Kōbe Hikaru did not charge down the hill.
He was not an idiot.
Seven or eight hundred demons besieging a village — even with Kikyō's barrier holding them back, marching down from the hilltop in broad view wasn't valor. It was suicide. Delivering the Shikon Jewel didn't require him to die in the process.
Not that he intended to hand it over immediately, anyway. At minimum, he needed to unlock its Affection rating first.
But he couldn't just sit here waiting, either.
The Shikon Jewel needed to get within proximity of Kikyō before the unlock verification could trigger — that was the prerequisite condition the system had given him. And right now, Kikyō was inside the shrine at the village's center.
He was on the hilltop.
Seven or eight hundred demons in between.
"…Bit of a problem," he muttered.
Kōbe Hikaru crouched behind a boulder and studied the chaotic battlefield below. Every demon in the horde had its attention locked on the barrier surrounding the village. Not a single one was looking toward the hilltop.
Good news.
Bad news: the Shikon Jewel was still glowing.
He'd wrapped the thing in several layers of cloth, but that distinctive aura kept bleeding through regardless — a steady, unstoppable leak.
Go straight through the front? The demons would notice him the moment he got close.
But if he went another way…
His gaze swept across the battlefield.
The demon horde's formation — if it could even be called that — was a complete shambles. Seven or eight hundred demons crammed together, every single one fighting for itself. Some were hammering at the barrier. Some were elbowing their own kind for a better position. A few had retreated to the corners and were gnawing on the corpses of freshly dead demons.
Chaos. Pure, absolute chaos.
And in that chaos: demon-qi, everywhere. Dense, turbid, all-consuming. It had thickened until it was almost solid — a heavy grey-green fog blanketing everything outside the village perimeter. An ordinary person caught in the middle of it would pass out in seconds.
For Kōbe Hikaru, it was perfect cover.
Because he was a demon, too. He radiated demon-qi — and not a small amount of it, either. In quality, it was purer than anything the rabble below were producing.
In a sea of demon-qi this dense, his own would dissolve like a drop of water into the ocean. Not a flicker of attention would turn his way.
As for the Shikon Jewel's aura…
He glanced down at the gem tucked against his chest. The pale violet light was still faintly visible even through the layers of cloth wrapping it.
"Can you not," he whispered at it.
The Shikon Jewel did not respond. It simply continued to glow, utterly indifferent to his request.
"…Fine."
He exhaled.
Fortunately, even as distinctive as the jewel's aura was, it would still be significantly diluted and obscured in a demon-qi saturation this extreme. Low-ranked demons had limited sensory capability. As long as he didn't take the jewel out and use it as a lantern, he probably wouldn't be detected.
"Let's move," he murmured to the blade at his hip.
[Cursed Blade Muramasa: Mood shifted to 'CONFUSED.' It conveys a message: 'Why aren't we just charging in and slaughtering everything?']
"Because I don't want to die, princess," Kōbe Hikaru answered succinctly.
He dropped low and began moving down the hillside, keeping to the shadows.
He didn't use [Phantom Step]. That would cause a pulse in his demon-qi output — detectable at this range. Instead, he chose the most primitive method available.
He walked.
On foot. Quietly. Like a snake.
He pressed himself nearly flat against the ground, body level with the grass. The battered red demon-armor he wore — cracked, filthy, long past its original state — had collected so much mud and plant sap that in the failing dusk light, it read as natural terrain.
He moved along the outer edge of the demon horde, threading deliberately through the areas where demon-qi was thickest. The density of that qi acted as a natural screen, swallowing his presence entirely.
A few Blue-Skin Fiends trotted past him. Their eyes were fixed ahead, locked on the barrier, not one of them glancing down at the shadow moving through the grass at their feet.
One Cyclops Fiend stepped directly on his hand.
It hurt.
Kōbe Hikaru said nothing. He quietly withdrew his hand and waited until the fiend had lumbered off before continuing forward.
[Cursed Blade Muramasa: Mood shifted to 'FURIOUS.' It strongly recommends chopping that Cyclops Fiend's foot off.]
"Quiet," he told it internally.
He kept crawling.
Fifty zhang. Forty.
Thirty.
The demon density was thickening. He had to move more carefully now. Several times he nearly gave himself away — each time, it was [Resonance with Blood] that saved him, the technique detecting the movements of nearby demons just early enough for him to reroute.
The slaughter on the road over the past three days had left plenty of demon blood crusted in the seams of his armor — most of it had been absorbed by Muramasa, but not all. What remained served as his early-warning network. Any living thing within three zhang of his position was flagged before it could get any closer.
Twenty zhang.
Fifteen.
The barrier was clearly visible now — a curtain of pale white light that drifted and flowed like something alive, radiating a warmth and sanctity that pressed against him at this range.
His skin prickled. The faint burning sensation of spiritual power brushing against demonic nature — it had started to kick in at this distance.
