Chapter Text
“You put your life on the line for us. Thank you so much!”
As the couple bowed their heads too low for Obanai to see their faces, he raised his hand and asked them to stop. Kaburamaru adjusted his hover as though surprised by something, looked down to Obanai’s chest, and then wiggled his tongue at Obanai’s nose. It was as though to say, ‘Your chest got warmer. You notice your heart beating faster? You liked that.’ It was natural to like the feeling of thinking one is good, Obanai would have said back to the snake had they been in privacy. Every time he identified that feeling, however, the other thoughts always resurfaced, dimming the pace of his heart to its usual grim beat.
Obanai was unscathed from battle, and not particularly tired. With winter approaching, he was most concerned for Kaburamaru. The sun would be out soon. The snake would like that. In the meantime, Obanai should do something to raise his own body heat, to keep the sluggish reptile warmer. A small rise in temperature was easy to sustain with Breath technique.
“C-A-A-A-A-W!” came the voice of his crow. “HEAD WEST! HEAD WEST, TO THE MOUNTAINS, C-A-A-A-W!”
Another mission already; always another demon. A good trek would have his body heat raised to the temperature Kaburamaru liked in no time.
“THE SOUND HASHIRA NEEDS YOUR HELP! C-A-A-A-A-W!”
A mismatched pair of eyes widened in the hazy morning light, shimmering teal and yellow-gold.
A Hashira…?
The journey took the whole morning, leading Obanai and Kaburamaru through a quaint mountain town and then up steep slopes where only tea houses and cabins dotted the path, and he’d have thought there was nothing ahead if not for glimpses of gabled rooftops and tiles. As he got farther up a flight of stone stairs, he could make out the clay faces decorating the ends of the slanted roofs; those faces in the tiles were what humans liked to think demons looked like. They liked to think that decorating buildings with them would scare off the real things. Since a demon slayer like Obanai was called to this place, those clay figures must had been no help.
Once he was on the flat courtyard of the temple with sand and pathways kept smooth between each of the four or five halls, he felt a sense of unease. Not the presence of a demon, he was used to that, but the sense that something was missing. The smell of incense? No, Kaburamaru seemed to the catch a whiff of it leaking out the main hall. Worshipers? There were a few of them, two with their heads bowed in prayer, an old lady being helped by a small acolyte with a shaved head, and a middle-age man smiling and chatting with the old fellow who, by his attire, may have been the head monk. Who was Obanai to look for here? What would the Sound Hashira look like?
That was what was missing, sound. Usually he’d have heard the echoing gong of an enormous bell at least a few times on his way to a mountain temple like that, but there was no such ringing of prayer or telling of the time. Perhaps this was one of those temples with a precious bell never rung but for special ceremonies? Even if that were the case, normally there would be a smaller one around there somewhere.
Kaburamaru slid down Obanai’s torso and leg, his attention caught by something on the ground. It was about time the snake had lunch, Obanai thought. Though he let him attend to his business, he never took his eyes off his companion, even when the front end of the white snake disappeared around a stone corner.
Just then, if Kaburamaru could make noise, the snake would have screamed. Obanai was sure of that by the way Kaburamaru’s back end tensed and twitched. He was in sudden trouble and needed help! Was he trapped? Was it poison? A bigger snake eating him? Obanai’s thoughts shot to all the terrible possibilities except the reality he found after his mad dash to the snake’s rescue: a mouse, fighting back with all its might and pounding its tiny paws into Kaburamaru’s eye.
“Knock that off!” he yelled at the vermin and swatted it backwards with his hand, surprised how it resisted with its back paws dug against the ground. That was a shocking sensation, but with that much strength packed into that bulky little mouse, it made sense how Kaburamaru would have bitten off more than expected when trying to make a meal of this feisty thing. However formidable it was for a rodent, a young man as small-framed as Obanai was still many times its match. The mouse had opened its jaws wide to ambitiously clamp its incisors all the way to Obanai’s finger bone, but this mouse was not his match in speed either, and Obanai’s hand twirled to escape injury and pick the mouse up by its tail.
With snake and foe separated, Obanai looked between them, assessing Kaburamaru’s swollen eye and wondering if holding the rodent that way would hurt it. By the way it kicked and punched in the air, it seemed fine, and Obanai respected its fighting spirit enough that it should not become snake lunch today. Before he could finish that thought, however, a shadow came over him, and his feet left the ground.
“What’s the big idea over here, picking on one of my mice?”
