"Eat you—I'm going to eat you!"
The demon's eyes lit up with a deranged light. Foul saliva dripped from its blood-smeared mouth. It was finally, truly "craving her body"—and the expression meant exactly what it sounded like.
—Negotiating our way out of this one seems unlikely.
The thing was genuinely hideous. Its eyes were like two baseballs crammed into a face that had nothing made for eyes, forcing a vague human shape out of the wrong materials entirely. It closed the distance, sharp animal claws glinting in the moonlight, and the heavy industrial oil-slick stench it carried became concentrated and overwhelming.
So that was what demons smelled like.
—Need to act. Now. Or it eats me.
Under normal circumstances, Inori would have summoned King Crimson and let it deliver a complimentary physical restructuring to whatever was in the way. But King Crimson had done something deeply rude—merged with her body in the form of this outfit and refused to leave—which meant the usual approach wasn't available. She would have to work with what she had.
"HRAAAH—!!"
The demon let out a blood-curdling shriek and charged—massive, like a healthy Siberian brown bear deciding to redecorate the forest floor with its footprints. It looked intimidating enough. To Inori's eyes, it was riddled with openings, a stumbling mess, like someone in a cheap mascot costume handing out flyers at a school festival who'd tripped over their own feet.
She stepped aside without hurry. It plowed headfirst into the large tree behind her—a solid impact, but hardly a scratch on anything that called itself a demon. It rubbed its head, mildly irritated, and reset for another charge.
A mindless brute, then. Some ordinary demon the story had probably never bothered to name—just whatever physical enhancement came standard. Nothing worth thinking too hard about. What Inori needed to do was simple: focus.
—Let the Nameless Monster attack.
She raised one arm, the line of it unhurried and elegant. The tip of one pale finger caught something in the air—and from it, a small scatter of deep crimson sparks.
"...Hn?"
She'd said she wasn't a demon. So she had to be human.
Even if she wasn't Demon Slayer Corps—this girl in the impossible outfit, whatever she was, deserved caution. The demon held its breath and watched. Those sparks were condensing into something at her fingertip—something was forming—
—Crack.
The sharp report of air being split at speed.
A slender object launched from her fingertip, leaving a brilliant red afterimage across the dark—and by the time the demon registered it as a ranged attack, the thing had already punched through its throat.
"What—what is that—!"
Reeking demon blood poured from the wound. It clapped a hand over the injury, trying to grip the object and pull it out—the way demons healed, this would be nothing—
Except it wouldn't budge. Not even slightly.
The demon looked down at what was lodged in its own throat.
A feather. A single red feather.
Or something shaped like a feather. Because this thing was harder than any Nichirin Sword, more resilient than anything that had no right to be this unyielding—and no matter how the demon twisted and pried at it, it stayed planted as if it had fused there entirely.
And stranger still: the feather had an eye.
One eye, growing from the shaft of the feather, calmly open and watching. A black iris with a vertical, blood-vessel-threaded pupil—an eye that clearly thought. This feather-shaped weapon was a living creature. A creature that could look at you. The demon, which was supposed to be the thing that made humans feel terror, found itself staring into something that drained its sanity points by the second—what is this thing—what is this woman—what is any of this—
"It's cutting my neck—it's going to cut through my neck—ahhh!"
The pain and fear hit together. The demon could feel that terrible feather burrowing incrementally deeper—any moment now, any moment—its head was going to come off—
"Told you it was strange, didn't I." The girl was smoothing a strand of hair back from her face with an air of mild distraction, not even looking at the spectacle. The tip of her finger pulsed with faint red light, like a remote control for something that moved on its own. "It really is nothing like King Crimson used to be."
"But they are useful, I'll give them that."
"HRAAAHH—!!"
The scream cut off.
The feather in the demon's throat made a single clean rotation. Its edge drew a smooth line through the neck—and the demon's head separated from its body with no resistance at all. The body collapsed. The head rolled to a stop at Inori's feet.
—The Nameless Monster's ability: using the feather-shaped extensions of the Goldfish Outfit's trailing streamers as weapons—what Inori had named Feather Blades. Each one carried a single eye. This was not a stylistic choice on her part; if the decision had been hers she'd have also preferred not to be wearing this outfit at all, but the Nameless Monster was in the business of pushing Inori toward becoming something that made people lose SAN points on sight, and it was doing its job.
The ability was directly analogous to Johnny Joestar's Nail Bullet—projectiles launched from the body that could be remotely guided. But just as Nail Bullets had their own unique effects, Feather Blades had theirs.
Red Feather Blades: devastating destructive force. There was a limit to how many could be prepared and launched, but sending out dozens or hundreds at once was entirely feasible. They could be guided freely within a certain range. The sole limitation was preparation time—the more feathers, the longer the charge.
And there was one other color.
Golden Feather Blades—their effect was tied to Time Erasure.
For something as minor as this, though, spending even one golden blade was out of the question.
"Doesn't matter! It doesn't work!"
The severed head spoke up from the ground.
It lifted itself as best it could, furious, hollering up at her—apparently it hadn't noticed that the same feather that had cut through its neck was now already fully buried in the center of its forehead, sunk entirely into the brain.
"I'm a demon! You can't kill me! Whatever you are—" What is this woman, what is she, what is this thing— "—are you human? Or demon?"
"Why would I tell you anything? You're almost dead. Close your mouth."
Inori didn't spare it a glance. She turned and walked away.
"Ha! You really think taking my head off kills me?!"
The severed head had realized she apparently didn't know the basics of demon anatomy. It rallied. "An injury this minor—I can still heal—I'll be up in—eh?"
The confidence died somewhere mid-sentence.
Because it couldn't make its body move. By every principle it understood, this should have been nothing—no Nichirin Sword, no sunlight, so no true death—it should have been fine—it had always been fine—
"What's happening... the body won't listen... the strength is gone... why—why is this—"
Something was speaking inside its head.
There was no metaphor that could contain the sound. It simply defied any attempt at comparison—but whatever it was, it was without question the most horrifying thing this demon had ever heard in its existence. It moved through the head like a wave of static, like a form of mental contamination, jamming every channel—thought, reflex, will—all of it. Not just regeneration. Thinking had become impossible. The head pounded, filled with a pressure that left no room for anything else.
"My brain—there's something in my brain—"
Two colorless eyes. Expression twisted and locked. At first it could still form words—then only sounds—then, in a single detonation, nothing at all: a small puff of black smoke that scattered on the wind.
Having successfully scared yet another demon to death, the Red Feather Blade that had done the work flew free of the dissolving smoke and returned to its owner's skirt hem, closed its eye, fell still, and became part of the outfit once more.
Like a player whose curse meter had been quietly filling the whole fight, and finally hit the cap.
The Nameless Monster's body was something that had fully absorbed and consumed the Apocalypse Virus, a plague that had once threatened to unravel the entire world. What sustained demons was the blood of their Progenitor—Muzan Kibutsuji—running through their veins. And the Nameless Monster's blood was its own thing entirely.
—Does the blood of the Nameless Monster lose to Muzan's? Really?