The seven-meter Shura Form stood at the center of the corridor. Upon its skeletal frame, light of five interwoven colors flowed. The thunder-body, infused by the power of the Five Elements, was denser than ever before. The yōki upon its surface had transformed from semi-transparent into a tangible, materialized mist.
Saint Hakurei, at last, retreated. That gaunt, withered silhouette settled back down at the far end of the corridor. The prayer beads flew from the ground back into his hand. His clouded, white eyes were fixed upon the Shura Form.
Shinji could feel it. He was truly looking. Truly regarding the yōkai before him. Truly regarding his enemy. Before, he seemed never to have genuinely treated Shinji as an opponent, only as a resentful spirit that needed to be purified as per the norm. Now, his attitude was entirely different.
And then Saint Hakurei moved once more. No more teleportation. No more flinging of prayer beads. No more condensing pillars of light. Only three beastly silhouettes, manifesting behind him. He summoned forth the three Guardian Spirits he had swallowed into the mountain.
The Golden Lion. Shattered. Its golden spirit-body, scarred by the searing wounds of blood-fire, emerged from the mountain walls.
The Celestial-Eye Peacock. Broken-winged. Half its golden spirit-body frozen solid by the moon-bloom, it seeped down from the ceiling.
The Leopard-Tail God. Severed-tailed. Its black spirit-body crawled up through the fissures in the ground.
The ruined remnants of the three Guardian Spirits surged toward Saint Hakurei simultaneously.
Fusion.
The golden, black, and white light of their spirit-bodies poured into that gaunt, withered frame, like three tributaries flowing into a parched riverbed.
Saint Hakurei's form began to transform. His spine straightened. His desiccated body swelled. His monastic robes shredded, revealing the petrified skin beneath. Gray-white contours, like the strata of a mountain, rose in layer after layer.
Four arms extended from his ribs. Each arm gripped a different object. A Vajra. A lotus. A treasure sword. A string of prayer beads.
A fleshly protuberance emerged from the crown of his head. His features shifted from gaunt and withered to dignified and solemn. His eyes shifted from clouded white to gold.
Vow-power had utterly overwhelmed resentment.
He was no longer a resentful spirit, a demon-buddha, trapped within a mountain.
He had become a true bodhisattva.
The flesh-buddha had devoured the Mandate power of three Guardian Spirits and manifested the Bodhisattva Aspect. Four arms of solemn majesty. Precious light swirling around him. Vow-power cascaded from his body at a concentration ten times greater than before.
The remaining Buddha statues lining the corridor, in that same instant, all shattered simultaneously. Every last trace of power within them was reabsorbed.
All the Buddhist power of Mount Hakurei.
All the petrified flesh.
All the accumulation of centuries.
It all converged into this Bodhisattva Aspect.
The suppressive force skyrocketed once more to an even more inconceivable degree.
The Shura Form's skeletal frame groaned and shrieked once more beneath the crushing majesty of the Bodhisattva Aspect. Seven meters shrank back to six and a half. Six and a half receded toward six.
A mayfly shaking a great tree.
The Shura Form of the Tenth Transformation's Five Viscera, against the Bodhisattva Aspect of Saint Hakurei, still faced a vast, insurmountable gap.
A staggering disparity of tiers.
Within Shinji's crimson demon eyes, beneath the radiance of the Five Elements, a color never before seen surfaced. A base of scarlet, overlaid with violet veins, orange luminescence, silver moonlight, emerald traces, and pale white. Five hues surging simultaneously.
He could feel it, he was already immensely powerful. So powerful that, using the most classic comparison, he could now defeat three versions of his four-viscera self simultaneously.
Among Twelfth Transformation yōkai, he could now be counted as one with considerable accumulation. No longer weak.
This was already astonishing enough.
By Shinji's own classification, which Twelfth Transformation demon had not undergone at least several centuries of accumulation? The weakest were still existences of four or five hundred years. The strongest, like Kidōmaru, were thousand-year-old demons, approaching the level of daiyōkai, whose domain-expansion could even surpass ordinary daiyōkai in speed.
The gap between the upper and lower ends was vast. Yet its baseline was, from the very start, impossibly high.
Shinji had achieved this with a single year of accumulation. Chasing, and surpassing, a thickness of five hundred years.
But it was clear, this was still not enough.
Facing a flesh-buddha.
Facing a half-enlightened one, merely a single step from nirvana.
A high monk whose heart still held resentment, yet was still a bodhisattva.
