Nejire Akeboshi

**Nejire Akeboshi** is the deuteragonist of *Blade of Honor: Meiyo no Yaiba*. She is a demon and the younger sister of Tatsuma Akeboshi and one of the two remaining members of the Akeboshi family. Formerly a human, she was attacked and transformed into a demon by Horobi Zetsumetsu.

## Appearance

Nejire is a petite young girl with fair skin, visibly large, prominent fangs, and sharp, stiletto nails with a base color of black. Her hair is long, black, and wavy. It reaches just below her waist, turning a blue as it passes her elbows, and appears to be crimped into large, straight ridges, worn side-swept drastically to her left. She has soft-looking, dark pink eyes that appear a lighter color around the rims of their irises, slanted downward toward the sides of her face and framed by notably long eyelashes, the pupils of which can appear slit as she transforms. In the manga, Nejire can sometimes be shown with more than one bow. According to Tatsuma Akeboshi, Nejire was known as a great beauty in their home town.

She wears a light pink kimono with an asanoha (hemp leaf) pattern, the lining a paler pink, secured by a red and white-checkered hanhaba obi with an orange-threaded obijime and a green obiage. Over this, she sports a long, dark-brown haori that reaches her calves, as well as a pair of zōri with pink straps and white tabi socks, wrapped with thick pieces of black material resembling kyahan. Nezuko also wears a small pink ribbon on the left side of her head to keep her hair out of her face, along with the bamboo muzzle Giyu Tomioka gave her, which is secured around her jaw with a strip of red cloth.

When Nejire transforms into her awakened form during her fight with Meirin, she has a bigger, taller and curvaceous body and has longer hair that reaches to her feet. She loses her bamboo muzzle and footwear, as well as the sleeves of her haori and kimono. She grows a short white horn on the right side of her forehead designed with irregular crack pattern, along with vein-like patterns in her forehead near her horn. She has vein-like pattern appears around her left eye, but her most striking new feature is the red and green vine-like pattern that covers her skin, circling around her arms, legs, and chest.

## Personality

Nejire's original personality as a human was that of a kind and caring girl who thought of others before herself much like her older brother, Tatsuma. Additionally, she was a responsible elder sister to her younger siblings and often put their needs first rather than her own. Nejire is, however, not afraid to get in harm's way, protecting her friends from demons even after being returned to a human state. It is also shown that Nejire's humane, laid-back demeanor supports this fact after Tatsuma apologized to her.

## Abilities

**Overall Abilities**: Despite not being a member of the Twelve Kizuki, Nejire is a very powerful demon. Her most prominent traits is her extraordinary growth rate possibly due to the high amount of blood she received from Horobi Zetsumetsu when he turned Nejire into a demon and the fact that she doesn't need to consume human blood to survive. This was shown across many battles in the course of the series where she could defeat her enemies despite being overwhelmed by them in the beginning. She has shown to defeat her enemies by increasing her own physical capabilities, enhancing her regeneration, or developing her own Blood Demon Art in dire situations.

**Abnormal Demon Physiology**: As the "chosen demon", Nejire has several unique demonic traits that set her apart from all other demons. Most notably, Nejire can continuously restore her power without consuming any human blood like any other demon would need to do. Instead, she recovers her strength through sleep alone, though she would have to spend a lot of time sleeping in order to recuperate and regain her power. Moreover, Nejire has an extraordinary growth rate, as shown multiple times when she grows stronger without any training or consuming humans.

* **Advanced Demon Form:** Nejire has the ability to enter a berserk state where she becomes more demonic in appearance, transforming into an adult version of herself with vine-like tattoos that circle her body, a single horn protruding from her right forehead side. This awakened form greatly enhances Nejire's physical capabilities as well as increasing her regeneration level to match that of the Upper Ranks'. When she first awakened this ability in her fight with Meirin, she became frenzied in battle, lost her usual restrain to human blood, and the only way she could revert back to normal is to have Tatsuma sing her a lullaby.
* **Sunlight Resistance:** During their battle against Upper Rank Four, Kenzaburou, Nejire developed immunity from sunlight, a feat impossible for demons, even by the Demon King himself. With this immunity to sunlight, she is able to completely walk and go about in the daytime without being burnt to ash, prompting Horobi to shift his goals to hunt and absorb her to conquer the sun himself.

