Chapter 229: Don't Seduce My Husband!
Takeda Shingen had indeed followed him into the oppressive depths of the mountain.
Kobe Hikaru walked in front, the heavy blade of Banryu resting casually on his shoulder. His long, pale hair drifted slightly, buoyed by the thick white mist that practically hummed with suffocating Buddhist power.
Shingen walked exactly three steps behind him to his left. Her iron war fan was tucked neatly at her waist, and her hands were clasped loosely behind her back.
The loose collar of her kimono made no attempt to return to its proper place. The heavy fabric had slipped entirely from her left shoulder, exposing a vast expanse of honey-colored skin. The curve below her collarbone was full and heavy, swaying side to side with the aggressive, rhythmic tempo of her large strides.
It swayed violently.
Her gait was wide, her steps long—truly the stride of a dragon and the pace of a tiger. Yet, beneath that imposing, athletic height lay the dangerous suppleness of a hunting leopard. With every step she took, that overly ample weight bounced in tandem, demanding attention.
Hikaru's gaze remained locked dead ahead.
His face was a mask of absolute apathy. He had long since grown accustomed to maintaining this cold, expressionless facade whenever he wasn't speaking. Normally, this icy demeanor was a disadvantage, keeping others at arm's length.
Right now, it was a deep advantage.
Because internally, he was dealing with quite a bit of turbulence.
Yura of the Hair, currently resting at his waist, was vibrating again. Although the oppressive Buddhist aura of the mountain had forced her back into her true form as a red comb, this particular function didn't require the release of Yao Qi. The comb itself was physically rattling against his hip in sheer agitation.
She didn't dare speak aloud in this holy domain, but she found another way to vent her frustrations.
Lines of text aggressively popped up on his system panel.
[Yura of the Hair: Why is she always swaying?]
[Yura of the Hair: It's an eyesore.]
[Yura of the Hair: Kobe Hikaru, look at the road, don't look to the side!]
Three consecutive messages fired off in less than two seconds.
A fourth immediately followed.
[Yura of the Hair: Favorability -0. (Cannot be lowered, already at maximum value.)]
She was so furious she tried to drop her favorability just to spite him, only to hit the hard lock of her maximum one-hundred value. Yura was seething; she didn't even have the use to threaten him anymore.
Hikaru felt a dry sense of amusement.
Behind Shingen, Yamagata Masakage kept pace, her hand resting tightly on the hilt of her sword as her eyes darted vigilantly across the towering Buddha statues looming in the mist.
The other two Hime-mushas followed closely. Neither was seriously injured; one rubbed a growing lump on the back of her head, while the other carried a heavily bent, V-shaped spear over her shoulder. Iron weapons were a scarce commodity in this mountain—and in the outside world, for that matter—so she stubbornly refused to discard it.
"Where exactly are you going?" Shingen's voice cut through the heavy mist.
"Looking for someone," Hikaru replied without turning.
"Looking for whom?"
"Imagawa Yoshimoto."
Shingen's tone immediately soured, carrying a heavy edge of dissatisfaction. "Yoshimoto, Yoshimoto. Why are you so fixated on her?"
Because I invested quite a bit of time and effort into her, and she's pleasing to the eye, Hikaru thought to himself.
He didn't bother answering aloud.
Beneath his feet, a blood-colored net of hair remained spread across the stone floor. The ends of his long pale hair branched out like living crimson veins, extending and probing in all directions along the ground.
Although the detection radius of this hair net was limited to a hundred paces, he was constantly moving. The radius shifted with him, acting as a continuous, sweeping radar through the dense fog.
So far, the sensory feedback had only returned cold stone, gravel, towering Buddha statues, and the suffocating white mist.
No signs of life.
Yoshimoto and Oda Nobuna had to be deeper inside.
The internal structure of Mount Hakurei was completely different from what Hikaru remembered. In the original Inuyasha lore, Mount Hakurei was a physical, albeit holy, mountain. But in this composite world, it functioned more like a massive 'Barrier' domain constructed by the living Buddha, Master Hakushin. It operated on the same spatial logic as Kidomaru's Rashomon, only vastly larger, more complete, and infinitely more magnificent.
Naturally, there were no real mountain paths here. The only routes were narrow, claustrophobic passages formed by the deliberate arrangement of colossal Buddha statues.
Every passage led higher and deeper into the mountain's core. The further in he walked, the denser the faith became, and the heavier the air felt in his lungs.
The more his demonic Yao Qi was suppressed.
And then, a pulse.
The blood-colored hair net finally caught the frantic, erratic signals of living beings.
From the chaotic rhythm of their movements, it seemed... they were being hunted.
