"Demonstrate?"
Urokodaki looked at Marcus's hand and, though the mask hid it, he was surely smiling ironically.
"You want to demonstrate the form you just 'understood'?"
"Exactly!"
Marcus nodded with all the conviction in the world. His face was a mess, with marks from the struggle, grass in his hair, scratches, and what looked like Nezuko's drool on his neck.
But his expression was serious.
"Master, when you see it you're gonna know! I guarantee it! You're gonna get the scare of a lifetime!"
"..."
Urokodaki stared in silence for a long time.
This brat who had spent months without achieving absolutely anything... was telling him he had understood a form.
Any sensible person would have laughed.
But him, remembering that current of pink air...
"Hmph."
Snorting, he reached behind his lower back and drew his short sword.
"It better be true..." His tone turned stern. "If you dare mess with me, when we get back the training volume triples."
"I never lie!"
Taking it, Marcus jumped to his feet and weighed the sword, spinning it a couple of times.
The blade was quite a bit shorter than a normal Nichirin katana. Compact. Light. Easy to conceal, easy to draw quickly.
And it made sense if you thought about it. Urokodaki was retired. Walking around the mountain with a long sword hanging from his belt would be like going to the grocery store with a bazooka. But he couldn't exactly stroll around unarmed either.
Hence the short sword. Discreet. Practical. The weapon of an old man who's not looking for a fight anymore but if the fight finds him, he doesn't plan on losing it.
But Marcus didn't care if it was short, long, or medium. For what he was about to do, size didn't matter.
"Watch closely, master!" Turning around with a smile, he faced that temple demon's head still pinned to the tree by the hatchet.
And suddenly, four pairs of eyes turned toward the demon.
"..."
He blinked.
Oh. You finally remember I exist. How kind of you—Wait a moment.
Why was the kid from the ground looking at him like that?
Why did he have a sword?
WHY WAS HE SMILING?!
Bad feeling. VERY bad feeling.
Tanjiro, still planted in front of Nezuko with a sour face, couldn't help but have his attention pulled away. He was still furious, but Marcus's stance... There was something different about the way he was standing. He didn't seem like the same idiot from a minute ago.
Marcus inhaled deeply, from the very bottom of his lungs.
And as he did, the air that entered didn't feel like the Water Breathing Urokodaki had taught him.
None of that spring water freshness, none of that current. This was something else. This was something sweet, warm. Like the air on a summer night mixed with something more...
Between his mouth and nose, the pink airflow reappeared, but denser than before. More solid. More real.
He held the blade horizontally in front of him and with his left hand slowly caressed the edge.
"Breath of Desire..."
With his whisper, the pink flow shot from his mouth and nose and ran down his right arm like water flowing downhill, climbed up the handle, passed through the guard, and wrapped around the entire blade like a vine blooming in fast forward.
"First Form..."
Pink flames erupted over the blade, vibrating with a low hum that was felt more in the chest than in the ears.
And then they grew.
The blade, which barely measured 12 inches, disappeared under a thick layer of pink fire that stretched forward without stopping.
In one second, where before there had been a retiree's short sword, now there was a GIGANTIC blade made entirely of pink flames.
MORE THAN TEN METERS OF PURE BRILLIANT FIRE!
Vaguely maintaining the silhouette of a colossal Nichirin Sword.
Marcus raised it.
"...!!"
Words wouldn't come out of Urokodaki... He literally forgot how to speak.
"...??"
And Tanjiro's anger shut off instantly, replaced by an astonishment so great that he forgot that thirty seconds ago he wanted to kill him.
The pink glow painted the entire forest, and in the night sky, the blade shone like an aurora borealis. Absurdly beautiful.
And under that light, two things were illuminated with perfect clarity.
The demon's face, whose eyes had opened so wide they looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets. And Marcus's serious profile.
For the first time in eight months, he looked like a real warrior.
"NO! PLEASE, NO!!"
The demon's gut wrenching scream echoed through the entire forest, but Marcus simply gave him a little smile. "Heh. Too late, buddy."
"First Form: Valkyrie!"
Swish
And he moved.
No flourishes. No dramatic poses. None of that. Just the simplest, most direct, and most brutally violent movement that existed in any swordsman's repertoire.
A full force vertical slash.
The short blade, wrapped in that gigantic monstrosity of flames, came down with a momentum that looked like it was going to split the world in half.
The first thing to suffer was the tree.
The demon howled with his eyes rolling upward, straining to see what was coming.
And the next second, the blade cut through his brow, the bridge of his nose, his mouth...
"NOOO...!!!"
That was all he had time for: Half a Scream.
Then the blade finished its path and the head was split into two symmetrical halves and disintegrated.
