Basked in the moon's dull ambiance, the glade was vacant to joy or positivity.
Fear swelled in its dwelling, and the air weighed heavy with the uncanny, acrid scent of aged decay and copper.
The simple laws of this world were to kill or be killed. It was a matter of the strong dominating the weak, it was a tragedy as old as life.
Weakness was a sin, and for those who failed to triumph over their brethren, died… or festered into insignificance.
Crunch! – Snap! – Chirk!
Torn flesh & filthy brown liquid scattered across a small vicinity of the glade's bed of otherwise luscious green bladed grass.
The tranquil environment was perverted, warped with the oh–so–subtle noise of flesh being gnawed on.
"Ughhh… Nyahhhhhh…" A soft, delicate voice moaned between short spurs of quivering breaths.
Her eyes glazed with hunger, pliable impatience as she feasted on the moldering carcass.
It was so damn good! The woman continued to indulge her cannibalistic cravings with a constant replenishment of vigor. This feast of human flesh was her gourmet, she was the predator and her captive was nothing more than mere substance to satiate her pitiful hunger.
Her mouth salivated fiercely, impatience growing constantly. Each time her unnaturally sharp mandibles sank into the fibered tissue of fat and muscle, streams of thick viscous crimson would spill.
The flavor of human blood could only be compared to that of ambrosia, it always granted that desired euphoria when drunk.
Her delicate features contorted into an amiable, spine-chillingly crazed, demented smile, veiled behind her lengthy onyx hair. With hastened practiced movement, underlined with famished desperation, the woman plunged her fist into the abdominal cavity of her captured youth.
This annoying skin was impeding her from properly feasting on the scrumptious entrails!
How annoying!
Tear!
And,
Tear!
And,
Tear!
Lost in her feral stupor, she continued that meager meal.
Yet, as with all good things in life they seldom last…
The carcass of the youth was deprecated far beyond recognition, reduced to nothing more than a canvas of carnage.
Flesh-clad bone was tossed with careless ambition. Half-devoured appendages dangled limply from their socket, while less appetizing organs–the stomach, the gall bladder, and others–were discarded, they were merely unworthy.
From her regal black silk textured Kimono, the "Woman" drew a canteen crafted of bamboo, and a black textiled hankachi.
Soddening the rag with the canteen's contents, the woman with an air of elegance, regained her crazed bearing before cleansing her crimson covered face of any reminiscence of blood or flesh.
Her features were revealed in full.
Her face bore of heavy eastern heritage, her neck thin and swan-like, her features sharp and symmetrical. Her milk-white skin lacked any blemish that would tarnish her natural allure, flawless .
She was in all reguards–stunning undeniably so. Yet… she had this odd atmosphere of suffocating malevolence that betrayed the natural splendor of her beautiful exterior.
Lifting herself to her fullest, the woman admired her handy work with an added sneer, It was unbecoming for someone of her status to gorge herself so unsightly.
Such mindless livestock should just drop dead rather than running in fear. Those bastards should be blessed—blessed!—to have such a perfect being as herself to even dare the notion of feasting on their imperfect bodies.
The woman lacked empathy towards her actions.
To her, human life carried no more weight than a pig for slaughter. Like this the life of a human youth had flickered out, their body now used as a kindling towards her own raging flame of eternal youth.
"Such a pity," a sullenly sharp voice pierced from behind.
The woman flinched from the unprecedented noise. In absentmindedness the woman sharply flanked her gaze.
Nothing.
Her view was met with nothing, no person,
No person, no beast, no bystander…
there was nothing?
And yet, the woman's instincts told otherwise of her lacking gaze… A primal fear surged through her being, her limbic system began to taunt her with a plague of nauseating thoughts. Her body tensed, adrenaline flooding her veins.
The simple system of fight or flight was kicked into a zenith.
Her slitted irises, semblant of a cat and reptilian in nature, shrank into pinpoints as she scourged the jagged circumference of the glades edges, the brush, the dark.
"What was that?" The woman muttered under her breath, in the tongue of native Japanese.
"The youth of today… betraying their humanity in the goal of immortality and promised eternal beauty, it's rather ironic, such a musing really…" The aged voice mocked, their tone flat and hollow.
torn from audible emotion.
