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Obanai was used to loneliness. He knew that his days would be filled with one sided conversation with the small white snake that had crept in. The noises outside his cell every night barely gave him pause now, despite the offputting scrape of harsh scales on wood. He was also used to pain. The girls, his cousins, would beat him every time they found a new escape attempt, and he bore the lash marks to proudly that spoke of it. They never inflicted anything life threatening but easily struck with enough force to cause him to spend weeks sitting in agony in his cell, recovering.
Even now, the cell stank of pungent food, and of stale blood. Obanai’s cell always smelt of blood nowadays. Ever since he had turned thirteen and the snake demon had tasted his blood for the first time and had grown addicted to it. His neck was littered from the small slices used to squeeze out enough for her to feel satiated every day.
Shifting uncomfortably, Obanai tried to sit so the open sores on his back weren’t pressed up against the harsh bars of the cell. The demon was slithering outside, causing an awful rasp of hardened, steel-like scale as it dug into the boards. “Do you want to offer me some blood, pretty?”
Obanai didn’t respond. He didn’t move. She would offer him favour after favour just so he would give her blood rather than force her to take it. He had never once freely given a drop, and he had sworn he never would. There were some things that were just too far for the boy's pride, and this most definitely had to be one of them.
“It wouldn’t hurt nearly so much if you gave it to me. I’m sure always being forced under the knife must hurt more than a little razor nick. I don’t need much, it's just… only your blood tastes right to me, dearest.” The voice sounded from right behind Obanai’s head, from where he sat in a suspended cage in the pitch black room.
He had been moved from the small cage of his youth into this room after the first escape attempt. Thrown in here, his mouth still torn and shredded, Obanai had cried for the last time. It was in here that the cold, metal core he clung too even now had been forged. Obanai couldn’t die, he had tried multiple times and each time his cousins came and ‘saved’ him. All escape brought was pain, and beatings. But he didn’t stop.
Anything was better than submitting, especially to a demon as foul as this. Eventually, he would escape this place, either by death or by miracle, and when he did? He would destroy all demons who dared harm innocents. He would obliterate people like his family who profited off the suffering of others and made deals with the enemy. There would be no hole safe to hide from Obanai Iguro!
The demon slid around the cage, and Obanai could feel her yellow, slit pupils staring into his mismatched eyes. “It is remarkable how much fire you show, dear pet. Soon will come the time I let you walk free under the moonlight, forever bound to me.”
Shivers ran down his spine at that. He didn’t want to know what she would do to try and enforce that upon him - what new torment and humiliation he would be subjected to in order to force him to accept such treatment.
“After all, it is only soon to be your birthday. Once you become a man? Well, I will make you mine. I will taste the last of your blood, and you can finally taste some of mine. I’m sure you will love it just as much as I love the sweet taste of yours.” The tip of her tail slid into the cage and caressed Obanai’s face with the last words, but he was too stunned to even try and attack her.
She was going to force him into becoming a demon? A foul monster that writhed around in the darkness? No. This was too much. She had given him some time to prepare an escape, or to try as many as possible. This demon wanted to rob him of his humanity, after robbing him of his childhood, and of his freedom. He had never even seen the sunlight, never felt its rays warm his face. He only knew of such things from the few books he had been allowed to read over the last seventeen years of hell.
Rage overtook him then, and he lunged, throwing a platter of seasoned meats directly at his tormentor's head. Her echoing laugh resounded around him, as the platter smashed into the next wall with a cacophonous crash.
Despite all that he tried in the next days, he wasn’t able to escape. Not even the reaper was able to steal him away from the fate he had been born into, despite all the tries he made. Eventually the night came, and Obanai was dragged, beaten and near senseless from his cell.
The week had been horrific to experience. His cousins had beaten him near to death in an attempt to keep him under control, and the blood the snake monster demanded had increased multiple times over. The loss of it had left him lightheaded and weak; weak enough that Obanai didn’t think even if he hadn’t been half dead from beatings he would be able to mount any meaningful resistance.
Rage, red hot and fiery, filled his veins. Obanai didn’t think there was more hatred one person could feel than what he knew from his past, but the last few days had proven that there were still new depths his rage could reach. The haze of loathing hung over his vision, adding laughing shadows and reaching claws to the already terrifying idea of being removed from his cage. As much as he hated it, even the crumbs of freedom that came from this frogmarch nearly sent him into panic.
The doors to the snake demon's throne room opened wide, showing him the torchlit view of a monstrous snake sprawled out on a throne of gold. Women waved fans, blowing cool air over her, and in front was a bowl of blood she frequently brought to her lips to drink from. Something told him that the contents of that bowl was, in fact, his own blood, spilt for her to consume.
He spat out a globule of blood and phlegm onto the floor in front of her. His tongue was thick with swelling as he spat out his final defiance. “I will kill you. One of these days, I will kill you and everyone of my pathetic family along with you, then I will burn…” The last words were robbed from him by a blow from the haft of a polearm impacting into his gut, forcing the wind out of his lungs.
The sense of loss began to grow even more powerful than the rage. He saw the muzzle they brought forward, and struggled weakly against it. Without pausing, they forced it over his mouth and locked the bar in place. It held his jaws open, unable to close, but equally unable to form sentences, and rage out about the unfairness of it all. Even after all these years, they were finding new ways to humiliate him.