The eastern side of the mountain belly.
Within a suffocatingly narrow passage formed by the crisscrossing stone arms and torsos of giant Buddha statues, Oda Nobuna was running for her life.
She was in a completely disheveled state. Her pitch-black kimono bore two massive tears from scraping against the jagged stone walls. She ran barefoot across the freezing stone surface, her soles worn raw and bleeding, leaving faint crimson footprints in her wake.
Her golden hair whipped wildly behind her, strands sticking to the sweat and grime at the corners of her mouth, but she couldn't spare the breath or the energy to brush them away.
Shibata Katsuie sprinted heavily behind her. Her silver armor was coated in a thick layer of gray stone powder. She gripped her massive axe with white knuckles, her amber eyes constantly snapping back to check their rear.
Maeda Toshiie darted along Nobuna's right side. Her round face was flushed a deep, panicked red as she clutched a short blade tightly to her chest. She was actually outpacing the others—not out of superior agility, but simply because she was the smallest and lightest, encountering the least air resistance in the cramped tunnel.
"My Lord! Those two things are gaining on us again!" Toshiie's voice cracked with urgency.
Nobuna threw a glance over her shoulder.
At the far corner of the passage, a blinding golden light bled into the shadows. It was one of her 'Guardian Spirits'—the Heavenly Eye Peacock.
Unlike ordinary mortals or even incarnations of gods and Buddhas, the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven existed in a different dimension as the Lord of the Desire Realm. As an incarnation of a divine artifact carrying a fragment of that faith's power, Nobuna possessed a unique, intrinsic connection to her Guardian Spirits.
She could see them with terrifying clarity.
In her line of sight, the three-eyed peacock blazed like a miniature sun in the darkness. Its massive wings practically scraped the walls of the passage. Remnants of dark red, ethereal chains hung broken from its wings, dripping molten fragments that burned charred, smoking pits into the stone floor wherever they landed.
And it wasn't alone.
Clinging to the ceiling above the opposite stone wall was a second Guardian Spirit. The pitch-black silhouette of the Hyōbi-shin glided silently upside down, its snake tail whipping in a vicious arc behind it. Its four claws dug effortlessly into the stone crevices, propelling it forward even faster than the peacock.
Nobuna gritted her teeth and cursed.
She wasn't cursing the spirits; she was cursing herself.
She knew exactly where these two nightmares came from. The Heavenly Eye Peacock was a prize from years ago, plundered from a temple monk when she first awakened the Demon's Karmic Fire. That incident had earned her the faint, whispered title of 'Buddha Enemy.'
The Hyōbi-shin was an even darker prize. She had violently torn it from her own sibling during her bloody usurpation of the clan's throne.
The defining trait of the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven was simple: the more she killed, the stronger she became. The more she fought, the more her power swelled. She had always believed this was a divine gift, an invincible ladder meant to carry her to the conquest of the world.
But now, that ladder had shattered. Two of its broken rungs had grown fangs and turned back to devour her.
"Katsuie! Block them!"
Katsuie immediately pivoted, planting her boots firmly into the stone and holding her massive axe horizontally across the narrow passage.
The gray-iron power of her divine artifact erupted from the heavy blade. The energy expanded, forming a thick, semi-transparent wall of light that sealed the corridor.
The Heavenly Eye Peacock slammed directly into it.
The wall of light shattered like cheap glass.
The resulting shockwave sent Katsuie skidding back three heavy steps, her amber eyes widening in shock.
"I can't hold it—!"
"I know!"
Nobuna, who had already spun around, grabbed the back of Katsuie's collar. Instead of retreating further, she violently yanked her retainer forward, charging directly toward the stalling peacock. "Now! Accelerate! Run!"
The Heavenly Eye Peacock had shattered the barrier with ease, but the impact had stalled its momentum for a fraction of a second.
Nobuna, Katsuie, and Toshiie seized that microscopic gap, sliding desperately beneath the massive spirit's glowing underbelly.
The peacock let out a deafening, ear-piercing shriek.
Above them, the Hyōbi-shin's tail roared through the air, its claws tearing chunks of stone from the ceiling as it scrambled to turn around.
Accelerate. Accelerate. Faster!
Nobuna pushed her burning muscles to the absolute limit.
But as they rounded the next bend, her heart plummeted.
A dead end.
It hadn't been there a moment ago. A sudden, seamless stone wall now blocked their path forward. A towering, three-zhang-high Buddha statue stood facing the inner wall, deliberately placed to cut off their escape route.
The moment the three women slammed to a halt against the cold stone, the Heavenly Eye Peacock rounded the corner, closing the distance to within ten paces.
