It was no coincidence that Kōbe Hikaru had appeared here.
After coming up empty at Odawara Castle, he had already changed his plans.
The Hōjō clan's main force had marched south, and the Imagawa clan had raised an army to press east—the two forces now faced off at Yadaihara, with the Uesugi clan's legions of Echigo liable to sweep south again at any moment.
A vast swath of the Kantō was being swallowed by the fires of war.
And behind him trailed twenty-three little yōkai with nowhere to go.
These creatures needed a place to land.
A place with people.
A place that could produce dread.
But in the cracks of a war, not a single village or town would take in a band of yōkai.
Unless—someone vouched for them.
And to vouch for something, one needed prestige, and even more, a display of power.
One had to let every soul see with their own eyes what stood behind this pack of yōkai.
So he needed a stage.
The battlefield between Imagawa and Hōjō happened to be the grandest stage of all.
Three thousand five hundred men.
The elite of two domains.
Dozens of banners.
And all he had to do was weigh the strength of both sides, and—so long as his own safety was assured—do one thing.
Walk in.
And then, let everyone see.
…
Blood mist billowed; a forest of bone rose up.
The two armies had been forcibly cleaved apart. The front-rank soldiers retreated and retreated, pressing back against the comrades crammed behind them, their faces stricken with horror.
That gray-robed, ashen-haired figure stood dead center on the battlefield, one hand resting on his blade, the other hanging at his side, violet arcs of lightning leaping silently across his fingertips.
A crimson oni mask.
White bone for armor.
Blood mist for a banner.
Under the gaze of thousands of eyes, this sight alone was terrifying enough.
But what truly froze everyone's breath—
was the thing behind him.
The blood mist churned.
A red haze drifted slowly outward to either side from behind Kōbe Hikaru, like a curtain being slowly drawn open.
Within the mist, shadowy shapes flickered.
First, a crooked, tattered banner.
Painted upon it was an absurdly ugly skull, its lines sloppy, like a child's scribble.
The one holding the banner aloft was a short, plump figure—the tanuki spirit, which had by now abandoned its disguise and reverted to its true form.
A round, rolling belly, a fluffy tail, two mung-bean eyes bulging wide—its legs were trembling.
But it did not run. It held up the banner and stood there.
Stood behind Kōbe Hikaru.
Then the first one. Then the second.
The one-eyed little monk stepped out of the mist, only three feet tall, holding up that ragged paper umbrella. The single eye painted on its surface no longer darted about in fright, but stared straight ahead—straight at those humans.
The third.
The fox-eared girl came out from the deepest part of the blood mist, gripping the tail of a giant rat with a broken leg. Her two furry ears stood bolt upright, the wreath atop her head askew, exposing half a pointed ear-tip.
The fourth, the fifth.
The two-headed crow spread its wings and alighted at the top of the bone forest.
The severed centipede drilled up out of the ground and wound its way to Kōbe Hikaru's feet.
A kappa, a lantern ghost, a fragment of an Ittan-momen, a cat with no eyes… one after another.
Twenty-three of them.
All of them walked out of the blood mist.
They were weak—so weak that any ashigaru with a weapon could have killed them with ease.
So weak that in the world of yōkai, they didn't even rank at the bottom of the food chain.
But in this moment, they stood behind Kōbe Hikaru.
Stood amid the forest of bone, stood in the lingering echo of the thunder, stood beneath the gaze of three thousand five hundred men.
The blood mist shrouded them.
That layer of red haze was no longer a concealment, but had become a rendering.
It rendered their shadows, dragging them high and vast.
It rendered their presence, magnifying it countless times over.
Set against that mist, these yōkai—originally so laughably feeble—somehow took on an inexplicable air of menace.
Not a pressure of strength.
But—the image.
An Asura-like being wearing a crimson oni mask, followed by a horde of demons and monsters great and small, walking amid blood mist and a forest of bone.
The image itself was enough to breed fear in any heart.
"Night… Night Par…"
Somewhere in the Hōjō ranks, an unseen soldier's teeth were chattering.
"The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons…"
The word spread through the ranks like a plague.
The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.
In legend, it was the sight of the lord of yōkai leading his host of demons in a brazen procession through the streets.
