WINDING SERPENT SLASH! — 委蛇斬り (Serpent Breathing Form 1)

WINDING SERPENT SLASH!

蛇の呼吸壱ノ型「委蛇斬り」

By Aine · Published 2026-07-20 · Updated 2026-07-20

Winding Serpent Slash (委蛇斬り, Ida Giri) is the first form of Serpent Breathing (蛇の呼吸), the style used by Obanai Iguro, the Serpent Hashira. It appears in the corpus during the series' final battle, thrown alongside Giyu Tomioka's Water Breathing (Vol. 21) as multiple Hashira attack Kibutsuji Muzan together. VIZ renders it "WINDING SERPENT SLASH!" 委蛇 (ida) is a rare literary word — borrowed from classical Chinese poetry — meaning a winding, sinuous, meandering movement, historically describing either a snake's path or a stately, swaying gait; 斬り is the ordinary combat verb "to slash."

Japanese	委蛇斬り（蛇の呼吸壱ノ型）
Reading	いだぎり
Romaji	Ida Giri
Official VIZ	WINDING SERPENT SLASH!
Literal	Winding Slash
Used by	Obanai Iguro

Japanese

委蛇斬り（蛇の呼吸壱ノ型）

Reading

いだぎり

Romaji

Ida Giri

Official VIZ

WINDING SERPENT SLASH!

Literal

Winding Slash

Used by

Obanai Iguro

Kanji breakdown

委 (i, base meaning "to entrust, leave to" but read here as part of a borrowed compound) + 蛇 (da/ja/hebi, "snake") — together 委蛇 (ida, also read ii) is a classical loanword from Chinese poetry (委蛇 wēiyí) describing a winding, meandering, snake-like movement; some historical usages apply it to a dignified, swaying human gait rather than literal serpents. It survives in Japanese almost exclusively as a literary/classical term, not everyday vocabulary. 斬り (giri, from 斬る, "to cut down with a blade") — the standard combat-slash verb shared across every breathing style's technique names.

Japanese original Obanai Iguro unleashing Serpent Breathing First Form: Ida Giri (Winding Serpent Slash) alongside Giyu Tomioka against Kibutsuji Muzan, Kimetsu no Yaiba Vol. 21

Obanai Iguro unleashing Serpent Breathing First Form: Ida Giri (Winding Serpent Slash) alongside Giyu Tomioka against Kibutsuji Muzan, Kimetsu no Yaiba Vol. 21

VIZ English edition Obanai Iguro unleashing Serpent Breathing First Form: Ida Giri (Winding Serpent Slash) alongside Giyu Tomioka against Kibutsuji Muzan, Kimetsu no Yaiba Vol. 21

Every appearance in the manga

Vol / page	Japanese line	VIZ English
Vol. 21 p.99	委蛇斬り	SERPENT BREATHING FIRST FORM: WINDING SERPENT SLASH!

Lines are byte-exact captures from a 26,000-pair bilingual corpus of the Japanese tankōbon and official VIZ Media edition.

委蛇 is the most obscure word in either style covered by this dictionary entry pair. It isn't standard modern Japanese — a native speaker with no classical-literature background would likely not recognize it on sight — and its root sits in Chinese poetic tradition (委蛇, wēiyí), where it describes a winding, meandering quality applied variously to rivers, roads, and a person's unhurried, dignified walk, as well as to snakes themselves. Choosing a technical/literary word this narrow for the opening form of an entire fighting style is a strong authorial signal: where Mist Breathing reaches for waka-poetry vocabulary (八重, 遠霞) that a modern reader can still parse from context, Serpent Breathing's Form One reaches further back, into classical-Chinese-derived vocabulary that functions almost like a specialist's password — fitting for Obanai, a character defined by guardedness and concealment (he fights masked, keeps his eyes hidden, and speaks in clipped, wary sentences).

VIZ's "WINDING SERPENT SLASH!" makes a smart translation call by making the snake explicit — 委蛇 doesn't contain the kanji for "snake" itself (蛇 here functions as part of the fixed loanword, not as an independent "snake" morpheme in quite the same way 長蛇's 蛇 does), but folding "serpent" into the English title reinforces the technique's place within Serpent Breathing for readers who wouldn't catch the classical allusion regardless. That's a defensible trade of etymological precision for immediate legibility, the same trade VIZ makes throughout the Mist Breathing forms.

This occurrence sits in the same climactic multi-Hashira assault on Muzan as several other named techniques (Giyu's Water Breathing Fourth Form appears in the same panel sequence), and the corpus's automated bilingual alignment garbles this stretch of pages — its stored English for this line is a fabricated composite ("...TWIN-HEADED REPTILE") that does not appear anywhere in the real printed volume. The actual VIZ rendering, confirmed by direct visual check one page later in the tankōbon, is "WINDING SERPENT SLASH!" — used here in place of the automated pipeline's incorrect guess.