They told me the killing of Ubuyashiki Kanata was a passion crime but I knew there wasn't any passion to it. I've seen it even in the younger days when I was a demon-slaying girl that no man has it out for Ubuyashiki. He's just a face. Really, the object of their anger is more abstract than a corporation or a person or anything a thing. It's dissidence amalgamated from starvation and underpay and whatever company those two keep. They wouldn't kill someone for that. That's what I thought. When Kanata was shot with the spear and he died four days later covered in black blood and wet fecal matter holding onto my arms like I was his mama I wasn't sure what to make of it. I'd seen children and people like children die before but still, I don't. It's not that I'm scared. Death in this job is only a requisite hazard and most here have a bigger enough enemy in front of them to keep their eyes away from it, but what about those who don't? Do they still want to fight after meeting such a thing? A part of me wouldn't. I know that. I don't want to know otherwise. Even if you told me it's my role to combat and you would be telling me that because it's true I still wouldn't. To look death in its eyes you'd have to put your whole being at chance. You'd have to become part of its wide world.


One day before the death of Ubuyashiki Kanata.


NEN KUSAKABE stood very still in the middle of the council of men who held him suspect at the tips of their pens, and though in defiance of each contorted look they gave he returned their stares with equivalent ire he held his head high hoping he would not have to hear, but to avail none. Then came the chastisement.

"The field reports dissent," a man said, "while Vitelli sends his notice, that the Catholics have won their battle."

Yobusake Iesato Hirobumi Ittōsai, veteran of the 1877 war on the Samurai, head officer of the vastest bank in Japan that no-one knew and greatest benefactor of the Japanese Demon Slayers with the funds of it, was the only one of the old and self-lauded Board of Sponsors that Nen Kusakabe did not look in the eye. The pair of them like magnum pearls sat behind high cheekbones sculpted in the image of fists, and he kept a beard with long German tufts that war in Europe and stigmatism of their Kaiser should have since rendered out of fashion. He was the head of the council, the richest man here, and because of that the rest were, in all practice to Kusakabe, the otherwise.

"In Catholic Europe, only," Kusakabe dared to correct. "And above that, only in the Catholic areas the Entente controls. We have no information on the populations in Germany and Austria. It's not that impressive."

However Kusakabe knew he was protecting a losing cause, because the unreduced telegram sent to him and not to Tsubone Endou nor Tetsuo Morinaga said this: despite three-quarters of their men lost to conscription, an obligated area of service comprising one-hundred and six million people in five nations – nations who had repeatedly turned on each other throughout history – and relentless but unheard condemnation from the Protestant Demon Slayers for their methods in engineering a famine in Ireland to snuff out a tiny inhuman population there, the militant arm of the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican stood champion over the infidel.

"And now their eye has turned to the Japanese," Yobusake said, then he sighed. "Three-hundred years ago, when that Italian missionary was brought to Japan as part of Hasekura Tsunenaga's westward expedition, and Yoriichi Tsugikuni taught him the way of breaths, who could have imagined from that friendship we would devolve into fiddle for the west? I have spent my whole life fighting it, and yet this place is now more theirs than ours."

"The Catholics feel obligated to make our decisions for us, now," Kusakabe said. "They think we're weak ever since we lost Shikoku."

"Well, do you think we are?" he was asked.

Kusakabe's reply was with all honesty. "I do."

Yobusake slapped himself on the thigh to awaken from the dream: "Good. Then at least you see sense."

In any case, the real purpose of this meeting was not to discuss an organisation seventeen-hundred leagues away on the earth, but this: the recent events of dissidence that shaken shook the organisation to the core and had left their honourable leader half-dead, and the task of finding a replacement for that honourable leader who through fifteen years of inept and defiant captainship from his adolescence until now had led the Japanese Demon Slayers by the nose down an irretrievable path of self-destruction.

"It is our belief that the incidents in Chiba and Otake and the attempt on Ubuyashiki's life are all linked," Yobusake said. "In other words, we believe that they all have the same force behind them."

"An insurrection?" Kusakabe said.

"Not just that," Yobusake replied. "A revolution."

The word was like a knife in the heart of everyone there, and it swelled in no larger capacity than in the conscience of Kusakabe. It was all because he was the only one here who could not escape the truth: of these old men in their high chairs, who dangled from the darkness the fate of the Ubuyashiki regime with threats of retracting the funding the contingent desperately needed to wage war, he was the sole participant in actual combat – even if it was not his belligerence rather than his perceived shrewdness that earned him the selection of facilitator of the aging mind of Ubuyashiki Kanata, a position well suited to relay the intentions of this tribunal.

"Of course, for this little organisation, it will be a miniscule revolution," Yobusake said. "But since Ubuyashiki is sure to die there will be a power vacuum created when he does. Even if… someone here takes over. It'll be a perfect launch-pad for insurgency."

"But it's not power they want," Kusakabe said.

Another man spoke up. "It's become apparent that we've kept our heels too tight on them for too long."

"Low wages," someone else listed. "No welfare. An abysmal system of 'Wisteria houses', or whatever. And a bunch of high-profile Hashira running around to compare their misery to."

"But the main thing, no solid enemy," Yobusake said. "Go and ask anyone in the field, and will they know who Kibutsuji Muzan is? A good chance not. Really, the object of their anger is more abstract than a corporation or a person or anything a thing. It's just 'demon-kind'."

"And an abstract enemy is easier to fall out of hate with than an easy enemy," Kusakabe said. "And that is what has happened after one-hundred years gone without killing an Upper Moon, and twenty years of dormancy after the loss of Shikoku. So now they focus on the way we wring them out."

Still, it was a truth well acknowledged that disillusionment was mostly in the older generations. The leftovers. Leftovers who had time to recognise the cancerous culture created by seven-hundred years of slow and paralysing corruption. Leftovers that made up thirty percent of the institution, but leftovers nonetheless.

"Our most skilled officers are all against us," Kusakabe said. "It's a joke."

"Not a joke," Yobusake replied. "Morinaga's ploy."

The name was rehashed throughout the room, and it brought a sourness upon Kusakabe's face. Mist Hashira Tetsuo Morinaga, veteran slayer of the field, and by popular vote starting ten years ago practical chairman of the organisation, was his greatest enemy. One decade ago, from the evening they met under the mediating eye of Tsubone Endou at a celebration of Ubuyashiki Kanata's twentieth year, until the day he succumbed to resistance meant to avenge him, he would remain like a burning nail in the heart of the secretary; and though an observer might examine that the despisal had roots no deeper than simple jealousy of power, that would be the opinion of the third-person.

"You think he's behind the dissidence?" Kusakabe asked.

"Perhaps. Maybe a long time ago, he had his part in fanning the flames. Or maybe as we speak he conjures a plan to hold us at gunpoint when we walk out of here and shoot us all in the head."

