Who Gave You the Guts to Touch One of Mine?

Yaha headed north along the dirt path through the woods.

His pace remained leisurely, his hands still tucked into his pockets. His black uniform jacket hung open, snapping in the mountain wind.

After roughly an hour, darkness had fallen completely.

Heavy clouds swallowed the moon, leaving only a hazy gray veil over the mountain path. The air grew damp, and the smell of rotting leaves mingled with the scent of earth.

Yaha yawned.

A fork lay ahead. The left path led toward Mount Sagiri, while the right wound up along the ridge and vanished into the pitch-black woods.

Mount Natagumo lay to the right.

He stopped.

The mountain wind poured out of the woods on his right, carrying a stench of blood so thick it turned the stomach. This was not the blood of one or two corpses, but a dozen, perhaps more. Blood had seeped into the soil, and the nighttime damp drew its smell back out, mingled with another nauseating stench.

The scent of Muzan's blood.

And its concentration was far from low.

Yaha's half-lidded eyes lifted slightly.

A Lower Rank.

He stepped onto the mountain path to the right.

The farther he climbed, the stranger the scenery became. Grayish-white threads began to shroud the trees on either side of the path. Fine as hair yet tough as steel wire, they stretched taut between the trunks, gleaming cold and pale in the moonlight.

Yaha reached out to brush aside a strand of spider silk blocking his way.

The instant his fingertip touched it, the thread gave a faint hiss and was severed by an invisible force. The fibers at the cut rapidly blackened and charred.

He continued without even looking at the broken thread.

He walked another hundred meters or so.

The woods ended.

An open hollow in the mountains appeared before him.

For the first time, Yaha truly came to a halt.

Countless grayish-white threads wove an enormous web above the hollow. More than a dozen corpses hung from it.

Swordsmen of the Demon Slayer Corps.

They all wore black uniforms, the word "Destroy" on their backs glaring in the moonlight. Some had their necks severed by the threads, their heads lolling to one side; others had been twisted into impossible angles, their limbs folded grotesquely. Still others had their chests forced open from within by threads, their organs scooped out and replaced with spider silk, like human-shaped kites.

Their deaths had been horrific.

Yaha swept an expressionless glance over them.

Don't know them. Not a single one.

Whether these people lived or died had nothing whatsoever to do with him. He could not even be bothered to work out which cultivator had trained them.

He withdrew his gaze, ready to go around the hollow.

Then he smelled it.

An exceedingly faint trace of a scent amid the blood stench blanketing the mountain.

It came and went like a guttering candle in the wind, almost completely drowned out by the surrounding stink.

But Yaha's nose would not mistake it.

It was the scent of Water Breathing.

More precisely, Giyu Tomioka's Water Breathing. Slow and deep, with extremely long intervals between breaths. Yaha had listened to that distinct, almost uncomfortable breathing rhythm for two years on Mount Sagiri.

Yaha's feet rooted to the spot.

He drew another deep breath.

The scent drifted from deep within the woods north of the hollow, at least several hundred meters away.

Giyu's breathing was faint and intermittent. The gaps between breaths kept growing longer, like the final struggles of a drowning man. The smell of blood was cloyingly thick. He had clearly lost a great deal of it.

He's dying.

Yaha's perpetually lazy, dead-fish eyes snapped wide open.

Utterly savage crimson instantly swallowed his pitch-black pupils. Black curse markings surged from beneath his collar like living things, racing up his neck and cheeks, tracing chilling patterns across half his face. His nails lengthened, their tips gleaming cold as metal.

The air temperature plummeted.

The rock beneath his feet gave a muffled crack. Web-like fissures burst outward from where he stood. The shock wave flung loose stones into the surrounding trees.

"You dared touch one of mine."

The words squeezed out between his teeth. There was no furious roar, no murderous howl, only a calm colder than the deepest winter-absolute zero.

The next second, he vanished.

His military boots crushed the rock beneath him as he became a black blur that tore through the air. The shock wave snapped trees along his route, and whole swaths of grayish-white spider silk shattered and charred in his wake. Each footfall gouged a pit half a meter deep into the ground, as though a meteor had plowed through it.

Deep in the woods.

Giyu knelt on one knee in the mud.

To sever the threads controlling dozens of lower-ranking swordsmen behind him and cover their retreat, he had fought relentlessly in this poison miasma for hours. With his strength severely depleted, this Lower Rank had ambushed and trapped him, leaving his uniform shredded into strips. More than a dozen hair-thin wounds cut deep enough to expose bone. Blood streamed from them, collecting in a small dark-red puddle in the mud beside his feet.