A man in garish fashion—a bejeweled headband with no purpose, gold cuffs around his ears, and a red design painted around one eye with painstaking attention to detail—stared back into Obanai’s face, while his hand had Obanai up in the air not by a tail, but by his belt. The garish man’s scowl was deep.
“This is your mouse?” Obanai asked.
The scowl peeled back with surprise. “Whoa! How’d you get your eyes to look like that? That’s really flamboyant!”
“My eyes have always looked like this. I was born with them like this.”
“’Tch!” he scoffed and flung Obanai out of his grasp. Back when Obanai was still a frail child learning Breath technique, that would have sent him flat with his chin on the ground, but nowadays it was a light descent to his feet. The mouse’s tail was no longer between his fingers though, and he looked around to see if it had gotten flung away somewhere, but as he looked back to the man speaking, he saw the mouse scurry from painted fingertips up to a neck thicker than Obanai had ever seen on any human. The rodent leaned a furry paw against the man’s collar as if to gloat how much of an advantage it had over Obanai now, and that collar made Obanai recognize the Corp uniform. “Figures that drab and serious types get blessed with all the flashy features!”
“That is a Demon Slayer Corp uniform, isn’t it?”
“It is. With improvements.”
“Hmmn. May I take it you’re the Sound Hashira?”
“The one and only.”
“Hmm. Hmmmmn. I see.”
“—Hey, wait. Does that make you the guy I was waiting on?”
“I was told to join you on your mission.”
“You told me I was getting a Kinoe!!” he screamed at a crow perched on the wooden veranda above them. “Not a shrimp like that!”
At this, Obanai looked to his hand as he made a fist and uttered a trite phrase. When the wisteria ink tattoo rose to his skin, he raised his eyebrows with another long ‘hnn’ before addressing the Sound Hashira again. “I am, for the record, a Kinoe. My apologies for being a shrimp.”
“That didn’t sound sincere in the least. Dang it, forget rank, I needed someone at least half Himejima’s size!”
“Seems to me you’ve got size to spare.”
“I could have done with someone only half my size too, got it? Could have done the whole thing myself, if not for that old fart over there!”
Obanai followed his pointed, painted fingernail to the other side of the courtyard, where the man in a monk’s robe gently smiled and nodded to the middle-aged man still talking to him. It seemed there was more detail to gather before they could get started on this mission, but with the sun so high in the sky, there was no rush. What came first was the matters at hand; first, that Kaburamaru was alright (he seemed recovered from the shock but shy from wounded pride), and second, that Obanai be on proper behavior around someone who carried the weight of the Demon Slayer Corp. “My name’s Iguro Obanai. I’ll be in your care, whatever that’s going to wind up looking like.”
“Dra-a-a-a-b. What’s with the wrappings? You doing the ‘don’t look upon my face, I’m too beautiful, spare your maiden heart’ thing?”
“No. And this is my companion, Kaburamaru. I believe he’s already acquainted with your companion, who I take it is no worse for wear?”
The mouse hopped up and down and punched its fists when pointed at. The Sound Hashira thunked it on the head to tell it to behave. “Yeah, this guy’s fine. I got plenty where this one came from.” At that, the mouse shuttered and peered up at him like it might cry, and then as painted fingertips gave it a demanding but gentle scoot, it scampered from his shoulder up to the wooden veranda, and then presumably somewhere into the temple. “The name’s Uzui Tengen. Sound Hashira. Flashiest of the Hashira, by a long shot.”
“More than the Flame Hashira?” he found himself blurting back.
“What about him?” Uzui looked peeved.
“…Is he well?”
“So chipper and healthy it makes you sick.”
“The Flame Hashira is?” he drew back. “That hardly seems like him. Are you sure?”
“Am I sure? It’s freaking Rengoku, how could I not—oh,” he snapped his fingers and pointed at him, “You mean the old one.”
“The old one? Then he’s dead?”
“Not really. His son’s just taken over for him, he’s still all bright and shiny with that new Hashira glow.”
“I see. Rengoku Kyojuro, so he’s a Hashira now. Hnnn. Good for him.”
“You know him?”
“We met once when we were children. His father was my first encounter with the Demon Slayer Corp.”
“One of those stories, huh? What’s your Breath, anyway?”
“Snake Breathing.”
“Snake!? They come up with anything these days! Well, we don’t have one of those. Ah! I get it, that must be why Oyakata-sama sent you. You’re a Kinoe, so that puts you up for promotion, doesn’t it?”
“That’s how it typically works.”
