There was no real evidence for it. All of it was nothing more than her own guesswork—maybe even pure imagination.
No matter how shrewd a person is, they can't cover every angle without a single slip. Maybe Kocho Kanae really had just been held up on the road, or maybe Inori's own reckoning had simply been off.
But Inori had always trusted her own intuition.
Perhaps this was what people called a protagonist's halo. She carried a special fate, and along with it a power that set her apart from ordinary people.
And whenever this intuition of hers spoke up, it was almost never—almost never—wrong. Before the decisive battle at the White Bone Christmas Tree, it was intuition that had her prepare the Third Void Genome ahead of time. When she faced Kira Yoshikage's faked death, even with the corpse right there in front of her and Heaven's Door on hand to confirm it, Inori had held firm that Kira was only playing dead. Not once had she been wrong.
Shinobu hesitated, but she didn't think Inori was making a fuss over nothing. That was her own sister—her only living family in this world—and there was never any harm in being a little too careful.
Besides, for Inori to come back to the Butterfly Mansion in the dead of night to find her, there had to be something important to discuss. The Mansion was crowded, full of prying eyes; if another Kaigaku, or another paid-off informant, happened to be lurking, they'd only be asking for trouble. Better to find a comfortable spot outside and sit down for a proper heart-to-heart.
...Come to think of it, it had been such a long, long time since she'd last tasted her sister's home cooking. Back when they were training under their teacher, her sister had still doted on her the way she always used to. But after Shinobu went ahead and took the Final Selection first, passed it, and joined the Demon Slayer Corps, the two of them had gone a stretch without contact—and by the time Shinobu cleared the Selection herself... she found that her sister had already become the Flower Hashira.
Might as well find somewhere they could light a fire and rest a good while~ Just the three of them.
It would be just like those quiet days not so long ago. If they could bring Kanao along, that would be ideal—but she was still a child, and to be safe... it was best not to drag her in too deep.
"Huh? Your... that red layer you had on—did you take it off?"
Shinobu, freshly out of her bath, noticed something off about Inori.
That red outer layer—the one that had turned her from a normal human into a monster—was gone. In its place was a covering of dark feathers, strange and unsettling, less a garment than the plumage of some primal creature, the kind of thing that clung to the body rather than clothed it.
"Oh, that. It evolved."
Inori answered offhandedly, without the slightest intention of dodging the question.
"How about it? Fitting, isn't it?"
"...Mm."
Shinobu's expression turned very strange.
—A person like Big Sis Inori is simply too dazzling. No matter what she wears, nothing can dim her radiance. So asking whether it suits her is meaningless—the answer's obvious.
She was certain no one would willingly walk the world wrapped in something so bizarre and eerie—but Inori had no choice. The thought stirred a flicker of sympathy in Shinobu... and, at the same time, an even deeper hatred for the "monster" growing on her body.
—What a vile, twisted thing! Using such a despicable trick to torment Big Sis Inori!
"Big Sis In—... Inori, is there really no way to cure you?"
The longer she looked at that thing fused to Inori, the less Shinobu could stand it.
"Not yet. But there will be, sooner or later."
—Big Sis Inori's mood seemed to have brightened all of a sudden, because she'd flashed Shinobu one of her rare, open smiles.
Inori would never have let that little slip slide—the way Shinobu had caught herself mid-word and swapped it out. And right away, she understood what the girl was feeling.
"If... if there's ever anything I can do to help, just say the word."
Shinobu hadn't meant to say it out loud, and her tone came out awkward and fumbling, shrinking until the last words were almost too quiet to hear.
Her voice was small because she felt guilty. And she felt guilty because she was so conflicted.
Shinobu was an earnest girl. She felt that quietly making up her mind wasn't enough—the right thing to do was to actually convey that resolve to the other person.
But doing that... made all the times she'd deliberately been contrary with Inori look utterly ridiculous, a walking contradiction.
