The fifteen days waiting for my new weapons were spent in a state of aggressive, horizontal recovery.
The Demon Slayer Corps, for all their weird, cult-like intensity, had an excellent logistics network.
After descending the mountain, I was directed to a Wisteria House—a safe haven funded by families previously saved by slayers.
They offered me a soft futon, hot baths, and three meals a day.
I took the futon, ignored the baths, and demanded twenty meals a day.
My ‘Iron Stomach’ was starving.
While raw mountain trout had kept me from dying, it hadn’t provided the dense, horrific caloric intake this new body required to bulk up.
The poor old woman running the estate looked on in sheer, trembling terror as I systematically emptied her pantry.
I ate bowls of rice by the dozen.
I ate whole sides of salted beef.
When they ran out of meat, I started eating the decorative, slightly toxic wisteria blooms from the garden, just to keep the furnace in my gut burning.
By the end of the two weeks, Genya Shinazugawa’s fragile, wiry frame had filled out.
I still didn’t have the absurd, cannonball-deflecting muscle mass of my East Blue body, but I had built a dense, highly coiled musculature.
I was faster, lighter, and my center of gravity was perfect.
On the morning of the fifteenth day, a man wearing a traditional haori and a deeply unsettling wooden hyottoko mask walked into the courtyard of the Wisteria estate.
He was carrying a long wooden box wrapped in cloth, and a second, much heavier-looking iron lockbox.
He didn’t politely bow or introduce himself.
He just kicked the porch, pointed a soot-stained finger at me, and started yelling.
“Are you the brat who asked for a gun?!” I paused, a massive onigiri halfway to my mouth.
I swallowed it whole and wiped my hands on my dark purple Slayer uniform.
“Depends.
Did you build it?” “Did I build it?” the masked man screeched, his voice cracking with pure, manic joy.
He dropped the wooden box onto the porch and slammed the iron lockbox down next to it.
“My name is Juzo!
For twenty years, I have slaved away over a hot forge, making the same boring, curved pieces of steel for a bunch of stuffy, breathing-obsessed traditionalists!
‘Oh, Juzo, the curve is a millimeter off!’ ‘Oh, Juzo, it’s not light enough for my Water Breathing!’ I was dying of boredom!” He leaned in close, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me.
“And then, a crow drops a note saying some lunatic wants me to smelt Nichirin ore into a firearm!
You, boy, are a visionary!” “I just have weak wrists,” I muttered, prying his hands off me.
“Show me what you brought.” Juzo cackled, kicking the wooden box open first.
“Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way.
Your standard Nichirin katana,” he said dismissively.
I picked up the sword.
The hilt was wrapped in dark leather, and the guard was a solid, utilitarian piece of blackened iron.
I drew the blade from its scabbard.
It was perfectly balanced, lighter than the practice swords I was used to, but the steel folded underneath the dull surface felt incredibly resilient.
“Nichirin steel changes color depending on the owner,” Juzo explained, waving a hand.
“Usually reflects their Breathing Style.
Let’s see what you get.” I held the blade up to the morning sun.
Slowly, a color began to bleed from the hilt up to the tip.
It wasn’t the bright, rolling blue of Tanjiro’s water style, nor was it a fiery red.
The steel deepened into a dark, heavy, mossy green.
It was the exact shade of my old hair.
“Green?” Juzo tilted his head.
“Wind Breathing, usually.
But the hue is strange.
It’s dull.
Heavy.” “It’s perfect,” I said, sliding the green blade into its black scabbard and tying it to my left hip.
The color felt like a nod from the universe, a small piece of my old identity bleeding into this fragile new vessel.
“Now, the real reason you’re here.” Juzo’s masked face practically radiated excitement.
He unlatched the heavy iron lockbox and threw the lid open.
Resting on a bed of velvet was a masterpiece of lethal, pragmatic engineering.
It was a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun.
The stock was carved from dark, polished oak, but the barrels and the firing mechanisms were forged entirely out of the same dark, sunlight-absorbing Nichirin steel as the swords.
It was compact enough to be drawn with one hand, but heavy enough to serve as a bludgeoning weapon in close quarters.
I picked it up.
The weight was immaculate.
It sat in my left hand with the heavy, comforting presence of a true weapon.
“I call it the ‘Sun-Spitter’,” Juzo bragged, crossing his arms proudly.
“The barrels are pure Nichirin.
But the real magic is the ammunition.” He tossed me a heavy leather bandolier.
I caught it, inspecting the shells.
They were thick, brass-cased shotgun shells, but instead of standard lead buckshot, the tips were packed with jagged, unrefined shavings of scarlet iron sand and Nichirin ore.
“You pull that trigger, and it fires a spread of sunlight-absorbing shrapnel directly into a demon’s flesh,” Juzo explained, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
“It won’t decapitate them.
But it will shred their regeneration, tear their limbs off, and cause localized cellular burning.
It creates the opening.” “I break the guard with the gun, and I cut the neck with the sword,” I nodded, a slow, dangerous grin spreading across my face.
I cracked the shotgun open, loaded two shells with a satisfying shuck-clack, and snapped the barrels shut.
I holstered the shotgun on my right hip, resting my left hand on the green katana.
Sword and gun.
It wasn’t the Asura’s path.
It was a completely new style.
A pragmatic, brutal adaptation to a world where I was no longer the strongest thing in the room.
I was going to fight dirty, and I was going to love it.
“You’re a madman, Juzo,” I told the swordsmith, tossing him a small bag of coins I had swiped from a mountain bandit before the Final Selection.
“Buy yourself a drink.” “Just kill something loud with it!” Juzo yelled cheerfully, packing up his empty boxes and practically skipping out of the courtyard.
Before I could even take a practice swing with the new setup, the sky darkened.
A massive, aggressive crow plummeted from the sky and landed heavily on the porch railing, glaring at me with beady black eyes.
“Caw!
Caw!
Roronoa Genya!
Your first assignment!” the crow shrieked.
Its voice was grating, like two rocks being ground together.
I blinked.
“Wait, did you just call me Roronoa?” “System integration!
Caw!
Identifying traits merged!” the crow squawked, completely ignoring my question.
“Head Northwest!
Northwest to the town of Kaza!
Young girls are vanishing in the night!
The demon hides in the shadows!
Go!
Go!” The bird took flight, circling above my head once before darting off toward the horizon.
I let out a long sigh, adjusting the collar of my Slayer uniform.
“Northwest.
Town of Kaza.
Missing girls.
Simple enough.” I stepped out of the Wisteria estate, ignoring the weeping, aggressively grateful farewells of the old woman whose pantry I had decimated.
I looked up at the sun, did some quick mental calculations regarding shadows and cardinal directions, and confidently set off down the dirt road.
Three hours later, I was standing in a swamp.
I looked at the mud slowly soaking into my sandals.
I looked at the dense, weeping willow trees surrounding me.
I looked at the sun, which was now in a completely different, mathematically impossible position in the sky.
“This isn’t Northwest,” I stated to the empty swamp.
[DING!
The ‘Divine Navigator System’ is currently on a discount!
Bind now for—] “I will shoot you with this gun,” I threatened the holographic screen, resting my hand on the Nichirin shotgun.
The screen flickered nervously and vanished.
I sighed, trudging forward through the muck.
The timeline wasn’t going to wait for me to find a map.
I had a demon to hunt, and if I had to walk in a massive, idiotic spiral across the entire country to find it, that’s exactly what I was going to do.