Chapter 52:
– Blake –
Two week had passed since my first day at SIT, and honestly, the academic side of things had been going better than I had any right to expect.
Sure, the classes were brutal and the student body was packed wall to wall with certifiable geniuses who made me feel like I was running uphill in the rain, but it wasn't like I suffered from a shortage of brilliant, beautiful women willing to help me study whenever I asked. Jean had this effortless way of breaking down physics concepts that made even quantum mechanics feel approachable, and Emma turned economic theory into something I actually looked forward to discussing over coffee.
Even Peter, who wasn't a beautiful woman but was absolutely a genius, spent half our late nights in the dorm room whiteboarding formulas and explaining things with the kind of manic enthusiasm that made learning feel contagious.
School was good. My budding superhero career, on the other hand, had not gone the way I imagined the first time I flew proudly over New York…
…I ducked under a right hook that would have hit my jaw if it connected, feeling the displaced air brush the tip of my nose as Natasha Romanoff's fist sailed past my face with the kind of speed and precision that reminded me she'd been trained to kill people since she was a child.
I pivoted on my back foot, dropped my center of gravity the way Tsunade had drilled into me during those early taijutsu sessions, and snapped a controlled kick into Natasha's midsection that landed flush against her toned stomach. Of course, this fight was me holding back a lot, but my opponent was still enhanced.
"Hngh!" She grunted, sliding backward half a step on the training mat, and I watched her abs flex beneath the skintight black leather of her catsuit as she absorbed the impact. She straightened, rolled her shoulders, and gave me a curt nod of approval. "That was better. You're actually pulling back this time instead of just swinging and hoping for the best."
"I live to impress," I said, resetting my stance.
The reason I was sparring with a SHIELD operative in the basement training room of Emma's secret campus building at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon was because my first week as a costumed hero had exposed a problem I never anticipated. I had spent the last several months of my life fighting fallen angels, shinobi, tailed beasts, and a cadre-class immortal who wanted to wipe my bloodline from existence. Every opponent I had ever faced was either superhuman, supernatural, or both. My body, my instincts, my muscle memory had all been forged in a crucible where holding back meant dying.
Turns out, that training was phenomenal for keeping me alive against things that could shatter mountains.
It was significantly less phenomenal for stopping a mugger in an alley without painting the brickwork with his internal organs.
My first night on patrol had started out fine. I had flown over Midtown in my new suit, black and midnight blue with silver threading that hummed faintly with residual holy lightning, the half mask covering the lower half of my face while my eight wings carved silent trails through the November air. I felt like a guardian. I felt like the protector Jean and Emma believed I could be.
Then I caught a man dragging a screaming woman into a parking garage by her hair.
I landed behind him, grabbed his shoulder to spin him around, and the amount of force I used shattered his collarbone, three ribs, and dislocated his arm from the socket in a single motion. He hit the concrete wall behind him hard enough to crack it and didn't get back up. The woman I saved screamed louder at the sight of me than she had at the man attacking her, which was not the reaction I'd been hoping for on my debut. The guy survived, barely, but only because I called 911 immediately and Natasha had a SHIELD medical team nearby running surveillance on my first outing.
That was Monday…
The next night, I stopped a predator who had cornered a teenage girl in a subway station. The things he was whispering to her, the way his hands were positioned, the sheer terror frozen on her face when I dropped from the ceiling, all of it ignited something deep in my fallen angel blood that I couldn't fully control. I hit him once. Just once. A single punch to the center of his chest that I genuinely, truly believed I had held back on.
His sternum caved inward and his heart stopped before he hit the platform tiles.
The girl ran. The security cameras caught everything. And by Friday morning, the internet had given me names.
"The Avenging Angel" was the polite one, coined by a blogger who focused on the fact that every person I'd seriously injured or killed had been in the active commission of a violent crime. "The Blood Angel" was the one that stuck on social media, accompanied by shaky cell phone footage of me standing over unconscious bodies with my wings spread and my silver-threaded suit splattered with someone else's blood, looking less like a guardian angel and more like a divine executioner.
