Book 4: Chapter 40: Lily Versus Kyūbōzu

The metallic chains inside the bottomless hole quivered uninterruptedly as some dust plunged into the darkness.

On the dimly lit round platform illuminated by the lanterns, a red-dressed girl and a dark-green archdemon were engaged in an impressive battle that awed all the samurai present at the scene.

A few samurai thanked their luck for holding back from rushing to the platform after watching the intensity of the duo’s battle.

There were also some who longed to have the power and talent possessed by the girl. However, the fact that a girl was battling an archdemon alone in front of such a huge gallery of iron-willed men while allowing no intervention from them made these chauvinistic Heian samurai and powerhouses blush with shame.

Kiuchidera Tesshin’s red-lined white coat fluttered in the air as he watched Lily and Kyūbōzu’s battle solemnly. He felt glad that they hadn’t tried to attack Lily in Kiyosu City. They wouldn’t have gotten away with just offending Lord Kamakura in the reverse case as they mightn’t have won against Lily even if they fought her.

“Lord Tamurakonoe, I didn’t expect this mirror girl to be so powerful! She’s indeed from that cursed clan. It would be too dangerous to allow such a clan to grow in strength,” Tesshin stated icily.

“Her current strength has exceeded my expectations as well based on the information we have on her. If there’s nothing amiss with the information, her strength must’ve advanced a lot recently once again. If she weren’t a mirror girl, I really wouldn’t have wanted to kill such a pretty and talented woman,” Tamurakonoe said with pity while looking at Lily. He felt that it would’ve been great to employ her at their dojo if she weren’t a mirror girl. However, a talent like this was destined to fall.

It had nothing to do with right or wrong, she had to die because she was a mirror girl1.

“Should I a.s.sa.s.sinate her, Brother Tamurakonoe?” Ui’s eyes flashed with innocent malice.

“No. That kappa is pretty strong, so it would be troublesome for us to deal with him if we kill her now. Although my blade is faster than hers, my evasive skills aren’t as good as hers. I can defeat her, but that doesn’t mean I can overpower Kyūbōzu in terms of brute strength,” Tamurakonoe narrowed his eyes.

“Is it possible for her to defeat Kyūbōzu though?”

Tamurakonoe shook his head, “I’m not sure. We can say that Kyūbōzu is bound to incur ma.s.sive injuries if he kills her based on the current developments and this would make it easier for us to deal with him. It would also allow us to both kill her and obtain the treasure in one move.”

Ui nodded after hearing this despite wanting to wring Lily’s neck with her kendama’s thread and humiliate Lily tormentingly while straddling her.

Lily rolled sideways to dodge the mountainous dark-purple pole that Kyūbōzu had smashed down towards her, causing it to land beside her. Lily then jumped up amidst the violent tremor and executed a beautiful flip to evade the swing from Kyūbōzu’s pole and sprinted forward to slash his foot. Unlike the ordinary blade attacks from the other samurai that failed to hurt him previously, Lily’s Yasutsuna left a deep wound on his foot.

Kyūbōzu fell to his knee and Lily seized this chance to flip over again after coming to a sliding stop and summoned Crescent Moon in her other hand while she was in midair before stabbing her two blades into his back, leaving behind two deep blade wounds when she pulled them out.

Kyūbōzu screamed in pain and sp.a.w.ned dark-green tentacles from his back to attack Lily all of a sudden.

“What?!”

Lily had been watching out for the tentacles that Kyūbōzu had sp.a.w.ned from his abdominal front, but she wasn’t expecting him to sp.a.w.n them from his back as well.

A tentacle caught Lily’s thigh by surprise and dragged her to the ground. The tentacle then pa.s.sed through the crack of her b.u.t.t from behind and slithered all the way around her waist by pa.s.sing between her crotch tightly before a.s.saulting her chest.

The tentacle squeezed Lily’s chest tightly and this made her run short on breath while experiencing a bone-crushing pain as Lily’s defense was her weakness.

Lily unsummoned Crescent Moon and summoned the shorter yet sharper Brocade-Patterned Koi to sever the tentacle binding her arm, following which she severed the whole tentacle binding her body with swift movements.

“Sakura Blizzard—Coffin of Wild Blossoms!”

A crimson aura shrouded Lily as sakura spun around her and formed crimson blades before mincing the tentacles into pieces, causing green blood to shower momentarily.

Lily dashed out of the green rain’s range and circled all the way to Kyūbōzu’s foot, she then leaped onto his foot and jumped up while spinning beautifully, her two blades slashing his leg tens of times in the form of a crimson storm.

“Spurt! Spurt! Spurt! Spurt! Spurt!” Blood jetted out from the blade wounds.

The darkwood pole descended towards Lily once again, but she arched backward to dodge it by a hair’s breadth, causing it to smash one foot away from her head. Lily then caught the wooden pole with her legs and borrowed the momentum of Kyūbōzu’s pulling motion to launch her body towards his hand and spun swiftly like a crimson lightning storm after switching Crescent Moon with Yasutsuna.

“Spurt! Bzzt!”

Kyūbōzu’s fingers were severed into a dozen pieces along with the back of his hand, following which the darkwood pole collapsed to the ground and caused all the chains to quiver.

“How dare you?! Argh!” Kyūbōzu screamed in pain while raising his bloodied hand.

Lily pulled the darkwood pole near her with her foot and made it disappear with a single thought.

“What?!” Tamurakonoe was shocked by this as well. How could such a ma.s.sive pole disappear so suddenly? Who did it? Lily or Kyūbōzu? How did they do it? They couldn’t have an artifact similar to my storage pouch, do they?!

