Tanjiro's body was as stiff as a weathered stone statue.
He could only watch helplessly, staring into Muichiro Tokito's utterly unruffled eyes as he slowly bent down and reached toward the unconscious child.
Helplessness surged in from every direction like the cold waters of the deepest sea, crushing his lungs and leaving him unable to breathe.
Anger, frustration, anxiety... before such an absolute disparity in strength, all those emotions seemed so laughable, so feeble.
The finger pressed against his abdomen had already withdrawn, yet that strange numbness remained like invisible shackles, severing his will from his body completely.
Was this... a Hashira?
Was this the swordsman hailed as a "genius," who had reached the pinnacle of the Demon Slayer Corps in just two months?
So he wasn't even worthy of making him draw his sword.
For the first time, a trace of bewilderment bordering on despair appeared in Tanjiro's eyes.
Yet just as Muichiro Tokito's fingers were about to touch Kotetsu's collar, his movement stopped without warning.
He slowly raised his head.
For the first time, those vacant eyes, always chasing the clouds drifting across the sky, shifted entirely away from Tanjiro, that "stone in the way."
His gaze turned toward the entrance to the clearing.
At some point, another person had appeared there.
Uesugi Sasuke.
He simply stood there quietly, making no sound and giving off no astonishing presence, like a villager who had happened to pass by on a stroll after a meal.
Yet Tanjiro could clearly smell that the air had changed.
If what Muichiro Tokito had brought him earlier was a suffocating cold like a frozen lake in the depths of winter...
Then now, with Sasuke's arrival, it was as though every scent in the entire space had been drained away.
It had become an absolute