I didn't feel great about the nicknames. But I also couldn't bring myself to feel genuine remorse for the men who died, and that disconnect was what really scared Peter.
"Dude, you killed a man," he had told me in our dorm room, sitting on his bed with his mask in his lap and his brown eyes boring into me with an intensity that made me want to look away.
I wonder if it was because I didn't feel guilty for killing the man, but instead because Peter was upset with me?
So I swallowed my pride and visited the campus nurse "Natasha."
The beautiful spy had been more than happy to help, showing up to my campus base the very next evening in that tight black leather catsuit that clung to every curve of her athletic body like it had been painted on with a very steady hand and a complete disregard for my concentration. Her red hair was pulled back in a practical ponytail, and her green eyes held the calm, calculating focus of a woman who had been the deadliest person in any given room for most of her adult life. I genuinely could not tell if the outfit choice was tactical, since she claimed the leather offered the best range of motion for close quarters combat, or if she was deliberately trying to distract me as part of the training, or if she just enjoyed watching me try very hard not to stare at the way the zipper of her suit strained every time she took a deep breath.
Knowing Natasha, it was probably all three simultaneously.
"Again," she said, settling back into her fighting stance with a fluid grace that reminded me of water finding its level. "This time, I want you to hit me at exactly two percent of your full strength. Not one. Not three. Two."
I took a breath and centered myself the way Shizune had taught me during those early morning training sessions in the Elemental Nations, feeling my heartbeat slow and my muscles loosen as I sank into the familiar rhythm of combat preparation. Natasha circled to my left, her footwork soundless on the padded floor, and when she came at me it was with a combination that would have dropped most trained fighters in under two seconds. A jab to test my guard, a feint toward my ribs that redirected into a spinning elbow aimed at my temple, followed by a low sweep designed to take my legs if I leaned backward to avoid the elbow.
I blocked the jab with my forearm, read the feint a half-second before she committed, and sidestepped the elbow by tilting my head just enough to feel her sleeve brush my cheek. The sweep I hopped over, using a tiny burst of chakra to my calves that Natasha couldn't see but definitely felt in the way I seemed to float for a fraction of a second longer than physics should allow.
"You're reading me faster," she observed, not even breathing hard despite the flurry she had just thrown. "Your reaction time is absurd, you know that? I've sparred with enhanced soldiers and supersoldier candidates, and none of them tracked a three-hit combination that clean."
"I had a woman who could punch mountains teaching me how to fight," I said, circling her. "You learn to read fast or you learn what the inside of a crater looks like."
Natasha smirked, and the expression did something unfair to her already dangerous face. "Tell me more about this mountain-punching woman sometime. Over drinks, maybe."
She is absolutely doing this on purpose.
"Focus, Romanoff…" I said with a deadpan.
"I'm extremely focused," she said, and attacked again.
This time she came low, driving a knee toward my thigh that I checked with my shin before she pivoted into an arm drag that wrenched my balance forward. She was fast, genuinely fast, fast enough that a normal human would have been eating mat before they registered the grab. I let her pull me off-axis and then used the momentum to rotate into a controlled elbow strike aimed at her shoulder, deliberately targeting a muscle group rather than a joint, pulling back at the point of contact instead of driving through the way my instincts screamed at me to do.
The elbow connected with a soft thud rather than a crack. Natasha winced, which meant I'd hit hard enough to be effective but not hard enough to injure. Progress.
"Good," she said, releasing my arm and rolling her shoulder. "That's the range you need to live in. Hard enough to stop someone, soft enough that they wake up in a holding cell instead of a morgue."
I dropped my hands and reached for the water bottle on the bench, taking a long pull while Natasha did the same. The training room was state of the art, all padded floors, reinforced walls rated for enhanced individuals, and a weapons rack along the back wall that Natasha had personally stocked with everything from escrima sticks to rubber training knives. The overhead lights cast a clean white glow that reflected off the sweat on Natasha's collarbone and the hollow of her throat, and I had to physically redirect my gaze toward the ceiling before my thoughts wandered somewhere that two telepaths on campus would definitely pick up on and judge me for.
