Chapter 68: Kaede Village Surrounded, Arrows from Heaven and Bones on Earth
Night had fallen on Kaede Village.
A vile miasma of demonic energy choked the heavens, swallowing the moonlight and plunging the entire village into an oppressive gloom.
The spiritual barrier still stood. The sacred boundary Kikyo had erected before her departure shimmered with a faint, milky-white light, a fragile dome against the encroaching darkness.
But that light was dimming with every passing moment.
"How many of them are there?" a middle-aged man stammered, his knuckles white as he clutched a common farming hoe. His voice trembled, laced with a fear he couldn't conceal. He was a farmer, a man who knew only the rhythm of the seasons and the feel of tilled earth. He had never faced a demon.
Tonight, however, he had no choice but to stand his ground.
Because there were simply too many.
Outside the shimmering barrier, a writhing sea of silhouettes clawed at the edges of the light. There were gaunt wolf demons prowling on all fours, their eyes glowing with feral hunger. Grotesque, tusked creatures with the faces of tormented ghosts shambled forward, their breath fogging in the cold air. Serpentine demons slithered through the press, their long tails lashing impatiently. And among them were countless other monstrosities, twisted things for which the man had no name.
Dozens. No, hundreds.
They paced and snarled, their inhuman eyes fixed on the terrified villagers, their gazes filled with a chilling, predatory focus.
"Where are the shikigami Lady Kikyo left behind?" someone cried out from the crowd.
"Over there," another villager answered, pointing a shaking finger toward the village center.
Three figures made of folded paper stood sentinel, spiritual power surging around them in visible waves as they poured their energy into maintaining the barrier. These were the guardians Kikyo had left in her stead, promising they could hold out for half a month.
But less than a week had passed, and the first cracks were already beginning to appear.
"There are too many," the man with the hoe muttered, his face ashen. "Far too many demons..."
"The barrier... it's not going to hold..."
As if summoned by his words, a sharp sound split the night.
CRACK—
A fissure, like a spiderweb in glass, spread from the barrier's edge. The sound was piercingly clear in the tense silence, shattering the last vestiges of hope.
"Charge—!"
A unified, guttural roar erupted from the demonic horde as they surged toward the breach.
The first wolf demon squeezed through.
Then a second, and a third.
The spiritual barrier, once a mighty dam, burst. The black flood of demons poured into the village, unstoppable.
"Grab your weapons!" a man's voice bellowed over the rising chaos. It was one of the village's young hunters, his face grim but resolved. "Protect the children and the elderly! All able-bodied men, with me!"
"Lady Kikyo isn't here, but that doesn't mean we'll lie down and die!"
Though they had lived their lives under Kikyo's protection, these were people forged in the crucible of a chaotic era. They did not lack the bloody courage to fight for their own survival.
...
The battle began. If one could even call it a battle.
It was a slaughter.
Farmers armed with hoes, sickles, and wooden clubs charged at monsters born of fang and claw.
The first young hunter to rush forward was swatted aside by a wolf demon's paw. Three deep, bloody gashes tore across his chest, and he collapsed to the ground, his body twitching.
A second man raised his hoe, but before the tool could even begin its descent, another demon lunged, its jaws clamping around his throat. Blood sprayed in a hot, crimson arc.
Screams tore through the night, one after another, a chorus of agony and terror.
The shikigami fought with divine fury. The three paper figures became blurs of motion, their spiritual power lashing out as bolts of pure white light that blasted demons back.
But there were only three of them.
And there were hundreds of demons.
One shikigami was swarmed by five demons at once. It fought its way free, only to be engulfed again. After felling more than twenty of the creatures, its paper form could endure no more and was torn to shreds. Its spiritual power dissipated, dissolving into motes of light that scattered into the night.
A second shikigami fell soon after.
The last one was struggling, its light flickering like a dying candle. Kikyo, after all, hailed from a humble country shrine. She was a wandering priestess without a head priest to guide her, and creating shikigami was not her specialty. The guardians she left behind were animated solely by her immense spiritual power; without her presence to replenish them, their time was always limited. Under normal circumstances, they would have been more than enough to handle stray demons for months.
But this was not a normal circumstance. The sheer scale of the assault had overwhelmed all expectations.
