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It took him the successful completion of five missions before his messenger crow would even let him fully state his request.
“Kageyama Tobio, you are more than well aware that this is highly frowned upon,” the bird intoned. “A Demon Slayer must have no other objective apart from the eradication of demons. Any other objective, however tangential or trivial, is nothing but an endangerment to this most sacred goal you have sworn to pursue.”
Kageyama had been around crows all his life―not for nothing was his home village nicknamed Crows’ Nest by its neighbors. But to hear such a booming, cavernous voice, as if created especially for the chanting of sutras, coming out of the beak of a regular-sized crow had yet to lose its novelty.
“Of course, crow-san. Hasn’t the speedy fulfillment of my first five missions been a sign of my commitment to the Corps?”
The bird seemed to hesitate for just a moment, but it was in Kageyama’s nature to aim for even the slightest fracture. “I believe my request in no way hinders my duty. I would even argue that it works towards its fortification.”
“Very well. Make your case,” the bird said and alighted on a nearby wooden post.
Kageyama took a deep breath. Sometimes he could not decide whether the hardest part of this job was the necessity to speak so formally.
“You have rightfully pointed out that personal interests endanger the ability of a Demon Slayer to fulfill their mission. Examples of this abound in the annals of our Corps, which I need not cite. Yet I cannot but observe that in one particular case―this being the exception that proves the rule you speak of, of course―personal sentiment actually binds more tightly the ties that exist between us Demon Slayers. Such a sentiment is vengeance.”
The sagely crow nodded, if not in approval, at least in appreciation.
“We are not merely soldiers. Soldiers fight for interests that are bigger than theirs, those of a head of state, for example. This is why armies are only as strong as the chain of command that binds them. But a Demon Slayer? A Demon Slayer fights for their own interests. Or should I say, interest. This interest is vengeance against the demon race. And, paradoxically, this single interest is also the most common, the one we universally find in each of our warriors. All of us who have taken up the sword do so because at one point in our lives, the exact moment when a sword was exactly what was needed, we could not.”
How much longer could he keep this up?
“So the stronger this thirst for vengeance, the sharper the blade cuts, and the better Demon Slayer one becomes. As I have mentioned to you, crow-san, I am merely trying to confirm a rumor that, in my estimation, seems to suggest that one of my old friends from my village, whom all of us assume was murdered during a demon attack several years ago, is not only still alive but has recently made it through a particularly gruelling Final Selection.”
“And you believe this is the orange-haired Demon Slayer of the recent rumors?” the crow said, as if he was embarrassed to let on that he too had heard of them.
“Yes. And if this Demon Slayer turns out to be him, it will be nothing but more fuel to the flames of not only mine but also his vengeance. I can be his tutor, his senior, his guide, one that can hone what is already a deadly weapon and guide it towards the extermination of all demons. The Corps can only stand to gain from this outcome.”
“Very well then,” the crow said. “I will pass around your message to the other messenger birds. I cannot make any promises, but you can expect an update after you have completed this mission. So try not to die.”
“Th-thank you, crow-san,” he said and almost bowed. Geez, which part of the job said that he had to be this deferential towards birds? It was definitely the voice.
The bird looked up, ready to fly off. “And what is the name of this orange-haired friend of yours?”
“Shoyo,” he said. “Hinata Shoyo.”
*
There was a game that every child in the village of Crows’ Nest knew how to play. But no one knew how long it had been around, not even the elders.
One time when Kageyama was in Asakusa for a mission, he ran into a gentleman who had introduced himself as an “ethnologist” at an udon street cart. He had no idea what the word meant, thinking perhaps it was a city job, especially since the man’s stylish clothes seemed to confirm that he was a city dweller. So he asked.
“I study primitive peoples. Tribes.”
Kageyama politely told the gentleman that he still had no idea what that meant.
“For example, people who live in villages deep in the mountains.”
Kageyama said that he had come from such a village.
“Ah, then perhaps one day I can come to your village and study it!” the gentleman enthusiastically exclaimed.
Kageyama gave him a polite smile and turned back to his own bowl.
“For example,” the gentleman went on, “is there a ritual that the whole village does together?”
Kageyama sighed, internally, which thanks to his training was now something he could do without giving offense.
“I don’t know if this counts, but there’s this game that you play as a kid. First, you have to find a level field. Then you put down two poles and stretch a fishing net across so that you have two teams on either side. Then you take a ball, and you pass it back and forth without letting it touch the net. The goal is to make the ball come down on your opponent’s team’s ground.” He was surprised by how much he was all of a sudden willing to tell this stranger.