Surpassing the accumulation of a five-hundred-year yōkai was not enough.
His Tenth Transformation, was also not enough.
He needed to advance one step further.
That step, was the Eleventh Transformation.
The Three Souls:
The Heaven Soul.
The Earth Soul.
The Human Soul.
For this step, he had long since conceived a blueprint. A blueprint that could be achieved with blinding speed.
The Earth Soul, he possessed it naturally.
The very essence of a demon warrior was rebirth after death.
The Earth Soul was the foundation of demonification. It had been rooted in his marrow from the very first day of transmigration.
The Heaven Soul, required the Shikon no Tama.
That sacred jewel, which sealed the grudges of hundreds of yōkai and the soul of the mightiest miko.
Though the Shikon no Tama was not in his hands at this moment, he had someone.
He had Kikyō.
The Shikon no Tama was upon Kikyō's person.
Kikyō was outside the temple.
All he needed, was a single medium.
A single connection.
A single arrow, shot in from beyond.
Upon the secondary peak opposite the main summit of Mount Hakurei.
Kikyō stood at the edge of the cliff. Her longbow was drawn fully open. The bowstring was stretched to its absolute limit.
White reiryoku condensed at the arrow's tip into a sphere of spiritual power three shaku in diameter.
Behind her was the Buddhist barrier wall of Mount Hakurei, the breach she had spent two days carving open. The breach was continuously contracting.
The Shikon no Tama against her chest shuddered violently. The light of the Naohi within pierced through the fabric of her miko robes, casting a bright, white luminescence upon her body.
Midoriko's residual soul was telling her something.
"The time has come."
Kikyō released the bowstring.
The arrow shot through the breach, trailing a wake of reiryoku three shaku in diameter. It pierced through half the spatial expanse of Mount Hakurei and shot straight toward the temple at the mountain peak.
But this arrow, naturally, was not aimed at Saint Hakurei.
It was aimed at.... Onmyōin Kokoro.
Outside the temple at the mountain peak.
Kokoro, possessed by Nue, stood upon the roof ridge. Seven puppet yōkai encircled her on all sides.
The blue-faced demon.
The colossal centipede.
The one-eyed giant.
Plus the other four, the Ghost-Chariot Bird, the Petrified Python, the Twin-Headed Hound, the Iron Rat.
Seven Essence-level puppets, sealed and remodeled by onmyōdō.
Golden chains and pentagram spell-characters wove into an interlocking formation.
Kikyō stood upon the distant mountain peak, separated by the span of an entire mountain, loosing arrows toward this side.
The two had been dueling across the void for a quarter of an hour.
Kikyō's reiryoku archery was astonishing. Piercing a willow leaf at a hundred paces was utterly insufficient to describe it. On the battlefield, she would be a marksman whose very name inspired terror.
And even off the battlefield, her archery, combined with her reiryoku, could still instill a terrifying, bone-deep dread in any existence.
Every single one of those arrows could instantly strike the onmyōdō seals upon the puppets. Every talisman-bead. Every junction of the chains. Every core of their spellcraft.
Fortunately, her response was not slow.
Nue's manipulation of the seven puppets far surpassed anything Kokoro herself could have achieved. The severed control threads were reconnected in the blink of an eye. The shattered talisman-beads were replaced in an instant. The seven puppets maintained their combat strength throughout.
And more, they converged into a single, unified force.
Seven powerful demons, by Shinji's definition, at least of the Ninth Transformation, if not the Tenth, condensed into a single entity.
It was the equivalent of an osore force-field unfurling its links.
In terms of resistance to damage, they would not be inferior to a daiyōkai.
That was why they could withstand Kikyō's spirit-cleansing arrows.
Reaching what appeared to be a stalemate.
But Nue knew, it was only an appearance.
Her golden slit-pupils narrowed faintly. The smile at the corner of the possessed girl's lips, instead, deepened.
"Truly remarkable."
Nue spoke through Kokoro's throat, her voice low and drawn-out, as though drifting from centuries past.
"Not a single arrow wasted. Every fraction of reiryoku wielded to its utmost extreme. A quarter of an hour, and not a trace of disturbance in her breathing."
Her golden slit-pupils gazed at that figure in white and crimson upon the opposite mountain peak.
Deep within those pupils surfaced an indescribable light.
No hostility.
No wariness.
Only a sigh of profound admiration.
"That Midoriko of ages past, though she was the creator of the Shikon no Tama, at your age, she was still far from possessing such a state of mind."
Nue mused, as though speaking to herself.
