The trembling demon, the king's arrival

The mountain of flesh barreled toward them beneath the moonlight ten times faster than Sabito had expected.

Twenty-three arms braced against the ground at once. Every thrust left finger marks half a foot deep, sending crushed stone and dirt flying under the immense force.

Sabito pulled Makomo three steps to the left. Six arms on the Hand Demon's right side swept across at once, and the gust they raised lifted both children off their feet.

"Why run? Snacks should stay nicely on their plate."

The Hand Demon's voice was cloying and excited. His mouth stretched back to his ears, and the crooked teeth inside gleamed a wet white in the moonlight.

Sabito steadied himself and held his Nichirin Blade across his chest, pointing its edge at that sickeningly hideous face.

"What the hell are you?"

"Me?" The Hand Demon tilted his enormous head, bracing several arms against the ground to shift half a step closer. "I'm the master of this mountain, brat. Been here almost fifty years."

His gaze clung to the fox mask on Sabito's face, one corner of it chipped away. A sick excitement churned in his bloodshot eyes.

"In those fifty years, I've eaten so many, many children wearing masks like that."

Sabito's pupils contracted.

"What are you talking about?"

"What am I talking about?" The Hand Demon's laughter suddenly rose in pitch, as shrill as nails scraping across an iron plate. "That wonderful teacher of yours, of course. That old bastard Urokodaki."

He raised his thickest arm and opened his palm upward, curling his five fingers one after another as though counting.

"The first was a timid boy. He cried for his teacher to save him. His mouth was still open when I twisted his head off."

Sabito clenched his teeth until they creaked.

"The second was a girl with braids. She ran pretty fast. Too bad my hands were faster."

The Hand Demon licked his lips. The tip of his tongue poked through his uneven teeth, coated in cloudy drool.

"The third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth-I remember them all perfectly. Every one of them called out the same name before they died."

He leaned his face a little closer and lowered his voice with a chilling intimacy.

"Master Urokodaki, save me."

Sabito's breathing fell completely out of rhythm.

"Shut up."

"The ninth was especially interesting. That child's Water Breathing was beautiful. He managed to cut me three times. Too bad he had no strength left after that. I pulled his limbs off one by one, and he screamed for a full quarter of an hour before he died."

"I said shut up."

"The tenth came with the ninth. Watching his friend's arms and legs get pulled off frightened him so badly he couldn't even hold his sword steady. His flesh was especially tender, and his bones were brittle. They crunched and crunched when I chewed."

The Hand Demon opened his fang-filled maw and made a series of chewing noises that brought bile rising in their throats.

"You two must be the twelfth and thirteenth."

Something seemed to ignite inside Sabito's head.

Eleven.

Before them, Master Urokodaki had already sent eleven disciples up this mountain. Eleven children wearing the same masks, all devoured by this thing.

Sabito did not know the faces beneath those masks. He had never heard their names.

But he knew they had been just like him, calling Urokodaki their master, training with their swords on Mount Sagiri, practicing Water Breathing beneath the moon.

Then they had been sent up this mountain and died.

"You pathetic coward." Sabito forced the words from the depths of his throat, his voice ragged beyond recognition.

The Hand Demon froze for a moment, then broke into an even wider grin.

"Oh? Are you talking about me?"

"Master Urokodaki locked you on this mountain for fifty years, and all you dare do is attack his disciples." Sabito's eyes reddened, his knuckles tightening one by one around the hilt. "You don't dare go down the mountain to find him. You don't dare face him head-on. All you do is stay here and eat children who haven't even grown up."

The Hand Demon's smile vanished.

"You're the pathetic one."

Sabito drove both feet against the ground. In that instant, he pushed Water Breathing to the fastest rhythm he had ever achieved in his fourteen years of life. The air seemed to burn as it rushed in and out of his lungs.

Sabito spun rapidly as he ran, using the centrifugal force of each rotation to drive Water Breathing to its limit. The phantom of an azure water dragon wrapped around his blade, and he hurled himself at the Hand Demon's neck with his accumulated power at its peak.

Tenth Form: Constant Flux.

This was his strongest strike, one he had practiced for two years and never once used in a real fight.

The blade bit into the Hand Demon's neck.

Sabito felt resistance-immense resistance, far beyond anything he had expected, as though he were chopping an old tree stump wrapped in three layers of iron.

Gritting his teeth, he poured every ounce of strength into the hilt. His feet gouged two deep trenches in the dirt.

The Nichirin Blade cut roughly two inches in.

Then it stuck.

"That tickles." The Hand Demon looked down at the wound still bleeding on his neck, and the corners of his mouth lifted again. "That's your strongest strike?"

Sabito desperately tried to force the blade another inch deeper, the muscles in his arms bulging to their limit.

It would not budge.