All three of its eyes snapped open simultaneously. Blinding golden light erupted from the pupils, weaving into a dense, inescapable web of lasers that filled the passage.
The Hyōbi-shin was even faster.
It dropped from the ceiling like a stone, its snake tail sweeping horizontally in a lethal arc. The black spiritual body passed inches over Toshiie's head, the scorching wind pressure alone forcing a scream from her lungs as she threw herself flat against the ground, her short blade clattering away.
Katsuie roared, stepping in front of Nobuna. She swung her great axe in a brutal vertical cleave, the gray-iron power exploding into a massive arc of light.
The Hyōbi-shin's front claws collided with the axe. The spirit recoiled slightly, but its momentum barely slowed.
Its second claw lashed out, slamming directly into the flat of the axe blade. The sheer kinetic force launched Katsuie backward. She slammed into the stone wall with a sickening crunch, her armor embedding three inches deep into the rock face as blood sprayed from her lips.
"Katsuie!" Nobuna screamed.
The Heavenly Eye Peacock's web of golden light had already closed in, hovering mere inches from her face.
There was nowhere left to run.
The golden light illuminated her pale face. The flames within her golden vertical pupils flickered erratically, violently suppressed by the holy radiance. She stared at the broken dark red chains on the peacock's wings—the brand of her Karma Fire, the shackles she had once used to enslave it.
The shackles were broken. It was free.
The corners of Nobuna's mouth twitched into a bitter sneer.
Retribution, she thought. Things plundered must eventually be returned.
"Return my ass—!" she roared aloud.
As the living avatar of the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven, she absolutely refused to accept this. Why the hell should she return something she had conquered with her own two hands?!
Nobuna screamed furiously, and the heavily suppressed Karma Fire resting deep within her soul violently detonated.
The holy aura of Mount Hakurei heavily suppressed her demonic flames. Forcing it out required an agonizing toll on her body, and the resulting output was barely a tenth of its true destructive power.
But right now, Nobuna didn't care.
This wasn't a controlled burst like the one she used against the Great Kappa at Shimizu Port. There was no direction, no restraint.
Crimson, lotus-shaped flames erupted simultaneously from every pore on her body. The fire produced no heat and no smoke, yet the sheer spiritual pressure instantly distorted the air around her.
The stone face of the Buddha statue began to spiderweb with deep cracks under the oppressive weight of the Karma Fire.
The moment the peacock's golden light web touched the crimson flames—hiss, hiss, hiss—the holy threads were instantly incinerated into nothingness. Deep, agonizing scorch marks branded themselves across the peacock's spiritual body, and its three eyes narrowed in sudden pain.
The Hyōbi-shin fared much worse.
It was too close. Having just batted Katsuie aside, it lunged for Nobuna and slammed face-first into the expanding shockwave of the Karma Fire.
An entire layer of its pitch-black spiritual form was instantly devoured by the crimson lotus flames, and the tip of its snake tail was burned clean out of existence.
The Karma Fire lacked physical temperature, but it carried a crushing, substantive pressure. It didn't burn flesh; it incinerated the soul.
Both Guardian Spirits shrieked, scrambling backward simultaneously.
But they only retreated a few paces.
Nobuna's flames began to flicker and wane after barely three seconds. Her mortal shell simply couldn't handle the strain. She had only tapped into a microscopic fraction of the Demon King's true power, and forcing a full-body eruption was tearing her apart from the inside out.
The Karma Fire wasn't weak; her body was.
A thick stream of dark blood poured from her left nostril, dripping onto the stone floor where it instantly vaporized into crimson mist.
"Ugh—" Nobuna collapsed onto one knee, slamming her right hand against the wall to keep from face-planting.
The flames still clung to her, but they were paper-thin, trembling like a soap bubble on the verge of popping.
The Heavenly Eye Peacock's three eyes snapped open once more. The golden light began to condense, brighter and angrier than before.
The charred stump of the Hyōbi-shin's tail was already writhing, rapidly regenerating. Guardian Spirits lacked true physical forms; as manifestations of destiny and possibility, their ability to repair themselves was terrifyingly fast.
In a matter of breaths, they would be fully restored.
Nobuna tilted her head up, watching the two massive spiritual bodies close in. The fierce light in her golden pupils began to dim.
Despair.
And a bone-deep, crushing exhaustion.
She wanted to curse them again, but when she parted her bloodstained lips, her vocal cords refused to make a sound.
Then—two streaks of blinding light violently ruptured the darkness.
One was a dark, blood-soaked red. The other was a ghostly, ethereal purple.
