Chapter 161: Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill!
Sagami Province, Odawara castle town.
The streets after nightfall should have been dead and silent. Tonight, however, a restless energy clung to the damp air. Inside a dimly lit tavern, several half-drunk merchants huddled around a corner table, their voices dropped to harsh whispers over cups of cheap, cloudy sake.
"Have you heard?" one merchant muttered, glancing over his shoulder. "That newly built small shrine down by Shimizu Port cracked yesterday."
"Cracked?" His companion frowned, setting his cup down. "Wasn't it just finished half a month ago? Could it be another earthquake?"
"It wasn't an earthquake. The damn thing cracked from the inside out. The stone statue's eyeballs shattered right down the middle. The pieces rolled clear across the courtyard."
"...That's ominous."
An older man leaning against the wooden wall interjected, his voice raspy and barely audible over the crackling hearth. "More than just ominous. My wife's maiden home is in a village up in northern Sagami. They sent a letter the day before yesterday. The Ksitigarbha statue at the village entrance grew a thick coat of black moss overnight. That was a newly carved stone statue, erected less than ten days ago."
"Moss is nothing," another chimed in, his knuckles white around his cup. "I heard a shrine in the next valley over had its roof violently ripped off. The offering table was flipped, the incense ash scattered everywhere, and the floorboards were splintered. Must be demons fighting..."
When he spoke the word 'demons', his voice dropped to the extreme, terrified that the shadows themselves might be listening. No one refuted him. The silence at the table grew heavy.
During this recent period, ghost stories had been spreading like wildfire throughout the Kanto region. It started when the legend of the Kaede Village deity was aggressively promoted by the Hojo Clan across Musashi and Sagami Provinces. Shrines were erected one after another, practically overnight.
The commoners had to believe it whether they wanted to or not. The Hojo Clan had issued a strict mandate. It was an orthodox deity personally guaranteed by the provincial lord. Even without an official certificate from Kyoto, the emperor was far away, and the Hojo Clan's blades were right at their throats. Who dared refuse to worship? They bowed their heads. The shrines were built, incense burned thick into the sky, and legends were fabricated to fill the void.
But immediately after, those newly built shrines began to rot from the inside.
First, the stone statues cracked. Then, fresh offerings decayed into foul sludge within hours. Finally, people began spotting an unnatural, creeping mist floating around the shrines at night.
That mist was certainly not natural water vapor. It was pitch-dark, ice-cold against the skin, and carried the faint, nauseatingly sweet stench of rotting fish. It was Yao Qi. Although ordinary humans could not clearly identify it, the elderly who had survived decades in this era of coexisting humans and demons knew exactly what it meant. The sensation was identical to the foul demon winds that blew down from the deep mountains. Gloomy. Suffocating.
"Something is very wrong..." The merchants exchanged uneasy glances. None of them knew the truth of the shifting world. They only knew one rule: these days, after dusk, you lock your doors and pray.
Meanwhile, on the official dirt road leading to Suruga in northern Sagami Province.
The moonlight struggled through a thick canopy of bruised clouds. The cedar forests flanking the road swayed violently in the rising wind, their intertwined shadows slicing the dim path into jagged fragments. A lone traveling merchant trudged along the night road, pulling his heavily loaded packhorse by the reins.
Suddenly, the packhorse planted its hooves into the dirt. It refused to move, pawing frantically at the ground. Its chest heaved with heavy breaths, and its ears flattened flat against its skull—a universal sign of pure, animalistic terror.
The merchant looked back over his shoulder.
There was nothing there. Only the howling wind rustling the cedar branches.
He yanked hard on the rough hemp reins, spat a curse into the dirt, and forced his legs forward.
He took three steps.
In the absolute edge of his peripheral vision, a shadow flickered.
It flashed from deep within the dense cedar forest on the right side of the main road. It moved with such blistering velocity that the merchant blinked, unsure if his tired eyes were playing tricks on him. It looked as though something massive was leaping straight through the treetops, treating the ancient branches like mere stepping stones.
Swallowing hard, the merchant quickened his pace.
He walked another dozen steps.
A muffled, deafening roll of thunder detonated directly overhead.
