Chapter 140:
– Haru –
"Is Cersei going to be my new mom?"
I did my absolute best to make the question sound innocent. Like I was eight years old again, tugging on her sleeve after she'd come home late from a council meeting. My fox ears drooped low on my head, pressing flat against my golden hair. All ten of my tails went perfectly still behind me, not a single twitch, as I stared up at my mother with the biggest, wettest, most pathetically fake tears I could muster.
Yasaka's golden eyes narrowed.
I held the expression. Held it beautifully, I learned from years of watching Kunou weaponize cuteness to get extra dessert.
And then the memory hit me.
Yasaka's naked body wrapped around Cersei's. Twelve golden tails coiled possessively around the former queen's pale curves. One hand between Cersei's thighs, the other gripping her ass, mouth on her breast while Cersei ground down into her lap making sounds that no amount of foxfire could burn from my brain. And my mother, catching me in the doorway, making direct eye contact with a smirk so shameless it could have started a war between pantheons before simply going right back to what she was doing.
Ah, fuck.
Heat crawled up the back of my neck. I felt the blush spreading, unstoppable, and the carefully constructed innocent expression collapsed like a house of cards in a hurricane. My ears snapped upright. My tails twitched.
Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about your mother's naked body pressed against... STOP.
Yasaka watched this entire performance with the patient, half-lidded expression of a woman who had raised two children, governed an entire supernatural faction, and dealt with the combined political machinations of gods, devils, and fallen angels for centuries.
She let me squirm for a full five seconds. Savored it, even. I could see the corner of her mouth twitching with barely restrained amusement. Then she smacked me across the back of my head hard enough to send my ears ringing.
"Behave," she said, her tone carrying the absolute authority of a woman who ruled an entire supernatural nation and was not remotely embarrassed about anything, ever. She settled back into her cushion across from me in her private tea room, twelve magnificent golden tails fanning out behind her like a living throne, and fixed me with a look that could have pinned a lesser yokai to the floor.
"In my defense," I said, rubbing the back of my head, "I've seen things that cannot be unseen."
"You saw nothing," Yasaka replied smoothly. The absolute audacity of that statement coming from the woman who had made direct eye contact with me, smirked, and then gone right back to what she was doing without missing a single beat. "And more importantly, you will say nothing. Not to Kunou. Not to Myrcella. Not to anyone."
I raised my hands in surrender. "I wasn't going to..."
"I mean it, Haru." Her golden eyes sharpened, and for a moment the teasing warmth receded, replaced by something more serious. She reached for her teacup, a delicate ceramic piece painted with wisteria blossoms that I'd bought her three birthdays ago, and took a measured sip before continuing. "What Cersei and I have is... delicate. She spent decades married to a man who used her body like a political tool and drank himself to death while doing it. Before that, she was trapped in a relationship with her own brother that was equal parts genuine affection and mutually assured destruction. Her mind was shattered when we brought her here, and the woman she's becoming now, the one who laughs when I make terrible jokes and who braids Myrcella's hair every morning without that desperate, paranoid look in her eyes..." Yasaka paused, her expression softening in a way I rarely saw from the Yokai Queen. "That woman is still fragile…"
The warmth in her voice when she talked about Cersei caught me off guard.
I let the teasing die on my tongue.
"You really care about her," I said quietly.
She glanced at me, and her smile returned, smaller and more honest than her usual regal mask. "She has very nice legs..."
I snorted.
"Besides," she added, her voice turning careful in a way that made my ears prick forward, "I don't want to rush into anything. Not like I did with my last two... most recent partners."
The room went quiet.
She rarely talked about them anymore. My father and Kunou's father. I didn't push. I never did. Some wounds you just left alone.
"I get it," I said, and I meant it. "Take your time. I won't say a word."
She let the silence breathe for exactly three seconds before redirecting with the practiced grace of a leader who'd been pivoting out of uncomfortable conversations for centuries. "So. The Demon Lord gathering." She folded her hands in her lap, her posture shifting from mother to queen so smoothly it was almost invisible. "Tell me everything. If these beings are anything like your friend Milim, we may need to reassess our dimensional security protocols."
I exhaled and leaned back against the wall. "Yeah, those guys are all crazy..."
I spent the next hour walking her through the whole thing. The summit, the other Demon Lords, the political posturing, Veldora blowing the doors off their hinges to give me the "overprotective uncle" speech, Cortana and Sif's ongoing cold war over who was dressed the sluttiest. My vote was still for Cortana because she absolutely rocked that sexy bunny outfit.
Yasaka listened, asking sharp questions at precisely the right moments, filing away every name and power level and political allegiance I mentioned.
By the time I finished, I was restless. The kind of keyed-up that came from spending an entire evening surrounded by beings who could each individually destroy a country, maintaining perfect composure while my instincts screamed at me to either fight them all or cook them dinner.
