Hantengu, Upper Moon Four, and his clones

He screams in fear when he is told that the last meeting of the Upper Moons was a hundred and thirteen years ago. He hides on the stairs so as not to talk to the others. He crawls instead of walking. Hantengu is the most cowardly demon Demon Slayer has put on screen, and that is precisely what makes him dangerous.

Every time he is struck, he splits. This article details his human past, exactly how his emotion clones work, their powers one by one, and the night when four young demon slayers finally find his real body, far behind the Hashira of the Demon Slayer Corps. The rest of his camp is presented on our page about the demons of Demon Slayer and the demon Moons.

Who is Hantengu?

In Demon Slayer, Hantengu’s original form is that of a skeletal old man, covered in veins and wrinkles, with a bump on his skull and two curved horns. He permanently wears an expression of terror, his eyes squinting, with no visible pupils.

His name already says a lot about the character. A tengu is a winged mountain creature from Japanese folklore, and the prefix makes him a half-tengu, an incomplete being. The kanji for fear is engraved on his tongue, just as each clone will bear its own.

In Demon Slayer, he is the only demon whose personality splits apart instead of evolving. The other Upper Moons gain techniques, Hantengu gains bodies, and each one thinks and speaks for itself.

His cowardice is no front. He cries when Muichiro Tokito cuts him, he hides from demon slayers, he bows as soon as Akaza raises his voice. Nothing in his behaviour matches his rank.

You will find this horned, anxious head in small format, among all the shop’s demons, alongside the figures from across the universe.

The criminal who claimed to be innocent

Before his transformation, the future Demon Slayer demon stole and murdered in several towns, insisting that he had done nothing. His defence came down to one sentence: it was his hands that were guilty, not him.

A magistrate eventually arrests him and sentences him to beheading. The prisoner’s protests stop the day he is threatened with having his hands cut off first, the very hands he named as responsible.

It is in his cell, awaiting execution, that Muzan Kibutsuji, the first demon, comes to see him. Muzan offers his help, gives him his blood, and the prisoner escapes to kill the magistrate who had sentenced him.

The dying man has the last word. He tells him that silencing him changes nothing, and that his deeds will end up being punished. What follows in the story proves him right, a hundred years later.

How the emotion clones work

This power has no equivalent in Demon Slayer. The other demons regenerate, Hantengu reorganises: each cut deprives him of a body and gives him two in return, with abilities the previous one did not have.

Hantengu’s Blood Demon Art in Demon Slayer is division. When his head is cut off, he does not die: he regenerates into two distinct demons, then four, each embodying a specific emotion and wielding its own power.

The clones are not copies. They have different bodies, different weapons, opposite personalities, and they argue in the middle of the battle. Sekido spends his time shouting at Karaku and Urogi, who play with their opponents instead of killing them.

Each makes its weapon from its own flesh, shaping it into a staff, a fan or a spear. If it is destroyed, they make another. The general mechanism of these gifts is detailed in our article on demons’ Blood Demon Arts.

What the clones have in common is their devotion to the main body. They protect it, hide it, and agree to serve the one Hantengu considers his only master.

Sekido, Karaku, Aizetsu and Urogi

Sekido leads the group of clones in Demon Slayer. He gives the orders, loses his temper with the others, and his lightning is the most dangerous attack of the four. One detail limits him: he cannot electrify what comes from his own cells, which Tanjiro exploits with a severed leg of Urogi’s.

A point the story stresses: these four waste time. Karaku plays, Urogi has fun, Sekido gets angry at them, and meanwhile the demon slayers catch their breath. Division multiplies raw strength and destroys coordination.

Karaku takes nothing seriously. He congratulates his opponents, marvels at new sensations when Genya Shinazugawa shoots him, and plays with Nezuko instead of finishing her off. His wind craters leave marks shaped like maple leaves.

Aizetsu is the calmest and most methodical. He observes, analyses weaknesses, then strikes with his extending spear. He is the one who impales Genya without a superfluous word.

Urogi has a bird’s body, wings and talons. Each piece cut off him grows a screaming head, but these replicas have only a tenth of his power, which ends up working against him.