From a sudden, jagged crack in the side wall of the tunnel—a crack that had just been violently cleaved open from the outside—two arcs of blade light tore through the solid stone and slashed directly into the passage.
The dark red arc slammed brutally into the base of the Heavenly Eye Peacock's left wing.
Onikiri.
The volatile Blood-Fire Transformation instantly infected the wound, spreading rapidly into the spirit's internal structure. The dark red flames dug into the golden light like parasitic vines, locking their jaws into the spiritual matrix to completely halt its regeneration.
A split second later, the ghostly purple arc severed the Hyōbi-shin's right front leg.
Yomikiri.
The freezing Breath of the Demon poured into the open incision. The necrotic blade energy rapidly crystallized across the spirit's body, flash-freezing the very limb that had just begun to heal.
Two strikes. Flawless precision. Delivered at the exact, critical moment when the spirits' defenses were broken.
It looked like a miracle.
But it wasn't. It was a calculated execution.
The crack in the stone wall violently expanded, sending a cascade of heavy rubble crashing to the floor.
Gray robes. Long pale hair. Crimson Demon Eyes.
Hikaru stepped casually through the shattered wall, Onikiri and Yomikiri resting easily in his hands. The residual glow of blood-fire and ghostly qi bled off the steel edges.
His indifferent gaze swept past the kneeling, gasping Nobuna and locked onto the two crippled Guardian Spirits.
A third of the peacock's wing had already been hollowed out by the blood-fire, its spiritual structure actively disintegrating. The Hyōbi-shin's entire right shoulder and leg were encased in a block of ghostly purple ice, completely destroying its mobility.
The two spirits let out a synchronized, miserable wail. Abandoning their prey, they turned and frantically dragged their broken bodies into the depths of the tunnel.
The golden and black afterimages bled into the white mist, vanishing completely.
The passage plunged into a heavy, ringing silence.
Only the spiderweb cracks on the Buddha statues, the shattered rubble, and the fading, ozone-like scent of the Karma Fire remained.
Nobuna remained on one knee, blood still dripping steadily from her chin. Her golden hair clung to her face in a sweaty, tangled mess.
She let out a long, shuddering breath. Was I... saved?
She slowly turned her head, looking at the tall, gray-robed figure standing by the breach. She opened her mouth, fully intending to swallow her pride and thank him.
Then, she watched the monster calmly sheathe his twin blades with two soft, metallic clicks. His posture was utterly relaxed, as if he had just swatted a pair of annoying flies.
Those Crimson Demon Eyes shifted down to look at her.
There was no concern in his gaze. No tension. No relief.
There was only a cold, pragmatic sense of satisfaction.
"Your Karma Fire is quite useful," his voice drifted over, smooth and entirely devoid of empathy.
He brushed a piece of dust from his sleeve. "It created the perfect opening for me to cripple both of them at once and plant my trackers. It was well worth the wait to watch you push them to their limits."
Nobuna's pupils shrank to pinpricks.
This bastard... he didn't come to save me?
"You—!" Nobuna's voice tore from her throat, raw and vibrating with absolute fury.
But Hikaru had already turned his back. His long pale hair drifted behind him as he began walking down the tunnel, not even bothering to spare her a second glance.
Of course he hadn't come specifically to play hero. Saving her was merely a convenient byproduct of his actual goal.
He had been standing behind that wall for quite some time. Waiting for her to be pushed to the brink. Waiting for her to detonate her Karma Fire. Waiting for the exact millisecond the Guardian Spirits' spiritual defenses were stripped bare.
Only then did he shatter the wall and deliver the crippling blows.
He had planted the blood-fire and ghostly qi deep within their spiritual cores—the exact same tracking and degradation technique he had used on the Vajra Lion.
From start to finish, Oda Nobuna had been nothing more than a convenient piece of bait. A tool used to exhaust his prey.
Nobuna stared at his retreating back, her chest heaving violently as she struggled to draw breath, desperately trying to convince herself not to erupt in anger.
Regardless of how much of a sociopath he is... he did technically save my life...
Meanwhile, Katsuie finally managed to pry herself loose from the crater in the wall. She staggered forward, her amber eyes darting from her trembling lord to the gray-robed figure disappearing into the mist.
She opened her mouth, but wisely decided to keep it shut.
Toshiie scrambled up from the floor, dusting off her knees as she retrieved her short blade. She leaned in, whispering nervously.
"My Lord... I think he used us on purpose?"
"Shut up!"
Nobuna's furious roar echoed violently down the empty stone tunnel.
The giant Buddha statues watched the scene unfold in cold silence, their carved faces eternally motionless.
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