Wind Breathing?
It was him—Kamado Roy.
A sudden typhoon roared up from the ground, whipping the little teru-teru bozu hanging from the eaves off its string, and blasting Shinazugawa Sanemi straight into the air along with it.
"How the hell do you know Wind Breathing?!"
Under the noonday sun, the white-haired young man landed in a swirl of wind, eyes wide, raking Roy up and down as he put into words what everyone was thinking.
Everyone knew this boy was the disciple of former Water Pillar Urokodaki and kouhai to current Water Pillar Tomioka. They had never heard he'd switched schools to learn Wind Breathing. More than a few people stole a glance at Tomioka.
Giyu was as calm and frosty as ever, unreadable.
From the moment he met Roy, he'd known it: no matter what outrageous thing this kouhai did, it wouldn't really surprise him. Even if, one day, Roy walked up and said, "Senpai, I already killed Kibutsuji Muzan."
He'd still feel like it made sense.
Wind Breathing, then, was nothing special.
Sanemi's eyes bulged. Uzui, Iguro, and the rest all turned to stare.
Tomioka said flatly, "Back then Roy only watched Master demonstrate Water Breathing for a day. On the second day he was already inventing his own forms. It's not surprising he's picked up Wind Breathing too."
"My senpai understands me." Roy stroked his short blade with two fingers, drawing it fully for the first time. He smiled. "Though, it's not that exaggerated."
He spun the sword in a light flourish. "No matter how many variations there are, they all come from the same source. Breathing forms are the same. Water, Wind—once you grasp the rhythm of the breath and the circulation, the rest follows on its own."
In the end, every style was just a way of using oxygen to push heart and lungs past their limits. With Sun Breathing as his foundation, picking up other schools really was easy.
"What about the Sun?"
Tokitō Muichirō, who so often drifted off into his own thoughts, suddenly asked. His innocent eyes reflected Roy's flame-colored hair as he stared.
"What breathing do you use?"
Invisible to the naked eye, in the En above them, Roy's domain rippled, eavesdropping on hearts. His hand snapped up and plucked the falling teru-teru bozu out of the air. He stood there, silent for a moment.
Rengoku watched. Uzui watched. Iguro and Mitsuri watched. Even Shinobu, who usually cared far more about poison formulas and killing Dōma than watching fights, was watching now.
"Amida Buddha…" Himejima helped Kagaya settle onto a cushion. The Master smiled faintly; he couldn't see, but his ears were keen, and his heart was full of regret.
To be unable to behold this boy clearly… what a shame…
A breeze stirred the wisteria. A few petals drifted loose.
Sanemi regulated his breathing, tightened his grip on his sword. This time, he didn't charge in recklessly.
Roy toyed with the little weather charm, then smiled. "Good question."
He flicked the doll back up. It swung from the eaves again, this time secure. Only then did he slowly raise his short blade.
What do I use?
Anywhere sunlight shines, it finds my eyes, sinks into my heart, becomes something I can sense—
Like… the omnipresent magnetism.
Roy lowered the blade. Gravity Blade blossomed.
He turned his aura to magnetism and wrapped it around the steel with Ken, and the blade flashed a deep violet. Sanemi suddenly felt his sword grow heavier—then his hands, then his shoulders, then his back—as if a boulder had dropped onto him. His knees buckled; he nearly dropped to the floor.
A soft hum rolled through the courtyard. The purple gleam washing off Roy's blade even outshone the wisteria blossoms.
The pressure flooded outward. After Sanemi came Rengoku… then Uzui… then Iguro. Everyone present except Tomioka and the people physically sheltered behind Himejima—Kagaya and Amane—felt a mountain-weight crash down on them.
One spine after another bowed under the load.
"So heavy—!"
"What breathing is that?!"
"Fsss—!"
Kaburamaru shrieked and flopped face-first toward the dirt.
"Serpent Breathing, First Form: Winding Serpent Slash!"
