Some tens of minutes later...
"Why won't it hit?!"
"Heyhey, what's the matter? Is that all you've got?"
There went Yasutaka, dodging about with easy, cheerful vigor.
There was a reason for this.
Truth be told, her attacks were monotonous to begin with...
She loosed her sorcery in great volleys, sure enough, but every bolt came straight on, with no cleverness to it at all.
Had he been fighting some other foe at the same time, it might have been trouble, but so long as he kept his focus, dodging was child's play.
If only she'd ignored his taunts and lent covering fire to the other demons instead. But no, she'd taken the bait like a fool...
But there was a reason for that, too.
Calling him a country-bumpkin swordsman meant she looked down on him. And failing to finish off a man she held in such contempt? That would wound the pride of any big-city sophisticate.
This is what happens when you look down on people.
By sneering at him as some country bumpkin, Kana had let him read her completely.
Irritated, Kana smiled a thin, wicked smile.
"If it won't hit, then take this!"
FWOOM...
With that, she gathered a ball of sorcerous light in her hand and dove straight at him!
She meant to slam it into him point-blank!
But Yasutaka only grinned!
This was the moment he'd been waiting for!
And so Kana, diving hard, collided with him...
KA-BOOM!!
An explosion tore through the spot where the two of them met!
"What happened?!"
Mōha watched the pair anxiously, and then...
"GYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!"
Kana let out a horrific shriek and convulsed in agony!
Onihei stared in shock.
"What in the world..."
By all rights, Kana should have been just like Kōen: utterly impervious to attack.
And yet here she was, screaming in dreadful agony, shaking with pain.
"Ngh... how's that?!"
As for Yasutaka, he hadn't come through unscathed either, badly wounded as he was.
Pieces of his armor had been torn away, his left arm hung limp and useless, and his legs wobbled beneath him.
He staggered back from Kana, but she was in no state to press the attack either.
"AGH-GAAAAAH!!!!"
Something was lodged in her arm, and she writhed in pain, unable to pull it free.
When everyone saw what it was, they were struck dumb.
"...Huh?"
What was stuck in her arm was a hairpin.
A thing like that stabbed into an arm should hardly have counted as an injury at all.
And yet the hairpin seemed to cause her unspeakable torment, and Kana groaned in misery.
Yasutaka dropped to the ground and grinned.
"Just as I figured. It's working..."
"Taka! What the hell is going on here!"
"Didn't he say it himself? 'No weapon can touch her.' So I got to thinking, what about something that ain't a weapon?"
He pointed at the kunai in Mōha's hand.
"Kōen thought it was strange that only the kunai worked on him, and he figured maybe it was some kind of sorcery like that. That kind of invincibility's gotta come with a nasty drawback, I figured."
"Well, maybe so, but... how the hell did you bet everything on that?"
It had been an attack made in full readiness to trade blows and die together, but Yasutaka answered coolly.
"I wouldn't have bet on that alone. What convinced me was that, as strong as she is, she was nearly even with Mani."
"Ah!"
It was true: for all Mani's skill as both a shrine maiden and an onmyōji, it made no sense that someone this powerful had only been her equal.
Granny Moon had been badly wounded, so there was no doubt it was Mani who'd taken over the fight and driven her off.
"Fight like that against anyone else and there's no way you'd win. So I got to wondering why it came out even, and figured Mani would've bound her up with thread right from the start."
"I see!"
The shikigami Mani kept at her side was a spider.
It excelled at attacks with thread, and thread wasn't a weapon, but it served well enough in a fight.
"And sure enough, the only thing she bothered burning off just now was that thread, which is what tipped me off."
He pointed at the onmyōji who'd just shot thread at Kana earlier.
That onmyōji was too busy fighting Sugar Man to say a word, but it was thanks to him that they'd found the weakness.
"So that princess was basically her natural predator, huh..."
"And on top of that, she got caught by surprise, too."
"That's not funny! If it were a normal person, that'd be murder!"
It only wasn't a problem because the one on the receiving end happened to be someone nobody would complain about killing.
Still, now that they knew this much, anyone else could take a crack at it too.
"Attack with anything but a weapon! They say that'll work!"
"Ohhhh!!"
The fire watch troops roared and surged toward Kana.
"The demons are all mopped up over here!"
"Same here!"
It seemed both the Northern and Southern Magistrate's Offices had finished off their demons!
All that remained now was Kana!
"Damn it!!"
Still shaking with agony, Kana took to the air and fled!