LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 101 - Take my hand
Chapter 101: Take My Hand
“Come out, Inari!”
As Katsuo ran toward her, Kurumi summoned a fox monster the size of a house from within the shadows.
“Growl!”
“The guardian beast, Inari…”
In a blink, all that was visible was the horrifying maw filled with jagged teeth.
However, Katsuo didn’t panic.
He immediately leaned back, dodging the bite aimed at him, and delivered a sharp kick to Inari’s jaw, forcing it shut.
“Too slow.”
“…! Inari! Split apart!”
“Growl!”
“Growl! Growl!”
“Growl! Growl!”
An A-rank danger-level fox monster was being toyed with like an unruly dog on a hot day.
Unable to watch any longer, Kurumi immediately had Inari split into eight smaller foxes.
“Bite! Inari.”
The more Inari divided, the weaker it became.
Kurumi aimed to subdue Katsuo by surrounding him with eight foxes, the most stable division for maintaining strength.
But her strategy soon proved futile.
“Huup…!”
Wham!
Crack!
Rip!
Katsuo tore through the charging beasts one by one.
He ripped, stomped, kicked, and bit, annihilating them all.
“I haven’t even summoned anything yet…?”
Kurumi’s expression was stunned, and even Asuna, watching from the sidelines, was equally horrified.
After all, Katsuo was supposedly a Beast Hunter.
Yet his overwhelming physical prowess was closer to what one might expect from a Fighter Hunter.
“This much won’t kill me.”
“…!”
“Bring out Amaterasu, Kitsune Kurumi. If not, I’ll kill you myself.”
“Tch! Come forth, Yukihime (ゆきひめ)!”
Inari, now bloodied and battered, retreated back into the shadows.
Kurumi summoned a new figure—a humanoid beast draped entirely in white, resembling a Japanese yokai, the “Snow Woman” of legend.
The monster Yukihime emerged from the shadows, her snow-white hair flowing like a winter storm over her pristine kimono.
“Freeze Katsuo in place, Yukihime.”
Obeying her master’s command, Yukihime unleashed a gust of freezing wind from her mouth.
The area where Katsuo stood, along with the opposite side of the domain, froze solid, becoming an arctic wasteland.
“Whooo…”
Even Katsuo exhaled a frosty breath before being encased entirely in ice.
“Did… Did you kill him, sister?”
“No… I’ve only barely sealed him. Trapping him like this is all I could do.”
Kurumi planned to leave him like that until everything was resolved and she had claimed the title of head of the Kitsune family.
Then, she thought, she could unseal him and talk things through.
For now, she sealed Katsuo in a pillar of ice, letting out a sigh of relief as she turned away.
Creeeak… Crack.
“Huh?”
“The ice pillar is… cracking…”
As if defying her expectations, fractures spread across the ice pillar where Katsuo had been sealed.
“I…”
“This can’t be happening!”
“I’m… not dead yet… Kurumi!”
Shatter!
Even the strongest Fighter Hunters couldn’t exhibit this level of monstrous power.
Yet Katsuo broke free from Yukihime’s seal, brushing off the icy shards on his body as if they were mere dust.
“Kitsune Kurumi. There’s only one way for you to stop me.”
“Katsuo, big brother!”
“Kill me. Use me as your stepping stone to become a true head of the Kitsune family, not a weakling pretending to be one.”
“Why do I have to kill you?!”
Kurumi wasn’t capable of fully controlling Amaterasu.
All she could do was prevent it from killing her.
She couldn’t yet command the monster revered as the Japanese sun deity to her will.
Summoning Amaterasu now would mean the fight could no longer be “moderate.”
In other words, if the battle continued, Kurumi would truly have no choice but to kill Katsuo.
“I’m coming…”
“Don’t come any closer…”
“No, I will. So if you don’t want to die, kill me! Kitsune Kurumi!!”
What in the world had driven this man to such desperation?
Over and over, Katsuo charged at her with reckless abandon, as if he wanted to die.
Seeing his desperate expression, Kurumi knew no other guardian beast could stop him.
“Damn it…!”
Just like in fairy tales, you can’t save everyone after all.
With that thought, Kurumi prepared to summon the national disaster-level beast, once worshipped as Japan’s sun deity, Amaterasu, to protect herself…
“Wait just a second!”
…when suddenly,
“?!”
“Shin-woo?!”
“Katsuo! Catch this!!”
Sweat-drenched and out of breath, Shin-woo dashed between the two fighters.
With those words, he tossed something through the air, and it landed with a soft thud in front of Katsuo.
“That’s…”
“A headband?”
It was a small, red children’s headband, worn and dusty as if it had been left in a corner for a long time.
And the moment Katsuo saw it,
Thud.
“K-Katsuo, big brother?!”
He froze, then collapsed to his knees in shock.
Kurumi, startled by his reaction, looked at him in confusion.
Tap… Tap…
“Big brother…”
“Are you… crying?”
For the first time, the man who always seemed emotionless, like an unfeeling statue, shed warm tears.
“Where… did you find this?”
“In your family’s manor. I snuck into the underground treasury and managed to retrieve it.”
“You… dared to enter the family’s treasury without permission? Do you not value your life?”
“Well, that makes two of us, doesn’t it?”
At Shin-woo’s reply, Katsuo nodded quietly, as if conceding the point.
