Kobuchi had read Kurobachi's report. He had read it sitting at his father's desk with the lamp turned up because the words had kept slipping through his understanding on the first pass. The six-eyed demon that had moved through the Kamizuru camps.
Looking at it now, Kobuchi understood what Kurobachi's report had failed to convey. The wrongness radiating from this figure was not fear exactly, though fear was part of it. It was the sensation of standing in front of something that existed outside every category you had spent your life building, and feeling those categories strain under the weight of it.
Three delegation members stood closest to the figure's end of the corridor.
The figure drew his sword. The sound was not the ring of steel but something lower and wetter, like something being separated from itself, and the blade that emerged was covered in crescent-shaped markings that caught the torchlight in ways that made the eye want to slide away.
"Moon Breathing, Third Form: Loathsome Moon, Chains," the figure said, his voice calm and almost gentle.
He swung twice. Two broad, sweeping arcs of the blade produced a storm of crescent projections that filled the corridor end to end, dozens of curved slashes overlapping and intersecting. The three Kamizuru closest to him had no time to react, no time to form seals or raise a guard or take a single step. The crescents found them and passed through them, and the sound they made was brief and total.
Three people, gone in the time it took to draw and swing twice.
The corridor went absolutely silent.
Kobuchi stood with the swarm around him and felt the silence press against his chest like a physical weight. Hachiko's breathing had gone shallow and fast beside him. Genji had stopped moving. Suzume had stopped moving. Even the surviving samurai had gone still, Kenji's raised sword frozen in place, Ryota sitting against the wall with both hands pressed to his sternum.
The figure stood at the far end of the corridor with his sword at his side. The crescent markings on the blade pulsed once, slowly.
Six eyes moved across the remaining Kamizuru.
Then they settled on Kobuchi.
Kobuchi pressed his right thumb into his left palm and drove chakra pulse, pulling the swarm back from its dispersed positions and compressing it into a dense, unified mass between him and the figure. Hundreds of bees, every reserve he had left. The hum they produced together was low enough to feel in the sternum.
"Everyone behind me," he said. His voice came out steady.
The figure tilted his head slightly and looked at the swarm. "The Kamizuru clan," he said.
"You are the one who attacked our camps," Kobuchi said.
"Yes," the figure said.
The flatness of it hit harder than anger would have. There was nothing to push against in that single syllable, no heat or justification or cruelty, just a fact stated by something that had done the thing and found no particular reason to feel any way about it.
Rage moved through Kobuchi like a current, clean and cold and focused. He kept it off his face and out of his hands and let it settle behind his eyes where it could be useful.
He formed the first seal before he finished the thought, pressing two fingers to the floor while keeping his eyes on the figure. "Earth Release: Rising Fang," he said.
Three stone spikes erupted from the floor in a line aimed at the figure's feet, fast and angled, designed to either impale the foot or force a lateral step into the second trap Kobuchi had already begun forming in the stone to the figure's right.
The figure stepped backward once. The spikes passed in front of him by inches.
But the second trap was already rising, a broad shelf of stone pushing up from the floor at an angle designed to catch the back step and throw the weight forward.
The figure looked down at the rising stone. Then he placed one foot on its edge and used it as a platform, stepping up onto the shelf rather than being thrown by it, and then stepping off it forward, toward Kobuchi, as though the trap had simply become a stepping stone.
Kobuchi drove the full mass of the swarm forward in a concentrated assault, not a wave or a drill but everything at once, every bee converging on the figure's face and hands and the joints of his clothing where skin might be exposed. At the same time he activated the Body Flicker Technique, pushing chakra through his legs in a concentrated burst and reappearing twenty feet to the figure's left in the space of a breath.
He formed three seals the moment he landed. "Earth Release: Mud Wall," he said, and a barrier of dense compressed earth rose between the swarm and the rest of the delegation, sealing off the corridor.
Then he looked at what the swarm was doing to the figure.
It covered him completely, tens of hundreds of stings going in at every exposed point, a volume of venom sufficient to drop a any shinobi in under thirty seconds. The figure stood inside the storm of it with his sword at his side and his eyes partially closed against the assault. He stood the way stone stands, without reference to what is being done to it.
But three of his six eyes had already turned toward Kobuchi's new position. He had tracked the Body Flicker without needing to turn his head.
The figure raised his sword hand, slow and deliberate, and the bees covering it fell away as though the air around the hand had changed. The ones touching his skin went still, not dead but ceasing to function, the venom doing nothing.
He turned fully to face Kobuchi. "You are strong," he said. "But, sadly, I am stronger."
Kobuchi said nothing. He was already reading the distance between them.
"These bees cannot harm me," the figure said.
"I have noticed it," Kobuchi said.
He pressed his palm to the floor and pushed chakra deeper this time, past the floor, down through the stone, into the foundations of the corridor itself. He felt the structure of it through the connection, the density of the rock, the way weight distributed through it.
About four feet down he found what he was looking for: a fault line in the original construction where two sections of foundation met without fully bonding, a weakness the palace builders had either not known about or not bothered to address.
He pressed chakra into it carefully.
The figure was walking toward him.
Unhurried, covering the distance with that deceptive ease of motion.
Kobuchi let him come.
At ten feet, he drove the chakra into the fault line as hard as he could push it. "Earth Release: Fault Collapse," he said.
The floor between them dropped. Not all of it, not a sinkhole, but a three-foot section of stone cracked along the fault and dropped eight inches at a steep angle, the kind of sudden unexpected shift that throws balance even when you're braced for it.
The figure's lead foot went into the drop. His weight shifted forward and down in a way that even his extraordinary balance could not fully compensate for in the fraction of a second available.
Kobuchi was already moving, closing the distance with a Body Flicker that brought him inside the figure's guard, and he drove the heel of his palm forward at the figure's sternum with every ounce of force he could push into the strike, his whole body weight behind it, the impact landing square and solid.
The sound of it was enormous in the confined corridor.
The figure moved backward. Two full steps, which given everything Kobuchi had seen was something he had not expected to see. The figure's back foot found the edge of the fault and he stopped himself from going further, but for one moment he had been moved by a physical strike, and both of them knew it.
...
Six eyes focused on Kobuchi with a sharpness that hadn't been there before.
The corridor held the silence for the length of a held breath.
Then the crescent markings on the figure's blade pulsed, brighter than before, and the eyes along the scabbard opened wide all at once, every last one of them. The figure raised his sword with a slowness that felt deliberate and ceremonial.
"Moon Breathing, Seventh Form," he said. "Mirror of Misfortune, Moonlit."