Chapter 163: Do You Also Wish To Dance?
The title of 'Commander'.
In the hidden world of demons, this moniker carried a crushing weight, far heavier than any mortal understanding of leadership. A human Daimyo maintained his grip on power through vast territories, the sharp steel of his military force, and the sworn loyalty of his retainers.
But a demon Commander relied on something far more primal. They relied on Fear.
Fear was the physical condensation of mortal terror. It was the dark direction of whispered rumors, the absolute proof of a yokai's existence, and the very nourishment that sustained them, precipitated through centuries of human word-of-mouth.
The Kappa Commander carried the heavy burden of a centuries-old taboo originating from a specific river basin in Tono, a lingering curse warning villagers never to approach the dark waters. He was not merely an individual beast; he was the living integration of countless river demons under his absolute command.
The Kamaitachi Commander similarly bore the weight of generations of urban legends, tales of vicious mountain winds that sheared the flesh from unsuspecting travelers' bones.
The Yuki-onna Commander carried the chilling folklore of solitary wanderers who vanished into snowy nights, never to return.
They were not just powerful individuals. Their sheer strength was built upon the bedrock of countless human stories passed down through the ages within their respective domains. Every Commander was a walking, breathing urban legend.
This was, in essence, exactly what Hikaru had been doing. He had been placing The Twenty-three Demons in various locations, constructing shrines, and weaving fresh legends so they could take root in human society. By collecting their own Fear and ultimately integrating it into himself, he was establishing himself as the 'Superior' of these newly forged myths.
However, while Hikaru had only been cultivating this system for a few months, these three commanders from Tono had been doing it for centuries.
The gap in their accumulated Fear was glaringly obvious.
And yet.
As Hikaru looked at the three imposing figures blocking his path, the expression hidden beneath his Crimson Oni Mask was not one of gravity or apprehension.
It was pure realization.
He had slaughtered his way here from Kaede Village, violently clearing three demon outposts along the route. Although the lesser demons occupying those outposts belonged to entirely different species, they all shared one glaring characteristic—chaos.
It was not a chaos of organization, but a chaos of origin.
Kappa, Mountain Spirits, Hitotsume-kozou, Rokurokubi... the types of demons formed a bizarre hodgepodge. The first two made sense together, but the latter creatures didn't seem to originate from the same region or ecological system at all. They resembled a ragtag band of deserters scraped together from all directions.
, Tono stood as one of the largest and most formidable demon settlements in the northeastern region of the island nation. If they truly intended to launch a southern expansion, they would have deployed highly organized, elite vanguards of the same clan, not this pathetic auxiliary force.
There was another glaring inconsistency.
The three remaining members of the Shichinintai—especially Bankotsu, a human who had butchered hundreds of mortals and thousands of demons—had been taken in as a vanguard by Tono's forces. This defied all basic logic.
According to everything Hikaru knew, the demons of Tono were xenophobic to their very core.
Their sense of territorial pride was extreme. Forget humans; even an outside demon attempting to step foot into Tono's sacred mountain forests would have to seriously weigh whether their neck was tough enough to survive the trespass.
Would such an isolationist, fiercely proud group of yokai suddenly accept a human mass murderer as their vanguard?
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
And if this wasn't an expansion, there was only one logical conclusion left.
"You aren't here to seize territory," Hikaru spoke.
His calm, deadpan voice traveled far on the night wind, echoing from beneath the Crimson Oni Mask. "You were driven out."
The riverbank plunged into a suffocating silence.
The massive, dark green Kappa's round, frog-like eyes widened a fraction of an inch.
The Kamaitachi—a silver-white afterimage constantly flickering in the treetops—saw its wind-like movements slightly stagnate.
The Yuki-onna standing in the center remained entirely expressionless. Her ice-blue eyes stared straight ahead, appearing completely unfazed, but the ambient temperature around her instantly plummeted.
It was a microscopic shift.
But Hikaru caught it.
He wasn't even deliberately trying to sense their reactions. The information flowed to him as natural feedback from the thin, invisible film of Yao Qi—reinforced by the Spirit-Chasing Transformation—that naturally coated his body after his recent qualitative evolution.
Minute changes in temperature, the slightest disturbances in the air currents, and even the almost imperceptible fluctuations deep within the opponents' Yao Qi were faithfully recorded by this invisible second skin.
Hikaru continued, his tone unhurried and pragmatic.