"Can I ask you something?" she said, capping her water.
I wiped my face with the towel draped over the bench and nodded. "Shoot."
Natasha leaned against the wall, crossing her arms beneath her chest in a way that was either casual or calculated, and with her it was genuinely impossible to tell. "Do you actually want to be a hero, Blake?"
The question hit different than I expected, not because it was offensive but because she asked it the way someone asks when they already suspect the answer is complicated.
"Of course I do," I said without hesitation. "Back in Tsunade and Shizune's world, we took down a merchant who had an entire nation under his boot. We killed the bastard, stole his fortune, and freed a country full of starving people who couldn't fight back on their own. And when the invasion hit Konoha and I was out there fighting alongside shinobi who had trained their entire lives for war, I felt this rush that I had never experienced before, this bone-deep certainty that I was exactly where I was supposed to be doing exactly what I was built to do." I paused, letting the memory settle. "So yeah. I want this."
Natasha nodded slowly, absorbing my words with the patience of someone who interrogated people for a living and knew when to let silence do the heavy lifting. Then she tilted her head and rephrased.
"Okay. Do you want to be a street-level hero, though?"
That one landed harder.
"Because when I look at you, Blake, I don't see a guy who's supposed to be chasing purse-snatchers through back alleys in Hell's Kitchen," she continued, pushing off the wall and taking a step toward me, her green eyes steady and unblinking with the kind of directness that made her so effective at cutting through bullshit. "I see someone who should be standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of your famous stepfather." She paused, and the corner of her mouth twitched. "And don't you dare tell that smug bastard I said that..."
I couldn't help the small grin that cracked through my exhaustion.
"Maybe one day you could even be something like Captain America was," she said, and her voice had dropped the flirtatious edge entirely now, replaced by something that sounded dangerously close to genuine conviction. "A symbol. A rallying point. I look at you and I see a larger-than-life fallen angel with divine lightning and wings that make grown adults drop to their knees and pray, but what I don't see is a man who's meant to be spending his weekend nights punching tweakers outside a bodega and accidentally caving their chests in because his baseline strength was calibrated for killing ancient immortals."
She's not wrong.
The thought settled into my stomach with an uncomfortable weight because it resonated with something I had been avoiding since that first disastrous patrol. I opened my mouth to push back anyway, because pushing back was what I did.
"In Emma and Jean's original timeline, I started out as a street-level hero alongside Peter," I said. "Spider-Man and the Angel of New York. They said we were partners, that people felt safe when they saw my wings in the sky above their neighborhoods."
"Yeah, about that," Natasha interrupted, holding up one finger with the energy of a woman who had been biting her tongue on this particular topic for a while. "I'm still very iffy on the whole time-travel thing. Those two gorgeous telepaths show up out of nowhere claiming they rewound reality, and everyone just accepts it because they're hot and confident and one of them can set things on fire with her brain." She fixed me with a flat look. "Also, didn't that future turn out so catastrophically bad that they literally had to reset all of existence just to fix it?"
I closed my mouth.
"And in that timeline, you never had the power to hop between dimensions," she pressed, pointing at my chest like she was pinning evidence to a corkboard. "You never trained with shinobi. You never fought tailed beasts or absorbed a curse mark or punched a cadre-class fallen angel in the mouth. That Blake and this Blake are not the same person, and trying to force yourself into a role that fit a version of you that no longer exists is how you end up killing more people you didn't mean to kill."
"How do you even know all that stuff?" I asked.
"Your mom and I text each other sometimes. I ask her for advice about having a daughter."
The training room was quiet for a long moment, just the hum of the ventilation system and the faint buzz of the overhead lights. I stared at the padded floor between my feet, turning her words over in my head the way I turned over a problem I already knew the answer to but didn't want to admit.
"You might be right," I said finally, and the admission came with a nod that felt heavier than it should have.
