Just as Cold Cry moved to take the Father Demon's head in a single stroke, an unnaturally cold presence drifted up from the river.
A shiver ran through him, goosebumps rising along his arms. He stopped mid-motion and turned toward where it was coming from.
He was certain, instantly, that this was a genuine member of the Twelve Kizuki.
Whatever it was, it seemed to be locked in a fight with someone else, and the fact that its presence carried this far meant whomever it was fighting had to be exceptional in their own right.
Cold Cry looked away, thinking hard.
With this many dead on the mountain already, word had surely reached headquarters by now. Could the one fighting this Kizuki be a senior Demon Slayer sent from the Corps, maybe even one of the Nine Hashira?
The thought put a knot of unease in his chest. Ever since he'd woken from his coma, finding his sister had been the one thing on his mind.
When Tamayo had told him Iguya Kishi was likely one of the Kizuki, it had felt like the first real lead he'd had. But the sheer power and mystery surrounding them had only dragged him deeper into confusion and dread since.
And now, out of nowhere, one of them had shown up practically at his feet, like something was steering all of this toward him on purpose.
The chance was right there. He wasn't going to let it slip by.
Strong enough to win or not, he had to go meet it. If it got away, or if someone else killed it first, an opportunity this close might never come again.
He glanced once at the ice-encased Father Demon, sheathed his blade in one clean motion, and took off toward the source of the aura without another word.
"Cold Cry, wait, where are you going?" Noe called after him, alarmed.
"Stay here. Don't follow me," he said flatly and vanished into the trees.
Watching the spot where he'd disappeared, something in Noe sank.
She was sure, in that moment, that he must hate her; why else would he leave her behind like that? The hurt of it welled up fast, tears threatening, and her swings lost both their speed and their force.
Inosuke watched the two of them, baffled. He'd assumed the boy in white had picked up on something and left the rest to the girl on purpose, but the way she was swinging now, half-hearted and weak, was pushing his patience.
Then he noticed the ice on the river shifting. He looked closer and realized, with a jolt, that the demon was waking up.
"Watch out!" he shouted.
Noe snapped back to herself and looked toward him on the far bank, but before his warning even registered fully, the ground seemed to tilt under her. She spun around and saw the massive demon still half-kneeling in the water, fighting to rise.
The ice around it had already started to crack.
Panic hit her, and she swung wildly at its neck, but even at full strength, still and immobile, she hadn't been able to sever that head in one blow. There was no chance of it now.
With nothing solid to work from, she pulled the blade back and retreated to the shore.
The demon threw its head back and let out a roar that shook the air, slamming its frozen arms against the ice like it meant to tear its own rage loose.
The ice shattered outright, chunks of it swept downstream, and the river settled back to normal within seconds.
It turned its frozen head toward her on the bank and lunged for the shore only to pitch forward and crash face-first back into the water.
Noe noticed, then, that every wound on it clustered around the same handful of points: knees, waist, elbows, wrists. Every major joint.
Cold Cry's brilliance struck her all over again.
He must have known from the start he couldn't beat this thing head-on, so he'd used his speed instead, cutting those exact points over and over, wearing them down.
Damage those joints enough, and both its mobility and its power dropped hard. And with the cold locking each wound shut, none of it could heal fast enough to matter mid-fight.
"Hey! Idiot! What are you doing? Just cut its neck already!" Inosuke shouted from across the river.
He'd assumed, when the white-haired boy walked off, that the demon's head was already as good as gone. Instead, the fight had been handed to a girl who, from where he stood, didn't look like she had it in her.
The demon was awake again; Inosuke himself was running on a fraction of his usual strength, and now their only hope was resting on this girl?
Even with Tanjiro fighting beside him, the two of them together had barely managed to hold their own against it. What was one girl supposed to do alone?
Whatever relief he'd felt a second ago knotted right back up in his throat.
Noe caught the shout from across the water. Normally something like that would have made her shrink into herself. Right now, none of it registered.
She couldn't say exactly when it had started, but somewhere along the way, nobody's opinion but Cold Cry's had been able to touch her anymore.
The demon dragged itself out of the riverbed and staggered toward her.
She steadied herself, weighing the situation. If she couldn't take the head soon, and this dragged into a stalemate, the cold would fade with time, and once it did, the demon's regeneration would come roaring back, along with everything else it could throw at her.
*By then, even with Boar Head's help, the two of us probably won't be able to hold him off.*
Noe pushed her arm's muscle density to its full six-times limit, snapped her blade loose from its coil, and let the whip-like length of it over two meters spiral around her feet.
With its knees and elbows still frozen and cut from Cold Cry's earlier work, the demon's speed and strength stayed well below what they should've been.
She dodged its next swing easily, slipped in close, and drove her thin, flexible blade hard into its neck.
*That's the deepest wound he left. Keep hitting this exact spot, and the head comes off eventually.*
Through everything that followed, she used her jumping ability to stay clear of its attacks while wearing down that same spot on its neck, again and again, until the cut had opened nearly two-thirds of the way through.
But then things started to turn. Exactly as she'd feared, she could feel its speed and power creeping back, the joint wounds slowly starting to knit shut.
The one saving grace was the neck; the cold there ran deeper than anywhere else, and it showed no sign of healing yet. But she knew that wouldn't hold forever. If she couldn't finish the cut soon, things were about to get a lot worse.
She wasn't going to keep chipping away at this. There wasn't enough time left for that.
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