At the foot of the mountain, Rengoku Jinjūrō had already laid the five bodies to rest, covering them with the half-burned remnants of the banners. He straightened up.
The torchlight fell upon his face, heavy brows, large eyes, a countenance crisscrossed with scars. There was no sorrow to be seen there. Only a calm, congealed, inextinguishable resolve. He lifted his head and looked toward the two figures on the mountain slope.
A faint breath of relief escaped him. This was his first real combat using the Breath of Flame. Without those two, he would never have dared to bring only two junior swordsmen and a single Kakushi operative to face a demon. In the past, he would never have mobilized with fewer than five or six.
But it was at that very moment, a sound emerged from the depths of the camp. Laughter. A clear, ringing woman's laughter. It drifted out from the only large shed in the deepest part of the camp that hadn't fully collapsed, accompanied by the splintering crack of wooden boards.
Jinjūrō spun around, his hand flying to his hilt once more. The burly man, the female swordswoman, and Chō drew their blades simultaneously, forming a triangle back-to-back.
The shed's remaining roof was shoved aside from within. A figure rose up. A woman. Or rather a demoness. She wore a crimson priestly robe, its style suspended somewhere between a nun's habit and a miko's attire, yet not fully either.
Embroidered at the collar were the yin-yang motifs unique to the Tachikawa sect. A golden silk cord was bound at her waist. From its end dangled a tiny skull charm, no larger than a thumb. Her face was exceedingly beautiful, if one ignored the clouded, slit-pupiled eyes and the mouth split wide to the roots of her ears.
Her ashen skin gleamed with a waxen luster beneath the firelight. Black hair cascaded down from beneath the hood of her robes, the tips stained dark crimson. She tilted her head and looked at Jinjūrō. And smiled.
"Oh my, how impressive. That slash just now, so much stronger than the ones who came before." Her voice was cloyingly sweet, like melted sugar, but carried a foul, putrid undertone. "But why must you stop my 'devotees' from attaining buddhahood?"
Jinjūrō's pupils contracted. Devotees. That word, spoken from the mouth of a demon, sent a violent churn through his stomach. Those corpses, those ordinary people whose throats had been torn out by a demon, were this thing's devotees?
"You… are the leader of this heretical cult?" Rengoku Jinjūrō was genuinely stunned. He had thought this was merely a cult camp that a demon had broken into. He had never imagined, the organizer of this camp was itself a demon.
"Heretical? How can you call it heretical?" The demoness tilted her head further. The split of her mouth stretched even wider, revealing two uneven rows of jagged fangs.
"I am Kisshō-in. The founder of the True Tachikawa Faith. They came here to train. To seek buddhahood in this very body. I was only helping them." She spread her arms wide, as though embracing something invisible.
"If not for you, they could have attained buddhahood… within our bellies." Our. Not my. The demon that Jinjūrō had already slain, it had, without doubt, been this one's companion.
Jinjūrō's grip tightened on his Nichirin Blade. The earlier strike of the Breath of Flame had drained a tremendous portion of his stamina. If he tried to muster it again now, whether his body could withstand it was an open question. But he did not retreat. He raised his blade and stepped forward.
Kisshō-in moved first. She did not charge. She merely raised her right hand. Her five fingers spread wide. A dark violet mist bloomed from her fingertips. Not yōki. Certainly not reiryoku. Not even the power of an ordinary demon.
This was something they had never seen from any demon they had faced before. The dark violet mist spread from Kisshō-in's fingers, diffusing outward in every direction, like an invisible flower unfurling its petals. Wherever the mist touched, the soil beneath began to discolor. Deep red. Dark brown. Pitch black.
As though corroded by something unseen. Corroded, then regrown. Things sprouted from the earth. Flowers. Flowers of dark violet. They pushed up through the fissures in the ground, their petals thin as cicada wings. Within their depths, tiny fangs were faintly visible. Every flower... was a mouth. A mouth that devoured humans.
The flowers carpeted the ground for ten paces in every direction in the span of a breath. Two blossoms sprouted beneath Jinjūrō's feet, their petals already closing toward his ankles.
"Watch out!" The burly man slashed through the flower stems near his leg. Dark violet sap splattered across his hand. His skin instantly reddened as though scalded. "It's toxic!"
The female swordswoman retreated a step, her Nichirin Blade held horizontally before her, its tip pointed at the ever-thickening thicket. Chō also fell back at speed. Even as a Kakushi, her movements were, by a hair, swifter than the others.
