"What?! You learned it just by watching me once?!"
Mita was utterly dumbfounded by Goku's words. It had taken him years of grueling practice to master the Third Form, yet Goku had mimicked it perfectly after a single glance. Was the gap between human beings truly this vast?
But following the shock, a wave of ecstatic joy washed over him. This meant Goku's potential was even greater than he had dared to imagine. He didn't just have a unique constitution and strange abilities; he possessed a terrifying talent for learning. If he brought this boy back to headquarters, he might prove to be a greater prodigy than even the Mist Hashira, Muichiro Tokito.
"Mita-senpai! I can't control my body anymore!"
Suddenly, the remaining conscious teammates around them cried out in panic. Mita's heart lurched as he felt his own limbs grow heavy and jerk unnaturally. He was losing control.
Looking ahead, he saw the previously controlled puppets—who had collapsed after Goku took their swords—lying motionless on the ground. It didn't take a genius to realize that the demon behind the scenes, seeing the puppets disarmed and useless, had shifted her focus to the new arrivals.
"Goku! Use your teleportation and get out of here!" Mita roared, fighting against his own rising arm.
He was terrified that Goku would be the next to fall under the demon's spell. Despite Goku's talent and strength, Mita didn't believe the boy could face a demon they couldn't even see.
Without a Nichirin Sword, brute force was meaningless against the immortal dead. He wanted Goku to vanish and save himself before the "Blood Demon Art" took hold of him.
"So, it's because of these threads."
Goku didn't run. Instead, he reached behind his neck, grabbed a handful of invisible air, and yanked. With a sharp *snap*, he held several broken, shimmering strands of spider silk before his eyes.
He had been observing from the start, trying to figure out how the slayers were being manipulated. It was only when a few tiny spiders crawled onto him and he felt the faint tug of silk against his skin that he finally understood the mechanism. Looking closely behind Mita and the others, he saw thin, nearly invisible threads trailing off into the darkness.
The demon was using tiny forest spiders to attach silk to the slayers, then playing them like marionettes.
...
At that same moment, atop a large boulder deep in the thicket, a female demon sat with her hands outstretched. Her skin was bone-white, her hair matching, and strange red dots marked her face. Her expression, however, was one of pure disbelief.
When her puppets were disarmed, she had immediately commanded her spiders to switch targets. Her primary mark was the boy who had moved like a blur. The process had been seamless; the spiders reached him, and the silk attached.
But when she tried to yank the threads to force his limbs to move, she felt like she was trying to pull a mountain. His body contained a density of power so immense that her silk couldn't budge him an inch.
"Then I'll just kill you!" she hissed.
She yanked her hands back, forcing the possessed Mita and the other slayers to raise their Nichirin Swords. Their bodies lurched forward, blades aimed directly at Goku's heart.
"Run!" Mita screamed, his face contorting in agony as he watched his own sword swing toward the boy.
Goku didn't even look at the blades. He simply pointed a finger.
"Fire Serpent, Clear the Path!"
A three-meter-long snake made of brilliant orange flame erupted from his fingertip. It hissed through the air, coiling rapidly around Mita and the other slayers before darting toward the downed puppets in the back. Goku wasn't quite at Grandpa Dumbledore's level of casting massive, world-consuming firestorms yet, but a targeted fire spell was well within his grasp.
"Watch out for the tiny spiders! The demon is using their silk to move you!"
As the fire serpent incinerated the silk threads, Mita felt the invisible weight vanish. He regained control of his limbs instantly and began slashing at the spiders scurrying near his boots.
In the world of Demon Slayers, Breathing Styles might be named after elements like Water, Flame, or Thunder, but they didn't actually produce magic. A Water user didn't create water; they just moved with its fluidity. Only a demon's Blood Demon Art could conjure elemental attacks like fire or lightning.
To the slayers, seeing Goku summon a literal snake of fire out of thin air was nothing short of miraculous—and deeply confusing.
"Senpai! More spiders are swarming toward Musashi and the others!" a slayer named Murata yelled. He was frantically crushing spiders, but dozens more were heading for the unconscious slayers on the ground.
The demon was clearly planning to use the injured men as human shields or suicide attackers.
"Leave it to me!" Mita prepared to launch another Flowing Dance, but he realized he didn't need to.
Goku moved again.
"Immobilize!"
With a flick of his finger, Goku cast a localized Freezing Charm. This wasn't a spell of ice, but of time—a magic that locked the movements of everything within a specific area. It was highly effective against small targets but struggled to hold anything larger than a cat or a dog. Wizards typically used it to catch pests like Cornish Pixies.
"They... they stopped!"
The slayers watched in awe. Every thumb-sized spider in the vicinity froze mid-crawl. Some were even suspended in the air, caught in the middle of a jump, looking like ornaments hanging on invisible strings.
"Bring the hurt ones over here," Goku said calmly to Mita. "I can give them some basic healing."
'Healing magic, too?' Mita poked a frozen spider with his finger, still unable to process what he was seeing. At Goku's command, he and Murata quickly moved to gather their fallen comrades and bring them to the boy.
***
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