"He's never been a shy critic," one man said.

"And he's the only one besides that woman Endou who knows about us," Yobusake said. "And it won't take much for him to decide to hold the information of our existence as leverage."

"They've always been close," Kusakabe said. "But you don't think Endou will let her tongue loose, do you?"

"She's always been loyal as a dog."

"And you don't think either that when it comes down to 'revolution' she'll choose her greatest comrade over us?"

"It doesn't matter if she does. She's easily replaceable. They all are."

"Yobusake, you are tying your own noose with this shit," Kusakabe spat. When it drew no reaction he smiled. "But what do I care? I'm only instrument of you. Everything happening now is a result of your orders."

"Nevertheless we trust you'll solve this, Kusakabe. When you eventually remember who got you into your position, you will cooperate well."

"Then give your ideas," Kusakabe said, "so I can die for them one more time."

Yobusake ignored the insidious comment, and leaned forward on the desk again. His plan would be simple: do something to inspire agitation in Tetsuo Morinaga, follow close what he did after that – and it would surely be something sloppy led by emotion – and arrest him when he showed the first sign of dissidence. Then they would let the monopoly they held over the information circulating the organisation dictate an execution. There would be no questioning, no trial, and surely the sentiment against the administration and Tsubone Endou's incumbent anger would die with him.

Later, when he was in the hallways of the Ittōsai estate that seemed imaginary, and Nen Kusakabe could hear from another room the singing cries of a fellow uniform doomed to torture for his betrayal of the beloved leader, the envoy of Yobusake came up to him running and called him again into the foyer. Only he remained in the auditorium of dark colonial granite and oily clapboard furniture when Kusakabe returned. He extended his hands and asked a final question.

"I just want to hear your opinion on this," Yobusake said. "Do you think a smart man like Morinaga would order such emboldened and hasty attacks on us which really amount to nothing for his cause at all, if there is?"

"…I think anyone can do anything when they pass an ultimate point," Kusakabe replied, in his own way. "Once a man goes beyond a certain extent they're bound to go a-warmaking or at least crazy. They just need pushing."

"So you're saying something triggered him?"

"I'm saying that he's always been like this, and for whatever he's moving now."

Yobusake nodded inwards, and took his hands off the table. When Kusakabe was back home in his armchair and intoxicated with the glory of his final cup of sake he saw the end coming to play before him and wondered if there was any time left for him to reach the grave. Later that evening, in the last obligatory report meant for Ubuyashiki Kanata's unseeing eyes, he wrote: "I give my life to my dear leader, even after he has doomed us all and it will be given regardless."


One day after the death of Ubuyashiki Kanata.


TSUBONE ENDOU would wonder many times in the later year of her life if the day her most intimate comrade Tetsuo Morinaga saw his foster daughter dead and hoisted by the neck with wire like a dog condemned for his mutiny was the day he passed the point of ultimatum. It was already for her and all of them inevitable, when the death rattle came and she hurried here to fend away with her medical hands of God what could not be fended away, but it only became material when she entered the office and witnessed it in the stillborn light of the entryway. The recently graduated Hashira Miyamoto Shō, orphan of the earth, lover of calligraphy, and one of few sympathetic women left at Tetsuo Morinaga's side since the day they joined ways under a band of laundry in a city he roamed in longing times passed, had made the irremovable decision to take her own life by hanging when she was nineteen years old.

Tetsuo, who could not understand, left with no resistance and nearly on his own accord to sit outside where children were weeping and simmer in the bog-swamp of memory, for he had seen Tsubone do the same thing so many times and on so many different occasions. It was her obligation as a doctor, to take death at face value when there was nothing more to it than face value. Yet now more than ever the fire of conspiracy burned in her heart and she felt compelled to find in her belief the lie beneath the truth.

Before it began Tsubone and Tetsuo worked together to lower the body into a more honourable position, and now it lay in a long couch with a towel covering everything beneath the chin. The office that would forever remain halfway through the workday was illuminated a golden brown from the door that faced the same direction as the sun set, yet there was not enough light nor fresh air passed through the room yet to alleviate it of the adhesive and stifling quality of new death. Next to the sofa that cradled the body was the toppled chair and the noose that still levitated, and beyond that was the desk with the drying pen and the windowsill which held the flowers, the opened cologne, the ivory comb. A moment like this floating in its own time was a scene Tsubone had seen too often before not to recognise, and if it was not the body of her oldest friend's daughter which occupied it, she might have been able to make herself indifferent.

Tsubone closed the door to block out the world and started her work. Pinching the corner of the towel, and with all gentleness, she pulled it from the body and left it aside. Miyamoto Shō had died fully clothed, perfumed, dry-haired, and in later admittance, seemingly with dignity. The upright collar of the Victorian blouse had soaked much of the cord's force that would have otherwise transformed her neck, and the spirit that once inhabited this place seemed yet to evaporate from the cooling body; but her feet were dark red and swollen when the socks were taken off, and her face had been drained of any organic colour. If anything it was supposed that Miyamoto Shō died upright as hanging would suggest. Gravity in that position would send blood from the head to the legs and that is what had happened. But Tsubone still suspected. Then came the second process: the observation of the signs of asphyxiation. The most apparent signals of this were the bloodshot eyes and surface-level bleeding from the tongue, indicative of sudden constriction of the vessels, a shooting increase in pressure, and blood bursting out wherever the walls were thin enough to let it burst out. All signs of the action of a lasso closing in on a neck. If anything again it was ascertained that strangulation killed Miyamoto Shō as hanging would suggest. It shouldn't have been the force that was lethal, because the distance she must have fell after kicking the chair was far too shallow for immediate breakage, and that was evidenced by the unbroken neck. But even then Tsubone still suspected.

Afterwards came the third and defining process. Tsubone inserted her fingers under the collar and dug around to find the hook – and only after some searching time she was able to unfasten it – but she released it immediately when her suspicions were proved so quickly and with such brevity she stumbled outside like a madwoman and only regained her academic composure when she was to stand before the bench on which Tetsuo Morinaga mourned in his own hardened way to give him her news. The straight shape of the ligature, an uncanny mark left on the neck for a supposed hanging such as this, said it all to an interpreter of death so experienced as Tsubone: that Miyamoto Shō was murdered, that this was the product of conspiracy.


It's a wicked philosophy when they say there's no rest for the wicked, but it is supposed that is true. The old Chinese idiom might have summed it up best: it is the tallest tree which gets the most wind. No matter what you do, if you are a better among inferiors, a left among rights, a differentiation to the crowd of sameness, you will, put simply, catch on shit. To lessen this by keeping your branches low is the basic philosophy behind humility, but the point here being lessen. Not avoid. Nothing ever so black-and-white. No such as thing as true calms and true storms, neither, no matter in what order you want to word them.

