Chapter 542: Slaying the Giant Yōkai
If I can just get there!
The Giant Yōkai watched the walls draw closer and closer, and its staggering steps grew a little lighter.
Soon it charged through the gate tunnel in the walls and into the barbican.
Its single eye locked onto the barbican's inner gate, a shabby thing made of broken planks and iron nails.
It charged the barbican gate and slammed its huge shoulder into it. The gate burst into splinters with a roar, and the Giant Yōkai was inside the city!
It planted its nine-metre body in the streets of Kyoto, its face savage, its single eye sweeping around like a camera, searching for someone to kill, someone to make afraid!
At first it didn't see anyone. Everyone near the walls had long since been eaten, and most people were deep inside Kyoto, hiding in every nook and cranny.
With demons running loose, who'd be out on the streets?
The Giant Yōkai was desperate. When a look around turned up no one, it raised its head and opened its bloody maw:
"I'll kill every last one of you!! I'll grind your bones and eat your flesh! ROOOOAAAAR!!!!"
The tremendous roar echoed across all of Kyoto.
And immediately, thick waves of fear came pouring out of every corner of Kyoto.
The Giant Yōkai sniffed, found the nearest area where the fear was strongest, and charged toward it!
Most of Kyoto's buildings were wooden houses of two or three storeys, and running down the street, the Giant Yōkai was nearly as tall as the rooftops.
Every step it took made the ground rumble, loud enough to hear hundreds of metres away.
And hearing those huge footsteps coming closer made people's fear grow stronger and stronger!
Ahead, the Giant Yōkai saw a complex of five-storey wooden buildings. It looked like some noble's estate.
As it drew closer, it smelled the fear coming from the complex growing richer and richer. Drool ran from the corners of its mouth, and it picked up its pace.
A dozen seconds later, the Giant Yōkai reached the estate and casually kicked down its four- or five-metre wall.
It strode into the courtyard, went up to the main four- or five-storey wooden building, raised its huge hands, and started tearing into it!
It ripped out great chunks of the wooden frame, tore down walls and beams, and exposed the inside of the building!
When its huge hand tore away an entire wooden wall, it revealed several dozen men, women, children, and old people inside.
When they saw the Giant Yōkai's demonic body, they screamed in terror.
The Giant Yōkai took a deep sniff, greedily drinking in their fear.
Then it reached out its huge claws to grab them and torture them to death one by one, letting the fear in their hearts ripen to perfection!
But just then, a voice that filled it with terror came from above.
"Hey! You bastard, look up!"
The Giant Yōkai's grabbing hand froze. It looked up. At some point, a black-armoured samurai had appeared on the roof of the five-storey building, the long blade in his hand gleaming coldly.
The Giant Yōkai's face changed. Before it could do anything, the black-armoured samurai leapt from the five-storey roof, gripped his sword in both hands, and drove it downward!
With a wet shluk, the sword tip plunged into the Giant Yōkai's one good, wide-open eye, and the whole point went deep into its skull!
"AAAAAAAGH!!!"
Agony tore through the Giant Yōkai's soul. The thrust hadn't just burst its eye. It had gone straight into its brain and destroyed part of it.
Any ordinary creature would have been lights out right there. But it was a demon, with incredible vitality, and even with its brain damaged it didn't die at once!
It reached up to swat the black-armoured samurai hanging off its head, but the samurai was very quick.
Before the Giant Yōkai's hand could reach him, the black-armoured samurai grabbed a fistful of the long black hair on its head, used the momentum to swing himself into a backflip in midair, and pulled the sword out of the Giant Yōkai's eye as he went.
He flipped over the Giant Yōkai's huge head and landed behind it, standing steady in the snow.
Now both of the Giant Yōkai's eyes were blind. Unable to see its enemy, it could only scream in terror.
Normally it could have tracked an enemy by smell, by the scent of fear in the air.
But the black-armoured samurai had no fear. To its sense of smell, he was completely invisible.
All it could smell were the terrified ordinary people in the wooden buildings around it. It couldn't smell the black-armoured samurai at all!
The black-armoured samurai flicked the brains off his sword, shot in a blur to the Giant Yōkai's heel, dropped into a solid horse stance to put his whole body into it, and swung hard, hitting the Giant Yōkai's ankle!
SHLUK! The blade bit deep, slicing open the skin, flesh, and tendon of the Giant Yōkai's heel until the edge struck bone!
With its heel cut, the Giant Yōkai couldn't stay up. Its knees buckled, and it dropped toward the ground!
The moment it went down on its knees, the black-armoured samurai blurred in front of it, raised both blades, and carved an X across the Giant Yōkai's belly!
The two huge cuts split the Giant Yōkai's belly wide open, and its intestines, liver, lungs, and the rest spilled out across the ground.
With that grievous wound to its belly, the Giant Yōkai let out a groan and stayed kneeling. It couldn't even straighten its back.
It clutched its spilling guts with one hand and flailed wildly with the other, trying to knock the black-armoured samurai away.
But the black-armoured samurai was already behind it. He leapt up, grabbed its hair, drove his blade into the armpit of the flailing arm, and ripped it out hard!
SHLUK! A huge wound opened beneath the Giant Yōkai's armpit!
Now its flailing arm couldn't even lift anymore. It just hung there, limp!
Then the black-armoured samurai jumped onto the Giant Yōkai's back and went to town like a headbanger, gripping the sword in both hands and hacking again and again at the back of its neck, at the massive trapezius!
Every swing threw up a spray of blood. Gash after hideous gash opened in that staggeringly thick trapezius, the great blood vessels were all cut, and blood poured out.
Even for a demon like the Giant Yōkai, that much blood loss was simply too much. It couldn't hold itself up anymore and crashed to the ground.
"I finally... finally had this chance... to become something great... and I fall at the last step..."
With no blood reaching its brain, the Giant Yōkai's mind began to fade.
The black-armoured samurai standing on its shoulders stopped hacking. He had cut through the Giant Yōkai's huge trapezius and every other muscle in its neck. Only the thick spine remained!
After swinging his sword that hard for that long, even the black-armoured samurai was a little tired. He stood on the Giant Yōkai's shoulders, breathing hard.
By now the floors of the wooden building in front of him were packed with people.
And not just the building. People crowded beyond the smashed estate wall too, and noise was rising from the street outside.
The fierce fighting and the Giant Yōkai's screams had drawn the attention of nearly everyone around.
They'd overcome their fear and come closer, and this is what they saw.
A powerful black-armoured samurai, a bloodied long sword in his hand, standing on the back of the Giant Yōkai, who had been hacked into a bloody mess!
Commoners and nobles alike stared wide-eyed in disbelief.
A demon that enormous had actually been slain by this man!!
The black-armoured samurai caught his breath for a good while and got a little of his strength back. He looked around and saw that a huge crowd had gathered!
He drew a deep breath, raised his long sword high, and proclaimed in a loud voice:
"I am Minamoto no Hei! Today, with my treasured blade the Cleave-Steel and my sword art, the Steel-Heart Iron-Forging style, I take the head of this demon that has plagued the world!!"
With that, as nearly a thousand people watched, the black samurai planted his feet on the Giant Yōkai's shoulders, gripped the hilt in both hands, and raised it high overhead, a living embodiment of the word courage!
Everyone held their breath and stared wide-eyed at him.
The black samurai gathered his strength, then brought the long sword down hard on the Giant Yōkai's spine, thick as steel rebar!!
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