Chapter Nine
Little Doma sat on his bed with a face empty of all expression. There was no one to perform for right now. He grabbed one pale hand with the other and began to pull. The familiar smile played on his lips—he felt no pain, but the process of inflicting damage and injury on his own body had struck him as amusing even in his past life.
First came the crack of bone, and then the skin could be seen splitting open, exposing red flesh beneath. A moment later and the arm was torn free.
Or was it? It would have appeared to any ordinary person that the boy had simply pulled the arm back out of a perfectly whole one. The regeneration was so rapid that an unprepared eye could not have detected its presence at all.
"How slow…" The former Second Upper Moon said with a sulky expression, pouting his lips in a childlike and amusing way. *Somewhere between fifteen and twenty times weaker than before. The level of a First Lower Moon.*
The limb, dripping crimson, began to be drawn back into the child's body, the point of contact rippling like disturbed water.
The remaining blood on the floor crumbled to nothing at a single mental command from the former leader of the Paradise Faith cult.
Then the small figure rose from the bed and began examining his palms. From them, like some kind of lava, pink flesh bubbled up and began to take shape—something resembling fans. The blades of the "weapon," ridged with unsettling veins, began to slowly shift in color and texture until the finished form slid into the demon's hands. The end result was a pair of very strange, razor-sharp battle fans constructed of gold that gleamed in the sunlight. The metal was adorned with an engraved image of a lotus that formed a single continuous design across all the separate components, flowing from one piece to the next. Both fans were folded shut, then immediately drawn back into their owner's body, returning once more to ordinary flesh.
*Excellent. It works.* The boy's sharpest fangs caught the light. *And this…?*
The boy began to strip off his clothes one piece at a time, fully baring skin that was deathly pale yet unnaturally flawless in appearance. Doma turned his attention to the red shirt and white shorts on the floor, and then the same pink substance began to blister and peel from his body. It took on the shape of the same clothing, though threaded through with ugly veins and welts. The color and texture shifted—visually and to the touch—presenting the appearance of the same outfit that the owner of those diamond eyes had just removed.
Saying nothing this time, the satisfied oni pointed with a hand bearing sharp blue fingernails directly at the old garments on the floor, and from it a light breeze blew—almost a fog—with finely glittering crystals of ice visible within it. The fabric froze at a remarkable speed, then began to break apart into the tiniest fragments, which the current of frozen air carried out through the open window.
"Ah, that's nice." The boy took hold of his own shoulders with both hands, giving them a demonstrative roll. "Nothing aches, nothing stiffens… How pleasant it is to be a demon."
And indeed, becoming an unholy cannibal once more was a very appealing prospect. An oni never fell ill, never tired, was extraordinarily difficult to kill, and required no food, sleep, water, or air—a nearly perfect existence. Doma had taken yet another step closer to the concept of an ideal demon.
These monsters possessed, among everything else, a fairly developed extrasensory perception—or something that closely resembled it. Demons were capable of detecting approaching danger, hostility, bloodlust, or sensing something at an extraordinary distance. And all of this applied even to ordinary demons, whereas Doma had been a member of the Twelve Demon Moons—an organization comprising the dozen strongest demons after Muzan Kibutsuji himself. It went without saying that the "divine messenger" surpassed nearly all of them in this regard by a considerable margin.
The owner of those diamond eyes had been capable of knowing, from an enormous distance, that Akaza—the Third Upper Moon—had managed to overcome one of an oni's primary weaknesses: decapitation by a Nichirin blade. He had nearly managed to regenerate his own head, but surrendered before it was done. With this same ability, the boy had felt throughout the entire appointment a very unpleasant and ominous interest emanating from the doctor who had been listening so carefully to him.
When the time came to take samples, things had begun to smell dangerous—and so Doma had simply destroyed the demonic cells, leaving only ordinary blood behind. Once he sensed the level of threat subside, he paid that doctor no further attention. Though he would certainly kill him if they ever met alone. A thoroughly disagreeable sort.
Japanese society had always held a rather reverent—and fearful—attitude toward everything supernatural. It had been that way in the past, and it was that way now, as evidenced by his parents' treatment of his sister. He had no need for problems of that kind, and so he had decided to take a far simpler approach and give his Quirk a vague, maximally non-specific name: "Moon Sovereign."
The adults were naturally bewildered by such an extravagant title, but the boy was not being dishonest in the slightest—it was the plain truth. Demons did, in fact, rule the nighttime hours, hunting freely while no one was capable of threatening them. Almost no one.
In any case, he needed to decide what to hunt. That would all be well and good, but operating anonymously had only been possible in the Taisho era thanks to that era's technological underdevelopment. The demon had killed thousands and had never been identified—but here there were cameras. Doma was unpleasantly surprised to learn that something existed capable of exposing his less flattering activities.
*Would my dear family appreciate something like that?* He was deeply skeptical on the matter.
However much Himiko craved blood, she was still an innocent child. That thirst might have driven her to extremes eventually, but it would certainly have happened much later. And so the boy was torn over whether his beloved elder sister would appreciate such a thing—she had been raised in a decent family. As for his parents, that went without saying. So if he was going to be exposed regardless, he ought to at least have some mitigating circumstances.
*Is it wrong to kill villains?* A thought that struck the grinning demon as nothing short of brilliant. *They call people like that "vigilantes," I believe.*
He could change his appearance and go out hunting freely. But that was all for later. He still needed to show his Quirk to his indispensable elder sister, who would be home from school soon.