"I think I'm going to stay up tonight," I said, rolling my shoulders to work out the tension. "Might head down to the restaurant. Make some late-night fondue."
Yasaka's tongue traced her lower lip. "That sounds delicious~" Then she sighed, the queen dissolving back into the tired mother underneath. "But I promised the girls I'd watch a movie with them tonight. So enjoy yourself with whoever wanders in."
I stood, stretching until something in my back popped satisfyingly, then paused at the doorway. "Hey, Kaa-san. How are Hela and Frigga settling in?"
Yasaka brightened slightly. "They've both been a delight, actually." Her expression shifted, the warmth giving way to something more calculating. The queen was back. "From a political standpoint, having two more homeless goddesses seeking permanent residence in Kyoto is excellent for our faction's reputation. Two divine-class beings voluntarily choosing to live under yokai protection sends a powerful message to every pantheon watching us."
"But?"
"But it will be awkward." She tapped one elegant claw against her knee. "Because another Hela already exists in this world. And this world's Frigga is supposed to be dead. How we navigate the diplomatic implications of harboring alternate-universe versions of known supernatural figures is..." She waved a hand vaguely. "A political headache for a future date."
I grinned.
So that's where I got it from.
All those times I'd kicked problems down the road, cheerfully declaring things "future Haru's problem" while everyone around me groaned in exasperation. Half the diplomatic messes I'd left in my wake across a dozen dimensions. I'd always assumed it was a personal character flaw, some quirk of reincarnation or a side effect of my yokai nature's preference for living in the moment.
Nope. Pure Yokai genetics. My procrastination was inherited, and I'd just watched the source material in action.
"What's that look for?" Yasaka asked, one eyebrow arched.
"Nothing," I said, already sliding the door shut behind me, my ten tails swishing with barely contained amusement. "Absolutely nothing."
Her suspicious stare followed me all the way down the corridor.
…I was butchering the lyrics to some anime opening I barely remembered, half-humming and half-singing as I stirred the pot of fondue sitting on the large communal table in the center of the Fox Hole. Something from a show Rias had made me watch three months ago, maybe? The melody stuck around long after the words had faded from memory, so I was mostly filling in the gaps with nonsense syllables and enthusiastic vibes, my voice echoing off the empty walls of my restaurant in a way that would've been embarrassing if literally anyone had been around to hear it.
But nobody was. The Fox Hole was completely empty, which was unusual enough to feel almost eerie. This place had become so consistently packed with interdimensional travelers. The chairs sat empty. The bar gleamed, freshly wiped. The only sounds were my off-key singing, the gentle bubble of melting cheese, and the ambient hum of dimensional energy that permeated the walls like a heartbeat.
I'd been keeping weird hours lately. Between the Demon Lord summit, the Asgard situation, Coulson's HYDRA meltdown, two pregnant girlfriends, the ongoing Greek god tension, and the indelible memory of my mother and Cersei that had taken up permanent, unwanted residence in my brain, my schedule had gone from "unconventional" to "completely unhinged."
I'd been relying on shadow clones to keep the restaurant running during the gaps, and while they were perfectly capable of following basic instructions like cooking, cleaning, and serving drinks, they weren't me.
I mean, they were me and had all my talent and skills but they lacked—soul?—I guess.
I chose not to think too hard about it.
Focus.
I channeled a thin ribbon of blue foxfire from my fingertip, letting it curl beneath the heavy iron pot in a precise, controlled flame. The cheese had reached that perfect point between liquid and viscous, a rich golden swirl of gruyere and emmental with a splash of dry white wine and a hint of garlic that I'd roasted earlier.
My slitted golden eyes narrowed with unnerving intensity as I monitored the consistency, watching the way the mixture coated the back of my wooden spoon in a smooth, unbroken film. Temperature was everything with fondue. Too hot and the proteins seized up into a rubbery mess. Too cool and it turned into a congealed lump of disappointment. The sweet spot was narrow, and I lived in that narrow space the way other people lived in houses.
My ten tails swayed behind me in lazy rhythms. A sign of contentment. Of a chef in his element, alone with his craft at three in the morning, the rest of the multiverse held at bay by nothing more than a closed door and the smell of melting cheese.
I was mid-stir, adjusting the foxfire down by a fraction of a degree, when I heard the front door open.
"Huh." The voice came from behind me, low and gravelly, with the worn texture of a man who had spent decades giving orders that people followed or died. "I thought this place would be more mystical or some shit."
I turned around, wooden spoon still in hand, cheese dripping slowly from its tip.
A tall black man in a long leather trench coat stood just inside the entrance of the Fox Hole, his posture radiating the particular brand of authority that came from being the most dangerous person in every room he'd ever walked into and knowing it. His head was held high, chin slightly elevated, shoulders squared beneath the coat in a way that was simultaneously casual and utterly commanding. An eyepatch covered his left eye, the leather strap cutting a diagonal line across his bald head. The remaining eye, dark and sharp as a surgical instrument, swept across the restaurant's interior with the practiced efficiency of a man cataloguing exits, threats, cover positions, and potential weapons in approximately two seconds flat.
