Kibutsuji Muzan who styled himself a being infinitely close to perfection, the Progenitor of Demons who saw himself as a living cataclysm, in that moment, for the first time in his existence, felt the unmistakable scent of death.
He feared death above all else. Everything he had done across five centuries, splitting his flesh, creating demons, concealing his whereabouts, lurking beneath the aegis of a daiyōkai, all of it had been for the sake of immortality.
But today, he knew. If he did not act now, if he waited until every last backup was purged, he would truly, utterly, irreversibly die. No one would come to his aid. Though he hid beneath Hagoromo Gitsune's banner, he was merely one of the "lesser demon contingent" under Kidōmaru, who himself served that fox. Without yōki. Without reiryoku. The forces of Kyōto would pay him no mind.
They would simply dismiss it as the internal strife of humans, a common, unremarkable affair. This, too, was precisely what Shinji had calculated. To use no power of yōkai, nor even of miko or sorcerers. To use only an exceedingly special force, human power.
Kibutsuji Muzan had truly never encountered such a situation. He had always believed his concealment was flawless. Those who knew of his existence and his weakness to sunlight were vanishingly few.
Those who knew of his sunlight weakness and, simultaneously, of his preemptive self-division, were practically nonexistent in this world. Even to deduce it would require comprehensive knowledge of his entire nature. And even if one deduced it, those who could effectively counter him were still exceedingly rare.
The probability was near zero. And Kibutsuji Muzan never granted any existence such an opportunity. Yet the yōkai before him seemed to be an exception. He could feel, this opponent truly understood him. The unknown. Coupled with death. Fear reached its pinnacle in a single instant. And then, flipped into berserk fury.
"In that case—!" Muzan's slit pupils blazed scarlet to their uttermost limit. Dozens of clones pinned to the wilderness by the Earth Barrier moved simultaneously. Without reservation. Without restraint. Violet-black flesh erupted from the surface of every single clone body, transforming into viscous liquid, crossing over the light of the ground, not stopping even as it was seared, converging toward the center.
Bones fractured and reassembled within the liquefied mass. Organs were crushed and regenerated in the fusion. All the mass of dozens of bodies. All their blood. All their life force. In an impossibly short span of time, they condensed into a single, unified whole.
The ground beneath collapsed.
A colossal figure rose from the vortex of flesh, over 30 metres tall. Its entire body was violet-black. Twisted muscle fibers crisscrossed its frame. From every part of its torso extended countless tendrils, each as thick as a man's embrace, their tips branching into bone spurs, razor claws, even human faces.
Five heads were arrayed above, each bearing Muzan's countenance, yet each twisted into a different expression. Rage. Fear. Greed. Loathing. Madness. Seven hearts beat simultaneously within a violet-black thoracic cavity visible through translucent skin, pounding with a dull, thunderous rhythm.
This was the ultimate, complete form, never even seen in the original story. Unscarred by the wound Tsugikuni Yoriichi had left, unweakened by centuries of lingering damage. Kibutsuji Muzan had withdrawn every last shred of power he had scattered across the land. Compressed it. Smelted it. Forged it into a battle-form that transcended all previous limits.
And what unfurled next, was the Blood Demon Arts. In the centuries prior, Muzan had never bestowed this ability upon the demons he created, whether lesser or greater. There had been no need.
In this era, even with Nichirin Blades, the Demon Slayer Corps posed no threat to him. The demons he created only required basic regeneration and strength. It was only recently that Muzan had begun granting Blood Demon Arts to his demons.
But Muzan himself, holding the very source of all demon blood, naturally commanded multiple Blood Demon Arts. Five centuries of accumulation. Dozens of Blood Demon Arts bloomed simultaneously.
Violet-black blood sprayed from the tips of the tendrils, transforming into corrosive acidic mist upon contact with the air. The grass and leaves for dozens of metres withered and carbonized in an instant.
Blood-spikes erupted from the earth below, forming a forest of impaling stakes. Slabs of flesh sloughed off the torso, becoming mobile barriers, dividing the entire battlefield into a labyrinth.
Tendrils wreathed in blood swept outward, each whip-stroke gouging trenches several jō deep into the earth. The wilderness for dozens of jō around was, in a single breath, rendered into a living hell.
Witnessing this, Tsugikuni Yoriichi's expression hardened. His feet shifted forward. The golden thermal mist of the Breath of the Sun at full concentration billowed from his body.
The crimson Nichirin Blade was held horizontally before him. His Transparent World had already clearly discerned the position of every tendril, every heart, every brain of that colossal monstrosity. Such a monster was indeed terrifying. But he could cut it. He simply needed time. Yet, he never even took his first step. The air before him was already torn asunder.
It was Shinji. The Bone Thunder Shura Form surged forward in a single, explosive motion. Its six-meter skeletal frame was less than half the height of the over 30 metre, fully manifested Demon King. But the yōki amplification from the dual resonance of its two viscera had, at this moment, long since reached its peak.
The dual cycle of Fire and Water had once again formed a complete loop within the Shura Form. And then, the Demon's Breath. Though the lungs were still absent, the Shura Lungs not yet formed, the Demon's Breath, though comprehended, had no organ to house that circulation.
It was like possessing the technique of breathing without the vessel of breath. But Shinji used another method. The Demon's Breath was forced into brutal operation within the Shura Form's thoracic cavity. Not through the lungs, but using yōki itself as the medium, channeling the impure energies of the world directly into the gaps of the Shura Form's skeletal framework.