No—it wasn't just thunder. The sound was far too sharp, too concentrated. Beneath the booming crack of lightning was the visceral, shuddering tremor of physical impact.
Accompanied by that sonic boom, the entire cedar forest was violently illuminated for half a breath by a blinding, violent purple light.
The streak of light tore across the sky from the northwest, dragging a dark red wake of mist behind it like a bleeding comet. Its speed was entirely beyond understanding to the mortal eye. Before the merchant could even turn his head to track it, the light had already vanished behind the jagged ridge to the southeast.
It left behind only a fleeting, burning afterimage seared into his retinas, and the sharp stench of ozone.
The packhorse completely lost its mind. It let out a shrill whinny, snapped the thick leather reins with a violent jerk of its neck, and bolted blindly back the way they had come.
The merchant didn't chase it. He stood frozen in the middle of the dark road, his face drained of all color, staring blankly at the empty ridge where the light had disappeared.
"Wh... What was that..." he stammered to the empty wind.
He didn't know what it was. And he would never know.
That purple light was Hikaru.
With Thunder Muscle pushed to its absolute limit, violent purple electric arcs exploded from the soles of his feet. Every single step he took shattered the earth beneath him, cratering the ground and launching his body forward. In the dead of night, his figure had literally transformed into a devastating streak of purple lightning and crimson blood mist.
His base speed after achieving the Ninth Transformation was already approaching the level of his previous, desperate full-power bursts.
And right now? He was bursting with absolute, unrestrained power.
He was faster. So fast that he was beginning to brush against the instantaneous speed of the twelve-transformation yokai, Kidomaru, in its normal state.
In this enlarged, sparsely populated world, the distance from Kaede Village to northern Sagami Province spanned roughly one hundred and fifty li. Even riding at a full, relentless gallop, a unit of elite cavalry would need nearly two days to cross it.
Hikaru crossed it in less than seven minutes.
, the journey was not a simple, unobstructed sprint.
It was currently the twilight hour, the bleeding edge where the sun and moon traded places in the sky. This alternation was the Hour of Demons—the exact moment when the pure and turbid energies of heaven and earth violently exchanged, making it the most active and dangerous time for all yokai.
Yokai settlements, usually buried deep within uncharted mountains and poisonous forests, would briefly phase into reality during this hour. These temporary, chaotic gatherings, known as 'Ghost Markets', were like fragile bubbles on the surface of a boiling swamp, rising to the top only to pop and dissipate.
Hikaru tore straight through three of them.
The first was nestled at the bottom of a jagged valley in the mountainous region of western Sagami.
As the final, bloody trace of the sunset clung to the mountain ridge, he swept over the mouth of the valley. His Sharp Eye Transformation instantly locked onto a dozen low-level yokai below. They were huddled around a roaring bonfire, tearing into the raw, bloody flesh of livestock stolen from nearby farms. Their bodies practically oozed with foul, unrefined resentment.
These were clearly outsiders. The local yokai of Sagami—those carrying actual resentment and dense Yao Qi—had already been systematically slaughtered and cleared out by Hikaru and Kikyo.
The Yao Qi radiating from these scavengers was turbid, muddy, and reeked of rot. Unlike the organized yokai in established settlements, these were pathetic stragglers. No organization. No allegiance. Just bottom-feeding scum taking advantage of the chaos in the Kanto region to migrate south and pick at the scraps.
Hikaru didn't even break his stride.
In the exact fraction of a second he passed over the valley, he casually raised his left hand.
Bone Spikes erupted from his fingertips, fanning out in a deadly, wide spread. The jagged white bones, crackling with violent purple lightning, instantly impaled the skull of the largest yokai leading the pack.
Before the rest of the scavengers could even drop their bloody meat to react, a thick, dark red mist seeped out from the dirt beneath their feet, wrapping around their ankles like iron chains. Bone Spikes violently erupted from the earth, and the purple thunder climbed up the bone shafts like predatory vines. Mixed within the slaughter was the lethal, corrosive poison mist harvested from the poison jiao scale.
Hikaru's figure had already vanished into the eastern horizon, leaving behind only a chorus of gurgling, terrified wails that were quickly silenced.
The second encounter took place in an abandoned, rotting village right off the main road.