His gaze landed on me, and he didn't flinch. Didn't blink. Didn't do the little double-take that most normal humans did when they saw the fox ears and the ten golden tails fanning out behind me like a peacock's display. He looked at me the way you'd look at a colleague you were meeting for the first time at a business lunch, one you'd already read an extensive file on.
Interesting.
Except my enhanced senses told a different story. Beneath that iron composure, his heart rate had ticked up by roughly twelve beats per minute. Not much. Not enough for a normal person to notice, or even for the man himself to consciously register. But I could hear it, the slight acceleration of blood pumping through his carotid artery, the nearly imperceptible tension in the tendons of his right hand where it hung at his side, fingers loose but ready. His left hand was in his coat pocket, and I was willing to bet my entire restaurant it was resting on a weapon.
He was used to meeting dangerous people. He was not, however, used to meeting people who could hear his heartbeat from across a room.
I grinned.
"How do you like your fondue?"
The question landed in the silence between us like a rock tossed into a still pond.
For a beat, maybe a full second, the man's single eye narrowed a fraction. Processing. Recalculating. He'd walked in here expecting... what? A throne room? A war council? A supernatural warlord surrounded by armed guards and glowing magical wards? Instead he'd found a guy in a black t-shirt and apron humming anime songs over a pot of melted cheese at three in the morning.
Something shifted behind his expression. The corner of his mouth twitched, just barely, and then he snorted. A genuine sound, brief and involuntary, the kind of laugh that escaped before the filter could catch it.
"With bread," he said. "Sourdough, if you've got it."
"I've always got it."
He crossed the restaurant floor with the measured stride of a man who'd walked through war zones, political summits, and alien invasions with equal composure, pulled out a chair at the communal table like he owned it, and sat down across from me. The trench coat settled around him like a second skin. He folded his hands on the table, and that single dark eye fixed on me with an intensity that probably made senators sweat and generals reconsider their career choices.
"Nick Fury," he said. "Director of SHIELD."
Oh.
The name clicked into place instantly, dragging a chain of connected information behind it. Coulson's boss. The man who ran the organization that monitored supernatural and extraterrestrial threats across an entire Earth. The same organization that had just had its deepest, ugliest secret blown wide open by a casually oblivious Asgardian goddess who didn't know what Hydra was.
"Oh, you're Coulson's boss," I said, already slicing sourdough into thick, even pieces with a knife that moved so fast it blurred. "Hey, listen, I'm sorry about that whole thing where me and my little sister basically kidnapped your best agent and dragged him to Asgard." I arranged the bread on a wooden board, then paused, tapping the knife against my chin thoughtfully. "Which turned out to be an alien planet run by an egomaniac dictator who mind-controls his wife, erases his own children from history, and weaponizes a rainbow bridge to blow up civilizations." I set the board down in front of him with a warm smile. "Did I mention he was a dick? Because he was a dick. A colossal, thundering, galaxy-class dick. Just want to make sure that's on the record."
Fury's single eye performed a slow, deliberate roll that communicated roughly seventeen different emotions, none of them surprise and most of them exhaustion. The man had clearly spent the last several days processing information that would've broken a lesser mind, and here I was, cheerfully piling more onto the heap at three in the morning over fondue.
"We have a lot to talk about," he said.
His tone carried the weight of someone who had rehearsed exactly how this conversation was supposed to go, had probably prepared talking points and leverage strategies and contingency plans for a dozen different scenarios, and was now sitting across from a fox-eared chef in an apron who'd just handed him artisanal bread and called the king of an alien civilization a dick. Twice.
I pushed the fondue pot toward the center of the table, the cheese inside a perfect, molten gold that caught the low amber light of the Fox Hole's hanging lanterns. I grabbed a fondue fork from the rack, speared a cube of sourdough, and dipped it with the practiced elegance of a man who took his cheese extremely seriously. The bread came up trailing a long, glistening strand of gruyere that I twirled around the fork with a flick of my wrist before taking a bite.
Perfect.
"Well," I said, settling into my chair and letting my tails drape comfortably over the back, "there's nothing quite like deep conversation over three AM fondue. Dig in, Director. The cheese isn't going to stay at optimal temperature forever (actually it would), and whatever you've got to say will sound better with a full stomach."
Fury stared at the fondue pot for a moment. Then at me. Then back at the pot.
He picked up a fork.
…Twenty minutes later, the fondue pot had dropped to half, and Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD, the most paranoid man on what I was increasingly realizing was a very complicated Earth, was on his third piece of sourdough and his second rant.
I hadn't expected this. Honestly, I'd been bracing for the interrogation. The hard questions. The veiled threats wrapped in government-speak. The classic movie spy power play where he'd try to establish dominance, make me feel like I was under his authority, leverage something against me to ensure cooperation. I'd dealt with enough supernatural politicians to recognize the playbook.