Crude, Unrefined, No purification, No filtration, No lungs to serve as the furnace. The impure energy was simply crammed wholesale, wrapped in yōki, into every crevice of the Bone Thunder colossus.
This was a desperately forced measure. The efficiency was low. The attrition was high. The strain on his body was far beyond normal parameters. But stacked upon the dual-viscera cycle, this crude infusion of the Demon's Breath forcibly dragged the Shura Form's actual output upward.
The yōki amplification, layered upon the foundation of the Ninth Transformation, broke through to a level comparable to an Eleventh Transformation, peak-tier high-ranking yōkai.
This was the absolute limit he could reach at present. But that limit, facing this hollow, bloated ultimate form of the Demon King before him, was, without question, enough.
The Blood-Fire Transformation erupted from the Shura Heart. Dark crimson yōkai-fire spread along the skeletal frame.
Simultaneously, the power of Yomi, forcibly driven by the Demon's Breath, seeped from the gaps in the bones. That freezing, annihilating force, as though drawn from Yomi itself, truly adhered to the blade's edge.
Dark crimson and Yomi's hue intertwined. Coiled. Compressed. The Sun and the Demon. Or rather Yin and Yang, fused into one. An imperfect fusion of Yin and Yang. The searing incineration of the sun and the annihilation of Yomi superimposed upon the same cutting edge.
The former burned flesh to nothing. The latter denied regeneration itself. Though, without the true refinement of the lungs, the power of Yomi was only at thirty to forty percent of what his theoretical, completed state could achieve, the searing power of the sun was at full capacity.
Against a Kibutsuji Muzan who had scattered his power across the entire realm and only now hastily reassembled it, thirty to forty percent of Yomi, plus full sunlight, was more than sufficient.
And so, in that moment, Onikiri and Yomi-giri were simultaneously drawn from the Shura Form's colossal palms. Projected and amplified. Upon their cutting edges blazed a color never before seen.
Half was the dark crimson fire of the blazing sun. Half was the dark, spectral bloom of Yomi. Where the two lights intertwined, the very air was vaporized, leaving only a visible fissure of vacuum in its wake.
But in truth, it was only a single slash. A single, simple vertical cleave. From the very center of the five heads of Kibutsuji Muzan's over 30 metre tall form, straight down, to the very soles of his feet.
Muzan's ultimate form never even had the chance to unleash its second wave of Blood Demon Arts. That single blade-light, woven of Sun and Demon, bisected the colossal body cleanly down the center. The severed surfaces were simultaneously seared by the blazing sun-fire and annihilated by the power of Yomi.
The very foundation of regeneration collapsed utterly beneath the twin onslaught. Seven hearts were pierced through in a single stroke. Five heads were split asunder in a single instant. Kibutsuji Muzan convulsed in agony, howled, raged, roared with fury, yet it was all utterly futile.
The over-30-metre body of the Demon King, the moment the blade-light faded, began to carbonize from the severed surfaces. To collapse. To scatter. Muzan's howls lasted less than two seconds before they were cut short.
All that remained, was ash.
Ash that filled the sky.
The Shura Form retracted. The Bone Thunder colossus collapsed. Shinji dropped back to the earth. He shook his right hand, which had gone numb. From shoulder to fingertips, his entire right arm was trembling.
Several hairline cracks had appeared across its skeletal structure.
Without the refinement and buffering of the Shura Lungs, the impure energy of the Demon's Breath, forced directly into the skeletal framework, had caused far greater attrition than anticipated. This single strike had overdrawn his reserves. But the outcome was already decided.
Yoriichi stood behind him, his Nichirin Blade still raised mid-swing. The golden thermal mist slowly dissipated in the night breeze. He never had the chance to strike.
There was no longer any need. He watched the ash drifting down from the sky. Within those deep crimson eyes was an expression impossible to describe. Something like astonishment. And something like release.
Shinji glanced back at him. "All flash. One-shot," he said. Just like that.
Yoriichi was silent for a moment. "…Mn."
The reason was simple, in truth. Kibutsuji Muzan's power had never been weak. Five centuries of accumulated demonic force was enough to make any existence wary.
Even if it never reached the level of a daiyōkai, its sheer volume was absolutely close to the yōki held by an ordinary high-ranking yōkai. But his fatal flaw lay precisely here, it was too dispersed. Flesh split off and scattered across the realm. Demons created and spread across the land. It appeared as though he had infinite contingencies. But in reality, every fragment diluted his power.
When he was forced to recall all his strength into a single body, that ultimate form's actual density was far inferior to a Twelfth Transformation yōkai who had genuinely accumulated an equivalent total volume of yōki. Inferior, even, to an Eleventh Transformation yōkai. Immense in form, yet thin in substance.
Dozens of Blood Demon Arts unleashed simultaneously might look terrifying, but the power allotted to each was negligible. Against an opponent who compressed two types of counter-elemental power into a single strike, against someone like Shinji, a demon among yōkai who had gathered countless abilities into a single body, it was truly a matter of a single slash.
Of course, the prerequisites were absolute: Kikyō's Earth Barrier locking down his backups. The Demon Slayer Corps purging the flesh he had scattered across the land. Tsugikuni Yoriichi forcing him to reveal himself.
If any single link had been missing, the complete annihilation of Kibutsuji Muzan would have been impossible. But every one of those links, from beginning to end, had been on Shinji's chessboard. Only thus, could the threat be ended forever.
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