Tsubone went into the still darkened house when it was too late and took off her shoes and fumbled into the living room to sink into the chair. The children were all in other rooms and floors sleeping, and if they were not sleeping they were grieving quietly and that was just fine as the status quo right now.

Despite this she went to see Shinobu, who lived on the same first story as her, in the strange bedroom of half-read encyclopaedias and charactered mosaics, motley maps of everywhere but Japan and stored and dusted toys which she no longer enjoyed. She sat by the shaped futon.

"If you're not sleeping," Tsubone said, "then know the storm will pass eventually, and the mystery will be solved."

Withstanding, of course, that Tsubone hadn't broken Miyamoto's death as a killing to them yet, and she didn't know if she would. It was only general advice meant to soothe. Then Tsubone went to the window of the room that faced the garden when she noticed it was open.

"Leave the window open and the mosquitoes will get in," she murmured, closing it.

"But I didn't leave it open," the futon replied.

For one instant Tsubone froze looking out the window, and she hadn't enough space for the next breath when she saw the barrel opposing her from the bushes, then the ruffling between them, and she ducked down and pulled Shinobu under her to evade the first uproar of bullets that reduced the thin walls of the estate into paper and shredded in an ear-scorching wake a state of peace that was always too tensile to be left at just that.

When the volley was done, Tsubone used a hand to keep Shinobu's head low and rushed her upstairs past the fragments of radio wire and porcelain vases and ordered her prone on the floor, with the other two who had already stumbled into the hallway. The second crossfire began. The tumultuous smoke of disintegrating houseware, accumulated over a period that might as well have been a century, now permeated the upstairs even, and beneath the shouting child and the mad sound of the guns going Tsubone felt her stomach fill with burning froth and she had to use every power in her to prevent her getting up there and giving instrument to her anger.

It went according to her guess, however: they only aimed for the first floor. The salvo died off and the children kept down on the ground while Tsubone skulked downstairs and threw the main door open with her scabbard, and when there was nothing in response but the clamour of disturbed birds in the maple trees and the off ticking of a gutted grandfather clock she knew the attack was done. Still, it took a scouring of every part of the house with a sword at ready for the closure to really settle. Afterwards, Tsubone called a convention in the bottom room that was least destroyed, which was the pantry, and she spoke standing to them sitting and announced the weight of their predicament.

"This place is no longer safe," she said. "You'll take a ferry to Shikoku tomorrow to stay with my mentor."

She allowed no gainsay. For the remainder of the night they packed, and in the morning they stood on the edge of a fog-soaked Hiroshima pier, where the remnants of a destroyed clinic Tsubone heard was once there still bobbed in the water, to exchange their farewells.

"His name is Urokodaki," she told them, and she thought she saw Giyuu's expression widen. "He'll be waiting for you at the landing. He wears a bright red mask. He told me he knows what you look like."

In their civilian drabs they only stood there, and Tsubone wasn't sure what to say next. They got on the boat and it was eventually Shinobu, the sweetest one, who leaned over the side to ask about her.

"I'll clean up things over on this side, then I'll come see you," Tsubone said. She saw her muddy expression, and tried to smile. "It'll only be a few days."

"You sure?"

"Am promising. And then…" Tsubone said. "And then we can have Miyamoto's funeral."

It was sealed with the age-old locking of the small finger. Tsubone waited until the fog enveloped the boat from behind before she went.


In the garden again, she bent down, ran a hand through one of the shrubs, and found it immediately. She drew the brass cartridge casing from the bush and held the back of it up to the sun to read off the ordnance.

Murata rifle.

The line in the sand was clearer than ever. Tsubone Endou, loyal soldier of the Japanese Demon Slayers since the eighty-eighth year of the 19th century, 371st incumbent and still incumbent Water Hashira of it, who worked every day of her existence to diligent death since she announced her qualifications as doctor to keep afloat the failing management of the crippled and the dead, had just had her life attempted on by rebels who disregarded in their crossfire the mentees she cherished more than anything else.

From the pried floorboards she took out the pistol wedged in an off-corner between peeling insulation, and she got it out of the linen wrapper. The Luger's black jacket still gleamed like oiled silver after all these years of hiding. She took the magazine hidden under another layer of fabric and loaded it in and jerked the mechanism to make sure all was smooth, and all was. Then she put the safety on and she stuffed it nozzle-down between her belt and her waist, and pulled her Haori over to hide it.

Rain started. Moved under a nearby thatch structure, at the meeting that evening she observed each Hashira with a hazardous eye. Forever emblazing but now downtrodden Shinjuro sat tucked in the corner, and closest to him was Tomita who was apathetic, and Himejima just aside. In the other part of the room was Tetsuo, who kneeled so near to Kusakabe his shaking, sleepless breath ran over him, and there was Yokota and then Yoneda, who kept looking over his shoulder at her.

"Your Tsuguko?" Yoneda asked.

"Ain't come," Tsubone replied.

Kusakabe clapped his hands together and stood up on the podium with that. He announced that Ubuyashiki Kagaya was still mourning. Therefore: "I am here in his place." He then passed the lead to whoever was willing to take it and that was Tetsuo and he spoke in a tone riddled with darkness.

"My daughter was found dead yesterday hanging." No-one replied, because they had already heard. Then he revealed it. "She was killed."

The younger gasps came. The older ones stayed morose and Kusakabe gave his condolences. Tetsuo, who was in a state too far from this world to notice, unfolded another revelation: that there was a traitor in the corps.

"What makes you say it was one of ours?" someone asked.

"A normal man wouldn't be able to strangle a Hashira," he replied, and he turned to the others momentarily to articulate his next suspicion. "And neither would a normal demon slayer."

At which point the burning in Tsubone's heart swelled past the capacity of her temperance and she came forward unable to suppress it any longer.

"Any of you heard what happened in my home yesterday?" she asked.

No-one. She explained the shooting in tormentous detail and in the increments her chainsaw breathing allowed her. By the end of it she couldn't keep her tone straight and she was trembling all around. So was Tetsuo.

"Enough of that," he said, and that denial was what started the splitting of the world. "We need to find this - this killer."

Tsubone tried to take the point back. They went back-and-forth, before the bickering escalated, and a nerve in Tetsuo became twisted by the total sum of emotion in him in that moment, and he began to shout. Later, Tsubone recalled vaguely, that it was something like "you don't know what this is like!", and she wasn't sure what he meant by that. Then she must've said something past the good margin, and she didn't know what, because it turned into a fight, and then a physical fight, and then Kusakabe was between them trying to break it up, and the last thing she saw before succumbing to a darkness of dropping adrenaline and three sleepless nights was the image of Tetsuo Morinaga being whisked away at hostage in the arms of Niten Ittōsai and Gyoumei Himejima, to a place that surely couldn't have been much farther than death.


