That night was not woken by the sun.
It was woken by fire.
The first to stir was the hunchbacked village chief who had led them there.
He hadn't really slept at all. He'd been lying awake, turning things over in his mind — thinking about the two outsiders who had taken shelter in his village, and especially the shrine maiden who called herself Kikyō. He had heard that name before. The most powerful shrine maiden in the whole region.
The arrival of someone like that always left him feeling two things at once: a faint, desperate hope, and a cold, creeping dread.
And as he lay there tossing and turning —
The night sky outside the window suddenly turned red.
A blazing, searing red. The kind of red that looked like someone had upended a great basin of blood and slapped it across the heavens.
"Fire?"
The old man threw on his ragged coat and shoved open the door. The instant he did, a wall of heat slammed into him, reeking of char, hot enough to curl the edges of his grizzled beard.
He raised his cloudy old eyes toward the far end of the village.
That was the direction of the shrine.
That shrine — the one that had lorded over them, demanding tribute and taking lives in broad daylight — was now burning like a massive torch.
In the midst of that inferno, there was nothing sacred or serene. Only the crack and pop of fat catching fire, and that sound… the dying screams of a beast.
"Is that… a god?"
The men of the village came running out, still hitching up their trousers. The women covered their children's eyes.
And they saw.
There, lit up by the towering flames, behind the collapsed torii gate —
No deity wrapped in feathered robes. No benevolent immortal, no serene bodhisattva.
Just a lump of flesh.
An enormous toad, oozing pus from every pore, its back covered in grotesque lumps, thrashing and shrieking as it wallowed in the mud. It rolled through the fire, crushing the side halls that had once been used to pen the "offerings." Its long, ropy tongues — like burnt, rotting cord — whipped and flailed, smashing to powder the stone lanterns that lined the shrine's perimeter, the very lanterns that villagers had always bowed their heads to even when just walking past.
"That is… a toad?"
A woman who had just lost her son murmured to herself.
Her voice was barely above a whisper — but it detonated in every ear like a thunderclap.
Every month, they had handed over the last grain in their homes.
They had sent living people inside.
They had pressed their foreheads to the ground until they bled, begging for good harvests and fair weather.
All for this?
All to feed a rotting toad from a drainage ditch?
"Liars…"
The village chief's hands began to shake — badly enough that his walking stick rattled along with them.
He had known it was a demon. But he had thought it was a mighty demon, an undefeatable "god."
And yet now, the way that thing was thrashing in the fire — it looked as pathetic as a stray dog with nowhere left to run.
It felt pain. It cried out. It bled.
But when a certain thought crossed his mind, the village chief felt a different kind of fear creeping in.
Fear of what would happen to the village, now that the illusion had been shattered.
"It ate my Gorō!"
Somewhere in the crowd, a voice rang out — no one could tell who it was first.
It was the kind of sound you tear out of your own throat, blood and all.
"It's a demon! It was never a god!"
"Kill it!"
That mountain of dread that had been pressing down on their chests for so long — the moment that ugly true form was revealed, it crumbled.
In its place rose something almost feral: three months of being played for fools, exploding into furious, half-maddened shame and rage.
Someone snatched up a hoe.
Someone grabbed a stone.
These people, who had never dared raise their voices — now they were kindling set alight, eyes gone red, low animal snarls rising from their throats, surging toward the shrine like a tide.
…
Before the shrine.
The heat pressed in from all sides.
Kōbe Hikaru stood on a flat boulder not yet eaten away by the venom, Muramasa held at a diagonal toward the ground, a single drop of murky demon blood sliding from its tip.
Across from him, the enormous toad had finally caught its breath amid the sea of fire.
It reared up on its hindquarters, that grotesque face — covered all over in compound eyes — contorted with the urge to kill.
"Mortals… insects…"
Its belly swelled and pulsed. Poison-gas, building up inside.
"How dare you destroy this god's temple!"
"I will reduce you all to bloody water! I'll leave not even fragments of bone!"
Even now, even at this point, it hadn't shed that mantle it wore called divinity.
It had spent three months cultivating that power. The power of dread.
It was utterly certain the villagers still feared it. As long as that fear held, its demon-qi would flow without end, and this poisoned bog spread across the ground would be its absolute domain.
"Kikyō."
Kōbe Hikaru ignored the toad's ranting and turned his head.
Three paces to his side.
The shrine maiden stood utterly still.
Firelight licked at the night sky and traced her silhouette with rare clarity. White robes whiter than snow, red hakama flowing like a long skirt — not delicate, but taut with tension, made all the more striking by the longbow drawn in her hands. Strands of her hair were blown loose by the scorching wind and clung against the damp, elegant line of her neck, beautiful in a way that felt almost out of place.
Her legs stood planted beneath the red hakama — still as a boulder, every line of fabric pulled taut over muscle coiled and ready to explode.
"I'm here," she answered, arrowhead as steady as if it had been cast in iron on the string.
"In a moment, if it tries to run — shoot its legs."