Natasha's expression softened by a fraction, which for her was the equivalent of a standing ovation. "SHIELD has plenty of dangerous assignments that need people with your kind of firepower. World-threatening stuff, not alley-level stuff. I could talk to Fury, maybe get him to send you on a mission with one of our agents, see if the bigger picture suits you better than the neighborhood beat."
I raised an eyebrow at her and let a grin pull at the corner of my mouth. "So what, on the weekends I fly off and go take down evil foreign governments?"
Natasha just smirked, slow and dangerous and full of secrets that had probably toppled actual regimes. "You'd be surprised."
I probably wouldn't be, honestly.
I tossed my towel over my shoulder and she grabbed her jacket from the bench, and we walked off the mat together in the kind of comfortable silence that only existed between two people who had spent an hour trying to hit each other and come out respecting one another more for it.
We barely made it three steps before I noticed the cute figure hovering just inside the doorway of the training room, fidgeting with the hem of her yellow cardigan like she was trying to physically hold herself together through sheer fabric manipulation.
Asia Argento stood there with her big green eyes darting between me and Natasha, her blonde hair slightly mussed like she had been pacing the hallway for the last twenty minutes working up the courage to interrupt, which knowing her she absolutely had been.
"Um," she started, her voice soft and tentative in the way that made every protective instinct in my body fire simultaneously. "Are you two done hurting each other now? Because I really don't like watching my mom and my friend punch each other, even if it's just practice. It makes my tummy feel all twisty."
Natasha's entire demeanor shifted so fast it gave me whiplash. The deadly SHIELD operative who had been throwing killing combinations at my head thirty seconds ago melted into something warm and gentle as she crossed the distance to Asia and wrapped an arm around the girl's shoulders, pressing a kiss to the top of her blonde head.
"All done, sweetheart," she murmured. "Nobody's hurt."
Asia peered up at me from under Natasha's arm with a suspicious squint that would have been intimidating if it weren't coming from a face that looked like it belonged on a greeting card. "Blake, you don't have any bruises, do you? Also, I brought snacks because fighting makes people hungry and I read that protein is important after exercise."
She held up a small canvas tote bag that appeared to contain granola bars, juice boxes, and a first aid kit decorated with cartoon kittens.
This girl is too precious for this world. Too pure. Too good.
I smiled at her, wide and genuine in a way that I couldn't have faked if I tried. "I'm okay, Asia. Promise. But I will absolutely take a granola bar."
She beamed like I had just given her the greatest compliment of her life, rummaging through her bag with the focused determination of a field medic sorting triage supplies, and handed me a chocolate chip granola bar with both hands like she was presenting a sacred offering.
Natasha watched the exchange over Asia's head and met my eyes with a look that said, very clearly, if anything ever happens to this girl I will burn the world to ash and salt the earth behind me.
I gave her the smallest nod.
Same.
…A rundown diner, a bit later that evening…
"So that's basically the conversation I had with Natasha earlier," I said, leaning back in the cracked vinyl booth and taking a long pull from my chocolate milkshake through a straw that had seen better days, possibly better decades.
Sitting across from me, with her hands folded primly on the laminated menu she had not touched and would never touch, was Sona Sitri. Her violet eyes regarded me with the flat, measured patience of a woman who had been quietly calculating the fastest route to the exit since the moment we walked through the door. She wore a simple navy blouse and dark slacks that somehow looked like business formal even in a diner where the ketchup bottles were sticky and the napkin dispenser had a crack running down the middle held together with duct tape.
"Okay?" she said, in the exact tone of someone who had listened politely to a five-minute story and arrived at the end with absolutely no idea why they had been selected as the audience. Her eyes drifted sideways, taking in the flickering neon sign above the counter that read "BEST COFFEE IN MANHATTEN" with the typo permanently baked into the glass, the elderly cook visible through the kitchen window scratching somewhere he probably shouldn't have been scratching while flipping a burger, and the overall ambiance of a restaurant that had last been renovated during an administration she couldn't name because she hadn't memorized American presidents yet. "But why did you drag me out here to this... establishment... to tell me all of this? Couldn't you have talked to Rias? Or your older sister? Both of whom are, I feel compelled to point out, significantly more emotionally equipped to discuss your career trajectory than I am?"