She called in the evening. That new thing called a telephone, there was one in Ubuyashiki's office with a line going down to the holdings centre that was someplace in Hiroshima proper. Himejima, ever ardent to her, had disclosed that they'd taken him there without much trouble, by Kusakabe's say. It didn't make sense to her to jail anyone for such a minor thing, and a Hashira too, but maybe he did something worse that escaped her memory. Not keen on going in person yet, that was why she was calling.

Inside the office that doubled as cell, the warden left Morinaga standing and handcuffed in the corner of the room while he received the call sitting down in his rocking chair with his feet on the table and collar two buttons undone. He was a young man. He received a lady on the other side.

"No ma'am on orders I can't let you talk to him. No-one. Yes ma'am. I can't do it even if he's your cousin. Even if he's your brother. What's that? You had a predicament? Yes ma'am. Well I suppose it's better anyway if you stay away from each other for a time. I have to hang up now. Can't be on the phone too long at work. No ma'am. I'm sorry. Goodbye now."

While the warden was talking Morinaga crouched with his buckled hands behind him and then rolled backwards onto the behinds of his shoulders which lifted his feet up just far enough that he could pass the chain under his squatted heels when he rocked again forward. He got up soundlessly. When the warden put down the phone Morinaga passed the chain over his face and hauled and they fell to the floor.

In reality the force should've then and there snapped the man's neck. However he kept struggling. With the flailing of his feet he was trying to swerve around sideways and get leverage but Morinaga was too strong. He was pulling one cuff harder than the other in alternating increments to create a back-and-forth, filing motion around the neck. This let the chain peel the meat away and reach the voice box and the warden's grunts became mixed with the tone of cold metal. An artery was torn and the blood started. It gurgled through the boy's teeth and from the corners of his eyes and by where the handcuffs were biting. Eventually the scuffling slowed when the chain got to the neckbone. After that, his quaking head went lax, and he was still altogether.

When Tsubone arrived twelve minutes later she found a strangled cadaver but Morinaga nowhere. She could draw up a pretty good idea of what happened when she saw the bloodied handcuffs in the basin and the bunch of keys next to it, but nothing besides that. Tsubone propped the chair up again and dialled the phone. She called Ubuyashiki's office and she didn't know why because it was a rarity for anyone but herself to go in there those days. Nevertheless someone did answer. It was Kusakabe.

"Tetsuo escaped," Tsubone told him. She did not yet think to question him for the imprisonment. "Saw it here when I came. The warden's dead."

Tsubone could hear the long analogue sigh in the speaker above the mir of electricity and her own heart. There was a lasting silence. Then Kusakabe put the microphone back to his mouth sitting with his eyes closed, pinching the bridge of his nose, seeing his whole life above him being played on the ceiling like a harp, all compacted into about ten square metres of smelly wooden drywall. He answered duly.

"My God, it's the end."


On the other side of the strait GIYUU TOMIOKA sat at rigid attention with his shins against the floor and chin angled up like there was a gun being pointed from below, and there might well have been. In that case said shooter was Sakonji Urokodaki. It was the morning after their arrival and the girls still slept and that left just them to sort out a two-years-old qualm. Though firstly:

"Wood," Urokodaki said, standing. It only made sense when he pointed to the wall-propped hatchet. "Come cut wood."

So they cut wood. Firewood, in the fire-glazed earth that was morning. Few years back if you came out here in these hills you would see two boys doing this job instead. Now, only a motley pair of younger and older man.

To Giyuu, who'd grown too accustomed to pre-furbished life in the city, it was an imposter Spring. When they got through the pile that had been accumulating faster than a lone man could burn it was already ten o'clock and high day. The forest simmered in the fragrance of wax and dew and the air was half aboil by the time they took their rest under the shade of a chestnut tree. The temperature, even here, was inescapable.

Weighed down by age, Urokodaki fell asleep in the leaves, without having said one word to his student since directing him to the axe. He saw this and Giyuu recalled the haphazard knowledge from his younger days that bands of vagabonds wielding golden matchlocks circulated these woods since being driven into hiding by the first Tokugawa ruler, looting anyone who slept under the alluring scent of the chestnuts, with an odd discretion that transcended age or class. Giyuu knew because he was fourteen with a broken shoulder and spending his pardon with Urokodaki when one day he awoke to a gun jammed in his belly. The commander of the troop, a ranger in western outlaw garb, asked him the cryptic question of Emperor Meiji or Insurgent Takamori.

"Neither," Giyuu replied, presuming he meant the yet recent conflict between the government and the samurai. Then he lied: "I'm a charcoal seller, making money for my sister to eat well on New Year's."

"Thank God!" the leader said, clutching his cross necklace. "Then you're otherwise, like us."

When they left Giyuu could not help but think they wouldn't have robbed him even if he told the truth. After all, a Christian in Japan was as ludicrous a concept as a Demon Slayer.

Later, when breakfast was done and the dishes were left to soak in the sink, when the girls had gone out for parts unknown and Nisegami Youma became an ornament in the corner of the room, Giyuu felt compelled to escape the awkwardness that had been smouldering in the house ever since he arrived, but Urokodaki stood in front of the doorway and let the crossbar down to bar it, and he realised he couldn't run anymore.

"Listen," he said. "I'm… sorry. For not visiting or writing. Very sorry."

"It's not about that," Urokodaki replied. "You've forgotten to pay tribute to your sister's shrine."

…Indeed, and though it seemed impossible, Giyuu had. They lit fresh incense and bowed to the altar that had no photo, and exchanged the leather-skinned offering pears for fresher ones. The procession was not interrupted, but Giyuu raised his eyes to see something he thought he heard outside the window – instead to find Urokodaki's gaze – and that offhand glance saw before it crumble two years of animosity that had been stretched so far the origin was inscrutable, but that was always striving to end better than it began.


Paparazzi perhaps.


The retired journalist JUNPEI MISHIMA tapped the rickshaw man on the shoulder to pull over, and he paid his fee and descended into the warden's office that had no number, to join the side of his attaché ATASHI UESUGI in overlooking the scene of the strangled man in dark uniform, in the cell whose air had already coagulated to the texture of old death, only the latest waypoint of a trail he had followed like a snuffing dog for the past twenty years of his life.

"That look like demon slayer garb to you?" Mishima asked.

"It could be," Atashi replied.

"I'd say it is, no doubt at all."

Mishima bent down and wrapped his hand around the dead man's wrist and squeezed. The character of rank became embossed in the skin like a vein: Kanoe. Indeed, demon slayers.

"There's a rank I've never heard of. But it is a rank," Atashi said.

"Yep. These boys love their secrets." Mishima let go of the wrist and observed the cold body again. "Well, ain't this a fallacy. A dead slayer."

