Akaza pressed his fingers against the severed edge of his left ear.
Demon blood seeped between his fingers. It should have grown a complete set of cartilage, flesh, and skin within half a second. This was an Upper Rank's body. The law of regeneration had never failed him in hundreds of years, engraved in the instincts of every cell.
Buds of flesh emerged.
Then they blackened.
Carbonized particles flaked from the edge of the wound, one by one, and scattered on the night wind. As the new tissue touched the invisible power lingering there, it hissed with black smoke like a drop of water splashed onto red-hot iron. Even the splintered bone crumbled into ash.
Akaza's fingers froze in midair.
He tried again. He concentrated a richer flow of demon blood into the wound, squeezing every drop of the purest blood Muzan had bestowed upon him to force the missing flesh back into place. The tissue grew half an inch, then died off in a sheet, carbonizing even faster than before.
What had burned away would not come back.
Akaza's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
He had lived for hundreds of years. Any injury short of decapitation was nothing more than a warm-up for his muscles. Severed arms could regrow. Internal organs could reconstruct themselves. Even if the Flame Hashira cleaved him in two, he could piece himself back together in the blink of an eye.
But this cut was different.
It was not destroying his flesh. It was erasing something deeper. The missing half of his ear seemed to have been stripped from the world along with every trace that it had ever existed.
A law.
The word sprang into Akaza's mind.
Lord Muzan had told him before he set out. That man possessed a power that could directly sever a demon's law of regeneration. The Lower Ranks had not even left ashes behind when they faced him.
Akaza swallowed. His throat was dry, and the sweet, metallic tang of demon blood turned his stomach.
Fear crawled up from the base of his spine. Cold as a slick, wet snake, it coiled around his spinal cord and bored toward his brainstem.
Three steps away, Yaha stood with both hands in his pockets, his posture exactly as it had been before.
As though the attack that had severed half an ear from a distance had been no more than a sneeze to him.
Akaza stared at him.
The fear reached his chest. His heart hammered, and a chill wrapped around his demon core. The sensation was utterly foreign. For hundreds of years, Akaza had never known what fear tasted like. He pursued the strong and craved battle. Death was the highest praise he could receive.
But the thing before him had nothing to do with being "strong."
The strong had killing intent, fighting spirit, emotional fluctuations his Compass Needle could detect. Yet this man had nothing. When the Compass Needle swept over him, it found only an emptiness that made his scalp crawl.
It was like reaching into a bottomless black abyss.
You knew something was inside, but you could never know at which second it would bite off your fingers.
The fear reached his throat.
Then Akaza swallowed it back down.
He stamped his foot hard. The muddy ground burst apart, scattering stones. Blue demonic markings surged from his ankles to his shoulders, each line as deep as a blade carved into bone.
If the Compass Needle couldn't read him, then he wouldn't use it.
He hadn't forged centuries of martial skill through fortune-telling. If his fists couldn't kill something, he would hit it with more fists.
Akaza vanished.
The blue afterimage he left behind had yet to disperse when his body appeared on Yaha's left.
Destructive Death: Disorder.
The first punch drove toward his temple.
Yaha tilted his head two inches to the right. The wind of the punch skimmed his temple, tearing away a few strands of hair.
The second punch followed close behind. A straight punch became an uppercut, tracing a tight arc upward toward his jaw.
Yaha leaned his upper body back slightly. The knuckles swept past three centimeters in front of his chin, and the gust they stirred flipped his collar.
The third punch. The fourth. The fifth.
Akaza unleashed every ounce of hand-to-hand skill he had honed to perfection over hundreds of years. Blue fists rained down, filling every inch of space around Yaha. High, middle, low. No blind spots, no gaps. Every punch carried enough force to turn steel into crumpled paper.
Yaha kept both hands in his pockets.
His body made minuscule shifts.
It was less like dodging and more like his body was breathing on its own. A slight tilt of his shoulder, a half-inch twist of his hips, the soles of his feet brushing shallow arcs into the mud. Each movement displaced him by only a few centimeters, just enough for the punches to skim past his skin.
The precision was sickening.
Akaza's punches came faster still. Blue afterimages traced dense arcs between them. Every strike changed its point of impact, its angle vicious, its force greater. He used centuries of accumulated combat experience to cover every possible escape route.
Yet the man seemed to be standing at the very center of the storm.
Everything around him was turned upside down, while the little patch of mud beneath his feet remained undisturbed.
In the distance, Tanjiro's mouth fell open.
What was he seeing? A man with his hands in his pockets, taking a stroll amid Upper Rank Three's storm of fists. Yes, a stroll. Like he was wandering around his own yard, casually avoiding a few mosquitoes flying at his face.
Beneath his boar mask, Inosuke kept his mouth tightly shut.