I clutched my chest and fixed her with my most wounded expression, the one that made Shizune fuss over me and made Tsunade flick me between the eyes. "I thought we were friends, So-tan!"
The temperature at the table dropped by approximately three degrees.
Sona's left eye twitched with the precise, controlled fury of a woman whose composure was a point of personal pride being tested by a man who had clearly chosen violence. "Do not," she said, her voice carrying the quiet danger of a blade being drawn from its sheath, "call me that."
"What, So-tan?" I repeated, because apparently my survival instincts had taken the evening off. "It's cute. It suits you."
"It is a childish nickname that my sister has been tormenting me with since we were six years old." Sona adjusted her glasses with one finger, the gesture sharp enough to qualify as a threat in certain cultures. "Furthermore, and I want to be extremely clear about this, we are not friends. We are acquaintances. At best. We are two people who happen to orbit the same social circles due to circumstances largely beyond our control. We have spoken perhaps a dozen times, most of which were in group settings where you were primarily focused on one of the several beautiful women attached to your arm at any given moment."
"Harsh but fair," I conceded. "Also, you have a crush on my mom."
Sona nodded once with the composed certainty of a woman confirming a well-established fact. "That's right."
The words hung in the air between us for exactly one and a half seconds before her brain caught up to her mouth.
I watched the realization cascade through her expression like a slow-motion avalanche—the slight widening of her violet eyes, the faint parting of her lips, the sudden rigid tension in her shoulders, and then the catastrophic rush of blood to her cheeks that turned Sona Sitri, heiress to one of the Seventy-Two Pillars of the Underworld and a woman who prided herself on never losing her composure, into a stuttering mess.
"I... that is... how do you..." She pressed both palms flat against the table and leaned forward with an intensity that made the salt shaker rattle. "How could you possibly know about that!?"
"My mom knows you follow all of her social media accounts," I said, stirring my milkshake with the casual indifference of a man delivering a killing blow. "Every single one of them. Instagram, Twitter, the private one she made for posting pictures of Tonton wearing little hats. JARVIS flagged you as a, and I'm quoting the AI directly here, 'persistent non-threatening admirer with browsing patterns consistent with romantic fixation.' He told her about a month ago."
Sona sat perfectly still for a long, terrible moment, her cheeks burning with a shade of red I had previously only seen on Shizune at her most mortified. Then she closed her eyes, inhaled through her nose, and muttered a curse in what I was fairly certain was Old Enochian, which was an impressively niche language to swear in and told me a lot about just how rattled she was.
"Whatever," she said finally, opening her eyes and forcibly reassembling her dignity like a woman rebuilding a wall brick by brick while the enemy watched. She took a pointed sip of the ice water she had ordered, the only item she had deemed acceptable on the menu, and fixed me with a look that very clearly communicated that the crush topic was now a closed subject or someone was going to lose a limb. "You wanted my opinion on your situation, so I will give you my opinion on your situation."
I gestured magnanimously for her to proceed.
Sona set down her glass, straightened her posture, and regarded me with the analytical detachment of a chess player evaluating a board. "Street-level heroism is, at its conceptual core, uncomfortably adjacent to the magical girl genre. And I despise magical girls."
I blinked. "That's... not where I expected this to go."
"A lone warrior, clad in a flashy costume, descending from above to dispense justice upon petty criminals while delivering inspirational speeches about hope and protecting the innocent," Sona continued, ticking off each point on her fingers with the systematic rigor of someone presenting a thesis defense. "Substitute your wings for a transformation sequence and your holy lightning for a sparkly wand, and the structural parallels are functionally identical. You even have the color-coded outfit. You have the tragic backstory. You have the found family of beautiful women supporting you from the shadows. Blake, you are one magical catchphrase away from being a textbook mahou shoujo protagonist, and I refuse to support that trajectory on principle."
She's thought about this way too hard for someone who claims to hate the genre.
"Sona, how much magical girl anime have you actually watched in your life?"
