An extremely weak, distorted voice, filled with endless despair and terror, abruptly emerged from the gaps between the Hand Demon's layers of thick arms.
Rokuya abruptly halted just as he was about to burst forward. The raging lightning already concentrated at his blade's tip gave off piercing cracks as he forcibly interrupted it. Several tiny, uncontrolled bolts spilled out, shattering a boulder beside him.
He narrowed his sharp eyes. Through the spreading, putrid mist, his gaze pierced like two knives into the mass of writhing flesh on the Hand Demon's chest.
"Help... someone, please save me... I don't want to die here... sob..." Another voice, choked with tears, immediately followed.
The Hand Demon seemed to notice the hitch in Rokuya's aura. It froze for a moment, then its enormous body began shaking violently as it let out a spine-chilling burst of laughter.
"Heeheeheehee! Hahahahaha! Urokodaki's student, so this is what you care about!"
With a nauseating sound of flesh rubbing against flesh, the dozen or so thick arms across the Hand Demon's chest slowly unfurled like a lotus.
In those palms covered with blue veins and pustules, two young swordsmen wearing Demon Slayer Corps selection uniforms were held in a crushing grip!
They were covered in blood, their limbs restrained at horribly twisted angles by the Hand Demon's fingers. One boy's left leg bent at an unnatural angle, its bone clearly broken; the other had tears and snot streaming down his face as he looked toward Rokuya, his eyes filled with both a longing to survive and an extreme fear of death.
"I saved these two especially for a 'midnight snack' I could chew on nice and slowly!" The Hand Demon lifted the boys high, placing them directly in front of its thick, scale-covered neck and shaking them tauntingly. "What's wrong? Where did all that killing intent go, the kind that was going to slice me to pieces? Come on! Cut me!"
Rokuya's gaze instantly darkened to the extreme, and the knuckles gripping his sword hilt turned white from the force.
Damn it... he cursed inwardly.
Standing nearby, Kanae saw it clearly too. Her eyes, gentle as water a moment earlier, instantly constricted, and cold sweat involuntarily seeped from both hands gripping her Nichirin Blade.
"Rokuya, it's using those two swordsmen as human shields..." Kanae lowered her voice, unable to hide her anxiety. "If you use a wide-range slash like the one before, those two children will be cut in half along with it!"
Rokuya did not turn around. He only stared fixedly at the Hand Demon's movements. Kanae was only half right.
What truly made him hesitate for fear of harming them was the core passive granted to him by the Heavenly Lord Gratitude Value System-the [Single-Target Critical Strike Rule].
When his normal attack or skill hit only one enemy target, its damage would forcibly increase by fifty percent, with an extremely high chance of triggering a double-damage critical strike that ignored defense!
That was what had given him the confidence to kill those Special Ability Demons with a single blow earlier. But now, the Hand Demon was holding two living people in front of its most vulnerable spot, its neck. If he forced an attack through, the system's targeting mechanism would definitely count those two swordsmen as "additional targets hit."
If he failed to behead it in one strike, the Hand Demon's terrifying regenerative ability would let it recover instantly, while the two swordsmen serving as human shields would undoubtedly die!
"Hey, you brat with the lightning!" One of the swordsmen clutched tightly by the Hand Demon endured the agonizing pain of his broken thigh and shouted at Rokuya at the top of his lungs. "This monster isn't something humans can handle! Its arms never end! Forget about us and run with the girl behind you! Run toward the wisteria grove!"
"Stop trying to sound brave! I don't want to die! Save me, please, save me!" The other swordsman had completely broken down. Tears mixed with dirt smeared his entire face as he desperately reached toward Rokuya. "My little sister is still waiting for me at home... I can't die here..."
"Shut up!" The Hand Demon abruptly tightened one finger.
A teeth-grating crack of breaking bone rang out. The crying swordsman let out an inhuman scream and spat out a mouthful of blood, his face instantly turning paper-white.
"Heeheehee... what a lovely sound, a human's despairing cries." The Hand Demon closed one eye in bliss, then abruptly opened it and stared fixedly down at Rokuya. "Say, if you're just going to keep standing there, I'll eat one of their arms as an appetizer, all right?"
Rokuya took a deep breath. The silver-blue aura around his body contracted, and he forcibly suppressed his explosive, wildly surging presence, concentrating it onto the surface of his blade.
He could not retreat. If he did, these two would certainly die, and he would not get any Gratitude Points either; nor could he simply unleash his ultimate move to clear the field.
The only option was an extremely narrow, precise strike that skimmed past the two swordsmen's bodies and severed the Hand Demon's neck without touching either of them!
But that required an absolutely perfect angle of attack, and the Hand Demon currently had them blocking it completely.
"You talk too much." Rokuya slowly uttered the words, his voice as cold as ice shards pulled from a freezing cellar.
"What did you say?" The Hand Demon froze.
"I said you talk too much! Survive one slash from me first!"
Before he finished speaking, the ground beneath Rokuya's feet exploded. He became a streak of silver-blue lightning. Rather than retreating, he shot straight toward the Hand Demon's enormous body!
"You have a death wish!" The Hand Demon flew into a rage.
Despite its enormous size, its reactions were astonishingly fast. With a ground-shaking roar, more than a dozen arms as thick as pythons shot out of the fleshy lumps on its back, weaving into an impenetrable net of death that slammed toward Rokuya in midair.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Every arm that struck the ground smashed out a crater several meters deep, sending shattered rock and dirt flying like bullets in every direction.
Rokuya forcibly twisted his waist in midair, pushing Thunder Breathing to its limit.
"Thunder Breathing, First Form: Thunderclap and Flash-Combo!"
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Golden lightning flashed wildly through the pitch-black woods. Rokuya's figure became countless afterimages in midair, the heavy katana as light as a willow leaf in his hand. Every swing struck precisely at the joints of the arms smashing toward him.
Severed limbs rained down along with nauseating green blood.
Yet at that moment, the Hand Demon's despair-inducing regenerative power was on full display. The severed arms had barely hit the ground before new flesh surged at the wounds. With a wet squelch, brand-new arms instantly regenerated and joined the attack again.
"Useless, useless, useless! You'll never cut off all my hands! Hahaha!" The Hand Demon laughed arrogantly.
It deliberately left the hands holding the swordsmen out of the fight, instead using its dozens of other arms to relentlessly pin Rokuya down.
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