lip. Shinji had already pierced through the mist. The Shura Form's right hand reached for her. The Yuki-onna swept backward, her speed was nowhere near the kamaitachi's, but as an incarnation of wind and snow, she excelled in elusive, drifting movement.
The hem of her deep blue kimono traced a curve through the air, ice crystals scattering from its edge. The Shura Form's palm closed on empty air… and yet, it didn't.
"—?!"
As though, in a single instant of dazed bewilderment, she had already been caught in its grasp. The Yuki-onna was seized directly in Shinji's grip, her long, graceful form crushed into the narrow confines of the Shura Form's hold.
Fast… that word didn't even describe it. There had been no process of swinging or reaching. The film of yōki covering the Shura Form's outermost layer, the invisible skin formed by the Eighth Transformation's overflow, amplified and projected through the Ninth, had locked onto her soul's position the very first instant she retreated.
That locking process had been shortened to a point before instinct. And it wasn't that Shinji had chased her down. His palm had known exactly where she would appear the moment it opened. He had arrived first. And simply waited for her to crash into it.
This was the Shura Form's projection-amplified, Soul-Chasing Bow Arm Change. Strike certain.
And in that same instant,
The kamaitachi finally struck again. A silver-white blur cut in from behind the Shura Form. As the fastest of the three commanders, the wind-blades forged of its vast mountain gales slashed in from four angles at once. But the blades bit into the Shura Form's spine. Sparks flew. No damage. Utterly useless.
The Bone Thunder structure of the Ninth Essence Transformation possessed a natural hardness advantage over the Eighth Transformation's wind blades.
After the Seventh Transformation's reforging, the interior of every bone was permeated with thunder fused into its very substance. Every bone strut was no longer mere bone, it was an alloy of bone and lightning, its density and rigidity far surpassing any steel.
The kamaitachi's crimson slit-eyes flickered with shock. Its speed was its pride. Its wind blades could shear through the flesh of most yōkai, even those of a higher tier. But this scene before it… had utterly defied its expectations. It couldn't cut through that framework.
Shinji didn't even look back. From the Shura Form's dorsal framework, a dense thicket of bone spurs suddenly erupted, the natural outward extension of the Eighth Transformation's overflow bone structures, shooting forth like a hedgehog bristling its quills.
The kamaitachi was forced to pull back. But its rat-like form, woven of wind, was still torn open along one flank, spilling a great gout of pale blood. Nearly half its body surface had been ripped away. Grievously wounded.
Three Eighth Transformation commanders. In less than ten seconds, utterly suppressed by a single opponent, with no strength left to fight back. The kappa, down. The Yuki-onna, captured. The kamaitachi so badly savaged it couldn't even draw near, had Shinji not been holding the Yuki-onna in one hand, it likely would not have escaped either.
The Yuki-onna gasped for breath, feeling the ever-tightening crush around her body. Pale blood trickled from the corner of her lips.
Their faces were filled with disbelief, as though they could never have imagined such an outcome. Their opponent was indeed strong, no one denied that. But they were all high-ranking yōkai. All had undergone Essence Transformation.
Even if, by Shinji's own scale of transformations, there was a difference of a single tier between them, theoretically, it should not have ended like this.
Unfortunately for them, Shinji's Ninth Transformation, the Shura Form, was all-encompassing. What the Shura projection amplified were all of his previous transformations in their entirety.
The high-density yōki compressed and condensed after the Seventh Transformation's reforging. The overflow extension and structural construction ability that had breached his body's surface after the Eighth.
All of it had been projected onto a six-meter scale. In other words, in terms of sheer yōki magnitude, he now possessed the equivalent of twice the power of an Eighth Transformation, not merely a step beyond it as the Ninth would typically imply.
Shinji stood his ground, looking down upon them. And yet, the osore force-field still held. The eighteen Fifth and Sixth Transformation demons had not joined the battle. They remained scattered at the extreme periphery of the battlefield, sustaining the collective force-field that blanketed the entire riverbank.
Osore continued to pour ceaselessly into the three commanders. Their own forms remained hidden within that osore, flickering in and out of visibility beneath the dim twilight, nearly impossible to see. This was the harnessing and projection of osore, a unique ability mastered by the yōkai of Tōno. As long as those lesser demons remained, the three commanders could endlessly recover.
But as long as the three commanders stood, that horde of lesser demons could not easily be rooted out, at least, not by ordinary yōkai.
At the bottom of the crater, the great kappa stirred once more. The deep blue fluid in its cranial dish was slowly rising again, the osore restoring it. The Yuki-onna, though still coughing blood, was also regenerating. In the kamaitachi's crimson eyes, the fervor reignited.
Osore couldn't directly amplify their abilities, it only served as an accelerant for growth and as a means of recovery. It could unite the collective power of the swarm, nothing more.
But as long as the osore force-field remained unbroken, they could truly keep recovering. Keep dragging this out. A war of attrition. That was their plan. Their opponent was terrifyingly strong, his yōki staggering. But his osore was comparatively sparse, and his use of it was crude, clumsy.
Sustained recovery would be nearly impossible for him. As one side waxed and the other waned… victory, in the end, would be theirs.
