Chapter 541: The Fear Yōkai Knows Fear
The black-armoured samurai leapt high with his sword in both hands, and as he came down, the blade struck the Giant Yōkai squarely in the neck!
The Giant Yōkai's body was immensely strong and its skin as hard as steel. That cut never should have broken through.
But somehow, when the blade slammed into the Giant Yōkai's neck, the flesh split open easily, the blade reached the great vessels, and crimson blood sprayed out!
And it didn't stop there. The black-armoured samurai's blade cut open the Giant Yōkai's neck, and his body kept falling.
He held the hilt tight and steered the blade around the bone, slicing across the Giant Yōkai's chest and then its belly.
When the black-armoured samurai hit the ground, he rolled nimbly across the snow, more than twenty metres.
With distance between them, he got back on his feet and looked at the Giant Yōkai. A single wound ran from its neck all the way down to its belly.
The blow hadn't cut through bone, only skin and muscle, but a wound that terrible poured out a staggering amount of blood!
The cut on the neck especially must have severed a great artery.
Blood came pouring down, and the already red-skinned Giant Yōkai turned an even brighter red.
It lost so much blood that a little pool spread out beneath it, and the white snow around it turned red!
After a blow like that, the Giant Yōkai grew terribly weak.
Its body was wounded, and its mind was in shock.
Just as the black-armoured samurai had said, a demon like it fed on fear.
It had taken on such a huge shape because the Big Yōkai were the thing people in this world feared most. Becoming a giant Big Yōkai made it easier to spread terror!
Everything it had done since it came into the world had been about harvesting terror.
It killed samurai to terrify the common people.
It destroyed the Mulberry Leaf Domain to terrify Kyoto.
And it meant to destroy Kyoto to terrify the whole realm!
It kept killing people in the most savage ways and deliberately sent survivors back, all to spread fear as efficiently as possible!
Only when people's fear reached a certain height would it kill and harvest them, and then it would gain the greatest power!
This seemingly impervious, Asura-like body had one huge weakness: its strength was directly tied to the fear in its opponent's heart!
The more an opponent feared it, the more of this body's power it could unleash. The less an opponent feared it, the weaker it became.
The same went for its defences. Most people couldn't break through this body's guard. Swords striking its skin were like swords striking steel.
That was only because the people swinging those swords were in turmoil, drowning in terror.
Back in the barbican, Hei had been able to wound it because Hei had been so furious that the fury drowned out his fear. That was why his sword was so keen and could wound the Giant Yōkai!
After the Giant Yōkai fled back up the mountain, it had ordered the demons to capture the common people all around and slowly torture them to death, so it could absorb huge amounts of fear and recover quickly from its wounds.
Then the great general had led three thousand elite samurai up the mountain to destroy the demons.
The original plan had been for Hei to lead the three thousand samurai up the mountain against the Giant Yōkai. But at the last minute they'd been given a great general none of them knew, and the army's morale wavered.
When the three thousand samurai got halfway up the mountain and saw that the Giant Yōkai had recovered from its wounds, they were terrified, and the courage they'd worked so hard to gather scattered completely.
Once their courage was gone, the Giant Yōkai and its demon army showed no mercy. They surrounded the three thousand samurai and slowly tortured them to death!
After killing the three thousand samurai, the Giant Yōkai had absorbed a vast amount of terror, but it still wasn't enough.
So it turned its claws on the other Big Yōkai and tortured them all to death too.
With that, the Giant Yōkai had built up an enormous store of fear and grown from six-odd metres to nine!
A body that huge should have been invincible on this feudal planet.
It could have swept through Kyoto, killed everyone in it, the Son of Heaven included, then terrorized the realm, absorbed the fear of every person under heaven, and become something even greater!
But now all of that had become an empty dream. A man without fear had appeared before it!
The black-armoured samurai flicked the bright red blood off his blade. Behind the black face mask, eyes like a hawk's were locked on the Giant Yōkai.
"Demon, your hour has come. Leave your life here!"
The black samurai raised his sword high and charged at the Giant Yōkai!
The Giant Yōkai's heart was full of terror. With this man, who felt no fear at all, every single cut was a critical hit.
It let out a terrified scream, turned, and actually ran down the mountain.
Because its heel had been cut, it fell when it reached the mountainside and went tumbling down like a rolling gourd, all the way from the mountainside to the foot of the mountain!
The thing made a terrifying racket as it rolled, clanging and crashing all the way from the mountain to the bottom, where it slammed into the ground and left a huge crater in the snow.
Luckily the fall did little harm to its demonic body. It scrambled to its feet and turned to look back up the mountain.
The black-armoured samurai had already sheathed his sword and was running down from the summit fast. It looked like he wasn't going to stop until it was dead!
The Giant Yōkai groaned inwardly. A mortal had actually driven it this far.
But then its gaze fell on the walls of Kyoto in the distance, and its eye lit up!
It couldn't terrify the madman behind it, but there were a million people in Kyoto. It could terrify them!
It could use the energy of terror for all kinds of things, like healing wounds or growing stronger.
As long as there was enough fear, it could just take the madman's hits and kill him anyway. Wouldn't that be easy!
With that thought, the Giant Yōkai got up and strode toward Kyoto, meaning to slaughter a hundred or so people quickly and use their fear to heal its wounds.
The Giant Yōkai was fast when it ran. Every stride covered ten metres or so.
But it was badly hurt now. One eye was blind, and there was a huge gash in its neck. All it could do was clutch the wound and hurry toward the city, leaving a trail of blood in the snow.
As it ran, a roar came from the black-armoured samurai behind it:
"You animal, you die today! Nobody's gonna save you! I'm taking your head and using it as a piss pot!!"
The staggering Giant Yōkai looked back and saw the black-armoured samurai charging at it at a full hundred-metre-sprint pace. It was so scared it yelled "MAMA!" and ran even faster!
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