"AAGH!"
"Help us!!"
"YOKAI!!"
Screams echoed through the village as people were dragged from their homes.
"Tch. Really wanna eat these ones."
"The Master said to bring them back for inspection first. Best not to touch them."
A group of Demons hovered around wooden cages packed with terrified villagers, chatting casually among themselves.
"Whatever. Hardly any of these weaklings would survive the conversion anyway."
"Sooner or later, they're just food."
"True enough. Hahaha!!"
Having already decided their captives' fate, the Demons laughed.
"Hm? Did something just move?"
One of them caught a dark blur at the edge of its vision.
"Your imagination."
"I don't sense anything unusual."
"Hey! Look at this! What the hell is...?!"
The others dismissed it as paranoia, until they noticed strange black characters crawling across their own bodies like spreading ink.
"Eliminate."
SHINK!
A cold voice. The whisper of a blade returned to its sheath. Every Demon collapsed at the same instant, dead before any of them could see who struck.
[Presence Concealment] (A+).
The ability Akame gained upon becoming a Heroic Spirit. When she chose to hide, virtually nothing alive could detect her.
"You're... the one from the village this morning..."
CRACK!
Akame pried open the wooden cage. The villagers poured out, and several recognized her immediately. The skilled stranger who'd bought rice and flour from them just hours ago had come to save their lives.
"Gather your belongings and leave this village as quickly as you can."
She glanced at the Demon corpses. She'd overheard their conversation.
They called themselves "Demons." Not strays. Not individuals. They answered to someone. An organized force with a leader.
Killing foot soldiers wouldn't solve the problem.
Since these Demons had been sent to capture humans, their failure to report back would inevitably draw their master's attention. Akame couldn't stay to protect this place forever, and when retaliation came, these people wouldn't survive it.
She told them straight.
"But... this has been our home for generations..."
Some of the villagers hesitated. Leaving behind ancestral land wasn't a decision anyone made lightly.
"The next time Demons come for you, there may not be someone like me around to stop them."
She offered nothing more. Those words were enough. Then she turned and walked toward the village entrance.
A boy in white blocked her path.
"!"
Every instinct screamed. The dissonance was immediate, visceral. Akame drew Murasame and dropped into her combat stance.
"Killing those Demons in the blink of an eye. You're no ordinary fighter."
Pale eyes appraised her. Hakudoshi's voice carried a note of genuine admiration.
He hadn't gone far. The instant the Demons vanished from his awareness, he'd circled back.
"Not a monk. Not a miko. Not a yokai."
"Yet those skills aren't something any normal human should possess."
"You're a Servant, aren't you?"
Fully aware of what Muzan's Demons were, Hakudoshi produced a long naginata.
"If I bring you back, you'd be worth at least a hundred humans. No... five hundred."
Emerald dragon scales glinted along the weapon's shaft. He swung it in a wide, testing arc.
"..."
Akame said nothing. She shifted into her stance and vanished.
"Her aura is completely gone?"
Hakudoshi's eyes darted in every direction. Not a trace. Not a flicker.
BOOM!!
He spun the naginata and unleashed his yokai aura in a violent burst. This was no ordinary Demon anymore.
Demonified by Muzan, Hakudoshi now inhabited a Yokai-Demon hybrid body, wielding power he'd never possessed before.
Dark energy condensed into physical slashes and tore outward in every direction. Hakudoshi's Blood Demon Art.
CRACK!
Trees splintered into sawdust. Deep trenches carved themselves into the earth.
WHOOSH!
He whipped the naginata backward in a horizontal sweep, catching the blur of an approaching figure.
WHOOSH!
'Fast!'
The blade passed through nothing. An afterimage.
SPLRCH!!
Two cuts opened across both shoulders simultaneously. By the time Hakudoshi registered the pain, Akame was already standing in front of him, turned sideways, blade angled down.
"That human dodged every one of Hakudoshi's attacks and counterattacked."
Kagura, hovering far above with Kanna on her feather, stared in disbelief.
"But that alone won't kill him."
She'd arrived too late to witness the earlier massacre, but she knew Hakudoshi's nature well. As one of Naraku's incarnations, he possessed formidable regeneration. Simple sword wounds couldn't finish him.
And the current Hakudoshi was even stronger than before.
CRACK!
Then Kagura watched Hakudoshi sever both of his own shoulders.
The speed and certainty of the self-amputation were staggering.
"You noticed."
Akame glanced back at Hakudoshi's decisive action and murmured.
"So your blade carries Cursed Poison."
"That explains how you killed those Demons so easily."
Both arms gone, naginata abandoned, Hakudoshi retreated several paces.
He looked down at the severed limbs. Black curse characters had already consumed them.
His regeneration was powerful, and his immortality formidable, but neither was absolute. Poison, if potent enough, could kill even him.
Even Naraku couldn't claim immunity from that truth.
"Hmph. Shame you couldn't finish me in two strikes."
Losing his hands was an inconvenience, nothing more. A brief rest, and they'd grow back.
The situation wasn't dire. Now that he knew her blade was the real threat, he just needed to avoid getting cut.
"No. It's already over."
"What?"
Hakudoshi froze.
His face drained of color as his gaze dropped to his chest.
There, beside the button of his collar, was a tiny mark. A scratch so shallow it looked like the tip of a blade had barely grazed the skin.
Dread hit him like a wall. He tore open his shirt.
The curse characters spreading from that faint, invisible wound had already consumed his entire torso.
'That woman!!'
'The two cuts to the shoulders were decoys!!'
'The real attack was here!!'
His expression locked into rigid horror. He'd never felt the blow land.
The shoulder strikes had been a feint. In the same instant, moving too fast for perception, she'd driven the very tip of Murasame into his chest. A nick so light it had only scraped off a sliver of skin.
Like being pricked by a toothpick.
But Murasame didn't care about the depth of the wound. A scratch was enough.
The Cursed Poison had already claimed him. The last thing Hakudoshi heard was Akame's voice.
"Eliminate."
[Translated and Rewritten by Shika_Kagura]
[TN: Akame's Servant stat card:
Assassin (Akame).
Skills: [Presence Concealment] (A+), able to hide her aura from almost any detection method.
[Instinct] (A), danger precognition and combat intuition (same rank as Kenshin).
Noble Phantasms: [One-Cut Killer: Murasame] (A++), any wound inflicted by the blade triggers instant death via Cursed Poison, extremely effective against living targets.
[Murasame: Demonify] (A to EX), sacrifices human identity to absorb the power of all beings Murasame has ever killed, dramatically boosting combat ability. Irreversible.]