Chapter Text
Shinazugawa Genya should not have woken up.
But he opened his eyes after a peaceful death of dusting away, through the pain of being cut in half, anyway. He gasped awake in darkness, trying to breathe but failing, gasping in air but getting none, and lashed out. His arms barely moved before his elbow was hitting a surface to his side, rotten wood walls giving from his strength. He was laying awkwardly, his gun digging into his side and his katana’s sheathe nudging him under his chin, his bullets scattered under him, rolling in a mock massage that ached . His hand scrambled in the hole he left previously, reaching cold, hard dirt, and Genya didn’t know where he was .
“Fuck!” He gasped, and lurched up, hitting his head hard on the surface above him, and the old wood groaned. “Fuck…”
He felt his ceiling, and hit it,with his fists this time, again and again. The ceiling made a splintering noise, and caved, but that was worse . The wood cut into his face, splintering him no doubt, and dirt filled all of his senses. He roughly pushed the ceiling so it fell outwards rather than in on him, and more dirt, more dirt, more dirt.
He held his breath, and closed his eyes, and reached up. Nothing. He forced the wood out of the way, and stepped on it to reach further. He dropped his head to his chest and breathed in more dirt, but kept reaching, kept swimming in a direction he hoped was up.
More dirt, more dirt.
And then, mud.
He moved faster, kicking into mud and finally his hand breached to the surface, and he felt cold cold cold air, and water pelting it from above. Rain. He slammed his hand onto the ground, the ground, and scrambled for purchase to pull him up. His head shoved its way through the hole his hands started and he heaved in air for a moment. Gasped in mouthfuls, lungfulls, overfilling his lungs and forcing him to cough out the excess. He curved towards to ground, heaving, touching his forehead to the mud.
He was probably hyperventilating.
That’s okay, though, because he was hyperventilating air and not dirt.
He pulled himself fully out of the ground, and rolled onto his back, letting the rain pelt him for a minute or so before he was turning back to the ground and digging, digging, moving the dirt out of the way to get to the box, because a demon slayer without his weapons was dead, and Genya had been dead and he decided he didn’t like it.
He was also fully, completely naked, and he was pretty sure his uniform was buried with his weapons.
It was.
When Genya had put on his uniform and strapped his weapons on, he was soaked to the bone, but he was also alive so it didn’t much matter.
Now, where was he?
Genya had been walking around for a while, and he still didn’t know where he was. He was cold, annoyed, and he’d already loaded, emptied, and loaded again his gun with every bullet in his pouch, and he wasn’t anywhere familiar. There were also no demons he could smell, so he didn’t have any direction. There wasn’t even the irritating, stinging scent of wisteria that he could go get a headache from.
He was in an unfamiliar forest, which was honestly really weird because why would he have been buried in a forest that he didn’t even recognize? ‘Nemi wouldn’t have done that, either. Sure, Genya had basically cremated himself, but his older brother would bury his possessions in the Offical Demon Slayer graveyard like everyone else. But Genya wasn’t there. He was…
Wherever he was.
Genya didn’t have to wonder for long, though, because abruptly his senses sharpened to a sound that he heard only after he was already holding his katana. He stilled, lowered his stance and switched the safety off his shotgun. There was a demon nearby, and while he had a lot of unresolved anger from waking up buried alive , he was also starving.
Demons never tasted the best, but he could eat an Upper Moon with how empty his stomach is.
He only moved when he saw the demon in the distance, all of his senses dialed up to eleven. Genya always did have better senses than other humans since his— palette changed. With a grin crossing his lips, Genya pushed off the muddy ground into the trees, running along them in the way Muichirou taught him back when he was officially Gyomei-sensei’s official Tsugoku .
The demon was larger than other demons he’d faced before, with an ugly spotted skin, and Genya could taste how foul it would be. Didn’t matter. With a loud growl, Genya pounced on it, already digging his teeth into the flesh of what would be a shoulder blade if he had to identify it and tearing. He felt the familiar crunch of his bones changing, morphing him into something less human. Not much changed this time, really telling him about how weak this demon is. His teeth elongated, and his senses sharpened even more, but nothing else. Genya could bet that the whites of his eyes didn’t even turn black.
Genya had long learned how to direct a demon’s power to assist him, and he pushed off the demon with the strength he had gotten —-because even a weak demon is stronger than a human— and flipped so he was upside-down in the air, and, grabbing his shotgun, he fired a bullet into its neck, the spray of the bullet hitting it directly in the neck but also into one of its eyes, its chest, and its shoulder.