Jinjūrō clenched his jaw. He forced the Breath of Flame into motion. Orange-red firelight blazed along his blade's edge. One sweeping slash incinerated every flower within a three-step radius at his feet. But the moment they were burned, new flowers pushed up from the scorched earth. Faster. Denser than before.
Kisshō-in stood at the center of the floral tide, the hem of her priestly robes encircled by those dark violet blossoms. She looked like a walking garden. She tilted her head and gazed at Jinjūrō, her slit-pupiled eyes brimming with playful mockery.
"That slash truly did hurt, you know. You're the first human who's ever made me feel pain. What a pity… you don't seem capable of swinging that blade again?"
Jinjūrō's breath was coming in ragged gasps. Activating the Breath of Flame a second time was causing his lungs to feel as though they were about to split open.
He had only grasped this breathing method a few days ago. His body's adaptation was nowhere near adequate. One all-out strike was already his limit. A second, and its intensity plummeted. A third… there might not be a third.
"Captain!" The burly man and the female swordswoman rushed forward together. Kisshō-in didn't even glance at them. The dark violet thicket stirred as though it had gained a life of its own. Vines lashed out toward the two.
The burly man's left leg was caught and coiled. The toxin seeped through the gaps in his armor. He let out a roar of agony and dropped to one knee. The female swordswoman cut through the vines lunging toward her, but new vines immediately split from the severed ends, doubling in number and binding her tighter.
And then, the last. The very last... was Chō. No one had noticed her. Amid the chaos of Jinjūrō and the two swordsmen being entangled by the toxic vines, every gaze was fixed upon that demoness in the crimson robes. No one would spare a thought for a single Kakushi. But she moved. This was her first time stepping onto the front lines of a demon-slaying battlefield.
This was her chance to prove herself. Though the girl code-named Chō had a sister who was a Hashira, the two of them, like everyone else, harbored a bone-deep hatred for demons. Now, the opportunity lay before her eyes. She would not let it slip. And she could not betray, the one who had given her this chance.
The girl drew a breath. Her blade lashed out. That single breath was different from any ordinary breath. An inhale, agonizingly slow, impossibly even, impossibly fine. It was less like breathing air… and more like compounding medicine. To treat every inhalation, every exhalation, as the process of preparing and administering a remedy.
This was what she had forged over the past few days. It had no name. It barely qualified as a complete Breathing Technique. All it could do was the most basic function: by controlling the rhythm of her breathing, she could momentarily boost her muscles' reaction speed. Three breaths. She only had three. But now, even if she had only one, she would still go.
The instant her first breath was complete, her body grew light. She launched herself forward on her toes, sprinting toward the burly man, whose left leg was still tangled in the vines.
Her speed was not fast, nothing like Jinjūrō under the Breath of Flame. But it was just barely enough. Her Nichirin Blade left its sheath. The edge swept across the roots of the vines entangling the burly man's leg. A single, shallow cut, carrying the unique sunlit gleam of a Nichirin Blade.
The vines snapped. They had been burned apart. The sunlight properties of the Nichirin Blade had triggered a faint, searing combustion the instant it cut through the plant tissue. That heat was nowhere near enough to harm the demon's true body, but it was precisely enough to wither and carbonize the toxic flowers' vines. "GO!" she shouted.
Second breath. The burly man wrenched himself free from the vines, limping heavily, his left leg already blackening from the encroaching toxin. But he was alive.
Third, it never came. Chō's third breath detonated inside her chest. It felt as though her lungs had been seized in a vice grip. A coppery taste of blood surged into her throat. Her vision blurred for an instant. Her body was still far from adapted to the physical strain of this breathing method.
Three breaths was the absolute limit, and a limit reached only by pushing far past her breaking point. What followed, was utter exhaustion. Her knees buckled. She nearly collapsed into the thicket.
New vines had already pushed up through the scorched earth beneath her, thicker and denser than before. Their petals spread wide, revealing fang-like stamens, closing in toward her throat.
Kisshō-in tilted her head and glanced at her. There wasn't even a flicker of interest in those slit-pupiled eyes. "Oh my, a little bug too." Her voice dripped with contempt.
Chō clenched her jaw. The hand gripping her blade was trembling. She raised the Nichirin Blade before her, her stance crooked and unsteady. She knew she couldn't block it.
But she didn't intend to close her eyes either.
In the very next second, the air before her split open. An arc of ghostly violet light, the color of Yomi itself, slashed down from the mountain slope above. Silent. Traceless. So fast that even the exhausted Jinjūrō's vision couldn't follow it.
The arc swept horizontally across the entire field of flowers. Every dark violet blossom. Every vine. Every stamen. The instant that Yomi-colored arc swept past, they withered, carbonized, and shattered in unison.