Meanwhile, Asuna and Kurumi, who had been listening, were utterly baffled.
“Shin-woo, what…?”
“What did you give him to make him like this?”
“Oh, that?”
“This… was my little sister’s.”
Katsuo answered in Shin-woo’s place.
“Little sister…?”
“But isn’t the youngest in the Kitsune family me? Big brother.”
“Yes, Asuna. Now you are. But 15 years ago, there was another younger than you.”
To be precise, Katsuo’s blood-related sister.
Born into his family, she was a prodigy once called a genius even among the top ten families.
She had still been alive back then.
“Such a child existed…? But I’ve never heard of her.”
“Of course not. She was such a genius that the family kept her existence a secret, even during her coming-of-age ceremony, intending to make her the next head of the family.”
“How could they…”
But who would’ve known that decision would become their undoing?
The history of the Kitsune family does not even remember the name of Katsuo’s younger sister.
Kitsune Harumi.
At three, she began taming monsters.
By five, she could control all of the Kitsune family’s guardian beasts.
But at the time, Katsuo despised her.
Because…
“I was nothing more than a nobody, not even born a Beast Hunter.”
“…What?”
“What are you saying…?”
“I am not a Beast Hunter. To be precise, I wasn’t even born with the talent to be a Hunter.”
The next head of the Kitsune family.
Kurumi and Asuna were left speechless by the revelation that he wasn’t even a Hunter, let alone a Beast Hunter.
“Even so, I tried.”
“…!”
“Though now it’s meaningless, at the time, I was a child desperate for recognition. Even knowing I was destined to be a sacrifice for Amaterasu, I trained my body relentlessly.”
“What…”
“You were supposed to be Amaterasu’s sacrifice, big brother?!”
A boy who wasn’t even born a Hunter, not even worthy of being a legitimate heir.
Naturally, Katsuo was deemed unfit to produce heirs of his own and was originally meant to be sacrificed to Amaterasu in Kurumi’s place.
But.
“Don’t bully my brother!”
“…!”
“Princess Harumi…!”
“If you keep tormenting my brother, I won’t just sit back and watch!”
Thanks to his younger sister, the greatest prodigy in the history of the Kitsune family, the role of sacrifice naturally shifted to Kurumi, the illegitimate child.
If it were the current Katsuo, he would have thanked his younger sister for saving his life, offering words of gratitude.
But.
“Back then, I was far too young and foolish.”
“Big brother…”
“Rather than feeling grateful for my younger sister protecting me from Amaterasu, all I felt was jealousy.”
It was shameful.
It was infuriating.
Despite training to the brink of death, he was nothing more than a sacrifice, while his little sister, who merely lived her life leisurely, basked in the praise of the adults.
He despised her so much that he wanted to kill her.
But if he had known back then that it would truly lead to her death, he never would have ignored her.
“Harumi was allergic to peaches—so much so that she couldn’t even take a bite.”
“An allergy?”
“Yes. And so I brought her a peach on purpose to mess with her. I thought that with her strength and intelligence, she’d either throw it away or take one bite and spit it out immediately.”
But contrary to the young Katsuo’s expectations…
“Thank you, big brother!”
Harumi ate the peach right in front of him, as if it were the most delicious thing in the world.
She ate it so enthusiastically that juice dripped down her face.
Seeing that sight only made Katsuo even angrier.
The fact that she had eaten the peach he brought, which was meant to embarrass her, irritated him to no end.
Without looking back, he stormed out of her room.
…Even now, it was one of the dumbest things he’d ever done in his life.
“She may have had the strength of a professional Hunter, but her body was still that of a child, not even ten years old.”
“……”
“That night, Harumi suffered a severe allergic reaction and passed away.”
“…!”
“Because of the peach I gave her.”
If she had simply spat it out when she began to feel sick, or even if she had vomited it up later, she could have survived.
But Harumi never spat out the peach.
Even as she suffered and died, she kept it in her stomach.
The reason?
It was the first gift her cold, distant older brother had ever given her.
After losing his sister, Katsuo came to a realization.
His arrogance, his weakness, had taken away the only family member who had ever truly cared for him.
His own foolishness had left a wound in his heart that could never be healed.
“This headband was my sister Harumi’s… Shin-woo, I have to ask.”
“Ask what?”
“How do you know about my past? How did you get this headband? And why are you giving it to me now?”
Katsuo’s backstory, buried deep in the annals of the Kitsune family, was something only those who dug deeply into their history could uncover.
But Shin-woo didn’t have the time to explain such elaborate details.
There was only one thing worth saying.
“This is about the kindness you wanted to show Harumi.”
“Kindness…”
“Can’t you offer even a little bit of that kindness to Princess Kurumi, who just wants to remain your little sister?”
“My kindness… to Kurumi…?”
“Don’t regret it after losing her too. Do it while she’s still here. You’ve already made that mistake once, haven’t you?”
“…!!”
Even if they didn’t share the same mother, they shared the same blood.
They were family.
Hearing Shin-woo’s words, Katsuo gazed sorrowfully at Kurumi.
Kurumi extended her hand once again, no longer wielding a weapon or summoning a beast.
With a desperate plea, she reached out.
Despite everything, they were still family.
“Katsuo, big brother.”
“…Yes.”
“I want to forgive you.”
“……Yes.”
“So please…”
“Take my hand.”