Yaha's gaze sank downward.
It passed through the soil beneath his feet, through the rock he had cracked underfoot, and locked onto a spot a hundred meters underground.
Something was moving down there.
An exceedingly faint presence, wrapped in cowardice, weakness, and the salty tang of tears, was desperately burrowing deeper.
That was the true body.
The hunchbacked old man.
Hantengu.
One corner of Yaha's mouth curled upward.
He lifted his foot from Zohakuten's face, pulled his hands from his yukata pockets, spread all ten fingers, and plunged them straight into the soil beneath him.
Cursed energy erupted from his palms.
It was neither a slash nor a cursed technique, but pure strength at its most primal, most brutal.
The ground began to shake.
It started as a faint tremor, then grew steadily stronger. Loose stones bounced off the ground, and leaves fell from swaying tree trunks.
Tanjiro knelt on one knee in front of Genya, barely keeping his balance with that three-hundred-year-old rusty sword braced against the ground.
Mitsuri's flexible sword fell into the mud. Unable to stay upright, she landed on her backside.
Muichiro gripped his sword, his eyes fixed on Yaha.
Yaha began pulling his arms apart.
Veins bulged along his forearms and spread up to his shoulders, his muscles stretching the sleeves of his black yukata taut.
He was tearing it apart.
Tearing the earth apart with his bare hands.
A thunderous rumble rose from underground. The entire battlefield began splitting beneath Yaha's feet, the fissure bursting outward in both directions along his hands. It widened from a finger's breadth to a palm's, then an arm's, until it became a canyon that could swallow an entire house.
The fissure was unfathomably deep. Moonlight could not reach its bottom; only the raw, earthy stench of churning soil