Lower Rank Two, Rokuro, elegantly flexed his newly regenerated hand.
"Forgive the embarrassing display, miss. Please take a look at this body's extraordinary potential." Before he finished speaking, his figure suddenly blurred!
The Sapphire Star's gaze sharpened. Her Scoutflies were instantly left behind, and she swung a swift backhand slash on instinct.
Shhk-
The blade tore through the air, but all it struck was a cloud of dark purple poison mist reeking of blood and rot!
Rokuro's true body appeared without warning, like a phantom merging with the mist.
The enormous crimson mouth on his abdomen suddenly swelled-and spewed a torrent of thick, poisonous miasma!
"Are you a Congalala? You sure love farting!" The Sapphire Star kicked off the ground and rapidly retreated.
The miasma crashed down like a solid wall of sludge. The surrounding trees hissed the instant the poison touched them.
"Terminal tuberculosis, huh? Where's Arthur Morgan? With fumes this thick, are you trying to suffocate me and turn me into cured meat?"
The Sapphire Star held her breath. The air grew thick and foul, while the churning miasma severely obstructed her vision.
Rokuro flickered in and out of the nearly liquid poison fog. A relentless barrage of claws coated in viscous venom attacked from every direction at treacherous angles.
Clang, clang, clang-rrrip!
The Sapphire Star spun her Fatalis Demolisher into a curtain of steel, blocking most of the attacks.
But his ghostlike speed and the poison fog's interference with her senses still allowed one claw to rake across the outside of her thigh.
A weapon of that caliber couldn't breach armor forged from forbidden monsters, but the blow still made her footing sink.
"Combat knows no distinction between elegance and vulgarity, beautiful miss. Allow me to show you the true power of this fusion..." Rokuro's gentle voice drifted through the swirling poison fog. His speeding figure abruptly stopped within the miasma, and he tore open three poison sacs on his body at once.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
Three streams of dark purple poison mist gushed wildly in different directions like high-pressure water jets.
They resembled three dark purple clones.
Together with Rokuro himself, they attacked from four directions-the front, the left, the right, and directly overhead.
They launched a lethal pincer attack. Poisonous winds howled, blotting out her vision entirely.
"Shadow Clone Technique? Four shifts working nine to nine, six days a week?!"
The Sapphire Star stamped her right foot hard against the earth and drove her enormous Long Sword into the ground.
Rumble-!!!
She swept it upward, throwing a vast cloud of dirt into the air.
"Miss, copying my mist trick with dust won't work... hmm?" Rokuro's attack met none of the resistance of human flesh. Instead, it felt as though he had stabbed wood.
"What is this?" Rokuro stared in confusion at what he had struck-a red wooden barrel. He was still wondering where such a large barrel had come from.
Bang, bang, bang, bang!!
The poisonous afterimages collapsed into venomous pus and blood, raining to the ground.
"Heh! A Mega Barrel Bomb G! Like it, baby?" While Rokuro reeled from the explosion, the Sapphire Star, who had already darted aside, drew her Long Sword and thrust it at his true body.
The demon had already been staggered by the Barrel Bomb, so he naturally failed to react to her attack. Though the immense regeneration granted by fusing three demons let him endure it, multiple wounds visibly split open across his body!
"Got you! Helm Breaker-up!!"
The Sapphire Star stepped on Rokuro's body and vaulted into the air, locking onto the enormous single eye on his chest bearing the character for "Two"!
Rokuro watched the blazing red blade descend toward him with annihilating force. His crimson abdominal mouth twisted into an inhuman smile, and a strange note of triumph entered his gentle voice.
"Your technique is as... magnificent and deadly as ever, miss. Unfortunately..."
In the thousandth of a second before the blade, falling like the sun itself, reached his head-
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh-!!!
Across the ground within ten meters of Rokuro,
several streams of viscous poison mist that had previously seeped underground erupted like geysers. They instantly wove themselves together and spread into a huge, resilient purple poison net, shielding the space above his head.