Shotguns .
The demon roared, and Genya finished chewing its flesh, swallowing it down. He was right, it was absolutely disgusting . “You’re really fuckin weak,” He told it, smoothly sliding his katana out of its scabbard, and twisting it in his grip so he could put away his shotgun. If this were a stronger demon, it would have attacked him, but this one just fell over, not even healing. “Really weak.”
He walked over to it, properly holding his katana. If Muichirou were here, he would’ve smacked him for how he put away his shotgun. Genya sliced off the demon’s head, and waited for it to dissolve. Gyomei-sensei may have chosen him, but Muichirou was the one to teach him to handle his katana, since Gyomei-sensei used his axe-chain-mase weapon. Genya never did figure out what it was called, only knowing it by the name ‘Ryuu.’
He went to sheath his katana, but…
The blood was still there. He furrowed his brow, and flicked his sword, the blood sliding off and landing at his feet in an arc. It still didn’t disappear. He turned to the demon, expecting to see the last of it still dissolving. It was large, after all. Maybe it was just taking its time.
He didn’t expect it to get up.
Genya leapt back, narrowly avoiding the swipe that was directed at him. “Woah, what? You’re still alive?”
Another voice piped up from behind where he’d landed, “You missed it by a centimetre. Close, but not close enough.”
Genya turned, but the voice had already passed him, moving towards the demon with speed and grace, and Genya could barely make out dark purple hair, an odd uniform, and two blades that didn’t quite look like katanas before the man was already stabbing directly into its open neck slashing out what looked like an orb.
What the fuck?
What the fuck is going on?
Did demons evolve while I was dead?
Genya watched as the man pocketed the orb, and make his way back to Genya. He either had really thin eyes, or he was keeping them narrowed on purpose, and though he was lean with tightly coiled muscle, he was still really thin compared to Genya’s own bulk and height. He sounded pleasant, but Genya got the feel he was being thoroughly scanned when he said, “Hello there. I don’t think I saw you earlier?”
Genya shrugged. “Probably because I just dug myself out of the ground after being buried alive. ” He huffed, gesturing to his dirty clothes and caked hair. Even how long he was out in the rain couldn’t wash out all the mud. “I don’t even know where I am. Just ended up here. Is this the Final Selection, or something?”
“Or something,” The man nodded, sheathing his swords in a crisscross behind his hips. Genya looked curiously at them. The man smiled, all teeth. “Yeah, I know. Swords. Nice to meet you, fellow swordsman. I’m Hoshina Soushirou. I’ll take you back to base, so we can figure out who put you out here, yeah?”
“Shinazugawa Genya,” Genya spun his katana with his wrist, smoothly settling his blade at his waist, ignoring the lingering stare at his blade. “Thanks, I appreciate it.”
Hoshina fell into to step with Genya, grinning. “Can I see your katana? It looks well forged.”
“Thank you, I forged it myself,” It was true. Genya had spent a lot of time everywhere in the corps, but his favorite place was in the Swordsmith village. Since Genya couldn’t utilize breath attacks like other Demon Slayers, he spent a lot of time bouncing back and forth between missions, being taught by Gyomei-sensei and Muichirou, and in the Swordsmith Village. He had apprenticed under Haganezuka-sama. The man was fierce and very, very passionate. Genya had gone with him to the mountains when he wanted to learn how to forge a katana from complete scratch, from mining the ore to sharpening the blade to perfection. Genya had learned a lot from Haganezuka-sama. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable giving my blade to someone else, though, swordsman or not.”
“Pity, but I get it,” Hoshina tilted his head. “Forged it yourself?”
“Mn. I designed my gun myself too,” He palmed the handle of his shotgun. “Though mostly I just watched the other smiths make it.”
Hoshina hummed. “You’re not apart of the Defense Force, are you?”
“Defense force? No.” Genya pulled his hair over his shoulder, running his fingers through it, and working out the knots. Or, trying to, at least. “Not officially, I think. I do the same work, though.”
He thinks. If the Defense Force is anything like the Demon Slayers, then sure. He wasn’t an official Demon Slayer despite having passed the Final Selection because of his apprenticeship in the Swordsmith Village. But he did still take missions and slay demons when he wasn’t busy.
“Yeah, I figured. You were close to taking out the Kaiju, but you missed the core just barely. Gotta take that out for it to really be dead.” Hoshina hummed. “You could join the Defense Force, though. We need as many people as we can get.”
“I know.”
There will never be enough people to fight the demons
Or, as Hoshina called them, the Kaiju.