He endured it.
Ten zhang.
He pressed himself behind a mound of demon corpses — felled by Kikyō's purifying arrows, still warm — raised his head, and looked toward the shrine through the gaps between the bodies.
Kikyō was right there.
White kosode. Red hakama. Black hair falling like still water in the dark.
She was shooting.
Bowstring drawn. White light condensed at the tip of the arrow. Release.
A centipede spirit attempting to scale the barrier's outer surface from the side was punched through the skull. Its corpse dropped and crashed into the demon horde below, scattering a wave of startled shrieks.
Kikyō's face held no expression at all.
Those clear, cool eyes were still as deep water. Not cold — not detached in the way that implied indifference — but possessed of a composure that bordered on transcendence. As though the assault of seven or eight hundred demons was simply a task that needed managing, nothing more or less.
Which, for her, it was.
Kōbe Hikaru watched her, and felt a thought surface in his mind —
She's strong.
And at the same time.
She's—
No, this was not the moment for that.
He took a slow deliberate breath of the battlefield's rancid demon-qi and forced himself to cool down. Damn that miasma, was it messing with his head again? He pulled his gaze away.
Whatever the case, now was definitely not the time for admiring the scenery.
He looked down, toward the gem at his chest.
The Shikon Jewel's light had changed.
The pale violet radiance was no longer a uniform, omnidirectional scatter. It had begun to concentrate — focusing, angling forward, toward the exact position where Kikyō stood.
The jewel was reaching for her.
Or perhaps answering her.
The system panel was flickering.
[Anchor of Suppression detected and approaching…]
[Affection unlock conditions under verification…]
[Distance threshold — minimum condition satisfied.]
[Affection unlock verification complete.]
[Shikon Jewel Affection may now be unlocked. Please perform operation in a secure environment.]
That was enough.
A spark of light crossed Kōbe Hikaru's eyes as he read the panel.
It worked.
Proximity to Kikyō had done exactly what he'd hoped. He hadn't even needed to meet her face-to-face. Hadn't needed to fight her. Hadn't needed to become a pincushion.
Just close enough — and the Shikon Jewel had automatically sensed the Anchor of Suppression's presence and completed the verification on its own.
"Perfect," he thought.
Then the system panel refreshed.
Kōbe Hikaru lay behind the pile of corpses and stared at the new content that had appeared.
[Shikon Jewel]
[Quality: DIVINE ARTIFACT]
[Current State: AWAKENING]
[Affection: UNLOCKED]
[Current Affection: 0 (Stranger)]
His eyes lit up.
But before he had time to feel pleased about it, an additional prompt materialized below.
[Please select an unlock path:]
[Option 1: Purify one demon — unlocks the 'Naohi' Affection Route]
[Option 2: Generate negative emotion in a human — unlocks the 'Magatsuhi' Affection Route]
[Note: The two routes are mutually exclusive. Once selected, this choice cannot be reversed.]
Kōbe Hikaru stared at the two lines of text for several long seconds.
This was a first. He had never encountered anything like this before — Affection with its own branching paths.
He hadn't forgotten the lore of the original work. The Shikon Jewel's origin: forged in the cataclysmic moment when Midoriko, the most powerful shrine maiden of her era, and hundreds of formidable demons had annihilated one another in mutual destruction five hundred years ago. The jewel was made of four souls — Aramitama, Nigimitama, Kushimitama, Sakimitama: the four spiritual natures representing courage, friendship, wisdom, and love.
But sealed alongside them were the four opposing forces: the accumulated resentment of the slaughtered demons. Cowardice. Estrangement. Ignorance. Apathy.
Virtue and malice, good and evil — two opposing forces locked in eternal standoff within the jewel.
If the wielder's heart inclined toward righteousness, the jewel would lean toward the Naohi — the radiant soul — and manifest its purifying power. If the wielder's heart inclined toward darkness, the jewel would lean toward the Magatsuhi — the twisted soul — and amplify demonic power beyond all limits.
That was the Shikon Jewel's fundamental nature: a mirror that reflected the true inner state of whoever held it.
"So what this is really asking me," Kōbe Hikaru thought, studying the panel, "is to choose a side?"
He considered both options.
Option 1: Purify a demon. Walk the Naohi route.
Which meant raising Affection through the act of purification.
This felt strange, on its face — he was a demon himself. A demon purifying other demons. What kind of absurd operation was that? Though, in fairness, he had been killing demons constantly anyway. The difference was that purification wasn't the same as killing. True purification meant leaving nothing behind — no corpse, no residual pollution, no taint in the surrounding environment. The demon and everything it carried had to be dissolved completely.
That, he genuinely could not do. Not without spiritual power of his own.
Option 2: Generate negative emotion in a human. Walk the Magatsuhi route.
That was clear enough. It meant raising Affection through malicious acts — harming people, causing suffering and fear.
