Subaru was not sure when the others felt it. The soldiers below her, hidden among the trees, their weapons ready, their eyes scanning the forest path. They seemed calm, alert but calm, as if the battle was still a distant thing that had not yet arrived.
But she felt it before anyone else.
Her ears, slightly pointy, were far more sensitive than those of a human. She had noticed it long ago, the way she could hear conversations from across a camp, the way footsteps sounded louder to her than they should, the way her head sometimes turned toward noises that no one else seemed to notice. It was useful. It was also unsettling, like having a sense that did not quite belong to her.
The rustling noise came from the east. Fast. Multiple sets of feet, too many to count, moving through the undergrowth with a speed that should have been impossible. Branches snapped. Leaves crunched. The sound grew louder with each passing second, a wave of movement rushing toward their position.
They did not feel like humans. The weight of their mana pressed against her senses, different from the soldiers around her, different from Übel, different from anyone she had encountered since waking up in this world. Cold. Dense. Wrong in a way that made her skin prickle.
Demons, she thought. They are here.
The soldiers below got into position. They raised their weapons, swords and spears and axes, their movements sharp and practiced. Their breathing slowed. Their eyes narrowed. They had done this before, many times, and their bodies remembered what to do even if their minds were afraid.
Subaru crouched on her branch, her weight balanced, her muscles tense. Her hand hovered at her side, ready to summon a blade. Her eyes fixed on the path below, on the shadows between the trees, on the darkness that seemed to move and shift and grow.
A figure entered the woods.
She leaped.
The figure looked human. Pale skin, dark hair, a face that could have belonged to anyone on the street. But the horns gave it away. Two curved points rising from the temples, dark as coal, sharp as broken glass. The eyes were blank, empty, showing no emotion, no fear, no recognition of the danger that was about to strike.
Subaru conjured a blade mid air. The katana materialized in her grip, the edge already singing toward the demon's neck. She did not think. She did not plan. Her body moved on its own, following instincts that felt old and practiced, as if she had done this a thousand times before.
The blade connected. Clean. Smooth. The demon's head separated from its shoulders and flew through the air, spinning once, twice, before landing on the ground with a soft thud. The body stood for a moment longer, frozen in the posture of running, then collapsed. Blood sprayed from the neck, dark and thick, staining the leaves below.
Then the body began to fade. The edges turned translucent, then vanished, piece by piece, until nothing remained but the blood on the ground and the head still lying in the dirt. The head faded too, slowly, as if the demon's existence was being erased from the world.
Every soldier stared. Their mouths hung open. Their weapons lowered slightly, forgotten in their hands. They had seen her fight Wirt, yes. They had heard stories of her conjuring magic. But this was different. This was not a spar. This was death, delivered so fast that the victim had no time to scream.
Subaru landed on the ground, her boots pressing into the soft earth. The katana gleamed in her hand, clean despite the blood that should have coated it.
Someone yelled. A soldier, young, his voice cracking. "Incoming more!"
More figures appeared from between the trees. Not one. Not two. A flood of them, their horns catching the faint light, their eyes blank and cold. They ran with the same unnatural speed, closing the distance fast, their hands reaching for weapons or simply reaching, claws extended, teeth bared.
Subaru leaped away to the trees. She did not run from the fight. She ran toward better ground, higher ground, a position where she could see the whole battlefield and strike from above.
The technique she was using had a name. Hiten Mitsurugi Ryu. She had never studied it. She had never practiced it. But Erfassen did not care about training. It cared about memory, about visualization, about the ability to take something seen and make it real. She had watched enough anime. She had seen enough swordsmen. The movements lived somewhere in her mind, and her body translated them into action.
The katana was the main weapon, designed for high speed slashing and thrusting. But unlike many other styles, Hiten Mitsurugi Ryu treated the scabbard as an active second weapon, a tool for blocking and striking and controlling the flow of combat. Subaru did not have a scabbard at the moment. She did not need one. The katana alone was enough.
The style also included unarmed techniques, rare and difficult, moves that allowed the user to parry an enemy's blade with bare hands. Subaru had never tried those. She was not sure she could. But the sword work alone was more than enough.
More demons came. About two dozen, pouring through the trees like a wave of pale flesh and dark horns. They moved with the same blank expressions, the same emotionless faces, the same terrifying speed.
Subaru flashed between them.
She appeared behind one demon, the katana already through its chest. She appeared beside another, the blade removing an arm before the demon could turn. She appeared above a third, dropping from a branch, the sword cleaving down through the skull.
The demons were strong. She could feel it in the way they moved, in the force behind their strikes, in the way they did not fall easily. A single blow was not always enough. Some of them took two, three, four cuts before their bodies gave out and began to fade.
But before any demon could see her coming, she was already gone. She moved too fast, struck too quick, vanished into the shadows before they could react. They swung at empty air. They turned toward ghosts. They died without ever seeing the face of the person who killed them.
She had already taken down seven.
The soldiers fought too, their weapons clashing against demon claws, their shouts echoing through the trees. They were skilled, brave, well trained. They fought in pairs, covering each other's backs, protecting each other's blind spots. Together, they had killed about the same number as Subaru. Ten demons lay dead or fading across the forest floor.
Subaru cleaved through another enemy, the katana singing through flesh and bone. The demon fell, its body already dissolving, its face still blank even in death.
She tried to feel something. Sadness. Guilt. Anything. These were her kind, technically. They had horns like her. They had pointed ears like her. They had faces that could have been her face, if she had grown up in this world instead of being dropped into it by forces she did not understand.
She felt nothing.
Not a flicker. Not a twinge. Not the smallest whisper of regret.
Her chest stayed hollow. Her hands stayed steady. Her eyes stayed focused on the next target, the next demon, the next body to cut down.
The realization should have horrified her. Some part of her knew that. The old Subaru, the boy from Japan, the person who had never killed anything larger than an insect, would have been sickened by this. Would have dropped the sword and run. Would have curled into a ball and cried.
But that person felt very far away now. Like a memory of a memory. A story someone had told her about someone else.
Something whispered in the back of her mind. A cold voice. A practical voice. The voice of survival.
You cannot let anyone blow your cover. You cannot let anyone leave alive.
She looked at the demons still fighting, still trying to kill her and the soldiers around her. She looked at the bodies fading into nothing. She looked at the blood on the ground, dark against the brown leaves.
Today, demons must die. All of them.
She raised her katana and leaped again.