"Three commander-level demon leaders fleeing south, relying on a few ragtag soldiers for a show of force along the way, and even grabbing a stray dog like Bankotsu as a vanguard to test the waters. You wouldn't go through all this trouble simply to attack my territory."
"You are looking for a place to settle."
As it turned out, Hikaru's initial calculations had been slightly off.
They had not come for the Shikon Jewel at all.
Silence.
A long, heavy silence stretched over the rushing water.
Finally, the Yuki-onna broke the quiet.
"You know too much."
Her voice was incredibly light, carrying the hollow, haunting sound of winter wind blowing over cracked ice.
"But so what?" she asked. "We have no way back."
Deep within her ice-blue pupils, swirling white flows of light began to spin with increasing violence.
"We cannot return to Tono. Those who were driven out, those who died bleeding on the road... it isn't just our three clans."
The Yuki-onna's voice lacked any emotional inflection, yet Hikaru's heightened senses caught the raw, desperate undercurrent hiding beneath her icy calm.
—It was the primal yearning for survival.
Meanwhile, the Great Kappa on the left let out a low, guttural croak. Its thick, webbed palms clenched and unclenched, the muscles in its forearms bulging like coiled steel.
On the right, the Kamaitachi dropped silently from the treetops, its slender, lethal form balancing perfectly on a withered branch. The bloodthirsty fanaticism that had previously clouded its crimson vertical pupils had receded, replaced by a cold, calculating wariness.
Yao Qi surged from all three of them. The sheer quality and oppressive quantity of their auras confirmed they were well above the Eighth Transformation, steadily approaching the Ninth.
Three boss-level Tono demon commanders stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the moonlit riverbank.
Behind them lay only death. They truly had no path of retreat.
"Struggling for survival is the norm of this era. I can understand that," Hikaru said, his posture relaxed. "But that is no reason for you to touch my 'people'."
The moment the words left his lips, the atmosphere shattered.
Yao Qi exploded.
The Yuki-onna was the first to move—not out of eagerness, but because her honed instincts screamed that this Oni Samurai would not afford them a second chance to breathe, let alone speak.
A blast of absolute zero cold energy erupted from her pale finger. Jagged white ice crystals instantly flash-froze the ground, spreading across dozens of paces in the blink of an eye.
The Kappa attacked in the exact same fraction of a second. The demonic power pooling in the dish-like depression on its head transformed into a highly pressurized, deep blue water column. Swirling with abrasive silt and crushed river stones, it blasted directly toward Hikaru's exposed flank.
Although the Kamaitachi was the last to launch, its speed was undeniably the most terrifying.
Its silver-white afterimage vanished entirely. Razor-sharp wind blades sheared inward from three blind angles, spreading like a violent typhoon and instantly sealing off every single one of Hikaru's escape routes.
Three Eighth Transformation demons attacking simultaneously.
Three directions, three attributes, three elemental transformations—Ice, Water, and Wind.
Their coordination was flawless, honed to an extreme edge. This was no temporary alliance of convenience; it was a lethal instinct forged through hundreds of years of coexistence and warfare in Tono.
They attacked from three sides.
There was no probing, no testing of the waters.
They went all out from the very first strike.
Because their instincts told them the truth: the Oni Samurai standing before them was not an opponent they could afford to test.
Bankotsu, a monster who possessed combat power equivalent to a high-level demon, had been slaughtered instantly in front of this creature. Forty to fifty miscellaneous demons had been impaled and turned into grotesque specimens by a forest of bone in a single breath.
If they didn't go all out, they would die.
But facing this apocalyptic convergence of elements...
Hikaru did not retreat. He simply took a single step forward.
And then—the Soul-Chasing Archer Transformation roared into operation.
The speed of that single step required no wind-up, no gathering of kinetic force.
Following his Materialization and physical reforging, the blinding speed that once required a full-power, taxing burst had become his natural state. It was as easy as drawing breath. With a single thought, his body simply arrived.
He bent his knees slightly and threw a casual punch, shattering the oncoming whirlpool of wind blades into harmless breezes.
Even before his fist fully extended, thunder had already burst forth from his skeleton. It wasn't just stray electric arcs clinging to his skin; blinding purple light surged aggressively from the microscopic gaps between his phalanges, metacarpals, and carpals. It looked as though the bones themselves were generating the storm.