A flock of Tengu were gleefully dismantling a small shrine that had been erected just days prior. It was a place of worship built by the Hojo Clan specifically for Hitotsume-kozo, the one-eyed boy of The Twenty-three Demons.
The wooden offering table was smashed to splinters, the stone statue was pulverized, and even the heavy stone foundation was being ripped out of the earth by sharp talons.
Seven small Tengu. They possessed pitch-black feathered wings and sharp black beaks. Roughly the size of adult humans, their flight speed was exceptional, and their Yao Qi was roughly equivalent to a fifth-transformation yokai. They were not weak by any standard.
But purple lightning descended from the sky like the wrath of a god.
Muramasa hummed as it left its scabbard.
A single, blinding flash of cursed steel. Seven heads, cleanly and neatly severed, flew into the air simultaneously.
The wings and heads of the seven Tengu rained down onto the dirt. Their lingering Yao Qi was ruthlessly stripped away, wrapped up by Hikaru, and dragged into the uninhabited wilderness.
The shrine was completely destroyed, but fortunately, the heavy foundation remained intact.
Hitotsume-kozo shakily crawled out from beneath the splintered ruins. His single, massive eye was swollen to a bruised slit, but it was wide with the overwhelming relief of having survived certain death.
"My... My Lord!" the small yokai stammered, falling to his knees.
"Are your injuries severe?" Hikaru's voice was cold, echoing slightly behind the Crimson Oni Mask.
"Not severe! It's just... just my eye is a little swollen..."
"As long as you can see the road, go back to Suruga and rendezvous with the Tanuki Spirit."
The third encounter was directly at the border of western Sagami.
The scale of this one was much larger. Over twenty miscellaneous, heavily armed yokai had occupied a fortified stronghold converted from an old mountain god shrine. They had deliberately cut off the flow of Fear energy from three nearby human villages, attempting to violently carve out this territory for themselves.
Hikaru didn't even bother unsheathing Muramasa.
He simply slammed his foot into the earth, pulling up a massive, jagged forest of bone from the ground. White Bone Spikes violently pierced upward through the floorboards of the entire stronghold, erupting like bamboo shoots after a heavy spring rain.
Twenty-three towering Bone Spikes perfectly pinned twenty-three screaming yokai in mid-air.
It was symmetrical to the absolute extreme. A gruesome work of art.
Violent purple thunder conducted directly up the bone shafts, electrocuting the pinned, thrashing yokai into smoking black charcoal one by one.
Cleanup complete.
The entire extermination took no more than thirty seconds.
Walking, killing, pushing forward relentlessly. From western Sagami all the way to the Suruga border, every single external yokai stronghold along his path was violently ripped out of the earth like pulling rusted nails from a floorboard.
No survivors. Just brutal, mechanical efficiency.
If these straggling scavengers weren't cleaned up now, they would continue to harass the territory of The Twenty-three Demons even after he solved the core threat. So, one must cut the weeds and violently rip out the roots. Having transmigrated into this brutal world, Hikaru understood this pragmatic principle better than anyone alive.
Finally, he arrived at the exact border of Suruga.
The ground beneath his feet trembled slightly, vibrating with a dense, suffocating Yao Qi. It wasn't his own. It was radiating from the horizon ahead. It was thick, chaotic, and heavily mixed with the nauseating, metallic scent of fresh blood.
A battlefield. Right ahead.
He didn't slow down. The purple electric arcs flared to life once more against the dark night, and that gray figure, wrapped in a shroud of thunder and blood mist, plunged straight into the epicenter of the thickest Yao Qi.
Suruga, fifty li west of Shimizu Port.
A desolate, dead river beach.
The river had long since dried up, leaving behind an exposed bed of cracked, gray mud. A few dead, twisted willow trees stood crookedly along the crumbling banks like skeletal fingers reaching for the sky.
The sunset was finally sinking into the earth. The horizon burned a violent, dark red, as if a god had slashed open the clouds and let them bleed out over the world.
The Hour of Demons.
On the cracked river beach, three figures stood in the shadows of the dead willow trees.
No, they could no longer be accurately classified as 'humans'.
