Giyu's back pressed against the tree trunk, his fingertips ice-cold.
His sword lay in the mud beside his feet, its hilt still holding the warmth of his palm.
Three demons reached for him at once, scraps of rotten flesh wedged between their fingers. A foul wind flooded his nose and mouth.
His eyes were closed, his mind utterly blank.
Then that voice surfaced.
It wasn't some solemn encouragement or earnest charge. It was just something Yaha had tossed out while leaning against a bamboo stalk and yawning, in that infuriatingly casual tone of his.
-You're much stronger than you think.
Giyu's right hand moved.
He didn't even know when that hand had picked the sword hilt back up from the mud. In the instant before those claws touched his throat, his body reacted ahead of his mind.
His knees straightened, his back left the tree, and his whole body sprang out of its huddled posture.
The demon on the left missed, its nails scraping five white marks into the bark.
Giyu's blade was already drawn.
He didn't think about which form to use. His mind was empty, holding only one action.
Cut.
The blade traced a clean arc from the lower right to the upper left. Azure water wrapped around it, trailing a bright ribbon through the darkness.
The long-tongued demon directly ahead lost its entire head, along with half its neck.
The head spun twice in the air and crashed into the bushes. The remaining body swayed twice, its knees buckled, and it fell to the ground, dissolving into ash.
The demon on the left froze for an instant.
Just that instant.
Giyu had already stepped forward. His blade swept a semicircle at his side, and he carried the momentum straight into a second slash, the edge biting into the base of the second demon's neck.
The sensation of bone breaking traveled through the hilt into his palm.
The head hit the ground.
The Spider Demon shrieked from a branch, then turned to flee deeper into the woods.
Giyu chased him.
His steps were light, almost silent on the fallen leaves. His breathing had changed. It was no longer frantic panting, but a slow flow, like something that had sunk to the bottom of the water.
He caught up within three steps, his blade cutting through the air.
The third head struck the ground beside a tree root, a length of spine still attached.
Giyu stood where he was, took two deep, ragged breaths, and slowly lowered his sword.
He looked down at the blue vapor lingering on the blade, his brows drawing together.
What was that?
During those few seconds of sword strikes, his breathing had entered a state he had never experienced before.
It wasn't Sabito's swift, explosive surge, crashing down like a waterfall. It was slow. So slow it felt as though he had sunk into a fathomless pool of dead water.
In that state, every stray sound around him had drained away. His field of vision had widened immensely. He could even see every twitch of the three demons' muscle fibers as they lunged to bite him.
His body had become light. Inhaling gathered strength; exhaling delivered the slash. There was no wasted interval between them.
Giyu sheathed his sword and touched his chest.
His heartbeat was slow. Unnaturally slow.
It was as though someone had pushed his entire body into a deep pool, leaving all his panic sealed above the surface.
He stood for a while, then looked up at the sky. The moon emerged from behind the clouds, illuminating the dried blood on his face.
Giyu turned and continued deeper into the mountain.
He wanted to find Yaha.
Not because he was afraid. He had simply begun to feel that his younger brother, who was too lazy even to draw his sword, might actually have been right.
He really was stronger than he thought.
But that door had only opened a crack. Before he could see what lay inside, it had closed again.
The northern woods.
Sabito pulled his Nichirin Blade from the fourth demon's neck. Before he could finish shaking the blood from its edge, a fifth lunged from behind a tree on his right.
He slipped sideways, pushed off with his right foot, and spun halfway around. Water Breathing: Third Form came down with the momentum of his turn, slicing the demon's upper body in two along with half a tree.
Wind rushed up behind him.
Without even looking back, Sabito thrust the tip of his sword behind him, driving it straight into the throat of the sixth demon sneaking up from the rear.
Before the demon could struggle, a petite figure leaped lightly over Sabito's head.
Makomo landed as silently as a falling leaf. Her blade flashed like a ribbon of white silk, carrying a light shimmer of water.
The demon's head fell, and its body turned to ash.
Makomo shook the droplets of blood from her blade. Her gaze settled on Sabito's arm, and her brows furrowed slightly. "Sabito, you're hurt."
Sabito looked down. A shallow cut on the outside of his forearm was seeping blood.
He tore a strip from his sleeve, wrapped it around twice, and tied a quick knot. "Just a scratch. I'm fine."
Makomo tilted her head as she studied his bandaging. Her lips moved, but in the end, she said nothing more.
Sabito rested his Nichirin Blade on his shoulder and looked deeper into the mountain.
"Makomo, did you notice? We ran into all six of those demons while they were heading inward from the outskirts."
Sabito frowned. "With this many demons around, something stronger must be lurking in the center of the mountain. If any of the other candidates wander in by accident, they'll die."
Makomo tightened her grip on her sword. "You want to go farther in."
"I have to find out what's in there." Sabito started walking. "If there's a powerful demon, I'll draw it out. At least that'll make things a little safer for the others."
"I'm coming with you."
"Yeah."
Their figures disappeared into the depths of the dense forest.
As he ran, Sabito suddenly turned to glance back the way they had come.
Where was that bastard Yaha now?
He shook his head, dismissing the thought. Who cared? That guy couldn't even be bothered to kill demons. He'd probably found a tree and was sleeping up in it.
The third night.
Sabito and Makomo had been moving through the mountain for nearly fifty hours.
They had kept pushing deeper, killing another eleven demons along the way. Between them, they had accumulated seven or eight wounds of various sizes, each hastily bandaged before they continued on.
The moon hung directly above the mountaintop, bathing the entire forest in a ghastly white.
Sabito was crouching beside a stream, splashing cold water onto his face, when he suddenly stopped.
A gust of wind blew from the heart of the mountain.
The smell made his stomach churn instantly. Rotten and thick, it was like the stench of dozens of corpses piled together and left to ferment for months.
Makomo smelled it too. She covered her nose and mouth, her face paling. "Sabito, that smell..."
Sabito stood, his hand already closing around his sword hilt.
He looked toward the source of the wind. His gaze passed through the layers of tree trunks and settled on a clearing roughly two hundred meters away.
Moonlight shone over it.
Something was slowly rising from beneath the earth.
First came an arm. As thick as a grown adult's thigh, its gray-white skin was covered in blue-purple veins. Its five spread fingers spanned more than Sabito's entire head.
Then came a second, a third, a fourth.
More and more arms braced against the ground, pushing an enormous, bloated body upward little by little.
Sabito counted.
Twenty-three arms.
When the creature's torso was fully exposed to the moonlight, Sabito saw its face clearly.
Its mouth split all the way to its ears, packed with teeth growing crookedly over one another.
Its eyes scanned the surroundings. Then it saw Sabito.
More precisely, it saw the white fox mask with red markings on Sabito's face.
The instant those bloodshot eyes caught sight of the mask, they widened as far as they could. The corners of its mouth lifted, higher and higher, forming a curve that made his scalp crawl.
It laughed.
The laughter sounded like rusted iron wheels grinding over bone, thick with nauseating, clammy excitement.
"Found you... finally found you..."
Several thick fingers clawed compulsively into the dirt as it stared fixedly at the mask.
"That familiar smell... that damned fox mask... that old bastard Urokodaki has sent me another snack!"
Dozens of arms pushed against the ground at once, and its enormous body surged toward Sabito and Makomo, bearing down on them like a mountain of flesh.
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