On the surface, this suited a demon's nature far better.
But…
Kōbe Hikaru's brow furrowed.
At his core, he was still a person. A transmigrator from the modern world, with a baseline moral framework he hadn't quite managed to discard. He could kill — for survival, for self-preservation — but not for sport. He had never had that particular appetite. Deliberately harming people to satisfy a system condition was something his gut rejected before his brain even finished processing the idea.
And then there was the purely practical problem.
He was currently lying in the middle of a circle of seven or eight hundred demons. The nearest human being in existence was the most powerful shrine maiden of the Warring States era, ten zhang away.
The Magatsuhi route. Generate negative emotion in a human.
How, exactly? Pull a face at Kikyō and get himself shot dead on the spot?
Be serious.
But the Naohi route — purify a demon.
He lifted his head and looked around.
Demons everywhere. Living ones, dead ones, half-dead ones. More than he could count in every direction.
Kill one, then let Kikyō's arrows do the purifying — her spiritual power would do all the actual cleansing work. Use her as the instrument of purification while he provided the target. That might actually count.
Honestly, it was an open-book question.
So I never really had a choice at all, he thought.
And beyond the tactical calculus — this was already his way of life. Feed demons to Muramasa. Build Affection. Absorb abilities. He'd been doing it since the beginning.
If the Naohi route let him keep doing exactly what he'd always been doing, and maybe make a few more trips near Kikyō on top of that, he barely even needed to change his approach.
He raised his head again and looked through the gap in the corpses toward the shrine.
Kikyō had already nocked another arrow. The white light condensed. The bowstring sang. A bird-headed demon took the arrow through the chest in midair — its body plummeted and struck the barrier's surface before sliding to the ground.
Kikyō was already drawing the next arrow before it had finished falling.
Her quiver was still more than half full. Her spiritual power remained abundant.
But seven or eight hundred demons represented a real and ongoing expenditure. Even the strongest shrine maiden couldn't sustain unlimited output — and Kikyō hadn't reached her peak yet. Her spiritual reserves might hold, but stamina and technique were a different matter. Maintaining the barrier and firing continuously at the same time multiplied the drain.
Could she hold on?
For now, yes. She looked like she could.
But then — just as that thought crossed his mind.
Kōbe Hikaru felt it.
Not from the demon horde in front of him. From further away.
His body went rigid.
The Ghost Warrior's instinctive alarm — that deep-body warning that only activated in the presence of something on his own level or above — screamed.
He snapped his head toward the western ridge.
There.
Four distinct auras of demon-qi, closing fast. Each one a full order of magnitude above anything in the surrounding horde.
No — more than one order of magnitude.
These were not rabble. These were elites. Leaders. The kind of demons that could genuinely be called high-ranking.
Four of them, converging from the western ridge at speed, with a clear and singular objective: the besieged village.
More precisely — the Shikon Jewel.
They'd been following the trail it left behind. The residual aura on Kōbe Hikaru's body had served as a perfect set of breadcrumbs leading them here. They'd simply arrived one step after him.
And now they had arrived.
Kōbe Hikaru wanted, very much, to swear out loud.
Of course. Right now. Of all the possible moments.
He lay behind the demon corpses, the Shikon Jewel pressed against his chest, ten zhang from Kikyō, roughly three hundred zhang from the four approaching elites.
Three hundred zhang. For a high-ranked demon, that was a matter of seconds.
Keep hiding?
Once those four joined the battle, the assault on the barrier would escalate in kind. Whether Kikyō's barrier could hold at that point was no longer a given.
The answer assembled itself before he'd even finished thinking.
"Option 1," he said, internally, to the panel.
His hand had already closed around Muramasa's hilt.
"Naohi."
Then he stood up from behind the pile of corpses.
The instant Kōbe Hikaru rose to his feet, the three nearest Blue-Skin Fiends froze.
They turned.
Staring at them was a figure who had just crawled out of a heap of dead bodies, clad in shattered red demon-armor. Pale, loose hair. The crimson-patterned face of a demon warrior. And a pair of eyes with their colors inverted — black where the whites should be, blood-red where the irises.
"Wha—"
The lead Blue-Skin Fiend had barely gotten its mouth open.
A flash of blade-light.
Its mouth was still open. But its head was no longer attached to its neck.
The severed skull spun through the air. From its tumbling vantage, it could still see its own body standing in place below, a fountain of blood erupting from the stump of the neck.
Kōbe Hikaru didn't watch it fall.
The blade was already swinging toward the second.
Kesagiri.
Shoulder to hip. Cleaved in two.
The third Blue-Skin Fiend screamed and spun to run. But the tip of Muramasa was faster than its legs —
A thrusting lunge. Straight through the back of the neck.
Three Blue-Skin Fiends. Fewer than two breaths, start to finish.
[Cursed Blade Muramasa: Affection +1]
[Current Affection: 73]
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