"Go!" the Sho Taisho bellowed, voice cracking.
"Inform everyone! The demon is here!"
Outside the gates of Kogarashi, beneath a sky choked in ash and crimson dusk, stood calamity incarnate—the Demon of Iyakari.
He wore red-lacquered o-yoroi, its plates stained darker than blood, clinking not with the sound of steel but like bone rattling in a mass grave. Each step he took was methodical, funereal. Like death himself had chosen to walk. The ground beneath him cracked with rot, the wind recoiling from his presence.
Behind the walls, panic ignited.
Soldiers—seasoned samurai, killers of men—fled like vermin. Screams pierced the air before any blade was drawn. Some defecated themselves before even leaving the barracks.
"Do not engage!" the Sho Taisho shouted again, though his voice now quivered, barely louder than a dying breath.
"We hold the gate... until reinforcements arrive!"
But reinforcements would never come.
Because no amount of men could defy what stood before them.
The Demon stopped.
He did not raise a weapon.
He only stared.
Through the slits of his demonic mask, two ghostfire-blue eyes pulsed—not with rage, but with absence. They were devoid of hatred. Devoid of mercy. What looked back at the army was something that didn't see men at all.
It saw meat.
A silent quake pulsed outward—not felt by the earth, but by the soul. It gripped hearts like frostbitten claws. Men seized up mid-breath, blood vessels bursting in their eyes. Some fell dead before even lifting their swords, their spirits crushed like insects beneath an unseen weight.
And then, without sound, it began.
The Demon moved—no longer a man but a void wrapped in shadows.
The first row of soldiers simply exploded.
Limbs spiraled through the air like wind-blown leaves. Spines snapped backward. Heads spun from their necks with geysers of blood that sprayed like fountains across the battlefield. One man's body was split down the middle, his entrails slapping the ground like butchered livestock, his scream gurgling out of both halves of his throat.
Another was cleaved so cleanly his top half slid from his waist, hitting the dirt with a wet slap as his intestines unraveled like rope. One samurai tried to scream—but his jaw was ripped clean off before he could, flapping in the Demon's hand like a trophy. He gurgled and clawed at the stump where his mouth had been, drowning in his own blood.
Men were impaled, crucified on shattered spears made of their comrade's bones.
A captain tried to rally his men. The Demon caught him mid-swing, drove his blade through his groin and out his mouth, then twisted. The captain's scream became a vomit of blood and teeth before his head was ripped free, spine trailing like a tail behind it.
The gates ran red. Then black.
And then red again.
What was once a field became a slaughterhouse, bodies piled like discarded meat. Some twitched, half-alive, screaming for help as they bled out with their guts coiled around their ankles like snakes.
When silence returned, it was deafening.
Only the buzzing of flies and the ragged groans of the dying remained.
The Demon stood among the carnage, unmoved. He was not panting. He was not bloodied. He hadn't even broken a sweat.
He simply raised his blade, now stained black with congealed gore, and walked into Kogarashi—like a god returning to his temple of death.
---
Hours later, in Raigetsu…
"There must be something—anything—we can do!" Shimoto shouted, frantically pacing. "We cannot let that... thing reach us!"
The war room buzzed with shouting voices, but none held answers.
"We should flee! Abandon Raigetsu! Burn it if we must!"
"You coward! This is our land! Our blood is in its soil!"
"And it'll soak it again!" another barked. "The Demon carved through legions at Kogarashi! They didn't fight. They didn't die. They were erased!"
"You weren't there!" a trembling voice cried.
"You didn't see their bodies! Carved open like animals... one man was still screaming, even with his insides trailing twenty feet behind him!"
The elder slammed his fist down, tears brimming.
"Do you remember the Hoshimiya War?! Do you remember the screams? The rivers of bile and blood? He didn't kill them. He devoured their will. They begged to die by the end!"
Shimoto staggered, gripping his temples.
"I saw it…"
His voice cracked, barely a whisper now.
"I saw men trying to hold their own organs in as they crawled... screaming for their mothers... clawing at their throats because they couldn't breathe through the blood..."
He collapsed into a seat, his body wracked with shudders.
"I ran. That day at Iyakari... I ran through puddles of human fat and broken teeth.
I lived... only because I was too much of a coward to die."
No one spoke.
Because deep down, they all understood:
They were not fighting a man.
They were standing against extinction.