Yaha pressed his index and middle fingers together.
He flicked them casually toward the front of the train.
An incredibly fine, invisible slash swept along the edge of the metal roof.
Without a sound.
Outside the driver's cab.
Over a dozen thick tentacles had coiled around Inosuke's ankles and were dragging him toward the gap beneath the wheels. In an instant, they were severed at their roots.
Dense black, carbonized particles erupted from the cuts with a piercing hiss of corrosion.
The severed ends had barely begun to regenerate.
The fresh buds of flesh blackened and died, turning straight to ash that the rushing wind carried away.
The weight on Inosuke's legs, dangling outside the train, abruptly vanished.
He swore and drove both blades into the sheet metal for leverage.
With a flip, he rolled back into the driver's cab.
"Where'd that weird wind come from?"
Inosuke shook the sticky strands off his mask, two white puffs shooting from the boar's nostrils.
Beneath the floor at the front of the train.
Enmu, hidden inside the central blood vessels, went rigid.
He had sensed that slash.
It was neither the heat of Flame Breathing nor the sharpness of a Nichirin Blade, but a power that defied all reason.
Even the instinctive regeneration of a demon had been completely shut down in the severed tentacles.
Death spread back from the wounds, rotting everything in its path.
Muzan's warning before his departure instantly surfaced in Enmu's memory.
The monster who could summon a shrine and crush demonic regeneration into dust.
The thing on the roof was him!
Terror exploded through Enmu's demonic core.
The fleshy walls throughout the train under his control began frantically withdrawing, countless tentacles retreating into the blood vessels.
The assault inside the carriages faltered at once.
A massive opening appeared.
Amid repeatedly slitting his own throat between dreams and reality, Tanjiro keenly caught that moment of weakness.
He bit through the tip of his tongue, and the strong taste of blood tore the illusion apart.
This time, he was not dragged back in.
"Hinokami Kagura."
Tanjiro opened his eyes.
His pupils fixed on the enormous, violently pulsing neck vertebra beneath the floor at the front of the train.
Gripping his sword with both hands, he twisted his body into a full arc.
"Clear Blue Sky."
The crimson blade swept down, wreathed in spinning flames.
Fast and heavy.
Inosuke's twin blades struck from either side at the same time.
Their serrated edges shredded the thin tendrils blocking the way, clearing the final opening for Tanjiro.
The blade slammed into the floor, cutting through layer after layer of flesh.
It struck the very core of that neck vertebra.
With a muffled crack, the vertebra was severed clean through.
Enmu let out an agonized shriek.
His voice seeped from every crack in the carriage walls.
He had been beheaded, but he did not die immediately.
The immense body of the train began to twist violently.
The shell, pieced together from hundreds of tons of steel and flesh, thrashed like a dying, malformed beast.
He meant to take all two hundred sleeping passengers down with him.
The heavy carriages twisted off the rails.
The metal wheels screeched, sending sparks flying.
The foremost carriage pitched high into the air.
Momentum carried hundreds of tons of weight crashing over to one side.
The passengers inside were still asleep, oblivious.
In another second, all of them would be crushed to pulp beneath that tangle of steel.
Rengoku forced himself steady in the third carriage.
His golden pupils sharply contracted.
He drove power into his legs, about to swing against the violent centrifugal force and unleash a sword technique to cushion the entire train's fall, only to realize he was already too late.
On the roof.
Yaha stood on the severely tilted sheet metal.
The angle beneath his feet grew steeper and steeper, yet he remained motionless, as though nailed in place.
He looked down at the rolling carriages.
His eyes were full of disgust as he watched the passengers inside with their eyes rolled back.
"If all these ants die, who knows how much the Old Man will nag me."
At last, he pulled his other hand out of his trouser pocket.
"Filthy."
Yaha spread his fingers slightly.
Ancient, jet-black cursed markings crawled out from beneath his collar, swiftly climbing his neck and the side of his face.
Cursed Technique: Dismantle spread like an enormous invisible net.
It descended over the entire toppling train.
A dense chorus of cuts, precise to the millimeter, rang out simultaneously from the front of the train to the rear.
All the demonic flesh clinging to the train, inside and out.
Those tumors, blood vessels, and still-twitching remnants of tentacles were shaved into invisible powder in an instant.
The purplish-black blood did not even have time to splatter before the friction of cursed energy vaporized it completely.
Yet the inner steel walls of the carriages and the frames of the seats.
And the coarse cloth clothes on the sleeping passengers.
Were left without even the faintest scratch.
Not a single hair was lost among the two hundred civilians.
Nor did anyone notice that, even as it cut, the invisible net of cursed energy quietly supported the bottoms of the overturning carriages.
It dissipated the terrifying impact of hundreds of tons of falling steel.
The train was completely freed from the pull of the tentacles and Enmu's control.
Amid drifting clouds of black ash.
The heavy carriages slid smoothly with their momentum into a patch of overgrown ground beside the rails.
Their wheels sank into the soil, and they slowly came to a halt.
A deathly silence fell over everything.
Someone kicked a carriage door open from inside.
Dragging Inosuke, Tanjiro crawled out of the front of the train, covered in dirt and dust.
He glanced back.
The dark red flesh that had been writhing madly inside and outside the carriages had all turned to black ash, flaking away in the wind.
Not a single intact scrap of flesh remained of Enmu.
Tanjiro's Adam's apple bobbed. He could not utter a word.
The neck vertebra he had severed only after giving everything he had in battle.
Had been nothing more than a casual cleanup to that man in black.
The mortal peril threatening the entire train-that man really had resolved it with a mere flick of his fingers.
For once, Inosuke did not shout either.
His eyes beneath the boar mask remained fixed on the tall, slender figure on the roof, and even his breathing grew quieter.
Rengoku emerged from a rear carriage, protecting Zenitsu and the Wooden Box.
His gaze swept over the unharmed passengers scattered across the ground, gulping down air.
He rested one hand on his sword hilt.
He had witnessed such a feat once in Blue Stone Town: destroying countless demons without harming a single person.
Yet seeing it again still left the proud Flame Hashira reeling, as though everything he understood had been utterly crushed.
Rengoku slowly raised his head.
He looked toward the figure standing with both hands in his pockets on the slanted roof.
His lips parted, and he was about to offer his thanks.
Just then.
At the far edge of the horizon, a blinding streak of dark red fire tore straight through the night.
A savage blast of wind pressure that froze everyone's blood.
Came crashing down from above the distant woods with a piercing sonic boom.
The ground shook violently.
Even the steel wreckage of the train groaned beneath the unbearable pressure.
Rengoku's words caught in his throat.
He spun around.
His crimson Nichirin Blade flashed from its sheath, his golden pupils locking onto the direction of the impact.
Tanjiro felt as though an invisible sledgehammer had struck his chest. His breathing stopped instantly.
The pressure left Inosuke's legs trembling, and he nearly lost his grip on both swords.
It was a terrifying presence unlike anything they had ever felt.
Compared with Enmu, it was like a dragon looking down on ants.
On the roof.
Yaha slowly raised his head and looked toward the mass of blue fire that had struck the ground.
His half-lowered eyelids finally lifted.
Deep within his pitch-black pupils, a brutal crimson rose inch by inch.
The ring finger of his right hand began twitching uncontrollably again.
A burning sting seeped through the gaps between his bones.
This human shell really was nearing the limit of what it could contain.
Yaha licked the corner of his mouth.
A trace of sick excitement crept into the smile on his face.
"Finally."
The true nightmare had arrived.
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