“I’ll put it frank. We’re hurting for more Hashira. The number the Corp always really wants is nine, to share the load and raise our juniors. It’s good having Rengoku in there now, but we’re still at only six. Oyakata-sama must have sent you here to test you out!”
Oyakata-sama, the leader of their Corp? That didn’t seem likely, for Obanai never did anything to stand out. Someone of such personage would never have taken notice, he’d have had no time for an antisocial nobody who kept his nose to the ground and his sword deep in demon flesh. Climbing ranks was a matter of consequence, Obanai’s own luck for having gone over five remarkable years without losing a limb or head. Rather than luck, it took fighting with all the grit his tiny body could muster, and a bellyful of hatred for demons always helped. “I don’t see what he’d want with a shrimp like me.”
“Snake! I meant to say ‘snake,’” Uzui squatted to throw an arm around Obanai’s shoulders with force that might have sent a lesser swordsman to his knees. “Between you and me, I get the feeling there’s a demon around here in the Twelve Moon ranks.”
“The Twelve Moons?” his mismatched eyes widened.
“If it’s a Lower Moon, tell you what, I’ll let you have it.”
Obanai squinted at him. “What kind of Hashira lets a demon get away?”
“It hasn’t gotten away!” Uzui screamed back. “I’ve got it trapped, I swear!!”
“And it’s not dead yet?”
“Because of the old fart!!” he pointed again to the pleasant old monk. Again, Obanai followed the imaginary line over to the monk, then back to Uzui, whom he looked at with a sigh. Uzui threw a pointed finger in Obanai’s face. “Knock that off!! What the hell am I supposed to do when he goes off spouting how much respect he has for the demon hunters, what good work the demon hunters do, how indebted he is to Oyakata-sama for help, all that, but then has the gall to get all sad and shocked about one stupid iron bell? This would have all been over already if he’d let me blow up the dang thing up, but no-o-o-o-o, the villagers will be sa-a-a-d, oh poo—”
“The bell is local cultural property, with a history of over four hundred years.”
“—yyyYYYAAAHHH!” Uzui tensed from his ankles all the way up to his ears, spinning to look at the bald-headed acolyte who barely reached the height of his waist. She was dressed so plainly that one might mistake her for a boy, but Obanai always knew.
“It’s irreplaceable. Please don’t break it,” she finished with a bow, and then continued on her way to greet the monk and his guest.
Uzui shuttered as he watched her go. “Sheesh. Footsteps almost as tiny and quiet as Kochou.”
“Kochou?”
“A Hashira even shrimpier than you are. In the end, swordsmanship is all that really matters.”
“It takes more than that, I’m sure. In any case, that bell may be posing a problem, but we can’t spoil Oyakata-sama’s goodwill. There’s got to be some way around it.”
“There isn’t. That’s the issue. The bell’s stuck on the ground, trapping the demon in total darkness under it,” he said, trailing off as he listened to the acolyte address the visitor as a ‘Sasai-sama’ and thank him for all his contributions to the temple, and then ask if he’d like a tour of the treasure storehouse.
Sasai thanked her and followed, and Obanai felt Sasai’s glance on them. Both demon slayers were ready to receive him when he strayed off the stone path to approach them. He wore a western style hat and coat over his kimono, and tied at his waist there was an ivory netsuke, bopping along with each of his footsteps. When he came to a stop before them, Obanai identified its shape, it was a carved to look like a mouse with rice. That was a common theme for people who wished for riches, as rice was money, and mice were always found where there was rice. Then again, that was also why snakes were a symbol for riches, for they were the ones who ate the thieves.
This was not a time to get swept up in memories of his childhood, of how the allure of lucky white snakes was what brought that indulgence of a live specimen out to his island, leading Obanai to encounter his one and only friend. It was not a moment to get lost in thoughts of riches and the dirty people who wished for them.
Nonetheless, when Sasai smiled at them, Obanai felt that smile was slimy. Sasai folded his arms and asked them, “You don’t know the story of the bell, do you?”
Uzui put on a tense smile back at him. “How could you tell?”
“You’re a very loud demon hunter.”
“That’s the Breath of Sound for you,” said Obanai, earning a glare from his superior.
“Sasai-sama, you needn’t bore them,” said the accompanying acolyte.
“Oh, come on, Hatoko, it’s romantic, everyone around here loves it!” he laughed over his shoulder to her. Had the weather not been cold, Obanai could imagine this fellow fanning himself as he’d speak, drawing listeners’ attention over and over to his face. “Story goes it was a lovers’ suicide. They met under the bell and made a pact, rang it together, and it kept echoing and echoing long enough for them to do each other in, meaning that Buddha showed them the way to paradise and all that nicety.”
