Scarlet Cherry Blossom Village: Dead Calm!

The dark-blue streak of light that had torn through the night came to an abrupt halt at the village's edge.

Giyu Tomioka went from extreme motion to absolute stillness. The sudden stop sent the hem of his white haori fluttering forward before it slowly settled.

He stood still, and for the first time, the devastation of this land was reflected clearly in his ice-blue eyes.

The ground, where a packed dirt road should have been, was completely covered by a layer of thick, dark-red liquid that reflected an eerie sheen in the scattered firelight.

A hand clutching straw, half a child's leg...

The air no longer moved, as though it had been entirely filled with a cloying, sickeningly sweet metallic stench that pressed heavily against his chest.

At that moment, the naked slaughter before him gouged a deep crack in Giyu's calm expression.

His fingers tightened around his sword until his knuckles turned white.

He did not even have time to take in each gruesome sight, or to feel the sorrow behind every individual life that had been lost.

A greater, heavier anger overwhelmed all those finer emotions.

As though drawn by an invisible thread, his gaze instantly pierced the hanging smoke and blood-red haze, fixing on the depths of the village.

There, a surge of pitch-black energy, brimming with destruction, crashed like a waterfall from the heavens against a faltering pale-gold radiance.

At the edges of the clash between the two forces, even the air warped slightly.

Mr. Himejima... there are still people alive... two faint presences.

The ground beneath his feet exploded into a shallow crater, and he became a dark-blue streak once more, shooting against the onslaught toward the heart of the clash!

The destructive black torrent and the protective pale-gold barrier had reached their final moment.

Blood seeped from Gyomei's eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and his body trembled like battered bamboo in the wind. Yet he remained rooted in place like a mountain, shielding the two small figures firmly behind him.

Jinhua laughed wildly in the air, as though already seeing the feast of victory.

In that very instant—

A dark-blue line cut without warning between destruction and protection.

Giyu Tomioka seemed to appear out of thin air several meters ahead and to Gyomei's side, almost parallel to the torrent of destruction.

Clang!!

Azure Tide flashed from its sheath, the blade's snow-to-blue gradient gleaming amid the turbulent energy.

Giyu held Azure Tide level, its tip pointing toward the side of the raging black torrent.

Then, with a slight turn of his wrist, so subtle it was almost impossible to follow with the naked eye, he traced an arc at once utterly simple and infinitely complex.

"Water Breathing ★ Eleventh Form ★ Dead Calm!"

As his deep voice rang out, starting from the arc traced by his sword tip—

In an instant, time and sound seemed to be drawn away.

Within the area covered by the arc, the violently surging torrent of black energy met a domain of absolute "stillness."

It was like striking the mirror-smooth surface of a deep, dark pool.

"Dead Calm"—not a ripple of wind or wave.

Like a giant python seized at its vital point, the black torrent writhed, twisted and broke apart. The heart-stopping black core at its center flickered several times before silently vanishing.

The remaining purple-black energy lost its guiding force, scattering into specks of light that quickly dimmed and disappeared.

The pressure vanished.

Gyomei let out a muffled groan. Unable to hold on any longer, he braced his axe and flail against the ground and dropped to one knee,

gasping violently, every breath flecked with blood. But his back, which had been strained to its limit, finally relaxed.

Giyu slowly lowered Azure Tide, which he held in one hand. The blade's radiance had receded, and not a speck of dust marred it.

He did not look back, but his cool voice carried clearly behind him:

"Before I arrived, you did your best to hold on."

His voice paused. He confirmed that Gyomei's life was not in danger, and sensed the two faint but living presences.

"The rest,"

he said, turning slightly. His ice-blue eyes swept over the Kocho Sisters, who were still shaken, before settling on Gyomei as he struggled to hold himself up.

"Leave it to me, Mr. Himejima."

"Namu... Amida Butsu..."

The Buddhist invocation came slowly from Gyomei's lips, deep and weary, yet filled with endless relief and trust.

His massive body swayed slightly, as though he could barely remain kneeling, but he forced himself not to fall and gave the slightest nod in Giyu's direction.

A faint, almost imperceptible smile appeared on his usually solemn face.

"I'll leave it to you... Giyu-san."

He could finally lay down that crushing burden.

Without reservation, he entrusted everything to this young colleague he had met only once.

Not until the destructive black torrent had dispersed, not until the towering monk who had protected them like a mountain had collapsed to his knees,

did Kanae Kocho and Shinobu seem to emerge, just a little, from a long and terrifying nightmare.

Their gazes involuntarily passed over Gyomei's broad, gently rising and falling shoulders and settled on the figure who had just appeared.

What first caught their eyes was a swath of white.

Amid the ruins of charred black, blood red and ashen gray, his white haori was almost painfully clean. The landscape patterns embroidered in silver thread along its hem shimmered with a cool luster in the flickering firelight.

He stood there, tall and straight as a green pine after snowfall, utterly out of place in this hell that had swallowed all their warmth and everyday life.

Then there was his black hair, tied behind his head, with a few loose strands drifting across his forehead in the night breeze.

When he turned his head slightly toward them, the sisters finally saw his face clearly.

He's so young!!

That was Kanae's first thought.

He might be the same age as me?

But those eyes...

What eyes they were.

They were an ice blue she had never seen before, like the clearest lake deep in the mountains in winter. Though they reflected the flames still burning nearby, they held only a fathomless calm.

There was no fear, no anger, not even a ripple from the fierce battle he had just experienced—only a kind of... absolute, crystalline coldness that seemed capable of cutting through all chaos and entanglement.

And yet, when those cold, calm eyes swept over them and confirmed that they were unharmed, Kanae strangely felt that beneath the ice, there seemed to be a fleeting trace of something faint and hard to catch... a softening?

Or perhaps it was a certain reassurance after confirming that "what needed to be protected was still safe."

Merely being swept by that gaze somehow steadied Kanae's heart for an instant, though it had been pounding wildly, clenched by fear and grief.

It was as though, even if the sky fell, as long as the boy in the white haori stood there, he could hold it up with one hand.

The hand gripping his sword had long, slender fingers and remained perfectly steady. The blue-white blade seemed a calm, sharp extension of his body.

Beside her, Shinobu's small hands still clutched her older sister's clothes tightly, but her eyes, red and swollen from crying, stared unblinkingly at Giyu's back.

She did not understand many complicated emotions. She only thought the way this big brother had appeared was "so amazing," and the way he had dispelled the terrifying fireball with one light swing of his sword was "so cool." He was more formidable than any hero in the samurai stories her father used to tell.

Her fear quietly receded like the tide, replaced by an almost blind dependence and the admiration of a fledgling.

She had not even noticed when she stopped trembling.