The moment Kōbe Hikaru plunged into the demon swarm, he regretted it.
Not the decision itself — he regretted not counting more carefully first.
Three or four hundred?
Like hell. There were at least five hundred of the things.
Grey-green silhouettes swallowed him whole in an instant. Shrieks, howls, and guttural roars crashed over him from every direction, a wall of sound loud enough to rupture eardrums. The stench of demon-qi hit him like a physical force — so thick and rancid it had almost taken on solid form, nauseating enough to make even a Ghost Warrior who didn't need to breathe want to gag.
A bird-headed demon lunged first, talons raking straight for his face at startling speed.
Kōbe Hikaru twisted aside. Muramasa swept out in a smooth horizontal arc.
The blade passed through the creature's neck without the slightest resistance.
Thwp. The bird-head went spinning into the air, trailing a curved ribbon of blood. The headless body lurched forward two more steps on sheer momentum before crashing to the ground.
[Cursed Blade — Muramasa: Affection +1]
No time to read the panel.
Three serpent-body demons surged in from the left — lower halves coiled serpent tails wound together, upper halves humanoid torsos scaled like fish, all three jaws yawning open as they lunged. From the right, two Blue-Skin Fiends came crashing down with bone-clubs slicked in blood and scraps of flesh that didn't belong to any of them.
Kōbe Hikaru planted one foot and launched himself straight up, clearing the serpents' coiling reach.
The blade traced an arc through open air.
Kesagiri.
Both Blue-Skin Fiends' heads dropped simultaneously, hitting the undergrowth with a dull, wet thud.
He hadn't landed yet when demon-qi pressed in from behind.
His body twisted in midair — a contortion that would have been anatomically impossible for anything still living, but a Ghost Warrior's frame wasn't bound by such considerations. His torso rotated, and the blade drove backward, tip-first.
A centipede spirit that had been lunging for his spine found the sword punched straight through its throat. Dozens of legs thrashed and spasmed against the flat of the blade as it shrieked, a sound like metal dragged across stone.
Kōbe Hikaru snapped his wrist and flung it — the centipede spirit sailed through the air and plowed into the cluster of small-fry demons charging in behind it, scattering them like pins.
— Four.
He counted silently, kicked off a demon corpse for leverage, and drove forward again toward the old man.
The grain pattern along Muramasa's dark blade had begun to blush — red deepening toward violet wherever the fresh blood had soaked in. The sword was excited. Ecstatic, even.
With every kill, blood was drawn into the steel. With every draw, its edge grew fractionally keener. It had the quality of feeding a starving animal — each mouthful making the beast more feral than the last.
Kōbe Hikaru didn't linger on any of it. His target was clear — get to the old man first. Everything else came after.
"Move!"
One slash split three small demons blocking his path. A flash of blade-light, three arms spiraling into the sky, a chorus of screams rising and overlapping.
At last, he broke through to the old man's side.
Up close, the situation was worse than he'd estimated from a distance.
The man was past seventy — grey-white robes, hair gone the same silver-white, a face buried under wrinkles and caked blood. His left arm was destroyed. The entire limb had been severed by something sharp, leaving nothing below the shoulder but a short, ragged stump, wound in strips of cloth already soaked through and dripping.
His right hand held a hand-seal — the kind human sorcerers used to focus their power. His left — what remained of it — cradled a cloth bundle tight against his chest, clutching it with the grip of a man who had decided he would sooner die than let go.
The old man clearly hadn't expected reinforcements.
He definitely hadn't expected the reinforcement to be a Ghost Warrior.
Murky, clouded eyes snapped wide with suspicion. What little spiritual power remained surged to his skin's surface in a reflex — forming a thin, faint membrane of light around his body.
The membrane was barely there. Still, at this range, it was a real threat. Even the ghost of it made Kōbe Hikaru's skin prickle with a low, searing sting — the unmistakable bite of a barrier raised by human spiritual power. He'd watched Demon Suppressors deploy this kind of protective field before, from a safe distance. This was his first time in range of one.
"Easy, old man!"
Kōbe Hikaru deflected two demons lunging from the side without looking away from the elder.
"I'm here to help you!"
"You're a demon!" The old man's voice was a raw rasp, heavy with suspicion and distrust. "Why would a demon save anyone?"
"I know I'm a demon!"
Kōbe Hikaru cut down a scorpion spirit that had gotten too close — the thing was the size of a human head, its venomous tail nearly catching him in the eye. He kept talking without looking back.
"But I'm a demon with principles. And I used to be human, for what that's worth. Believe me or don't — your call. But if you don't, I'm leaving."
He'd come here to harvest affection points and rescue someone on the side. If the rescue part fell through, that wasn't on him.
Kōbe Hikaru had some moral floor. Just not much of one. He wasn't a saint — he was, at best, an ordinary person who happened to have died. He'd do what was within his means, and not one thing more. He wasn't throwing his existence away over a stranger's stubbornness.
"..."
The old man went quiet.
He looked at the demon horde pressing in from all sides — grey-green forms nearly blotting out the sky above. Then he looked at his own spiritual power reserves, almost gone. Then he looked down at the bundle clasped against his chest.
He let out a long breath.
"Fine."
The membrane of light dissolved. "An old man like me doesn't have much choice anyway."
"Now we're talking."
