Daki's cries broke off abruptly amid a scream that pierced the night sky.
But the demonic aura erupting from her headless body, a hundred times colder and more vicious than before, swept across all of Yoshiwara in an instant like black floodwaters bursting through a dam.
Five hundred meters away.
The blood drained from Tengen Uzui's face in an instant.
He stared fixedly at the kneeling corpse. His instincts as a Ninja and his experience as a Hashira both sounded the most piercing alarms in the depths of his soul.
"Watch out! She isn't the real Upper Rank Six! There's another one! The real body is coming out!"
He mustered every ounce of strength and let out a desperate roar.
Yet his warning seemed to have come a moment too late.
Tanjiro's nose caught a stench unlike anything he had ever smelled, something beyond words.
It was not merely rot or blood.
It was a smell that mingled resentment, jealousy, poverty, disease, and an utter hatred of everything beautiful in the world that had accumulated over a hundred years.
Merely smelling it made his stomach churn and nearly suffocated him.
At the center of the battlefield.
Inside Susanoo, Sasuke's ominous Mangekyō Sharingan suddenly contracted.
He clearly "saw" an energy utterly different from Daki's yet sharing the same origin, even filthier and more viscous, gathering and boiling furiously inside that headless body.
"Crack... crunch..."
A faint sound, like bones slipping out of place, came from Daki's back.
Then, before everyone's horrified eyes, the skin on her back split as though an invisible blade had sliced it open from within, its edges curling grotesquely outward.
That was not flesh and blood. It was more like an open doorway leading to hell.
A hand reached out of the split.
It was a hand