This one before them, though it numbered only twenty-three.
Though it was in broad daylight.
Though those yōkai were weak enough to be chased off with a broom.
No one found it laughable.
Because the being standing at the very front—the being who had just cleaved a battlefield of three thousand five hundred men in two with a single stroke of thunder—
was too strong.
So strong that even if only an ant trailed behind him, that ant would seem impossible to dismiss.
This was momentum.
This was dread.
The little yōkai did not need to spread fear themselves.
They needed only to stand behind Kōbe Hikaru.
The humans would frighten themselves.
And the dread that fear congealed into was, in this moment, spreading silently across this battlefield.
It flowed toward those little yōkai, flowed toward their feeble bodies.
Like nourishment.
Like—power.
The one-eyed little monk's single eye suddenly flared.
The fox-eared girl's ears twitched even more violently—not out of fear, but out of some unfamiliar sense of fullness.
The tanuki spirit froze.
It lowered its head and looked at its own hand.
Its fingers were glowing?
No, not glowing.
It was yōkai aura.
Its yōkai aura was growing.
Ever so slightly, but growing all the same.
Kōbe Hikaru stood amid the forest of bone, his gaze beneath the crimson oni mask sweeping across the ranks on either side.
He was not watching the changes in those little yōkai behind him.
He was watching the panel.
To be precise, the panel of the Nekomata's Claw tucked in his arms.
[Nekomata's Claw: Favourability +12]
[Current Favourability: 45 (Resonance)]
[It has suddenly reacted.]
[For the first time.]
[The breath of those departed spirits—the souls newly slain on this battlefield, the tattered remnants drifting through the air—it is absorbing them.]
[It is awakening.]
Kōbe Hikaru's brow arched faintly beneath the oni mask.
Twelve points?
The favourability had jumped twelve points at once.
This thing used to rise a point or two a day, no different from feeding some dull, lifeless object with no spirit to it at all. And now it had suddenly surged?
He lowered his head and felt out the withered black claw against his chest.
It was trembling.
Unlike that earlier unconscious, wood-dull, sluggish quiver, this was a real, rhythmic trembling, laced with a kind of yearning.
Like a beast that had slumbered for ages suddenly catching the scent of flesh.
Battlefield. Death.
Departed souls.
These things were the nourishment of the Nekomata's Claw.
It had always been a yōkai weapon that manipulated the dead—the more death, the more active it grew.
And on this battlefield, the clash just now had already felled dozens of corpses, the air thick with the reek of death.
This was the trigger for its awakening.
Not an infusion of Kōbe Hikaru's yōkai power.
Not the patient, day-after-day courting.
But—the scene was right.
"So that's how it is."
Kōbe Hikaru said in his heart.
This thing doesn't go for gentleness. What it feeds on is death.
Good. Noted.
[Nekomata's Claw: Favourability +3]
[Current Favourability: 48 (Craving)]
[It wants more.]
Kōbe Hikaru paid its craving no mind.
He withdrew his gaze and looked forward once more.
The two armies were still separated by the forest of bone and the thunder. The soldiers had fallen back to a safe distance, but no one had withdrawn.
The Hōjō side was watching and waiting.
The Imagawa side—
A single rider burst out from the southern ranks.
Hooves trod the withered yellow grass, not fast, yet each fall of the steps was even, like the beat of a drum.
The rider wore a sumptuous jūnihitoe kimono, dark-brown long hair streaming across the horse's back, the golden butterfly ornament in her hair glinting in the sunlight.
A petite figure sat upright upon the horse, back straight.
On that exquisite face was a smile so brilliant it dazzled the eyes.
Imagawa Yoshimoto.
Lord of Suruga Province.
She spurred her horse through her own lines, all alone, galloping toward that forest of bone.
The attendants behind her tried to follow, but a single backward glance pinned them where they stood.
And so the drum of hooves drew from far to near.
It halted at the edge of the bone forest.
Imagawa Yoshimoto swung down from her horse, the hem of her jūnihitoe trailing across the grass, stained with mud—she did not care in the slightest.
She lifted her head, gazing at that gray figure standing deep within the forest of bone.
Those bright eyes were brimming with excitement.
"We meet again."
She said, "Lord Demon God."
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