The wild success, animation, beauty, and music soared the Entertainment District Arc’ s popularity when it got adapted into an anime in early 2021. The brutal, merciless, and massive fight between the Upper-Rank 6 demons: Gyutaro and Daki versus Tengen, Tanjiro, Inosuke, and Zenitsu.
The next arc continuing is the Swordsmith Village Arc. The manga (graphic novel of an anime) will be reviewed instead of the show, comparing it to the previous arcs that have been animated.
Right off the bat, an Upper-Rank meeting is held in the Infinity Castle where all the strongest demons reside. Muzan, the main antagonist, expresses fury for the death of Gyutaro who held the position of Upper-Rank Six, not only because Upper-Ranks in general have stupendous strength and powers; but also, they’ve lived for hundreds of years and fought off some of the strongest demon slayers who have trained hard for years. Muzan orders both Gyokko and Hantengu to go to the Swordsmith Village.
Reading that was very concerning because Gyutaro was barely defeated because of his immense power and now, two more powerful demons are invading a place. Most likely, they will get into the Swordsmith Village based on the arc’s name.
All of the demons get revealed during the meeting and their designs and personalities are unique, Upper-Rank Five: Gyokko has a weird face with two mouths where a person’s eyes should normally be, an eye on his forehead, and another where his mouth should be. He has multiple small hands on the side of his head and side of his torso, and doesn’t seem to have legs as he emanates his body from his vase. Upper-Rank Four: Hantengu, looks like an old demon who is constantly terrified, scared, and paranoid. He has two thorns and a huge bump on his head and appears weak, but I wouldn’t underestimate a demon based on his behavior as he is stronger than Gyokko and Gyutaro based on his rank. Akaza was already shown from the Mugen Train Arc with his tattoos and Douma from the Entertainment District Arc with his white hair and rainbow eyes.
Upper-Rank One has yet to be revealed until now. Upper-Rank One: Kokushibo, the strongest demon in the Twelve Kizuki. Kokushibo has six eyes on his face and he is dressed properly as if he was a swordsman. He also has a sword, which is very unusual because no other demon uses swords besides him, but it can indicate in his past that he was a demon slayer, along with the ability to use breathing techniques. This might explain why he is so strong, especially when you get way more powerful as a demon.
We also get many new characters featured such as Muichiro Tokito, the Mist Hashira; Mitsuri Kanroji, the Love Hashira; Genya, a member of the Demon Slayer Corps, and the swordsmith chief.
I love the attention to detail as the story is consistent with characters like Tanjiro recovering because of the hard-fought battle in the Entertainment District. They still show him training to get his strength back up, which has been shown in previous arcs. The story includes details such as how swordsmiths are important even if they aren’t fighting, as they make swords for the demon slayers to use. The swordsmith chief is the most important, as he’s responsible for making some swords exclusively for the Hashiras.
As Tanjiro and Nezuko were sleeping, Muchirio woke them up while Hantengu slowly crawled into the room they were all staying in. It didn’t take long for his head to get decapitated as Muichiro charged at Hantengu, slicing his head in the process.
I can already tell that a fight cannot end so quickly, as demons like Hantengu can survive for long periods of time. It’s thoughtful that the arc shows Tanjiro staying alert, and obsessively thinks about his previous fight where Daki did not die, even though she was beheaded by Tengen. While she was beheaded, Daki calls out to her brother, Gyutaro. One last thing to point out is Nezuko, a demon related to Tanjiro, kicked Hantengu as a sign that she is ready to fight.
As Upper-Rank Four’s head was cut off, Hantengu’s head grew a body, while his body grew a head, making two separate demons. Hantengu doesn’t seem to show any signs of incredible strength currently, but his demon clones can take you out by surprise. As Muichiro goes for one of the demon clones with a fan in the shape of a leaf, he gets blasted, and the building Tanjiro was staying at gets partially blown up. Several decapitations came from Genya with his double-barrel shotgun and now there are four demon clones that represent emotions and distinct powers. There are Sekido for anger, Karaku for pleasure, Urogi for joy, and Aizetsu for sorrow. Not only that, these demons appear younger compared to when Hantengu arrived, looking old and fragile.
I think one of the most iconic things reading the manga was when Tanjiro was posing with his sword that resembled a powerful demon slayer named Yorichi who is vaguely featured. Tanjiro uses “Sun Breathing: Sun Halo Dragon Head Dance” with the help of Nezuko’s blood demon art to set his sword on fire to completely decapitate Urogi, Karaku, and Sekido in a quick flash, while Genya already gets Aizetsu’s head.
