Nightmare Fuel / Usagi Yojimbo

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• Let's cut to the chase and say Jei is basically Nightmare Fuel personified. Want more details? Well...
  • He is, to put it simply, a slasher villain that's invaded a historical fantasy. He wholeheartedly believes he is the "Blade of the Gods", sent to purge sinners in the name of the gods. Unfortunately, not only is he Ax-Crazy, his sense of morality is seriously skewed, and he's a Serial Killer who solves all of his problems with "murder". The worst part? He can't be killed. He's a disembodied spirit with the power to Body Surf—even if you kill one of his bodies (a Herculean task as is) he'll just bounce back with another.
  • It's heavily implied that Jei is the Sword of the Gods, just not the ones any sane person wants to worship - the priest who served as Jei's original host is all but stated to have made a desperate Deal with the Devil for the power to heal the daughter of a nobleman who threatened to wipe out a whole temple if the monks couldn't cure her. The bargain comes true - the girl recovers, but the priest returns deathly ill, only to rise a few days later with Jei in control, massacring almost all the monks and the nobleman, though sparing the girl, because she's "innocent". The one surviving monk? Years later, after the destruction of his original body, Jei possessess him instead.
  • His introductory issue, "Blade of the Gods", is haunting. It starts with him slaughtering an entire group of samurai trying to avenge their master, whom Jei had murdered. Some time after, Usagi, trying to get out of the rain, stumbles across him in a house and the two stay the night...which ends violently when Jei suddenly awakens and tries to impale Usagi. In the resulting Battle in the Rain, not only does he survive what should've been a Single-Stroke Battle (shocking Usagi since the blow should've been fatal) but he comes incredibly close to killing Usagi, only being stopped due to a lightning bolt out of nowhere. By the end of the issue, even Usagi is shaken.
    • The scene where Jei kills the samurai deserves special mention. They charge towards him, weapons raised and yelling out a Battle Cry...and then the comic cuts to the sky as those cries turn into screams of pain, complete with the sounds of Jei's spear. The effect is absolutely chilling.
• The nightmare Usagi has while struck with a fever from a poison dart. He dreams that he's become the new host of Jei, and breaks into Lord Noryuki's castle, mercilessly slaughtering all who stand in his way, before attacking Tomoe and Noriyuki. Tomoe only manages to fight him to a Mutual Kill, with Usagi snapping out of his possesion moments before dying together with Tomoe. When the fever breaks and Usagi wakes up, he hopes that it really was just a fever nightmare and not a case of Dreaming of Things to Come...
• Although Kotetsu from the Kusanagi arc is a bonafide Smug Snake, his connections can make him a nightmare for the unprepared. He nearly has Noriyuki killed through a proxy and orders an entire village that Usage helped be wiped out on the off-chance that the samurai told someone about Kusanagi.
• One of the "Travels With Jotaro" anthology revolves around Usagi and Jotoro trying to help a village opressed by a greedy and corrupt magistrate who gained his position by betraying the former lord of the area, being rewarded with his current job as a result. However, the magistrate is terrified of the nearby woods, where the betrayal took place, believing that it's haunted by the spirits of the men who died because of him. Usagi enacts a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax (a Call-Back to an earlier story where Usagi exposed one himself), which almost works, but fails at the last second. Chasing Usagi into the woods, the Magistrate becomes separated from his men, and suddenly turns around and notices that he's somehow found himself deep in the woods, despite only going a few feet. Soon, hours have passed, with him only getting more and more lost, the trees themselves seem to block his path. Suddenly, something spooks his horse, and someone calls his name... It then cuts to a few days later, with Usagi commenting on them beating the magistrate's men, but that there was no sign of the magistrate himself, who seems to have disappeared without a trace. Jotaro wonders what happened to him... The final panel of the story reveals the agonized face of the magistrate trapped inside the bark of a tree.
• The fate of the Witch from Grasscutter: hired by the leader of the Conspiracy of Eight to find the real Grasscutter sword, she serves as a Non-Action Big Bad for most of the story, letting her monstrous Familiar and other animals serve her, such as using crabs to find Grasscutter on the ocean floor. Then Jei attacks her Familar. Upon his death, the Witch dies, and her body withers into nothing but dead autumn leaves. Witnessing this, the leader is driven to insanity, and the rest of the Conspiracy find him babbling like a madman, clutching a kimono filled with leaves.

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