Gyutaro's body fell apart.
Not the kind of falling apart that came from being hacked to pieces. Starting at every red line, chunks dropped away-shoulders, chest, arms, thighs-landing neatly on the ground like a porcelain vase someone had smashed.
He looked down at himself.
Blue smoke rose from the severed surfaces, and blackness ate inward inch by inch. He drove his demon core to force fresh flesh to sprout, but the moment it emerged, that sizzling burn swallowed it back up.
He tried again. It dissolved again.
Gyutaro's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
These were not sword wounds. He had suffered hundreds of those, and they closed in the blink of an eye. This was a piece gouged out of somewhere deeper, a place no one had ever touched in all his centuries of life: the very source of his existence.
His soul.
At last, he understood. What this monster had been cutting was never flesh.
At the other end of the ruins, Daki had likewise failed to escape the domain's indiscriminate slaughter.
The remaining section of her body had also been sliced into a precise grid. She lay in a pool of blood with her head tilted back, her mouth open, wrenching scream after wrenching scream tearing from her throat. She sounded less like a demon than a person being taken apart alive.
Deep within Infinity Castle.
Muzan sat on a raised platform, watching the scene beneath the Entertainment District through the surviving demonic links.
Civilians with zero casualties. Blood sashes precisely excised. The Upper Rank siblings cut into grids, unable to regenerate.
An almost inaudible sound escaped his throat.
The fear surging from the depths of his soul was even greater than when he had seen Akaza crawl back. He refused to watch any longer. With a twitch of