I find it amazing to see Tanjiro attempting to defeat these demons as he thought getting all of their heads at the same time would work except it did not work, and the emotion demons regenerated from their injuries. It’s like fighting the demons has no purpose for the demon slayers, except to waste precious energy. Tanjiro uses his sense of smell to figure out that there was a fifth demon who was a miniature version of Hantengu with the embodied emotion of fear. He assists Genya by finding himself the small demon and beheading it. As soon as Tanjiro attempts to cut the head. Behind Tanjiro, and other figure appeared behind him as he failed to decapitate the miniature Hantengu.
It’s phenomenal how as you read more, you know more about Hantengu. At the start, it was just one demon then it multiplied to six demons. I love the ability Hantengu has because I find it creative. To be fair, Tanjiro is a character willing to do hard work, and fighting the four emotion demons wasn’t as challenging as I expected, but this new figure is a menace with immense power summoning multiple dragon-faced trees. This demon was named Zohakuten because Sekido had absorbed all the other emotion demons, transforming into Zohakuten to not only keep their abilities but gain an immense amount of power. This demon has a completely different emotion when combining anger, joy, sorrow, and pleasure into hatred. It also has the appearance of a young child with five drums behind his back with the emotions labeled. When the drums are hit, Zohakuten can control the dragon-faced trees. He also protects the small Hantengu, indicating that it is the main body.
The irony hits with Hantengu’s character as Zohakuten calls out Tanjiro and the demon slayers fighting for tormenting the “weak” referring to how Tanjiro tried to behead the miniature Hantengu small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, yet Hantengu has eaten hundreds of people. The problem will only get worse and more difficult, because Tanjiro is getting held back by the hatred demon.
Moving on, Muichiro’s encounter with Upper-Rank 5: Gyokko was underwhelming because the demon made Muichiro trapped in a water vase, and let him drown while he had all the time to eliminate Muichiro. He does get saved by Kotetsu and learns a valuable lesson of not overestimating his strength because of his Hashira status.
These short moments really show off that demon slayers can still be vulnerable when encountering an Upper-Rank. It is also crazy to think that if Gyokko and Hantengu get decapitated, there are more stronger Upper-Ranks to encounter resulting in battles getting more risky and deadlier.
This fight doesn’t last as long because Muichiro is a child prodigy who became a Hashira in two months with exceptional skills, but the training and practice he did was so harsh and brutal, he would train to the point of vomiting blood.
Gyokko came to an end when Muichiro used “Mist Breathing: Obscuring Clouds” which allows himself to disorientate his movements against an opponent like Gyokko, because he envelopes his environment and surroundings into mist. When Muichiro is seen, he moves like a turtle, but when he is hidden, he runs extremely fast where Muichiro gets the chance to behead Gyokko’s head, ending him for good.
Mitsuri arrives late, ready to attack Zohakuten. Mitsuri’s sword is unique as it is flexible which acts like a sharp whip and her body is also quick and flexible so she can attack simultaneously.
Hantengu died when Tanjiro saw another demon with the emotion of resentment, but was another clone and realized the real one was the miniature demon with the emotion of fear hiding inside the heart he has beheaded and slashed the heart with a lot of force, decapitating the small demon. We also see that Nezuko is exposed to the sun despite being a demon and Muzan becomes aware of Nezuko overcoming the sun. Muzan wants to target Nezuko because he wants to live forever by means of consuming her.
This was a tough battle that I mostly enjoyed. The fight lasted so long that it started during twilight to when the sun started to rise making demons vulnerable to disintegration. There were many other intense scenes that I didn’t mention and you should read, but this arc did well with compacting the two fights involved for the most part, and character introduction. The drawbacks I saw when reading the manga was how they managed the fights between Gyokko and Hantengu, and how the backstories from Genya, Mitsuri, and Muichiro were so bland that I skimmed some pages. The story felt like it had a slow pace whenever I was reading the parts where Gyokko was involved. I was more amazed by Muichiro when he showed his breathing techniques, compared to Gyokko. At the end of Swordsmith Village Arc, it was wild as Muzan foreshadows more brutal fights in the future and the Demon Slayer Corps will do anything to eradicate all demons. In addition, Tanjiro has again improved his swordsman skills, as he is able to endure harsher fights because he bought a significant amount of time dealing with the emotion demons with the others like Genya and his sister before Mitsuri arrived.
The manga overall was an amazing short read with only 29 chapters that felt vital and the perfect continuation of the Entertainment District Arc. It will be far more difficult as now the Demon Slayer Corps have to soon deal with the top three strongest demons Muzan has in the Infinity Castle Arc: Akaza (Upper-Rank Three), Douma (Upper-Rank Two), Kokushibo (Upper-Rank One), and soon the main antagonist himself.
