Titania danced around the demon, trifling with it, using the chill from her swords to threaten its joints. Meanwhile, Liliana used her xenoglossia spell to create a large wolf; then she straddled it and used its howls to blow away the Evil God’s miasma.
“I cast my body upon the rocks and give my life to the immovable Kurikara.”
Hatsumi chanted a verse from the dharani, picturing it in her mind. She imagined the moment before she unleashed her slash, the scene that would follow afterward. Once she saw how one led to the other, she immediately took action.
The fused demon moved, a desperate attack to try to close the opening it’d left. Hatsumi evaded its reckless sword, then got herself in the best position to strike. She looked to the right, left, in front, and behind, like searching for the moon’s reflection on the surface of a lake. She found the optimal spot.
This was where she could draw her opponent in a single step. This was where she could mess with the sense of distance between them and close the gap. To demonstrate that, she thrust her odachi into the ground.
“Hatsumi-sama?!”
“Hatsumi! What’re you doing?!”
The others were shocked that Hatsumi had let go of her weapon.
The demon’s massive frame closed in.
Hatsumi endured the gust of wind blowing against her and postured herself to meet the charge.
And then...
Phantom Sword of the Kurikara Dharani, Esoteric Technique, Wisdom King’s Judgment.
She would reproduce the secret art to create a wind slash capable of bisecting her enemy from bottom to top, right here and now.
Her sword flashed upward, defying gravity and creating a devilish wind from the depths of the earth. Right as the wind blew up into the heavens, the fused demon and the empty church behind it were bisected vertically.
Splitting to the left and right, the two halves of the demon collapsed. The debris blown up by the sharp slash slowly fluttered down to the earth. After following through with her blow, Kuchiba Hatsumi hummed the song Gikou had taught her.
“With its roots in the earth,
“the blade becomes an illusion,
“blowing up into the heavens,
“creating an unreasonable gale.”
The song spoke of the core of this technique. The sword in the ground was meant to bewilder the opponent and mess with their sense of distance and timing. Taking advantage of the opponent’s disorientation, the technique then unleashed a sharp wind that was far faster than any opponent’s downward strike.
“Splendidly done, Hatsumi-sama,” Titania said.
“No, I still have a long way to go,” she replied. “My dad and Granny Byakuya could’ve defeated it more easily.”
“Really...?”
“Yes. They’re that outrageous...”
There was no mistaking it. It was entirely possible for Byakuya to exterminate every demon in this world single-handedly. Hatsumi shuddered at the thought. She really did have a long way to go. Even after obtaining this much power, she was nowhere close to the heights of the Four Great Sages.
Meanwhile, Yakagi Suimei watched this scene through the eyes of his cursed crows.
“Holy crap! When did Hatsumi learn such a scary technique...?”
Suimei’s entire face had spasmed into a yelp as he watched the end of Hatsumi’s fight with the fused demon. Hatsumi had used an impossibly crazy skill. It was the secret esoteric wind slash of the Phantom Sword of the Kurikara Dharani, the Wisdom King’s Judgment. When wielded by a master, it could split a skyscraper vertically in two.
And Hatsumi had just reproduced it.
Suimei imagined that devilish wind blowing up from beneath his own feet and shuddered. Things had been going poorly for a little while there, so he’d considered stepping in to support them, but once he’d seen the tides start to turn, he refrained from intervening.
“Anyway, that’s an awfully high-handed approach,” Suimei commented.
As he thought back on Hatsumi’s fight, Suimei took a moment to analyze the demons’ methods. He remembered seeing that demon, the general Rajas, before. It looked like their enemy had manifested someone who’d already died once before and had fused it with something else. The stunt had required a significant amount of power. No, in this case, rather than power, it had required authority. In other words...
A significant amount of the Evil God’s authority has been inherited...?
They’d created a general-level demon, a feat that normally required considerable authority to pull off. At this point it was best to assume the most powerful demon Suimei had seen had just taken the field. If he underestimated this enemy—if he didn’t consider the idea that a foe on the level of Kudrack had just appeared—he’d be liable to receive quite an unpleasant surprise.
Suimei strained his eyes to refocus himself. He was searching for the demons’ movements and what they might possibly mean.
What exactly are they up to...?
Their attacks were sporadic. They were fighting as if their plan was to intentionally drag things out, showing leniency in a way they never had previously. More often than not, this implied something was happening behind the scenes. Such a tactic was tailored to lower the enemy’s guard in service of some other scheme.
An attack elsewhere... was unlikely. They were already at the capital’s gates. There was no point attacking another city.
Suimei’s original idea that they were letting refugees escape to put pressure on other settlements... would also be strange. It was hard to imagine the demons were so pressed for resources that they had to resort to such methods. If that were the case, they wouldn’t have chosen a strategy where they’d charge in so recklessly.
The only thing he could think of that could plausibly fit with these sporadic attacks was if some large-scale trick—something that involved the entire city—was in the works.
“But there are no signs of that,” Suimei said, thinking out loud. “What are they even trying to do here?”
They were secretly up to something, but it wasn’t a grandiose plan on the level of constructing grand magicka to blow away the entire city. There were no signs of sacrificing humans and demons alike to create a path, or using the city’s structure and blood to create a massive magic circle.