"Enough to know I despise it!" she said crisply, which was absolutely not a denial. "The point stands. You are wasting your considerable abilities on criminals who could be handled by a moderately competent police officer with a taser. The Natasha woman is correct. You are built for larger conflicts, and pretending otherwise because two time-traveling telepaths told you a version of yourself that no longer exists used to do it is not strategic thinking. It is sentimental."
I sat with that for a moment, swirling the last of my milkshake around the bottom of the glass. Between Natasha's pragmatic assessment and Sona's ruthlessly logical teardown, the argument was starting to feel less like advice and more like a verdict.
"So your professional recommendation, as a devil heiress and strategic genius, is that I stop being a magical girl?"
"My professional recommendation is that you stop insulting your own potential," Sona corrected, and beneath the clinical delivery I caught something that might have been genuine concern from a woman who was allegedly not my friend. "But yes. Also stop being a magical girl."
I sat there for a moment after Sona left, swirling the dregs of my milkshake around the bottom of the glass and listening to the thin rattle of ice against cheap plastic. The diner hummed with the quiet, greasy ambiance of a place that survived on regulars and stubbornness rather than quality, and I let my thoughts drift in the comfortable anonymity of being just another guy in a booth that smelled faintly of bacon and industrial cleaner.
I really did love my costume…
That was the thing that made all of this so frustrating, because the suit itself was a goddamn work of art and every stitch of it reminded me that people I cared about had poured genuine thought and love into turning me into something the world could believe in. Jean and Emma both really believed in me.
Even Peter had contributed, and the fact that he did so after being explicitly told his fashion input was unwelcome made it more meaningful, not less. He had quietly redesigned the chest plate's internal shock distribution after studying my fight data from the Kokabiel encounter, rerouting the impact dispersal pathways so that a hit strong enough to crack my ribs would spread across the entire torso panel instead of concentrating at the point of contact. He slipped the revised schematics under Emma's door without a note, and Emma never acknowledged receiving them, but the final suit used his design.
These people built me armor because they wanted me to survive. They gave me a symbol because they believed I could be one.
And I had spent the past week using their gift to break the bones of muggers and send drug dealers to the ICU.
I'm wasting it. I'm wasting all of it.
My mind drifted to Tony, the way it often did when I started measuring myself against the concept of what a hero was supposed to look like. My stepfather didn't patrol neighborhoods. He didn't perch on rooftops scanning for petty crime. Tony Stark strapped himself into a suit of weaponized genius and flew to the Middle East, where he dismantled entire terrorist cells in a single afternoon, reduced weapons caches to slag, and extracted hostages from fortified compounds that entire military operations had failed to breach. He did this last Tuesday and was home in time for dinner with my mother, who would scold him for getting scorch marks on the kitchen counter when he landed on the balcony still wearing the suit.
Did that violate international law? Almost certainly. Multiple international laws, probably, across several jurisdictions and at least two Geneva Convention subsections that Tony had definitely never read and wouldn't care about if he had. But that was the dirty truth that nobody in polished diplomatic circles wanted to say out loud: international law wasn't real. It had never been real. It was a gentleman's agreement enforced by nothing except the collective willingness of powerful nations to pretend they respected it, and the moment any single entity acquired enough raw force to ignore the agreement without consequence, the whole framework dissolved like wet paper.
Whoever had the biggest stick made the rules.
That was true in the halls of the United Nations, it was true in the courts of the Four Great Satans, it was true in the Grigori's hierarchy of fallen angels ranked by the number of their wings, and it was true on the streets of any village in the Elemental Nations where a single shinobi with enough chakra could flatten whole civilian villages.
The mundane world and the supernatural world ran on the same engine. Power dictated terms. Everything else was theater.
And right now, I have power that I'm not using properly.
I finished the last of my milkshake with a hollow slurp that earned me a disapproving look from the elderly woman in the next booth, left a twenty on the counter as a tip and stood up to leave.
I didn't get the chance.
A body dropped into the seat directly across from me with the boneless, entitled ease of a man who had never once in his entire existence been denied access to anything he wanted, including other people's personal space. The booth's vinyl cushion wheezed under the sudden weight, and the air in the diner shifted in a way that had nothing to do with the door opening or the ventilation kicking on.