Instead, I got... this.
"Three hundred and fourteen agents," Fury said, dragging a chunk of bread through the cheese with more force than strictly necessary. His voice had the raw, gravelly quality of a man who'd been swallowing his frustrations for days and had finally found a room where the walls didn't have ears. "Three hundred and fourteen people I personally vetted. Handpicked. Read their files. Looked them in the eye during their interviews. Watched them train, watched them bleed, watched them put their lives on the line for the mission." He bit into the bread, chewed aggressively, and continued talking with his mouth half full in a way that told me the Director of SHIELD had completely stopped caring about appearances. "And apparently a good chunk of them were going home at night and goose-stepping around their living rooms. Nazi motherfuckers sitting in my briefings, reading my intelligence reports, eating lunch in my cafeteria."
I dipped another piece of sourdough and listened. I was good at listening. It was a skill most people underestimated, probably because they associated it with passivity, but in my experience the fastest way to understand someone wasn't to interrogate them. It was to put food in front of them at three in the morning and shut up.
Why was the Director of SHIELD dumping classified intelligence on a ten-tailed fox demon he'd met less than half an hour ago? That was the question I kept turning over in my head as Fury talked. The rational answer was that he shouldn't be.
I knew a bit about him from Coulson.
Fury—this man—had built his career on paranoia. Trust was a foreign currency in his world, hoarded and never spent. He didn't share information, he weaponized it.
The idea that he'd walk into a stranger's restaurant and start venting about the single greatest security breach in human intelligence history was, objectively, insane.
And yet here we were.
I had a theory. Actually, I had two theories.
Theory one was that I'd always had this effect on people. Something about the Fox Hole, about the way I carried myself, about the warmth and the food and the casual atmosphere of a place that existed between worlds, made people drop their guards. I'd watched it happen a hundred times. Ainz Ooal Gown, an undead overlord who could end civilizations, had sat at my bar and confessed he was afraid of losing his humanity. Hela, the Goddess of Death, had sobbed about a millennium of hallucinations. Shepard, the most capable soldier I'd ever met, had grabbed my hand and dragged me to bed because she needed to feel something that wasn't the weight of the galaxy on her shoulders. People came to the Fox Hole carrying burdens they couldn't set down anywhere else, and somehow, between the good food and the weird interdimensional ambiance, those burdens got a little lighter.
Theory two was just that this was really good fondue!
"And the thing that really fries my ass," Fury continued, stabbing another cube of bread onto his fork with the precision of a man who'd once used that same motion with a combat knife, "is that Coulson figured it out in under five minutes. Five. Minutes. Because some Asgardian lady mentioned it in passing like she was commenting on the weather. 'Oh yes, they kept shouting Hail Hydra, it was rather confusing.'" He did a surprisingly good impression of Sif's formal diction, then dropped it with a snarl. "And I'm sitting there in my office with my thumb up my ass, running an organization that's been compromised since before I took the chair. How long? How deep does it go? Is it ten percent of my people? Twenty? Fifty?" He dipped the bread, ate it, and spoke through it. "My own Deputy Director. Alexander Pierce. The man who recruited me. I'm getting reports that suggest he might be one of them, and if that's true, then the rot goes all the way to the goddamn root." Fury paused. His jaw worked. His single eye stared at the molten cheese like it held the answers to a question he'd been afraid to ask. "What the hell am I supposed to do?" The words came out quieter than everything that preceded them. Rawer. "Dismantle my entire organization? The thing I built from the ground up? The thing that's the only reason half the world is still standing?" He leaned back in his chair, the leather trenchcoat creaking with the movement, and fixed his eye on the ceiling of my restaurant. "SHIELD has prevented over a dozen apocalypses. Three different alien invasions. We stopped a rogue AI from launching nuclear weapons in '08. We contained an interdimensional breach in the Arctic that would've frozen the Eastern Seaboard. We kept a psychotic billionaire from weaponizing a particle accelerator and turning Manhattan into a crater." He exhaled through his nose, long and slow, the sound of a man who'd been holding his breath for days. "And now I find out the whole time we were saving the world, the people sitting next to us at the briefing table were working for a Nazi death cult that should've died in 1945." He picked up another piece of sourdough. Dipped it. Ate it. "Damn," he muttered, and for the first time since he'd started talking, something other than fury and exhaustion crossed his face. Something almost like surprise. "This is some motherfucking good fondue…"
Damn, that was a long rant. I think he feels better after getting all that off his chest though. Good for him!
I grinned. The kind of grin that came from a place of genuine pride, the same one I wore every time someone tasted my food and their armor cracked, even just a little.