The woman's expression seethed with rage after hearing such utterance.
Snap!
"You know nothing!" she spat. "What would you know?! Do you—no, can you even understand the fear of treading the line between life and death? The misery of an illness that…" Her voice faltered, ravaged by incoherence, her spoken emotions blanketed the underlying truth… It was all just disgusting hypocritical justification.
Whomever it was poked they had clearly poked at a deeply suppressed insecurity the woman had.
The voice had struck deep. Too deep.
"Detestable," The voice taunted for a final time.
From the shadows of the woodlands, a man of slender silhouette and gaunt stepped onto the glade.
His skin sickly pale, his bones outlined beneath a frail frame. He wore light armor bound with silk and leather cords, draped in a frayed black kimono and a crimson-and-white haori. A wide-brimmed hat concealed his face.
His skin sickly pale, his bones easily observed beneath a famined figure. He wore a light maneuverable Sane bound with silk and leather cords, draped in a frayed black kimono and crimson–and–white haori which rested on his shoulders. The individual's face was concealed via a wide-brimmed chronicle hat which attired his head.
A yellowish wheat excluded from the person's mouth in a lazed manner,
With their forearms resting on their sheathed katana's shaft, the individual excluded an aura of neutrality and, yet, a contradictory — potent disdain evident from his earlier tone.
"You know," he said quietly "I once thought as you demons do…" The man muttered under his breath with a distant smile that never reached his eyes.
Clink!
"Wha-"
The female demon never had the chance to utter her final words.. Such a mercy would have been wasted on her
–THUMP!
—Pop! –Burst!
The demon's head flung several dozen meters from the neck of her startled figure, flung into the air the demon's head hit a distant pine caving in her skull before splattering her head matter explosively with a small drizzle of sharded bone and chunked tofu like flesh.
It was a gruesome sight,
"..." The man with forlorn eyes sheathed his Kanata back into its scabbard. The azure color of the blade faded back into its standard silver.
His movements were unparalleled when compared to that of meager man, they were inhumane in haste, a simple drawing of his blade was all the slender man needed to slay the unsuspecting demon.
A slash honed though countless years of desperation in the single pursuit of his own coveted death.
–Sigh…
Releasing the sigh which he bore for an unheeded amount of time, the man watched as the decapitated demon's body fragmented and cracked into frayish ash. Her body withered, and dissolved. The glade was silent once more.
The small glade was vacant of sentience with the exception of this lonely soul who merely watched this process of scattered essence.
"The 14th tonight," The man uttered with a discontent sigh, it already was a long night, he was tired but the value of slaying those who've fallen from humanities graces was the priority at the moment, his own leisure could wait.
Though not affiliated with any organization and without an incentive to continue with this noble steed of altruism. The man saw none of it, to him it didn't matter what such people thought, or their depiction of him.
Those similar to himself had coined the term Demon slayer, a large collection of people with similar harrowing escapades. Some had lost family, loved ones, some condemned themself with the vindictive thoughts of revenge, to others it was more superficial as that of good pay and promised welfare, and to a percentage in this cliche it was a matter of family lineage. The identical irony in them all was their equivalent hatred towards Demons.
Stealing another halfhearted glance fleeting towards the "remains", the man muttered a silent prayer under his breath as to rest the poor soul who lost their life.
It was a pity but the passage of time would continue, and the world wouldn't rest to mourn a single insignificant life.
Closing his eyes the man began to focus on the rhyme of his breathing, the sterile unconscious movement of repetitive exhalation was now his to command.
Inhaling sharply, he patterned his breath into the shape of an equilateral snowflake he patterned the motions of his breath into the shape of an equilateral snowflake, though this merely was in a metaphorical sense as it was a mere spawn of his imagination in order to bring out the full dexterity of his technique.
His muscles contracted, his adrenaline spiked, and an unhealthy amount of oxygen coursing forcefully through his veins.
PWOOM!
The release of his confined mussels gave way towards a powerful surge of speed which the slender man exploited towards his sprint, the man burst forward dashing back into the dense woodlands once more.
His desired location unknown, even to himself…
His goal–an aimless ambition which would bear no fruit.