His Nichirin Blade was planted in the ground for support, a small section of its blade chipped away, leaving a jagged break.

A white-haired demon boy stood before him.

Chalk-white skin, bloodless lips. The stark characters for "Lower Five" were etched into his eyes. Crimson threads wrapped his body, stretched taut like sinews growing out of his flesh.

Lower Rank Five, Rui.

Rui tilted his head, studying the blood-soaked human before him as though inspecting a toy about to break.

"I already told you." Rui's voice held no warmth. "Become my family, or die."

Giyu gritted his teeth and pulled his sword from the ground.

His arm shook violently. Not from fear, but because his muscles had gone into full spasms. The blood lost through his many wounds had left his hands and feet growing numb.

But he still raised his sword.

"I won't be... family to any creature."

His sword tip pointed at Rui.

Not even the faintest phantom stream of blue water could form along the blade.

Rui watched him sway on the verge of collapse, his eyes utterly unmoved.

"Then become fertilizer."

He sharply spread his hands.

Blood Demon Art: Slaughterous Eye Cage.

Countless crimson threads shot from between his fingers, weaving an inescapable killing net in midair. Every strand stretched taut to its limit, gleaming with an edge sharp enough to slice through metal and jade. The threads screamed as they scraped through the air at high speed.

The net descended over Giyu's head.

Giyu clenched his teeth and tried to unleash one last Dead Calm.

But his arm no longer obeyed him. Halfway through raising the sword, his wrist gave out, and the blade slipped from his hand into the mud.

He watched the enormous red net descend, blotting out everything above him.

It's over.

Those were the last words to flash through Giyu's mind.

At that critical instant, with the crimson threads less than a foot above his head.

A black shadow burst from deep within the woods.

It was too fast. Too fast for the air to move aside, too fast for light to reflect, too fast for even Rui's demon eyes, enhanced hundreds of times over, to catch its full trajectory.

Boom!

The ground exploded.

A crater more than three meters across erupted between Giyu and Rui. The shock wave hurled shattered rocks over ten meters into the air, and they crashed down, breaking an entire row of trees.

Amid the swirling dust, a hand reached up from the bottom of the crater.

Its five fingers were slightly spread, its palm facing upward.

The countless crimson threads, sharp enough to shred steel, all stopped the moment they touched the air three inches around that palm.

It was as though some invisible, absolute domain had forcibly frozen them in place.

Then they snapped, one after another.

Without a sound.

Faint sizzling rose from the severed ends as they rapidly blackened and charred, turning into lifeless ash that drifted down through the air.

Rui's pupils shrank sharply into two black dots.

His Blood Demon Art, his prized "Strongest Thread," was being destroyed strand by strand by some incomprehensible power, as easily as snapping ordinary spider silk.

The dust cleared.

A boy stood in the center of the crater.

His black uniform jacket hung open. Black curse markings covered half his face, writhing like living things in the moonlight. Eyes of pitch-black shot through with savage crimson locked onto Rui.

There was no anger in that gaze.

Only the pure disgust of someone watching a bug crawl onto his dining table.

Yaha did not turn around.

But he spoke.

"Giyu."

His voice echoed through the deathly silent mountain woods, so calm it made the skin crawl.

"That lousy Dead Calm of yours can't even cut a hair. Why bother raising your sword?"

Kneeling in the mud, Giyu looked up at the black-clad figure with his back to him.

His lips moved, but no sound emerged.

Yaha finally turned his head.

His crimson eyes swept over Giyu. Drenched in blood, ribs broken, unable even to hold his sword. A complete wreck.

One corner of Yaha's mouth twisted.

"Pathetic."

Just one word.

Then he turned his gaze forward again.

Toward the chalk-faced Lower Rank Five.

"Your name is Rui."

Yaha's voice was soft.

"Lower Rank Five."

"Yes."

Rui instinctively took a step back. His body trembled. Not from the cold, but because the aura pouring from this boy was crushing every drop of Muzan's blood within him, his instincts screaming wildly at him to run.

Yaha took a step forward.

His military boot landed on the broken stones with a dull crunch.

"Know where the last Lower Rank who strutted around in front of me is now?"

He raised his right hand.

His index and middle fingers pressed together.

"Not even ashes are left of him."