Night crept in, and the moonlight spilled a ghastly pale over this stretch of wilderness beyond Kaede Village.
The voice of that tanuki spirit was pressed low, almost hugging the ground as it came out, as though afraid the wind might scatter it away.
"My lord... we truly... mean no harm..."
Behind it, the yōkai of every size, large and small, timidly poked out their heads.
There was a one-eyed little monk, a little girl with fox ears, and a great rat with a broken leg... along with a handful of nameless lesser yōkai—every last one of them covered in wounds.
And every last one of them stared up at him with pleading eyes.
Kōbe Hikaru counted them. Roughly twenty or so.
But not a single one had passed the second transformation.
The strongest was that tanuki spirit—about a transformation and a half. It had transformed once, then failed to complete the second, and what it had transformed was clearly only its mind, its brain. Its actual combat strength was barely a hair above that of an ordinary tanuki.
The rest were about a single transformation, and nearly all of it weighted toward the awakening of intellect.
In the world of yōkai, these creatures were the very bottom of the food chain. Apart from the ones that were simply large in body, even the most ordinary farmer could probably chase them down at a run.
Seeing that Kōbe Hikaru gave no reply, the cat spirit's eyes reddened despite itself, showing a bearing that was startlingly, achingly human.
"We three yōkai villages once had seventy or eighty yōkai between us... after the Echigo army came, they burned two of them down. The third fled fast, but even so, half of us died..."
"The rest all scattered. Only we few are left..."
It sniffled. "We ran south all the way, and then we sensed the yōkai aura over here... very thick, but not vicious..."
"And then we saw you, my lord..."
"We saw you, one man alone, drive off that army of humans..."
As the tanuki spirit reached this point, it dropped down with a thud onto its knees.
"My lord! We beg you—take us in!"
"Those human armies will come again! They march under the banner of 'exterminating demons.' They kill any yōkai they see, never caring whether we have harmed people or not!"
"We... we only want to survive!"
Behind it, the little yōkai knelt too, a whole spread of them.
More than twenty small yōkai, weak as weak could be, kneeling in unison before a single demon samurai.
The scene was a touch absurd.
And also... something that stirred a feeling too hard to name.
Kōbe Hikaru looked at them.
The moonlight fell over these broken silhouettes, casting a scattering of shadows long and short across the ground.
They were weak.
So weak they could not even best an ordinary samurai.
So weak that even if he took them in, it would bring him no gain whatsoever in fighting strength.
By the normal logic of yōkai, these creatures were worthless—devouring them would net only a trifling, negligible scrap of yōkai aura.
But as has been said before, Kōbe Hikaru had never been a normal yōkai.
As he looked at these little yōkai, what turned over in his mind was another matter entirely.
Kyoto.
Hagoromo-Gitsune.
Kibōmaru.
And the thing that had been mentioned countless times—the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.
In this world, a true great yōkai was never a lone figure.
Shuten-dōji, the great yōkai who once held dominion over all under heaven, had four great retainers and the demon horde of Mount Ōe.
Hagoromo-Gitsune had the hundred demons of the underground palace of Kyoto, had Kibōmaru, had great yōkai retainers even stronger than Kibōmaru, and countless nameless demons besides.
Even Nura Nurarihyon, that fellow who went about mooching food and drink everywhere, was gathering underlings in every direction.
His aim was to be Lord of all demons and spirits, and he too would build his own Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.
Kōbe Hikaru knew that, in the future, he too would succeed.
And what of himself?
Kōbe Hikaru recalled that night before, when Kibōmaru had driven him to the brink of ruin.
Had he not borrowed the favourability of the land of Kantō, had it not been for Kikyō's help, he could never have held on.
And the next time?
Kibōmaru was only one of Hagoromo-Gitsune's retainers.
As far as he knew, among the yōkai over in Kyoto, Kibōmaru might count as an extremely strong fighting force, yet he was nowhere near the strongest—
Those stronger than him were not many, but no fewer than the fingers of one hand.
To say nothing of Hagoromo-Gitsune herself.
That was an existence bound up intimately with Tamamo-no-Mae, the nine-tailed fox spirit.
