20demayo Chapter 4 Sweeping Blade
Chapter 4 Sweeping Blade
The air inside the carriage instantly became scorching hot due to someone's awakening.
Kyojuro Rengoku suddenly opened his eyes, his pupils, like burning torches, showing no trace of the confusion of just waking up.
With an unimaginable willpower and survival instinct, they forcibly broke free from the shackles of the dream.
"Hmm! It seems I slept quite soundly!"
Kyojuro's voice shook the dust off the roof of the carriage.
Tanjiro quickly stepped forward and explained the perilous situation to him in concise language.
Kyojuro turned to look at Pei Qi, his eyes sharp as if judging him, but he didn't ask any questions, only nodding slightly in acknowledgment.
At this juncture, saving the lives of the two hundred passengers on the train is of paramount importance.
"Based on my previous observations, the demon named 'Nightmare' has probably already abandoned its human form. It has now become one with this entire steam train."
Pei Qi pointed to the slightly undulating floor beneath his feet, his voice steady.
"In other words, this car is his spine, his internal organs, his flesh and blood."
"Has it merged with the train? This is a tricky situation!" Kyojuro said in a deep voice.
"The only way to kill him completely is to find his 'neck,' which is the core node of this vehicle. I suspect it's near the boiler room."
Pei Qi did not reveal that he knew the truth about the plot, but instead gave advice through logical deduction.
"Mr. Rengoku, please take charge of the defense of the last five carriages. The 'flesh chunks' there will proliferate wildly due to his agitation. Tanjiro, you take Nezuko and Inosuke to find the core. As for me..."
Pei Qi looked down at the hilt of the sword in his hand, which shimmered with a purple light. "I'll be responsible for attracting his attention from the front and giving him a surprise."
At this moment, Nightmare, located on top of the car, was falling from extreme smugness into despair.
Through the sensory network integrated with the train, he was horrified to discover that the swarms of monsters he had deployed in various carriages were disappearing in droves.
In Nightmare's perception, the mysterious figure of unknown origin pushed the car from the back to the center almost without stopping.
In each carriage, with each ghost, the person stayed for no more than a minute.
Not a single human was harmed, and there was no unnecessary chatter. It didn't feel like a battle; it felt more like a skilled demolition worker clearing away debris.
"This kind of killing speed... even that so-called 'Flame Pillar' couldn't possibly achieve this, right?" Nightmare's eyes darted nervously across the floor.
Suddenly, he sensed a familiar presence rapidly approaching him. It was the boy wearing the flower-shaped earring.
"Only one? Hmph... Fine." Nightmare suppressed her fear of the mysterious person and a sinister smile appeared on her lips.
"Although I don't know where that monster is hiding, as long as I deal with this target first, I'll still be invincible after being strengthened by that lord's blood!"
The wind howled from the roof of the car as Tanjiro arrived as promised.
Nightmare grinned as she activated the Blood Demon Art, and countless hands with eyeballs emerged from the flesh and blood on the roof of the car.
Tanjiro struggled incessantly with the voice that forced him to sleep, and even had to force himself back to reality by committing suicide in his dream.
Just as Tanjiro was momentarily dazed due to exhaustion, Enmu let out a maniacal laugh: "Sleep! Die happily in your dreams!"
However, the next second, a deafening roar suddenly erupted from the roof of the car beneath Nightmare's feet.
"boom!!!"
A burst of fire, accompanied by a violent shockwave, instantly blasted open the roof of the carriage. It wasn't the power generated by any breathing technique, but a pure, irrational physical explosion.
Amidst the thick smoke, Nightmare was horrified to discover that the foothold beneath her feet had been blasted open with a perfectly square gap.
In the shadows below the gap, in a place that was originally empty, Pei Qi's silhouette suddenly appeared as the invisibility potion's effect wore off.
The lower-realm alloy sword in his hand was already raised high at some point.
"When...did you get there!" Nightmare screamed, her body losing its balance in mid-air due to the impact of the explosion.
Pei Qi gave no reply, but simply swung his sword at the Nightmare in mid-air in an unremarkable manner.
In Nightmare's eyes, this sword strike had neither the imposing effects of a breathing technique nor the sharp whistling sound of it cutting through the air.
He instinctively stretched out his arm to try and withstand the attack, hoping that if he could just get through this second, he could transfer his consciousness to the flesh and blood at the bottom of the carriage.
However, the moment the sword blade sliced through...
The longsword, gleaming with a purple enchanted glow, sliced through his arm the instant it touched him, as easily as a hot knife through butter.
The speed of the blade seemed to have been forcibly corrected in the judgment, heading straight for his neck.
"I'll die! Getting hit by this sword really will kill me!"
An unprecedented sense of terror, from the depths of the soul, swept over Nightmare.
Even though the person in front of him wasn't using breathing techniques, and even though the black sword wasn't a Nichirin Blade, the fear made him desperately try to escape his consciousness from this fake body.
"It's too late, this is the attack sector of 'Sweeping Blade'," Pei Qi thought to himself.
Just as Nightmare's consciousness was about to disappear into the carriage, an extremely bizarre logic occurred.
Visually, Pei Qi's longsword was clearly still a dozen centimeters away from the afterimage of Nightmare's escape. Logically, this strike should have missed.
But just then, a purple fan-shaped crack seemed to appear in the air. That was the additional damage from "Sweeping Blade III".
In the underlying logic of MC, the attack distance does not depend entirely on the position of the blade tip, but rather on the "interaction judgment range".
The sword seemed to disregard the laws of physical distance, forcibly fixing the numerical result of "damage" onto Nightmare's neck.
"Why... I didn't touch it..."
This was the last thought left behind by Nightmare.
There were no cries of pain, no bloodshed.
Nightmare's original fake body suddenly froze in mid-air, and then, with a crisp sound of the system shattering, it completely turned into countless white particles flying in the night wind.
Pei Qi landed smoothly at the bottom of the exploded carriage and casually put away his longsword.
"Is this... over?" Tanjiro jumped down from the gap and looked at the empty carriage in disbelief.
After all, in the original understanding, killing demons requires the use of a Nichirin Blade, and the neck must be severed.
Pei Qi didn't speak; he habitually opened the small map in the upper right corner of his view.
On the map, the once large, high-risk red dot representing "Lower Moon One" has now completely turned gray and eventually disappeared.
The tiny red dots representing "Nightmare Flesh" that were originally scattered throughout the train went out one by one, just like light bulbs that had lost their signal.
"If nothing unexpected happens, he should be completely dead." Pei Qi pointed out the car window.
At this moment, the entire train began to shake violently, as if in mournful wailing.
The chunks of flesh covering the rails and carriages withered and shriveled rapidly, eventually turning to ashes and drifting away with the wind.
The train transformed back into a steam locomotive made of steel, running smoothly under the moonlight.