Iguro drew his bent Nichirin blade and hacked at the invisible weight. Unlike the others, his sword, born from Water Breathing, was serpentine, perfect for tight curves and sudden shifts.
He took one cut and immediately understood why Sanemi couldn't even lift his sword in front of Roy.
It was too heavy.
"Don't draw in front of him!"
Through the crushing force, Sanemi finally pieced it together and shouted a warning.
But Rengoku, Uzui, Mitsuri, Shinobu—instinct took over. Before they could stop themselves, their swords were already half out of their sheaths.
Too late.
Roy simply flicked his fingers. Magnetic Attraction.
Clang—clang—clang—clang—
One by one, Nichirin blades tore themselves from their owners' hands and flew past him, hilts jerking free of sweaty palms, steel quivering like traitorous dogs happy to have a new master.
They nailed themselves into the wall behind Roy in a neat row.
In the end, they were all just flesh and blood, with only a bit of breathing technique to lift them above the ordinary. In terms of raw stats, apart from Himejima, none of them could compare to a true nen-hardened body—and certainly not to Roy.
The boy in white, flame hair bright as the sun, stood with his one sword. He seemed to be asking himself as much as anyone: What else do I know?
He rubbed the short blade thoughtfully.
Then shoot—God Spear.
"Whoosh!"
The purple light drained from the blade, the gravity vanished. Just as everyone was straightening with hands on their knees, catching the first relieved breath—
Roy's humble practice sword suddenly stretched.
In an eyeblink it spanned the courtyard, a spear of steel a hundred meters long. It scraped the air past Sanemi's ear, punched through the rear wall of the compound, and sheared off a lock of his white hair on the way.
Sanemi stared at the gouge in the stone, at the strand of hair drifting down, and for the second time in his life he felt something like fear. The first had been the night his mother turned into a demon. To protect his younger brother Genya and with his own "rare blood" as a lure, he'd been forced to kill her.
It was that moment that set him on the path of slaughtering demons more cruelly than demons themselves.
And then there was the Sun.
The enormous blade hung there, crossing half the garden.
Roy tilted his head back, studying the blazing disc at its zenith. In his eyes, two small suns ignited.
"Come, fire," he whispered.
The hundred-meter sword turned red in one second. In two, it caught flame. In three, the flames surged. In four, they burned white-hot, licking across Sanemi's hair and forcing him to break away at last, throwing himself aside to smother the blaze.
"Is that… Sun Breathing?" Rengoku's flame-colored eyes flared brighter than ever.
As the user of Flame Breathing, the closest successor to the original Sun, his nose could clearly smell just how fierce this white-centered flame really was.
The phrase Sun Breathing meant something to every Pillar. Their eyes—Sanemi's, Iguro's, everyone's—tightened.
"I'd heard the legendary style had been lost," Shinobu said calmly. "I didn't expect to see it with my own eyes."
Uzui, stripped of his precious twin swords, felt terribly unbalanced and more than a little put out. But he couldn't deny it—the kid's "shell you can't break, and in front of him you can't even draw," and to top it off, he used Sun Breathing—
It was more flamboyant than anything Uzui could wear.
"I think that's enough."
The heat rolled outward, curling the edges of tiles and coaxing sweat from brows. Just before it swallowed the little teru-teru bozu again, Roy slid his sword home.
Clack.
The blade shrank. The flames winked out and withdrew quietly into the scabbard.
Only then did he look around at them, still smiling. He didn't even raise his hand this time.
"Go back," he said.
Their Nichirin blades answered before they did. One by one they jerked loose from the wall and flew back, hilts slapping back into stunned hands.
"Amida Buddha," Himejima breathed. "Is that enough, everyone?"
Sanemi and Iguro said nothing.
At this point, the question was no longer whether Roy might be a burden to them, but whether they were going to be a burden to him.
The Ubuyashiki manor, after being torn up once again, slowly reclaimed its calm.
Inside the main hall, Kagaya asked Amane to bring everyone cushions. She walked over to Roy first with a formal bow.
"Please, sit."
