Chapter 165: Treat to a Beheading, Keep as a Dog
At that exact moment.
Far across the horizon, at the very source of the flashing thunder.
High above the sprawling domain of Suruga Province, the Tenshukaku of the Imagawa Clan's main castle pierced the night sky. It stood at an elevation far surpassing the grand hall where Imagawa Yoshimoto, the head of the clan, typically resided.
Within the highest attic of the keep lay a small, secluded room.
Strictly speaking, it was less of a room and more of a carefully maintained shrine. The four paper walls enclosing the space were plastered thick with warding talismans. Pure white sand coated the floorboards, and a simple, unadorned sword rack sat dead center.
The rack was empty.
Yet, mere seconds ago, a slender, elegant tachi had rested horizontally across its wooden arms—the Sōza Samonji, widely known as Raikiri. It had just violently launched itself into the sky, streaking through the clouds.
Now, all that remained were two deep, blackened scorch marks burned into the wood. The sharp, metallic tang of lingering ozone hung heavy in the enclosed air.
Directly facing the empty rack hung a scroll painting.
The figure depicted on the parchment was blurry and indistinct—a man donning a Crimson Oni Mask, pale flowing hair, and ash-gray robes. The brushwork was crude, hastily drafted by the Imagawa Clan's finest painter based entirely on terrified rumors and fragmented descriptions. Unfortunately, the artist's skill had its limits; the portrait captured neither the true physical form nor the oppressive spirit of its subject.
However, beneath the crude ink, four characters were written with sharp, deliberate precision.
Thunder-slaying Demon God.
It was the reverent, terrified title the people of the Imagawa territory had bestowed upon Kobe Hikaru.
Incense smoke curled lazily through the cramped shrine, filling the space with a thick, heady haze. At the entrance, a lone figure sat cross-legged on the floor.
She wore pristine white monastic robes, draped with a muted gray kasaya. The collar of her robes was crossed tightly at her throat, yet the heavy fabric could not hide the generous, full curves of her chest, pulled taut against the seams. Her abdomen was flat, cinched sharply by a wide belt. The long slits of her lower garments parted to reveal the subtle, elegant curve of her hips and the deep shadows where they dipped. Her legs, wrapped in pitch-black stockings, were neatly crossed beneath her.
Her face was strikingly young.
She appeared to be in her early twenties. Her skin was pale to the point of near-transparency, and her features were clean and regular, though not exceptionally beautiful.
But what truly commanded attention were her eyes.
They were deep, weathered, and impossibly ancient, carrying a crushing weight that completely contradicted her youthful appearance. The quiet intensity settled within those irises felt heavier than the combined reigns of every Imagawa Clan head over the past several centuries.
Her hands rested gently in her lap. A string of wooden prayer beads wrapped around her slender fingers, her thumb unconsciously flicking one bead over the next in a rhythmic, silent cadence.
She stared at the empty sword rack, watching the residual sparks of indigo thunder faintly pulse against the scorched wood.
The corner of her mouth twitched upward by a fraction of an inch.
"He's here."
She whispered the words into the empty room, sounding as if she were talking to herself.
Or, perhaps, reporting to an unseen presence lurking in the shadows.
The riverbank.
At that exact same moment.
Indigo light violently bloomed from the massive, skeletal palm of the Asura Transformation. The brilliant electricity cascaded down the length of Raikiri's blade, illuminating the blood-soaked riverbank with the blinding intensity of high noon.
The instant Hikaru's fingers closed around Raikiri's hilt, a long-lost, deeply familiar sensation welled up in his chest.
'As I thought.'Beneath the terrifying oni mask, his mouth curved into a wide, pragmatic grin.'Returning this blade back then was the absolute right choice.'If he hadn't played the long game to build up the weapon's favorability, he never would have been able to remotely'borrow' the blade across such a massive distance tonight.
The towering, six-meter-tall behemoth of bone and thunder pivoted its massive frame back toward the center of the battlefield. The Asura Transformation gripped the indigo Raikiri tight. The pure light of human faith and the violent, crackling thunder of his Demonic Power intertwined flawlessly along the razor edge.
He turned to face the oppressive field of Fear constructed by the eighteen surviving yokai on the periphery.