Atashi, young enough to be the retiree's son, was tall and soft-boned and in most accounts meek. He kept his hair in a good English style and stepped around in bison leather shoes, but despite appearances he was humble as inexperience as a novice correspondent would mandate, which was complement to the coldness of kimono-clad Mishima who prowled the room with his nose down for clues he had seen thousands of times before, yet whom still kept on the trail of his lifetime.

"The marks on this guy's neck says chains." Atashi went to the sink and pulled out a pair of bloodied handcuffs. "I'm guessing whoever he was keeping choked him with these. See – over here's even the keys."

"I recognise this place." Mishima stood up and looked around. "Been here a few times. The police used to operate this holdings cell. Either they vacated here and they took over, or it's on lend lease to the slayers."

"If it's the latter then that'd mean these guys have hands even in the pockets of law enforcement."

"Well, we've already determined that, haven't we?"

"…Yes we have, sir."

Mishima went to the desk and tried the phone, but the line was dead or cut or something like that. He read a few of the papers on the table but it was all normal financial garble, not a new tip nowhere, and he walked round the room again before finally turning to the dead man again.

"Shame. He was only around your age," he said.

"You reckon it was one of their own that killed him?" Atashi asked.

Mishima took a seat and crossed his legs and leaned forward. He sighed. "I don't know. But they wouldn't put a demon in cuffs and a demon wouldn't kill him and leave his body further untouched."

"It had to be a human, you're saying."

"Yep. But it doesn't matter to us." Mishima scanned the desk again. "Ever since the disappearance of slayers from Shikoku, and the Asclepius murders, and that fracas in Otake, they've been clamping up more and more. Who knows what goes on behind their curtain…"

"On top of the vow of silence all of them keep," Atashi said. "But it's strange for you to be stumped."

"Go journaling the same people for ten years, Atashi, and you have to make a line at some point between what's substance and what's just weighted air. Just nowadays the division's so marred it's hard not to be confused." Mishima nodded, with frankness. "By the way, are you going to check the body?"

Atashi made a face but did it anyway. He found a scrunched-up newsletter in the breast-pocket, and he did his best to smooth it out before holding it up to the light to read.

Announcement: speech on the 30th

The General Secretary Nen Kusakabe, who is temporarily serving as Oyakata-sama since the death of the last incumbent his honourable Ubuyashiki Kanata, will be addressing the Demon Slayer Corps on the 30th of April, 19:30 Japan Standard Time, at the Hero's Auditorium in the western outskirts of Hiroshima city. He means to announce the plans for the future, in order to mark the end of the 1916 Wisteria Week. It is advised that all personnel in the near area do attend.

"This is signed by a guy named Gotoh. If only we could get our hands on him," Atashi said.

"If only. 'If only' for these demon slayers is what killed my career chasing them dead leads, but if only." Mishima said it with no pity for himself. "Well, this is just a bubbling of tension gone wrong, isn't it?"

"Wait–" Atashi suddenly spat. "I've got a location."

"We always get locations. Like this. It doesn't help any."

"No, where this 'Hero's Auditorium' is."

All of a sudden boorish old man Mishima was compelled. Atashi stepped over and showed it to him, and it was there inscribed in fine blue ink on the other side of the postage, so simply and swiftly said, that the revelation it would entail seemed unbefitting.

"Seventeen Heiseigahama Street," Mishima said. It was the first piece of locational evidence he'd found in four years and he was gleeful for it.

"Has gotta be the auditorium's address, huh?" Atashi remarked.

"And there's bound to be someone there who we'll be able to make talk," Mishima said. "If this doesn't work, then I don't know what will…!"

It was one 'finally, after all these years' moment among many. However Junpei Mishima saw before his old eyes the luminous quality of the end of his lifelong goal shine closer than ever and it was as if he was being beckoned in the ear to jump and catch it. It would have rendered his bachelorism, his unemployment, and his ten long years spent on the road trying to get a story out of his boyhood heroes for his boyhood dreams of being a journalist, all for a cause. He folded the paper and left it in the warden's hand, saying: "Let's go before the Kakushi come."


Breaking news: Tetsuo Morinaga has disappeared!


The rap came on Sakonji Urokodaki's door and Tsubone Endou was on the other side. It seemed surreal, for there to be no parental nor natal connection: the woman of forty-five and the man of sixty-eight. Yet that was what it was between the mentor and mentee here – and both champions of the Water Breathing style they upheld, no less.

"And Tetsuo?" Urokodaki asked.

"Gone with the wind for God knows where and what," Tsubone replied. She touched the bruise on her cheek. "And my face still hurts."

There was no need for invitation. She went inside and sat by the table and poured two cups of tea. Urokodaki knew the bait: he could only drink with his mask off. A long time ago, Tetsuo Morinaga played the same gimmick on him to avail, and that was why he had since made the resignation to eat in the same room as others, given that would be the only time of the day they would see him unmasked. So he declined the tea.

"Tetsuo's gone mad," Tsubone said then.

"I've heard."

"What've you heard?"

"His Tsuguko's suicide. His disappearance," Urokodaki said. "…From you, him killing that warden."

"And I've come to ask you what you make of it, our good teacher."

Urokodaki relented and held his mask up halfway to take a sip of tea. He mopped up the liquid in two scorching gulps, almost blistering his lips, allowed himself the liberty a mouth wipe, before giving his answer in a sorrowful tone.

"He means for there to be a war."

It was not the answer Tsubone wanted, because she'd already conceived it and denied it in her mind, but the mention of it again filled her throat with cold broth. Nevertheless, she felt obligated to ask more of the response that seemed too near to the truth. But the mask came down again and the master replied in riddles.

"You ask me what I mean by that, Tsubone," he said. "But you know as well as I do the revolutionary's how he's always been. Since he walked in here with you as that… nationalist, until he walked out as…" And not even Sakonji Urokodaki could find a word for the student that he had long acknowledged as an abomination that had bubbled out of his hands.

"So you mean a revolt," Tsubone said.

"You know I'm loyal to Ubuyashiki," Urokodaki said. "But because of fifty years in this field I am in a place to say this world they have has turned to such shit. I saw it fast coming and that's why I left. But Tetsuo wouldn't leave."

He put a hand up before Tsubone said anything else. He poured himself more tea and leaned back, keeping his eyes straight behind the mask-slits, trying to see another future than the one at hand, but he could not. He sat back up, therefore, and confronted Tsubone with the question of her survival.

"You're loyal too, aren't you?"

"Huh?"

"To Ubuyashiki."

"…I am."

"So who'll you choose when Tetsuo has a gun against Ubuyashiki's belly and Ubuyashiki has a gun to Tetsuo's heart?"

