Chapter 539: The Fear Yōkai
The black-armoured samurai walked through the streets of Kyoto, leaving a trail of footprints in the white snow.
The people of Kyoto were in a panic again. Everyone stayed inside their houses, peering fearfully out at the street through cracks in their doors and windows.
As they watched, the black-armoured samurai walked out of Kyoto toward Peach Blossom Mountain.
The sky was a dull grey, a light snow was drifting down, and the whole world was grey and white.
The black-armoured samurai began to climb. From the foot of Peach Blossom Mountain he found a narrow path through the snow and followed it up toward the peach-blossom pavilion at the summit.
All along the way, the black-armoured samurai saw bodies on the ground. All of them were samurai!
They had been thoroughly killed, their limbs torn off and strewn everywhere. Some samurai had been gutted, painting the snow with crimson.
The bodies of Kyoto's three thousand samurai covered the mountainside. Not a single one was whole.
Their heads still wore looks of terror. They had clearly been tortured inhumanly before they died.
The black-armoured samurai glanced at the broken bodies and kept striding up the mountain.
As he neared the summit, he came across another field of bodies. But this time they weren't human. They were Big Yōkai!
Just like the three thousand slaughtered samurai, these Big Yōkai had been torn to pieces too!
The bodies of more than two hundred Big Yōkai had been ripped apart into scraps and scattered everywhere!
The huge, twisted heads of the Big Yōkai were frozen in shock, panic, and disbelief.
They seemed to have suffered inhuman torment before death, or else something beyond their understanding.
The black-armoured samurai paused briefly among the demon corpses. All these Big Yōkai killed, and damage on this scale clearly wasn't the work of any human. What had happened here?
Then he kept climbing, all the way to the summit of Peach Blossom Mountain.
There were many peach trees on the summit. Some had been smashed and toppled by the Giant Yōkai, but many still stood.
The peach blossoms on the trees were in full bloom. That was deeply wrong, because peach trees couldn't possibly blossom in the snow of winter.
Yet here they were, blooming against the heavy snow around them in a deeply eerie scene.
The peach-blossom pavilion on the mountain had been torn down by the Giant Yōkai and his kind, leaving only rubble on the ground.
The black-armoured samurai walked over, sat down sideways on a stone, and leaned forward with his head bowed, as if lost in thought.
A tremor came through the ground from far off. When it stopped, the black-armoured samurai looked up. The Giant Yōkai was standing in front of him, looking down at him with an eerie grin.
The Giant Yōkai had changed completely. From the six-odd metres he'd been at first, he'd grown to nine!
His skin was a red that made your heart race. Three full pairs of horns crowned his head, and long jet-black hair, deeply unsettling to look at, hung from his head down to his feet, with most of it trailing behind him.
His bones had grown thicker and his muscles more knotted than ever. He looked like a demon lord come down into the world!
The Giant Yōkai split his mouth into a grin and looked down mockingly at the little ant he could step on at any moment.
"Food. Seeing a body as magnificent as mine, what do you feel?
"I'm not what I was before. That broken blade of yours can't cut me anymore!!"
The black-armoured samurai slowly raised his head and met the Giant Yōkai's gaze. His eyes were perfectly calm, and the Giant Yōkai frowned.
Faced with how huge he'd become, why was this fellow still giving off that stench that turned his stomach?
Did he really think he could beat him now, with nothing but a mortal body?
After they'd stared at each other for a while, the black-armoured samurai said slowly:
"I've heard that beneath the Nine Netherworlds lie the eighteen layers of hell, each inhabited by a different kind of demon. And on the ninth layer lives a creature called the Fear Yōkai!"
When the Giant Yōkai heard this, his eyelid twitched. Every muscle in his body tensed, the fibres pulling so tight they actually made a creaking sound.
The black-armoured samurai paid no attention to the change and went on:
"Now, the Fear Yōkai isn't actually that strong. But it has one peculiarity: it feeds on other people's fear!
"The more fear it eats, the stronger it grows.
"The more people fear it, the stronger it becomes!
"The Fear Yōkai is skilled at toying with people's hearts and spreading fear. It shapes its body into whatever people fear most, and uses that to terrify them!
"If people are frightened by it and lose their nerve, then even with swords and spears and halberds in their hands, they can't cut through a demon body made of their own terror!
"The Fear Yōkai then kills them and eats the fear they gather up as they die!
"And once the Fear Yōkai has killed enough people and eaten enough fear, it truly becomes whatever people fear most in their hearts!"
With that, the black-armoured samurai stood and glanced down at the shredded corpses of the three thousand samurai on the mountainside, and the two hundred-odd Big Yōkai torn to scraps.
"Looks like you even killed your own demon army to get enough fear to take this form."
The Giant Yōkai saw that this black-armoured samurai stood before his enormous body without the slightest trace of panic, and his face slowly grew serious.
"I have attained an indestructible Asura vajra-body. Those scraps were no use to me anymore, so I killed them!"
Then he split his mouth into a menacing grin and pointed down the mountain toward Kyoto.
"I'll kill you first, then go down the mountain and slaughter every last person in that city!"
The black-armoured samurai slowly drew his sword, gripped it in one hand, and twirled it in a flourish.
"Is that so? Then let me test it and see exactly how much that Asura body you've worked so hard to conjure up is really worth!"
With that, there was nothing more to say. Each of them showed what he could do.
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