"Thanks," I said, twirling my own fork through a long, glistening strand of cheese. "I put the best effort into anything I make. Whether it's hot pot for a table of Demon Lords or melted cheese at three AM for a spy having the worst week of his life." I let the strand wrap around the bread and took a bite, savoring the way the gruyere had hit that ideal point where it was rich and sharp without being overpowering, the wine cutting through the fat just enough to keep each bite feeling fresh. "Food's supposed to do two things, Director. Feed the body and quiet the mind. Everything else is just noise."
Fury stared at me for a long moment. His single eye did that thing again, the sharp, clinical assessment that stripped away surfaces and catalogued what it found underneath. Except this time there was something else in it too. Something that might've been the earliest, most reluctant stage of respect.
"You're a strange man," he said finally.
"I'm a ten-tailed fox Demon Lord who runs a restaurant that connects to other dimensions and is dating over a dozen women from across the multiverse, at least two of whom are pregnant," I replied, dipping another piece of bread. "Strange stopped applying a long time ago…"
Fury's brow furrowed at that last part, but he let it go. Smart man.
He reached for another piece of sourdough instead.
"I don't suppose," Fury said, his tone shifting from emotional spillage back to something harder, more calculated, the spy reassembling himself in real time over a pot of melted cheese, "this strange restaurant of yours has any people for hire who can clean house?" He dipped the bread slowly, deliberately, watching the cheese stretch between pot and fork like he was measuring something invisible. "Preferably quietly," he added, quieter. Almost a mutter. The kind of afterthought that wasn't an afterthought at all but the actual point of the sentence.
Nothing quite like discussing targeted killings at three AM over fondue, I thought, watching the Director of SHIELD eat my cheese with the measured calm of a man who'd just asked a supernatural being to help him assassinate an unknown number of his own employees.
There was something almost poetic about it.
Dark poetry. The kind Hela would appreciate I think....
And the thing was, I wasn't even uncomfortable with the request. That realization settled over me like a coat I hadn't noticed putting on. The old me, the chef from another life who'd died before his dream could come true, would've been horrified. But somewhere between eating a god's soul, evolving into a True Demon Lord, watching Milim casually decapitate serial killers, and learning to weaponize foxfire against things that threatened my family, my moral compass had recalibrated itself around a different north.
But still, I wasn't the type of guy to think murder was the first option. Usually.
But also—these were literal Nazis. Secret Nazis who'd infiltrated his world's primary defense organization, who'd been puppeteering global intelligence for decades, who'd probably gotten good people killed and derailed operations that could've saved thousands of lives. Nazis who were sitting in Fury's briefing rooms eating his cafeteria food while plotting to subvert everything he'd built.
Yeah. I was cool with it.
"Actually," I said, and watched Fury's single eye sharpen with predatory focus at that word, the shift from casual to operational happening in less than a heartbeat, "I do know people who could handle something like that."
Fury was waiting for me to continue.
I leaned back in my chair, letting my tails drape over the armrest, and laid it out for him in broad strokes. "Two of my girlfriends, the pregnant ones I mentioned earlier, they come from another world. A world organized into hidden villages, each one essentially a military state that trains professional soldiers from childhood. Espionage, assassination, sabotage, infiltration, the works. They're called shinobi. Ninjas, if you want the pop culture term, except these ones can walk on water, spit fireballs, create solid clones of themselves, and move fast enough to blur." I ticked off details on my fingers as I went. "Naruko and her mother Kushina are both members of Konohagakure, the Village Hidden in the Leaves, which is the most powerful of the five major villages. The current leader of that village, the Hokage, is a woman named Tsunade. She's one of the strongest fighters in that entire world, she's got a legendary temper, and she can punch a hole through a mountain with her bare fist." I paused for effect. "She also happens to be a subordinate of my fiancee, Rias Gremory. Tsunade is her Rook, if I'm remembering the peerage structure correctly."
Fury stared at me. It was a very specific kind of stare. The kind that belonged to a man whose brain was processing multiple layers of absurdity simultaneously and trying to decide which one to address first. His single eye twitched, just slightly, at the left corner. "Let me get this straight," he said, his voice flat as a highway through Kansas. "Your pregnant girlfriends are from a world of ninja villages. The leader of the most powerful ninja village works for your fiancee. Your fiancee is a separate person from either of the pregnant women. And the ninja village leader is somehow also a subordinate in what sounds like a feudal chess piece hierarchy…? Why chess?"
"Devil chess piece hierarchy, technically. But yes."
"That," Fury said, with the exhausted certainty of a man who had abandoned all expectations for normalcy approximately forty-five minutes ago, "sounds like a clusterfuck and a half of nepotism."
I grinned. "You're not wrong!"
"But." He held up a finger. The finger of a man who was already doing math in his head, running operational projections, calculating logistics and cost-benefit ratios and acceptable casualty thresholds with the cold efficiency of someone who'd been doing exactly this kind of calculus for thirty years. "If these are actual, professional, trained operatives for hire. Covert specialists who can infiltrate a target-rich environment, identify hostile actors embedded within a friendly organization, and neutralize them without triggering a wider panic or alerting the remaining hostiles..."