Tsubone looked at him sideways. He'd seen the pistol jammed in her belt, but the question was not a segue from that, but of two dozen and more years of tenuous history they shared between them that was now coming to a strangling head by way of forces that couldn't have been anything but the intervention of heaven. She concluded, with apathy, after a long time: "I don't know."

Urokodaki crossed his arms and hmphed. He declared that was all he could say.


Seemingly from the sky, postage to every Demon Slayer in Japan:
Six demands from a group calling themselves the otherwise.

1. INCREASE THE MINIMUM WAGE OF MIZUNOTO TO HINOTO RANKED PERSONNEL FROM ¥ 15.00 TO ¥ 35.00.

2. SET UP A PENSION FOR RETIRED/DISABLED DEMON SLAYERS OF ¥ 20.00 PER MONTH, NON-DISCRIMINATORY BETWEEN RETIREES OF DIFFERENT RANKS.

3. ALTER THE UNNECESSARY HARSHNESS OF FINAL SELECTION. DO NOT IMPOSE A LIFE OR DEATH MANDATE. ALLOW EXAMINERS TO STEP IN TO PRESERVE THE LIVES OF EXAMINEES WITH YET DORMANT TALENT.

4. MODERNISE THE WARFARE DOCTRINE TAUGHT TO DEMON SLAYERS. IMPLEMENT MORE ADVANCED SQUAD TACTICS TO REDUCE THE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES SUSTAINED.

5. DISMANTLE THE MONETARY BACKING SYSTEM OF THE BOARD OF SPONSORS; TRANSFER THE FORTUNES OF SPONSORS TO AN ACCOUNT MANAGED BY AN ELECTED COUNCIL OF DEMON SLAYERS.

6. REMOVE THE INADEQUATE UBUYASHIKI LINEAGE AS THE FUNCTIONING HEAD OF THE DEMON SLAYERS. INSTALL A POPULARLY ELECTED FIGURE TO SUCCEED THEM. HOLD ELECTIONS EVERY FOUR YEARS.

IF THESE PARAMETERS ARE NOT IMPLEMENTED WITHIN THE NEXT WEEK, ACTION WILL BE TAKEN.


It was the 29th then, when Shinobu Kochou lifted the sword over her shoulder, hauled it harder than her festering grip would've practically allowed her, and the head of the dummy was offed in one ungraceful swoop.

Nevertheless, one!

Nisegami Youma, who kept her company while she trained and watched her with the vigilance of an archangel, recognised the act immediately and every bit of significance behind it, and they rejoiced together. Shinobu went to Kanae, who slept under a chestnut tree, surely confident in her safety there, and she was joyful too, and then Giyuu who read in the little barnyard that Urokodaki owned, and then to the house itself, to disclose her success to the senior there.

She found not only the masked man but Tsubone Endou, sat around the same table drinking tea. The sudden appearance stunned her momentarily, but she didn't ask for the circumstances, and instead told her straight:

"I did it!"

"Did what?" Tsubone asked.

"Cut off the head! The dummy!"

"Any witnesses?"

"Him…" Her finger nearly fell on Youma in the corner, but she diverted it to Giyuu. "He saw it."

Giyuu nodded in assent. And that was how Shinobu Kochou attained her mentor's blessing to attend Final Selection. For a good while they forgot the misery of the day as the smaller ones celebrated.

At Seventeen Heiseigahama on the mainland Nen Kusakabe sat alone in the half-egg auditorium reciting the lines that he was to propagate on the stage tomorrow, but he was interrupted by one of the boys who stood duty outside coming in and saluting his side and standing like he had something to say. Realising he was waiting for permission to speak, Kusakabe granted it.

"…There're two guys outside, sir."

"Oh. Well, don't mind them." Kusakabe went back to reciting. But the boy didn't go away.

"Sir."

"Huh?"

"They're journalists," he said.

"Then don't mind them even more," Kusakabe replied. "We're just schoolboys having a concert, that's all."

The boy didn't leave after that either. Kusakabe couldn't concentrate on his cue cards but he tried to persuade this.

"Sir."

"What?"

"They say they know we're demon slayers and they won't leave till they get a story."

Kusakabe clicked his tongue. He put the cards down and looked up at the boy. What was he, sixteen, seventeen? Clearly at the age and character where he didn't know how to throw off the dogged pursuit of a newsman. He would know.

"For what paper?" asked Kusakabe finally.

"They say they're freelance."

Kusakabe flicked some dust off his sleeve.

"Then I suppose we can shoot them."

The boy stiffened his grip on the gun slung behind his shoulder. He was frightened. Kusakabe put one leg over his knee and leaned forward and stared at the door opposite the stage on which he sat. After he was done stretching, he turned away: "Just joking."

The boy's expression didn't change. Kusakabe pushed the cards away and talked to him.

"You know those six demands we got via the crows the other day?" he asked.

"I know."

"What do you think of them?"

"I can't say."

"You can. I don't bite."

"…I think they're sensible," was the boy's reply.

"I think they're sensible, too," Kusakabe said. He nodded slowly. "Not so much the guy I think is behind them, but they're sensible. Doesn't mean that I can abide them, though."

"What do you mean?"

"If a man's a turnover a man's a turnover. But I ain't no turnover. Not that I love Ubuyashiki," Kusakabe said. "And I'll look death in the eye tomorrow for my asswipe philosophy."

"Why're you telling me all this?" The boy asked.

Kusakabe gave a small paternal smile. "I don't know… my mind dallies. Forty in this job is like ninety."

He instructed the boy to chase the journalists away, and gave word for him and the other guards to end their duties early. Kusakabe also told him that, if he had the choice, it would be preferred he not attend the speech the next day.


30th of April 1916


It was evening over Seventeen Heiseigahama, and now the half-egg auditorium had slayers abound and chatting everywhere – the Hashira somewhere amongst – and Giyuu Tomioka arrived with the rest seven minutes and twenty seconds early, so that Tsubone Endou could take everyone's attention and stand at the head of the group.

"If hell blows loose tonight," she said. "You'll run and not care for me. That was our agreement to let you come."

"Again, why would anything blow loose?" Kanae asked.

Tsubone didn't answer this time neither. They went to find their seats, and while they walked Giyuu ran an eye through the crowd – and he only knew what he was looking for when he found it – and the flash of silver somewhere struck out to him and he departed the group and went to pursue.

So, Numachi had come. She must have grieved the same way Giyuu did and he felt spurred to approach her to share wounds because of it.

She was leaving the complex, and Giyuu followed her through the entryway that was really a vague marking in the earth between a patch of garden and the auditorium grounds, but a hand shot from the shadow of a tree, and he was pulled into the darkness, and when his eyes became acclimated and the image of the man came into focus under the moonlight he saw that it was Tetsuo Morinaga.

"I've been looking for you, Giyuu," he said.

"Well, us for you too," Giyuu replied.

