Night had fallen. The moon was gone, the wind was sharp, and thick storm clouds blanketed the sky.
Then, with a thunderous boom, the heavens opened as if floodgates had been thrown wide, and rain came crashing down in sheets.
At the House of the Wisteria Crest, Lady Kyoka—who was clearing the table—looked up at the window. The downpour battered the wisteria blossoms to the ground, filling the puddles with dreamy shades of violet.
Then she heard the front door slide open.
"Oh my, has Lady Sui returned already? I wonder whether your trip to Mount Shakara brought any resu—"
Her voice stopped dead.
Kyoka's eyes widened, and she took a step back.
Outside the doorway, a pale claw gripped the frame overhead. The creature beyond it lowered its head and looked at her.
Its upper body resembled that of a woman dressed in an old-fashioned kimono, but below the waist it became a coiling white serpent body, sinuous and immense, easily over ten meters long. Its golden slit pupils turned, then locked onto Kyoka. In one eye was the mark for Lower Rank. In the other, One.
"Heehee."
Its enormous serpent body swayed as it smiled at her.
"What's wrong, Kyoka?"
Fujiwara stumbled from his room, still drowsy. But the instant he saw what stood there, a chill shot straight up his spine and jolted him fully awake.
"A Lower Rank demon…? A Lower Rank… One?"
He lunged forward and shielded Kyoka behind him.
"That's impossible! How could a demon find this place? There's a whole forest of wisteria outside!"
The demon did not answer.
Instead, hanging from one of its arms was a Kasugai crow.
Slowly, it tore the bird to pieces and stuffed them into its mouth.
Fujiwara stared fixedly at it.
The White Snake hidden in Osaka's shadows had revealed itself. That alone proved Sui's deduction had been correct—this demon really was connected to the serpent god of Mount Shakara.
But Sui had gone there herself.
This thing should not have been here.
Unless—
Sui was dead.
She had died at the hands of the demon standing before him.
The thought made Fujiwara's anger erupt. Every nerve in his body trembled.
"Heehee."
The demon laughed as its massive serpentine body slithered aside.
It deliberately exposed the route by which it had entered: the wisteria trees there had been chopped down, a path forcibly hacked open through them.
Demons could not touch wisteria. To them, wisteria was deadly poison.
But humans could.
Standing on either side of the muddy path were several people, their faces full of fear, axes and saws in their hands. They had cleared the way for the demon.
"Hey! You can let us go now, right? We did everything you asked!"
One of the men holding an axe shouted desperately.
"Yeah! Let us go! We've done our part!"
At that moment, Fujiwara felt as though his heart had stopped. The entire world seemed drowned in the demon's mocking laughter. Behind him, Kyoka clapped a hand over her mouth, trembling uncontrollably under the strain.
The demon's tail swept across the men.
Then it raised its head, its mouth splitting open all the way down its neck, and swallowed them whole like a giant snake devouring prey.
When it was done, it bent down and smiled at Fujiwara.
Sui returned to Osaka with her sword in hand, her gaze lowered, weariness clinging to her.
That cavern beneath Mount Shakara had gone far deeper than she expected, descending almost straight down through a crack in the mountain and connecting to an underground river.
Within one of the broader chambers there had been human clothing and traces of sticky residue. That alone was enough to prove Mount Shakara was indeed the demon's nest.
But the cave itself had been empty.
The demon was not there.
Either it had learned of her approach in advance, or by sheer chance it had failed to make it back to its den before dawn and had remained outside the mountain instead.
Sui had waited inside the cave for a long time.
By the time she finally climbed back out, night had already fallen.
Rain was pouring.
That had delayed her return.
By the time she reached the end of the mountain road, it was already deep into the night, and at the far end of the muddy path a black motorcar was waiting by the roadside.
Fujiwara stood beside it with an umbrella, waving to her.
"You've really been waiting here this whole time, Mr. Fujiwara?"
Sui settled into the rear seat.
"By the way, what did you eat? The car smells strange."
"Ah, that might be the miso soup Kyoka made," Fujiwara said. "Of course I wasn't here the entire time. I went back first, then came again. I figured the timing should be about right."
The headlights flared on, and the car began making its way back toward Osaka, rain beating densely against the windows.
"Did you find anything useful this time, Lady Sui?"
"No. That thing wasn't in its own lair."
"Then doesn't that mean we'll find it sooner or later?" Fujiwara said with a smile. "Now that we know its nest, we can always wait there and catch it eventually."
The tassels on Sui's hairpin chimed softly.
The car jolted over the rough gravel road. It was still far smoother than the mountain path, but in the uneven rattling Sui heard a faint, unnatural sound.
It seemed to come from beneath the car.
A scrape?
