The Jumping Demon dropped out of the sky, aimed straight down at Cold Cry.
He didn't even look up. A tap of his toes and he was already backward, clear of it.
Landing on nothing, the Jumping Demon sprang again, this time into the trees.
A few exchanges in, and Cold Cry had its measure: it jumped high, landed without a sound, and either dragged people up into the air to drop them or used the fall itself, plus its leg strength, to hit hard. Dodge it before it landed, and there was nothing to it.
For anyone else, an attack with no warning would be hard to read. For Cold Cry, it didn't matter which direction it came from; the moment anything crossed into Cold Tide's reach, he felt it and answered.
The Spider Demon was no different.
The six arms wrapped around the Three-Headed Demon's body slowly loosened. It looked almost like an overgrown octopus now, the ice cones lodged in its flesh clearly bothering it; it wouldn't stop roaring.
The Spider Demon slipped out between its legs, glanced at Cold Cry, and seemed to decide the three of them together couldn't win. It turned and slunk back into the forest.
Something about that didn't sit right with Cold Cry. If he lost sight of all three demons at once, there was no telling what they'd try next, and the thing he worried about most was them slipping past him to go after the other Contestants.
"Those two have pulled back into the forest. Stay sharp, you three."
He'd tried to cut the Spider Demon off, but the Three-Headed Demon's six arms blocked his path, so all he could do was call out the warning.
The fight settled back into its old shape: the Three-Headed Demon locked onto Cold Cry, while the Spider Demon and Jumping Demon waited in the trees for an opening.
Six huge hands grabbed at him again and again, missing every time, and the demon's temper only got worse for it. Its long, thin arms lashed out at random like whips, and any time Cold Cry closed the distance, they'd snap shut around him in an instant.
The Jumping Demon darted out of the forest now and then, from no fixed direction, to land a stomp or two, but a single trick like that couldn't touch him. All it left behind were craters in the mud.
The Spider Demon, meanwhile, seemed to have gotten smarter. It never showed itself again once it went to ground.
Its instincts ran sharper than the other two, sharp enough, probably, that it had baited the Three-Headed Demon into that first chase on purpose, the one that had broken Kimura's team apart and turned everyone into prey.
With no backup coming for the giant, Cold Cry turned his full attention to it. The priority now was the two heads on its neck; take those off and see if that was enough to kill it.
He didn't hold out much hope. He'd suspected for a while that the face on its chest was the real weak point. But the heads were closer, easier to reach, so he'd start there and find out.
He swung his blade left and right, opening cuts across the grasping palms as he closed the distance. The nearer he got, the wilder the demon's attacks became.
One huge hand dropped from above, aimed straight at him; a hit like that would have crushed him flat.
He stepped back, let the palm miss, and vaulted onto the demon's arm instead.
Ice formed under his feet the instant he touched down, giving him the footing to push off it, dodge the hands closing in from every side, and close in on the heads.
The Three-Headed Demon seemed to see what he was going for. Its two heads whipped around, letting out confused, panicked sounds, while its six arms crossed above them, hands snatching harder than ever.
Close enough.
He used the swinging arm itself as a springboard, gripped the hilt with both hands, and lined up a cut at the head on the left.
Just as he swung, two arms crossed in from either side and wound around its neck like gray scarves.
He caught himself for a beat; he'd forgotten how flexible those six arms were.
He turned toward the head on the right instead. Two more arms already had it wrapped tight. Nothing left to say. He dropped the horizontal cut and brought the blade down instead.
"Ice Breathing, Fourth Form: Icefall."
He flicked his wrist and drove both hands down. Cold air poured off the blade, mist and ice chips trailing it like a white thread dropping straight between the two heads.
Several hands closed in from all sides, trying to lift the blade before it landed; they clearly had no idea how much force was behind that strike.
Icefall lived up to its name. Like a waterfall dropping out of the sky, with enough weight behind it to shake the ground.
Thousands of pounds of force crashed down onto the demon's stacked palms, and cold air rolled off the blade in waves.
In an instant, the palms and arms froze solid, and the impact of the blade shattered them into chunks of ice that rained down over the demon's body.
It let out a scream that would break your heart, still trying to keep him back, but the palms came off one after another, leaving only frozen, useless stumps.
The blade sank into the flesh between its two heads, more than ten centimeters deep, and stuck there.
Even so, the damage was already done. Cold poured through the wound and into the body, and white frost crept out from the cut, spreading toward both heads.
The Three-Headed Demon thrashed, trying to throw him off. Ice flowers bloomed white through its gray, deathly hide, and its screaming rolled across the whole of Fujikasane Mountain.
The sound cut through everything; every fight on the mountain stopped, every head turned toward the clearing, even the demons that had been retreating.
Then the Three-Headed Demon flung its legs under it and bolted straight for the crowd.
"Scatter!" Cold Cry shouted. He wrenched his blade free and leapt clear of the demon's back.
His voice, along with Kimura's and the others', got everyone moving. They broke off and ran, following Kimura's lead, putting distance between themselves and the demon.
It crashed, stumbling, into the spot the crowd had just left. A handful of demons were still lingering there, and one look at its agony sent fear straight across their faces.
One of them couldn't take the pressure and turned to bolt for the mountaintop, only to get caught by a pair of hands still wrapped around the Three-Headed Demon's neck and torn clean in half.
The rest dropped to the ground and didn't move.
The Three-Headed Demon roared, and every demon's eyes swung toward Cold Cry. Then, as if on cue, they all rushed him at once.
The Spider Demon and Jumping Demon broke from the treeline, not toward Cold Cry, but straight for the Contestants.