Encounter with Tanjiro and Nezuko

After Yuto and Giyu had been traveling for about a couple of hours, Yuto saw a small temple that gave him a strange feeling of nostalgia.

In the temple yard, a man, a woman and a teenager were carrying trees they had cut down elsewhere to the temple.

----- 3 hours later

Yuto felt nostalgic again as he passed a small house. There was also a small garden in the yard of the house, but it was covered by the snow.

It had been snowing continuously for the last two days. This allowed Yuto to walk around without being exposed to sunlight.

As they passed by the house, a young woman saw them, opened the window of the house and called out to the two young men passing by the house.

"You guys must be cold walking around outside in this bad weather. Come inside I'll offer you boys some hot tea."

When Yuto heard someone addressing him as "children", he turned around with an unhidden smile on his face and looked at the source of the voice. The woman looked at Yuto's slightly aged face and graying hair, as he had used up all the blood he had, and in a more respectful tone apologized and invited him to have tea with her again.

Meanwhile, Yuto saw Giyu looking at him with a hidden smile.

When Yuto ignored her offer and kept walking, Giyu had to keep walking with him. Yuto had refused the offer of tea because he was being addressed as an old man, and Giyu, a skilled swordsman, realized that the woman was a woman who lived alone with her young daughter, and so as not to disturb her, he bowed to her 90 degrees, thanked her and continued on his way.

-------- a few hours later

Yuto encountered one of the scenarios he had been afraid to encounter. Tanjiro had taken nezuko on his back and ran past them.

They were indeed early, but only by a few minutes.

Yuto immediately reached for his arm to stop Giyu, who was about to attack the little girl on Tanjiro's back.

As soon as Giyu's movement was blocked, Tanjiro caught the scent of it and turned to his side. Luckily there was a void one step behind him and when tanjiro tried to retreat, he fell several meters.

Giyu and Yuto came close to the tiny cliff-like place, lowered their heads and looked down. Meanwhile Tanjiro saw the two worried men watching him and told them he was okay.

"Luckily there was snow and when I fell it softened my fall."

"If there hadn't been snow, you would have noticed the gap and not fallen down."

Tanjiro's thumb, which he had raised to signal that he was okay, slowly came back down with the words of the middle-aged man.

And at that moment the little girl Tanjiro was carrying on his back woke up and screamed. This time, without giving Yuto a chance to stop him, Giyu drew his sword and attacked.

As soon as Nezuko opened her eyes, she instinctively moved to bite her brother, the person closest to her.

Giyu was about to reach them under the influence of gravity when he heard Yuto's warning not to kill her. And as he was about to reach the ground, he kicked the wall next to him and used a powerful shoulder strike to push the girl away from the boy. As she rolled for meters on the snow, tanjiro got up quickly and tried to run in the direction of his sister.

Giyu held Tanjiro with one hand and then turned his head to look at Yuto. Knowing why he was looking at him, Yuto answered before he could ask.

"I don't think that girl has ever hurt a human before."

"So what? She's already turned into a demon."

"Let me go! Nezuko! Are you okay!"

Instead of continuing to talk, Yuto pointed at Giyu, who was running at him. Since he had already noticed Nezuko, he sped up and came to Yuto's side in a teleportation-like motion as Nezuko was about to reach him.

"Why did you stop me?"

"Instead of taking my advice in the first place and leaving earlier, you stalled. And because of that decision, this boy's entire family is dead. Now you are going to kill his sister in front of this poor boy. It seems the person who said that the real devil lives in the heart not in the body was very right."

Giyu gritted her teeth in anger at hearing Yuto call him a demon in a veiled way, but even without his saying it, Giyu already felt guilty for stalling.

"More importantly, she's only a demon in body. If you don't believe me, throw that passed out child next to her."

As Yuto spoke, he pointed first to Nezuko, who had fallen trying to climb to where they were, and then to Tanjiro, who had been held unconscious by Giyu for a while.

Giyu, of course, decided to ignore him and look down at the girl below. And all the while feeling a small amount of guilt inside. Even though he didn't have a good sense of smell, he had his own way of sensing the corpses inside the house a short distance in the back direction.

Just then Yuto took advantage of his distraction and kicked the passed out boy hard into the demon girl's side. As soon as Giyu realized what was happening, he tried to jump after the boy without thinking, but Yuto grabbed his clothes and pulled him back.

Giyu hurriedly cut Yuto's arms off and looked down to see a sight that shocked him. Nezuko was in front of her brother's unconscious body, growling at him like a dog.

When Giyu saw that Yuto was indeed right, he looked at him, not knowing what to do. He saw a small hand, like a baby's hand, grow from the cut part of Yuto's arm and give himself a thumb.