Meanwhile.
For the villagers of Kaede's Village, life went on much as before — farming the fields, drawing water, going to market.
The only difference was that their shrine had been elevated in status, and more people came to pay their respects. Every few days, one could spot traveling merchants from distant places dropping a few copper coins into the offering box.
Of course it had.
By now, the Hojo clan's petition to Kyoto had long since been approved, and Kobe Hikaru already held a formal place within the Shinto religious hierarchy.
As for Kikyo and Kobe Hikaru,
these past weeks had truly become a time of walking the same path together.
Kikyo's Spirit Transformation Technique had grown ever more refined — her spiritual power now wrapped her whole body, turning her into a moving body of light, its speed no longer merely approaching but truly matching Kobe Hikaru's baseline Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body.
She could keep up now.
Once she could keep up, she could go out.
Even venture far from home.
In present-day Kanto, even with Kobe Hikaru's Night Parade of a Hundred Demons holding Musashi and the neighboring provinces in check, scattered yokai settlements still stirred up trouble now and then — especially in the mountains of western Sagami, where border-crossing yokai occasionally appeared. The Earth Barrier had once swept over all three provinces in a single night, but that suppression had only targeted vengeful Demons tied to Kibutsuji Muzan, nothing else.
A year ago, Kikyo had handled all of this alone.
Now there were two of them.
A yokai and a shrine maiden, joining forces to exterminate Demons.
The efficiency was naturally extraordinary.
They set out at dawn and returned by afternoon.
Kobe Hikaru cleared the way ahead with his Thunder-Sinew Razor-Body, his blood-red demon eyes sweeping across the mountains and forests, his Sharp-Eye Mutation catching every anomaly.
Kikyo followed three steps behind and to the side, her white robes and red hakama skimming over the treetops through her Spirit Transformation Technique, like a white rainbow.
Against ordinary yokai, a single strike of bone spikes or a bolt of thunder from Kobe Hikaru settled things in an instant, blood and fire flashing and gone.
Against slightly stronger yokai, even chieftains who had undergone transmutation, all it took was Kobe Hikaru pinning them down for an instant before Kikyo drew her bow — a Sacred Arrow shrieking out, spiritual power condensing at its tip into a fist-sized ball of light. On impact, the target crumbled to ash. Such yokai were rare, but they did exist.
No words were needed between them.
That kind of understanding had already been forged through battle after battle. Now all it took was a glance — or not even that, since the yokai aura and spiritual power radiating from each of them served as signal enough.
The time outside of Demon-slaying was small and warm.
On the way back,
Kikyo stopped by a stream to wash her hands.
She crouched by the water, sleeves rolled up to reveal a pale forearm, her wrists dipping into the cold stream, her expression focused.
Her spiritual power seeped unconsciously into the water's surface. The fish and shrimp in the stream weren't afraid of her at all — instead they gathered, circling around her fingers.
Kobe Hikaru leaned against a tree, arms crossed, watching.
"Even the fish like your spiritual power."
"Spiritual power is naturally drawn to living things."
Kikyo shook the water from her hands and stood, her gaze lingering on him for a moment.
"You, on the other hand — even fish swim away from you."
True enough.
The little fish circled near her hand, but the moment they neared him, they scattered.
A yokai's aura naturally suppressed living creatures. Even though he'd already reined in most of his yokai aura, the instincts of small animals still drove them away.
"Once I'm truly alive again, that'll change."
Kobe Hikaru said.
Kikyo didn't respond. She simply walked over to him, her fingers naturally hooking around his palm.
Naturally, their fingers laced together.
The two of them walked slowly back along the stream.
...
Days like this went on for nearly a month.
[Bankotsu: Favourability 44. First talent unlocked — 'Valor' (when gripping a sword, strength doubles beyond its base value).]
[Black Pearl: Favourability 31. First talent unlocked — 'Piercing Illusion' (while carrying the jewel, discern truth from falsehood and see through all illusions).]
[Tahoto Shrine Maiden's Prayer Beads: Favourability 36. First talent unlocked — 'Curse Resistance' (while carrying the beads, nullify most non-conceptual curses).]
The three yokai weapons were steadily advancing.
Beyond that,
the Shikon Jewel's favourability had also been climbing steadily during this time.
The more settled Kikyo became, the stronger her Naohi grew.
The stronger her Naohi, the more it suppressed the Magatsuhi, and the more the Shikon Jewel's overall state trended toward stability.
As for just how settled Kikyo had become —
one only had to look at the almost otherworldly calm on her face each night as she knelt before the altar, chanting sutras.
Or the joy plain on her face each time she and Kobe Hikaru grew close.
That old heaviness, built up from years of being alone, had nearly vanished.
She had found somewhere to belong, roots to hold her.
Someone whose back she could trust with her own.
[Shikon Jewel: Favourability: 90.]
Ninety.
Very close to the cap now.
Kobe Hikaru studied the number on his panel, knowing the last ten points wouldn't come as easily as the rest had.
The closer to the cap, the deeper the 'acknowledgment' required.
All the more so for a divine artifact like the Shikon Jewel.
But it didn't matter.
It was only a matter of time.
After all, Kikyo was right beside him.
...
That night,
Kobe Hikaru sat beneath the eaves before the shrine hall.
Kikyo leaned against him.
The two of them leaned into each other without any gap between them, both gazing up at the night sky.
Below, Momiji and Botan swept fallen leaves with their brooms, craning their necks now and then to peek up at the pair — a man and a woman? A yokai and a woman? A god and a woman?
