"You talk too much."
Squelch.
Roy appeared in a flash, his hand chopping through the air and plunging into the back of Dohihara's head, silencing the demon's pathetic monologue for good. He shook his hand clean, letting the gray matter splatter onto the snow.
He turned, his eyes cold and hard as he stared at Tanjiro. "Do you have any idea what you were just doing?"
"I know..."
"You know? Then why did you hesitate?"
"I... I don't know," Tanjiro stamred, unable to et his brother's gaze.
Roy moved. In an instant, he had retrieved Tanjiro's axe from the tree and pressed the cold steel against his brother's neck. The razor-sharp edge rested directly over his carotid artery. "You don't know? Good." A humorless, angry smile twisted Roy's lips. "In that case, rather than watch you get eaten by the next demon you et... I think it's better if I just kill you now. At least this way, I can leave you a whole corpse."
Sympathy for a demon? Who the hell do you think you are?
In the original story, Tanjiro's hesitation had nearly cost him his chance with Urokodaki. Now, Roy was beginning to think that the demon Dohihara had been right about one thing.
A damn bleeding heart like you deserves to have a knife at his throat.
"I just... he seed so pitiful..."
"Was the man in the shrine, the one with his guts ripped out, pitiful?" Roy's voice was a low snarl. "What about all the other people he's eaten over the years? Were they pitiful?"
His anger boiled over. He spun the axe in his hand, and with a powerful, open-pald motion, backhanded Tanjiro across the face with the flat of the blade.
BAM!
The blow sent Tanjiro flying ten ters, his body crashing into a tree before slumping to the ground.
"Rember this," Roy's voice was ice. "If there's a next ti, and the demon doesn't kill you, I will."
He slid the axe back into his belt, shouldered his basket, and walked back into the shrine, his figure frad by the warm, orange glow of the single oil lamp within.
Tanjiro sat slumped against the tree, his right cheek already swelling to the size of a lon. He didn't feel the pain. He just stared, his eyes vacant, at his brother's retreating back.
His father had always taught him to be kind, to help those in need. But tonight... he had shown kindness in the wrong place. A demon was a demon. A human was a human. A predator that sympathizes with its prey is already dead.
The last remnants of Dohihara's body dissolved into ash. The snow began to fall faster, harder. After a long ti, sensation returned to Tanjiro in a wave of fire, his cheek throbbing with a deep, aching pain. He was lucky. Thanks to years of Zoldyck "conditioning," Roy knew exactly how to inflict pain without causing permanent injury.
Tanjiro staggered to his feet and knelt in the snow, facing the shrine. "I was wrong!" he cried out, his voice thick with sha.
He was still young, his worldview still malleable. If he had been an adult, Roy would have killed him without a second thought rather than risk being dragged down by his weakness. Roy snorted from inside the shrine, not even bothering to look. "Am I supposed to co out and carry you? Get in here."
A wave of relief washed over Tanjiro. He scrambled inside and saw Roy starting to clean up the blood and gore with a broom. "Let , Bro!" he said, taking the broom. "You go rest. I promise, I'll get this place spotless. There won't be a single trace of blood left."
Roy trusted Tanjiro's "dog nose." He let him have at it.
A few minutes later, Tanjiro went to move the broken statue. And then he saw it. Behind the altar was a pile of human bones, stacked nearly to the ceiling.
He finally, truly understood why Roy hadn't given the demon a shred of rcy. Every last one of these creatures deserved to die.
"And I actually believed that thing's lies..." Tanjiro's face was pale with sickness and self-loathing. If he could, he would go back in ti and slap himself for his own naive stupidity.
Roy had already seen the bone pile with Gyo. He said nothing, a shadow falling over his heart. The Zoldycks were killers. His grandfather killed soone every single day. But their kills were clean, professional, painless. They were assassinations, not torturous feasts. He couldn't begin to imagine the horror these people had felt, being eaten alive.
He walked past his basket, took out his hand-axe, and went back outside. His father had told him the blade was getting dull; now it would have a different use. Tanjiro, seeing the axe, understood. He grabbed the oil lamp and followed.
They found a clear patch of ground behind the shrine and, working together in the falling snow, they dug a large grave. They brought the bones out from the shrine and laid them to rest.
The snow was coming down in thick, heavy flakes. Tanjiro stood over the grave, the lamplight casting a warm glow on his face. "May the God of Fire watch over these poor souls," he murmured. "May they find peace, and be reborn into a better life."
When the last of the dirt was piled on, he turned to Roy. "Bro," he asked tentatively. "Should we go inside now?"
Roy stood leaning on his axe, his gaze fixed on the freshly made grave. Unseen by Tanjiro, a milky-white film of Nen coated his eyes.
An orb of pure white energy, like a will-o'-the-wisp, floated up from the grave mound.
Roy bowed his head slightly. "I apologize for eting you under these circumstances," he said, his voice respectful. "My na is Eiichiro Kamado. May I ask your na?"
A faint, ghostly wind stirred the snow. My humble na is Hiro Minamino, a voice whispered, audible only to Roy. I am from the village of Uchida, at the foot of Sagiri Mountain. Thank you, Master Eiichiro, for avenging .
The wind swirled, and a flurry of snow hit Tanjiro's face. He rubbed his eyes, confused.
Roy touched his brother's forehead. He channeled a thin, controlled stream of his own aura into Tanjiro's eyes.
And then Tanjiro saw it. Standing right beside him was a faint, translucent figure. It was prostrating itself before Roy, its forehead pressed to the snowy ground in the deepest bow of gratitude.
"That's... that's the man from the shrine!" Tanjiro gasped. "The one the demon..."
It was him. The rchant.
And in that mont, for the first ti in his new life, Roy was witnessing the phenonon known only to the most powerful and obsessed.
Nen after death.
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