Should They Be Pitied?

After burying the swordsman, Chiba Yo continued searching Mount Fujikasane with Zenitsu.

"Can you hear any other demons nearby?" Chiba Yo asked Zenitsu as they walked.

What had just happened had taught him that Zenitsu possessed extraordinary hearing. Sometimes, he could even identify demons by sound.

Zenitsu shook his head.

Just then, a swordsman suddenly ran out of the woods ahead, his expression panicked. He kept glancing over his shoulder.

"Get out of the way!"

The swordsman shouted when he saw Chiba Yo and Zenitsu, then shoved past them and kept running.

As the swordsman passed him, Chiba Yo heard him muttering, "A demon that's eaten fifty people? How are we supposed to deal with something like that?"

"F-fifty people! Yo, you're not still thinking of fighting that demon, are you? It's eaten fifty people! It's nothing like those demons that only ate two or three. It must be terrifyingly strong. Let's get away from here! Please!"

Naturally, Zenitsu had also heard what the swordsman said. Terror instantly filled his face, and he tried to talk Chiba Yo out of it.

"Let's go." With that, Chiba Yo ran toward the place the swordsman had fled from, completely ignoring Zenitsu's pleas.

"Aah-I knew it! Wait for me, Yo!" Zenitsu clutched at his hair and shouted. In the end, he followed him anyway.

After passing through the dense trees, Chiba Yo saw only an enormous green hand crumbling to ash. Its size alone told him how monstrous the demon must have been.

It's already been killed. That boy must have done it.

Chiba Yo stopped and looked at the red-haired boy beside the enormous hand, who was sheathing his Nichirin Blade.

To Chiba Yo's surprise, however, the red-haired boy walked over and took the enormous hand in his own. Then he closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to the back of it, as though praying.

"Hey, what are you doing? Pitying a demon?" The sight made Chiba Yo angry. Demons had slaughtered so many people and destroyed so many families. What was there to pity about creatures like that?

Hearing Chiba Yo's voice, the red-haired boy turned toward him. Chiba Yo saw the wound on his forehead and the sorrowful compassion on his face.

"These demons used to be human, too," Tanjiro told Chiba Yo.

By then, the Hand Demon's last remaining hand had crumbled entirely to ash.

"But after becoming demons, they slaughtered countless people and destroyed countless families. That demon you were just pitying ate plenty of people too, didn't it?" Chiba Yo still could not understand the boy's actions.

"I know. That's why I didn't hesitate to kill him. But they might not have chosen to become demons. They're victims too. I smelled sadness on him," Tanjiro explained.

Tanjiro's words did not convince Chiba Yo. Kyojuro had told him that all demons were created by the progenitor of demons, Muzan Kibutsuji. But Chiba Yo believed that once they had eaten people, they were no longer innocent. They deserved to go to hell.

His own experiences also made it utterly impossible for him to feel sympathy for demons.

"I don't understand." Chiba Yo shook his head.

Although he disagreed with Tanjiro's sympathy for demons, the boy had indeed killed the demon, so there was little else he could say.

Grrr...

An ill-timed noise came from beside him, just as the horizon began to pale with the first light of dawn.

"Yo, I'm so hungry. Let's find something to eat," Zenitsu said weakly, tugging at Chiba Yo's sleeve.

Chiba Yo looked up at the gradually brightening sky and replied, "All right. Once it's light, the demons will probably all go into hiding. We won't be able to keep hunting them."

Just as Chiba Yo and Zenitsu were about to leave in search of food, a voice behind them stopped them.

"Um... if you don't mind, I have a few flatbreads. Why don't we share them?"

Chiba Yo turned around. The red-haired boy pulled a few flatbreads from inside his clothes and held them out with a smile.

"Really? Thank you so much!"

The moment Zenitsu saw the flatbreads in Tanjiro's hands, he rushed over, grabbed one, and began gnawing on it. He kept chattering as he ate. "The two of us spent all last night walking. We didn't rest for even a moment. I'm practically starving to death."

"That must have been rough. If it isn't enough, I have more," the red-haired boy said with a smile.

Then he picked up another flatbread and offered it to Chiba Yo.

"Huh? Oh, thanks." Chiba Yo accepted it in a daze, momentarily at a loss for words.

He looked down at the flatbread in his hand, then back at Tanjiro's smiling face. The displeasure he had felt toward Tanjiro's actions vanished in an instant.

He really is a kind person, Chiba Yo thought.

Zenitsu: "What's your name?"

Tanjiro: "Tanjiro Kamado. What about you?"

Zenitsu: "I'm Zenitsu Agatsuma. This is a friend I just met, Chiba Yo."

Chiba Yo: "Let me bandage that wound on your forehead."

Tanjiro: "Thank you."

The three sat together, eating flatbread and chatting, their friendship quickly growing.

Over the next six days, the three of them stayed together. With Zenitsu's hearing and Tanjiro's sense of smell, Chiba Yo hunted demons much faster. During their hunts, however, he noticed that Tanjiro always asked the demons how to turn a demon back into a human.

Although Chiba Yo wondered about this, he did not question Tanjiro.

During that time, they also rescued quite a few swordsmen taking part in the Final Selection. By the fifth day, Chiba Yo had cleared out every demon on Mount Fujikasane. For the next two nights, they did not encounter a single one.

On the morning the Final Selection ended

Chiba Yo and his two companions left the central area of Mount Fujikasane together and returned to the platform where they had gathered before.

"Less than half are left..." Seeing that more than half the people who had arrived were missing, Chiba Yo's heart grew heavier.

He had already done his best to find and kill demons as quickly as possible, but sometimes he still arrived too late. Most of the swordsmen were afraid of demons, which kept them from using their full strength. Mount Fujikasane was so vast that Chiba Yo simply could not be everywhere at once.

What he did not know, however, was that having this many survivors at the end of the Final Selection was already an extraordinary result.

"Welcome back, everyone."

"Congratulations on returning safely."

The two children still stood before the torii gate, offering their congratulations to the surviving swordsmen.