1) The encounter with the Suicide Squad would be triggered by one of three things:
- One of our demon slayers stops by the town in which they’re based, hears of the urban legend that you’ll die if you leave a personal effect at a statue, and decides to try it out, waking up to a demon later that night.
- Something tips Tora off that Rin and Shirade are demons when she visits their shop. She kidnaps Rin later that night, Shirade comes after her, frees Rin and they fight and kill her together. Either Tora’s already requested backup, or the Demon Slayer Corps sends the main cast to investigate her disappearance. Kit fights Saito 1 on 1 (battle of the reverse grips), and Shirade and Rin defect from the Red Demon as their branch comes crashing down.
- Shirade and Rin botch a mission in the estate of the town’s wealthiest nobleman (they were supposed to kill his daughter), where there are plenty of maids to spot them even at night. Either the daughter genuinely wanted assistance with suicide, or the lord’s popularity had fallen among the locals and solving the urban legend would give him a political victory, so he left one of his daughter’s personal items at the statue and set a trap. The bloodshed that ensues when Rin and Shirade show up at the estate makes an eventual clash with the demon slayers inevitable.
2) The encounter with the Gravediggers would be triggered by the demon slayers getting wind of people turning into demons (or more demons mysteriously appearing in an area). That’s what white magic does to humans eventually. They are currently cooking up a way to speed the process.
3) I had a scene in my head where the slayers stumble upon a wide open wilderness that happens to be one of the Servers’ hunting grounds. I pictured them like Attack on Titan beyond the walls, with demons several times a human’s size roaming the land, the slayers taking shelter in the boughs of colossal trees, and having to survive over the course of several weeks.
4) Kit goes AWOL and fights demons in underground clubs because he feels he needs to get stronger, Sena is dominating all their missions. That he’s killing off their clubs gets the Gladiators’ attention, which culminates in a fight with the Branch Leader at the main coliseum (Hokori). Kit and Sena (who intervenes) end up losing this fight, sent flying through the ceiling to an unfamiliar location and separated from the rest of the group (who are chased out of the stands afterwards). They crash through a barn and land safely in the hay. They meet a nice farmer. Later that night they hear neighing from the stable that seems off. When they approach, they are horrified to see that the cause of the neighing was not a horse, but a woman. That’s when the farmer is standing in the doorway and reveals under his hat that he’s a demon. Afterwards would’ve been a perfect place for a private RP between me and Mango where it’s just Kit and Sena traveling across the demon world before they rejoin the group. Alternatively this could have happened at the end of Season 1, where the search of the lake Sena requested turns up nothing and the Corps punishes her and Kit for wasting their resources by sending them off on stupid missions (comedy spinoff RP, where they eliminate a demon who’s peeing on people’s heads in public, a demon that can fuse his body parts with people’s houses and can only be killed if you find what his neck fused with, I can imagine Kit opening a cupboard in search of his weak spot and being scarred for life instead, etc.)
Which leads me to the big reveal. Kit develops feelings for Sena. But she’s actually a demon. Her true identity is Sera Kurono, a red-haired demon slayer who was killed 50 years ago after 2 years on the job. Her family was indeed slaughtered by a demon who could shoot blades from his throat (and every inch of his body, like a porcupine). This demon is called Yamarashi the Sword Swallower, who later becomes Branch Leader of the Farmers. But 50 years ago he worked for the Queen, tasked with delivering a vial of her blood to a dying human politician and forging an alliance that would entrench her influence in society. Sera however encounters Yamarashi and tries to exact her revenge, almost succeeding, but he throws the vial of blood as a last-ditch distraction and blasts a sword through it, impaling Sera and killing her. Having been exposed to the Queen’s blood however she wakes as a demon and goes into hiding. Yamarashi can’t face the Queen after failing his mission so he went into hiding as well. This is when Sera meets the Mystery Eater, whose real name is Agatho. He’s a humble taxidermist who fashions a perfect disguise from human skin and eyes that creates the Sena we know today, and allows her to walk in the sunlight. With her criminal mind and Agatho’s skills they found the Red Demon, with Sera becoming the fabled Branch Leader of the Warmongers, the organization’s strongest division whose commander is known only to a few. Every Branch Leader has a title (e.g. Saito the Gorgon Brother) and Sera’s is “the Executioner,” she spends the next 48 years as a traveling swordswoman recruiting members for the Mystery Eater and the last 2 years prior to Season 1 re-emerging as “Sena Kronos” the demon slayer, her hair having turned an icy blue from all the humans she’d eaten. Her role as “the Executioner” is to kill off any branches/members of the Red Demon that the slayers discover to preserve the secrecy of the whole, and eliminate solo demons who compete with the organization for resources; she can better serve these purposes if she infiltrates the Corps’ ranks herself. This is also why the Mystery Eater knows as much as he does about our characters; not only are the nightjars spying on them, but he and Sena can also use birds to exchange messages if needed. Fun fact: Sena deliberately led Ren to the bar and left with Kit so the Mystery Eater could recruit him.
