Night wind carried the reek of blood and char from the village at the mountain's foot, spreading through the forest like a slow tide.
Five silhouettes shoved their way along the woodland path. None stood taller than three feet. Their skin was a grimy blue-grey, and between the sparse tufts of hair on their scalps, fleshy tumors bulged and knotted. These were a common enough sight in this era — low-ranking demons known as Qingpi Gui, Blue-Skin Fiends. They attached themselves to greater demons and made their living raiding human villages.
The one at the front clutched a severed arm to its chest. Scraps of flesh still clung to the corners of its mouth. It looked deeply satisfied.
"The road ahead is blocked."
The lead fiend halted. A low growl rumbled up from its throat — the sound of a beast warning others away from its kill.
Standing in the middle of the only path back to their lair was a man.
He wore a suit of broken red armor. The lacquered plates had been laced back together with coarse hemp rope. His helmet was long gone, leaving bare a cascade of stark white hair — and beneath that hair, a face hidden behind a crimson demon's mask.
He wasn't breathing. His chest didn't move. A grey, deathly mist coiled around his body like something that had never quite decided whether to be fog or smoke.
A Ghost Warrior.
In this age where humans and demons lived intermingled, Ghost Warriors were a specific category of the undead. They had been formidable human fighters in life — warriors who, upon dying, refused the cycle of reincarnation, their souls too weighted with obsession or the karmic debt of killing. Instead, their spirits had forcibly absorbed the demon-qi drifting through the world and used it to reforge their bodies. They retained the combat techniques of the living and gained the physical endurance of monsters.
As a rule, Ghost Warriors were silent killing machines.
This one, however, seemed to have a screw loose.
The Ghost Warrior blocking the path had his head bowed. His left thumb idly stroked the guard of the black tachi at his hip. He was mumbling to himself.
"I know you're picky," he said. "Last time, that boar-demon's blood was too greasy — made you nauseous. Didn't I give you a full rust-removal and polish afterward to make it up to you?"
The Blue-Skin Fiends looked at one another.
The Ghost Warrior wasn't looking at them. He went right on talking to the sword in his hand. "Tonight's batch is just small fry, but freshness counts for something. Blue-Skin Fiends — the flesh is on the sour and astringent side, I'll admit, but the marrow is absolutely saturated with resentment-energy. You'll love the texture. Nice and crispy."
"You want something more prestigious? Like the legendary Shuten-dōji?"
The Ghost Warrior let out a small sigh and tapped the hilt twice with his fingertips. "We have to build up to that. Your edge still can't cut through a great demon's outer membrane. Finish this meal first, and once your — affection rating — no, wait — our synergy goes up, we'll take on stronger prey. Be good. Stop pouting."
The lead Blue-Skin Fiend felt personally insulted.
True, as the lowest rung of the Hundred Demons Night Parade, Blue-Skin Fiends were routinely treated as cannon fodder by greater demons. But they would not stand here and be casually appraised as ingredients by some lunatic who held one-sided conversations with his own sword.
"Kill him!"
The lead fiend let out a piercing shriek, flung the severed arm aside, and ripped a leg-bone club slicked with black blood from behind its waist. Its hind-leg muscles went taut — and it launched itself forward like a bolt.
The other four Blue-Skin Fiends followed immediately, fanning out to either side. It was their standard hunting formation for isolating lone warriors.
Kōbe Hikaru ended his one-sided conversation with his weapon.
"Looks like I don't need to do a sales pitch after all," he said. "Dinner delivered itself."
He raised his head. His pale face held no expression. Only those eyes — irises red as blood, whites black as ink — locked onto the foul wind rushing toward him.
The perspective snapped in an instant.
Kōbe Hikaru looked at the semi-transparent panel hovering in his vision, visible only to him.
[Cursed Blade — Muramasa (Replica): HUNGER STATE. Current Mood: IRRITABLE.]
"What a high-maintenance princess," he murmured.
His center of gravity dropped.
The leg-bone club came crashing down from above. He didn't step back.
A Ghost Warrior's body had no need to breathe — and so there was no such thing as "steadying one's breath" before a strike.
His left thumb shoved the blade one inch clear of the scabbard.
"Tsshng——!"
A clear, piercing ring tore through the night — the cry of a dragon in steel.
Iai Draw — Against the Wind.
Black sword-light traced an arc through the moonlit air: a rising curve that defied all intuition.
The lead Blue-Skin Fiend was still airborne when darkness swallowed its vision. The leg-bone club it had been so proud of — and the tough, leathery hide it had trusted to protect it — crumbled before that single line of black light like paper left out in the rain.
