Without warning, Rui's eyes went cold. He flicked a nearly invisible thread of silk at a nearby tree, and it toppled sideways, revealing a Demon Slayer standing behind it, blade in hand.
For half a second, Tanjiro's heart leapt, thinking help had finally arrived. Then the man's head simply came apart, his whole body collapsing into pieces scattered across the ground.
The smell of blood hit Tanjiro like a wall, thick enough to gag on. He doubled over, retching.
"You weren't actually hoping he'd come save you, were you?"
Rui went back to toying with a strand of thread between his fingers, unbothered. After a moment, his voice went flat and cold. "No one's coming for you today." He flicked a finger toward Tanjiro, and a sharp whistling sound cut through the trees.
Tanjiro couldn't see the thread itself, but the sound alone was enough to run a chill down his spine.
He'd just watched exactly how little Rui valued a human life. Whatever that finger-flick meant, he wasn't waiting to find out; he threw himself flat against the ground on instinct.
The moment one foot left the ground, a loud crack sounded behind him, and the spot where his other foot had been was sliced clean in two.
He stared at the ruined earth, breath ragged, cold sweat running down his back. A half-second slower, and that would have been him.
He shook himself out of it, gripped his hilt tight with both hands, and fixed a wary stare on Rui.
Two attacks in, and he already understood that if he couldn't find a way to track the thread's path, dodging wouldn't stay possible for long, let alone fighting back.
Then it came to him: his sense of smell.
It was the same trick that had let him track the demon controlling his teammates earlier in the forest. Rui's scent was distinct and so, he realized, was the thread's.
*If I can actually follow it now, this fight doesn't have to be one-sided. At the very least, I can keep dodging.*
Relief flooded through him despite everything.
Rui tilted his head, faintly surprised that the dodge had worked. Assuming it was luck, he flicked his fingers again, sending a sharpened line of thread slashing toward Tanjiro.
This time, tracking the scent clearly, Tanjiro spun into a full sideways somersault and dodged cleanly, the strike splitting another tree trunk in half behind him.
Real surprise crossed Rui's face this time. This human could actually track his attacks.
"You caught that one. Doesn't mean you're getting away from me. Since dodging's your specialty, let's see you handle this."
He spread all five fingers and flicked them together. A sharp, ringing hum rang out from nowhere.
Tanjiro felt five threads converging on him at once and swung his blade up to block.
A line of cold opened across his cheek. His blade had caught one thread, but another had curled unnaturally around it, licking across his face and leaving a bloody gash behind.
He didn't dare take another hit head-on. He rolled back hard, putting as much distance as he could between himself and Rui.
Rui's mouth curled into a sneer, and his fist closed.
Something about that set off alarm bells in Tanjiro. He looked around and saw two more threads sweeping in from both sides at once, the same technique that had just cut a man into pieces in front of him.
There wasn't time to dodge.
His mind went completely blank. Just as he braced for the cut, the wooden box on his back burst open, and a slight figure launched out of it, shoving him backward out of the way.
A scream tore through the air, and both Tanjiro and Rui froze in place.
Nezuko stood where he'd been standing, her right arm shredded to ribbons, chunks of flesh scattered across the ground.
"Nezuko!"
Tanjiro scrambled up and threw his arms around her.
Surprise gave way to delight on Rui's face. He started walking toward them, unhurried. "Now that's interesting. You had a little treasure like this hidden away the whole time."
Tanjiro scooped her up and ran, ducking behind the cover of a large tree.
Watching her face twist in pain, he pressed both hands hard against the wound, trying to slow the bleeding.
He'd never imagined she'd throw herself in front of him like that, and now her arm was gone.
"Nezuko, are you okay?"
She only groaned, eyes shut against the pain.
"What do I do? What am I supposed to do?" Panic cracked his voice, tears rising.
Then, impossibly, the wound began to close, new flesh knitting itself into a whole arm right in front of him, the injury vanishing as if it had never happened.
Relief and disbelief hit him at once. He looked up and found her watching him with soft, affectionate eyes.
It didn't last.
Rui was already closing in, cutting down trees on either side of him with idle flicks of thread.
"Fascinating. Truly. Why would you throw yourself in front of a human? You and I are the same kind of creature. Come to me. Be part of my family."
The words were aimed squarely at Nezuko.
Her eyes flared with open resistance, and a low, wordless sound of protest rose in her throat.
Tanjiro patted the back of her hand, trying to calm her.
Then, all at once, the forest went completely silent, and that silence felt worse than the noise had.
After a long, tense pause with no movement, Tanjiro gathered his nerve and peered out from behind the tree, toward the spot where Rui had been standing.
Empty.
He didn't believe for a second that they'd been let go. Rui was hunting them, or lying in wait somewhere, patient.
He tightened his grip on Nezuko's cold hand and forced something like a smile onto his face.
"Just as I thought. Different." Rui's voice came from directly above them, cold as ever. "Seems the only way she'll truly come to me is if I remove you from the picture entirely."
Startled, Tanjiro's head snapped up.
Rui stood in midair, balanced on a crisscrossing lattice of thread, one hand already reaching down toward them.
Tanjiro recognized the motion from before. Before he could react, threads shot down and wrapped tight around Nezuko.
A sharp scream, and she was yanked straight up to Rui's side.
The thread bit into her skin as it pulled, blood tracing down its length and dripping to the ground below.
"Nezuko!" Tanjiro scrambled up, shouting her name.
Rui landed lightly on the ground.
Tanjiro leveled his blade at him with both hands and shouted, "Let go of my sister, you bastard!"
"...Sister?"
Rui repeated the word with something almost like amusement, then his eyes went cold in an instant. "What gives you the right to call yourself that?" His palm opened, and he swept it in a flat arc toward Tanjiro.
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