"That's literally what they do for a living," I said. "Konoha takes mission contracts from governments and private clients. Assassination, escort, intelligence gathering, counter-espionage. They've got specialists for everything. Some of them can read minds. Some can control shadows. One family has bugs that live inside their bodies and can—do very gross kills with those bugs I guess…?" Yeah, the bug guys creeped me out. But, I watched Fury's eye widen incrementally at each detail. "The chunin-level operatives, your mid-tier professionals, are each worth roughly a hundred conventional soldiers in terms of combat effectiveness. The jonin, the elites, can level buildings solo. And Tsunade herself is in a class that defies any ranking system you'd have a reference for."
Fury was quiet for a moment. Then he leaned forward, planted both elbows on the table, and interlaced his fingers with the deliberate precision of a man about to make a decision that would cost a fortune. "I have the entire budget of the United States intelligence community at my disposal," he said. "America's piggy bank. Black funds, discretionary accounts, emergency allocations that don't technically exist. If your ninja people can do what you say they can do, price is not a concern."
"I'm sure they would be very pleased to have your patronage," I said, unable to suppress a chuckle at the sheer absurdity of what I was brokering. Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD, hiring shinobi from the Naruto world through a fox demon's restaurant in Kyoto to purge a secret Nazi organization from within the most powerful intelligence agency on Earth.
At three in the morning. Over fondue.
My life was ridiculous.
My tails swayed in contented arcs behind me as I stood and began clearing the table, stacking the bread board on top of the empty sourdough plate and lifting the fondue pot with practiced ease. The residual foxfire had faded when I stopped consciously maintaining it. I carried everything behind the bar and set it in the wash station with the careful attention of a man who treated his kitchen equipment with the same respect a warrior showed their blade.
"But nothing's happening at three AM," I said, running hot water over the pot. "Konoha's on the same day-night cycle as we are, and I'd rather set up a proper meeting between you and Tsunade than try to broker a contract for covert multinational assassination myself. Come back tomorrow. I'll make the introductions." I glanced over my shoulder, water still running. "Your Nazis don't know you know about them, do they?"
Fury snorted. The sound contained approximately six different flavors of professional offense, all of them justified.
"Bitch, please," he said, standing from the table and adjusting his trenchcoat with a sharp tug at each lapel that was less about straightening fabric and more about sliding the armor back on. The Director of SHIELD was reassembling his public face in real time, tucking the tired, angry, vulnerable man who'd been venting over cheese back inside the impenetrable shell of the world's greatest spy. "I'm the best intelligence operative on this planet. I've been running ops since before you were born, probably?"
I nodded and told him that I was the same age that I looked.
His single eye glittered with something between pride and barely contained fury. "There is no goddamn way I gave away the game. Coulson's been compartmentalized. The information is locked down tighter than Fort Knox. As far as Pierce and the rest of those goose-stepping pricks know, everything is business as usual and their Director is none the wiser."
He crossed the restaurant floor, and I dried my hands on the towel hanging from my apron before meeting him near the front door. The Fox Hole felt different at this hour, the ambient dimensional hum lower, almost meditative, like the building itself was half asleep.
He paused at the door, turned back, and extended his hand.
"I'll stop by sometime tomorrow," he said. "And you can explain to me how this crazy restaurant of yours actually works. Other worlds. Other dimensions. All connected to a place that looks like..." He glanced around the Fox Hole one more time, taking in the wooden bar top, the mismatched chairs, the family photos on the shelves, the faint scorch mark on the ceiling from that time Milim had gotten excited about spicy ramen. "...a family diner."
"The best family diner in the multiverse," I corrected.
"Fucking crazy," Fury muttered, but there was something in his voice that wasn't quite dismissal. Something closer to wonder, buried deep under decades of practiced cynicism and professional paranoia.
I took his hand and shook it. His grip was iron, calloused, the handshake of a man who'd shaken hands with presidents and killers and aliens and never once let his palm sweat. I matched it, because I'd shaken hands with Demon Lords and gods and undead overlords and my grip had supernatural strength behind it that could've crushed diamonds if I'd wanted to.
We held it for exactly the right amount of time. Long enough to mean something. Short enough to stay professional.
Then Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD, one-eyed spymaster of a compromised intelligence apparatus, turned and walked out the front door of the Fox Hole.
I stood alone in the silence, towel over one shoulder, apron still on, ten golden tails swaying slowly behind me.
Well, I thought. That was a thing…
I turned off the lights, locked up, and headed home back to the palace. Tomorrow was going to be interesting.
…The walk back to Yasaka's palace was quiet in the way only Kyoto at three-thirty in the morning could manage. The human district had long since surrendered to sleep, storefronts shuttered and streets empty except for the occasional stray cat that watched me pass with luminous eyes before deciding I wasn't interesting enough to follow. The yokai district was marginally more alive. A pair of tanuki stumbled out of a late-night izakaya, arm in arm, singing something about a magical raccoon who tricked a monk. They spotted my tails and bowed with exaggerated, drunken respect before continuing their song at twice the volume.