Below the Sapphire Star lay a disgusting, sticky web of poisonous blood, sizzling with corrosive power.
Her tremendous momentum left her no time to adjust her posture in midair.
Rokuro's mocking voice reached her through the poison net.
"Your dance is intoxicating... now remain forever within this artistic web, and become a final masterpiece offered to that lord!"
While Rokuro's falsely elegant taunt still echoed through the poison fog-
the devastating force of the Helm Breaker Slash continued straight down without a single flourish!
The false smile froze on Rokuro's face. His crimson abdominal mouth sucked in a horrified breath.
He had accounted for the trap, the poison net, and how losing her footing would send his opponent into an uncontrolled fall...
But the one thing he hadn't anticipated was that this woman would completely ignore the lethal poison net beneath her.
Splat-crack!!!
The terrifying blade struck the eye marked "Two" with flawless precision. The enormous eyeball burst instantly.
The blade's momentum carried it farther down his chest, brutally splitting Rokuro's massive body-the fusion of three Lower Ranks-straight down the middle!
"Aaaaaaagh-!!!" Rokuro's refined mask shattered completely, leaving only a heart-rending scream mingled from three different voices.
Countless frantically writhing buds of flesh and spurts of poisonous blood tried to seal the exposed halves of his body.
"Are you fucking... trying to get yourself killed?!" Rokuro roared through the agony.
Yet the Sapphire Star wore a vicious grin of triumph. "Hehehe... you little punk. You thought that shitty net could corrode me?"
The expected sight of torn skin and dissolving flesh never materialized.
Wrapped in poisonous slime, the Sapphire Star's equipment merely gave a faint hiss. A barely perceptible dark green stain appeared on its surface, and then... that was it!
The Sapphire Star flipped off Rokuro's body as he squirmed in agony.
"See that? Fatalis and Kingfrost armor. You could let your poison eat at it for twenty thousand years, and all you'd do is polish and wax it! Want to break through my defenses? Try reincarnating as a Tempered Arch-Tempered Pukei-Pukei first!"
With that, she turned her blade and slashed with unerring precision at the joining point of Rokuro's neck, which was still regenerating wildly in an attempt to seal itself.
"Stay fucking dead!"
On Rokuro's bisected body, the two differently colored eyes marked "Three" and "Six," which had previously dimmed, suddenly erupted with blinding blood-red light!
"Byōga! Kamanué!!" A desperate howl threaded through Rokuro's screams.
"Aaah! Don't cut my head off!" Kamanué shrieked, his voice thick with tears.
"Fuck! You two morons! All or nothing!" Byōga roared in madness.
Splat-!!!
The flesh and bones of Rokuro's neck abruptly exploded on their own. Countless crimson tendrils of budding flesh lashed out like tentacles, launching his head away.
Propelled by that explosive thrust, the stitch-covered head shot free of his body and hurtled deep into the forest!
Whoosh!
"What the fuck?!" The Sapphire Star watched the head trail a sticky line of blood as it vanished into the darkness like a cannonball. The corner of her mouth twitched.
"...His head... flew off? You can do that? You Twelve Kizuki really never run out of fancy tricks to save your skins!"
She glanced down at the two halves of his body, still writhing wildly on the ground and attempting to regenerate new limbs and even heads, then looked in the direction the head had vanished. Her head began to ache.
"Now this is a pain... which one do I chase?" The Sapphire Star was overwhelmed. The remains on the ground still seemed capable of regenerating.
The Sapphire Star hurriedly rummaged through her hunter's pouch.
"Hmm... Dung Pods, useless... Shock Trap, not much help... got it! Great burst arowana scales and fire herbs!" She pulled out the scales and herbs and hastily threw herself over Rokuro's remains.
Though Rokuro's remaining body was blind, he could still feel the Sapphire Star placing a pile of strange things on him.
This woman... what is she doing...?
"Igni Sign!" The Sapphire Star unleashed another burst of flame.
