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"Do you resent me?"
In the boundless dark, Muzan's voice rang out without warning.
I cut off my awareness of the outside world and pulled all my attention back to the man in front of me.
He had broken free from the illusion I'd constructed. He sat in the darkness exactly as he'd looked in the old days, same face, same clothes.
I guessed he'd already sensed the deaths of the two Upper Ranks. That seemed to have pushed him toward a decision: break out, no matter the cost.
The evidence was right there. I could no longer feel Tamayo's presence, and the body outside, wrapped in its cocoon and reborn inside it, was changing in ways that shouldn't have been possible.
He was almost ready to break free. Sunrise was still hours away.
Muzan's spirit held steady as we communicated, or so it seemed. But I knew he was pushing back, trying to flip the trap, to pin me here and drag me into some grotesque symbiosis with him.
The thought almost made me laugh.
He had always looked down on me for keeping company with humans. And now, at the very end, the best plan he could come up with was taking me hostage?
He was tearing at his prison in furious desperation. I was using every ounce of brute force I had to hold him there, to deny him any chance of crawling out of that cocoon.
But the real fight was happening beneath the surface. On the outside, we sat across from each other in perfect stillness, as if we weren't each other's mortal enemy.
I genuinely hadn't expected him to ask that. It made me start overthinking immediately — was there some hidden angle to the question, or was he just performing vulnerability to make me drop my guard?
Maybe Mitsuri had shared one too many romance novels with me. Or maybe it was the fact that he and I did have a history that was, in its own strange way, complicated.
Either way, the question landed in my head with an odd, mournful weight. I wasn't sure if I was imagining it.
It made me shudder, regardless.
But when I actually thought about it , I couldn't say I resented him. Not really.
The me from back then was too small, too powerless. Just surviving took everything I had. Every scrap of thought, every ounce of will, spent on the simple act of staying alive.
"I have never hated you," I said.
A strange ripple moved through the darkness. Something like shock.
From Ubuyashiki to every last member of the Demon Slayer Corps, they all despised him with everything they had. Some because of the curse. Others because he had taken the people they loved most.
But for them, no matter how monstrous he was, he existed in the same world they did. He was real to them in the way that enemies are real.
I was different.
From the moment I walked into that mansion, the young master lying sick in his bed had been something from another world entirely. If I borrowed the language of modern novelists, he was an indescribable thing. A monster in the truest sense.
And monsters don't belong to your world. So when they do monstrous things, there's nothing to understand, and nothing to resent.
Because that's just what monsters are. Of course they do terrible things.
No understanding, no resentment. It was that simple.
Even after he became a demon, eliminating him was never personal. It was a task. Something that had to be done.
Why would I have spent any feeling on him at all?
I hadn't said any of this out loud. But we were locked in a quiet war for dominance, and he had almost certainly read every word of it from my thoughts.
I heard him laugh, low and soft. When he spoke, his voice was pure venom. "But I detest you. Immensely."
That surprised me. I raised an eyebrow and caught fragments of image bleeding out of his fury:
My back as I worked. Sneaking into a corner with O-Koto during breaks, whispering about what the kitchen was making that day. Quiet laughter. Running full-tilt down the corridor and leaping off the end. Standing in sunlight with my arms stretched wide open.
Trivial moments. So many of them. Half of them I didn't even remember myself.
I hadn't known he'd been sitting inside that house, watching me so carefully all that time.
Watching me with that much malice. That much jealousy.
"You are truly pitiful," I said.
Muzan stopped responding. He turned every last bit of himself toward the cocoon wall and began to tear through it, clawing his way out of the dark, the way he must have clawed out of his mother's womb the very first time, into a world of enemies who had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Muzan—"
Someone's roar split the air like thunder. The wind was the only answer.
Tamayo's drugs worked through him in layers, one after another. But he burned through half his brain and half his heart to do it, spent everything he had, and forced me out.
If he'd swallowed me instead, he probably would have fallen faster.
I felt a small, quiet regret about that. But it was enough. We had done enough. The rest belonged to everyone I trusted.
Yushiro had moved the Infinity Castle above ground, into open country, wide fields with no cover, nowhere for Muzan to hide from the sky.
The battle outside was still going when I heard rustling against the torn shell of the cocoon.
"...Found it! Over here!"
My consciousness was starting to blur at the edges. I heard a blade punch into something dense and wet, and then someone was struggling to crawl inside.
Hands came from everywhere. They grabbed me, pulled me upright. Someone got me onto their back. They leaned on each other and carried me out.
"Are you alright?"
"Are you hurt anywhere?"
"Do you want something to eat?"
A damp cloth scrubbed across my face, and I realized I couldn't open my eyes because they were caked in blood.
I looked up. A group of Corps members stood around me. Strangers, mostly.
Not entirely strangers. I'd crossed paths with some of them once, maybe offered a word of guidance, maybe helped some unlucky kid track down the sword that had been taken from him. Small things.
They didn't know my name. They didn't know who I was. But every young face looking down at me was full of concern.
A few of the female members settled beside me, using water their companions had brought to clean the blood and other things off my skin, careful and unhurried, tending to me like it mattered.
"How is it... now?"
One of them started to answer, then suddenly shot to their feet and pointed. "Look! The sun!"
I turned toward the voice without thinking. On the horizon, the sun was rising.
One last roar of defiance rang out. Several battle cries answered it.
Then the sun crested the horizon, and every sound stopped at once.
The whole world held its breath.
"Muzan... is gone."
Someone's voice was shaking. "We... won."
"We won!"
The cheer hit like a wave and rolled across the entire field, sending a line of birds bursting into the sky.
I couldn't help it. I smiled. I must have been more hurt than I realized, because my face felt strange, hot and tight and a little painful for no reason I could name.
Then the cheers turned into screaming.
"Clothes , someone bring clothes! Lady Chihaya is right here, oh no oh no oh NO—"
"Over here too! A few people, come block the sun! Hurry! It's coming this way!"
"Yushiro! Yushiro! Get over here, get into the shade!"
I didn't even have time to react. Jackets and cloaks and tunics rained down on me from every direction, soaked in blood and sweat, piled on until I was buried.
Look. I know how this sounds. I know it's ungrateful.
But it really, truly, absolutely reeked.
Someone. Anyone. Please save me.
I squeezed my eyes shut in pure suffering, and with every fiber of my being, I wished I could just pass out.
➤ Next: Thank You, All This Time
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