This force field was a collective manifestation of Fear, maintained by the three commanders and their eighteen subordinates. Twenty-one distinct strands of Fear had woven their Yao Qi together into an invisible, suffocating net that blanketed the entire riverbank. They had attempted to use this localized domain to suppress his demonic energy. While they had failed to crush him, the field provided a continuous, maddening stream of rapid regeneration for the three leaders.
As long as this interwoven field of Fear remained intact, the three commanders were effectively immortal.
Without a suitable weapon, breaking this domain would have been an incredibly tedious chore for Hikaru. He would have been forced to use the Asura Transformation's raw physical might to violently grind the barrier down until their collective Fear shattered from exhaustion.
It was doable, but it would waste precious time and burn through an unacceptable amount of his stamina. The Yao Qi consumption required to maintain the Asura Transformation for a prolonged war of attrition was massive.
Now, however, the rules of the board had changed.
Because faith directly targeted Fear.
And because thunder possessed the absolute piercing power to shatter all worldly obstacles.
Since he couldn't efficiently break it with his bare hands, he would simply use a Divine Artifact to cleave it wide open.
The Asura Transformation raised the glowing tachi high above its horned skull.
Then, he brought it down in a flawless, vertical slash.
It was a straight, heaven-to-earth-piercing strike that divided the very air.
The indigo blade light erupted from the edge, expanding into a towering curtain of electricity three feet wide and ten zhang high. It tore through the vast night sky, carving a glowing trench directly in front of the Asura Transformation.
The curtain of light did not move fast.
In fact, it was agonizingly slow—so slow that every single yokai present could clearly track its descending trajectory with their wide, terrified eyes.
But this was not a construct of Yao Qi, nor was it a simple display of swordsmanship.
It was a slash forged entirely from the physical manifestation of human faith.
Faith and fear were two sides of the exact same coin. Faith reached upward toward the heavens, while fear dragged downward into the abyss. And when the pure power of faith took the physical form of a descending blade, the force field of ordinary yokai fear became as fragile as wet rice paper.
The indigo curtain swept through the invisible barrier constructed by the eighteen yokai.
There was no deafening explosion. No dramatic shockwave.
Just a clean, absolute break.
The force field of Fear was snipped apart as effortlessly as a thread caught between invisible scissors. The Yao Qi at the severed cross-section instantly collapsed, violently billowing out to both sides in thick clouds of black smoke.
The eighteen yokai of the Fifth and Sixth Materialization stages simultaneously let out choked, agonizing groans. The violent backlash from their shattered domain surged backward through their spiritual bonds, slamming into their bodies like a physical battering ram. They were thrown off their feet, crashing into the mud.
Several of the weaker yokai instantly fainted, their eyes rolling back into their skulls.
The ones who managed to stay conscious couldn't stand. Their legs gave out beneath them, their internal Yao Qi spiraling into chaotic, painful disarray.
But it was the three commanders who bore the absolute brunt of the backlash.
The Great Kappa had just managed to drag its massive, battered body out of its crater and was in the middle of regenerating its wounds. The absolute instant the force field snapped, the endless supply of Fear pouring into its flesh came to a screeching halt. Its rapid recovery was violently interrupted, and the faint blue life-water pooled in the dish atop its head splashed over the sides, spilling uselessly into the dirt.
The Kamaitachi's terrifying momentum dropped off a cliff. Stripped of the domain's enhancement, its speed plummeted from an untrackable blur back to its natural, baseline limits. It was still fast, but it could no longer maintain the extreme, physics-defying velocity that had constantly squeezed its physical potential.
The Yuki-onna's regeneration failed completely. Still firmly pinned in the grip of the Asura Transformation's secondary skeletal hand, she violently coughed up mouthfuls of freezing white blood. Her originally pitch-black hair—a facade maintained entirely by the illusion of Fear—instantly drained of color, reverting to a stark, icy, bone-white.
One single strike.
It had completely severed the collective Fear condensed by twenty-one elite yokai.
The towering Asura Transformation stood motionless in the center of the ruined riverbank.