Zohakuten, hatred

The turning point of the Demon Slayer fight comes when Sekido has had enough of his companions and absorbs them by force. Karaku and Urogi first, then Aizetsu despite his pleas, and he becomes Zohakuten, the embodiment of Hantengu’s hatred.

Zohakuten carries five drums attached to his back, each stamped with the kanji for hatred. By striking them, he directs wooden dragons he draws from the surrounding vegetation, and each dragon head spits out one of the absorbed clones’ powers.

Sekido’s lightning, Urogi’s screams, Karaku’s gusts, Aizetsu’s spikes: the fused form combines everything. It is the level that forces Mitsuri Kanroji, the Love Hashira, to give her all to hold the ground.

The form also has a flaw. By fusing, Hantengu reduces the number of bodies his opponents have to watch, and they can focus on a single target. Mitsuri quickly works out where the real source of his strength lies.

His personality remains Sekido’s, only worse. He insults his opponents, calls them wicked for attacking a weak and innocent being, and claims that only one person in the world can give him orders.

You will find this fused form on his large figure, among the demon figures.

Urami, the last attempt

When Zohakuten falls, the Demon Slayer demon tries one last thing. He produces Urami, resentment, a giant version of his original form, and hides himself in the heart of this colossus.

The choice of this form says something more about the character. Rather than fight, Hantengu builds himself a living shelter and settles inside, leaving the colossus to take the blows in his place.

Urami is above all a fortress. Considerable strength, rare toughness, able to withstand direct sunlight for a long time, and to hold Tanjiro by the throat while Genya tries to loosen his fingers.

His speech does not change by a single word. He asks Tanjiro why no one sees his innocence, reproaches him for attacking a weak being, and keeps to the very end the logic of the criminal who blamed his hands.

Nezuko has to use her own Blood Demon Art to weaken him enough for the others to attack, and our page on Tanjiro’s sister and her flames details what she brings into play that night.

The fight in the Swordsmith Village

Muzan sends Hantengu and Gyokko, Upper Moon Five, to destroy the Swordsmith Village, to deprive the Corps of its swords. It is the only mission in Demon Slayer where two Upper Moons work together.

Hantengu starts by running into Tanjiro and Muichiro Tokito, the Mist Hashira. A first beheading splits him into Sekido and Karaku, and from then on every blow makes things more complicated for the demon slayers.

Genya Shinazugawa comes from behind with his gun and beheads Sekido, with no lasting result. The two clones become four, Urogi carries Tanjiro off by the leg, Aizetsu impales Genya, and the fight spreads across several fronts.

The village is not a target chosen at random. The swordsmiths of Demon Slayer forge the Nichirin blades, the only weapons capable of killing a demon, and our page on the swords explains why their disappearance would have ended the war within a few months.

The battle lasts until sunrise, and this detail ends up mattering. Our page of every arc of the story places this clash in the chronology, between the Entertainment District and the Hashira Training.

The real body and the beheading

The key to the whole Demon Slayer fight is a deduction by Tanjiro: none of the clones is the real body, and as long as you strike them, you feed the division. You have to find the original demon, the one carrying the core.

This body is the smallest, the ugliest and the most fearful, hidden inside Urami and busy fleeing. Tanjiro chases it, catches it, and beheads it in a single stroke just as the sun begins to rise.

The scene turns the character’s logic upside down. Hantengu spends his existence presenting himself as an innocent victim, and he dies fleeing, far from the battle he had started. Our article on the ways to kill a demon explains why only the neck matters.

His last act is to report to Muzan. He passes on what he saw of Nezuko, who was standing in broad daylight, and this information changes everything that follows in the story.

What his death changes for Muzan

Hantengu dies while doing Muzan the most important service of his entire career as an Upper Moon. Through him, Muzan learns that Nezuko withstands the sun, and he immediately abandons the search for the blue spider lily, as told in our article on the flower Muzan searched for a thousand years.

The first demon even pays him a compliment, something he almost never does. Hantengu thus obtains after his death the recognition he had been demanding since he was human.

His rank does not stay vacant for long. Nakime, the biwa player, becomes the new Upper Moon Four, and the complete organisation is detailed in our article on the Twelve Kizuki and their ranks.

In the shop, he remains one of the faces in the demon head ring series, which covers almost all the Moons.