Though she had long harbored suspicions, long guessed that the Demon God Nakai Shinji, whom she had striven so tirelessly to court and ally with, was the contingency her teacher had left behind for her.
Nn this moment, Imagawa Yoshimoto knelt upon the mud and lifted her head to gaze at that gray silhouette. Her heartbeat still thundered in her ears. It was the pounding of one delivered from certain death. The pounding of one who had glimpsed a thread of salvation in the darkness. And even more, it was an inexplicable sense of fulfillment. And joy.
He had come. He had truly come to save her. She stared at him, utterly motionless. She watched his gray robes flutter gently in the heated wind left behind by the vanished lightning. His white hair hung down to his waist. His right hand gripped that colossal pale greatsword, which matched his own height.
His shoulders were broad, but his frame was not, in truth, overwhelmingly massive. He was simply very upright. But it was this silhouette, this silhouette alone, that had placed itself between her and death. Completely. Utterly. This feeling... was truly… so reassuring. Profoundly, immeasurably reassuring.
Ahead, Shibata Katsuie finally steadied her startled warhorse. The black horse circled twice over the shattered earth. With one hand, she wrenched the reins. With the other, she hefted her great axe back onto her shoulder. Her amber eyes locked dead onto the newcomer who had suddenly appeared.
Banryū's pale blade, faintly bleeding dark violet yōki, was reflected in her pupils. She saw what flowed along that sword. Yōki. Yōki so dense it was nearly tangible. Wrapped in impure energy and osore.
Heavy as a mountain driven straight into the earth. That weight, was far heavier than the weight of the divine-buddha power clinging to her own great axe.
"You are—" She was about to demand who he was. But Shinji had already moved. No extraneous opening. The Lightning-Sinewed Body instantly surged to its maximum.
The soil beneath his feet detonated. His entire form became a violet-white blur, charging directly toward the mounted Shibata Katsuie. Banryū, gripped in his right hand, dragged along the ground as he accelerated. The pale blade plowed through the earth like a blade through paper, carving a trench three shaku wide in its wake.
Katsuie's reaction was blindingly fast. Her great axe swept down from her shoulder. The blade-light slashed horizontally. The air within a 30 meters radius was crushed into visible, distorted ripples.
A single strike, amplified by the power of gods and buddhas. It could shatter mundane iron. It could split the very earth. It could cleave an ordinary samurai, armor and all, clean in two. But Banryū rose to meet it.
The pale blade and the gray-iron axe-light collided in midair. BOOM.
This time, there was sound. A deep, muffled roar, as though mountains had crashed together. The shockwave exploded outward from the point of collision. The mud beneath their feet fractured into a web of cracks. Shattered stone and withered grass for ten paces in every direction were hurled into the air by the blast wave.
The weight of divine-buddha power crashed against the absolute mass of yōki condensed within Banryū. Faith suppressed the supernatural, but what Banryū carried was not merely the supernatural. It also carried pure, physical weight.
The strength of Shinji, doubled by the Valor Talent at thirty Affection, combined with the mass amplification from the death-energy and grudges Banryū had accumulated through the Hundred-Man Slaying and Thousand-Demon Slaying.
The result of these two weights colliding head-on was beyond all doubt. Shibata Katsuie's great axe was hurled back. Brutally. Head-on. Overwhelmed by a greater weight and smashed back in the opposite direction.
The gray-iron axe-blade scraped across Banryū's blade with an ear-splitting shriek of tearing metal. Then the entire arm Katsuie held the axe with went numb from the shock. The web of her hand split open. Blood streamed down. The great axe flew from her grip, spinning end over end into the air.
She herself, along with the warhorse beneath her, was nearly sent hurtling backward into the sky. And Banryū's residual force had not yet ceased. And this was still Shinji not exerting his true strength. The moment Banryū had deflected the axe, his left hand drew Onikiri.
The dark crimson blade-light slashed upward from below, wrapped in the searing heat of the Blood-Fire Transformation, aimed directly at Katsuie's flank.
Katsuie tried to parry with her bare hands, but she was a step too slow. The tip of Onikiri tore across the side of her breastplate. The silver armor split like paper, and the battle-dress beneath was also torn. Blood sprayed. Not deep. But painful enough.
"—!"
Katsuie let out a muffled grunt. Her body lurched violently backward on the horse. Shinji still gave her not a shred of room to breathe. Banryū swept horizontally in a backhand slash.