The man standing in the center was massive. Shirtless, his heavily scarred, bronze muscles were now spiderwebbed with deep, pulsing purple veins—the obvious, permanent traces left behind after dense Yao Qi forcibly seeped into human skin. His face still bore that familiar arrogant, youthful cruelty, but his jawline was even sharper, more hollowed out than it had been months ago.
A colossal weapon rested horizontally across his broad shoulders. A giant war halberd nearly two meters long. The massive blade looked as though it was heavily rusted—but it wasn't rust. It was layers upon layers of dried, blackened blood.
The weapon was Banryu.
The man was Bankotsu.
The ruthless leader of the Band of Seven.
After four of his sworn brothers were brutally slaughtered by Hikaru in Shimura a few months ago, he had fled north in a blind panic alongside Jakotsu and Suikotsu. They fled from Kanto all the way to the northeast, crossing from Suruga deep into Mutsu Province.
They fled all the way, and they killed all the way.
Killing humans. Killing yokai. Making absolutely no distinction between their targets.
And deep within the uncharted mountains and ancient forests of Mutsu Province, Bankotsu encountered the legendary yokai of Tono.
According to common sense, when mortal humans stumble into a major yokai settlement, there are only two possible outcomes: being eaten alive, or successfully slaughtering the yokai.
But Bankotsu was neither eaten, nor did he manage to kill them all. He couldn't defeat this massive clan of demons, yet he was far too violently capable in a fight for them to put down easily.
Before arriving in Mutsu, the three surviving members of the Band of Seven had slaughtered over one hundred humans and one thousand yokai along their bloody pilgrimage.
One hundred human slays. One thousand yokai kills.
This wasn't just an empty boast. The humans they butchered weren't ordinary peasants; they were pampered aristocrats, corrupt warlords, and a group of vile evildoers. Although Bankotsu's twisted nature would have preferred to slaughter everyone in his path regardless of age or gender, every time he raised his blade against the innocent, he felt his blood run in reverse, a sickening pressure crushing his chest. In the end, he restricted his human targets to those who had committed great evils. It was much less efficient, but it kept him moving.
As for the demons, they were all well-known, vicious entities that had ravaged the northern lands, all ranking at medium-level or higher.
Bankotsu had strung every single severed head onto the massive hilt of Banryu, dragging them along the dirt roads like a grotesque, walking sacrifice.
In fact, it was exactly a sacrifice.
Through this endless slaughter, a terrifying mutation occurred. The heavy blade, repeatedly soaked in the blood of wicked men and powerful demons, began to gorge itself on the lingering resentment of the dead. Fine, jagged patterns emerged along the grey-white edge of the steel, pulsing with a dark, liquid red light.
The absolute terror of one hundred humans and the boiling resentment of one thousand demons were entirely poured into the steel.
Banryu had ascended from a heavy mortal weapon into a true demonic weapon.
And Bankotsu himself, because he constantly wielded the demonic weapon, nurtured its thirst, and was steeped in its dense Yao Qi, began to undergo a violent physical mutation.
His body had been drastically reinforced. His speed, raw strength, and combat reflexes were now far superior to his human peak. The deep purple veins pulsing beneath his skin were obvious proof of the Yao Qi's erosion.
But he hadn't fully become a demon. At least, not yet. He still retained his human consciousness, his tactical judgment, and his burning hatred. His body had simply stepped half a pace into the world of the non-human.
A half-human, half-demon. But unlike Inuyasha, who was born of a mixed bloodline, Bankotsu had been forcibly, violently twisted by an external force. The overwhelming resentment swallowed by Banryu had backfired, warping his physical vessel into an anomaly trapped between two worlds.
Afterward, the ruling demons of Tono had taken a keen liking to this exact aspect of him.
A human who could slaughter demons with ease, wielding a newly born demonic weapon, and radiating an intense, suffocating killing intent. To the Tono demons, who were currently attempting to expand their dark influence southward into the Kanto region, Bankotsu was a perfectly forged, ready-made blade.
A blade they could use to test the waters in the south.
Thus, a dark collaboration was struck. Bankotsu obtained the full backing of the Tono demons: raw demonic power, detailed intelligence, and a legion of expendable troops.
