"Ha?" Wakuraba looked at her like she'd said something absurd. "I'm the fastest thing alive. Even Upper Rank demons might not be able to match me for raw speed."
Where that confidence came from was anyone's guess.
Inori suppressed the urge to comment and looked at that ridiculous face a moment longer. Then she recalled — this was the demon from the Season 1 finale of the Demon Slayer anime. The one who'd tried to make a break for it in the Infinity Castle after Nakime shifted the terrain, only to be cut down by Muzan on the spot.
So maybe the speed was real. He might not have been showing everything he had earlier — a Hashira's threat fell far below that of his lousy boss Muzan, so conserving made sense, and what he'd shown against the Corps members might have been less than his ceiling.
Either way, he'd gotten Inori mistaken for a murderer. She had no intention of letting that slide. Right here and now, she'd pin him in place and let him wait for the sun.
While Inori ran through her thoughts, Wakuraba wasn't wasting time. He crouched and scooped up his severed arm, channeling his demon blood to reconnect it at the stump.
"There's nowhere to hide out here — leaves won't block enough sunlight. If you want a Blood Battle, pick a better time for it!"
He snapped, agitated. He could feel the coming sunrise building from the east — that unbearable heat at the edge of the world, absolute poison for their kind, the same thing that sunlight was for the vampires in the JoJo world — something their kind could never, ever overcome.
"And what if I want to catch a bit of sun?"
Inori leaned against a tree trunk, tilted her head back, and studied the brightening sky at her leisure.
The more anxious he was, the more entertaining she found it. She genuinely wanted to watch — would he melt on the spot? Disintegrate the way DIO did, turned to ash in an instant?
"...?"
Wakuraba's mind stalled. He concluded either his ears had broken or her mind had.
—Was she serious? Sunbathing? She... she wasn't a demon?
"You — are you actually not a demon? You're human?"
When that impossible yet strangely rational conclusion landed, Wakuraba looked at Inori for the first time with something like real fear.
Yes. That was exactly the emotion she'd been waiting to see. In this world, she felt, her place was to become something that both humans and demons alike feared.
"You're welcome to verify it yourself."
"What kind of joke is this?! I don't have time for your games!"
Wakuraba didn't need to know whether the pink-haired girl would die in sunlight. He only needed to know that he would — and that was enough.
"I don't care if you're human or demon. I'm getting out of here."
He had no intention of wasting another second on her. Those wide vertical pupils filling with blood — as if he'd activated his special Blood Demon Art — his legs launched, each step a bolt of lightning, and he streaked past her and blazed down the road.
—Tch.
Inori knew this coward wouldn't stand and fight. She'd expected exactly this.
She didn't turn. Her fingers lifted behind her, gave a single quiet twist — and a blood-red Feather Blade shot from her fingertip, cold light trailing behind it.
This one moved faster than any she had fired before.
—That sluggish little thing thinks it can catch up to me.
Wakuraba caught the whisper of wings the moment the blade launched, and measured its trajectory.
He allowed himself a small, contemptuous thought: So that's all this strange woman had. A feather. Even the ambush earlier hadn't connected — and now she was trying again? If it wasn't almost dawn he'd have stopped and taught her exactly what it meant to cross one of the Twelve Kizuki. A captive like her would probably make an interesting amusement — chain her down, break her properly, see how long that composure held—
While Wakuraba's attention drifted for half a second, the red Feather Blade had quietly accelerated and caught up with him. But it didn't strike.
It simply hung there at a fixed distance behind his skull, one blood-red eye wide open — hovering like a lens locked into place in the air.
"You have nowhere left to run."
Inori hadn't moved from where she stood. The wind was doing what it liked with her skirts.
In her hand rested another Feather Blade. She pressed her gaze to the pupil — and through it, watched Wakuraba scrambling in the dark.
Every one of these red Feather Blades carried eyes that belonged to the Nameless Monster. Eyes connected to each other, feeding into the same shared network. Beyond sharing sight, they carried one more function — a convenient one.
Inori turned her right hand toward the eye of the blade she held and fired.
A new Feather Blade shot out — aimed at the eye of the one in her hand. But instead of impact, it passed through. The launched blade drove clean through the pupil of the Feather Blade Inori held — and emerged from the other end of the link, out through the eye of the Feather Blade hovering behind Wakuraba's skull.
The eyes of the Nameless Monster held the power to cross space.
Wakuraba had no time to react. He barely registered the sound — then his vision went black. The back of his skull took the blade point-blank. The hit scattered his ability to hold himself upright, his legs went out, and he went face-first into the dirt.
Like an arrow the moment it leaves the string — fastest at the point of release, before deceleration begins — the Feather Blade had passed through the spatial shortcut without losing a fraction of its speed. It reached its target at full velocity.
Inori breathed out. From the hills below the mountain, the first clear call of a rooster rang through the predawn air. She looked east again — the deep blue of the horizon had a thousand lights pressing against it from below, held just barely under the line.
Sunrise was close.
She watched through the distant eye and quickened her pace.
Wakuraba hadn't made it far. Two minutes of walking brought her to him — sprawled in the middle of the road, coughing blood.
The Feather Blade lodged in his skull kept firing its pulse of interference into his brain. Any chance of running at his former speed was gone. Getting upright would be difficult enough.
"Just... if I can reach — that place—"
Wakuraba coughed blood and dragged himself forward an inch at a time. His demon-blood senses screamed — dawn was coming, every instinct shrilling the warning. He fixed his gaze on a large stone beside the path. Just — if he could get under that—
"I want... to live—"
His vision swam. At the edges of his hearing, something whispered — voices he couldn't make out. He didn't care. He had one thought. Reach the stone.
"To die under the sun... that's too humiliating. I'm sorry, Lord Muzan. Better to be beheaded by a Hashira than like this... ah, blood — your blood, Lord Muzan — with that blood I could kill a Hashira, rise to the Upper Ranks—"
Wakuraba shuddered head to toe. He'd spent every last reserve. His mind had already slipped away. The Feather Blade behind him pulsed its interference, and the hallucination swallowed him whole. He lay flat in the dirt, his tongue working uselessly against the mud beneath him — a pitiful sight.
But Inori was not Tanjiro. She didn't spend a moment thinking about a painless death for him. She simply stood behind him, waited, and watched — waited for sunrise, for Amaterasu's radiance to reduce this wretched thing to ash.
—Hm?
She was still weighing whether to finish him herself when something else reached her — faint, distant, but the Nameless Monster's sharp senses didn't miss it.
—Footsteps. Uneven. One light, one heavy. One quick, one slow.
Probably those two sisters, catching up.