In the clearing not far from the summit of Fujikasane Mountain, nearly every demon on the mountain had gathered.
The three leading them, the Spider Demon, the Jumping Demon, and the Three-Headed Demon, were sharper than the ordinary demons, and each had its own physical edge.
With Cold Cry holding the Three-Headed Demon back, the Contestants were finally free to fight without looking over their shoulders. They shook off the fear and despair that had been dragging on them, joined forces against the rest of the demons, and slowly started turning the fight around.
Noe still couldn't bring herself to kill cleanly. She knew, in her head, that these things weren't human anymore. She'd steeled herself to take their heads off. But her hand shook every single time she raised the blade.
The two demons watching from the hillside finally moved.
Noe's heart climbed into her throat, and Kimura and Akino's did the same. Cold Cry had told them not to interfere if the two demons went for him, only to hold them back if they turned on the Contestants instead.
But could the three of them actually hold two demons like that?
And if the demons went for Cold Cry instead, that meant he'd be fighting three at once, alone. Could he really take on all three combined?
Cold Cry was the team's only real hope now. If he went down, so did everyone else. Was it really right to just stand back?
None of the three said a word, but they were thinking the same thing. None of them could decide what to do, so for now they held to what he'd told them.
Maybe Cold Cry really did have what it took to face all three. He'd sounded sure enough.
That's what Kimura and Akino told themselves. Noe wasn't so sure. She knew he was strong; she just didn't know if he was strong enough for three demons at once.
Maybe the two demons were still nursing a grudge over the wounds he'd already given them. They tore down from the hillside, ignored the Contestants entirely, and went straight for Cold Cry.
"Cold Cry, watch out! They're coming for you!"
He was still in the middle of fending off the Three-Headed Demon when Noe's warning reached him from behind. Before the words even finished, he felt the temperature shift inside his Cold Tide off to one side, up and behind him.
He almost smiled. He'd guessed right. Turning into a demon didn't just dull the mind; it sharpened whatever was already there, until instinct ran the show completely. Even something as small as a grudge got amplified into an obsession.
He swung his blade to knock aside a fist from the Three-Headed Demon. In the same instant, the Jumping Demon's foot came at the back of his skull. He froze a sheet of ice under his feet, dropped backward to a forty-five-degree lean, and used the ice to slide clear. He needed distance from the Three-Headed Demon, now.
That was when the Spider Demon, which had crept in behind him unnoticed, launched itself off the ground straight at the back of his neck.
The pincer Jumping Demon high, Spider Demon low was near-perfectly timed.
He'd already seen this kind of trick from them. He held his blade flat across his chest, and as the two demons closed in from both sides, he wrenched his hips around and let the motion carry his whole body into a spin.
The blade caught the Spider Demon across the chest and stomach on the way around, then opened a line across the Jumping Demon's calf.
Cold Cry spun out of the pincer like a small storm of wind and snow and landed, steady, a few meters clear of all three demons. His white haori snapped in the wind, and the wisteria stitched into it looked, for a second, almost alive.
The three watching from the crowd could only stare. Any one of them, caught in that spot, would have ended up with a caved-in skull or a torn-out throat.
There was something else that didn't add up, too. Noe had shouted the warning in time, sure, but how had he judged the exact direction and timing of two attacks he never even turned to look at?
Whatever the answer, watching him walk away from certain death like that had everyone's blood up.
Once it was clear he could handle all three at once, Noe, Kimura, and Akino let out a breath and turned back to help clear the ordinary demons.
With Cold Cry pinning down the big three, the rest was only a matter of time.
The Jumping Demon, the Spider Demon, and the Three-Headed Demon regrouped.
The two frost wounds on the Spider Demon's chest still gave off cold air. The Jumping Demon had a cut on its right calf too, but its muscle ran denser, so the wound sat shallower, and the ice was already melting fast, the gash closing behind it.
Behind them, the Three-Headed Demon's two heads and one face let out a mess of furious, garbled sounds, its six arms a mess of frozen cuts.
Then, as something had snapped, it began tearing at itself, ripping the frost-damaged arms clean off its own body. New ones grew back from the stumps almost as fast.
It stunned everyone who saw it.
Cold Cry glanced toward the group still fighting nearby and decided it was time to press the advantage.
If he couldn't keep all three pinned down, they'd break off and go after the Contestants, and the nerve everyone had just clawed back would collapse all over again.
"Ice Breathing, Fusion Technique: Phantom Shattering Drizzle."
It was an area technique built from two forms: Third Form, Shattering Drizzle, and Sixth Form, Phantom.
Phantom closed the distance fast and threw down footholds everywhere as it moved. Shattering Drizzle fired from each one. Together, a single-target strike became a wall of attacks with nowhere left to run.
Cold Cry blurred, and in an instant, he seemed to be standing on every side of the three demons at once. All his images brought their blades down together, and ice spikes tore in from every direction at the demons caught in the middle.
Just seeing him appear on all sides had already rattled them. The spikes coming in on top of that pushed it into outright panic.
The Spider Demon and the Three-Headed Demon both let out ragged, furious roars.
The Three-Headed Demon's six arms kept stretching, winding around its own bulk, clearly trying to wrap its whole body in a shell of its own limbs.
The Spider Demon spun in place, panicking, trying to dig itself under the ground with its small frame, but ice spikes were coming up out of the earth too. At the last second, it spotted the Three-Headed Demon beside it and dove under its body instead.
The Jumping Demon just leapt straight up into the air.
Every spike meant for the Three-Headed Demon buried itself in the arms it had wrapped around its own torso, driving deep and freezing solid against the limbs.
Cold Cry's plan had been to catch all three off guard with Phantom Shattering Drizzle, then adjust on the fly depending on how they scattered.
He hadn't planned on the Three-Headed Demon curling itself up like a dumpling. That killed the follow-up he'd already lined up; slashing at arms that could just tear off themselves wasn't going to do much of anything.