The dark red flame flickered twice in Yaha's palm.
There was no heat. The air around him was actually a little colder than before he lit it. But something had gone wrong with the space around that flame. As though seen through a sheet of melting glass, every line twisted and warped.
Kyojuro Rengoku stood twenty meters away. His hand rested on his sword hilt, his entire body frozen.
As the Flame Hashira, he had spent his whole life working with fire. Every form of Flame Breathing embodied an understanding and application of flame. He could sense the temperature and movement of any real flame within a hundred meters.
But he could not read that thing.
There was no burning sensation on his skin, no scorched smell in the air, and the red light reaching his eyes was not blinding. There were no physical signals at all. Yet Rengoku's heart clenched violently. A voice screamed deep within his soul.
That was not fire.
It was something more fundamental than fire, wearing fire's shell.
Akaza saw the flame too.
His feet were still planted on the snowflake pattern of Compass Needle. The breastbone Yaha had shattered with his knee had already regrown, and blue demon markings slowly emerged across the fresh flesh. The severed edge of his half-missing left ear still smoked black.
Compass Needle began to spin.
It was not the normal rotation of tracking a target. It was twitching. Like a compass needle disrupted by a magnet, it jerked this way and that, completely losing its bearings.
Akaza looked down at the pattern beneath his feet. Its blue light flickered violently, and the edges of its lines began to fracture like the crazed glaze on overfired pottery.
Compass Needle sensed the direction of fighting spirit. The intent to strike, the intent to kill, the will to fight-the emotional currents every living being released in combat could all be captured, located, and predicted.
But the power emanating from that thing in Yaha's palm had no direction.
It simply existed.
Just as the sun could scorch the earth without aiming at anything, that dark red flame did not need to be directed at anyone. Its very existence was destruction.
The needle spun madly three final times.
Crack.
A main fissure split the blue snowflake pattern from its center. Dozens of branching cracks then shot outward from it. The entire Compass Needle shattered beneath Akaza's feet. Blue motes scattered through the air like fireflies, then went dark.
Akaza's face twitched.
Hundreds of years.
Over those hundreds of years, he had encountered all kinds of powerful opponents. Swordsmen, spearmen, fist fighters, practitioners of Breathing Styles. Each attacked differently, but they all shared one thing-they fought with emotion.
Compass Needle had never failed.
Even against that swordsman Muzan himself had feared all those years ago, Compass Needle had at least been able to read some of his intentions. Yet the monster before him had ground the sensory system he depended on for survival straight into dust.
A low hiss rolled from Akaza's throat.
It was not anger. It was a cornered beast twisting the last shred of survival instinct in its spine into killing intent.
He began compressing his blood.
The demon blood Muzan had bestowed on him boiled inside his body. Starting at his demon core, deep blue energy poured along his meridians into his limbs. Every muscle fiber stretched to its limit. His blue demon markings darkened almost to black, crawling from his neck all the way to his fingertips.
The ground began to shake.
It was not the vibration of his footsteps. The energy spilling from Akaza's body crushed the surrounding earth. Within five meters of him, the entire surface sank by half a palm's depth. An invisible aura pushed loose stones outward, and wild grass snapped at its roots.
Deep blue fighting spirit surged into the sky. Its glow shone against the night, staining half the clouds blue.
Destructive Death, Annihilation Type, Final.
Akaza crossed his fists before his chest. In the gap between his knuckles, he compressed everything he had accumulated over hundreds of years of martial arts. Blue light seeped between his fists, too dazzling to look at directly.
This was his trump card. For this moment, he had compressed even the last drop of Muzan's blood in his demon core into it.
Watching that mass of blue light from afar, Tanjiro stopped breathing. Inosuke's two swords were planted in the ground, and his arms shook so badly that the hilts rattled.
Yaha did not interrupt him.
The dark red flame still danced in his palm. Yaha simply stood there, head tilted, watching Akaza build his aura higher and higher.
His gaze was that of someone watching a street monkey show.
In his mind, the System Panel flashed.