“Interesting, interesting,” the gentleman said while trying to slurp his broth. “Do you all have a name for it?”
Kageyama shook his head. “When someone takes out the net, everybody pretty much knows what it means.”
“But how did that fishing net end up so deep in the mountain?” the gentleman pressed on.
Kageyama shrugged.
“Maybe a really big wind blew it up there!” he said, laughing.
Kageyama turned around and glared at the man, but the latter did not seem to notice.
Having calmed down, the gentleman said, “I bet you people believe in all kinds of things.”
And what, you don’t? Kageyama was almost tempted to say.
“Things like evil spirits. Or gods. Demons. The fishing net is a sign from the gods. Whosoever lets the ball touch the soil is guilty.”
He turned to Kageyama, his face pale and yellow in the gaslight. His eyes were bloodshot red, and for the first time Kageyama noticed that his hands were trembling.
“But don’t you worry,” he continued. “We’ll get to you people one of these days. And you won’t have to worry about any of those things anymore.”
When the ethnologist-gentleman ambled away into the night after having insisted on paying for both of their food, Kageyama had a thought: maybe some humans had it coming. Maybe some of them deserved the demons that visited them.
But he immediately shook off the thought. How could one ever tell? Neither the net nor the ball was an instrument of divine judgment. No. If he never wanted to let the ball touch the ground, it was because he never wanted the game to stop, because he wanted to keep playing with Hinata Shoyo, his dearest of friends, taken from him seven years ago, the only orange-haired boy he had ever known and ever hoped to know.
*
“Orange hair? Oh, he’s right there.” The proprietor of the inn pointed his thumb at the general darkness over his shoulder. “He asked to be as far from the entrance as possible.”
Kageyama had decided that if this person turned out to be his old friend, the first thing he would do would be to apologize. He walked down the corridor, past the other rooms dimly glowing from the inside. Apart from the sounds of food being consumed, there was almost nothing else to indicate the presence of people.
He stopped in front of the last room in the corridor. “Excuse me,” he said and slid the door open.
An orange-haired young man, dressed in the usual gakuran jacket underneath a bright orange haori dotted with little white triangles.
It’s… not him.
The eyes were rounder and had none of the sharp, focused look that would always stare at him across the fishing net. That look he could recognize anywhere. The hair was orange indeed, but it was a lot brighter than his friend’s, almost yellow at the top, and cut like streamers from some festival.
Before Kageyama could say anything, the man was already at his feet.
“PLEASE I DIDN’T KNOW I LOST COUNT OF ALL THE PEOPLE I AM INDEBTED TO―”
Whoever this person is, Kageyama thought, he is fast.
“RIGHT NOW I AM JUST TRYING NOT TO DIE BUT I PROMISE I WILL REPAY ALL OF THEM PLEASE DO NOT HURT ME―”
Hurt him? He could have attacked me and by the time I noticed, it would have been too late.
Kageyama noticed that everyone was now standing outside of their rooms.
“Hey, what’s going on down there?” the proprietor called out.
Panicking, Kageyama dropped to his knees and tried to calm down the man while simultaneously apologizing. “Please calm down―I AM SORRY EVERYONE―I am not here to collect debts―I AM SORRY PLEASE DO NOT WORRY NOTHING IS HAPPENING―please stop shouting―YOU MAY RETURN TO YOUR DINNER―”
This isn’t working. So Kageyama dragged him inside, pinned him against the wall, and put a hand over his mouth.
“Please play a game with me.”
The screaming immediately stopped. The bulging eyes suddenly transformed into a pair of melancholic pools of mud.
“Huh? A game? So you’re not here to collect debts?”
Kageyama sighed. “No.” Then he repeated himself, “Please play a game with me.”
“What kind of game?”
Kageyama smiled and said, “Something every child from my village can play.”
The orange-haired man looked down and gasped. “You’re a Demon Slayer!”
Kageyama was taken aback. “You only just realized that?”
The man laughed apologetically. “I guess I am not used to having a Demon Slayer look for me. The people who try to find me are usually, well, either people I’m indebted to or their debt collectors.”
But why would a Demon Slayer, especially someone that judging from his movements was not in any way weak, be afraid of debt collectors? Even if they could in any way harm other humans, wouldn’t they be able to at least intimidate them?
The sound of two stomachs growling inserted itself into the silence.