Rengoku's grip on his sword hilt loosened, then tightened again. Yaha had just pulled him back from the brink of death. His body was completely unharmed, but his heart was still pounding. He could follow the paths of Akaza's punches and gauge the destructive force of each one.
Any one of those punches would have been enough to kill a Hashira-level swordsman on the spot.
Yaha dodged as though he were dancing.
The corner of Akaza's eye twitched.
He had already thrown more than two hundred punches, at three times the speed he normally used against a Hashira. Every strike drew on the full physical power of an Upper Rank.
Not a single punch had touched him.
He had not even grazed the knuckles of those hands tucked in his pockets.
Yaha yawned.
That gesture nearly burned through the last of Akaza's reason. He let out a low roar, compressing all the demon blood in his body into his right leg in an instant.
Crushing Style: Ten Thousand Leaves Flashing Willow.
His right leg whipped through an enormous arc toward Yaha's right ribs. Its speed surpassed Akaza's own limits, and the air ahead of his foot burst into a layer of white mist.
Yaha stopped moving.
He did not dodge.
Akaza had no time to wonder why. The instant the top of his foot struck Yaha's right ribs, a crisp crack of breaking bone rang through the night.
The kick knocked Yaha three steps sideways. His military boots dragged two deep grooves through the mud. A thin line of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth.
Akaza landed, his blue demonic markings still pulsing fiercely.
"Mr. Yaha-"
Rengoku's voice came from behind. His golden pupils abruptly contracted, and his hand was already on his sword hilt. Tanjiro tightened his grip on his Nichirin Blade as well, his face deathly pale.
The corner of Akaza's mouth lifted.
He had finally torn through this monster's skin. Human flesh had its limits after all. He had dodged two hundred blows through speed, but the two hundred and first had landed.
"The human body-" He had only just begun.
Yaha raised a hand and wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.
He glanced down at his right ribs. The skin there had caved in, its shape distorted.
A sound came from inside his body.
Crack.
The first broken rib joined back together. Driven by cursed energy, the splintered ends aligned and locked into place.
Crack, crack.
The second, then the third. The successive sounds of bones reconnecting were like someone tightening a few loose screws inside Yaha's body.
The sunken skin rose back into place. Within half a second, the blood that had seeped from the fractures evaporated completely, leaving not even a stain on his clothes.
The rest of Akaza's sentence lodged in his throat.
Yaha raised his scarlet eyes. He spat a mouthful of bloody saliva onto the ground and ground it beneath his boot.
"You hit like a girl."
He struck.
His right knee rose, his body lunged forward, and his knee slammed toward Akaza's chest.
He moved too fast for the air to get out of his way. A shrill sonic boom erupted between them.
Akaza's breastbone and three rows of ribs folded inward at once. It was as though a speeding train had struck him head-on. His feet left the ground, his chest caving into a horrific curve. His spine snapped inside him with a dull crack.
He was blasted back twenty meters, his heels plowing two deep furrows through the ground. By the time his legs stopped his retreat, his collapsed chest had already swelled back into shape under the influence of his demon blood.
But the missing half of his left ear was still hissing with black smoke.
Yaha slipped his hand back into his pocket.
He weighed his options.
The targeted slashes of Cursed Technique: Dismantle were precise enough to carve this demon into a grid of chunks. But Akaza's animal instincts were too keen. Even with his Compass Needle rendered useless, centuries of muscle memory still let him shift his vital points out of the way at the last instant. One or two cuts were no problem, but completely finishing an Upper Rank would require repeated pursuit. It would waste too much time.
The ring finger of his right hand began to grow faintly hot again.
This body's overload warnings were becoming more frequent.
A glaring red panel appeared across his vision.
[The target's faith in his martial path has been detected as exceptionally strong.] [Host, overwhelm him through absolute superiority in attributes and completely burn away the ultimate techniques he takes pride in to unlock: Open (Flame Arrow).]
Yaha glanced at the line of text.
Then he looked at Akaza twenty meters away, burning through his blood as he crossed his fists and gathered power. Blue fighting spirit surged from the demon's body, crushing the mud beneath his feet until it burst apart in all directions.
Overwhelm him through absolute superiority in attributes.
Burn through his faith in his martial path.
Yaha stopped moving entirely.
The slashing cursed energy lingering at his fingertips dispersed. The black Cursed Markings receded half an inch from the back of his hand, then climbed back up in a deeper shade.
He opened his right hand.
Palm up.
A dark red flame sprang into existence out of thin air.
It gave off no heat. Yet the surrounding air visibly warped at that same instant. Like distant scenery viewed across the surface of a desert, everything shimmered.
Yaha's lips curled into a savage grin.
"Playing with fists is boring. Let me show you a magic trick."
Before you continue