I looked at the man who had just invited himself into my evening and felt my stomach drop through the floor!
Everything about him radiated the particular brand of arrogance that came not from achievement or merit but from the simple, unshakable conviction that the universe had been arranged specifically for his benefit and everyone in it existed to serve his convenience.
I recognized him instantly. Akeno had shown me pictures, her expression hardening with barely concealed disgust every time his name came up. Rias had described him in clinical detail during their strategic planning sessions, her voice going flat and hollow in the way it only did when she was discussing something that made her feel like property rather than a person.
Fuck. What is this guy doing in New York?
…Riser Phenex sat across from me in a shitty Manhattan diner.
And did not know who I was.
That realization hit me about three seconds into the encounter, right around the time his deep blue eyes swept over me with the kind of cursory, dismissive appraisal that a man gives to a piece of furniture he's considering stepping around rather than acknowledging. He hadn't followed me here.
He hadn't tracked me down specifically.
He hadn't done a single shred of research into the people connected to the woman he was supposedly trying to reclaim as his fiancée, because if he had, he would have known that Rias Gremory's Queen had a younger brother, that said brother was an eight-winged fallen angel living in New York, and that said brother had a very personal interest in making sure Riser Phenex never got within a hundred miles of anyone he cared about.
No. This idiot had been tailing Sona…
It was obvious in retrospect. Rias had vanished completely thanks to Serafall's magical shielding and JARVIS scrubbing every digital trace of her existence from the internet, which meant Riser's only viable lead was Sona Sitri, Rias's childhood best friend and the one person most likely to know where she had gone.
Then he sat down across from me and his demonic senses actually registered what I was, and I watched the curiosity drain from his expression like water from a cracked glass, replaced by a contempt so reflexive and deeply ingrained that it clearly required zero conscious thought to produce.
"A half-breed crow…?" Riser said, and the words dripped from his mouth the way someone might say cockroach or sewage, with a casual disgust that wasn't even heated enough to qualify as hatred because hatred implied the target was worth the emotional investment. His lip curled faintly, and he leaned back in the booth as if putting an extra inch of distance between himself and something unclean. "Well. That certainly answers the question of whether Sitri has lowered herself to some secret affair with whatever this is. Even she wouldn't stoop that far beneath her station."
Okay. Options. I can punch every single one of his teeth down his arrogant throat right now, which would feel incredible but would blow Rias's cover and undo months of careful planning. Or I can laugh in his face, which would also blow the cover but at least I'd enjoy myself. Or...
Or I can play this.
The decision crystallized in my mind with a clarity that surprised me, and I felt my expression rearrange itself before I had consciously committed to the bit.
Don't laugh. Do not laugh. This is too useful to waste on a laugh.
I hunched my shoulders inward, dropped my chin slightly, and let my posture collapse into something small and deferential.
My eyes went to the table, then back up to Riser's face with the quick, nervous flicker of a creature accustomed to being struck by things stronger than itself.
I softened my voice, stripped out the confidence and the edge, and replaced it with the reedy, eager-to-please tone of someone whose entire survival strategy revolved around making powerful beings forget he existed.
"You are absolutely right, Lord Phenex," I said, and the title tasted like ash on my tongue but I delivered it with the reverent hush of a man addressing divinity. "This one would never presume to... Lady Sitri is far too gracious and noble to even consider... no, no, of course not." I shook my head rapidly, the motion jerky and subservient. "This one is just a humble and lowly half-breed crow named Moe. I'm Lady Sona's gopher, nothing more. She sends me into the human world to acquire things for her, supplies, items she needs from surface markets, things that are beneath her to personally shop for. She took pity on trash like me, gave me a purpose, and I am grateful every single day for her generosity."
My bullshit lie worked.