**Blood Control:** In addition to her Blood Demon Art, Nejire has shown in her Awakened Form to have immense control of her own blood. When her limbs and head were all severed and she was going to be cut into pieces by Meirin, Nejire managed to control her severed limbs and head by instantly congealing and solidifying the blood spraying from them before the streams could break apart. With this, she was able to command her limbs to grab and stop Meirin's sashes, and, even though it was done with floating, severed limbs connected by blood, she was able to do it with such strength that the sashes were stopped dead in their tracks. She was then able to pull all of her limbs back together through those blood streams, allowing her body to regenerate.

**Immense Regeneration:** As a demon, Nejire has enhanced regenerative abilities that allow her to heal in the blink of an eye. When she first became a demon, her regeneration was relatively slow compared to other demons, taking a while to heal slash wounds. However, once in her awakened state, her regeneration ability evolved to the point it matched the caliber of the Upper Ranks, allowing her to reconnect her whole torso and body parts as well as regrow her arms and legs instantaneously. Meirin noted that Nejire's regeneration then surpassed her own.

**Immense Strength:** Nejire possesses naturally enhanced physical strength as a demon. Even at the start of the series when she first became a demon, she was strong enough to decapitate another demon with a kick. Nejire also punched the Swamp Demon so hard that he coughed up blood, even overwhelming the demon with powerful punches and kicks. As she has no combat experience, Nejire relies on brute strength, using her legs as her main weapon to deliver fast and strong kicks.

**Size Alteration:** Upon being transformed into a demon, Nejire displayed the basic ability to change and alter her body's size and height. She was able to shrink herself into the physical size of a small child in order to fit inside a small box or a basket in order to hide from sunlight when traveling through during the daytime with Tatsuma and could enlarge herself into a much bigger form, in order to be able to battle against demons.

## Fighting Style

**Skilled Hand-to-Hand Combatant:** Nejire's fighting style mainly revolved around the use of her powerful legs and sharp nails. She was skilled enough to fight back the likes of the Upper Rank demons in the Twelve Kizuki, and numerous demons before that. She doesn't use her Blood Demon Arts as often, as using too much blood could make her fall asleep.

### Blood Demon Art

**Blood Burst:** Nejire's Blood Demon Art allows her to generate and manipulate special demonic flames created from her blood that are pinkish in color. Nejire can do this by igniting her blood or creating it from thin air. Her flames have a special property which makes it only harmful to demons and objects of demon origin while being completely harmless to humans and other objects. This was shown when her fire could burn Kimura's threads, Geiken's dream spell and Shinya Umeda who had consumed demons but unable to affect Tatsuma and the Mugen Train. These flames of purification have been noted to hamper the regeneration of demon's to an extent too, as shown with Daki being temporarily unable to regenerate from being burned by her flames.

#### Techniques

* **Explosive Blood** (爆血 *Bakketsu*): Nejire can ignite the blood that has exited her body, turning it into crimson-pinkish flames that is harmful to demons.

* **Heat Floor** (床暖房 *Tokodanbō*): Nejire quick windup raises her leg up, and strikes it down knocking opponent away.

* **Exploding Blood, Rupture** (爆血**・**猛擊 *Bakketsu - Mōgeki*): Nejire performs a drop kick at her opponent and drags them along the ground, followed up with a series of scratches from left to right and vice versa that slowly engulfs the ground on fire before finishing it off with a destructive axe-kick, uprooting and igniting the ground into crimson-pink flames.