The remains immediately caught fire, giving off the foul stench of roasting meat.
"Bye-bye! I'm off to chase your head!" Without looking back, the Sapphire Star turned and pursued the fleeing head.
"Aaaaah! Fire! Fire!"
Though the remains had no head, the searing pain sent them rolling across the ground. The flames did not weaken at all; fire fueled by materials from another world wasn't so easy to extinguish.
Meanwhile, the head trailing foul-smelling blood vessels and slime bounced madly through the pitch-black forest.
Buds of flesh writhed frantically, trying to regenerate, but the head had lost the tremendous energy source its body supplied. Its regeneration had noticeably slowed.
"Useless! Every last one of you!! Rokuro, you fucking moron! If you'd let me take charge back there, we'd never have ended up like this!"
"Shut up, you brute, Byōga! If you hadn't tried to monopolize this body and used a Nichirin Blade to suppress my consciousness, how could that woman have forced me to blast my own head off to escape?!" Rokuro's voice echoed within the head, his anger overwhelming his cultivated manners.
The eye marked "Two" opened eerily beneath the head's severed neck, its gaze full of venom and accusation.
Beside it, Byōga's eye marked "Three" had dimmed considerably and looked drained, while Kamanué's eye marked "Six" darted around in terror.
"Bullshit! At least I didn't act like such a pretentious prick when I controlled the body! And what happened? Did you even look cool for three seconds? She still chopped you in half with one swing!" The eye marked "Three" throbbed violently.
"Enough! Stop arguing! There's something there!" Kamanué cried out in a tearful shriek.
An innocent wild deer drinking beside a stream seemed to have been startled by the earlier fighting and raised its head warily.
A sharp gleam flashed in Rokuro's eye. He abandoned the infighting at once. "Shut up! That thing will give us a temporary foothold and let us recover a little!"
The head abruptly accelerated, and the severed blood vessels in its neck shot outward.
Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft!
Several sticky crimson blood vessels, tough as tentacles, pierced the deer's head with precision. They instantly swelled and sucked ravenously like greedy leeches.
The deer couldn't even let out a cry before its blood was drained. Its flesh rapidly withered.
"Fusion!" Rokuro controlled the blood vessels and sliced off the deer's head.
Byōga snapped, "Fuck! Stop giving stupid orders!"
The blood vessels embedded in the deer abruptly contracted and took root, surging wildly into its shriveled shell along their own paths!
Skrrrk-!!!
The spine-chilling sounds of growing flesh and shifting bones rang out.
The dried deer hide tore apart as swelling demonic muscles forced it open. Under the violent tugging of blood vessels and budding flesh, the deer's head was forcibly ripped away. In its place sat the demon's head, stitched together with three differently colored eyes marked "Two," "Three," and "Six."
The monster rose upright in a humanoid posture, its once-slender hind legs covered and reinforced by thick demonic muscle.
"Useless! That little bit of blood wasn't even enough to fill the gaps between my teeth!" Cursing nonstop, Byōga controlled-or rather, was forced to share-the crude stitched deer body as it raced deeper into the mountain forest.
"Hmph. If I hadn't fused with it in time, that woman would still be batting you around like a ball!" The eye marked "Two" flickered. The stitches across the head seemed to have thickened, showing that Rokuro had clearly taken the lead in the fusion.
"What use are you besides swearing and losing your temper? At least I bought us time, and-"
"You bought us jack shit!" Byōga cut him off at once. "Your grand entrance didn't even last as long as one of my farts! You spent all that time showing off, but the moment you started taking hits, you ran faster than anyone!"
"Waaah... stop fighting... those green bugs behind us... they're getting closer again! I'm scared..." The eye marked "Six" stared behind them in terror, and the body instinctively accelerated in fear.
The stitched deer body barreled through the mountain forest, leaving a trail of vegetation withered by its corrosive poisonous blood. Byōga never stopped hurling abuse at Rokuro.