Kōbe Hikaru seized the elder's arm. Demon-qi flooded into his legs.
"Hold on tight. It's going to be bumpy."
The next moment, he punched through the encirclement with the old man on his arm.
[Phantom Step] detonated at full force.
Two silhouettes ghosted through the densely-packed demon swarm — moving faster than eyes could track, leaving nothing in their wake but severed limbs, scattered bodies, and screams tearing open the night air.
Kōbe Hikaru ignored every demon writhing on the ground. He ran.
Using [Phantom Step]'s short-burst displacement, he wove through the forest in rapid, unpredictable changes of direction, shaking the pursuit. Any demon caught alone got a single clean cut as he passed — one stroke, one kill, no wasted motion. Any cluster large enough to be trouble, he went around.
The sheer number of demons was genuinely terrifying to look at. But they were still demons — they didn't know how to form ranks, couldn't coordinate a proper formation the way humans would. The swarm had gaps, and Kōbe Hikaru had learned how to read them.
The old man had lost consciousness. He hung across Kōbe Hikaru's back, dead weight — but even unconscious, that one remaining arm refused to release its grip on the bundle at his chest. As if whatever was inside it mattered more than his own life.
Kōbe Hikaru was genuinely curious about that treasure.
Two quarters of an hour later.
A hidden cave, somewhere in the mountain.
Kōbe Hikaru set the old man down on the ground and slumped against the cave wall, catching what passed for his breath.
Ghost Warriors didn't need to breathe, but the intensity of the battle — the sustained combat, the massive output of demon-qi — had drained him considerably. His body had gone slightly rigid. That was the telltale sign of demon-qi running low.
For him, that almost never happened.
"Cough — cough, cough..."
The old man stirred.
He coughed violently, each wracking heave bringing up blood.
Kōbe Hikaru watched him in silence.
He didn't need a medical diagnosis to see it. The old man didn't have long.
Wounds too severe. Blood loss too great. Spiritual power exhausted. Age too advanced.
Four killing factors piled on top of each other. Even a god couldn't have reversed that.
Looks like I rescued him for nothing.
No — not quite nothing. The affection points gained from the fight were real. That counted.
"You..." The old man's voice barely carried, thin as something drifting in from another world. "Why... did you save me?"
"I saw injustice and drew my blade," Kōbe Hikaru said. "Good enough reason?"
The old man looked up at him. Clouded eyes lifted slightly, and something moved through them.
Surprise, perhaps. Or relief.
Or the resigned, bone-deep resolve of a man who had run out of any other option.
"I am... the chief of the demon-slayer clan... in the mountain... a few li from here..."
Each word came as though dredged up from somewhere very far away. "Those demons hunted me... for this..."
Trembling, he lifted his remaining hand and held the cloth bundle out toward Kōbe Hikaru.
"This must not... fall into demonic hands..."
Kōbe Hikaru hadn't expected this — the old man was already settling his affairs. He blinked, paused a moment, then accepted it without argument.
A demon who could hold a conversation. An old man with no remaining options.
It was, in its way, perfectly logical.
The bundle was light — no larger than a fist, wrapped in coarse hemp cloth. He undid it.
Inside was a jewel.
Thumb-sized. Pale violet. Smooth and translucent, radiating a soft, steady glow.
The light was strange. It lacked the sharp brightness of spiritual power and the cold, rotten quality of demon-qi. What it carried instead was something harder to name — a sensation that sat just beyond the edge of description.
And yet—
It felt familiar.
Kōbe Hikaru stared at the jewel. The system panel materialized automatically.
[Eligible pursuit target detected.]
[Shikon Jewel]
[Quality: DIVINE ARTIFACT]
[Current State: DORMANT]
[Affection: LOCKED — prerequisite conditions not met.]
Kōbe Hikaru stared at the panel.
Looked at the jewel in his palm.
Looked back at the panel.
"..."
His expression went completely blank.
"Hold on."
His voice had developed a slight tremor, hovering somewhere between disbelief and something he hadn't felt in a very long time. "What the hell is this thing?"
The old man either hadn't heard him, or couldn't spare the attention to answer. He simply kept going, each word dragged out with what remained of his strength.
"Please... deliver this... to the village... beyond several ranges of mountains..."
"Find a shrine maiden... by the name of... Kikyō..."
"She is... the only one... who can suppress... the Shikon Jewel..."
"I am entrusting this... to you..."
Kōbe Hikaru had stopped listening.
His mind had locked onto a single thought, and it was ricocheting around inside his skull like a stone in an empty room.
The Shikon Jewel.
The Shikon Jewel from Inuyasha.
The jewel that could grant any wish.
The jewel that sent a demon's power surging beyond all limits.
The jewel that had driven every faction in that entire story to absolute madness.
The old man's voice faded to almost nothing.
"My grandson... is still waiting... back in the village..."
"Tell them... grandfather..."
"...is sorry."
Silence.
The old man's head dropped. His breath did not come again.
The cave went quiet.
Only Kōbe Hikaru remained, head bowed over the Shikon Jewel resting in his open palm.
Soft violet light pulsed against his skin — gentle, and deeply mysterious.
"The world of Inuyasha, then..."
He murmured to no one in particular.
What a twist of fate. Truly, spectacularly, un-fking-believably wild.
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