The blade entered muscle and glided through the gaps between bones without a single moment of resistance.
Two halves of a body tumbled to the ground in a rain of blood.
Kōbe Hikaru turned his wrist. The blade did not return to its sheath — instead, he carried the momentum forward into a horizontal sweep.
"First one," he said. "How's the taste?"
The tachi called Muramasa shivered in his grip. The faint grain-pattern along the dark blade flared with a flicker of eerie purple light, and the Blue-Skin Fiend's blood coating the steel seeped inward — absorbed, and gone.
[Cursed Blade — Muramasa: Mood shifted to 'MILDLY APPEASED.' Sharpness +5%.]
The remaining four Blue-Skin Fiends faltered at the sight of their leader's instant death, their charge stuttering — but terror only sharpened their savagery. The two on the left stretched open their jaws and spat two globules of green acid. The two on the right dropped to all fours and sprinted low, aiming for Kōbe Hikaru's legs.
That was [Corrosive Venom Spit] — the Blue-Skin Fiend's only ranged attack, capable of eating through mundane iron armor with ease.
Kōbe Hikaru moved forward instead of back.
His straw sandals hammered the earth and burst it apart. In an instant, his entire body became a blur, cutting left.
[Phantom Step].
A technique he had worked out himself — a burst of demon-qi condensed into a split-second explosion of speed, achieving something close to instantaneous movement across a short distance.
The two acid globules splashed against empty ground and hissed.
Kōbe Hikaru was already in the faces of the two spitting fiends.
Muramasa made no use of any flashy sword art. What he gave them was the simplest thing in the world — a single kesagiri, a diagonal slash across the collarbone.
The blade fell.
The left fiend's head launched skyward.
Riding the momentum of the downswing, Kōbe Hikaru let his body spin like a top. The blade swept out behind him in a full circle and rang hard against a raking claw that had been lunging for his back.
"Clang!"
Steel on iron. The ambushing fiend's claws shattered from the impact. It shrieked and tried to reel away — but it found that black tachi clinging to it like a sickness that had worked its way into the bone.
Kōbe Hikaru gripped the blade in one hand. The tip trembled with a fine, precise vibration. He executed a technique that had crystallized for him mid-battle — his own personal sword style.
Thrust.
Thmp.
The tip punched through the fiend's throat and pinned it to the trunk of an ancient pagoda tree.
"Still warm," Kōbe Hikaru remarked to the sword. "Eat while it's hot."
He ripped the blade free. The body slid down and crumpled.
The last Blue-Skin Fiend finally broke. It dropped its weapon, spun on its heel, and dove headlong into the undergrowth, scrambling up the mountain on all fours.
"Don't let it run," Kōbe Hikaru called out. "That one's dessert."
His left hand formed a seal, fingertips pressing into a mudra. A ball of pale blue ghost-fire condensed at the end of his white fingers.
Demon Art — Ghost-Fire Wisp.
Ordinarily, it was a basic technique used for illumination and tracking. But fueled by a Ghost Warrior's demon-qi, the ghost-fire shot forward like a parasite that had caught a scent, and latched itself onto the fleeing fiend's back in an instant.
The fire burst. The fiend screamed and went down.
Kōbe Hikaru walked over without hurrying.
The Blue-Skin Fiend rolled onto its back, trembling violently as it stared up at the approaching Ghost Warrior. Whimpers of supplication spilled from its mouth.
Kōbe Hikaru raised his blade and held it up to the moonlight, examining the edge.
"You're telling me you're not full yet?"
He looked down at the demon on the ground.
"Sorry. My kid's still growing."
The blade came down.
A head rolled into the grass.
Silence reclaimed the forest. Only the smell of blood grew thicker.
Kōbe Hikaru flicked the last traces of blood from the blade — not that there was much left. Most of it had already been drunk by the steel itself.
He opened the system panel.
[Cursed Blade — Muramasa (Mass-Produced) has absorbed the vital blood of five Blue-Skin Fiends.]
[Sharpness: 52 → 53]
[Affection: +5]
[Current Affection: 15 (FRIENDLY)]
[Bond Dialogue Unlocked (I): It finds this low-grade blood rather unremarkable in flavor, but concedes that the sheer quantity is filling. It would like to try the blood of a human Demon Suppressor with active spiritual power next time.]
Kōbe Hikaru stared at the panel. The corner of his mouth twitched — barely.
"A Demon Suppressor's blood runs too hot," he said. "It'd burn your teeth. Let's stick to the buffet for now."
He slid the long blade slowly back into its sheath.
Click.
The sound of the guard settling into the mouth of the scabbard rang out with peculiar clarity in the darkness of the night.
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