A few hours later, Kaigaku came to in a dark hospital room—and none of the clean, rested feeling of waking from genuine sleep came with it. His mind was still foggy, like he'd spent an entire night trapped inside a nightmare with no end. The dream itself was too strange, too fractured to hold onto. What stayed was a single thing: a monster's murmuring voice, somewhere in his skull, refusing to leave.
He closed his eyes, focused, breathed deep several times. His pulse steadied. Then he looked at his right hand.
Layer after layer of bandage. Medicine smell so sharp he could catch it without lowering his head.
The bandaged hand was still mostly numb—no sensation. A stab of dread he'd been pushing away made it through. His right hand was his sword hand. This could cripple his training permanently.
—Damn it.
—It was that waste of space's fault. If the idiot hadn't gotten himself struck by lightning playing the fool, he wouldn't have had to make this trip at all. No trip, no injury, no loss of the one hand that actually mattered.
...Then again—this was just a glorified clinic. Why were there so many strange people here? First there was Kanao—absurdly powerful for someone so young. And then that pink-haired woman wasn't normal in any way—everything about her felt fundamentally off.
—What exactly had that woman done to him?
Kaigaku sat on the bed, head in his hands, turning it over. The more he thought about it, the more his scalp crawled. Could a human being actually make something like that? A poisoned throwing blade, he could accept. But he knew his own wounds.
That had not been any kind of poison.
The sensation—the living feather blade with the eyeball. The wrongness of being pierced by it. The thousand-mosquito-bite eruption at the wound site all at once. Thinking about it carefully, quietly, from the beginning...
This was a demon, wasn't it?
Kaigaku's childhood wasn't something he let himself look at too closely. He'd survived on theft, drunk muddy water, and all of it had twisted him into what he was now. A kind young monk had taken him in once. He'd been chased off by the other children for stealing—and to get back at them, he'd waited until the monk was away and let a demon into the temple. Every last one of the children died. The monk was imprisoned—innocent, carrying someone else's sin.
Kaigaku had never felt a single moment of guilt. It had been, in his view, deeply satisfying.
This was how he'd first encountered demons, and eventually why he'd joined the Demon Slayer Corps. And now, thinking back: the wrongness he'd felt from that woman was exactly what he'd sensed from a demon back then. Identical.
But demons feared sunlight. Why could she move freely in it?
—No, that was nothing. This was the Butterfly Mansion—these people spent their days brewing God knows what kind of medicines. Sheltering a demon and developing a sunlight-resistance drug for her was not out of the question.
—Damn her. She crippled my most important hand. That pink-haired bitch... I'm going to kill her.
The resolve settled like ice in his chest. His eyes went cold and flat. He gripped the sheets with his left hand, jaw clenched.
He'd act. But his word alone wasn't enough to condemn Inori—he needed corroboration. He thought of one person: the sword-carrier he'd spoken to before intercepting Kanao. He'd played the concerned senior disciple back then, coaxed out the details of Zenitsu and Kanao's situation. If anyone here knew something useful, it was him.
Kaigaku ignored the pain in his right hand and slipped out of the ward.
The man was still where he'd last seen him, pushing a wide broom through a drift of fallen leaves.
"Oh! Zenitsu's senior, it's you."
Kaigaku arranged his face into his most guileless expression and explained that his hand had been cut passing through the bamboo grove. A few easy exchanges in that same unhurried tone—and then he changed tack.
"Say, friend—you know anything about that woman?"
"There are plenty of young ladies here. Which one?"
The swordsman looked about twenty. He didn't find anything suspicious about the question—injured men who got feelings for one of the girls here and came fishing for information were common enough. Most of them were just asking in passing.
"A woman with pink hair. Do you know her?"
"Hm? You mean Inori-san?"
The name rang a bell. He traced it back: the children doing laundry had mentioned it when he'd questioned them. He hadn't paid any attention at the time.
"Right, her. Is she... a member of the Corps?"
The swordsman's expression tightened. "Why are you asking... have you seen her?"
The reaction itself was answer enough. He knew exactly who Inori was—because that night, he'd been one of the dozen-odd soldiers who accompanied the Flower Hashira on the Lower Rank mission. He'd seen her with his own eyes at the end of it. She'd walked into sunlight without flinching, which was how she'd cleared herself of suspicion.
But the Flower Hashira had given them all a specific order: not a word about this to anyone. That explained everything about the way he was acting right now.
"Well." Kaigaku let something like longing arrange itself across his face. "A woman that beautiful—who wouldn't notice?"
Praising an enemy turned his stomach. But right now it was necessary.
"I don't know anything—she just appeared one day with Kanae-san. That's all I know. Really."
His repeated insistence on not knowing only had the opposite effect. The moment someone started stressing I know nothing over and over, Kaigaku knew they knew everything.
He was precisely the kind of person Jigoro Kuwajima had once seen merit in. He'd used the same cunning to conceal his true nature for years.
"I'm only curious—no need to be tense, friend." He smiled. "I'll make it worth your while."
He fished coins from his pocket and pressed them into the man's hand. The man looked down.
"...All right."
He licked dry lips and tucked the coins away. Once that much money was in your hand, nobody wanted to let it go. And in his mind, it wasn't a serious matter—just a senior who'd caught feelings for the new guest and was asking around. He'd share a little, bend the facts slightly. Nothing to it.
"About two weeks back, give or take. The Butterfly Mansion received a crow message—a Lower Rank demon had appeared in a mountain nearby. The Flower Hashira-sama led a team out to investigate. They came back reporting a successful kill, but they also brought Inori-san with them."
"A Lower Rank..."
—Twelve Kizuki!
Kaigaku murmured under his breath. Despite himself, a smile started pulling at his face.
"That's all I know. Please stop asking."
"Oh?" Kaigaku pressed. "Could there be some connection between Inori-san and that Lower Rank?"
A single phrase—and the swordsman's composure evaporated.
"There's no connection! Stop imagining things." He was tripping over himself now, denying too fast, too loudly. Then he seemed to hear himself and tried to paper over it: "Demons fear sunlight—how could Inori-san possibly be a demon? You're being ridiculous, haha—"
He'd as good as announced what he knew.
"You're right—sorry. Just talking."
Kaigaku smiled. Let it go there.
—This was enough. He was certain: this man knew the full truth. The pressure from above was keeping him quiet. But the moment Kaigaku could engineer a public confrontation and drag him into the open—this man would give up everything.