Time lost its meaning at that moment.
Everything seemed trapped in an amber of deathly silence.
Akaza's fist was less than an inch from Kyojuro Rengoku's abdomen. The smile on his face was a martial artist's cruel respect for a powerful opponent he was about to destroy.
The flame of Kyojuro's life was already a candle guttering in the wind.
Tanjiro's shout caught in his throat.
Everything would follow that predestined course toward a tragic, heroic end.
Yet, at that very instant.
In the distance, Uesugi Sasuke, kneeling on one knee with his hand clamped over his right eye, slowly raised his head.
He lowered his hand.
What kind of eye was that?
Within the scarlet eye, the spinning tomoe were gone, replaced by an eerie pinwheel made of six pitch-black blades that seemed capable of drawing in a person's very soul.
It was turning.
Sasuke made no sound and no movement. He merely fixed that ominous, blood-streaming right eye firmly, relentlessly on Akaza's arm-the arm about to pierce Kyojuro.
His gaze marked the focal point.
The focal point marked the end.
The next instant.
A small cluster of ink-black flames appeared out of thin air on Akaza's right arm without warning.
It appeared so abruptly, so quietly, without any heat or sound, as though someone had simply dabbed a black dot there with an ink brush.
Akaza did not even notice it at first.
His fist was still driving inexorably through that final inch.
Then an indescribable agony erupted from the deepest reaches of his soul!
It was not the scorching sensation of fire.
It was a deeper, horrifying pain, as though life itself were being mercilessly devoured and erased!
"Aaaaaaaargh!"
A scream so shrill and distorted that it sounded nothing like anything a living creature could produce burst