Here’s where it all unravels. As far as they’re aware, the Dungeon Masters are the last, strongest branch the slayers need to defeat (the Farmers and the Warmongers are the stronger “hidden” branches) and they’re on their way to doing so. Sena tells Kit and the others to proceed to the next floor of the abandoned factory to fight the Mystery Eater, while she and Phyra hang back to fight the Branch Leader of the Dungeon Masters. They win, and the demon explodes into a sticky mess. Sena suggests that Phyra use one of the drums filled with water in the corner of the room to take a bath (where the Dungeon Masters boil humans, unbeknownst to her). She urges her to dunk her head in more, and when she does, Sena slides a lid shut over the drum and locks it to drown her. Phyra’s sword rests by the wall, out of reach. Sena tells her backstory as Phyra fights to stay conscious, then ascends to the next floor where Kit and the others have worn the Mystery Eater down, saying he only needs to hold out “until the Branch Leader of the Warmongers gets here.” Of course this is Sena, which Kit doesn’t see coming when she stabs him in the back and sends him flying through the floor with a kick to the one below. She then leaves with the Mystery Eater, and as they’re walking away from the building, she snaps her fingers and causes it to blow up (her Blood Demon Art allows her to manipulate the smallest grains of dust in the air to generate an explosion as far as her eyes can see them. She can also sense the tiniest disturbance in the particles around her which is why it’s hard to sneak up on her.) Kit will have gotten up before this, realized that Phyra was trapped/comatose, and resuscitated her (or gotten her out of there first and let Miyaji do the mouth-to-mouth.)
“What will you do now?” is what the Mystery Eater asks Sena, to which she replies that the world is on the brink of war (it’s 1914) and that it’s time to reap what she’s sown. The Warmongers had been stirring tensions with the ships of other nations (can be a made-up country or a real one like Britain) that finally decide to invade the shores of Japan. Led by Sena, the Warmongers mow down their numbers and collect the bodies.
The Mystery Eater meanwhile has been planning an invasion of Dowa, Pearlan’s domain, so that the Farmers can breed its human population for food like chickens cooped up within the walled city. Yamarashi the Sword Swallower, unbeknownst to Sena, is the Branch Leader of the Farmers whom the Mystery Eater has kept in the shadows like a secret weapon, feeding him the lion’s share of the organization’s spoils and promising him a return to favor with the Queen if he usurped Pearlan’s position. Yamarashi turns into a colossus made of blades (his real body embedded at its heart) and towers over the walls of Dowa similar to the Colossal Titan from AoT. The invasion starts.
The slayers have a choice of whom they want to fight. I imagined they’d split up, with Kit and a few others going after Sena. Ren (who defected from the organization when the Gravediggers fell) can use his mist powers to bond to the sand particles in the air and prevent Sena from exploding them, which protects Kit from insta-death. Still, she’s the strongest in all the Red Demon (Duke-level) and has way more than 2 years experience, so she defeats him easily, removing her scarf (an enchanted item that suppresses her power to avoid tripping the slayers’ senses) to reveal a lower face of flayed skin, visible gums, and glistening fangs (she’d consumed so many humans that it wore down her skin there and any new coating the Mystery Eater applied would just get eaten through later.) This will definitely be a team effort, but eventually Kit beheads her. I’m not sure if he’ll be heartbroken or feel sympathy because he loved her, but her disembodied head breaks down into tears that she couldn’t find the demon who murdered her family. She fades away having never known that the Mystery Eater kept Yamarashi in hiding and intended for them to never meet.
Pearlan loses to Yamarashi after he enters the mouth of the blade golem in search of his real body, only for the latter to surprise him with a Nichirin blade that launches from under his tongue and beheads him. But Pearlan can turn up alive later in one of 2 ways. The “head” that was chopped off was just a molt; Pearlan is reptilian, he can already change colors like a chameleon, so why can’t he shed his skin like a snake too? He shed at the right moment, leaving the skin of his likeness in the blade’s path and ducking his real head out the way. Or, Pearlan can actually die and be revived with a piece of his DNA (the severed middle finger he sent the Prince in Season 1) at one of the Lab Rats’ hideouts.
This is why I considered leaving the Lab Rats as the sole remaining branch after the rest of the Red Demon falls. I’m not sure how Kit will feel about Sena after everything that’s happened. If he wants to remember her, he can preserve her somehow, her ashes in a jar or another memento. When the slayers discover the Lab Rats and that there’s a way to revive demons, it’s up to Kit to bring back Sena if a part of him still loves her. She’ll still be a demon but she’ll have no more reason to fight when she learns that her life’s work—killing Yamarashi the Sword Swallower—is complete (he and the Mystery Eater will have been defeated by this point.) She’d make a powerful ally against the Queen’s army, and if Kit has a goal to bring Sena back to the human girl she once was like Tanjiro with Nezuko, maybe they can get married after.
Or just kill her and leave it at that. No happy endings.
You can use Akane's sword
aw I can't believe it's going to be over.
