So saying, Druella removed her hand from Tasogare's head, and took a step backward.
"Wait! I won't let you get away!"
Koyoi hurled three talismans at Druella, who had left the mana dome. They flew true at the monster's eyes, heart, and feet, faster than the eye could catch. Every one of them, however, was struck out of the air by Druella's tail.
The talismans had been so powerful that one touch of them would have paralyzed an ordinary monster and brought them to their knees. The monster before Koyoi's eyes, however, had made short work of them with just her tail.
"This is still just the entrance, you know?"
Druella spread her wings, and her feet left the ground.
"Fighting in a place like this just isn't exciting. I suppose this sort of thing really does have to be done all the way inside," Druella laughed obscenely, making a circle with the fingers of her right hand, and passing her left index finger in and out of it.
"Well then, I'll be waiting for you in the throne room. Bye-bye."
Druella leisurely floated up, passed through the castle wall, and disappeared from sight. Koyoi still clutched her talismans, but all she could do was grind her teeth in frustration.
She turned her back to me, but she still never left herself open...
"Ooh, ah."
Bunkichi, still straddled by Tasogare, let out a cry that sounded like it had been wrung from his throat. Koyoi turned her attention to him. He shuddered two or three times.
"Aaah. You came... You came for me..." Tasogare whispered happily, and sighed with contentment.
The low rumble emanating from her body grew louder. The part behind her hips swelled, and something long and thin peeked out below the hem of her torn kimono. It was a pair of orange and white-spotted tails. The two cat tails were growing as Koyoi watched, like plants budding in the spring sunshine. They dragged up the hem of Tasogare's kimono, exposing her lower body.
Koyoi instinctively averted her eyes. Bunkichi's penis was lodged in Tasogare's vagina. Koyoi lacked the knowledge to recognize it, but Bunkichi's testicles were twitching up and down. A long, long ejaculation. Tasogare was using the rise and fall of her hips and the wave-like contractions of her vagina to savor what leaked out with each upward spasm.
When her tails had finished growing, the transformation moved to her hands and feet. The same pattern of white and orange spots as on her tail appeared on her arms below the elbows, and her legs below the knees. Fur grew, covering the skin, which it seemed to split. Her fingers fused into a lump, then rapidly metamorphosed into fur-covered cat's paws.
"Aaah, meooohh."
She raised her face, and let out a caterwaul of joy.
Opening her eyelids, Tasogare basked in the pink and purple-tinted rays of monster realm sunshine. Her pupils, now vertical slits, contracted, reducing the amount of light that entered her eyes. Then, for the first time, she realized that her elder sister was just on the other side of the barrier.
"Sister...?"
A monster slayer must be merciless.
Koyoi recalled what their grandfather had once told her.
Those fascinated by monsters will inevitably cause harm to the humans close to them.
Koyoi grit her teeth.
A monster's fascination is a sickness.
"To treat it..."
You must either isolate them, or dispose of them.
She affixed a talisman to her right palm, then spread the hand open and held it high over her head, as if displaying it to the sky. The writing on the talisman shone. A moment later, it turned to ash and spread into a sphere. Each particle of ash sucked in mana from the surrounding air. The sphere glowed faintly violet, and expanded. When its diameter was roughly equal to her height, the sphere's growth halted. Its purple hue melted like heated glass, and formed into patterns.
This was the secret culmination of Koyoi's skill — a technique for destroying a monster by slamming a massive quantity of mana into them, and forcing their body to take in more than it could absorb.
Tasogare took no action; she just continued to stare at it. As she was also an Amanomiya, she soon realized what her sister intended to do. But she said nothing. She neither begged for her life, nor hurled curses. She only smiled, and shed tears. Understanding everything, she smiled at her elder sister.
◊ ♦ ◊ ♦ ◊
"Sister! Sister!"
Koyoi's attendants desperately struggled to restrain her from running to Shinonome.
Half a year had passed since Tasogare's disappearance. It was just before sunrise, and the first fingers of dawn colored the sky.
Someone had made an attempt on the life of Koyoi's elder sister, Shinonome. The culprit apparently commanded flames, and had attacked her in her sleep. Shinonome had noticed something was out of the ordinary before the attack, and managed to wake in time to evade it. But the would-be assassin's spell had been potent; although Shinonome had cast a defensive spell of her own, both her arms had been burned, and the force of the blast had smashed her into the wall of her room, knocking her unconscious. The people of the household had noticed the noise, and found her collapsed.
Shinonome's life was in no danger, but the burns she had sustained on both arms would leave scars.
"Who was it!? Who attacked my sister!?"
Koyoi vented her anger on her attendants, shouting in an uncharacteristically loud voice.
In the Amanomiya clan, it was usual for even those who trained in the same place to study different subjects. This was so that a master could gauge the quality of their disciples' mana, and teach each one what they were best suited to handle. The same held true even for candidates to become the next head of the clan.
Koyoi's training had focused on large-scale, highly destructive techniques specialized for offense.
Shinonome, in contrast, had studied defensive spells and small-scale techniques that supposed a one-on-one confrontation.