Shinji understood this perfectly. He saw through their design with absolute clarity. He had never intended to drag this out in his Shura Form. He had only wanted to force them, to draw out every last drop of their osore. That was enough.
The Shura Form's movements came to a halt. The six-meter-tall Bone Thunder colossus stood motionless at the center of the riverbank, violet arcs of lightning leaping through the gaps in its skeletal frame, illuminating the crimson demon eyes upon that ghastly mask.
His right hand, the Shura Form's massive right hand, opened. The palm was empty. Muramasa still rested at his waist in its sheath. He did not draw it. The blade had developed cracks during its awakening process and could not withstand the amplified projection of the Shura Form. Forcing it would only shatter the sword entirely. He would not let Muramasa break. Before coming here, he had already thought of an alternative.
As the two great commander yōkai surged forward once more, and as the Yuki-onna in his grasp continued regenerating, the Shura Form's right hand rose higher. Larger. Palm facing the sky.
And then he spoke. Two syllables, cadenced and clear.
"Rai. Kō."
The voice was not loud. But his yōki wrapped those two words and sent them speeding along an invisible tether, the tether that connected the three provinces, the Twenty-Three Demons, all the osore he had gathered, hurtling toward the southeast. Toward Suruga. Toward… the Imagawa clan's capital.
A resonant hum. The world seemed to freeze. Stop. On the horizon, through the gaps in the clouds, light flared.
Not the fading light of the vanished sun. Not the half-hidden glimmer of the moon. Not starlight. It was, falling from the heavens, the blazing majesty of thunder.
BOOM!
A muffled roar of thunder rolled across the sky from the southeast, as though something was tearing through the night at unimaginable speed. The Yuki-onna halted. She looked up in abject terror. The kamaitachi was equally horrified. The great kappa, struggling to its feet at the bottom of the crater, wore an expression of sheer dread.
This second. This moment. Not only them. The eighteen demons behind them. The dozen-some lesser yōkai behind Shinji. They all saw it. A streak of blue-white light rising from the horizon line, dragging a contrail of thunder behind it, racing toward the riverbank at a speed the eye could still track.
This was no natural lightning. Because within that light, there was the outline of a blade. A long, slender body. A simple, unadorned tsuba. And an edge… sheathed entirely in lightning.
Raikiri. Sōza Samonji. The famed blade passed down through generations of the Imagawa clan. It was also the very sword Shinji had used to cleave the thunder-beast in two, to cut lightning itself.
A blade that had been venerated and worshipped by an entire castle town, an entire province, for three full months.
Months ago, after slaying the thunder-beast, Shinji had done something entirely out of character. He had not claimed this renowned blade for himself. Instead, he had returned it to the Imagawa capital.
He left behind the legend of the thunder-slayer, and he left behind the blade that had cut the thunder. He let it receive offerings. He let it receive faith.
All for this day.
Back then, he hadn't yet known that the concept of divine artifacts even existed in this world. But he had understood the power of osore. He had understood the power of faith.
Osore could swell a yōkai's strength. Faith could elevate a blade. He himself was no god, he couldn't wield the power of faith directly. So he had left this sword in the hands of the Imagawa clan, letting the belief of an entire castle town pour into it like rain.
Now, months had passed. Raikiri had not yet become a true divine artifact, that would require far longer, and far deeper faith. But it had already crossed the threshold of a mortal blade. It had become… a demi-divine artifact.
A being suspended between the mundane and the sacred. It carried the weight of a city's faith, a province's belief. Though it had yet to crystallize the na and kotoba, the name and the commandment unique to divine artifacts, it had already taken on the essence of one.
Compared to true gods and buddhas, like the incarnations of Uesugi Kenshin or Takeda Shingen, who could imbue faith into a being with nothing more than a bestowed name, Shinji's method had been painstaking, roundabout, beyond compare. And yet, he had still done it.
A streak of blue-white lightning tore across the night sky. Hundreds of paces above, it abruptly veered and plunged straight down toward the Shura Form's open palm.
Shinji caught it. The Shura Form's colossal right hand closed around the lightning-wreathed blade.
The instant they connected, the System panel flickered to life.
[Raikiri (Sōza Samonji)]
[Quality: Demi-Divine Artifact (In Metamorphosis)]
[It is exhilarated. It is overjoyed. At last, it can fight alongside you once more.]
[Current Affection: 26 (Thrilled)]
The blade trembled in his palm, a joyful, eager quiver. Like a dog left too long at home, finally greeting its master's return.
Along Raikiri's cutting edge, the blue-white radiance merged with the Shura Form's violet lightning. Two kinds of thunder, the thunder of yōki and the thunder of faith, collided upon the blade, tangled, intertwined, and fused at last into a light deeper, brighter, and more solid than either alone. The color of indigo. The light of a demi-divine artifact.
The temperature of that light was not high. But every single yōkai, whether the three commanders or the eighteen demons at the periphery, felt the same unease bloom in the same instant.
It was not yōki. It was faith. The prayers of an entire city. Incense smoke rising for months. A weight belonging to the "positive", condensed upon a single sword. Osore swelled a yōkai's power. But faith—that, a yōkai feared.