Moonlight was thin and pale.
Kōbe Hikaru and Kikyō walked the village's dirt path toward the shrine.
The deeper they went, the more the air thickened — damp and clinging, laced with a rot that had no clean name.
Kōbe Hikaru's brow furrowed.
"This smell…"
"Demon-qi."
Kikyō's voice was low. "High concentration. Whatever's nested here has been here a while."
The silhouette of the shrine slowly came into focus.
The vermilion torii gate looked wrong in the darkness — its lacquer peeling and mottled, as though smeared with dried blood.
The stone steps were coated in something slick and glistening.
Not moss.
Slime.
Kōbe Hikaru crouched and poked at it with his blade tip. The slime hissed on the steel, wisping white smoke with a low, wet sizzle.
"Poisonous."
He withdrew the blade and stood. "Pretty potent poison, too."
[Cursed Blade Muramasa reports: this stuff tastes awful. It refuses to eat it.]
"Picky eaters don't prosper."
Muramasa's Affection had long since maxed out — no more stat bonuses to be gained — but its edge had reached a sharpness rivaling a true demon-weapon. Kōbe Hikaru treated it no differently for it. He muttered a word at the blade, then stepped onto the stone stairs.
Three steps in, the stone beneath his feet went soft.
The steps themselves were dissolving into something semi-liquid, sinking under him.
Kōbe Hikaru launched sideways with a Phantom Step, landing on a patch of stone that was, barely, still dry.
"So the poison ate through the ground… It looks like the whole shrine has been 'remodeled' by whatever's inside pretending to be a god."
Kikyō stood at his side, bow already in hand. Her gaze swept the surroundings.
"The ground, the steps — even the torii. All of it saturated with its venom."
"This isn't a shrine anymore. It's a den."
Kōbe Hikaru looked ahead.
A dim, sickly yellow light bled through the main hall's walls, pulsing unsteadily — like something breathing.
"So that's why the old man said not to go in."
He understood now.
"Not divine punishment or superstitious nonsense — it genuinely can't be entered. An ordinary person steps foot in here, the miasma kills them."
"Yes."
Kikyō nodded.
"But for us —" She paused. "— it's not a problem."
Kōbe Hikaru drew his blade.
The steel shimmered with a faint violet light — the glow built up from the blood of every demon Muramasa had cut down along the road.
"Let's go."
He stepped forward.
Just one step.
The next instant, the demon-qi and ghost-energy of a six-Change creature detonated outward.
A torrent of demonic wind surged, billowing his sleeves like sails.
The slime underfoot recoiled from his demon-qi, hissing furiously at the barrier it could not cross.
BOOM.
The main hall's doors blew open, hurled back by the shockwave.
A wall of fetid, iron-thick stench rolled over him.
Kōbe Hikaru narrowed his eyes.
There were no enshrined idols inside the hall. No incense stands, no candle holders.
Only two rows of guttering candles on either side, their light barely enough to illuminate the vast, reeking swamp that had replaced the floor.
And at the center of that swamp — something enormous, crouching.
The candlelight could only sketch its outline: grey-green skin, squat, thick limbs, a body hunched over itself like a mountain of flesh.
A toad.
A colossal toad.
"Hmph."
The toad spoke. Its voice was a wet rasp, like words being squeezed through rotting mud. "Not an offering… you dare intrude upon this god's dwelling?"
"Are you looking to die?"
Kōbe Hikaru looked at it. The corner of his mouth curved.
"A god?"
He laughed.
"You?"
The toad's eyes narrowed.
Something cold and sharp flickered in those murky, clouded orbs.
"Ignorant creature."
It opened its mouth.
A dense cloud of virulent green mist erupted from deep in its throat, flooding the entire hall in an instant.
Poison fog.
Kōbe Hikaru braced — he didn't need to breathe, being a Ghost Warrior, but the stench was vile enough to trigger an instinctive flinch. He stepped back half a pace, blade raised horizontally before him.
"Don't go in."
Kikyō's voice came from behind. "That fog corrodes both spiritual power and demon-qi."
Kōbe Hikaru gave a small nod.
He could feel it — the green haze was eating into everything around it. Stone walls smoked. Wooden beams rotted. Even the demon-qi and spiritual power drifting in the air were being dissolved.
"Troublesome."
He said it quietly.
The toad wasn't especially powerful — judging by the density of its demon-qi, it was probably only at five Changes. But it had converted the entire shrine into its home turf.
In this poisoned swamp, its toxic fog was inexhaustible, its venom soaked into every inch of ground.
Ordinary attacks couldn't get close.
And then — Kōbe Hikaru sensed something else. Something even more irritating than the fog.
It was — Dread.
He'd picked up the term from his time among demons.
Some demons weren't especially strong on their own — their Physical Transformations gave them only so much — but they were masters of cultivating a 'field.' By spreading fear, keeping the humans in their territory in a state of perpetual dread, they could condense that enormous mass of terror into a power source. The result was a force-field called 'Dread.'
At its core, Dread was similar to faith in the gods — except faith arose from hope, and Dread from despair.
