Chapter 443: Shinobu's Hunt!
"This... what is going on with this woman? You've— you've got to be kidding me. She killed all five demons with a single strike? And— and that was a Lower Rank, taken down in one cut too? How is that even possible? Am I... am I dreaming? Can demons even dream?"
Night had settled in, the sky scattered with stars, the darkness not especially heavy tonight. Moonlight filtered down through gaps in the tree branches overhead, falling across the frost-covered ground below.
Shinobu stood in a pair of small white boots trimmed with a touch of purple lace — different from the Demon Slayer Corps' standard footwear.
After some time spent training, she'd simply found the Corps' regulation shoes too impractical to fight in.
The ground lay blanketed in snow, though her own clothing was far from heavy. Her calm gaze settled on the trembling demon in front of her — she'd clearly heard its mumbled, terrified muttering.
I killed a Lower Rank demon? Shinobu blinked slightly, genuinely surprised. She'd assumed she'd just cut down a handful of minor underlings — they'd all looked weak enough, every last one of them.
Oh, right — now that she thought about it, one of the five had actually shown a bit of fight.
Not that it had mattered. She'd cut it down just as cleanly and decisively as the rest.
Her brows drew together slightly. She'd finally found a group of demons worth questioning, and ended up accidentally killing their leader in the process.
Which left just this last one. Could she still get the information she actually wanted out of it?
Had an outside observer been present, they'd have noticed the ground scattered with drop after drop of crimson blood.
None of it Shinobu's own — all of it belonged to the demons she'd just cut down.
As for why demons bled this much in the first place?
That was a question with no easy answer, probably just some particular quirk of how this world's demons worked.
These demons functioned a bit like vampires, in a sense.
Though the whole "blood demon" framing carried a certain eerie resemblance regardless.
If one of the five she'd just killed really had been a Lower Rank demon, and she hadn't even registered any particular strength from it at all — that said quite a lot about how far her own power had climbed.
Her voice came out cool and even, her expression unreadable. "Do you know where the Upper Ranks are?"
The demon Shinobu had cornered wore a face etched with genuine, naked terror.
Strange to imagine, honestly — a demon's face capable of showing that kind of fear.
Stranger still that a mere human could inspire that much dread in one.
And that human happened to be a small, slight-framed young woman, no less.
Shinobu was only eighteen this year — as for how someone that young had ended up a Hashira, well, don't ask. That's just how the story goes. Naruto saved the entire shinobi world as a teenager too, didn't he?
And yet, improbable as it was, here it was happening — a demon reduced to this state of fear by a living human.
Word of this getting out, honestly, few people would even believe it.
"The... the Upper— Upper Ranks?" The demon Shinobu had questioned flinched hard at the sound of her voice, scrambling backward several meters on all fours, desperate to put distance between itself and this clearly dangerous woman.
Not that it held out any real hope. Whatever instinct for self-preservation it had left told it plainly: running wasn't an option.
If running had actually worked, its boss — Lower Rank Three — wouldn't have died this pathetically.
"I-I-I... m-ma'am! Since I turned from human to demon, I've never once laid eyes on any of the Upper Ranks. The most I've ever seen is Lower Rank Two, Lord Rokuro."
Gripped by sheer terror, the demon spilled everything it knew, the words tumbling out at breakneck speed.
"That was when Lower Rank Three — m-my boss — went to meet Lord Rokuro. It... it brought me along that one time."
Watching Shinobu's utterly unreadable expression, the demon shook even harder.
"That's— that's really all I know. All of it."
Having listened to the demon's trembling, stuttering account, Shinobu tilted her head slightly, one hand resting on the hilt of her oddly-shaped blade, and asked, expression still flat, "That's all you've got? Really, that's it? I have one more question for you. Answer it, and I'll let you go. Spare your life."
"Huh?" The demon, by now curled into a near-fetal ball of fear, looked up with open shock. "R-really? Ma'am, you'll— you'll really spare me?"
"Really." Shinobu smiled faintly, her refined features carrying what looked like genuine sincerity.
Then she asked her final question. "Since you've met Lower Rank Two, you must know where it's based. Tell me its location, and I'll let you go."
"Lord Rokuro... Lord Rokuro is to the east of this mountain. Walking at an ordinary human's nonstop pace, it'd take about three or four days to reach... that's where it is."
The demon clearly had no shame left, no hesitation whatsoever about selling out a fellow demon.
As far as it was concerned, staying alive was worth far more than loyalty.
It would've gladly dropped to its knees and kowtowed to the woman in front of it — hundreds, even thousands of times over.
Staying alive was all that mattered.
"I see!" Shinobu nodded, as if something had clicked into place, a faint, gentle smile crossing her face. "Since you've answered my last question, I can let you go now. Feel free to leave."
Hearing that, the sweat-soaked, thoroughly cowed demon felt an overwhelming wave of relief wash over it.
Just as it began rising from the snow, it suddenly sensed something was wrong.
It reached up, instinctively, and touched its own neck — and felt something warm and strange.
Looking down at its hand, it blinked. "...Blood?"
Then it noticed its vision tilting, uncontrollably, to one side.
Its sizable head simply slid free and dropped to the ground.
Blood sprayed across a wide stretch of the snow beneath it.
Like a sheet of white rice paper, dotted here and there with blossoms of deep red plum blossom.
Strikingly beautiful, in its own grotesque way.
Impossible to look away from.
"Forgot to mention — I'm not exactly a woman of my word. Especially not where demons are concerned." Just before the demon finally crumbled to ash, Shinobu added that last line with a gentle smile, as if determined to crush its spirit even in its final moment.
Her calm gaze settled on the droplets of blood scattered across the snow, and she let out a small, rueful sigh. "Well, that was a mistake."
She'd originally meant to capture a Lower Rank demon alive and interrogate it about Muzan's whereabouts.
Instead, she'd mistaken that very Lower Rank demon for an ordinary underling and beheaded it in a single stroke, without a second thought.
Not entirely her fault, honestly — she'd never expected a Lower Rank demon, Lower Rank Three no less, to turn out this pathetically weak.