Once the Elite Ten finished eating, they began preparing to leave.
Originally, they had intended to take Erina back with them, but when they learned that she planned to stay and continue working at the restaurant for the rest of the night, several expressions changed immediately.
Rindō reacted the strongest.
"I'm so jealous!!!"
Even as she walked toward the door, the way she looked at Erina was practically dripping with envy.
That gave Erina an unexpected sense of satisfaction.
Yuto could only shake his head helplessly.
Then he suddenly remembered something.
Reaching beneath the counter, he pulled out two small bottles.
These were the potions he had previously asked Tohru to obtain, medicines capable of strengthening a human's mental endurance and resistance to fatigue.
He had prepared them specifically for Erina and Hisako.
The two girls were ordinary humans, after all.
Constantly staying awake throughout the night and working these kinds of hours would eventually wear down both their minds and bodies, no matter how determined they were.
The potions were meant to prevent exactly that.
"Here. These are for you."
Yuto handed one bottle to each girl and briefly explained what they did.
Erina and Hisako stared at the bottles in surprise.
Something like this was completely outside their normal understanding of the world.
"Thank you, Kamisaka-kun."
Erina bowed deeply.
Hisako immediately followed her example.
Afterward, both girls drank the potions.
According to them, the effect became obvious almost instantly.
Their thoughts felt noticeably clearer, the lingering fatigue in their bodies faded, and even from the outside, their overall energy and alertness visibly improved.
Yuto nodded in satisfaction.
As long as they worked, that was all that mattered.
...
A little while later, Saitama left as well.
For a brief period, the restaurant entered one of those rare stretches where no customers were present.
While cleaning up in the kitchen, Yuto happened to notice a thin strand from a sunflower lying near the counter.
It had probably fallen loose when he was making flower cakes for Yuuka earlier.
Thinking of Yuuka naturally made him think of everyone from Gensokyo, and a faint smile appeared on his face.
"They really are a lively bunch..."
Then he remembered Suika, who had left with Kanae, Shinobu, and Kanao earlier that evening.
"I wonder if Suika found a demon yet..."
He was admittedly a little curious.
...
"You really aren't going to tell me where Kibutsuji Muzan is?"
Suika looked down at the Lower Rank demon sprawled in front of her, her expression becoming increasingly troubled.
The demon stared back at her in absolute terror, as though he were looking at some incomprehensible monster rather than a small horned girl.
He never wanted to experience another beating like the one she had just given him.
Damn it!
Which one of them was supposed to be the demon here?
The Lower Rank was furious inside, but he did not dare show any of it.
"I'm running out of patience, you know. If you still won't tell me, I'm going to turn you into mist."
Suika sighed.
The demon stared at her blankly.
Mist?
What was that supposed to mean?
"Let's start with your leg."
Suika pointed casually toward his lower body.
In the next instant, the demon's leg began to swell.
At first it simply became thicker, but the expansion continued until the limb had grown as wide as a bucket, and even then it refused to stop.
The demon immediately panicked.
"What the hell are you doing?! Stop! Stop it!"
His screams echoed through the night as the leg continued expanding, but what happened next was even more incomprehensible.
Instead of exploding into flesh and blood, the limb itself seemed to lose its ordinary state of existence.
The moment the swelling reached its limit, the entire leg dispersed into a pale, almost transparent gray haze.
It looked vaguely like mist, though not the ordinary white vapor produced by water.
This was something thinner and stranger, a translucent cloud in which only the faintest suggestion of the original shape remained.
The night wind caught it almost immediately and began carrying it away.
The Lower Rank stared in horror.
He could still somehow feel that his leg existed.
And yet there was no longer any leg attached to his body.
The contradiction was terrifying.
The limb had not exactly been destroyed, but it was no longer part of his physical body either.
It had simply been dispersed into another state and scattered into the air around him.
Just as yōkai existed beyond ordinary human logic, so too did oni.
And among her own kind, Suika possessed an extraordinarily unusual power.
The ability to manipulate density and sparsity.
She could cause almost anything to gather or disperse, changing its density, structure, shape, and even its physical state.
Her ability was not limited to ordinary matter either.
Even something as abstract as thoughts could be dispersed.
Likewise, she could gather substances together with equally absurd freedom.
Moisture in the atmosphere could be condensed into water, carbon within a human body could be gathered into a tangible mass, and entirely different substances could even be forced together.
Wood and water.
Air and moisture.
Matter that normally had no reason to coexist in the same form.
As long as something already existed, Suika could manipulate how densely or sparsely it was gathered.
In that sense, her power bordered on creation, though there was still an important distinction.
True creation produced something from nothing.
Suika merely rearranged what was already there.
The Lower Rank's leg had simply been dispersed until it became something the wind could carry away and water could potentially dissolve.
Suika pointed toward his left arm.
"You still don't want to talk? Fine. I'll melt this next."
The power to gather did not merely mean collecting things together.
It also meant compression.
And sufficient compression generated heat.
A faint light appeared in Suika's eyes.
The demon screamed almost immediately.
Agony tore through his arm as though countless invisible millstones were crushing every gap inside his flesh at once.
Bones broke beneath the pressure, skin split apart, and yet almost no blood escaped because even the blood itself was being dragged inward and compressed around a single point.
The tighter everything became, the more violently the temperature climbed.
The Lower Rank howled until his voice cracked.
Blood leaked from his eyes, his teeth tore through his own lips, and his face twisted beyond recognition as he thrashed helplessly across the ground.
His left arm gradually lost its original shape.
Flesh, bone, and blood collapsed inward under the pressure until the limb began melting into a glowing red liquid that looked disturbingly similar to molten metal.
Each drop struck the earth with a sharp hiss.
At last, the demon broke.
"I'll talk! I'll talk! I'll tell you!"
He no longer cared whether Muzan's curse killed him afterward.
Anything was better than enduring this.
Suika immediately smiled.
"See? That wasn't so hard~"
The Lower Rank panted heavily, struggling to force the words out through the pain.
"M-Muzan-sama... is..."
Suika leaned closer and listened carefully.
Before the demon could finish, however, something changed.
His head began swelling violently.
Suika's eyes sharpened.
Then, with a sudden burst, the demon's head exploded and his body collapsed lifelessly onto the ground.
Whether that counted as punishment or mercy was difficult to say.
For him, it may have been both.
Suika, however, was no longer paying attention to the corpse.
A delighted smile slowly appeared on her face.
"Found you, Kibutsuji Muzan~"
For the briefest instant before the curse activated, an extremely faint ripple of foreign power had appeared.
It was so small that almost anyone else would have missed it completely.
But once Suika caught that tiny trace and dispersed it through the surrounding space, the presence became much easier for her to follow.
That was all she needed.
A moment later, Suika vanished from the mountain, leaving only the ruined remains of the Lower Rank behind.