Then they greeted each other. Afterwards, Giyuu observed Morinaga. He was even shorter now, because he stooped, and he had accumulated a jagged stubble and his mint eyes were dull from many nights of anguish. It was the first time Giyuu saw him in demon slayer uniform, too. Morinaga held his arm and pulled him closer.

"I hope you're doing well, Giyuu. You and the rest."

Giyuu wanted to give his condolences in turn, but he did not have the courage. He only nodded.

"Good. How is Tsubone?"

"…So-so. Anxious."

"I see. Will you do me a favour and bring her to me to talk? It'll be trouble if I let myself be seen. And, for that same reason, don't tell her that it's me who wants to see her."

Giyuu nodded again. Morinaga smiled, but it was not a genuine smile, and he shook his shoulder and showed him where he wanted to be met. Later, when the speech was just to begin, Giyuu told Tsubone that there was someone who wanted to meet her, and after some prodding she yielded to leave Shinobu and Kanae alone in the crowd, and they went backstage to the door of the changeroom and they went inside.

The two saw each other instantly. Tsubone standing and Morinaga bent over in a chair. In the low light of a candle he looked sicker than he did outside, but no less interminable, and he held in his hands an indiscriminate box with a handle sticking out of the top and a wire that ran up the wall behind him. Morinaga told Giyuu to close the door and he did with reluctance. Then he pointed to the empty chair before him and asked Tsubone to sit.

"But first, listen," he said. Footsteps went by on the other side of the wall and stopped where the podium was, and a cheer arose. Nen Kusakabe's voice greeted them in turn. Giyuu confirmed it from his watch, 19:30, and that the speech had begun.

"They're going crazy for him. It's a good mood tonight," Morinaga said. "Sit, Tsubone."

"Tetsuo, what're you–"

"Sit."

Tsubone sat. She was sweating above her eyes and between her fingers and it wasn't the heat that made it so. Morinaga looked at the machine in his hands and asked Tsubone to do the same. Then he explained that below every chair in the complex, above every ceiling and under every leaf, there were bombs set to detonate in a chain from the first to the last, ending in a storage room at the far end of the estate, and beginning beneath the stage upon which Nen Kusakabe spoke. The box he cradled was its detonator.

"Secondly," he said, "if they're on your mind, I've ordered my men to escort Kanae and Shinobu out of the blast radius and not harm them anyhow. I'll do the same for Giyuu after this. So then neither of us will have qualms about blowing this place."

It didn't set in for Giyuu yet. He stood against the door and watched. Though slowly, ever so gradually, he was beginning to suspect.

"Why're you doing this, Tetsuo?" Tsubone asked. She held her hands in her lap.

"Change this organisation for the better," Morinaga replied. "The fighting way."

"You can do it peacefully."

"No, I cannot. I've tried for ten years and I cannot. But let's hear Kusakabe for a moment."


Shinobu and Kanae Kochou sparsely wondered where their mentor and fellow mentee were when the lights were dimmed and the men were hushed and Nen Kusakabe appeared and bent down to the microphone. Nisegami Youma less so. He kept on walking out to find them but returned every time saying he could not. The speech began.

"First, a moment of silence for the late Oyakata-sama and Cloud Hashira Miyamoto Shō."

And there was silence. Then Kusakabe went on.

"Let's start off with a look back in time. One-thousand years ago in the Heian era, Ubuyashiki Kaemon was born into a minor noble family that served in the Imperial Court in Kyoto. From young he was embittered and sickly. He shunned his siblings despite their mediatory attempts and kept himself isolated from the world. When he was nineteen his father set him up for marriage but he stabbed his wife-to-be's hand with a knife. The evil in him was already apparent. Then, when he was nearly twenty, a brutal sickness overcame him, a sickness that threatened to kill him, and his family sent for the most skilled doctor in Asia to heal him. When his treatment was nearly done, however, Kaemon saw no progress in his condition, and he killed the doctor in a fit of rage. It was only afterwards that he found out the medicine had worked, but abnormally. The result of his impatience was this: Ubuyashiki Kaemon had become the first demon, and later he would name himself Kibutsuji Muzan. From then on, the Ubuyashiki family swore to combat the monstrosity they had birthed, and they formed the demon slayers. Ever since then we have fought a long and tumultuous and brutal battle against demonkind, risking annihilation countless times, but pushing through all hardship by way of the visionary leadership of the Ubuyashiki. And yet, there are those now who seek to topple them."


Giyuu listened from the changeroom, and it was intriguing history indeed, but he couldn't will himself to be invested in anything but the bigger matter before him that was increasingly being held to his chest like a bullet in a barrel. Morinaga sighed.

"You hear that, Tsubone? It is so noble. Ubuyashiki fighting what they feel responsible to have created. How God might've reacted to Eve eating that apple in a different world. But we knew that already."

"Tetsuo, I'll say it again… you don't have to do it this way," Tsubone said.

"Well, I suppose, if Miyamoto were here, I'd agree, but…" Morinaga scratched his chin. "There's no helping it now. The bloody way is the more efficient way. Whoever killed her must have realised that too."

The revelation coursed through Giyuu like a current, but it seemed to Morinaga it was not his intention to shock. Tsubone, who did not want him to know, took it in the opposite way, and her face crinkled around her nose for the indignation she thought to have been caused to him. Nevertheless the fear was yet predominant.

"…I spoke with Kusakabe and all of them," she replied. "They said – I know – none of them did it. It wasn't one of ours, Ubuyashiki's cause or… yours."

"But beware, Tsubone, of traitors. Me and otherwise. Though that's never been conceivable to you, has it?"


Kusakabe onstage had to grip his throat to stop the trembling and he wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve. He spoke again.

"Yet, there are those now in our ranks who seek to topple the Ubuyashiki. Vagabonds. Insurgents. They claim they are disillusioned with us, because we are incapable. They claim that in Final Selection we send children to die for a worthless cause, though it was their choice, a choice taken with full knowledge of the dangers, to embark on it. So they sent their six demands yesterday. We all saw them. But, at the very least, it was implied that if these were not met they would protest peacefully. This is not so!"


"What kind of people must we be to let orphans die a death eaten on a mountain, but we don't allow them to carve "kill" into the sides of their swords because it's profane, Tsubone?" Morinaga said. "The way I see it, I'm not the bad one here. But I haven't come to tell you what I'm doing is right."


"You haven't been told this yet, but it is false when we said Ubuyashiki Kanata succumbed to a benign infection of the lungs. He was assassinated, by one of our own. By rebels. They first attacked at Chiba. Then, Otake, where they looted guns. Then they shot up the home of the Water Hashira Tsubone Endou with those guns. Then, when we held a Hashira meeting to discuss all this, Endou was attacked by her closest comrade among them. When we detained and arrested him, he killed the warden of his cell and escaped. Indeed, that is what it is: the traitor, and perpetrator of a violent revolution that now threatens to uproot us, is the Mist Hashira Tetsuo Morinaga!"


