At that same moment, at the source of that blazing lightning, beyond the horizon line,
Suruga Province. The Imagawa clan's capital. The topmost level of the tenshukaku. A place even higher than the hall where Imagawa Yoshimoto herself resided.
A small room. Strictly speaking, it was less a room and more a miniature shrine. It was set into the highest attic of the castle keep. Talismans covered all four paper walls. The floor was paved with purified sand, and at its center stood a simple, unadorned sword stand.
The stand was empty. Mere seconds ago, a long, slender tachi had lain horizontally across it, Raikiri, Sōza Samonji, the very blade that had just torn through the sky.
Now, all that remained were two scorch marks burned into the wood, still crackling with the remnants of lightning. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and seared timber.
On the wall directly across from the empty stand hung a painting. It depicted a blurred figure, a crimson demon mask, flowing white hair, gray robes. The likeness was crude, painted by an Imagawa artist working from hearsay and oral descriptions.
Regrettably, his skill was limited. It was neither true to form nor true to spirit. But beneath the painting, two characters had been written in a firm, steady hand: Zanrai Kishin. The Demon God Who Cleaves Thunder. That was the name the people of the Imagawa domain had bestowed upon Shinji.
The shrine was small. Incense smoke hung thick in the air. And at its threshold, a single figure sat cross-legged. A monk. A woman. She wore white monastic robes with a gray kesa draped over them. The collar of her robes was folded tight and neat, yet further down, the fabric strained against the fullness of her chest, cinched taut at the sides.
Her stomach lay flat beneath the sash at her waist, but the long robe was slit at the sides, and where her shadowed hips flared, the fabric gave way. Her legs were folded in meditation, wrapped in stockings of pure black. Her face was young, barely past twenty at a glance. Her skin was pale to the point of translucence. Her features were refined and delicate, though not exceptionally striking. But what truly commanded attention were her eyes.
Deep. Profound. Bearing a weight of years utterly mismatched with that youthful face. What lay settled in those eyes seemed to hold more than the combined lifetimes of every Imagawa clan head for centuries.
Her hands rested folded on her lap. A string of prayer beads was wound through her fingers. Her thumb moved unconsciously, turning one bead after another.
Before her, on the empty sword stand, the afterimage of lightning still flickered faintly. She watched that lingering trace, and the corner of her mouth tugged, ever so slightly.
"He's here," she murmured. It sounded like she was speaking to herself. And yet, it also sounded like a report meant for someone not present.
The riverbank. The same instant.
Raikiri blazed with indigo light in the Shura Form's palm. That radiance spread outward along the enormous blade, illuminating the entire riverbank as though it were broad daylight. The moment Shinji closed his grip around Raikiri, a long-absent surge of emotion rose in his chest.
"As I thought." Beneath the demon mask, the corner of his mouth split wide. "Returning this blade back then… was the right choice." If he hadn't, he couldn't be here now, borrowing it once more.
The Shura Form's colossal body turned back toward the center of the battlefield. The six-meter-tall Bone Thunder form now held Raikiri wreathed in indigo, its blade-edge blazing with the intertwined light of faith and yōki-born lightning.
Before it lay the osore force-field woven by the eighteen demons at the perimeter.
As stated before, this field was the collective osore sustained jointly by the three commanders and their eighteen subordinates. Twenty-one strands of osore, binding the yōki of twenty-one demons into a net that shrouded the riverbank.
They had sought to use it to suppress his yōki. They had failed but it still provided the three commanders with endless restoration. As long as this field held, the three commanders could not be beaten to death. Without a suitable weapon, even Shinji would have found it difficult to shatter it outright.
He could only have used the Shura Form to grind it away, wearing it down until all the osore could no longer sustain itself. It could be done. But it would have been costly in time and strength. The Shura Form's consumption was immense.
Now, however, things were different. Because faith directly countered osore. And because thunder could sunder all barriers. If he himself could not break through, then he would use a divine artifact to cut it down.
The Shura Form raised the blade. And then, a vertical slash. A single, straight stroke, cleaving from crown to sole, rending heaven from earth.
From the blade's edge, an indigo wave of light erupted outward, a curtain of radiance three shaku wide and ten m tall, slashing straight into the endless night before the Shura Form. The light was not fast.
One could even say it was slow, so slow that every yōkai present could trace its trajectory with perfect clarity.
But it was not yōki. It was not a simple slash. It was a strike given form by the power of faith itself.
Faith and osore. Two faces of a single coin. Faith rose upward. Fear sank down. And when the power of faith manifested as a cutting strike, a force-field of ordinary osore would tear like paper.
