Chapter 127: A Force of Two Hundred Against Three Thousand
Kikyo's fingers were still pressed against the back of his hand. The soft, delicate sensation seemed to travel through his skin and seep into his very bones, but Hikaru had no time to linger on this fleeting warmth.
His crimson Oni eyes stared north, his mind already a whirlwind of calculations.
Uesugi Kenshin had come alone, a gesture of courtesy before the inevitable application of force. She had departed just as calmly after her offer was refused. But the three-thousand-strong army she commanded was stationed at a mountain pass a hundred miles away.
If he simply waited for her to walk back… at a normal marching pace, they could reorganize their troops at dawn and descend upon Kaede Village by the following morning.
Three thousand soldiers.
This was a threat on an entirely different scale from the thousand men they had faced before.
The only reason he had managed to behead Kakizaki Kageie with a single strike was due to the vast disparity in their strength, but that victory had been a confluence of fortunate circumstances. The enemy had underestimated him, failing to order a full charge from the outset. He had relied on the explosive burst of his Thunder Muscle Transformation to seize the initiative. Most, the Dragon of Echigo had not yet known the true extent of his capabilities.
This time, however, the enemy was fully aware of his combat strength.
, Uesugi Kenshin had declared that the next time she came, she would bring all her divine artifacts. In other words, her army was certain to contain multiple warriors wielding the power of these so-called reincarnated artifacts, likely serving as commanders.
If he and Kikyo waited for the enemy to regroup and attack, defending passively from Kaede Village… even if they could somehow win, the village itself would be lost. The two young shrine maidens, Momiji and Botan, were not even qualified to step onto such a battlefield. Their paper shikigami were effective for exorcising demons, and their individual spiritual power was not weak, but they were utterly unsuited for the brutal reality of war. Every trade has its specialty, and mass combat was clearly not theirs.
Therefore, he could not wait.
"Kikyo," Hikaru's voice was low. "Guard the village. I'm going out for a bit."
Kikyo withdrew her fingers, her jet-black eyes meeting his. She did not ask where he was going.
She already knew.
"You're not waiting for dawn?"
"If I wait for dawn, it will be too late." Hikaru raised a hand, once again covering his face with the Crimson Oni Mask. The night wind caught his long, pale hair, lifting it like a spectral banner. "Uesugi Kenshin is taking the mountain path. She is powerful, but she is ultimately human. I can command lightning—in terms of sheer speed, I am faster."
"I must reach her army camp before she returns."
"And then…"
He did not finish the sentence, but Kikyo understood completely.
She did not try to stop him. She only gripped the longbow in her hand a little tighter, her knuckles turning white.
"Be careful." A single phrase, heavy with unspoken meaning.
"I'll be back." A single promise.
Hikaru gave a sharp nod.
The next instant, his Thunder Muscle Transformation ignited.
Vicious arcs of purple lightning exploded from his body. His figure dissolved into a bolt of pure electricity, launching from the stone slab before the torii gate and streaking toward the northern horizon.
But he did not charge directly toward the enemy encampment.
Instead, he first veered west.
Because he needed an army. His own army.
North of Kaede Village, nestled between rolling hills and shadowed valleys, lay a forgotten battlefield. Several months ago, this land had been soaked in blood. The frontline skirmishes between the Imagawa and Hojo clans, the sweeping raids during Echigo's southern invasion, and the path carved by the demonic vanguard sent from Kyoto—wherever blades had passed, the earth was littered with corpses and bones.
Though the bodies on the surface had long been gnawed clean by wild beasts or buried by shifting soil, something yet remained beneath the ground.
Wandering souls.
Faint, residual fragments of consciousness that had long since lost their sense of self. They were not like him, an Oni Samurai resurrected by the sheer force of obsession. They were merely the final, lingering traces of unwillingness from men who had died in battle, echoes that had seeped into the soil and clung to shattered bones, like words left unfinished and scattered by the wind.
Under normal circumstances, these remnants would have dissipated completely within a few months.
But they hadn't. Not yet.
Hikaru landed silently on a hillside. The soil beneath his feet was soft, and stepping on it produced a strange sensation—not a problem with the ground itself, but a feeling that something beneath the ground was responding to his presence.
He activated his Spirit-Tracking Archer Transformation.
Undead Affinity.
Soul Summoning.
Pressing his right hand flat against the earth, he channeled his Yao Qi, pouring it into the soil through his fingertips.
A dark green phosphorescence spread out from the point of contact, creeping along invisible fissures and cracks deep within the ground, like a vast, spectral net being slowly cast. Every node of that net stirred a wisp of a residual soul.
Hikaru closed his eyes, his perception expanding as his Yao Qi saturated the area.
One. Two. Ten. Thirty… It was not just this hillside.