The two halves turned to ash that floated in the air, and the temple demon, who had spent years terrorizing people, who just a while ago had been fighting two siblings... was gone. Just like that.
Tanjiro's hatchet, still embedded where the head had been, was also split in two.
Meanwhile, the giant blade didn't stop there.
The blade kept going down and cut through the tree trunk like it was butter. It cut through the next tree too and slammed into the ground like a meteor.
BOOOOM!
Dust. Dirt. Grass. Rocks. Everything went flying in every direction...
And when the dust settled, what was left was a brutal gash several meters long and six inches deep cutting across the ground like a scar.
The edges were blackened, scorched, smoking, while small pink flames still flickered here and there.
Crack...
Crack Crack Crack...
The split trees leaned slowly, and with dramatic slowness, they fell.
Boom!
They collapsed to both sides with a crash that shook the ground and probably scared every animal within half a kilometer.
"..."
Silence is what followed.
Urokodaki remained motionless.
...What kind of power was this!?
None of this made any sense!
He knew Marcus, he knew him FAR too well, and he knew exactly how much strength he had in his arms, in his legs, in every muscle of his body. And the force of that cut, the force he had just witnessed... was not something Marcus could generate.
Not even close.
Meaning, that giant flaming blade hadn't just extended the range of the attack, that alone was already impressive. But what was truly terrifying was the potency.
The raw power he had unleashed in that single cut!
That strength was far above that of a normal demon slayer, and in fact, that strength approached, vaguely... the level of a Pillar.
A HASHIRA.
Staring hard at Marcus, who wouldn't stop panting, not a single word came out of Urokodaki.
This kid... in the time he spent lying on the ground with a demon on top of him, he didn't just invent his own breathing technique... he created a form with potency approaching that of a Pillar!
HOW!?
Eight months unable to even inhale correctly and now THIS!?
What was that pink essence? What kind of breathing worked like this? Did anything similar exist? No. It didn't exist. He had never seen anything like it.
An uncomfortable thought crossed his mind... What if the problem was never Marcus?
What if it was him, Urokodaki, trying to force Water Breathing onto a boy whose path was something completely different? What if all this time he had been trying to teach a bird how to swim while the brat just needed to be allowed to fly?
What if this cup breaking, rice burning, ass grabbing idiot... had always been a genius?
Tanjiro, for his part, was experiencing what is technically known as a "brain blue screen."
Mouth open. Jaw on the floor. If he had been a cartoon, they would have drawn his eyes popping out of their sockets.
A human... a human could do that?
In ONE slash!? Split a tree that thick? And the one behind it too? AND CRACK OPEN THE GROUND!?
Was this possible for a human being? Because he was a human being, and he had barely survived a fight against a demon using a hatchet. And this guy shows up out of nowhere and does THIS?
Was he sure he wasn't a demon?
But while his worldview was cracking apart, something strange nagged at his brain.
The sword's blade getting bigger... a cut with monstrous force... it felt familiar.
Where had he seen that before...?
Two images overlapped in his head...
Marcus's giant blade and... Nezuko, his sister who had suddenly enlarged her body and kicked the demon's head clean off.
Turning his head sharply, he looked at her, blinking at the gash in the ground, and then at Marcus who had a smug expression on his face.
"COUGH... COUGH...!"
Coughing dryly, Marcus tried with all his might to look casual and not like someone who had just burned every last drop of energy in his body trying to show off.
He dissipated the last trace of pink essence from the sword and the blade returned to its normal size. As if nothing had happened.
And turning around, on his slightly pale face was a proud smile he couldn't hide.
"Master, how was that? I didn't lie to you, did I?" He handed the sword back to Urokodaki, who still looked like he had seen a ghost. "My Valkyrie move was pretty good, right?"
Without the slightest shame, he took full credit for the system's work.
"..."
Urokodaki took the sword back like an automaton, and the feeling of the slightly warm handle snapped him back to reality.
He looked down at the sword, then looked up at Marcus, and then looked again at the gash and the fallen trees...
And finally, after a silence so long that a turtle could have made it to the village and back, he squeezed out a few words:
"...Not bad."
But behind those dry little words, he was thinking something completely different.
This kid might truly be a monster.
'Tsk.'
Marcus kept a polite smile on the outside, but on the inside he was cursing with every word he had learned.
Tsundere old bastard. Incapable of giving a compliment. JUST ONE. Was it really that hard to say "well done, Marcus, I'm proud of you"? Was he going to break out in hives? Was his mask going to fall off? Eight months putting up with him, he shows him something incredible, and he gets a "not bad"? Typical. TYPICAL.
But just when he was about to open his mouth to complain—
The sky changed.
Dawn was breaking.
________
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