Bone is thunder, and thunder is bone.
The brutal results of the Seventh Transformation's reforging were most intuitively manifested in the sheer kinetic impact of every strike.
Simultaneously, dense bony matter extended and spread, weaving a heavily reinforced cage around his body.
These Bone Spikes didn't violently tear through his flesh from the inside. Instead, they naturally extended and grew from the existing external bone structures already resting on his elbows, shoulder blades, and spine. They branched out like a rapidly growing pale tree, splitting and weaving into a seamless, impenetrable white cage.
The byproduct of the Eighth Transformation's overflow meant his Bone Soul Transformation no longer required the agonizing step of creating and firing from within his body. It simply grew, spread, and constructed its defenses directly outside his flesh.
The bone cage blocked the crushing water column and trapped the encroaching ice.
Thunder roared furiously within the white prison, exploding violently outward.
The three Great Yokais were forced to retreat abruptly, their feet skidding across the dirt.
Ice crystals slammed into the bone shield and shattered into harmless powder. The high-pressure water column was instantly flash-evaporated into a thick white mist by the sheer heat of the thunder.
The Kamaitachi's wind blades surged again, cutting through the steam with extreme speed. The sharpest blade managed to slice off a small corner of the first layer of white bone.
But it was only a corner.
Hikaru's right hand had already pierced through the boiling white mist, his fingers spread wide.
Sickly dark green phosphorescence flared in his palm.
He didn't even need to consciously lock onto his target. The overflowing film of Yao Qi on his body's surface had automatically marked the exact location of the Kamaitachi's soul the very millisecond the wind blade cut into his defense. A process that once required intense focus and multiple steps was now reduced to pure, lethal instinct.
A fine blood mist had already unknowingly mixed into the icy fog surrounding them.
And then, it was directly ignited.
Oni Fire roared to life.
A deafening explosion rocked the riverbank as the misty light detonated, transforming the immediate area into a chaotic, churning hellscape of interwoven blood, fire, and purple thunder.
The dozen or so small demons belonging to Hikaru had long since scrambled far out of the combat range, trembling in the brush.
Faced with such a terrifying, overwhelming display of power, the three Tono commanders had no choice but to push past their limits.
They were forced to exert even more power after already going all out.
"Freeze!"
The Yuki-onna's desperate voice echoed from deep within the boiling mist. Blinding ice-blue light expanded rapidly around her, flash-freezing the explosive blood mist within a radius of over ten zhang and granting her a brief, precious moment of respite.
Simultaneously, the Great Kappa slammed its massive webbed palms onto the earth. A towering, deep blue wall of water surged upward from the subterranean water table, creating a thick, reinforced barrier between itself and its companions.
The Kamaitachi landed heavily back on a tree canopy, its chest heaving. Its crimson vertical pupils frantically scanned the ruined surroundings.
Then—they blew a whistle.
It wasn't a physical sound, nor was it a traditional surge of Yao Qi or demonic power.
It was Fear.
A dense, suffocating wave of Fear, released by the three commanders simultaneously, radiated out into the dark woods in all directions.
The response was almost instantaneous.
Deep in the mountain shadows, eighteen distinct Yao Qis lit up at once. These were not the pathetic small fry currently pinned to the bone forest; these were the true, elite combat forces they had brought with them from Tono.
Eighteen demons ranging from the fifth to the sixth transformation stepped out from the darkness.
Large and small Kappa belonging to the deep rivers, Kamaitachi Tengu belonging to the high mountains, Snow Snakes and Ice Demons slithering across the frost... they were vastly superior to the previous rabble. More, the Fear each one carried could be perfectly integrated into the domains of the three great commanders.
These were the true remnants of the three clans.
Eighteen mid-level demons, plus three high-level commanders.
Twenty-one bursts of Fear intertwined, overlapped, and violently connected in the night air.
Together, they formed an oppressive field of Fear that covered a radius of a hundred paces, turning the atmosphere thick and hard to breathe.
Hikaru felt the pressure immediately.
That Fear aggregated the Yao Qis of the twenty-one demons before him, attempting to violently counter and suppress his own Yao Qi.
It was a direct clash of domains. The Fear of the Tono remnants was grinding aggressively against the Fear of The Twenty-three Demons from the Three Provinces that Hikaru had integrated into his own soul.
The collective power of terror condensed by the opponent's twenty-one elites was trying to overwhelm his core field as the absolute ruler of his faction.