Across the entire region of rolling hills, within a radius of five hundred meters, every wandering soul fragment buried underground, clinging to bone shards, and drifting through the ruins of the old battlefield was touched by his power.
The range was not vast, but the number of souls was far from small. In the chaos of the Warring States period, far too many had died upon this land.
Hikaru spoke in a low voice, a whisper carried on the night air. It was not a command. It was more like an invitation.
At this moment, his Undead Affinity talent came into play.
Those fragmented consciousnesses held no hostility toward him. On the contrary, they displayed an instinctive closeness—a result of his demonic resonance, but also because he was one of them. An undead. An Oni Samurai. A dead soul that had clawed its way out of a pile of corpses.
Yes, they were of the same kind. They recognized him.
The ground began to tremble.
Then, something started to push its way up from beneath the soil.
The first hand breached the surface on the side of the hill—a grayish-white skeletal hand, its finger joints missing, a tattered piece of rotten armor still hanging from the wrist.
It was immediately followed by a second, and a third.
A skull broke through the dirt, only half its face remaining. In its hollow eye sockets, dark green phosphorescent flames flickered to life. Most were not complete corpses, but fragments of remains—a lone arm, a leg bone, a torso pieced together from a few ribs.
Yet, driven by the Soul Summoning technique, those residual fragments of consciousness reattached themselves to these bones, granting them a brief, unholy 'existence'.
They could not stand steadily, swaying and wobbling as they rose. Some were only an upper body, crawling across the ground with two skeletal hands. Some had heads tilted at an impossible angle, still adorned with half a rusted helmet. Some still clutched blades that had been broken in two.
But they all looked in the same direction—at Hikaru.
Dark green soulfire flickered in their hollow eye sockets. It was their response to his call.
Obedience. Allegiance.
Hikaru stood and surveyed his work. On the hillsides, in the valley floors, and from within the woods, one set of remains after another crawled out from underground, slowly gathering around him.
Their numbers grew.
Fifty… eighty… one hundred…
The summoning finally stopped when their numbers reached around two hundred.
It was not a large force. But for his purpose, it was more than enough.
He didn't need these undead to fight a war. They couldn't, anyway. These skeletal remains couldn't even defeat a single, ordinary ashigaru; one solid strike would shatter them into a pile of bones.
But what he needed wasn't combat power.
It was the visual.
It was Dread.
Over two hundred sets of broken undead bones dragged crooked shadows under the moonlight as they fell in line behind the Oni Samurai in the Crimson Oni Mask. A blood-red mist began to seep from Hikaru's body, enveloping his entire macabre 'army'.
The thin red mist made the fragmented skeletons appear even more eerie. In the fog, a severed arm became the silhouette of a sharp claw; a half-formed torso expanded into a massive, hulking shadow in the crimson light. It was the same technique he had used to enhance his Twenty-Three Demons at Jentaigahara, only this time, the scale was ten times larger.
Hikaru set off, heading north.
Over two hundred undead followed.
The sound of bones clashing and scraping against one another rattled softly in the night, like a dense swarm of insects gnawing on wood. Soulfire drifted through the blood mist, the green light flickering, illuminating the hollow faces of every skeletal soldier.
From a distance, it looked exactly like a troop of ghost soldiers from a dark legend.
An army of the dead, said to appear only in the dead of night.
This was a true Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. Not the daytime illusion he had used to frighten the soldiers of two armies, but a genuine procession of the dead, moving through the dark night, under the moonlight, and wreathed in blood mist.
And the figure leading this army was clad in grey robes, his hair as white as bone, his face hidden by a Crimson Oni Mask. Purple arcs of lightning leaped around him, and the hilt of Muramasa swayed gently at his waist.
He walked at the very front.
Behind him marched two hundred undead.
Beneath his feet lay the Kanto region.
Above his head hung the setting moon.
This time, after all, was different.
He was no longer that lonely ghost who had crawled out from a pile of corpses on a forgotten battlefield. No longer a squatter who could only act recklessly by relying on Kikyo's protection.
He had his Twenty-Three Demons rooted in Suruga, the official endorsement of the Imagawa clan, and the recognition of a Level 2 Favorability with the Kanto region itself. He had the unerring aim of the Spirit-Tracking Archer Transformation, the extreme speed of his Thunder Muscle, and the iron-clad defense of the Bone Soul Transformation.
And now, he also had an army of souls.
They were weak, true. So fragile that any trained samurai could scatter them with a single swing of his blade.
But that didn't matter.
What mattered was this: when three thousand living men, in the dead of night, saw two hundred skeletons crawl out of the ground, form ranks, and march toward them behind a demonic general… they would be afraid.
A chill would rise from their very bones.
This was not a fear that courage could overcome.
This fear… was Dread.
And Dread was precisely the weapon he intended to use.
A curved trail of purple light scarred the night sky as the Oni King led his hundred demons north.
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