The pale blade, wrapped in yōki so dense it warped the very air, sheared across the warhorse's front legs. The black horse screamed in agony. Its front knees buckled.
Shibata Katsuie was thrown from the saddle. She caught herself with her bare hands, barely preventing a full collapse. She knelt on one knee amidst the shattered stone. Her amber eyes glared at the gray figure before her.
"You—" The words never finished.
Shinji's Onikiri was already pressed against her throat. From the first clash to the final blow, not even a single full exchange. The dark crimson cutting edge hovered less than an inch from her skin.
The searing heat of the Blood-Fire Transformation curled the fine hairs on the side of her neck in an instant. She could feel what lay upon that blade. Still yōki. Still yōki so dense it was nearly tangible. And further away, that colossal pale greatsword he had casually thrust into the ground was still humming.
A deep, low-frequency hum. Like a mountain breathing. That thing had just smashed aside her divine-artifact power in a direct, head-on collision. No trickery. Absolutely no mere elemental counter. It had used pure, absolute weight to reverse-suppress the weight of faith.
"Such… a powerful yōkai…" Shibata Katsuie gritted her teeth. Sweat dripped from her brow onto the blade's edge and vaporized with a hiss. From the moment Banryū's absolute mass had deflected her great axe, to the moment Onikiri's yōki had torn through her armor, three seconds.
In a true battle, this hadn't even been half an exchange. Utter domination. Complete and absolute. Yet her divine-artifact power was by no means weak. Placed among the forces of any daimyō in the land, even counting the likes of Takeda and Uesugi, she would be considered elite among elites.
Even across the entire Warring States era, counting all the yōkai, Shibata Katsuie was no weakling. It was simply that the being before her was far, far too strong. A yōkai body, wielding a demon-artifact blade. Countering weight with weight. Defeating her head-on.
Now, Onikiri pressed against her throat. Katsuie clenched her fists in bitter unwillingness, yet she did not move a single inch. She knew, if she moved, she would die.
Shinji lowered his demonic gaze. He was just about to speak. Hoofbeats. From the far side of the northeastern hills, the dense thunder of hooves rang out once more. Another company. Fewer in number, barely a dozen riders. But the presence of the one who rode at their head, made Shinji's pupils contract violently.
It was not the power of a divine artifact. It was not yōki. It was not even reiryoku. It was something he had personally experienced before, yet something entirely different.
It was the power of gods and buddhas, similar to the Bishamonten force carried by Uesugi Kenshin, yet different. The power of a divine artifact's origin. What met his eyes was hellfire. A crimson lotus of infernal flame cascaded down from the crest of the hill, like a colossal beast awakened, its jaws agape.
The very air seemed to burn. Yes, seemed to. That fire was no true flame. It held no heat. No smoke. Yet it sent every single one of Shinji's five senses screaming the highest-level alarm. And yet, to call it mere illusion felt wrong. Because his Shura Heart pulsed.
It pulsed, truly and undeniably. That projection of a heart, forged from the fusion of blood and fire within the Shura Form, at the sensation of that crimson lotus hellfire, stirred. As though it had encountered kin. As though it had met its natural predator. This was, the power of the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven.
Shinji, of course, knew precisely what he was facing. He had already investigated. The opponent Imagawa Yoshimoto confronted this time was none other than the figure who, in later ages, would be known with infamy as Oda Nobunaga.
In this world, named Oda Nobuna. The protagonist of Oda Nobuna's Ambition! And Oda Nobunaga had proclaimed herself the incarnation of the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven. That was Māra. The sovereign of Takejizai-ten. The existence recorded in the Buddhist scriptures as the adversary of Shakyamuni himself.
The embodiment of desire. The very source of destruction. The king of the highest realm of the demonic path across all three realms and six paths of existence.
It was a power utterly and completely the polar opposite of Bishamonten. Pure Ma. An existence that dwelled on the same plane as gods and buddhas, yet stood in absolute opposition to them. Symbiotic with faith. A power condensed from desire itself.
In that single instant, Shinji did not hesitate for even a fraction of a breath. Onikiri withdrew from Shibata Katsuie's throat. He had fought against the incarnation of Bishamonten, Uesugi Kenshin. He had tasted the power of the Dragon of Echigo.