Roy accepted without fuss, folding his legs and settling in, listening as Kagaya spoke of the recent movements of the Twelve Kizuki and the investigations underway.
Roy thought of the that "polite child" face Muzan had worn in Tokyo and said, "He's looking for me."
"You've seen Kibutsuji Muzan?"
Sanemi and Shinobu both snapped their heads his way.
Roy didn't answer immediately. He simply activated Deceit, and his body shrank and shifted. In a blink he was the very image of the child Muzan had used as a disguise.
The Pillars stared.
In the right-hand corner under the eaves, Sanemi's hand almost reached instinctively for his sword. For a heartbeat he thought he was facing a demon with some bizarre blood demon art.
Then his mind caught up—remembering whose hands this art was in, and the burning blade he'd just seen. Slowly, he forced his fingers off the hilt.
This was the Demon Slayer Corps' own stronghold, and the boy—very likely—was the user of the legendary Sun Breathing. He couldn't be a demon.
He looked sideways. Tomioka, Himejima, and Kagaya were all calm, as if they'd seen this trick before.
So Sanemi shut his mouth.
"I met him twice, a few days ago," Roy said.
Once through the Swamp Demon, once through the Eye Demon. Shifting his features fluidly, he cycled through the forms Muzan had shown him—
the elderly madam persona he'd used to haunt the red-light district in search of blue spider lilies—
the wealthy gentleman he'd worn when he first crossed paths with Tanjiro in the Tokyo streets—
the refined noble who would one day walk into the Ubuyashiki estate itself after being drawn out as bait.
Form after form after form. Even the three who'd already seen Deceit—Giyu, Himejima, Kagaya—couldn't help but think that if not for the very human scent clinging to Roy, even they might have mistaken him for a demon.
At last he let the shapeshifting fall away, returning to his own face.
"That's all the appearances I've seen of Kibutsuji Muzan," he said. "He's cunning and cowardly. If the Twelve Kizuki are moving, they've almost certainly been summoned to a meeting. And the topic of that meeting…"
He smiled.
"Is probably me."
Silence fell again.
"Master," Himejima said softly.
Kagaya sat kneeling on his cushion, pale eyes clouded and trembling faintly as he turned everything over in his mind. He listened in quiet for a moment, then began listing recent incidents.
"The Tokyo red-light district cannibal case.
The Kanagawa village massacre.
The Infinity Train disappearances…"
"Roy." He turned those milky eyes toward the boy. "You're right. Muzan is spinning a killing net to draw you in."
"That many?" Mitsuri's hand crept to her hair. "If it's an ambush, isn't one enough?"
Kagaya's voice stayed calm. "He's cunning. He'd never put all his eggs in one basket. If I'm right, each of these three traps will have at least one Upper Rank lying in wait—and probably…"
He paused, tone heavy.
"Not just one."
The air grew thick. The Demon Slayer Corps had slain many demons over the years, even clipped off a few Lower Ranks when fortune favored them. But as long as Kagaya had held the reins, not once—not in several generations—had they managed to kill a single Upper Rank.
That alone spoke volumes about how terrifying those demons really were.
For some here, the word Upper Rank had personal weight. Shinobu thought of Dōma and the Flower Pillar's death and had to force her breathing steady.
"Then we kill them all," Sanemi said bluntly.
Kagaya didn't look at him. His blind gaze stayed on Roy, as if waiting for something.
"That's fine too," Roy said lightly. "We'll start with the Infinity Train and kill them all."
And with that, he effectively brought the meeting to a close.
…
Later, as plans were laid and assignments quietly shifted, Roy turned his thoughts in another direction.
If he was going to build a religion in this world—if he was going to gather believers and faith under the sun—
then the first person he looked at was, naturally, Rengoku Kyōjurō.
~~~
Free Memberships in my Patreon Page! Just click the link and received the free memberships! Thank you Everyone!
Patreon(.)com/Bleam
— Currently You can Read 50 Chapters Ahead of Others!