Both the demon slayers grimaced under the erroneous impression that they were smiling politely. “Charming,” said Uzui. “Lame ending, though. Should have lit off fireworks and told the world to screw themselves before running off to enjoy each other.”
“Hmmn. If they really loved each other, they’d have wanted each other to live, even if they had to be apart.”
“Now that’s a drab ending.”
“It gives people hope, though,” said Hatoko. “As our Head Monk has always taught, everyone has circumstances, but with goodness in their heart, anyone can be afforded mercy. Lovers under difficult circumstance have long since come here to pray that their difficulties may pass away and that they may find happiness together.”
“At least, they used to.”
At the tone Sasai used, Hatoko wrung her hands and looked away, and Obanai shared a glance with Uzui. This was the part they probably wanted to hear.
“A couple weeks ago, the temple bell fell. That was right around the time one of the most devote parishioners around here disappeared, good old Izumi-san. Only some bloody scraps of his clothes here and there, they say. His son, and then his wife came looking for him. Nothing was ever found of the wife, but the boy’s body was splayed across the temple steps. What was left of it, anyway.”
“Sasai-sama, please. It was a terrible incident. These mountains are full of dangerous creatures.”
“None more dangerous than jilted lovers, as they say.”
Uzui’s tone took on a deep timbre. “Jilted lover?”
“Izumi-san’s marriage wasn’t a happy one, if you get what I’m saying. Rumor has it he was going to meet with his lover here and they’d pledge under the bell to run away together, but it all went sour when he had a change of heart and broke it off with her instead.”
“How many victims have there been?” asked Obanai.
“Who’s to say? I can’t get out here enough to know who’s missing. Where are all your regulars?”
“Many of them have been staying away,” struggled Hatoko.
“It’s even getting to my own wife. She used to be here all the time but now she’s all jumpy with rumors, but I know as well as you both do, nothing’s going to happen in daylight.”
“You should listen to your wife more, you know,” said Uzui.
“I’ll listen as much as I please. Besides, if the big donors don’t keep coming around, soon this temple’s going to lose all its income. The moment that bell goes back up the faithful will all think it's all safe and fine and come back. But if that demon got to the rest of the Izumi family, that means it’s not under the bell in the first place, is it?” he said, casting them a calculating glance. “Well, I’ll be off to let you work. We’ll be in your care.”
Uzui grumbled at the back of Sasai’s head as the man followed the acolyte, and Obanai shot Uzui a glance. “It’s not under the bell, is it?”
“It’s under the bell!! That thing is reverberating and reverberating with the sound of a demon and it’s driving me crazy!”
“And you haven’t killed it yet because…?”
“Because of the old fart!” he pointed a third time.
“Because it’s too heavy for you to lift, isn’t it?”
He muttered and folded his arms, which made the veins bulge bigger than they already were. “If Himejima were here too we’d have lifted it high up in the air and fried that thing under the sun ages ago.”
“Lower Moon, huh? Hmmn. Sounds like your true opponent around here is an inanimate piece of property.”
“No, see? That’s the part that doesn’t make sense. The demon should be starving if it’s stuck there, but it doesn’t sound that way. It may have only come to this temple recently, but I’m willing to bet that this demon has been around a lot longer, using its Demon Blood Art to slip around and cause these incidents in spot to spot, over and over, before moving on.”
“What sort of Demon Blood Art do you suspect?”
“Passing through solid objects.”
Obanai had been following Uzui’s assessment seriously, but took pause here. “That’s a joke, right?”
“It doesn’t make any noise at night! I’m telling you, there wasn’t a squeak of this bell budging an inch!”
“Seems it’s giving you quite a headache for all its silence. Not to worry, I’ve reported for duty to help you egg-sit tonight. You’re in luck, Kaburamaru loves eggs and by now I’m sure he’s starving.”
“Argh! Me too! We break now for lunch.”
“No, I don’t need any—”
“Lunch,” he reiterated, throwing his elbow around Obanai’s neck with a squeeze as he lifted Obanai’s feet off the ground. In a momentary panic as Obanai felt his usual Total Concentrated Breath unable to get through his windpipe, he wondered if that was what it felt like to be a snake’s prey.
Not that he’d have ever known that; he was never set aside as prey for an animal, only for that woman. Rather than a helpless mouse, he shared more in common with that ill-fated Izumi family, victims of complicated circumstance and the evil depths of the human heart, and still deeper pits of demons’ avarice.