The Hand Demon raised his nearest arm, palm facing Sabito's side, and casually swatted at him as though swatting a fly.

The force of that slap sent Sabito flying sideways.

His body spun twice in midair before his back struck a tree trunk as thick as a bowl. The trunk snapped on impact.

The fox mask on his face shattered into three pieces at the moment of impact, its white-and-red fragments scattering across the muddy ground.

Sabito hit the ground, and a mouthful of blood tasting of rust surged into his mouth.

He braced his hands against the ground and tried to stand, his arms shaking uncontrollably.

"Sabito!"

Makomo darted in from the side, her blade flashing with the color of water as it slashed toward the Hand Demon's eyes.

The Hand Demon did not even turn his head. Three arms on his right side intercepted her at once, their palms closing together to trap Makomo's sword.

Makomo desperately tried to pull her blade free, but it would not come out.

A fourth arm reached up from below, its five fingers clamping around Makomo's waist.

A fifth coiled around her right leg.

A sixth wound around her neck.

"Makomo!" Sabito scrambled up from the ground, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth, and stumbled desperately forward.

The cluster of arms on the Hand Demon's other side spread open in an instant. Seven or eight thick, gray-white arms lashed out like hunting tentacles, wrapping Sabito tightly after he had taken only two steps.

The arms tightened.

Sabito heard his ribs creak beneath the crushing pressure, and another surge of blood filled his mouth.

"Be good and stay still." The Hand Demon lifted them both in front of him, his bloodshot eyes flicking between their young faces. "Which one should I eat first? Such a hard choice."

He opened his mouth.

That maw stretched wide enough to swallow a human head, rows upon rows of teeth inside it, saliva drawing out in thin strands.

Sabito struggled desperately, but the arms wrapped around him did not budge.

Makomo's face had already turned purple from the grip on her throat. Her Nichirin Blade had long since slipped from her hand.

The Hand Demon brought Sabito half an inch closer to his mouth.

Rotten breath washed over his face.

Then the wind stopped.

Sabito could have sworn that, in that instant, he could no longer even hear his own heartbeat.

It was as though something outside the forest had pressed pause. Falling leaves hung in midair, and every distant insect fell silent.

In their place came a chill that shot from the base of his spine all the way to the crown of his head.

That sensation was different from fear.

Fear was the body's instinctive recoil in the face of danger.

This was absolute submission rising from the depths of the soul before some higher-order existence far beyond any demon.

The Hand Demon stopped moving too.

His mouth, stretched back to his ears, froze where it was, still gaping open.

Slowly, inch by inch, his bloodshot eyes turned toward the darkness behind him.

Deep within the canopy, where the moonlight could not reach, something was making its way down.

Nineteen of the Hand Demon's twenty-three arms began trembling at the same moment.

It was not from cold. It was not from exhaustion.

The demon blood that had flowed through his body for fifty years instinctively wanted to flee before that presence.

"Wh... what is that?"

The Hand Demon's voice changed. Its cloying mockery had become a rasp, as though someone had seized him by the throat.

The arms wrapped around Sabito and Makomo did not loosen, but they stopped tightening, as though all his attention had been diverted elsewhere.

Sabito turned his head, peering through the gaps between the gray-white arms wrapped around him toward the place the Hand Demon was staring.

Someone stood on a horizontal branch at the lowest edge of the canopy.

Moonlight filtered through the leaves, revealing his outline.

His black uniform jacket was only half fastened, the other half draped over his shoulder and fluttering in the wind. His hands were in his pockets, his head tilted slightly, his posture as languid as someone who had been disturbed during an afternoon nap.

Sabito's lips moved.

"Yaha."

When that name left his mouth, it carried a tangle of emotions he could not even begin to explain.

Yaha stood on the branch with his eyelids lowered, sweeping his gaze down over the entire scene.

The Hand Demon's arms wrapped around them both, the blood at the corner of Sabito's mouth, Makomo's neck bruised purple by the strangling grip, the shattered fox mask scattered across the ground.

He looked for about two seconds.

Then his expression changed.

It was not anger.

Sabito had known Yaha for two years. He knew what the guy was like when he got angry: his tongue grew sharper, his movements lazier, and he used mockery like a weapon, stabbing straight into people's hearts.

This expression was nothing like that.

Yaha's features were calm. There was no curve to his lips, no crease between his brows.

But his eyes had changed color.

Deep within his pupils, a dark red glow slowly spread outward, ring by ring, as though something that had slept for a very long time had been awakened from the deepest depths.

Black markings crawled out from beneath his collar.

They climbed his neck, crossed his jawline, spread to his cheekbone, and finally covered half his face.

Those markings writhed beneath the moonlight as though alive.

At that moment, the temperature throughout the forest dropped another few degrees.