Several dark corners simultaneously turned into man-eating Dark Beasts, which suddenly sprang up and opened their gaping, bloody maws to bite at Shinji's head.
Shinji remained unruffled by the attack, without so much as a ripple in his heart.
He swung the Kubikiribōchō hard, beheading the Dark Beasts in an instant before they could reach him!
But then something surprised him.
The Dark Beasts he had beheaded did not die. Instead, they merged into the surrounding shadows, instantly reappeared completely unharmed, and lunged to bite him again.
After all, even if shadows gained physical form, having their heads cut off would not kill them.
They had no such thing as a "vital spot" to begin with, and death could not even be defined for them!
Shinji's gaze sharpened, as though he had realized something.
So he tried using [Cursed Speech] on the Dark Beast closest to him.
"Disperse!"
The Dark Beast suddenly turned into a mass of shadow and swiftly retreated into a corner.
Only then did Shinji notice that although these Dark Beasts looked three-dimensional, thin, elongated shadows stretched from where their feet met the ground into patches of darkness.
He had missed them earlier because these shadows were so thin that only careful observation could reveal them.
A bold conjecture suddenly occurred to him.
He immediately hurled the Kubikiribōchō in the direction the mass of shadow had retreated.
Accompanied by a scream, the Kubikiribōchō nearly sliced that person in half at the waist.
It turned out that a creature neither human nor ghost had been hiding in the shadows behind a rock. Presumably, they had also been forcibly transformed into this hideous state and gained the power to command those Dark Beasts.
That explained why the Dark Beasts could not be killed.
They were not the actual bodies