Serpent Breathing

Serpent Breathing imitates snakes, chiefly their winding glide and their fast, darting bites, and pours that motion into the user's steps and cuts. Its forms twist and bend the blade much the way a serpent coils, so the attacks rarely travel straight and constantly wander, able to land from any direction and throw an opponent off balance. Practitioners also picture pale serpents trailing alongside them as they release each technique.

The style grew out of Water Breathing. Since only Obanai Iguro is known to use it, and he is taken to be its originator, it demands a specially curved blade resembling an Indonesian kris dagger or an old Japanese dakoken, its outline modeled on the form of a snake.

At minimum the style holds five recorded forms, every one of them shown in the story. The First Form, Winding Serpent Slash, sends a single horizontal cut snaking toward the target. The Second Form (titled Venom Fangs of the Narrow Head, Chapter 164) has the user flash behind a foe at blinding speed and sweep their head off in one horizontal cut. The Third Form, Coil Choke (Episode 56), circles an enemy and carves at them from every side. The Fourth Form, Twin-Headed Reptile, is a forward leap into a slicing horizontal strike, visualized as a two-headed snake. The Fifth Form, Slithering Serpent (Episode 56), charges ahead in a curling path, bending the sword across several angles to cut down one or many enemies at once, capable of taking several heads in a single pass.

Obanai Iguro is the sole confirmed practitioner and the presumed creator. Blind in his right eye since youth, he performs the style with help from his snake, Kaburamaru, who reads and anticipates an enemy's moves and feeds that information back to him; whether the style works without the snake is unknown. According to the second databook, defeated demons recalled the style as harsh, leaving an odd cross-section, with one grumbling that the snaky blade and Obanai's biting words stung alike.