Half of Uroko's face was being ground into the mud.
Uroko rolled both eyes upward, trying to meet the gaze that had descended from the sky.
Following that fathomless cut, Muichiro raised his head too.
A black silhouette stood at the very top of the canopy.
Yaha wore a loose black yukata, its collar wide open and half of one shoulder exposed, its sash tied in a knot that could come undone at any moment. There was not a trace of sleepy confusion in his crimson eyes, only the dark, vicious irritation of someone dragged out of bed.
"Setting off firecrackers outside in the middle of the night."
His voice was quiet, pressing down on the night wind and reaching every ear with perfect clarity.
"You trash must want to die even more thoroughly."
There was no threatening inflection in those words. They were as flat as if he were counting stones on the ground, yet every creature on the battlefield received the same command through its spine at the exact same second.
Don't move.
Uroko's pinned body began to twitch. Uroko drove the demon core into action, flooding both severed surfaces with Muzan's blood. Fresh buds of flesh had barely emerged before they hissed, blackened, died, and crumbled away as black ash.
A second time.
A third time.
Uroko had never seen a wound like this in two hundred years. A demon's immortality, a demon's arrogance-all of it rested on regeneration that could never be torn apart or burned away. Now it had failed.
"How is this possible?" Uroko's voice cracked. "I can't grow back even after being cut in half? My body, my immortality..."
That little source of pride had become a joke.
Yaha couldn't be bothered to listen.
He lifted his right foot off Uroko's face and