In exchange, he only had to do one thing. Return to Suruga. Return to Kanto.
Kill the Oni Samurai named Kobe Hikaru.
Revenge. It happened to align perfectly with his own burning desires.
"Having killed my four brothers, that bastard with the Oni mask—no matter what the hell he is, human or demon, I will cleave him in two."
Those were the exact words Bankotsu spat when he marched south.
Jakotsu stood silently behind him to his left. His effeminate face bore a sickly, unnatural pallor, his narrow, fox-like eyes half-closed in a lazy daze. Tucked securely at his waist was his signature serpentine blade, the sword that could bend and extend like a whip. The scabbard now showed faint, creeping patterns of Yao Qi infiltration. Although it was far less obvious than the corruption on Banryu, and it remained a mortal weapon, it had still been tainted by the sheer density of the aura around them.
Suikotsu stood behind Bankotsu to the right. He was tall, thin, and his expression was completely dull, his eyes drooping as if he might fall asleep standing up. Strapped heavily to his back were two modified small cannons, deadly artillery obtained from a rogue blacksmith in Mutsu Province.
Behind the three of them stood a scattered, chaotic horde of forty or fifty demons of various sizes. Kappa, mountain spirits, one-legged demons, and floating flying-head demons. All sorts of low-level, grotesque creatures were gathered on the dry riverbank. Naturally, they were not the elite core fighting force of Tono. They were merely cannon fodder, expendable pawns used to surround, harass, and exhaust The Twenty-three Demons.
The true leaders of Tono were clearly not here. They were hiding much further away in the shadows. Waiting patiently to close the net.
At this moment, Bankotsu stood tall on the riverbank, his purple-veined muscles flexing as he faced southeast. The Twenty-three Demons' last remaining segment, their main gathering place in Suruga, was exactly in that direction.
The final, bleeding rays of the setting sun sank below the horizon. Only a bruised, purple afterglow remained to illuminate the dead river.
The Hour of Demons had officially descended.
"Let's go."
Bankotsu grabbed Banryu's hilt and hoisted the massive blade onto his shoulder. The heavy axe-like edge carved a dark, humming arc through the twilight air.
The forty or fifty demons moved in unison, surging forward toward the southeast like a tide of black sludge.
Three miles south of Shimizu Port.
The temporary stronghold of The Twenty-three Demons was an abandoned, rotting fishing village recently requisitioned by the Imagawa Clan.
The Tanuki Spirit crouched low on the sagging roof of a hut, its fluffy tail tucked tightly between its trembling short legs. Its mung-bean-sized eyes stared fixedly toward the northwest, wide with terror.
It could feel it. Yao Qi was approaching. A massive, suffocating amount of it.
"It's here, it's here, it's here—" the Tanuki Spirit's voice violently trembled.
Inside the dilapidated house below, a dozen or so heavily injured little demons were huddled together in the dark. Some were missing ears, some had broken, bleeding tails, and some had entire arms frozen into solid ice that refused to thaw.
They were the remaining, battered members of The Twenty-three Demons' night procession who hadn't been entirely scattered. They had been beaten severely by the Tono demons over the past few days.
It wasn't that they couldn't win in a fair, one-on-one fight. It was that the enemy simply crushed them with sheer, overwhelming numbers, sealing off the entire periphery, cutting off their communication lines, and severing the channels for transmitting Fear. They were picking them off, one by one.
"Has our Lord not arrived yet...?" a Kappa whimpered, holding its cracked, bleeding shell, its voice muffled with despair.
"He's on the way! The Lord said he's on the way!" The Tanuki Spirit desperately shouted to comfort its companion, though it was mostly trying to comfort itself.
In the northwest, cutting through the twilight, Yao Qi surged forward like a tidal wave.
The grotesque figures of dozens of demons emerged from the dead forest, a dark, overwhelming mass of teeth and claws.
At the very front of the horde, three figures walked with terrifying purpose.
Bankotsu carried Banryu casually on his shoulder. Jakotsu gripped the hilt of his serpentine blade, a twisted smile forming on his pale lips. Suikotsu adjusted the heavy cannons on his back.
"Found them."