“Well,” Kageyama said, “I am not too short on money. And I think after the ruckus we’ve caused, we at least owe it to this inn to spend some money on them, especially since both of us will be spending the night here. Please let me treat you to dinner. I was the one who requested this meeting after all.”
A smile bloomed on the young man’s face, making it suddenly turn even more boyish. It was then that Kageyama realized that he could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen.
“Really? Thank you very much―um, what is your name?”
“Kageyama Tobio. And what is your name?”
“Agatsuma Zenitsu,” he said. “But you can just call me Zenitsu.”
*
They found a couple of discarded poles, some rope, and an empty clearing in a forest not too far away from the main street of the village. It was a cool summer night, and the rice field they passed by gleamed under the light of a full moon. At a small wooden hut in the middle of the field, Kageyama found what he knew he would: a ball made from scraps of leather stitched together.
“Um, Tobio-kun, don’t you think the villagers are going to see us and think we are stealing from them?”
“Don’t worry, Zenitsu-kun. I completed a mission here a few months ago, and everyone still remembers me. And of course, I will return this ball once we’re done with it. It belongs to the kids, after all.”
“Ah, that explains why that proprietor was very nice to us.”
Kageyama did not have the heart to tell him it was probably also because he’d left him some extra money out of guilt over the ruckus they had caused. A period of goodwill and hospitality usually followed a successful, no-collateral-damage mission, but from what he had heard from others, the locals usually wanted Demon Slayers to move on as soon as possible, fearing that their presence would attract other demons.
Zenitsu turned out to be a quick learner. Of course, Kageyama wanted him to get into the groove of passing the ball back and forth before teaching him anything more complicated.
“Say, Tobio-kun.”
“Yes?”
“You haven’t told me why you wanted to meet me.”
He was right. Suddenly a surge of emotions threatened to rupture his chest. He caught the ball with both hands, killing its momentum.
“That’s, er, a long story, Zenitsu-kun,” he said.
To his surprise, Zenitsu smiled at him. “Well, I think I’m getting the hang of this game. If you wanna keep this up, I’ll listen to it.”
Kageyama smiled back. When was the last time, since leaving his village, had he felt like he had the freedom to play like this? He tossed the ball to Zenitsu.
“I thought you were someone I knew from a while ago. You see, he had orange hair like you.”
“‘Had,’ Tobio-kun?”
Kageyama nodded. “A demon attacked our village around seven years ago. Thinking there was no way it could get all of us, we split up and ran in different directions. In that regard, we weren’t wrong. The demon ended up attacking only one family. I’ve always had this thought that it’s because he was there, that it’s his orange hair that made him stand out to the demon.”
“I-I’ve never thought of my hair like that.” Kageyama sensed a slight tremor in Zenitsu’s voice.
“It’s just a theory, Zenitsu-kun,” he said, trying to reassure him.
“What was your friend like?”
Suddenly, Kageyama found himself grinning ear to ear, at what he did not know. “He’s the biggest idiot I’ve ever known.”
“I-I didn’t mean that literally,” he went on, realizing that he was confusing Zenitsu. “At first I didn’t really like him. I was really good at this game, and he would almost always get picked last. You see, Zenitsu-kun, this is a game where you have a lot of advantage if you’re tall. My friend, well, he’s the shortest of all of the kids our age, so most of the time he would either be the referee or the person who chased after the ball when someone threw it too far. But he didn’t let any of this stop him. He kept showing up whenever there was a game, even if he might as well play with the toddlers for all we cared. We weren’t very nice to him, to say the least.
“One night I saw him. I was going to the outhouse, and I saw him jump. I thought he was flying―he was jumping that high. I didn’t tell him that I saw him, or anyone else for that matter. But the next time we had a game I was chosen captain and I picked him. Everyone thought I was trying to play a cruel prank on him. After all, I’d kind of made a name for myself for throwing the ball quite high so only other tall guys like me could hit it.
“That day I threw the highest ball I’d ever thrown, and he jumped up and hit it as if it was the easiest thing to do in the world. That was the day we became friends.”
The ball had been going back and forth perhaps a hundred times between Kageyama and Zenitsu. It did so a few more times before Zenitsu spoke.
“So when you heard about an orange-haired Demon Slayer, you thought it was your friend?”
“When I heard about an orange-haired Demon Slayer, who made it past what was considered to be one of the most gruelling Final Selections in recent times,” Kageyama said, “I thought it was him.”