Ding.
[You watched a weakling's desperate struggle without intervening, displaying the composure of the supreme. Roleplay level +1%. Current roleplay level: 57.5%.]
Yaha glanced at the panel and ignored it.
His attention settled on his right wrist. Beneath the skin on the back of the hand holding the flame, a capillary had burst. A hair-thin trickle of blood seeped through the creases of his skin, only to be evaporated by dark red cursed energy.
An overload warning from his human shell.
He frowned slightly. Finish this quickly.
Akaza finished gathering his power.
He raised his head. Deep blue fighting spirit had already stained his golden pupils indigo. His fists slowly parted before his chest, and the destructive energy compressed to its limit between them became a suit of blue armor covering his entire body.
He looked like a meteor about to strike the ground.
He stepped forward.
The ground did not shatter. It simply ceased to exist. Akaza left a two-meter-deep crater where he launched himself, its smooth walls crushed by pure force into hard-packed earth almost as reflective as a mirror.
His blue afterimage stretched into a twenty-meter trail. His speed tore the air in two, and with a muffled crack, a belated sonic boom exploded behind him.
Akaza opened his mouth wide and shouted something.
Yaha did not listen.
He saw only what lay deepest within that demon's eyes. Not killing intent, not fear, but an emotion more primal than either.
It was defiance.
Fists honed over hundreds of years, convictions forged over hundreds of years, had been driven to their limit by someone who could not even be bothered to take his hands out of his pockets.
Yaha spoke.
"You've trained those fists for hundreds of years."
His voice was quiet, but Akaza heard it perfectly. Every word stabbed into his eardrums like a needle.
"What can they do besides break a few bones?"
Akaza's face twisted.
At that same moment, the dark red flame in Yaha's palm collapsed.
It did not spread or swell. As though gripped by an invisible hand, the flame was brutally compressed. It shrank to a point no larger than his thumbnail, its color turning from dark red to deep red, then to a crimson so dark it was almost black.
The air around that point vanished outright. It had not been burned away. Space itself developed a visible depression, like a sheet of paper indented by a pencil tip.
A second after the flame collapsed to its limit, Yaha loosely curled his left hand and pulled it to his side.
A bow.
Dark red cursed energy traced an arc between his left hand and his right shoulder. The bow's shape was so ancient it belonged to no era. Yaha pinched the utterly compressed ember between his right index and middle fingers and set it against the bowstring.
An arrow took shape.
Dark red light extended backward from its tip, forming a flaming shaft nearly two feet long against the bowstring. Black cursed energy churned at the ends of its fletching, like ink spreading through water.
Akaza saw the arrow as he charged.
His scalp went numb from the back of his head to the space between his brows. A primal alarm rang through his spine. Something older than Compass Needle warned him that once this arrow was loosed, dodging in any direction would be useless.
Because this arrow was not aimed at him.
It was aimed at the space he occupied.
But he could no longer stop. All the power of Annihilation Type poured into his fists as his body hurtled forward at several times the speed of sound, his feet leaving a chain of deep craters in the ground. Turning back would mean blowing himself apart.
Akaza chose the only thing he could do.
Drive his fists straight into it.
Yaha released the bowstring.
The movement of his two fingers was gentle, like flicking a speck of dust from his clothes.
"Take a good, long feel."
Brutality and mockery mingled in the depths of his scarlet eyes.
"Of heat that can burn straight through your soul."
The dark red flaming arrow left the string.
There was no whistle. No blast of air. Along the arrow's path, a visible scorched-brown streak appeared in the air, like paper seared by a hot iron.
Akaza's Annihilation Type Heavy Fist collided with the flaming arrowhead.
Sound vanished.
Every sound. The chirping of insects, the wind, the groaning metal of the train wreckage, Tanjiro's heartbeat. Everything was stripped away at the instant of impact.
The entire world had been muted.
Then white light exploded from the point of contact between them.
It swallowed Akaza, swallowed Yaha, swallowed the field of wild grass, and swallowed everyone's vision.
Before you continue