As though some power rising from the deepest depths of the earth had drained every last trace of vitality in a single breath. The process of decay itself was skipped entirely. They simply disintegrated into dust.
Kisshō-in's smile froze on her face. She looked down at her own chest. A single, impossibly fine cut stretched from her left shoulder to her right hip. The cross-section was flawlessly smooth, as though shaved by a razor. The severed surface gleamed with that dark, spectral Yomi hue, cold and horrifying. And it would not regenerate.
"Wh—"
Her upper body slid free. There was no blood at the wound. Only the cold vapor of Yomi spreading outward. The deathly chill crept from the cut across her entire body.
Kisshō-in's regeneration never even had the chance to activate. That layer of Yomi's color directly annihilated the life force of every piece of flesh surrounding the wound. The power of regeneration had been torn out at the root. But she didn't die immediately.
The vitality of a demon, even split in two, kept her from expiring. The mouth of the bisected head was still moving. Those slit-pupiled eyes spun wildly, searching for the source of the attack.
On the mountain slope, a gray figure had already descended to the edge of the camp. White, flowing hair drifted in the night wind. A demon mask covered his face. Crimson demon eyes stared down through its gaps at the demon on the ground, cleaved in two, yet not quite dead.
Yomi-giri slid back into its sheath. Click. The crisp sound of the blade seating home echoed through the night.
Yoriichi landed immediately behind him, his hand on his blade. His deep crimson eyes took in Kisshō-in, now split into two halves by a single stroke. He had moved as well. The Breath of the Sun had already been poised, ready to erupt. But Shinji had been a step faster.
Jinjūrō crouched on the ground, gasping for air. He lifted his head and stared at that gray figure. "Sir… Sir Nakai…"
Shinji paid him no mind. His gaze shifted to Chō, whose condition was far worse. The girl, her face half-exposed, was on the verge of unconsciousness. Yet she still struggled to lift her eyes and look at him. "Sir Shinji… I swung my blade…" Her eyes held no relief at having survived.
Instead, there was joy. The first time she had swung her blade in real combat. The first time she had cut a demon. Though she hadn't landed the killing blow, she had stepped forward. She had not betrayed the blade in her hand. Nor the chance that the figure before her had given.
Shinji nodded toward her. She wasn't exactly his disciple, but even setting aside her "future life", his impression of her was not poor. It was only a pity that Chō lost consciousness before she could see his nod.
She was carried away by another masked female Kakushi operative who had followed closely behind Shinji and Tsugikuni Yoriichi.
Rengoku Jinjūrō, at least, could still hold on. He staggered to his feet. But Shinji had already crouched down, studying Kisshō-in, who still writhed on the ground. His demon eyes reflected that face, cleaved in two, yet still hauntingly beautiful.
"Blood Demon Art," he spoke. His voice was very soft. So soft that only he and the half-dead demon at his feet could hear. Before today, of all the demons he had known, from the horde he had personally cut down to every case recorded by the Demon Slayer Corps, not a single one had displayed such an ability.
Those demons had possessed supernatural strength, speed, and regeneration. But in essence, they were merely brute monsters with enhanced physical bodies.
Kisshō-in was different. She could generate toxic flowers. That was no simple bodily toxin. It was the ability to transform her own blood into supernatural constructs, things that could grow, move, and attack independently.
This, according to the stories Shinji knew, was called a Blood Demon Art. A technique akin to a supernatural ability, awakened only when the concentration of demon blood bestowed by Kibutsuji Muzan reached a certain threshold.
Different demons wielded different Blood Demon Arts. Some could manipulate threads. Some could warp space. Some could unleash frost. Some could spawn venomous creations.
But in this era, at least in the months since Shinji had arrived in this world, he had never once seen it. Never once encountered a demon that wielded a Blood Demon Art. Not a single one. The reason was most likely singular: in this age, Kibutsuji Muzan had not yet bestowed Blood Demon Arts upon his demons on a large scale.
Or rather, only an exceedingly rare few demons had been granted such a privilege.
Shinji looked down at Kisshō-in, still clinging to a wretched half-life on the ground. "Speak," he said.
His voice was utterly calm. "What are you?"
He had thought tonight would be nothing more than a simple outing, watching from the sidelines, casually cutting down a demon or two to raise Yomi-giri's Affection.
He hadn't expected… a surprise.
And moreover, the name Kisshō-in. Something about it tugged at his memory. Kisshō-in. Or was it…
"Sesshō-in?"
"—?!"