The curtain of light swept across the force-field woven by those eighteen demons. There was no explosion. No sound. It simply, severed. The osore force-field split apart as though sheared by an invisible pair of scissors.
At the severed edges, yōki disintegrated into smoke and churned away to either side. The eighteen Fifth and Sixth Transformation demons all let out stifled groans at the same moment, the backlash of the ruptured field crashed into them along the tethers of osore, sending them staggering backward one by one.
Several of them collapsed unconscious on the spot. The rest couldn't even stay on their feet, legs buckling, yōki in chaos.
The three commanders bore the brunt of it. The great kappa had just dragged itself out of the crater and was in the midst of recovery. The instant the field snapped, the osore pouring into its body cut off abruptly. Its regeneration halted. The deep blue fluid in its cranial dish spilled out once more.
The kamaitachi's speed plummeted. Stripped of the force-field's reinforcement, it crashed from its extreme velocity back down to its base level, still fast, but no longer capable of sustaining that breakneck, potential-burning speed.
The Yuki-onna's regeneration finally failed. Still clutched in the Shura Form's other hand, she coughed up great mouthfuls of pale blood. Her raven-black hair rapidly bleached white, as though this was its original color all along, and the dark shade had been nothing but an illusion sustained by osore.
One stroke. It severed the collective osore condensed by twenty-one demons.
The Shura Form stood at the center of the riverbank. The indigo Raikiri hung at its side, the light of faith along its edge slowly fading. This demi-divine artifact's stored power was limited.
That one slash had nearly exhausted its accumulated faith. It was, after all, only a half-step into divinity, it lacked the endless, ever-flowing faith of a true divine artifact. It still needed further offerings. Further restoration. Further metamorphosis. But it was enough. The objective had been achieved.
The Shura Form's crimson demon eyes swept across every yōkai present. The great kappa sat slumped at the edge of its crater, its frog-eyes brimming with shock and terror.
The kamaitachi clung to a dead willow, the bloodthirsty fervor in its crimson pupils utterly extinguished, replaced by instinctive, primal cowering.
The Yuki-onna had been tossed aside, crashing painfully onto the melting ice. The hem of her deep blue kimono was soaked through. She struggled to prop up her upper body, her ice-blue eyes fixed straight on the blade in the Shura Form's hand.
That blade which bore faith. This demon warrior held more than mere yōki in his grasp. He also commanded the belief of mortals. Osore and faith, both in his hands. Such an existence, in her hundred years in Tōno, she had never once seen.
And so, in that moment, silence reigned. A hundred demons, stricken with awe.
The Shura Form's voice emerged from beneath the demon mask. He did not press the annihilation. Instead, after a pause of rapid deliberation, he spoke the optimal resolution for these homeless, wandering yōkai.
"Submit."
One word. A pause. Then—
"Or die."
No third option.
On the riverbank, twenty-one yōkai, plus the forty-some lesser demons still impaled in the forest of bone, nearly seventy demons in total, all beneath the dual shroud of the Shura Form's yōki and the indigo light of Raikiri.
Silence like death. No demon moved. No demon ran. Not because they couldn't, though they truly couldn't, but because they had seen. They had seen that single slash. They had seen the moment their osore was cut apart.
They had seen how utterly fragile the very foundation they had relied upon for survival was before this opponent.
They… had no choice.
The Yuki-onna moved first. Her knees bent.
The hem of her deep blue kimono spread across the wet, muddy ground.
She knelt. Her white hair fell forward, pooling on the earth. Her ice-blue pupils lowered, gazing at the melted ice water beneath her.
"I am willing… to serve you, my lord."
Her voice was very soft.
The great kappa followed immediately after. Its enormous body sprawled forward over the rim of the crater, its frog-eyes tightly shut. The kamaitachi was the last. Within its crimson slit-pupils, a struggle waged for three full breaths, and then, the silver-white form dropped from the treetops. All four claws pressed flat against the ground.
Beyond them, the eighteen Fifth and Sixth Transformation demons at the periphery, those still conscious, knelt one after another. The motley demons impaled within the bone forest went without saying.
Across the riverbank, over seventy yōkai prostrated themselves in submission.
The final vestiges of the setting sun grew dimmer still, until only a crimson sliver of afterimage clung to the horizon. Yet from the other side of the sky, moonlight spilled down in radiant, silvery waves.
The colossal silhouette of the Shura Form slowly stretched its shadow over them all. Like a wrathful god. Like an unyielding, hell-born sovereign.