The water streams increased in size, but the water humanoids continued to shrink. The streams then split up and transformed into kappas, each wielding poisoned fishhooks that they shot towards Lily. The kappas were all 6th-stage or 7th-stage Awakened, and though they weren’t that powerful, the fishhooks were pretty bizarre.

Lily didn’t have the leeway to deal with these kappas, so she waved her hand to summon a helper, “Aid me, Yuki-Onna!”

An ice-cold wind pa.s.sed beside Lily and the white-dressed, translucent-cardiganed Yuki-Onna manifested along with snow bursts.

“Remember that you owe me once now,” Yuki-Onna’s melodious voice resounded throughout the hole.

Yuki-Onna then waved her sleeve and launched a frigid, crystalline ancient rune towards a kappa.

The kappa’s body began freezing when the runes struck it and Yuki-Onna floated towards it while manifesting an ice blade in her hand.

“Spurt!” A blue sword beam shot out from the ice blade’s slash and severed the kappa’s body into two.

“W-What is going on?” The samurai had long become unable to make sense of the battle unfolding before their eyes, “Where did that flying demoness come from?”

“A familiar! It’s a familiar! As it’s fighting the kappas, Kagami Lily must’ve summoned it!”

“What?! S-She has a familiar, too?!”

The samurai were left stupefied.

“That’s Yuki-Onna!”

“What?! The fabled demoness of the East’s snowy plains, Yuki-Onna, has become Kagami Lily’s familiar?!2”

Lily then summoned the white hound’s soul and made it attack the kappas as well.

The temperature of the cave had dropped down a lot by now.

Tamurakonoe’s expression also turned solemn. He wasn’t afraid of Yuki-Onna, but he was worried about how many tricks Lily still had hidden under her sleeves.

“Why is it that a mere woman like her possesses so many treasures and skills?” Tamurakonoe felt that Lily might actually possess more treasures than him, the young lord of the Maro Dojo.

“How dare you steal my weapon, b̲i̲t̲c̲h̲?!” Kyūbōzu howled as he punched towards Lily.

However, void of the darkwood pole, Kyūbōzu’s punches weren’t that much of a threat to Lily, so she danced with her two blades and left several blade wounds on Kyūbōzu’s hands and legs.

Lily questioned Kyūbōzu while dodging his attacks, “Answer me, Kyūbōzu. What is a sword miko3?”

Kyūbōzu’s ma.s.sive body trembled, and fury filled his whole being immediately, “How dare a mere samurai woman from the East like you ask me such a secret?! You have no business asking such things! Die!”

Kyūbōzu’s foot stomped towards Lily.

“Boom!” The round platform shook violently as a result, leaving behind a crater and a long crack on it.

But Lily managed to retreat in time and circled to the back of his foot before stabbing her power-infused blade deeply into Kyūbōzu’s heel.

Lily unsummoned Crescent Moon and held Yasutsuna’s hilt with both hands before pulling it upwards with all her strength!

“Spurt!” By the time Lily finished executing the sword movement, her blade was pointing towards the top after severing through the tendon of Kyūbōzu’s heel.

Kyūbōzu kneeled once again, but it wasn’t that easy for him to stand up.

Although the hand severed by Lily had long regenerated, he had no means to recover his darkwood pole.

Kyūbōzu glowered at Lily with hate. He far overpowered Lily in terms of strength, but he was unable to catch her, “This b̲i̲t̲c̲h̲ has some incredible evasion skills!”

Kyūbōzu opened his duckbill suddenly and spewed out a vast amount of purple mist, filling the whole platform with it in just a few moments.

“W-What is this?” Lily was certain that it was some kind of toxic mist. She would’ve pulled some distance from her enemy usually in cases like these, but the round platform wasn’t that huge to begin with, so she had nowhere to hide from the toxic fog.

Yuki-Onna was a snow-type demon, so she didn’t fear the toxic mist at all and just released a powerful snowstorm with a fling of her sleeve.

Lily also manipulated her domain’s sakura blades to a.s.sist Yuki-Onna in releasing the snowstorm and boosted its power to disperse the toxic mist immediately.

“What?!” Kyūbōzu’s eyes opened wide, “How dare you do this, b̲i̲t̲c̲h̲?!”

A raging storm of spirit power akin to a boiling lake unleashed from Kyūbōzu’s body along with the gradual reduction of the green liquid inside the translucent disk on his head.

“This looks bad! Watch out, Master. Kyūbōzu intends to use the kappas’ lifeblood spell!” Kagura warned. Although Kagura couldn’t partic.i.p.ate in this deadly fight, she was observing the whole battle with rapt attention from within the mirror.

“A lifeblood spell, you say?” Lily felt a shiver pa.s.s through her when she heard this.

“The green liquid inside the disks of kappas are their lifeblood essence and Kyūbōzu has boosted his strength temporarily by expending it. You must act with caution, Master!”

Kyūbōzu’s body had taken a magmatic red shade by the time his lifeblood essence vanished and had become so hot that it vaporized the water droplet that fell on it from the cavern’s top, giving rise of steaming vapours from his body.

“You wanted to know about sword mikos, right, samurai woman? Here’s my answer, then. I used this form of mine to slaughter countless sword mikos until now! If you want to know about them so much, let me give you a taste of the pain that those formidable yet narcissistic sword mikos experienced at my hands in their final moments!”

The chaotic eldritch energy coming from Kyūbōzu caused the whole cavern to tremble…

1. Silva: And why’s that? What did mirror girl ever do to anyone? Are they just so powerful that the whole world is afraid of them and want them gone? The author never explained this part.
2. Robinxen: Power move.
3. Robinxen: Maybe Yae knows. Huh. Wrong setting?