Bankotsu grinned. In the dying twilight, his smile looked exceptionally ferocious, his teeth bared like a starving wolf. "It's just this pathetic bunch of little things. Wipe them out, and that bastard with the Oni mask will naturally come running."
Banryu was raised high into the air.
A violently dark, pulsing light bloomed from the heavy edge of the blade. It was Yao Qi. It was a concentration of demonic energy entirely sufficient to wipe this abandoned fishing village, and the dozen little demons inside it, off the face of the earth with a single, devastating strike.
Bankotsu's purple-veined muscles tensed, bulging with unnatural power.
And just like that, Banryu began its downward arc to obliterate the village.
However.
At that exact second. In that exact, frozen instant of time.
"I heard you're looking for revenge against me?"
The cold, deadpan voice fell abruptly from the empty air above.
There was no warning. No rustle of wind, no approach of presence. It was as if the speaker had simply phased into reality from the void itself.
Bankotsu's massive swing stopped dead in mid-air.
It wasn't that he had chosen to stop his attack. It was that his mutated body had instinctively, violently frozen the absolute moment that voice hit his ears.
Blood mist.
A thick, dark red mist violently erupted from the cracked mud. Without anyone realizing when it had started, it had already permeated the entire riverbank, covering Bankotsu's ankles, swallowing his calves, and rapidly spreading upward like a living entity.
Bone forest.
Massive, jagged white Bone Spikes violently erupted from the blood mist. They thrust out simultaneously behind him, to his left, and to his right. They didn't attack him directly—they simply formed a perfect, inescapable cage, completely sealing off any possible retreat.
Thunder.
Violent, blinding arcs of purple electricity burst from the sky overhead, illuminating the entire dead riverbank in a ghastly, strobe-like flash.
Bankotsu slowly looked up.
A grey figure hung suspended in mid-air. His long, pale hair whipped wildly backward in the violent airflow. The pair of glowing, scarlet demonic eyes set into the Crimson Oni Mask looked down at him with absolute, freezing apathy.
The physical Turbid Qi brought about by the Ninth Transformation, combined with his Yao Qi in its normal, terrifying state, was fully, unrestrainedly unleashed.
Bankotsu's pupils dilated to pinpricks.
He recognized that mask. How could he not recognize it? It was the face that haunted his nightmares, the face he had dreamt of tearing apart with his bare hands.
But he hadn't expected it to arrive so quickly.
And he certainly hadn't expected—
A sudden, hollow chill bloomed in the center of his chest.
Bankotsu looked down.
Directly through his chest, there was an extra hole. A perfectly round, fist-sized hole piercing straight through his sternum and out his back. The edges of the wound were neat, smooth, and scorched entirely charcoal-black by intense thunder.
It was a Bone Spike.
A single Bone Spike, shot silently from the blood mist and wrapped in concentrated thunder, had already cored straight through his mutated body the exact moment he had tilted his head up to look.
Bankotsu didn't even feel the pain.
It was just cold. An absolute, icy emptiness spreading outward from the hole, shutting down his organs one by one. Thick, dark blood foam welled up in his throat, spilling over his lips, and his vision violently blurred.
Three steps away, Jakotsu's combat instincts flared. His reaction was blistering fast—his serpentine blade sprang from its scabbard, the segmented, curved edge whipping upward to slash at Hikaru in the air.
But it didn't reach.
A second Bone Spike violently erupted from the side, piercing straight through Jakotsu's right shoulder. The sheer kinetic force lifted him off his feet and pinned him brutally against the thick trunk of a withered willow tree behind him.
Suikotsu immediately turned to run.
A third Bone Spike erupted from the dirt, piercing cleanly through his calf and nailing his leg to the riverbed.
The entire, devastating process took no more than a single breath.
From the sudden rise of the blood mist to the brutal pinning of all three elite mercenaries—two breaths.
Hikaru slowly descended from the air.
His boots touched down lightly on the cracked riverbed. The lingering, violent resonance of purple thunder spread out in a shockwave from beneath his soles.
The forty or fifty miscellaneous Tono demons standing behind the Band of Seven hadn't even registered what had just happened.
The dark red blood mist had already completely enveloped them.
And then.
In an instant, total annihilation.
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