Chapter 518: Panic
Human thighs, limbs, heads, torsos, and even people who were still alive after losing their arms and legs.
The Big Yōkai pulled them out like they were playing with their food and began eating them right in front of the pikemen.
A bone-chilling sound of chewing filled the battlefield. At the sight of such a horrific feast, the faint-hearted threw up on the spot.
The Giant Yōkai was clad in heavy armour, and several people with their arms and legs removed were strapped to it.
They were still alive, screaming.
Whenever the Giant Yōkai got hungry, it pulled one of them off, tore open his belly right in front of the pikemen, and ate his insides.
The man howled and howled, but he just wouldn't die.
When the Giant Yōkai had emptied the man's belly and he still hadn't died, it grabbed him by the waist and hurled him forward.
The wretched man sailed through the air in an arc and landed among the pikemen, knocking two samurai flat.
As if at a signal, the other Big Yōkai began throwing the body parts in their hands at the pike ranks, and a whole swath of pikemen went down.
The samurai were armoured, so the body parts didn't do much physical harm when they hit. The problem was the blow to their minds!
As body part after body part rained down on the pike ranks, some men couldn't take it. They broke on the spot, screaming like madmen and running for the rear.
"No running! Hold the line! Attack! Charge, damn you!!"
The great general, on horseback, could see further than the men. When he saw how easily his army's morale had collapsed, he was shocked too, and he gave the order to attack!
The pikemen let out a terrified yell and charged forward, pikes levelled.
The Big Yōkai attacked as well, and the two sides crashed together in a chaotic melee.
But the humans' weapons might as well have been giving the Big Yōkai a massage. The pikes couldn't punch through three or four layers of armour.
The Big Yōkai, on the other hand, were all over two metres tall even at the smallest, with most of them between 2.5 and 3.5 metres.
These huge monsters cackled shrilly. One careless swing of a door-plank or a heavy weapon snapped pikes like kindling. If it hit a man, it shattered bones and tore sinew.
Worse, the monsters ate as they killed.
One Big Yōkai grabbed a pike thrusting at it, gave it a vicious yank, and dragged the samurai holding it out of the ranks.
Then it seized the pikeman by the throat and started eating him, neck first.
The pikeman let out a terrified scream. Blood sprayed from his neck, and in moments he was gone.
After a couple of bites, the Big Yōkai ripped off the pikeman's head and threw it as a weapon at the samurai further away.
Head first, then the arms, then the legs, until only the torso was left, which it swung around like a flail, smashing people with it.
That horrifying way of fighting put enormous psychological strain on the pikemen.
Fear spread through every heart, and before long the samurai broke. It turned into a mass rout.
The great general, on horseback with his katana in hand, kept cutting down the deserters around him.
"No running! Get back and fight! Get back to the battlefield, all of you!!
"You cowards who've thrown away your honour, every last one of you will commit seppuku!!"
He was shouting this when he suddenly felt the sun blotted out. He was standing in a shadow.
He looked up. At some point the Giant Yōkai had appeared right in front of him.
The people strapped to the Giant Yōkai's body, the ones without arms or legs, were staring at him in terror and screaming:
"Kill me, please, kill us! AAAAAAAH!!"
The great general felt a chill run through his whole body and tried to ride away.
But before his horse had even finished turning, the Giant Yōkai slammed a fist into its neck.
Blood sprayed from the horse's mouth, and it collapsed dead. The great general cried out as the horse came down on his legs, pinning him.
The Giant Yōkai reached down and grabbed the great general, who screamed in terror. He tried to break free, but the Giant Yōkai's huge hand was like a steel bar clamped around his body!
The Giant Yōkai lifted the great general up to its face and sniffed him with its huge nose.
"The scent of fear. So rich, so sweet, the scent of fear!"
It opened its bloody maw, baring rows of sharp teeth, and stuck the great general's head inside its mouth.
"YAMETEEE!!!"
The great general screamed. He couldn't bear to look at that bloody maw and squeezed his eyes shut.
But he waited a good long while, and the maw never closed to crush his head.
As the great general watched in confusion, the Giant Yōkai slowly pulled him back away from its mouth.
"Heh heh. A great man like you, I won't kill you so carelessly. I'm going to let you go back."
The great general stammered, "R... really?"
The Giant Yōkai chuckled.
"Of course. I'm letting you go back to spread fear. But for the full effect, you'll need a few modifications."
Two days later, below the walls of Kyoto, a man came staggering out of the distance carrying another man on his back.
The samurai on the walls peered out, unable to tell who the two were.
A dozen or so samurai opened the gates and went out to find out who they were.
But when those samurai got close, they nearly wet themselves.
The man doing the carrying was an ordinary samurai, but he had no hands, and his eyes had been gouged out.
And the man on his back was the great general. He had no legs and could only hold on around the soldier's neck with his arms. Two great holes had been gouged where his ears had been, and he looked to have lost his hearing.
A blind man with no hands and a deaf man with no legs had worked together like that, and in that horribly grotesque way they had made it from the northern battlefield to the foot of Kyoto's walls, spreading fear to everyone who saw them.
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