The indigo-colored Raikiri hung loosely by his side. The brilliant light of faith coating the steel slowly began to fade, dimming back to a faint hum. This weapon was only a semi-divine artifact; its internal energy storage had strict limits, and that singular, overwhelming strike had nearly drained all the faith stockpiled within the steel.
It did not possess the endless, self-sustaining stream of faith found in a true divine artifact. It still needed to return to its shrine, receive continuous offerings from the mortals, and slowly recover its strength.
It still needed time to complete its final 'metamorphosis'.
But for tonight, it was enough.
The objective had been perfectly achieved.
The glowing crimson oni eyes of the Asura Transformation slowly swept over the broken remnants of the yokai forces.
The Great Kappa sat slumped on the jagged edge of its crater, its bulging, frog-like eyes trembling with absolute horror.
The Kamaitachi had retreated to the high branches of a withered willow tree. The bloodthirsty, manic fanaticism that usually burned in its crimson vertical pupils had been completely extinguished, replaced by the primal, instinctive urge to shrink away and hide.
The Yuki-onna had been casually tossed aside by Hikaru, landing heavily on the melting slush of her own ice. The hem of her deep blue kimono was soaked through with freezing mud. She struggled violently just to prop up her upper body, her ice-blue eyes locked in a dead stare at the fading blade in the Asura Transformation's hand.
A blade that carried human faith.
What this Oni Samurai wielded was not just overwhelming Demonic Power. He somehow controlled the sacred faith of humanity itself.
Fear and faith—he possessed both.
Such an impossible, contradictory existence... in her entire hundred years living in the Tono region, she had never witnessed anything like it.
And so, the battlefield fell completely silent.
The Hyakki were paralyzed by terror.
A deep, rumbling voice echoed from beneath the Asura's oni mask, vibrating through the damp air.
Hikaru did not immediately move to slaughter them all. Instead, after a brief moment of cold, pragmatic calculation, he made the most efficient decision regarding this group of homeless, immigrant yokai.
"Submit."
Just one word.
He let the silence stretch for a heavy, suffocating beat before speaking again.
"Or, die."
There was no third option.
Across the ruined riverbank, twenty-one elite yokai—plus the forty or fifty minor demons still pinned and bleeding within the jagged bone forest—fell into a deathly, trembling silence under the dual, oppressive shroud of the Asura Transformation's Yao Qi and the lingering scent of indigo lightning.
Not a single yokai moved. Not a single yokai dared to run.
It wasn't just because they were physically incapable of fleeing—though their battered bodies certainly wouldn't carry them far—but because they had seen it.
They had witnessed that singular strike.
They had seen the exact moment their Fear was casually snipped apart. They had seen just how pathetically fragile their entire existence was when placed before him.
They... had absolutely no choice.
The Yuki-onna was the first to break.
Her knees buckled, sinking into the freezing mud.
The elegant hem of her deep blue kimono spread out across the wet, bloodstained ground.
She bowed her head. Her stark white hair cascaded down to touch the earth, her ice-blue eyes downcast, staring blankly at the melting slush beneath her palms.
"I am willing to serve you, My Lord."
Her voice was barely a whisper, trembling but absolute.
The Great Kappa immediately followed suit, throwing its massive, bulky body completely prostrate against the edge of the crater, squeezing its frog-like eyes tightly shut in submission.
The Kamaitachi was the last of the commanders to yield. Its crimson vertical pupils darted frantically for three agonizing breaths—then, the silver-white beast dropped from the tree canopy, landing with all four claws pressed flat against the dirt, lowering its head.
Seeing their leaders break, the eighteen yokai of the Fifth and Sixth Materialization stages—at least, the ones who were still conscious—began to drop to their knees, one by one.
The minor demons trapped in the bone forest naturally followed, weeping and pressing their faces into the dirt.
On that shattered riverbank, over seventy yokai prostrated themselves in total worship.
The final, bleeding rays of the setting sun grew dimmer, leaving only a faint red phantom hanging on the western horizon.
From the east, the cold, brilliant glow of the rising moon began to cast its silver light across the carnage.
The massive, terrifying silhouette of the Asura Transformation was slowly projected across the backs of the kneeling horde.
Majestic. Absolute. And utterly terrifying.
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