“Don’t worry my sweet. Once the transformation has occurred, we will remove that crude muzzle. You will wear this,” with a motion she gestured to a golden chain and collar laid out on a cushion beside her throne, “and I will allow you to pick one of these women to consume as your first meal.”
A pair of swift blows knocked Obanai to the ground, onto his knees. He looked up at the demon as it slithered towards him, taking his jaw in one taloned hand. First, she bent down, and latched her teeth into the flesh of his neck. Pain blossomed out first, but as his vision began to swim the pain was replaced by cold. His heart beat out a faltering, staccato rhythm as she took more than his body was able to survive without. His end was coming now.
A bitter, rotten taste entered Obanai’s forced open mouth. He tried desperately to gag it up, to not swallow the poisonous liquid, but it was to no avail. He could already feel the changes taking place as he began to writhe in agony.
Screams sounded out, and a body thudded to the ground behind Obanai. He wasn’t able to focus, but it looked like one of the guards had been thrown from her position holding the doors into the room.
Next, he saw the demon rear up in pain, before being thrown back. A hand pressed into Obanai’s shoulder, turning him over, onto his back. A moment passed, as he stared up into the face of this new foe. While his vision may have been swimming with black spots, Obanai knew the face of a demon when he saw it. The eyes had slit pupils, and glowed with the heat of a furnace coal. Strange, morphing, purple flames fell from his shoulders, draping down onto the floor, leaving odd patterns of burns scorched into the wood.
Strangest of all, the demon looked sad. Truely, heartbreakingly, devastated by what he was seeing. It reached out a claw, and sliced the leather straps of the gag holding Obanai’s mouth open. Then, it ran that very same claw down its own wrist, and held it out in front of Obanai’s mouth.
Some newly awakened instincts kicked in, and Obanai bit. As soon as one drop of blood hit his tongue, he needed more. It was sweet, and filling in a way that transcended description. The insatiable hunger that had started almost lessoned, and the pain changed into something he would almost call bearable. Then the hunger returned five hundred fold. Next to him, he felt the cool scales of Kaburamaru slide up his arm and take his usual position around his neck. The familiar sensation soothed the pain.
The next minutes were filled with blood, and combat. Something had changed inside of Obanai, and the rage he had been unable to express for so long unleashed itself. First, he tore bloody chunks out of the snake demon with only the fangs he himself had grown. The venom he seemed to inject slowed down her healing, and the consumption of her essence continued until she was unable to move, and was completely absorbed.
Then, he fell upon his family. The hunger had faded but the rage? That was still glowing red hot, and only grew as he set about the grizzly business of slaughtering his tormentors. All the while, a figure stood and watched him, arms folded and a look of profound sadness on its face.
Obanai tore out throats, and used improvised clubs to equal effect. He threw, strangled and bludgeoned people until every corridor was soaked in deep, crimson, pungent blood. He slaughtered until all he could smell was hopelessness and death. His clothes stuck, slick and heavy, to his morphed flesh as it continued to transform. Only once the screams had faded, did Obanai’s rage begin to abate. Then the man was there, with kind eyes, and kinder hands.
He took the young man by the shoulders and guided him out into the darkness. Away from the torn, destroyed bodies. While it may have been a new moon, Obanai’s vision was more than sharp enough to make out details despite the impenetrable pitch black of the night.
Then, he knelt before Obanai and began to speak. “I. I can’t apologise enough. This is all my fault.” Tears fell from his eyes, and before Obanai could stop himself he reached out and whipped them away. Something about this man was the most entrancing thing he had ever seen. His smell was unlike anything else he had ever had occasion to smell, unlike anything he may be able to liken it too, and it washed away the last of the confusion and rage his transformation had brought on. It calmed him so much, he understood now what this stranger had done.
“You turned me into a demon!” Obanai recoiled as though burnt.
Tears fell even faster, dripping down onto the ground. The figure bent their head, and let crimson hair hide their face from the enraged Obanai. “Yes. Yes I did. I hijacked your transformation, and made you one of my demons instead.”
“What does that mean?”
“You had already transformed. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been so entranced by my blood. The demon had taken root. If it hadn't…” The man trailed off, and more tears dropped to the ground.
Obanai took a deep, fortifying breath. He could feel his body work to heal his injuries, even those decades old. The stretching, pinching sensation of the scars at his mouth didn’t fade, however. “What would you have done?”
He looked up into mismatched eyes. “I’d have sent you on to your next life. But it was too late. You were already one of us. I thought: better still a person than a mindless animal, and so here you are.”
Obanai scowled. “Why did you even come? What even is your name?”
The man stood, and towered over the frail and sickly Obanai. “I am Tanjirou Kamado, and I came as I smelt your blood, and knew something was wrong. When I closed on the compound and sensed the rogue demon? I knew something was terribly amiss for her to risk blood at night, even at a new moon, so I moved quickly. But not fast enough.”
Obanai scowled. “What do I do now that you have turned me into a monster?”
The man smiled a small, but encouraging smile. “You are no monster Obanai. I won’t lie, you are cursed, but that doesn't make you a monster. And from here? You have two options. You can give in, head for about three miles west, and try to consume all the people in the local village you find there. That will end in your death, at my own hands. Or, you can come with me, and try to prevent tragedies such as this ever occurring again.” He held out a hand to the newly turned demon.
Obanai took it with a scowl.