Chapter 262: The Real Prey

Inside the Infinity Castle, the atmosphere was suffocating.

"This is it?" Marcus shook his head in disdain, still holding the demon by the skull. "This is the ’elite’ it took you so long to gather?"

He swept his gaze over the twisted faces on the platform and curled his lips. "Your judgment is terrible."

A vein bulged on Muzan’s forehead.

The spiky-haired man was the most promising demon among the twenty thousand. His talent had let him withstand the extremely high concentration of blood without turning into a mindless demon, and awaken a crucial Blood Demon Art: teleportation.

Ever since Marcus became a demon, Muzan had found no way to kill him.

He was too fast.

Even if Muzan managed to sever his head, Marcus would flee clutching his own head within seconds, putting himself out of reach.

The appearance of that fat man had been his hope!

Teleporting to any point within his line of sight was the perfect counter to extreme speed. That was why Muzan had indulged him so much, letting him act arrogantly in front of the Upper Ranks.

In the fat man’s eyes, Muzan was raising him as a successor, as the future Demon King... never realizing he was merely a trap created to hunt Marcus.

"Muzan-sama... save me..." the fat man whimpered, all arrogance gone.

Marcus looked at him, surprised. "You’ve got that much recovery ability? You’ve already come back to your senses?"

He glanced at Muzan, whose face had gone livid.

"How much blood did you give him, and how many people did he devour?"

And as he spoke, he tightened his fingers inside the skull, making the fat man groan in pain and convulse.

"MARCUS!!"

Muzan’s sudden roar made the floor tremble.

And just when he seemed about to explode, Muzan held his breath and, with a look of extreme humiliation, said: "...Let him go and leave the Infinity Castle."

Gritting his teeth, he declared in a trembling voice: "Let him go and... I’ll pretend I never saw you today!"

!

The offer froze everyone.

Even Kokushibo and Douma opened their eyes wide.

Marcus opened his mouth as well, looked at the demon in his hand, then at Muzan.

"W-Wait... don’t tell me... is he your son?"

Muzan’s face shifted between blue and red as his teeth ground together in fury.

"Enough nonsense. Let him go, or else—"

Swish

Before he could finish, a flash appeared and the fat man’s headless body dropped to the floor.

Marcus looked at the severed head dripping blood and, with a wave of his arm, reduced it to ashes.

"Since you were so fond of him, then this is better," he said, wiping the blood off his hand and looking at Muzan with a smile. "Killing him will be his punishment for not bringing your Daddy his slippers on time."

Muzan’s last hope was shattered.

Watching the ashes scatter, the thread of his sanity snapped.

His pupils shrank to needle points against blood-red sclerae.

"MARCUUUUUS!!!"

With a bloodcurdling roar, his clothes disintegrated. Eighteen bony whips erupted from his back, his arms transformed into whips as well—but lined with teeth—and monstrous maws tore open all over his body.

"DIE!!"

His subordinates moved too.

To the left, Kokushibo used a Breathing technique, all of his eyes fixed on Marcus.

To the right, Douma spread his fans; though he kept his smile, there was no laughter in his eyes.

Behind them, more than twenty newly transformed demons wielding Blood Demon Arts descended from the platform with roars, displaying mutated limbs.

A veritable tide of zombies.

Faced with the dark shadow bearing down on him, Marcus sheathed the Butterfly Sword, gripped Makomo’s hilt with both hands, and thick pink mist billowed from his body.

’Breath of Desire, Tenth Form: Equinox Flower Wheel.’

He crouched and drove the sword into the floor in a single blow, and with that, the mist flowed into the floor and fractured.

Countless sharp pink petals surged upward, wrapping his body at the heart of a cocoon.

But with no time to charge it beforehand, the cocoon stood barely a few yards tall. It hadn’t even begun to spin when Muzan’s whip slammed into it.

Crack!

The cocoon shattered in a single blow, but its destruction sprang a trap: the cocoon had worked like a pressurized container.

A suffocating pink haze burst out explosively in all directions, blanketing the entire area.

"This trick again!"

Muzan deeply loathed this mist.

So, knowing Marcus’s escape pattern, he acted fast.

He raised his limbs, and the maws on his arms opened suction vortices that desperately devoured the haze.

At the same time, Kokushibo unleashed a flurry of slashes that scattered the remnants of the mist, while Douma swept his fans to freeze the residual particles.

In less than two seconds, the mist cleared.

Resolute, Muzan immediately blew off both of his contaminated arms and regenerated them at once.

He was terrified by the thought that there might be some poison or trap in the haze.

The entire sequence took barely four seconds.

And yet, when he moved to tear Marcus apart... the spot was completely empty.

Where he had been standing, only the sword remained, driven alone into the wood.

It was the same formula, the same maneuver from their first encounter.

"DAMN YOU!!!" Muzan threw his head back, screaming out of his mind. "You broke into my house just to run away?!"

Beside him, Kokushibo’s six eyes were fixed on the sword driven into the floor.

A glimmer of contemplation had just appeared in his eyes when his expression changed drastically.

"No!"

Kokushibo gripped the hilt of his katana, and for the first time his voice carried impatience: "Marcus wasn’t here for us!"

Muzan’s roar cut off.

He froze, stunned.

Then his face went pale in an instant; without thinking, he began calling out mentally to the mistress of the Infinity Castle.

’Nakime! Take us back, now!’

But there was no response.

Muzan waited a second, then another, and another.... His fingers were trembling.

’Nakime?!’

He lost control completely and reached straight through the cellular connection to scream into Nakime’s mind.

That point of light in his mind that represented Nakime began to flicker, over and over, like the flame of a candle about to go out.

’Take us quickly to—!’

Pop

The point of light went out.

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Throw your stones, drop them ALL! 💎

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