Even disregarding its suppressive properties, that opponent had already been comparable to an Eighth Transformation yōkai. Add the suppression, and even as he was now, he would still go all out. He would still respond with the utmost caution.
Thus, in that moment, the Shura Form erupted outward from his body. Bone spurs shot up from his elbows, shoulders, and spine. Thunder flooded the gaps, condensing into flesh.
The yōki membrane wrapped the outer shell. A six-meter-tall Bone Thunder Shura rose from the earth. Four viscera resonated as one. Heart-Fire blazed. Kidney-Water descended. Lung-Metal purified. Liver-Wood unfurled. A nearly closed circuit formed within the Shura Form.
Though the link of Spleen-Earth was still missing and yōki continued to leak, the sheer total volume of yōki generated in that single instant directly approached, even brushed against, the threshold of the Twelfth Transformation.
Yōki was demonic power. It was the impure energy precipitated from a yōkai's physical body. The very source of a demon's strength. In that split second, the sheer density of the roiling impure energy made every soul in the vicinity recoil in abject terror.
The Shura Form's right palm instantly projected and amplified Onikiri. A colossal dark crimson blade coalesced within its skeletal grip. The left palm projected Yomi-giri. The ghostly violet Nichirin Blade solidified into tangible form, filled with the surge of thunder. Twin blades, drawn simultaneously.
Onikiri in the right hand, wreathed in Blood-Fire. Yomi-giri in the left, cloaked in the Demon's Breath. Dark crimson and ghostly violet intersected before the Shura Form's chest. Under the guidance of his Extreme Will, the two forces compressed, spiraled, fused, and overflowed.
At that very moment, the crimson lotus hellfire from the hilltop had already swept down. The leading rider burst into view. Not tall. Mounted upon a fiery red warhorse.
She wore a loose, deep crimson kosode under a black short-haori. Her golden hair streamed behind her like a blazing war-banner in the light of the hellfire. Her face was exceedingly young.
A girl of fifteen or sixteen. Her features were almost unnervingly exquisite. But the color of her eyes was wrong. Gold. And blazing. True flames, born from the same source as that crimson lotus hellfire.
Shinji saw her face clearly. He identified the origin of that hellfire presence cascading from the hill. The knowledge of a transmigrator overlaid the image before his eyes. But he had no time to think. Because that hellfire had already reached him.
The Shura Form crossed its arms. The power of fused Sun and Moon blazed upon the twin cutting edges. A single vertical slash. Carrying with it, Extreme Will: Cloud-Severing. The earth was split apart. The clouds in the sky above were cleaved asunder.
A blade-light woven of dark crimson and silver-white split the heavens as it slashed down before the Shura Form's colossal body. It tore through the curtain of crimson lotus hellfire. The blade's edge struck straight for that golden-haired figure on horseback. It landed. Cleanly. Decisively. The blade-light entered at the left shoulder and exited at the right hip.
That golden-haired figure, along with the fiery red warhorse beneath her, was hurled from the saddle by the force of the fused Sun-Moon strike. A mist of blood exploded into the air. Her body tumbled twice through the sky and smashed into the slope of the hill, carving a long trench through the soil.
The hellfire, the moment it was severed, dissipated entirely. Like foam. Like a phantasmagoric nightmare. Once woken, nothing remained.
The Shura Form stood rooted where it was. The arms of the six-meter Bone Thunder Shura were still locked in the posture of that cleaving strike. Inside the skeletal framework, Shinji himself blinked in bewilderment.
That hellfire, just moments ago, the oppressive terror it had radiated was so horrifying that he had reflexively unfurled the Shura Form, maxed out his four viscera, and even deployed the fused Sun-Moon strike. And the result?
A single slash had sent her crashing down. Even if this strike could be considered near his full strength, it was only his full strength under normal parameters. It was far from his absolute limit.
Amidst this, Shinji lowered his gaze. At the far end of the earthen trench gouged into the hillside, the golden-haired girl's body lay crookedly wedged among the shattered stones.
Blood poured from the diagonal gash stretching from her left shoulder to her right hip, dyeing her deep crimson kosode an even deeper shade of red. That crimson lotus hellfire had truly, completely vanished. The air had returned to normal. The Shura Heart no longer resonated. Everything was still. The enemy, it seemed, was also dead.
Shinji: "…?"
That's it?