Strange as it sounded, they looked strangely fitting together.
The two foxes' chattering, kept low but still perfectly audible to both Kobe Hikaru and Kikyo, left them at a loss for words and more than a little amused.
Lanterns flickered throughout the village, and in the darkness the fields lay crisscrossed with narrow paths.
This stretch of time was a rare one — Kanto without any large-scale warfare.
A season of peace.
And yet.
Calm always comes to an end.
Just then, at that very moment, Kobe Hikaru felt a tremor of dread at his waist.
A message among the hundred demons — long-distance communication relayed through the tanuki spirit — had arrived.
Urgent.
Kobe Hikaru frowned, cupping a bowl of clear water and setting ripples across its surface, letting those ripples serve as the vessel of dread to manifest the scene from the other end.
The face of Tanuki Juzaburo, chief steward of the twenty-three demons and the tanuki spirit, appeared within it.
His voice carried a rare note of panic.
"My lord! Urgent word from Suruga—"
"The Imagawa clan's chief steward, Taigen Sessai..."
"...is dead."
The voice cut off there.
Dead.
Taigen Sessai — de facto head of Suruga Province's administration, strategist of the Imagawa clan, known to the world as the Black-Robed Chancellor.
That woman in white monk's robes.
The one who had waited for him three days in the shrine of the castle keep, who had used her own mind to calculate the exact timing of his borrowed-blade scheme.
She had told him once.
That she wouldn't live much longer — perhaps less than a year.
Now, her fated hour had come.
Kobe Hikaru closed his eyes.
The last words the woman had said to him surfaced in his mind... She hadn't needed him to fight her wars or govern in her place — only to pull her back from the brink at the single most dangerous moment.
She — Imagawa Yoshimoto.
And that most dangerous moment required no guessing.
It was the fate Imagawa Yoshimoto was destined for.
One of the rare battles in the history of the Sengoku era where the outnumbered triumphed — the Battle of Okehazama.
He opened his eyes, his blood-red demon eyes flickering in the dim lantern light.
Taigen Sessai's prophecy, and the trust she had placed in him—
The time was almost here.
Meanwhile, far away, at the heart of the realm, thousands of li distant,
Kyoto.
The Onmyoryo.
The bureau should have been silent in the depths of night, but tonight was different.
A divination plate engraved with a pentagram began spinning on its own, untouched by anyone. The onmyoji on night duty, just lifting his teacup, was so startled he dropped it to the floor.
"The heavens... have changed!"
Footsteps burst through the corridors, paper doors were flung open one after another, and lanterns flared to life.
The entire Onmyoryo was thrown into chaos.
The disturbance in the divination plate meant the great currents of the realm were shifting violently — some being capable of upending the whole order was rising, or some once-stable order was crumbling.
But no one could read the exact direction of it.
The pentagram's light flickered on and off, as though disturbed by some outside force.
"Where's Lord Tsuchimikado, the Onmyo no Kami? What — he's not here?"
"Then hurry, go summon the Onmyo Gon no Suke and Lord Keikain, at once!"
And beneath the chaos of the Onmyoryo —
deeper still —
beneath the earth of Kyoto,
in the palace-den where Hagoromo-Gitsune lay dormant, the air suddenly turned cold.
The great yokai who had coiled beneath Kyoto for centuries opened one eye.
A slit pupil, golden.
She had sensed something.
Not the disturbance from the Onmyoryo above ground — to her, that level of commotion was no different from ants moving house.
It came from somewhere far more distant.
An extremely faint pulse, as though it had passed through countless layers of veils to reach her.
The child in her belly — moved.
As if sensing her recent frustration and impatience, some surviving fragment of will within had crossed the boundary between life and death, reaching a tendril out toward the mortal world.
Hagoromo-Gitsune's slit pupil contracted slightly.
She didn't move, didn't even fully open her second eye.
Only her tail, coiled in the darkness, gave the ground a light sweep, and the dust it raised settled slowly through the air.
Deep within the den, the dormant yokai felt their mistress's aura stir and, one by one, lifted their heads from the shadows —
red eyes, yellow eyes, ghostly green, deep violet — countless pairs of eyes flickering to life and dimming again in the dark.
A stir.
A suppressed stir, one that dared not make a sound.
Hagoromo-Gitsune paid them no mind.
She simply closed that one eye again.
But the corner of her mouth curled, just slightly.
A faint, unreadable curve.
"...My child, will you lend your mother a hand, from within hell itself?"
Hagoromo-Gitsune had indeed grown impatient of late. The wars of Kanto had ceased, even trending toward unification.
Word had it that two more yokai factions had recently risen in the Western Lands as well, one of them a boundary-yokai of the flower-in-mirror, moon-in-water sort.
They competed with one another, yet together kept the once-chaotic yokai populace in check.
The amount of grudge-rancor had dropped considerably,
forcing her to consume even more human livers from Kyoto — though even that had slowed considerably, for lack of a certain tool.
That tool being the peculiar little demon under Kidomaru's command... Yes, Hagoromo-Gitsune had always known exactly what sort of creature he was. She simply hadn't cared.
But compared to what was stirring now, none of that was worth mentioning.
A blissful smile spread across her face — so blissful she forgot to swallow the sliver of human liver resting on her lips.
Her voice fell into the empty depths below, without an echo.
Above in Kyoto, the lanterns of the Onmyoryo still flickered.
Below Kyoto, the eyes of the yokai still flickered on and off.
____
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