"Don't get the wrong idea! It's not like I want to help you!" The girl deliberately raised her voice, which only proved all the harder how much she was trying to hide. "Sis was the one who promised to save you—so of course, as her little sister, I can't just stand by and watch. Don't go reading into it."
A simple fourteen-year-old girl—nearly every thought she had was written plain across her face. Inori said nothing, only watched quietly as Shinobu kept scrambling to excuse herself... and the more she watched, the more amusing it became, the more endearing.
Only there was no time left to tease her now. Every extra second they wasted was another second she was failing Kanae.
"Mm~ I know, I know, little Shinobu. Thank you for the thought." Inori sped up the motions of getting ready. "Come on. Take me to your sister."
The tangle in Shinobu's heart went quiet all at once.
The Inori standing here now... was serious. Compared to her usual devil-may-care self, always smiling and smirking, she seemed like a completely different person—more serious than she'd been even when the Wind Hashira and Flame Hashira were grilling her.
How to put it? There was a change, of course.
A serious Big Sis Inori was dashing, dependable—someone who made her feel safe.
...
...
Doma had been born with that peculiar, incurable affliction.
—Emotionlessness.
Just as the word says: he possessed none of the emotions of a human being. You could just as well call him an utterly, absolutely cold-blooded animal. From the time he was small, nothing his family ever did could stir the slightest ripple of feeling in him. He couldn't feel joy, anger, sorrow, or delight—love, hate, resentment, none of it.
The vast majority of demons have their original personalities thoroughly twisted after being turned, losing great swaths of memory in the process. But Doma was not like that. Even while he was still human, his character had already been warped to the extreme—and on top of that, his parents, taking advantage of his unusual looks, had dressed him up as a "Divine Child," using him to lure in throngs of believers and swindle them out of their money.
From childhood, Doma had stood in that environment and listened to the sorrowful laments of countless people. Gradually an idea took shape in him, and he came to treat it as the one and only truth of this world: that as long as a person lives, they can never escape suffering—and that it is only after death that one can pass on to true paradise.
Everything Inori had sensed to be wrong about him was born from exactly this. He couldn't tell that Inori had been mocking him, because he had no emotions at all. He had even watched his own parents beat each other to death before his very eyes without feeling the slightest grief—only wishing someone would hurry up and clean the place, since the stench of the corpses was more than he could stand.
But then... after meeting Inori, that beautiful and powerful existence, his affliction seemed to reach a turning point.
For the first time in his life, he'd encountered such a wondrous woman. She had a face without equal in all the world—the phrase might sound like an exaggeration, but it was simply the truth. Doma had to admit she was the most striking person he had ever seen... striking enough that, as a demon who devoured humans, he couldn't wait to make a meal of her, so that Inori would belong to him and him alone, forever.
But as it turned out, she was an existence even stronger than Muzan-sama—so Doma, who valued his own life, very rationally let the idea go.
Beauty usually goes hand in hand with fragility. Yet Inori's beauty was of a wholly different kind. She had not only an exquisite bearing and a gentle temperament, but also a strength and decisiveness far beyond his own.
Two flavors that should have clashed—and yet, blended together, they made the most exquisite dish of all.
In the brief time he'd spent with her, Doma had felt, for the first time in his life, joy—the joy of being praised, of being cared for.
...He marveled that, for the first time in his life, he had felt an emotion.
He was fascinated with Inori. He wanted to do everything in his power to make her happy, to make her look his way more and more.
The hair ornament Doma meant to give Inori wasn't merchandise sitting on some store shelf—it was a possession already worn on another's head: a pair of red-and-green butterfly hairpins, so lifelike they seemed about to take flight.
That woman was pleasant enough too, but Doma regarded her as nothing more than his next meal. The only one who could move his heart was Inori, and Inori alone.
"What are you smiling about?"
A swordswoman in a butterfly-wing-patterned haori, her long hair black as a waterfall streaming in the wind beneath the moon.
Kocho Kanae gripped her blade, eyes locked on this Upper Rank Two who had appeared without the slightest warning.
"I remembered something happy."
Doma answered with a smile.