With only the two of them, him and Kikyō, no matter how much stronger they grew, there would in the end be a limit.
No matter how strong a single person is, he cannot appear in all places at once.
So—
Power. A faction of his own.
The word leapt out in Kōbe Hikaru's mind.
He needed his own faction.
Not to reign as king, not to lord over others.
But so that when he faced the hundred demons of Kyoto, it would no longer be only him and Kikyō, the two of them alone.
So that when he went abroad, someone could hold Kaede Village; so that when he faced battle on multiple fronts, he would no longer be stretched thin and short-handed.
Nura Nurarihyon wished to build a Night Parade of a Hundred Demons, to bring the yōkai of the world under his command.
Then why couldn't he?
For one must understand—if one reasoned from the world in which Nurarihyon existed, then the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons in this world carried a very special significance indeed.
Nor did he need an organization too vast.
He needed only a band of yōkai that could obey orders, coordinate in battle, gather intelligence, and prove of some use at a critical moment.
Even if they were weak.
Even if they were nothing but bottom-of-the-food-chain scraps.
Still, having them was better than not.
What was more—
He had the favourability system.
He could win over non-living things; he could communicate with all things.
If he turned that ability toward the management of yōkai...
"Get up."
Kōbe Hikaru spoke suddenly. His voice was not loud, but clear enough. "Get inside the barrier for now."
The tanuki spirit lifted its head, its face full of disbelief.
"My lord... you mean..."
"I said, go in."
Kōbe Hikaru turned and walked toward the village. "Settle in for tonight first. Everything else we'll speak of tomorrow."
"But remember—you may not disturb others, you may not frighten people, and above all you may not harm people, or eat people."
"Otherwise—"
The words set the swarm of yōkai trembling—and also, all the more, overjoyed.
They had never intended to harm anyone to begin with.
They were very small, very weak little yōkai, yet also intellect-awakened little yōkai untainted by the instincts of beasts.
They understood, against the terrifying strength possessed by the seemingly frail humans compared to demons, that they had never killed a person, never eaten a person, and neither wished nor dared to do so.
This band of little yōkai stood dazed for a moment.
Then, as though coming to their senses, they scrambled up, jostling to be first, and stumbled after him.
The one-eyed little monk rolled its single eye excitedly as it ran.
The fox-eared girl clung tightly to the tail of the broken-legged great rat and was dragged along forward.
The tanuki spirit walked at the very back. It glanced once behind it—at the cold corpses on the battlefield, the ravaged husks of the dead that Kōbe Hikaru had summoned, now being dragged underground, and at the last vanishing shadows of the Echigo army, which had by now dissolved utterly into the night.
It drew a deep breath.
Then it turned and quickened its pace to catch up with that gray back ahead.
The next day.
Noon.
Sunlight poured down through the window lattices of the Shrine, laying out a warm, glowing patch of light along the corridor.
The wooden door of the rear hall opened.
Kikyō stepped out.
Seven days of seclusion had wrought some subtle change in her air.
Her white upper garment was neat as new, her red hakama swaying lightly with each step, her jet-black long hair bound at the back with a white ribbon, though the ends spilled loose over her shoulders, a few stray strands falling beside her ears.
That exquisite, delicately lovely face was more serene than before her seclusion; within her pitch-black eyes, the light of her spiritual power was drawn inward now, no longer leaking out.
Like a deep pool whose bottom cannot be seen, yet whose contained power can be felt.
She walked to the corridor and saw Kōbe Hikaru.
He sat cross-legged there, the reverse scale and the Nekomata's claw laid out before him, and that red comb still tucked against his chest.
But he was not winning over a yōkai weapon.
He was waiting for her.
"Out of seclusion?"
He raised his head, his crimson eyes meeting her gaze.
"Mm."
Kikyō sat down across from him, her knees a foot's distance apart.
Her gaze swept over the courtyard beyond the Shrine.
There were some new things there.
More precisely, some new existences.
But she did not ask, because she knew Kōbe Hikaru would explain it to her.
He had never concealed the things that mattered.
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