"Lady Sui, perhaps a stray cat ran under the chassis?" Fujiwara said, forcing a smile in explanation.
It was too dark.
The rain was too loud.
So dark that Sui could not properly distinguish the person beside her—but through her senses she could tell that Fujiwara was giving off a stench, not the smell of miso soup at all, but the fetid odor of decaying flesh.
"The road earlier didn't feel nearly this rough," Sui said.
"That's because it's raining. Osaka's roads have always been terrible in wet weather."
At that very moment, the engine died.
The dirt roads around Osaka had turned under the rain into a churned swamp of slick, broken mud. The tires lacked the traction to hold, and the car sank straight into it.
"As expected, we're stuck in the mud," Fujiwara sighed. "What rotten luck."
Rain lashed down in torrents.
In the rearview mirror, Fujiwara's eyes split vertically into slitted pupils.
The air was damp and thick with a nauseating fishy stench.
It was the same kind of rotting smell as the cavern beneath Mount Shakara.
Sui lifted the guard of Hachiu slightly. The brass serpent heads on the tsuba glimmered faintly in the dark.
"It seems you've changed quite a lot, Mr. Fujiwara," she said softly.
"Have I?"
Fujiwara's neck twisted violently. His head turned from above the seatback to stare directly at her. His mouth split into a grotesque grin, his throat rattling with a sound no human could ever make.
This was no Osaka suburb at all.
It was a black swamp.
The motorcar had plunged into it, and the mud outside was already climbing the windows.
"Thunder Breathing, First Form—"
They were too close.
Fujiwara struck first.
The scabbard and blade scraped together in a burst of sparks, briefly lighting the cramped interior—and in that instant the flash revealed the gray-blue claws lunging toward her.
"Thunderclap and Flash!"
Her crimson haori erupted with violet lightning inside the car, blood spraying through the cramped space.
The dark crackling arc severed Fujiwara's head in an instant, so fast he could not even react.
It took only one exchange.
Sui had already beheaded him.
And yet the severed head still stared at her, grinning hideously.
"To think a little girl like you would have such astonishing reflexes and swordsmanship."
Even in the narrow confines of the car, Sui still had the precision to unleash the First Form.
She split the roof open, violet lightning flooding the carriage, blasting apart the swamp that was swallowing the vehicle, and sprang upward from the seat.
The tassels on her hairpin chimed in the darkness of the marsh.
Leaping high, Sui looked down.
The car was indeed sinking into a pitch-black mire—but the mire itself looked impossible, as though it had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the road, like a dark abyss swallowing the vehicle whole.
A Blood Demon Art.
Fujiwara's corpse dissolved into purplish-black sludge and seeped through the cracks of the car door into the mud below.
A normal demon's body should char and burn after decapitation.
But this one was melting, merging with the swamp beneath it. The black sludge churned, and a wave of foul stench rose up.
That too was a Blood Demon Art.
A puppet created through a Blood Demon Art.
Sui felt a flicker of surprise.
She could not tell whether her own senses had dulled, or whether the demon's disguise had simply been too perfect.
That demon, masquerading as Fujiwara—a member of the Wisteria Crest House—had fooled her so thoroughly that she had not noticed the flaw in time.
Then, in the beam of the car's headlights, a huge shadow passed beneath the sticky black mire.
The real body.
Air stirred at Sui's nose. Arcs of electricity flashed through her hair.
She twisted in midair and changed direction.
There was no footing in the air, so she used Thunder Breathing itself as propulsion and burst forward.
Jigoro's judgment of her talent had been correct—though she had trained in Thunder Breathing for only two months, her mastery of it already rivaled his own youthful peak. In truth, she was every bit a Pillar-class swordswoman.
Thunder roared.
Hachiu's blade traced a perfect arc and cleaved the swamp apart.
Sui froze.
The swamp vanished.
That strike left behind only a bottomless gouge in the road.
Then Kasugai Crow Chihana swooped down from the sky and landed on Sui's finger.
"Lady Sui! The House of the Wisteria Crest is under attack!"
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
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Zenless Zone Zero: I'm a Doctor, Not a Bangboo (Chapter 115)
Ben Tennyson Wants to Join the Justice League (Chapter 126)
TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter105)
Yu-Gi-Oh! — Transmigrated into the White Dragon Girl (Chapter100)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter82)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter134)
Can Playing Games Save the World? 65
Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 70
From Junkman to Wasteland 66
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 46
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 87
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 79
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass 64
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 73
Naruto: Weaving the Future, Be 45
Zenless Zone Zero, but Kamen R 49
Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 45
My Cyberpsycho Girlfriend 45
Uma Musume: The Dark Trainer 31
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 27
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player 26
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