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Chapter 86: What Are You Doing to My Mother?
"What are you doing to my mother?!"
Just as Suyan used his Conjured chains to tie the three of them up tightly like a bundle of meat dumplings, a sharp, angry girlish shout rang out from behind him.
Suyan turned to look.
A charming and adorable teenage girl stood in the doorway, glaring at him with a face full of fury.
He could see faint traces of Kamado Kie's features in her face. Given her age, it wasn't hard to guess her identity.
Barring any surprises, this was the female lead of Demon Slayer, Kamado Nezuko.
Behind Nezuko stood a younger boy and a younger girl. They hid behind her back, looking thoroughly terrified and timid.
Yet, despite their fear, all three siblings glared at Suyan with unified hostility.
Seeing Suyan look over, Nezuko didn't make any sudden, reckless movements. Even while glaring daggers at him, she fulfilled her duty as the eldest daughter of the house, firmly shielding her younger brother and sister behind her back.
"Mom?!"
Perhaps because the male Kamado Shigeru was a bit more impulsive by nature, seeing the pained expression on his mother's face proved too much for him. He couldn't hold back and dashed frantically toward Kamado Kie.
"Shigeru!" Nezuko cried out anxiously, reaching out to grab him.
But she was a second too late and her fingers slipped past her brother's clothes.
Just as Shigeru was about to reach the three restrained demons, a hand shot out from behind him. It clamped onto the back of his collar and hoisted him straight off the ground.
Naturally, the hand belonged to Suyan.
Suyan didn't want to waste another drop of demon blood turning this impulsive little kid into a demon too. So, lifting him by the collar, he applied a clever bit of force and tossed him lightly back toward his sisters.
"Let me go!" Shigeru yelled, immediately scrambling to his feet to charge forward again.
But this time, his older sister held him down.
"Shigeru, calm down!"
Nezuko had already noticed something fundamentally wrong with the situation.
Under normal circumstances, shouldn't their mother and two brothers be saying something to them right now?
But they weren't.
Not only were they completely unresponsive to her and Shigeru's cries, but their faces were contorted into hideous, feral snarls she had never seen before.
They looked exactly like mindless, rabid beasts.
They gave off an incredibly dangerous aura. This was the real reason she had forcefully stopped Shigeru from running back over.
Furthermore, Suyan had tossed Shigeru back without actually harming him.
Judging by that alone, perhaps this man wasn't entirely evil?
Taking a deep breath, Nezuko forced herself to remain calm and tested the waters. "Mister, could you please tell us what just happened here?"
Suyan chuckled.
Originally, to avoid their interference, he had planned to just tie these three up the same way he did Kamado Kie. He hadn't expected the anime's female lead to be this sharp.
It seemed he wouldn't need to lift a finger after all.
However, Suyan had no intention of explaining himself. Human nature was funny like that. People were always more inclined to believe the conclusions they drew themselves rather than information handed to them by a stranger.
Rather than wasting his breath explaining a myriad of unbelievable concepts that she might not even accept, it was better to just make Nezuko wait.
Once the newly turned demons regained their sanity, Kamado Kie could explain it to her kids herself.
Suyan spoke in a calm, flat tone. "Just stand there and watch quietly. Once your mother regains her senses, she will naturally tell you what happened."
"How can we just stand here and watch?!" Shigeru, still pinned by Nezuko, yelled out impatiently.
"Shigeru!!" Nezuko scolded sharply.
"But—"
As the eldest daughter, Nezuko held quite a bit of authority among her siblings. Seeing her genuinely angry, the fire went out of Shigeru, and his voice shrank down to a weak mumble.
"Say no more," Nezuko ordered, cutting him off.
She understood their situation perfectly. Given their current circumstances, their best bet was to pray this man wasn't a villain. If he was, there was absolutely no way two girls and a young boy could fight him off.
Moreover, Suyan's suggestion to "wait a moment" actually worked in their favor.
If they could stall until their eldest brother, Kamado Tanjiro, returned from selling charcoal in town, his years of heavy labor and woodchopping might give him the strength to overpower this stranger.
At the very least, it drastically improved their odds.
As for running away?
Setting aside the fact that their stamina couldn't possibly outlast a grown man's, where could they even run in the middle of a pitch-black forest? The mountains at night were perilous; running blindly into the woods wasn't necessarily safer than staying put.
So, Nezuko maintained a level, measured tone as she probed Suyan again. "Mister, can you promise not to hurt us while we wait?"
"I can," Suyan nodded.
He didn't care about the girl's little tactical calculations. As long as they didn't bother him, he was content.
Hearing this, Nezuko let out a quiet sigh of relief.
However, she didn't completely drop her guard. While keeping her siblings securely behind her, she kept her full attention locked onto Suyan.
Perhaps because her intense vigilance had slightly waned, she finally had the mental bandwidth to take in Suyan's appearance.
Lacking formal education, she didn't have the vocabulary to properly describe his features. Only two plain, remarkably ordinary words surfaced in her mind: Very handsome. Nezuko watched silently as Suyan walked a short distance away. Only then did she notice with a jolt of shock that there was another entity standing in the dark—a hulking figure built like a small giant.
"Do you know any Blood Demon Arts?" Suyan asked, not wanting to waste the waiting time. He turned to the demon he had subdued earlier, who had been completely devoid of presence until now.
"No," the demon replied, its voice cold and utterly devoid of emotion.
Suyan frowned in disappointment, instantly losing interest in questioning it further.
He glanced at the creature. Even though he had extracted a substantial amount of Muzan's blood from its body—blood granted specifically for turning others into demons—that blood was meant for transmission, not absorption.
Furthermore, this demon hadn't been turned very long itself. It made sense that it hadn't awakened a Blood Demon Art yet.
If Suyan fed the blood he had extracted back to the demon and allowed it to digest it, perhaps it could awaken an art. But that was obviously a terrible trade. He was much better off keeping the blood for his own experiments.
As for this particular demon?
He'd just keep it restrained. Once Kamado Kie and the boys regained their sanity, they could use it as a punching bag to vent their trauma.
"Nezuko? Hanako? And Shigeru...?"
Right at that moment, Kamado Kie finally began to snap out of her mindless, feral state.
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