-Broadcast — Flower Capital, Wano Country-
The black blood pool was boiling.
Heavy, viscous bubbles rose from the bottom and burst at the surface with dull, wet sounds. The liquid thickened as it moved — not like fluid finding its level but like something organizing itself, sending out dark tentacles that extended into the air and tested the environment with slow, deliberate movement. They were covered in mucus. They made no sound.
Everyone who had stayed to watch understood what was happening.
"Is he even human?"
"What fruit does a body like that come from?"
The contestants who had held their ground through the flesh mountain's rampage made their final tactical assessment and withdrew from the ruins. They had lost enough people to what they couldn't understand tonight. Let SWORD have it. The Marines could absorb this particular lesson on everyone else's behalf — and points accumulated by Marine soldiers were useless anyway; they'd never be permitted to join the God's Knights regardless of what they killed.
They left the field and stood at a safe distance to watch what came next.
The monster that emerged from the pool was the size of a building and built wrong in every direction.
Its skin was black — not dark, black, the black of something that had been at the bottom of a fire and come back from it — and covered with ridged bumps and raised lines that followed no anatomical pattern. At the top of its body: a skull. Bone-white, the jaw of a sheep, teeth too large and too sharp for the size of the animal the skull had come from, blood-red eyes recessed in the orbital sockets. Multiple tentacles extended from what might have been arms. Sharp protrusions emerged from the body in irregular clusters, each one catching the moonlight.
When the Fearful Sheep Demon opened its mouth, the sound it produced shook the ground.
Kyoshiro, standing at the edge of the ruins, looked at the third form of Kurozumi Orochi and revised everything he thought he'd understood about tonight. The first form had been a man he'd known for years. The second had been an abomination assembled from the mist of a crushed body. This was neither. This form had no reference point in any of his experience.
"Miss," he said, half under his breath — addressed to someone not present in the ruins, some arrangement made before tonight had begun. "You didn't tell me how many lives he has."
The shock wave arrived before the monster visibly moved.
It came from the demon's body outward in all directions — an invisible compression that hit the ruins and the ground and everything standing on it simultaneously. The earth cracked. Anyone who had been positioned in cover or hiding below ground was not protected; the force passed through solid stone and hit internal organs directly. Several people nearby collapsed. The one who remained standing walked out of the ruins with blood running from his eyes and ears and nose and mouth, and managed three steps before his body informed him it had finished.
The Fearful Sheep Demon's tentacles extended. One of them found the dying man.
What followed was rapid and functional. The demon consumed him. The bones were audible. The blood reached the surrounding stone in a radius that established how large the meal had been.
The Celestial Dragons watching from the perimeter did not speak.
"Enough." Sett's fists had been closed for several minutes. The disgust in his chest had reached the point where it needed somewhere to go. "Someone needs to end this."
Kyoshiro was already moving away from the demon, putting distance between himself and its third form, trying to establish the time to think. The demon in this state was not a samurai's opponent — not because it was too strong, but because it was too different. Nothing he had learned about the first form or the second form translated here. He needed a different approach entirely.
The demon moved faster than its size should have allowed.
In the space between one breath and the next, it was in front of him.
The heat from its nostrils hit Kyoshiro's face like a blast from an oven — not dry heat but wet, carrying a smell that arrived before the temperature did, a deep rot that went past the nostrils and settled somewhere that ordinary smells didn't reach. His legs began to shake. Not from fear — from his body making an autonomous assessment of what was standing in front of it and responding accordingly. His mind remained clear. His legs did not agree.
The demon looked at him. Did not move. Did not open its mouth. Just looked, its blood-red eyes steady, as if it had all the time it needed.
Kyoshiro opened his kimono.
"Some good things," he said quietly, "were made for a moment like this."
White paper flew out — sheet after sheet of it, catching the air from his opening garment, dispersing in every direction.
In the ruins of the Shogun's Mansion, lit by the remnant glow of blue fire on cooling stone, the paper caught the light and moved.
The memory came to him unbidden, as memories do when the body has decided a moment might be final.
Sunset. The sake was good. Oden was laughing about something — he was always laughing, the laugh that made every room feel half its actual size because it filled the rest. Denjiro was there, and the other eight, and they were all young enough that the future felt like something they had a vote in.
Denjiro.
His own name. The one he had buried under Kyoshiro for years, under the fat body and the deliberately common face and the servility that was never servility but patience — the patience of a man waiting for the right moment to spend everything he had in a single act.
He had spent tonight well. Whatever came next was a reasonable accounting.