The battle seemed to be over.
The enormous purple skeletal demon god held its sword-swinging pose, like a sculpture marking the end of judgment.
In the rubble before it, Upper Rank Six's headless body knelt silently.
And on a ruined rooftop in the distance, that beautiful head lay motionless too, as though all life had left it.
"We... we won?"
Five hundred meters away, Zenitsu's voice trembled with the relief of having survived.
"Yes! We got her! That bastard Sasuke's pretty good!"
Inosuke waved his fists excitedly, letting out a cheer of victory.
Only Tanjiro kept his eyes fixed on the battlefield, his brow tightly furrowed.
Something's wrong.
The smell is wrong.
After a demon was beheaded, that rotten, sinful smell would quickly dissipate, as though purified by sunlight.
But now, the smell belonging to Upper Rank Six, so intense it was nauseating, had not weakened at all. Instead... it seemed to have grown thicker, more ominous.
At the center of the battlefield, Sasuke had not relaxed in the slightest inside his Susanoo either.
His ominous, six-pointed pinwheel Mangekyō Sharingan remained firmly locked on that headless corpse.
In his vision, the energy that made up Daki's body showed not the slightest sign of breaking down.
This did not follow the pattern of any demon he had slain.
And in the safe zone five hundred meters away, the most experienced among them, Tengen Uzui, had an utterly grim expression.
He stared fixedly at the kneeling corpse as a long-buried piece of intelligence he had overlooked flashed through his mind like lightning.
-Upper Rank Six's strength did not match her rank.
-Rumors about Upper Rank Six always seemed to be linked to the words "brother and sister."
A suspicion that chilled him to the bone rose in his mind.
Just then, the