In terms of sheer numbers, the opponent held the advantage.
In terms of quality, the three Eighth Transformation commanders far surpassed any subordinate currently under Hikaru's command.
The dozen or so small demons hiding behind him huddled together in absolute terror. The Tanuki Spirit's tail puffed up to twice its size, its bead-like eyes wide with mortal panic as the oppressive weight of the enemy's Fear pressed down on them.
The situation looked entirely precarious.
However.
Standing calmly between the swirling blood mist and his towering bone forest, Hikaru slowly raised his head. His Crimson Demon Eyes scanned the approaching demonic figures surrounding him from all directions.
He smiled.
The corners of his mouth beneath the Crimson Oni Mask curled upward, revealing a dark, amused smile that had no business appearing in such a dire situation.
"I see. It seems these are your true subordinates," he spoke.
His voice wasn't loud, yet it pierced through the oppressive atmosphere, clearly reaching the ears of every single demon standing within the field of Fear.
"Not bad," he said dryly.
"It seems it's actually worth me using a bit more strength."
The previous exchange had been brief but intensely violent, yet it was far from Hikaru's full effort.
He was a demon of the Ninth Transformation. What he possessed was definitely not limited to the mere transformation of thunder, the external manipulation of bone, the ignition of blood, or simple physical reforging.
He possessed something vastly superior to everything currently standing before him. He possessed the final, absolute construction built upon the foundation of all his previous evolutions.
The Ninth Transformation.
As his deadpan words fell, the environment shifted.
The sprawling bone forest violently retracted.
The external bone structures pulled in their jagged segments like living, breathing serpents. The massive white skeletons scattered within a radius of dozens of zhang converged toward his body all at once, grinding down and turning into a swirling, blinding flow of bone powder that orbited him like a planetary ring.
The blood mist also flowed backward. The dark red fog that had permeated the battlefield gathered back to his body's surface from all directions, as if time itself were being rewound.
Thunder manifested in its purest form. Purple electric arcs no longer just danced playfully on his surface; they burst outward from the very depths of his bone marrow, erupting from the source of thunder that had permanently merged with his bony matter after the Seventh Transformation's reforging. Each arc was as thick as a grown man's arm, blooming simultaneously from the bone nodes of the Eighth Transformation's overflow at his elbows, shoulders, and spine.
Bone served as the indestructible frame. Thunder served as the roaring flesh.
The returning bone powder rapidly condensed half a meter from his physical body.
Projection.
Expansion.
A towering, six-meter-tall Bone-Thunder Giant Body grew aggressively from the outside of his physical form.
The white skeleton was perfectly woven into massive, reinforced bones. The blinding purple electric arcs condensed into thick, pulsing muscle fibers, and the invisible sensory film stretched over it all, acting as an impenetrable skin.
The giant humanoid rose from the shattered earth into the night sky, its brilliant purple light illuminating the forest for a hundred paces in every direction.
This was Hikaru's true, strongest state. The towering, forest-like... Asura Transformation.
At this exact moment, his Yao Qi surged, and then surged again, breaking past every known limit.
The apocalyptic aura belonging to a Ninth Transformation Materialization Great Yokai poured out from the colossal body of the Asura Transformation. It crashed into the field of Fear constructed by the opponent's twenty-one demons like a catastrophic mountain flood slamming into a fragile dam.
Collision. Absolute crushing.
The eighteen demons of the fifth and sixth transformations all staggered, taking a synchronized step back as the sheer pressure threatened to snap their spines.
The expressions of the three Eighth Transformation commanders changed drastically, their previous confidence shattering into pure horror.
They felt it instantly.
The opponent's Yao Qi didn't just exceed theirs in sheer, overwhelming quantity.
It was a completely different world of 'quality'.
The monumental gap in power was so vast, it was almost identical to how the human Bankotsu had looked when facing Hikaru just moments earlier.
This was no longer just a one-step difference in cultivation. It was two steps—perhaps even three.
The giant, crackling figure of the Asura Transformation cast a massive, suffocating shadow under the moonlight, completely covering the entire riverbank in darkness.
The massive pair of Crimson Demon Eyes resting on the giant Crimson Oni Mask looked down from the heavens, coldly surveying every single demon present.
Yao Qi spread.
Like an unstoppable tide.
Like a walking natural disaster.
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