Inori launched six Red Feather Blades in a single instant.
A probe, nothing more. She understood that after a thousand years as Demon King, Muzan's strength couldn't be anything but extreme — and she'd already filed him under the same category as Kars before throwing the first strike. She needed to force his real abilities out into the open.
Six blades. No dead angles. Unless Muzan had something like her Epitaph, he'd eat at least one hit no matter which direction he moved.
But he wasn't an ordinary demon. He was Muzan.
In the next second, Inori's eyes went wide.
Facing six Feather Blades bearing down from every direction — above, below, left, right, and both flanks — Kibutsuji Muzan simply stood his ground, and twisted his body into something that defied every principle of human anatomy. It was more absurd than any JoJo pose she'd ever witnessed. His left elbow wrenched outward at an angle that had no business existing, and he slipped cleanly between every single blade.
He snapped himself back into position, drove off the ground with explosive force, cleared the encirclement, then executed a high-difficulty mid-air maneuver, planting one foot on a passing Feather Blade and launching himself off it in a second jump. He came straight for Inori.
She had to admit his speed was worthy of the Demon King title. Unfortunately, she'd clashed with Kujo Jotaro. Compared to Star Platinum, this was pitifully weak.
He was reading her as a ranged type. His plan: close the gap and end it.
"Hmph."
Inori saw through him completely. She smiled, cold and brief, and twisted her wrist. The Feather Blades he'd dodged snapped into reverse and rocketed back, six blades angled directly for his back.
—?
The overcast sky split open as the wind pushed the clouds apart. Sudden moonlight filled the clearing, and in that light Inori saw Kibutsuji Muzan's face clearly for the first time.
Blue veins stood out sharply against skin as pale as a vampire's. His eyes were dense with crimson, like broken spider's webs.
He saw her hands move. He heard the air part. Without a word he spun, and his right arm swelled in an eyeblink, exploding into a massive, grotesque mass of flesh. He swung it like a whip, and every one of Inori's Feather Blades stopped dead.
She felt them anchor into the pulsing mass, drive in deep, and hold. However much she pushed, they wouldn't advance another millimeter.
The elegant salaryman image was gone.
"Oh — you can make your body expand?"
Inori nodded, looking satisfied.
One ability accounted for. Keep it coming. Show me what else you have, Kibutsuji Muzan.
He was no combat slouch — she had to give him that. A thousand years of surviving wars and nemeses had made his instincts sharp. He might loathe fighting, but his combat awareness wasn't weak.
"..."
Muzan stared at her in cold silence.
He was about to let his arm return to normal — when something wrong cut through the sensation of total control. A strange paralysis, spreading from the pulsing mass of his right arm, from the exact spots where those blades had buried themselves. It moved through his flesh like Wisteria Poison.
This wasn't right.
Muzan's sensitivity to blood far surpassed any being alive. He identified the source immediately: the Feather Blades embedded in his flesh were leaking something. Inori's blood — her Blood Toxin, flowing directly from the blades into his flesh.
But this was not what he'd imagined.
When Muzan's blood entered a human body, it was like a drop of plasma into a glass of clear water — spreading instantly, staining everything red, and the human became a demon. He had assumed Inori was a random mutation, a demon born with some spontaneous immunity to sunlight. He'd been wrong.
She was something entirely different. Not a demon. Not human. An unknown existence, more powerful than either.
He'd thought he was the drop. He'd thought she was the waiting water. He had just discovered he was the water — and the Tainted Blood on her Feather Blades was already eating through him.
—This will compromise the whole body if it continues.
Kibutsuji Muzan made his decision with characteristic speed and absolute ruthlessness. He separated — severed the bloated arm outright and forced it free. The contaminated mass of flesh hit the ground and began to shrivel and blacken, life leaving it in seconds.
He stared at the withered remains. Cold sweat broke across his forehead.
He was afraid.
"What... are you?"
He forced the trembling back, turned to face her with effort. His right shoulder ended in nothing. The blood-soaked sleeve hung in tatters, drifting in the wind.
"I've told many people this. I'm not a demon, and I'm not human."
Beneath the moon, the pink-haired woman's smile was breathtaking — and cold enough to chill anyone who looked at it directly.
"That's impossible!"
Muzan snapped it out loud, using the volume to cover the fear underneath.
"Then what are you, Muzan?"
She asked it the way someone might ask for directions.
"I am—"
The words stopped.
He had no answer.
A hollow wind moved through the mountain trees, brushing a whisper of dead leaves across the silence. For a moment the world held only the two of them.
—I am, of course, a demon.
That was the simplest, most direct answer. But no one had ever asked him this question before — what, exactly, am I — and in the instant of it, his mind reached back past a thousand years, pulling up the face of a boy in the Heian Period. A human boy. Himself.
He'd been sickly his entire childhood. To survive, he'd sought out a renowned physician, who prepared a medicine to extend his life. But the drug's side effects felt like his condition worsening — so he'd killed the doctor.
Later he discovered the drug had worked. His illness was gone. His body was harder and stronger than any human's. But it also craved flesh and blood, and sunlight became agony. He became something inhuman, and over time he killed more and more. People began calling him a demon. At first he'd found it beneath his notice. With enough repetitions, the name had settled.
But was he truly a demon? Not exactly. Even he had never fully known what he became after swallowing that drug.
"You too... are..."
It finally landed.
She was like him — an unknown creature that, for reasons of its own, could no longer be human. There were others in this world with Tainted Blood, beyond himself. She wasn't a mutant demon. She was another Muzan.
"This is a trial."
The woman — extraordinary in both beauty and bearing — began to do something unexpected. She reached for her obi and loosened it, let her haori fall, worked through each cord and tie until her outer garments slid free and pooled at her feet. Then, under Muzan's bewildered gaze, she shed the rest.
But beneath was not the body of a girl.
Layered across her skin, gradually rousing from sleep — was the Nameless Monster.
"I believe this is a trial. One where I find the self I've lost... and overcome the past. That's what this is for you, too — isn't it?"
"Kibutsuji Muzan."