I passed through the palace gates and nodded at the midnight tengu guard rotation. Four of them stood at attention along the outer wall, their black-feathered wings folded tight against ceremonial armor that gleamed under the moonlight.
The lead guard, a senior tengu named Hayato whose beak-like nose and sharp crimson eyes gave him the perpetual expression of a man who disapproved of everything, inclined his head as I approached. "Late evening, my Prince," he noted, his tone carrying the carefully neutral judgment of someone who wanted to say more but valued his position too much to do so.
"Late everything, Hayato. Get some rest when the next rotation comes in."
"I shall rest when my duty permits, my Prince."
Of course you will. I'd never once seen Hayato take a break that wasn't mandated by Yasaka herself. The man was either the most dedicated guard in the yokai faction or a very convincing golem. I'd genuinely considered both possibilities.
I rounded the corner toward my bedroom and stopped.
Hela and Frigga were standing together in the hallway outside the guest quarters Yasaka had given them, both in sleeping robes, their conversation animated enough that neither had noticed me yet.
They were talking about Ponyo.
"...and the way the ocean simply rose," Hela was saying, her luminous green eyes bright with something that looked startlingly close to wonder. Her hands were moving as she spoke, cutting shapes in the air, which was more animation than I'd seen from the Goddess of Death since we'd pulled her out of Helheim's wasteland. "The entire sea, alive and furious, and that tiny child just ran across it without fear. On a toy boat." She shook her head slowly, dark hair swaying with the movement. "There was never entertainment like this on Asgard. A thousand years ago, most entertainment was fighting, fucking, or some drunk Nord singing a ballad about fighting or fucking. Usually in that order. Occasionally simultaneously."
Frigga snorted.
The way her nose crinkled, the way her lips pressed together a fraction of a second too late to contain it, the way her golden hair caught the lantern light as her shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. Even the most undignified sound that woman made was beautiful.
She turned, sensing me the way she always did, some combination of magical awareness and the particular sixth sense that powerful women seemed to develop around men they'd been intimate with. Our eyes met, and the flush deepened from her neck to her cheeks in a wave of warm pink that she absolutely could not control despite being a goddess who had once governed the magical defenses of an entire realm.
"Pretend you didn't hear such an undignified sound from me," she said quickly, straightening her posture with the reflexive grace of a queen reassembling her composure. Her chin lifted. Her shoulders squared. The silk robe shifted with the movement, the fabric pulling across her chest in a way that I noticed because I was alive and had functioning eyes and Frigga was devastatingly gorgeous in everything she wore, including borrowed nightclothes.
I grinned. "How could that be the case?" I said, leaning one shoulder against the corridor wall and letting my tails sway behind me. "Any sound that comes out of your beautiful lips is perfect."
Hela snorted. It was a vastly different snort than Frigga's. "I've been isolated from all meaningful contact with living beings for over a thousand years," she said, folding her arms beneath her chest in a way that pushed her breasts up against the loose neckline of her robe, a gesture I was about eighty percent sure was deliberate, "and even I know that line was unbearably cheesy."
"Worked on your mother, though," I pointed out.
Hela's glares were cute too…
"Don't call me her mother," Frigga murmured, but she was already moving. She crossed the distance between us with a slow, deliberate sway of her hips that was entirely different from her usual regal stride. The blue silk clung to her curves as she walked, shifting and flowing with each step, and then she was against me, her body pressing flush to mine, the warmth of her bleeding through the thin fabric as her breasts compressed softly against my chest. "I prefer naughty stepmother~"
I gulped…
Her hands found my jaw. Her blue eyes held mine with an intensity that had nothing to do with propriety and everything to do with a woman who had spent a century untouched and was making up for lost time with a ferocity that still surprised me.
Frigga kissed me like she was staking a claim, her lips parting mine with practiced confidence, her tongue sliding against mine with a slow, thorough deliberation that sent heat pooling low in my stomach. One of her hands slid from my jaw to the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair just above where it met my fox ears, and she pulled me closer, deeper, a soft "Mmm" vibrating against my mouth that was equal parts satisfaction and hunger.
When she pulled back, her lips were flushed and glistening, and she ran her tongue slowly across the lower one while holding my gaze with the half-lidded confidence of a woman who knew she'd just scrambled every coherent thought in my head.
Frigga of Vanaheim was going to be the death of me and I was going to die smiling.
Hela, who had been watching this display with an expression that started at amused and had rapidly migrated toward openly jealous, shifted her weight from one foot to the other with the restless impatience of someone who was very much done spectating.
"My turn," she said, and it wasn't a request.
