Horseback riding. Nothing strange about that on its own.
But a girl named JOJO, riding horses in the late nineteenth century, with an English noble for a father—that was a different matter entirely. Inori had a suspicion forming, but it was too early to draw conclusions, and she had no way to explain her reasoning to Mana.
"Once things settle down, I'm going to that sea of memories myself."
She had made up her mind. She needed to verify those memories with her own eyes, because she carried something no one else in this situation could claim—the plot knowledge of someone who had crossed into this story from the outside. There might be details Mana simply wasn't equipped to notice.
"You don't need to. I can handle it perfectly well. Or do you not trust me?"
Mana hadn't the faintest idea what Inori was actually thinking. She took it as a slight against her own powers of observation, and her expression curdled accordingly.
"There are things I can only grasp by seeing them myself. It's not what you think, Mana."
"...Fine." Mana conceded with a small nod. "In that case, you should know—you'll probably fall into a prolonged state of unconsciousness. Once you enter that world, you can't turn back halfway. If you do, you'll return to square one."
Inori's brow furrowed slightly. She had already anticipated this. It was like the setup in Inception—some memories were buried deep in the furthest reaches of the mind, and the deeper you dove, the more dangerous it became. Time itself grew slippery, its meaning dissolving the further down you went.
The whole thing was like one of those vertical-scrolling games. Quit in the middle and you got sent back to the start. Which meant that once Inori entered that state, she would be completely cut off from anything happening in the outside world—unable to sense it, unable to respond. For a stretch of time, she would be entirely without her guard up.
She had already dealt with the biggest threat—Kibutsuji Muzan—but that didn't mean she could afford to relax. The situation inside the Infinity Castle was still unstable. Those Upper Rank demons were all smiles to her face, and who knew what calculations were running behind those pleasant expressions. Better to shelve the plan for now.
"Maybe you could try relying on me~"
Mana watched Inori sink into that focused, deliberate silence and ventured a suggestion.
"What do you mean...?"
"We swap positions."
She put her hands behind her back, shifting her weight with a trace of embarrassment.
"You're saying you'd hold onto this body for me in the meantime?"
Mana gave a careful little nod. She seemed nervous, but the anticipation underneath it was plain enough—this was an enormous challenge for her, but maybe something like a gift as well.
It had been this way ever since Lost Christmas. Mana's physical body had died, and from that day forward, apart from the rare moments Inori felt like indulging her and handed over the reins for a little while, Mana had existed purely as a soul. No one outside this body knew she was here. Nothing she said or did could leave any mark on the real world. Day after day, year after year, she stayed inside this dark, solitary cell—watching Inori's life play out through borrowed eyes, feeling the ripples of Inori's emotions from a distance.
In some sense, Mana had become an ornament.
"Right now we can't switch as freely as we used to. The Stand's changes have locked my soul in place."
Inori had tried before—letting Mana take over to break free of the Nameless Monster's binding—but it hadn't worked. Maybe the only way, as Mana had suggested, was to sink deep enough into the dark sea of the soul that both her consciousness and the Nameless Monster could be sealed away together.
"If you're going to take my place, Mana... that means you'd be living in this world on your own, as a human, without me."
Yes. It would mean she could no longer play Demon King—because she would have finally shed the monster's skin. That part, Inori wasn't worried about. The demons had no strict chain of command, no proper bureaucracy to speak of. She could hole up in the Infinity Castle for weeks, months even, and no one would start asking inconvenient questions.
What concerned her was something else. A human's scent, inside the Infinity Castle—it was practically the deadliest lure imaginable to the creatures that lived there. Especially the Upper Ranks. If they found Mana while Inori was too deep under to surface, the consequences didn't bear thinking about.
She couldn't leave Mana in the Infinity Castle. But was the outside world actually safe?
"You've seen it yourself." Inori's expression was serious, her voice measured and careful. "This world is nothing like the peaceful eras we've passed through before. It isn't just a matter of disorder—every night out there, man-eating demons roam in the dark. Tragedy isn't an exception here. It's the daily rule. And you know... what you'd be walking into is a far more direct threat than anything we've faced before."
People said that the hearts of men were more terrifying than any demon. Inori didn't want to imagine what this world would look like without the Demon Slayer Corps—or worse, if the Corps turned out to be some corrupt organization serving its own ugly ends, like the Organization in Claymore. How dark and suffocating it would all become.
But as it happened, the Ubuyashiki family's descendants had not been warped by the sins that clung to their bloodline, nor seduced into becoming the very demons they hunted by some pull toward "perfect beings." That was the whole point Demon Slayer was trying to make—the idea of inheritance. Conviction passed down generation after generation, handed off like a flame, until one day it finally bore fruit.
Only the fruit they'd been reaching for all these centuries had been plucked by Inori, without so much as a warning. She had cut through their millennium of enmity and hatred in one careless stroke.
"Relax. I'm not that fragile."
Mana understood that the worry was for her safety, and something warm moved through her. She reached up and gave Inori's soft cheek a gentle pat.
"I should be doing something for the person I care about, shouldn't I? So go. Look for what you need to find. Don't look back—don't hold yourself back by worrying about me. Leave the real world to me."
Her voice was gentle, but there was a firmness beneath it. A certainty.
Inori didn't dismiss it. She shouldn't. Mana was not an ordinary girl, and treating her as one would be a mistake. There was a kind of strength inside Mana that brooked no argument—she had once stood alone against the will of an entire world, the biological imperative of evolution itself, a mortal body raised in defiance of something divine. Her resolve was not lesser than Inori's.
And her power was real. That Void Greatsword was hers. Inori had no idea how effective it would be against demons—but if it could suppress their regeneration, all the better.
"I've already gotten what I wanted," Mana said quietly. "So... there's nothing left for me to be afraid of."
—?
Inori's heart skipped, just by a fraction of a beat. Even she couldn't say why. But something in those words set off a low, wordless alarm—the feeling of a flag being planted in the wrong place.
"...Let me prepare first. There's no rush."
"Yes! I'm ready whenever you are, Inori!"
Mana was thrilled. Genuinely, visibly thrilled—the prospect of finally stepping out of the role of passive observer, of ceasing to drift through existence like a ghost, was enough to light her whole face. A borrowed body. Temporary. But already more than she'd dared to hope for.
...
...
Inori surfaced back into reality. She was still lying in the same sealed room in the Infinity Castle, the air carrying the faint drift of sandalwood from the incense burner, the flame still going. But her body had changed in subtle ways—temperature elevated, and there was a faint, moist warmth somewhere that had no business being there.
Inori's cheeks went red. The mixture of shame and something she couldn't quite classify came rushing in at once.
—So I look like I just finished doing something with my hands. Please tell me my actual body wasn't out here doing any kind of "self-exploration" while I was in there.
Impossible.
She shook her head and dismissed the thought. Whatever that had been—it was all sensation generated by two souls in contact, psychic resonance bleeding over into the physical. Not real. No different from how thinking about something delicious makes you hungry.
Yes. Exactly like that.
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