"Come on then!"
Demon-qi surged through the Ghost Warrior's frame. Kōbe Hikaru's voice rang out again — and beneath his feet, demonic energy ignited. [Phantom Step] fired.
He didn't fall back. He charged forward.
But not at the center.
At the left side.
The side carrying the old wound.
The Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior had clearly read his intent. The rusted tachi swept horizontal, cutting off his approach.
Kōbe Hikaru didn't take it head-on.
His body changed direction in midair — [Spearman's Core Mutation] twisting his waist and abdomen like a coiling serpent — and he vaulted clean over the blade's edge.
The instant his feet touched the ground, he was already standing at the Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior's left.
Blade tip aimed straight at the left knee.
"Die!"
The Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior's left leg snapped upward, dodging the thrust — and in the same motion, drove its knee directly into Kōbe Hikaru's face.
The blow connected squarely with his chin.
His head snapped backward. A crack split across the demon-warrior's patterned face.
But his blade didn't stop.
Muramasa carved an arc through the air, sweeping toward the Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior's abdomen.
A trade. One hit for one hit.
The Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior's left hand shot up and caught the blade bare-handed, taking the cut by force. The dark edge drove into its palm. Blood erupted.
It didn't care. Not even slightly.
The rusted tachi rose high above its head — and came crashing down toward Kōbe Hikaru's skull.
Kōbe Hikaru didn't dodge.
He had no intention of dodging.
Because his goal had never been to win.
It was to make the Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior shift its entire weight onto that left leg.
The creature had just planted its left knee back on the ground after the kick. Its center of gravity wasn't fully settled yet. Every ounce of its force was concentrated on that one leg — the leg with the old wound. And now its rusted blade was raised as high as it could go, attack posture fully committed, every last shred of defense stripped from that left knee.
The weak point.
The old wound.
Completely exposed — right inside Kikyō's firing range.
Because the shrine maiden — that shrine maiden, right at this moment — had just freed her hand. She had raised her bow again.
In that single instant.
Shhk——!
A streak of white light screamed out from within the barrier.
This arrow blazed brighter than any that had come before it. The spiritual power coiled around the shaft blazed like a second sun — the whole arrow was a falling meteor, ripping across the night sky.
The Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior's pupils contracted.
It felt the searing heat closing from its left-rear flank.
Too late.
All its weight was on the left leg. The rusted tachi was at its highest point.
Dodging was no longer possible.
Thwmp——!
The demon-breaking arrow punched straight through the left knee.
Spiritual power detonated at the wound's edge. The white light burned like a brand driven into its demonic flesh.
"Aaagh——!"
The Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior let out a shriek that tore the night open. One knee struck the earth.
Its left leg was gone — no longer capable of movement. Spiritual power poured continuously from the wound, corroding inward, scattering its demon-qi into chaos, making it impossible to gather or focus.
Kōbe Hikaru gave it no room to breathe.
That rusted tachi — raised high, already beginning its downward arc — was thrown off course the moment its master's knee hit the ground. The blade passed just wide of his shoulder, shearing through a few loose strands of pale hair.
Nothing more.
Muramasa was already pulling free of the creature's palm.
Bringing grey-black blood with it.
The blade flipped.
No elaborate technique. No flourish. Just the most fundamental thrust imaginable.
Straight through the back of the neck — from the front, bursting out the other side.
The tip emerged from the throat.
The Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior's body went rigid.
It lowered its head. It looked at the dark blade protruding from its own neck.
For the first time — the ash-grey eyes behind that mask held something other than killing intent.
Confusion.
"You…"
It tried to say something. But its throat had been run through. What came out was nothing — only a wet, garbled gurgle, swallowed before it could form.
And the arrow wound was still releasing spiritual power. From the shattered knee, it climbed — threading upward through the creature's meridians like a viper burrowing deeper with every heartbeat.
When that spiritual power reached the wound at the back of the neck —
The two forces converged.
External wound from the blade.
Internal spiritual power eating outward.
The Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior's body ignited from within.
White light welled up from every pore. From the hollows of its eyes. From the corners of its mouth. Even from the gaps between its fingers — light burst free, blazing and uncontainable.
The Hannya mask began to crack.
Fissures spread from the forehead down to the chin. Fragments peeled away, one after another, crumbling to nothing.
The face beneath the mask —
A dead man's face. Pale. Desiccated. Scored with the old sword scars of the death that had made it what it was.
It looked at Kōbe Hikaru.
Kōbe Hikaru looked back.
Two Ghost Warriors.
One at five Changes. One at six.
One who had fought for humanity. One who had died for the demons.
"Damn… traitor…"
The corner of the Hannya-Mask Ghost Warrior's mouth seemed to twitch — trying to snarl, trying to curse — but it had no more time left for that.
Because the white light simply detonated.
Its body came apart under the spiritual power's blaze — dissolving, crumbling, scattering upward as ash on the wind.
But these were not ordinary ashes.
They drifted upward, light as breath — and in the moonlight, each mote shimmered with a faint, pale silver.
The trace left behind when resentment is purified clean.
Clean. Pure. Not a single particle of corruption remaining.
Purification.
True purification.
Kōbe Hikaru stood in the center of the ash, and felt it — the warmth that still lingered in the air. The residual heat of spiritual power.
Warmth.
The complete and utter opposite of the demon-qi coiling inside him.
[Shikon Jewel — Naohi: Affection +1]
[Current Affection: 2 (Budding)]
[It conveys a message: 'Well done.']
So it wasn't every purification that triggered a response — it depended on the Shikon Jewel's judgment, on how it evaluated his 'performance.'