Demons could draw on Dread to temporarily amplify themselves. It was temporary — the power lasted only as long as the fear did — but compared to spending ages absorbing ambient demon-qi, or fighting their own kind for scraps, it was a shortcut.
No wonder.
No wonder this toad had been mistaken for a god.
It was only five Changes by nature, but here, in this swamp it had been cultivating for months, bolstered by Dread, it could match a high-ranked seven-Change demon in raw power.
In this poisoned swamp, the toad was lord.
"GROAK——!"
A thunderclap-like bellow shook the air.
From within the yellow-green poison fog, a crimson whip lashed out — fast as lightning, aimed straight at Kikyō's face.
Its tongue.
Kikyō didn't dodge. Didn't even blink.
She simply raised her hand.
TWANG.
The bowstring rang.
A purifying arrow wrapped in white light shot forth and struck the tongue's very tip.
A sizzling crack — like a brand pressed against raw meat — white smoke curled upward, and the tongue whipped back into the fog with a shriek of agony.
But the swamp around them grew frenzied.
The mud heaved and churned, forming countless black hands that clawed at their thighs and waists.
"Troublesome."
Kōbe Hikaru severed three mud-hands in one stroke, activated Resonance with Blood underfoot — blood surging through his veins like liquid mercury — and wrenched himself free, vaulting to the top of the torii gate.
From up here, he could see it clearly.
Five Changes. That was the toad's ceiling.
Five Physical Transformations meant five structural mutations in its body — not yet at the threshold of qualitative change.
But this fog and this swamp were disgustingly cheap tactics.
As long as the villagers kept fearing it, the Dread would flow without end, and the swamp would never dry up.
Kikyō's spiritual power was immense — overwhelming — but purification still cost resources. Grinding this thing out in its own home turf, surrounded by filth, wasn't worth it.
That left only one option.
Drive it out of its own territory.
"Kikyō!"
Kōbe Hikaru called out. "Cover me!"
Kikyō didn't ask why. She loosed three arrows in rapid succession — white light streamed like rain, punching through wave after wave of black mud-hands.
Kōbe Hikaru fixed his gaze on the oil lamps hanging on either side of the shrine.
The lamp oil — animal fat scraped together by villagers who could barely afford it, offered up as tribute, kept burning year-round to appease their god.
Perfect fuel.
"Mind if I borrow your fire."
Kōbe Hikaru moved like a bolt of lightning, twisting through the air, and kicked over the left oil vat with one heel.
SPLASH.
The fat poured out, cascading down the steps and into the churning poison swamp.
He wasn't done.
He kicked over the right one too.
Two vats of oil, coating most of the courtyard.
The toad seemed to sense something wrong. Countless poison spines erupted from the swamp to intercept — but Kikyō's arrows were faster, each one pinning into the ground just ahead of Kōbe Hikaru's landing points, scorching clean patches of earth for him to touch down on.
Kōbe Hikaru landed. His blade tip flicked up a wick that was still burning.
A snap of the wrist.
The ember fell into the oil.
WHOOOM——!
Fire erupted skyward.
This was no ordinary flame.
The swamp had been soaking up miasma and marsh gas for who knew how many years — it caught instantly. With the fat to feed it, the entire shrine became a roaring furnace in seconds.
"GROAK-AAAAAAH——!"
This scream was real. It tore through the throat raw, laced with genuine agony.
The heat scattered the poison fog. The swamp charred, cracked, and dried.
The 'deity' that had lurked in the dark all this time — it could hide no longer.
A bloated black shape smashed through the wooden wall of the main hall and came tumbling out, wreathed in fire, rolling and staggering across the ground.
The toad had seemed merely large inside the shrine. Out in the open, its true scale was shocking.
It was the size of a full-grown bull — a grotesque monster covered head to toe in oozing pustules.
Its skin was thick and weeping venom; the tongue it lashed out was studded with writhing barbs; its leg muscles were corded with bulging veins, like serpents coiling beneath the skin; its back arched and swelled, like a flower bud clenched shut, continuously belching poison fog from its center.
Its eyes sat atop its head — and there were many of them, packed tight, all compound facets.
Profoundly, cosmically hideous.
Now, the pustules on its body popped and crackled in the heat, the venom inside burning away before it could even flow out. The pain sent the creature rolling across the ground, and every last shred of its divine dignity rolled away with it.
Down at the mountain's foot, the fire lit up half the village.
The toad thrashed in the muddy wetland outside the shrine, bellowing like a wild beast.
Frenzied. Incandescent with rage —
It saw the shrine maiden across from it, standing on a flat rock outside the gate, white robes and red hakama, longbow raised.
It saw the Ghost Warrior who had finally driven it out — and he was smiling.
The long blade swept up.
His voice rang out like a struck bell.
"People of this village — wake up!"
"Help me slay this demon!"
His fire — it had never been only to drive the toad from the shrine.
It was to make it visible.
To light up the darkness for the people of that village.
To let everyone see — what their so-called 'god' truly was.
To set the fire. To make it known. To all people, to all souls.
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