She stepped forward and kissed me before I could respond, her mouth hot and demanding against mine, tasting faintly of the Skyrim mead she'd been drinking at the Fox Hole earlier. Where Frigga kissed with practiced elegance and building heat, Hela kissed like she was trying to consume me, all teeth and tongue and desperate, greedy need. Her hands didn't go to my face. They went around my back, sliding beneath the hem of my shirt, her fingers tracing up my spine until they found what they were looking for.
The base of my tails.
She knew. She absolutely knew what she was doing, because she'd filed that information away back in Helheim when her fingers had first brushed that spot and my entire body had gone rigid. Her fingertips pressed into the junction where fur met spine, right at the root where the nerve endings were concentrated so densely that the sensation was almost electric, and she rubbed. Slow. Deliberate. Circular motions with just enough pressure to send a shiver cascading down every single one of my ten tails simultaneously, the golden fur standing on end as a jolt of pure, raw pleasure arced through my nervous system and settled somewhere significantly south of my stomach.
"Nngh..." The sound escaped me before I could stop it, low and involuntary, and I felt Hela smile against my mouth with the triumphant satisfaction of a goddess who had just discovered her favorite new weapon.
I broke the kiss before things escalated past the point of no return in a palace hallway where any passing tengu guard could round the corner. My breathing was heavier than I wanted to admit, and certain parts of my anatomy were making their opinions known with aggressive enthusiasm.
"It's been a long day," I managed, running a hand through my hair and trying to will my tails to stop twitching. They ignored me completely. "I should probably head to bed."
"What a coincidence," Hela said immediately. Her green eyes gleamed with undisguised hunger, and her smile was the kind of thing that had probably preceded the fall of civilizations back when she was Asgard's general. "We shall join you, then."
Frigga reached over and booped Hela on the nose with one finger.
The Goddess of Death, firstborn of Odin, conqueror of the Nine Realms, went cross-eyed for a fraction of a second.
"Not tonight," Frigga said, her voice carrying the gentle authority of a woman who had spent centuries managing the egos of gods and was very good at it. "Prince Haru does look genuinely exhausted. And despite what your millennium of isolation may have done to your patience, darling, there is value in restraint."
"...Fine," Hela grumbled, her lower lip pushing forward in something that was absolutely, undeniably a pout, regardless of what the Goddess of Death would claim if confronted about it. "But I'm registering my formal objection!"
"Noted and overruled," Frigga said serenely.
I gave them both a warm smile, the kind that I hoped communicated I adore you both and I promise to make it up to you without actually saying those words out loud in a hallway, and turned toward my bedroom door. My hand found the handle, I slid it open, and I stopped dead.
Cortana and Sif were on my bed.
Both of them. Passed out cold. Completely asleep.
Cortana was sprawled across the left side of the mattress on her stomach, still wearing the midnight blue bunny suit from the Demon Lord summit, the one that matched her skin so perfectly it looked painted on. Her bunny ears were slightly askew on her head, and one arm hung off the edge of the bed while the other was tucked under the pillow. Binary code flickered lazily across her exposed skin in her sleep, flowing in slow, dreamlike patterns across her shoulder blades and down her spine like a screensaver. Her lips were parted slightly, and she was making the softest sound, barely a whisper of breath that my enhanced hearing caught as something between a hum and a sigh.
Sif occupied the right side, sitting upright against the headboard with her arms crossed and her chin resting on her chest, having clearly fallen asleep in the exact position of someone who had been waiting and had lost the battle against exhaustion. She was still in the sexy knight armor the dwarves had put her in that showed off her long legs.
They'd been waiting for me…?
Whoops. This is why communication is important, because I had honestly no idea!
Behind me, Hela peered over my shoulder, took in the scene with a single sweep of her green eyes, and rolled them so hard I'm surprised they didn't complete a full rotation.
"Well," she said, reaching down and lacing her fingers through mine with the casual possessiveness of a woman who had decided that physical contact with Haru was a basic right she would never again be denied. Her grip was warm and firm, her thumb tracing slow circles against my palm. "Since your bed is occupied..." She tugged my hand, already pulling me back down the hallway toward the guest quarters. "...you'll simply have to join ours instead."
Frigga fell into step on my other side, her hand finding the crook of my elbow. "Just sleeping," she said, though the faint smile playing at her lips suggested the definition of 'sleeping' was open to negotiation.
"Just sleeping," Hela echoed, in a tone that suggested the exact opposite.
I let them lead me down the corridor, one goddess on each side, my ten tails swaying in lazy, contented circles behind me. In my bed, a bunny-suited AI and an armored goddess of war were drooling on my pillows…
– Dino –
Yawn…
"I'm here everyone… Sorry I'm a bit late. I overslept," the Demon Lord Deno said as he walked into the Walpurgis meeting room. His head swiveled around to see every single seat was empty. His empowered senses told him that a bunch of other demon lords had been in this room—a few hours ago. "Ah…"
He accidentally missed the meeting…
XXX
No—I didn't forget to add Dino in the last few chapters, and you can never make me admit I did…