It was Zenitsu who killed the ball this time. “I’m sorry, Tobio-kun,” he said quietly.
Hearing that, Kageyama started panicking. “P-p-please don’t feel that way,” he said. He had not expected Zenitsu to take his compliment in this way. “Obviously, Zenitsu-kun, you are not even remotely to blame. I would say it is I who should apologize for making you go through all of this trouble.” He tried laughing it off.
“No,” Zenitsu said. “I wish it were your friend who is standing here right now.”
“Zenitsu-kun, it’s not fair―”
“I still don’t understand how I didn’t get killed within the first few minutes,” he said. “I did nothing but run away and hide during the entire thing. I even slept. Can you imagine, Tobio-kun, sleeping during a time like that? It takes a special kind of cowardice, doesn’t it?” A disdainful smirk secreted itself on his face.
Kageyama could not find anything to say.
“I am a coward, Tobio-kun. Even worse, I’m a coward who’s lucky. A lucky coward. That’s a cruel joke, if I ever know one.”
Both of them were silent for some time. So was, it seemed, the forest around them.
“Zenitsu-kun, please toss the ball to me,” Kageyama said.
Zenitsu dutifully did so. As if obeying year-old reflexes, Kageyama jumped, met the ball when it was at its zenith, and slammed it back. He was right: Zenitsu’s speed was nowhere near inadequate, although he chose to avoid the ball.
“Please be clear about one thing, Zenitsu-kun,” he said. “My friend did not die for you. Perhaps we should leave it at that.”
If anything, Kageyama was glad to have jogged the young man out of his self-pitying speech. “Please toss the ball to me again, Zenitsu-kun.”
Once again, he dutifully obeyed; once again, Kageyama slammed it down, this time with enough force to leave a dent in the soil; once again, Zenitsu executed his lightning-quick avoidance. They continued doing this for a few hours.
“Please, one more time, Zenitsu-kun,” he said.
But this time something seemed to snap inside the orange-haired young man. He planted himself directly in the ball’s line of flight and, having cut the ball in two with his katana, ran away, screaming like a madman.
“See you at the inn, Zenitsu-kun,” Kageyama called out, although Zenitsu was already far gone at that point. He looked at the two halves of the leather ball. “Huh, I guess I’ll have to take care of that first,” he said to himself. “Can’t have the kids be mad at me too.”
*
Slipping off his clothes, Kageyama slipped into the bed next to the one where Zenitsu lay with his back to him. The room smelled of hay, that night’s dinner, and sweat. Zenitsu-kun is too quiet to be asleep, he decided.
“Zenitsu-kun.”
No response.
“Zenitsu-kun.”
Still no response.
“Zenitsu-kun,” he called out once again.
The young man finally turned onto his back. His eyes were wide open. They looked like two frozen pools in the moonlight that streamed through the window in a broad, angled swath.
“What?”
“You can run even faster.”
“What?”
“You can run even faster. Than my friend, I mean. If he had been you, he’d still be alive.”
Zenitsu shot up. “Tobio-kun,” he whispered, aghast.
“At least that’s what it seems like to me. I don’t know. If I ever end up actually finding him, I’ll look for you and make both of you race each other,” Kageyama said and softly laughed.
He got up and looked at Zenitsu in the eye. “You’re probably one of the fastest creatures―human or demon―that I’ve ever met. Please don’t ever forget that, Zenitsu-kun. It might save your life.”
Zenitsu lay back down. The room was quiet for a while. Kageyama was already on the brink of drifting off to sleep when Zenitsu whispered his name.
“I promise I will do my best to not die, Tobio-kun.”
“I’m glad. Maybe one day both of you will actually meet.”
“I’ll certainly be on the lookout for another person with orange hair. I don’t think it’s that common. By the way, Tobio-kun, I’ve never told you that my hair hasn’t always been orange, right?”
It was Kageyama who shot up now. “Is that so? Did you dye it?”
Zenitsu shook his head and told him how he had tried to escape his training by climbing up a tree, only to have lightning strike him and turn his black hair the color it was now. Kageyama laughed, and soon enough Zenitsu joined him.
In a way, maybe Shoyo is still the only orange-haired person I’ve ever known. Kageyama found some solace in that thought.
“Well,” he said, “if you ever run into someone with orange hair, you know whom you should call.”
Zenitsu nodded. “Uh, but you’ve never told me his name, Tobio-kun.”
“His name is Shoyo,” Kageyama said. “Hinata Shoyo.”