Akaza's Annihilation Type stopped.
A blue storm of fighting spirit spilled through every gap between his knuckles.
Its power was so immense that the entire stretch of wild grass trembled, and the shock waves hurled stones into the air.
Yet his fist did not budge.
Five pale fingers gripped the front of Akaza's fist.
The knuckles bent slightly, bone grinding against bone with a dull scrape.
There was no stance, no motion to gather strength. It was as casual as picking up a fallen pebble by the roadside.
A shock wave exploded outward in a fan from where fist met palm.
Within thirty meters, the turf tore free by its roots, and the soil surged like waves.
The wreckage of a steel carriage slid two meters across the ground with a teeth-grating screech.
Rengoku knelt three paces behind Yaha.
The blast swept over his head, plastering his disheveled hair against his forehead and drying the blood covering his body.
Not a single strand of his hair broke.
Akaza's golden pupils abruptly contracted.
He tried to pull his fist back.
The muscle fibers in his right arm twisted to their limit. His blue demon markings darkened almost to black, and his bones bulged and warped beneath his skin.
His fist did not move even half an inch.
He pushed harder.
Veins bulged along his entire right arm, and a succession of snapping tendons sounded beneath his skin.
Upper Rank Three drove his body to its absolute limit.
Still, his fist did not budge.
That pale hand was like a steel floodgate welded to its foundations.
Yaha tilted his head.
His scarlet eyes swept down over Akaza's flushed face, his struggling right arm, and the veins bulging at his temples.
Then he flicked his wrist.
The motion was light, like shaking a drop of water off his finger.
Akaza's body, weighing hundreds of pounds, left the ground.
He went tumbling through the air at an initial speed approaching the speed of sound.
Heaven and earth inverted in his vision, and the wind from his own hurtling body battered his eardrums until they rang.
The first ancient tree snapped at its waist, its trunk exploding into a cloud of splinters.
The second.
The third.
Akaza's back finally slammed into the roots of a fourth ancient tree, driving both him and the tree half a meter into the mud.
The canopy shook violently, and dead leaves rained down.
Yaha withdrew his hand and shook his fingers.
He turned around.
Kyojuro Rengoku was still kneeling in the mud.
The earlier relentless close-quarters fighting had completely caved in his left ribs, and splintered bones had punctured his internal organs.
Blood poured from the corners of his mouth and his nostrils, soaking the earth beneath him into dark brown sludge.
Blood had already crusted over his left eye.
The pupil of his remaining right eye was losing focus, and his breathing was shallow and irregular.
He still clutched his Nichirin Blade, its tip planted in the mud. That support alone kept him from falling.
Yaha walked over.
He did not crouch, did not slow his steps, and did not even look directly at Rengoku's blood-covered face.
He simply raised his right hand and slapped Rengoku's collapsed left ribs.
Rengoku's body arched violently.
A mouthful of dark red clotted blood erupted from deep in his throat, steaming as it splashed onto the mud.
What little awareness remained in his eyes told him that the slap had struck his shattered organs. By all logic, he should have died that very second.
Dark red light poured from Yaha's palm.
Cursed energy flooded into Rengoku's abdominal cavity.
It was bitterly cold, carrying an indescribable, sickly-sweet bloody scent.
Rengoku heard sounds coming from inside his own body.
Crack.
His shattered seventh rib reconnected.
Crack, crack.
The eighth. The ninth.
Driven by the cursed energy, the broken ends aligned, interlocked, and fused solid.
His punctured lung tissue knitted smoothly together within three seconds.
On the surfaces of his ruptured spleen and liver, new tissue surged forth at a visible speed, sealing the wounds layer by layer from the inside out.
The torn, exposed flesh contracted and closed.
Rengoku lowered his head to look at the left side of his abdomen.
The chest that had been caved in and deformed a second earlier now bore only a layer of pale pink new skin.
Not even a scar remained.
Yaha pulled his hand back and wiped it on his trouser leg.
"Who gave you permission to die?"
His voice was as cold as shards of ice, his tone brimming with undisguised disgust.
"I just don't want the Old Man nagging me if you die here."
Yaha turned his head, glancing at Rengoku from the corner of his eye.
"Now get the hell out of my way and watch."
Deep in his mind, an icy mechanical voice sounded right on cue.
Ding.
[Displayed extreme arrogance and nastiness while saving someone, perfectly embodying the essence of a villain.] [Roleplay level +3%.] [Current roleplay level: 56.5%.]
The corner of Yaha's mouth tugged upward.
In the distance, Tanjiro stood with his mouth half-open, his sword hand hanging at his side, his entire body seemingly frozen.
He had witnessed everything.
Akaza's Annihilation Type, powerful enough to blast a train into scrap metal, had been stopped by Yaha with one hand.
Upper Rank Three, weighing hundreds of pounds, had been flung away like garbage, smashing through three trees.
Then a slap to Rengoku's fatal wound. Three seconds.
The Flame Hashira, who had just been coughing blood and waiting to die, was now standing.
His breathing was steady, his eyes clear, and even his back had straightened.
For once, Inosuke did not utter a word.
Beneath his boar mask, his mouth was clamped shut. His legs were still shaking, but no longer because of Akaza.
A dull crack of breaking wood came from the dense forest.
Akaza rose from the crater at the ancient tree's roots and shook the splinters from his shoulders.
His spine had snapped in two places during the impact, but it had already reconnected.
Blue demon markings reappeared over his newly grown muscles.
He stared at Yaha, and the thing burning in his golden pupils changed.
It was no longer the desire to fight.
It was hunger.
"Have you reached the supreme territory too?"
Akaza's voice was low and trembling.
He stamped both feet down heavily, blasting the muddy ground apart.
A blue, snowflake-shaped formation rapidly spread from beneath his feet, covering ten meters of ground around him.
Destructive Death, Compass Needle.
The needle within the formation began to turn, attempting to detect the flow of Yaha's fighting spirit and lock onto his attack trajectories.
The needle completed one rotation.
Then a second.
It stopped.
Akaza's expression froze.
The Compass Needle's feedback was blank.
A pure, absolute blank, without the slightest fluctuation.
Yaha had no fighting spirit, no killing intent, none of the aura fluctuations that belonged to a human martial artist.
He stood there like a hollow shell with its organs scooped out, nothing inside him but a black hole of emptiness.
The Compass Needle could read nothing.
The needle began to tremble.
The blue lines of light flickered, like a signal source suffering interference.
Akaza's pupils widened.
He retreated half a step.
In all his hundreds of years, this was the first time Akaza had ever stepped back in battle.
Yaha slipped both hands back into his pockets.
The black cursed markings on his neck writhed upward, creeping past his jaw and spreading along his cheekbones to the corners of his eyes.
His scarlet eyes locked onto Akaza.
"A beast's instinct, fighting by sensing emotions."
Yaha's voice was soft and slow, every word carrying a languid disdain that crushed everything beneath it.
"Since those eyes of yours are blind, I might as well dig them out for you."
Before he finished speaking.
A piercing tearing sound rang out of thin air.
Akaza's Compass Needle gave no warning.
The needle within the formation did not even have time to turn half a notch.
But his centuries of combat instinct made him turn his head at that instant.
Half his left ear came off.
Black smoke hissed from the smooth cut.
New tissue had barely emerged before it blackened, died, and carbonized into ash that the night wind swept away.
Akaza clamped a hand over the severed surface of his ear.
The demon blood seeping between his fingers touched the edge of the cut and was instantly burned into char by an invisible force.
He looked up in horror.
"What sorcery did you use?"
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