"Uncle!" a child's desperate cry rang out.
It was Kaede.
Huddled in a corner of the village, she watched in horror as a man she knew, a farmer with a hoe, was pounced on by a hulking demon and dragged down.
He fell.
Another villager, a woman wielding a kitchen knife, took his place.
She fell, too.
Kaede watched it all, her eyes burning red with unshed tears. She saw the faces of her neighbors, the uncles who greeted her every morning, the aunts who wove flower wreaths for her hair. Kikyo was her sister, but it was often inconvenient for a priestess to travel with a small child. In a very real sense, Kaede had been raised by the entire village.
And now, the people who had watched her grow up were falling.
One after another.
Blood slicked the ground, and still, the demons poured in.
The last shikigami was finally ripped apart.
Silence fell, broken only by the guttural snarls of the victorious demons. No one was left to fight. Only the elderly and the children remained, huddled together in the village center, completely surrounded.
"It's over..." someone whispered in utter despair.
"Lady Kikyo isn't here... We're finished..."
The demons closed in, their inhuman eyes glinting with avarice in the darkness.
Just then, Kaede tore herself from the grasp of an old grandmother who had been holding her back.
She scrambled to the very front of the terrified crowd, planting her small feet to face the monsters baring their fangs.
"Don't come any closer!" Her voice trembled, but it was loud and clear. "My sister will be back!"
"She promised she would protect us!"
The demons did not stop. Perhaps they couldn't understand human speech. Or perhaps they simply didn't care.
A wolf demon lowered its head and sprang, a blur of fur and claws aimed directly at Kaede.
"Watch out—!" a woman screamed.
Kaede squeezed her eyes shut, but she didn't stop shouting, her voice rising to a desperate, defiant shriek.
"Sister—Kikyo-oneesama!"
"And—"
"Kobe Hikaru!"
She didn't know why she screamed his name. It was an instinct, a desperate hope. That pale, red-eyed big brother... the demon who had protected her sister so fiercely.
Her sister. And him.
They would definitely come.
They had to—
A thought, so clear it felt like a voice, echoed in her mind.
'Sister, and... big brother!?'
...
A piercing whistle descended from the heavens, slicing through the night.
It was followed by a spear of brilliant white light that tore through the demonic clouds above.
It was a single arrow.
Just one.
But the radiance that bloomed from it poured down like the celestial river of the Milky Way. The demons that had been about to pounce on the villagers were touched by that holy light and instantly turned to ash, their snarls silenced forever.
At the exact same moment, the very ground began to shake.
A forest of ivory spikes erupted from the soil.
One, two, ten, a hundred—they burst forth with terrifying speed, a thicket of bone growing in the blink of an eye. The spikes skewered the demons on the outskirts that had not yet reached the village center, impaling them where they stood. Some were pierced through the chest, others through the head, their limbs pinned to the earth.
The screams that filled the night sky were cut brutally short.
Kaede opened her eyes.
And she saw them.
Standing at the village entrance, bathed in the now-unobstructed moonlight, was a figure in white robes and red hakama. A longbow was held loosely in her hand, her long black hair fluttering in the breeze.
It was her sister. It was Kikyo.
And beside that sacred figure stood another.
He wore simple gray clothes, his hair was the color of snow, and his eyes glowed with a crimson light. His body was wreathed in an armor of jagged white bone, making him look like an Asura walking out of the depths of hell.
Though his face was obscured, Kaede knew. It was that handsome, demonic big brother. It was Hikaru.
They had returned.
At the most critical moment, just as everyone had fallen into despair.
They were back.
"Sister!" Tears finally spilled from Kaede's eyes, streaming down her cheeks.
She ran.
She ran toward those two figures standing side-by-side, a beacon of hope in the carnage.
From behind his ghost mask, Hikaru watched the little girl sprinting toward them, his crimson eyes calm and unreadable. He raised a hand, and another bone spike shot from his palm, pinning the last fleeing demon to the ground with a wet thud.
His gaze swept over the blood-soaked scene. Some villagers were dead, but most were merely severely injured, lying unconscious or moaning in agony on the ground.
They hadn't been too late.
The truly late ones were the villagers in the settlements they had passed on their journey here—charred ruins and silent streets where not a single soul had been left alive.
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