"You… have already overcome the Trial of Emotion, haven't you?"
Her words had barely fallen.
Kikyō's ninth arrow arrived.
This arrow was not aimed at any single puppet.
It shot toward the roof ridge beneath Kokoro's feet.
Nue's golden slit-pupils constricted violently.
In a single instant, the intuition accumulated over centuries of experience screamed a frantic warning.
Nue saw it.
Nearly in the very same breath that the arrow left the bowstring, Nue pierced through Kikyō's entire intent.
Nine arrows.
Nine landing points.
From the very beginning, this had never been a battle of attrition against her puppets.
Those arrows aimed at the puppets had been nothing but diversion.
The true killing stroke, was buried within the mountain itself.
Seeping and spreading along the flesh and bones of Saint Hakurei's body.
Weaving into a net of reiryoku that covered half the temple.
Waiting for all nine anchor points to be fully in position.
Then detonating them all at once.
Nue saw it all.
"…Magnificent."
Within her golden slit-pupils, there was no panic.
There even surfaced genuine admiration.
But admiration was one thing.
Seeing was another.
Her body... could not keep up.
That was the crux of the problem.
Nue was the possession of a shattered, incomplete will, returned from the depths of hell.
Not a true descent.
She could borrow Kokoro's eyes to pierce through every stratagem.
Could borrow Kokoro's mind to extrapolate every possible countermeasure.
But her hands, were the hands of a fifteen-year-old girl.
Those hands could not manifest even one ten-thousandth of Nue's true power.
To dismantle that net of reiryokum, she would need to simultaneously sever the reiryoku links between all nine anchor points and the mountain body.
With Nue's onmyōdō at its zenith, a matter of a single snap of the fingers.
With Kokoro's body, impossible.
Absolutely impossible.
Like a master swordsman sealed within the body of an infant.
The mind knew exactly how to swing the blade.
But the arms couldn't even lift the sword.
Nue sighed.
That sigh, exhaled from Kokoro's lips, carried a weight of ages that did not belong to a young girl.
"What a pity."
Her golden slit-pupils gazed one last time at that figure in white and crimson upon the distant mountain peak.
"As expected of the strongest miko of this age. I cannot say my defeat was unjust."
The arrow embedded itself into the petrified roof tiles.
Reiryoku erupted from the arrow's shaft.
White reiryoku spread along the grain of the tiles.
It traced the spinal structure of the roof ridge and burrowed deep into the mountain.
Deep into this mountain, formed from the very flesh of Saint Hakurei.
Kikyō drew her bow once more.
The tenth arrow.
The diameter of the reiryoku radiance swelled from three shaku to five.
The nine arrow landing points activated almost simultaneously.
White light erupted from within the mountain's body.
The roof ridge shattered.
The corridor pillars split.
Half the outer structures of the temple collapsed beneath the piercing onslaught of reiryoku.
The onmyōdō control threads upon the seven puppet yōkai, were severed simultaneously by the reiryoku network.
All of them.
Simultaneously.
In a single instant.
Nue's control over the puppets collapsed.
The control threads and the maintenance of the possession had always shared the limited spiritual veins of Kokoro's body.
The backlash from the total annihilation of the puppets directly shattered the very foundation of the possession.
The blue-faced demon's talisman-beads detonated. Its uncontrolled husk stiffened dead on the spot.
The colossal centipede's hundred legs twitched twice before it crashed to the ground with a thunderous roar.
The one-eyed giant's knees buckled. Its three-jō-tall body smashed into the rubble.
The Ghost-Chariot Bird.
The Petrified Python.
The Twin-Headed Hound.
The Iron Rat.
All seven puppets, like clockwork mechanisms whose gears had been simultaneously ripped out, ground to a halt in perfect unison.
The possessed Kokoro stumbled from the shock of the backlash.
Her entire body was hurled off her feet by the collapsing fragments of the roof ridge and slammed into a heap of shattered stone.
The golden slit-pupils flickered twice.
In the final instant before her consciousness receded, Nue's lingering will silently spoke a single sentence with Kokoro's lips.
No sound.
Only the shape of the words.
"Well done. Next time… we shall meet in Kyōto."
And then the golden tide receded.
That layer of golden shadow, which had coiled like a serpent across the surface of Kokoro's soul, faded away, strand by strand, like a thin mist scattered by the morning light.
Her large, amber eyes returned to their original color.
A stalemate of a quarter of an hour.
Yet in the end, a single arrow had decided the victor.