Kōbe Hikaru filed that thought away without slowing down.
Because it wasn't over yet.
He tightened his grip on Muramasa and raised his head toward the remaining demon horde.
The One-Horned Oni. The Giant Python. The Three-Eyed Crow.
All three were staring at him with something that looked very much like terror.
One of their commanders — a Ghost Warrior at six Changes — was dead. Killed by something that looked weaker than it had been.
For what it was worth, Ghost Warriors weren't considered weak among demons of equivalent rank. Far from it. They were typically counted among the stronger specimens of their tier.
"Anyone else?"
Kōbe Hikaru's voice was flat. His hand rested on the hilt.
The demon horde stirred.
The One-Horned Oni's expression had curdled into something ugly and unreadable. It wanted to give the order to press forward. Its throat refused to cooperate.
Fear.
That was what it was. Pure, simple fear.
This Ghost Warrior wasn't obviously the strongest thing on the field — but it was clearly something different. Something outside the expected framework. And the abilities of the Ghost Warrior they had just watched die — those were known quantities. As a demon born in humanoid form, that creature had been stronger than most things at its rank, more complete, more dangerous.
And it was ash now.
And then there was the shrine maiden inside the barrier. Even restrained — even forced to divide her attention between holding a barrier large enough to cover the entire village and every soul within it — she was still a level of threat that defied easy description.
Together, the two of them had produced something the sum of their individual strength should not have allowed. One plus one, yielding more than two.
There was no winning this.
No path to victory existed here.
This was a conclusion that required a higher order of intelligence than the mindless rabble surrounding them — but the One-Horned Oni possessed that intelligence, and it had reached it.
"Re…"
It forced the word out with visible effort.
"Retreat!"
The remaining minor demons had no great intelligence to speak of — but their instincts had been screaming at them to run for some time now. The elite demons pressing down on them from above had been the only thing keeping them in place. The moment that single word landed, it was as if a dam had broken. The horde erupted like convicts granted a sudden pardon, flooding backward in a wave of panicked retreat.
The Giant Python turned first, its five-zhang body vanishing into the undergrowth at terrifying speed. The Three-Eyed Crow spread its wings and was swallowed by the night sky in an eyeblink.
The One-Horned Oni was last. Before it turned to run, it leveled a furious glare directly at Kōbe Hikaru.
"You — remember this, kid!"
Then it too was gone.
Kōbe Hikaru stood where he was and watched the demon horde's silhouettes dissolve into the dark.
"…That's it?"
He was, if anything, a little disappointed.
The Shikon Jewel's Affection counter wasn't fixed — that much he'd already understood. But he'd been hoping to squeeze a few more points for Muramasa out of this.
Full gauge was still the dream.
[Cursed Blade Muramasa: Mood — Regretful. It conveys a message: 'The ones that ran away looked delicious.']
"Next time," Kōbe Hikaru muttered, and patted the hilt.
Then he turned toward the shrine.
The barrier was still standing. The pale curtain of light still enclosed the shrine and the villagers within.
The figure on the stone steps was still there.
White kosode. Red hakama. Black hair falling like a river in the dark.
Kikyō was looking at him.
She still held her bow. Her quiver was empty.
Half of those arrows had been fired in coordination with him.
He hadn't had the leisure to really look at her in the middle of the fighting. But now, with the battlefield quiet — that figure settled into his field of vision complete and whole, like a painting coming into focus.
Her black hair fell loose behind her shoulders. A few strands had been caught by the night wind and draped forward across her chest, resting against the pale cloth of her kosode — making that expanse of moonlit white somehow more arresting than it had any right to be.
The ends of those strands had come to rest exactly at the rise and fall of her breath, trembling faintly with each inhale and exhale. Like dark flower petals floating on a stream.
And her face —
Clear. Pale. Precise, in the way that didn't quite look like it belonged to a mortal.
There was exhaustion in it — the kind that came from sustaining a barrier of that scale while keeping up a continuous barrage of purifying arrows. But even exhausted, she stood straight.
Not the practiced composure of someone performing dignity. Something older than that — the bone-deep, near-instinctive uprightness of a person who had spent their entire life standing between something and everything that threatened it.
Like a white blade driven into the dark of the night.
Cold. And yet — impossible to look away from.
Kōbe Hikaru watched her, and felt the corner of his mouth shift, beneath the demon-warrior's painted face.
This was Kikyō.
The girl he had watched on a screen, in another world, more times than he could count — and now she was standing ten zhang away. Real. Breathing. Present.
Not the clean lines and flat colors of animation.
Alive. Warm — if warmth in this case meant spiritual power rather than body heat — with hair that moved in the wind and sleeves that shifted and eyelashes that cast fine, faint shadows in the moonlight.
The real Kikyō.
More beautiful than any version of her he had ever imagined.
And more — compelling — than any version of her he had ever imagined.
Hm. Damn that miasma — it was messing with his head again.
Kōbe Hikaru offered himself that excuse, quietly, and moved on.
Across the darkness, their eyes met.
Kōbe Hikaru opened his mouth. He found he actually had something he wanted to say.
But before he could get a word out — the system panel flashed with a new prompt.
[Shikon Jewel — Naohi conveys a message.]
[The shrine maiden is watching you. She is hesitating.]
[You need to give her a reason to trust you.]
[Give me to her — and you will be safe. She will no longer threaten you. She will, in fact, protect you.]
Kōbe Hikaru looked down at the Shikon Jewel resting against his chest.
The pale violet gem lay quiet in his palm. Its light was soft. Unhurried. Mysterious.
____
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