Giyuu slid down the wall and he realised what it had come to. In his mind he may have dramatised his situation as impending death and what scared him was that this did not seem too far from the reality. The candlelight cast muscle knots in Tsubone's jaw. Then she untwisted her face.

"Tetsuo, were you the one who ordered that… on my house…"

His eyes were hidden behind clumps of shadow in the sockets. He replied immediately: "I was."


On the other side of the stage Kanae Kochou heard her name behind her and she turned around and she saw Yoneda Magase. He had a rifle slung round his chest and in his hands, and he wore a plate-like, purple-dyed straw hat. She recognised the getup as that of the security team she had seen at events she'd attended before.

Magase tipped his hat. "Kanae, Tsubone sent me. She wants you out of here."

"…You lead security this year?" she replied. "And what's wrong, anyway?"

Magase didn't answer. Kanae chose not to resist and she followed him out to the courtyard with Shinobu behind her. Here there were a few of his people. Some also had guns but others had awkward spears of straight razor blades attached to poles. They were talking between them about having just kicked out some journalist. Besides that, nothing of supposed 'trouble'. Kanae made small talk.

"…What kinda gun is that?" she asked.

"You want to know?"

"Yeah."

"Murata rifle. Old army," Magase replied. "In any case, you'll wait here till the event is done."

"Okay, big man," Kanae said, and it earned her a sneer but nothing else.


Kusakabe was still speaking, and he had already shed the vituperation in his voice, but he continued with as imperious a determination he could gather. He said, lowly:

"Indeed, we have had our issues. Some in our ranks are corrupt. Pulled into positions by strings their families hold. Others are inept, and inept because we have turned a blind eye. However, this is because of the unbelievably powerful demon enemy we face. So conniving, as has been carved into all of your hearts, by the sisters, the fathers, the lovers that you have lost to them. This enemy will surely destroy us, and humanity next, if we fall into one bit of disarray. Yet despite his knowledge of this, Tetsuo Morinaga still rises up!"


"It's true, Tsubone. I'm a bad man and an opportunist and a man-hater. And you are the opposite. My better half. You were always loyal. Death in this job is a requisite hazard and you always had a bigger enemy to distract yourself from it. The incompetence, too. But for how much longer? You're older now and calmer and wiser. Wise enough to know that we don't fight for the people but for the men of money who pay us to stand guard outside their walls while we leave a whole home island neglected, and look at Shikoku because of it. And I am the same kind of nepotist, Tsubone. Remember the Final Selection of '13? Giyuu, do you remember?"

"…That's the one I was in," Giyuu replied.

Tsubone foresaw it: "Don't tell him!"

"That day, after that other boy saved you, you weren't meant to pass," Morinaga said, "but I was there as invigilator, and I thought you ought to have…"

"Tetsuo–"

"And wouldn't you have done the same thing, Tsubone?"

Now, Morinaga was looking straight at her. She averted her head and she saw her student desperate and ragged on the floor and she felt for the first time the urgent pangs of anger. Morinaga asked her again. She said that she would have.

"Even though it breaks the 'rules'?" he asked.

"Even though."

"Even if it means giving up impartialness?"

"…Even if."

"You see, Tsubone, you're the same as me."


"But," Kusakabe said, "I will admit firstly, that I am the same. In some past theatre of my life I was against Ubuyashiki, too. I thought his policies were bastardly, so I went against them. I did not understand his impartialness, so at times I was unkind. And I would be a liar if I said those feelings sis not remain today. However, I realised only on the eve of his death the travesty of my rebellion, and maybe many years ago, too. That is only human nature. We're all the same. We all want more money and to be with who we like and to be free. In this way we cannot fault Tetsuo Morinaga. In this way we cannot entirely credit Ubuyashiki. However, I urge you not to think of this as just 'human nature' against Ubuyashiki! Rather, as 'human nature' against our demon slaying organisation, formed all those years ago as the embodiment of humanity's will, to defeat demonkind among others. A civil war, in every aspect. That is what Tetsuo Morinaga wishes for. Our nature versus our will. One overtakes the other and they both die in the end because of the demons."


"And that is why I've come to ask you to join me, Tsubone. Because we're the same."


"So I beg of you, as humans, to join me in stopping this enemy, together, to guarantee our future!"

Kusakabe's analogy finally seemed to set in for the crowd, and they were whistling for him, hollering, holding their hands over their heads and clapping, some weeping. Others sat still with their hands bunched up on their laps, the older ones, the officers, and who'd know why they were the way they were.

"On this day, I order a state of war against the rebels of Tetsuo Morinaga!"


Tsubone knew Morinaga was done talking and it was only this question and her answer left that would determine a cataclysm of revolution that could have not hoped to have ended until one side had been buried and suffocated under a pile of the other's sins. Her answer was not resolute, nor confident, and she said slowly:

"…I won't."

Morinaga nodded and the speech was done around that same time. Above the cheering, he knew his men were sitting somewhere in the crowds of the enemy, unswayed and deadpan, because he had already so far drilled into them the idea of mutiny that nothing would be able to extract it. He knew how near they reached under the seat where their guns had been stowed, and he knew the intent way they watched the stage so that they would see him appear and fire the first shot and let them be the second – and it wouldn't be a bomb, of any sort, because they recognised their leader as an honourable leader, and an explosive as a dishonourable weapon, even if he may have projected to some the image that he had hidden such devices in the auditorium, even if he carried with him a remote that was all to sure to be a dunce.

"I guessed so," Morinaga said, and he stood up with the detonator. "You've always been incorrigible like that. But it doesn't change anything."

"…Tetsuo?"

"It only means that you're another one of my enemies."

He pushed the handle down and that mechanical action engulfed the world in a beehive of dirt and dry blows of energy and fire afterwards, and it took the dust to settle - and there was no dust - for Morinaga to walk past Tsubone Endou, ducked over and shielding her student, outside unfettered. He took a revolver from his pocket and drifted onto the intact stage with the serenity of a river idol, and he aimed it and shot. In the moment that lay between the bullet and his mortality Nen Kusakabe realised he had died without tending Ubuyashiki's grave, without having loved and having been loved, and without saying goodbye to anyone. The rest would be the dissidence of normal routine.


A/N

Seventeen has got to be an unlucky number somewhere, like thirteen in Friday the thirteenth. And I've got seventeen reviews (as of the 28th of August, 2021). Therefore - please review, for the sake of my fortune. I don't know if a higher number of reviews is necessarily luckier but I wouldn't know until I get there. I've seen Naruto fanfiction with more reviews than favourites and follows... combined. If we're going by the linear way of thinking, those authors must be winning lotteries, hmm?