"It won't run."
Kikyō's voice was calm. And utterly certain.
The words had barely left her lips.
The toad moved.
"Groak—!"
Its belly convulsed hard, jaws snapping open as a torrent of dark-green venom erupted out — like a pressurized water cannon, sweeping horizontally across everything in its path. Stone itself smoked where it touched.
If that swept him clean on, Kōbe Hikaru's demon-qi armor might hold — but it would still hurt like hell.
But Kōbe Hikaru didn't dodge.
He smiled.
"Did you hear that?" he asked.
The toad faltered.
The torrent of venom had barely made it halfway out before it went limp — like a hose that had just had its throat pinched. The flood simply… softened.
The demon-qi that had been surging moments ago dropped off a cliff in an instant, like a spine had been yanked out from under it.
Why?
All of the toad's compound eyes swiveled wildly.
Then it heard.
"Kill!"
"Kill that beast!"
Human voices. Not weeping. Not begging.
Battle cries.
In the firelight, a mass of dark figures came surging up the steps below the shrine.
A woman who had lost her son and her husband walked at the very front, swinging a rusted wood-chopping blade, her face stripped of every last trace of meekness — nothing left but raw, snarling hatred.
"Give me back my Gorō!"
A rock flew.
It landed with sharp precision, dead center on the toad's largest compound eye.
Smack.
Fluid splattered.
It didn't hurt. Not really. For a creature that size, it barely qualified as a scratch.
But the toad panicked.
It felt it.
That power that had been feeding it all this time, the power that had let it tyrannize this broken little village — the dread — was gone.
They weren't afraid of it anymore.
They wanted its flesh. They wanted its blood.
"You… you swine!"
The toad shrieked, but there was a tremor in its voice now: "You want to die?! I am a god! I am your god!"
It tried to command the poisoned bog around it to swallow the villagers whole.
But the black mud, which had always moved at its slightest thought, was now rigid as dried cement — utterly unresponsive.
Without the power of dread feeding it, this was nothing but a five-Change toad.
Nothing more.
"It seems your seat of divinity has reached its end."
Kōbe Hikaru touched the tip of his foot to the ground, and launched upward like a grey hawk lifting off from earth.
[Cursed Blade Muramasa: ELATED! It says this toad may be hideous, but now that it's shed that shell, the meat underneath should be quite tender!]
"Then let's cut some off and find out!"
He was already in midair.
The blade light swept out like a ribbon of silver.
The toad lurched to dodge, its thick hind leg just beginning to push off —
Snap.
White light came first.
Kikyō's arrow was faster than Kōbe Hikaru's blade — and more precise. It didn't aim for a vital point. It drove straight into the tendon at the back of the toad's right knee.
The purifying force detonated on impact.
The toad let out a wail. Its entire right leg simply ceased to exist, and the enormous body lurched sideways off-balance, toppling to the right.
And that was Kikyō holding back.
The lurch also exposed its neck.
That neck was as thick as a water vat, covered in folds and pustules, revolting to look at.
But in Kōbe Hikaru's eyes —
It was the perfect opening.
"Cut."
Kesagiri — ascending and descending!
No flashy technique name. Just every ounce of strength in his body, every trace of demon-qi and ghost-qi, poured into a single stroke.
Diagonal slash up. Diagonal slash down.
Ascending. Descending.
Fwshunk —
First came the sound of a keen edge parting tough hide; then, immediately after, the brittle crack of bone snapping.
In this moment, the Cursed Blade Muramasa proved what it was — even as a mass-produced blade, it stood head and shoulders above any ordinary steel. And with all the care Kōbe Hikaru had put into it over time, that bond between wielder and blade meant that even cutting through something this thick-hided and dense — the stroke went through like slicing tofu.
Black blood sprayed up three zhang high.
Like a sudden black rain falling in the middle of a sea of fire.
That enormous head — covered all over in compound eyes — tumbled off with an expression of absolute disbelief, rolling end over end into the flames.
The headless body convulsed twice, then collapsed with a thunderous crash.
It slammed down into the dried-out poisoned bog with enough force to shake the ground.
Silence.
A silence like death.
Only the crackle and pop of the burning fire.
The villagers who had charged up the steps stopped dead, hoes frozen in the air.
They stared at the man standing atop the corpse.
Kōbe Hikaru flicked the blood from his blade.
Firelight danced behind him, stretching his shadow long — so long it swallowed the entire torii gate.
He wasn't wearing that demon's mask.
A pallid face, spattered with a few drops of black blood. Those crimson eyes burning bright in the darkness, terrifying in a way that stopped the breath.
He was a demon.
A demon more fearsome than that toad had ever been.
And yet, in this moment, in the eyes of these villagers —
That grey figure looked more like a god than the "god" they had worshipped and fed for three months.
One who slays demons and monsters —
Is naturally called divine.
[Shikon Jewel — Naohi: Affection +3]
[Current Affection: 44 (Trust)]
[It says: well done.]
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