Riser's expression shifted from contempt to something almost worse—satisfied confirmation. He nodded along with the slow, sage authority of a man whose worldview had just been validated by the universe. Of course a half-breed crow served a devil heiress. Of course she had taken pity on the wretched thing. This was how the world functioned. The strong commanded. The weak served. And creatures like "Moe" existed to remind the Riser Phenexes of the world just how far above the filth they truly stood.
"As expected," Riser said, waving one hand in a gesture that managed to be both dismissive and magnanimous, as if he were granting me permission to continue breathing in his presence. "A half-breed with a Sitri patron. Unusual, but I suppose even the eccentric Sitri heiress needs someone to carry her bags." He paused, and something shifted in his expression, a sharpening of focus that told me the idle curiosity phase was over and the operational phase had begun. "But I imagine a gopher like you, even one as lowly as you clearly are, still has his uses. You carry her things. You run her errands. You stand in the corners of rooms while important people have important conversations, and nobody pays attention to the furniture." His blue eyes locked onto mine with an intensity that was almost flattering in how seriously he was taking this. "Tell me, Moe. Have you heard Lady Sona mention where her red-haired friend has disappeared to?"
There it is.
I let my eyes widen with the practiced surprise of a man who had just been asked a question by someone far above his station and couldn't believe his input was being solicited. "Her red-haired friend? You mean the Gremory girl?"
"I mean my fiancée," Riser corrected, and the possessive edge in his voice made my skin crawl with a revulsion so visceral it took active effort to keep it off my face. "Rias Gremory. She has been... absent from the Underworld for some time, and her family is concerned for her wellbeing. As her betrothed, naturally I share that concern."
Concerned for her wellbeing. Right…
I chewed my lip, shifted my weight, and glanced around the diner with the nervous energy of a man debating whether to share information he probably shouldn't have. Then I leaned forward slightly, dropped my voice to a conspiratorial murmur, and said, "Actually... I did hear something."
Riser's entire body language changed. "Tell me where," he said, and the command in his voice carried the weight of a man accustomed to having every order obeyed immediately and without question. "Tell me, and I'll make it worth your while."
He reached into the inner pocket of his tailored charcoal suit and produced a small glass vial filled with shimmering golden liquid that caught the diner's flickering fluorescent light and seemed to glow with its own inner warmth.
"One vial of Phenex Tears," Riser said, placing it on the table between us with a soft clink. "For a half-breed crow, this is a fortune beyond your wildest comprehension. Enough to buy your way into any faction's good graces or sell on the black market for enough human currency to live like a king for the rest of your short, miserable life."
Okay. New plan. I am going to take this man for absolutely everything he's worth.
…Rias Gremory was sitting cross-legged on her dorm room bed, and laughing so hard that the composed, dignified heiress of the House of Gremory had been completely replaced by a girl who couldn't breathe. "You... you told him your name was Moe!" she wheezed, pressing both hands over her mouth as another wave of laughter ripped through her, her blue eyes glistening with tears that had nothing to do with sadness. "Moe! And he just... he just accepted it!"
"He didn't even question it," I confirmed from my current position, which was horizontal across the foot of the bed with my head resting in Akeno's lap.
My older sister had claimed this arrangement the moment I sat down. She had been wearing sleep shorts that could generously be described as minimal and a loose t-shirt that kept slipping off one shoulder, and the instant I settled onto the bed she had seized my head with both hands, guided it down onto her bare thighs, and informed me that this was "onee-san privileges" in a tone that suggested the matter was settled, non-negotiable, and any attempt to argue would be met with the kind of sweet, smiling resistance that Akeno had elevated to an art form. Her thighs were incredibly soft and warm, and the skin was smooth in a way that made my brain want to short-circuit if I thought about it for more than two consecutive seconds, which I was trying very hard not to do because there were two omega-level telepaths somewhere on this campus who would absolutely pick up on those thoughts and I would never hear the end of it.
Three crystal vials of Phenex Tears sat on Rias's desk. The most valuable healing substance in the supernatural world, worth more than most devils earned in a lifetime, obtained through the power of a fake name and a rich man's staggering lack of due diligence.
Rias wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, sat up straighter, and fixed me with an expression of delighted, breathless anticipation, like a woman settling in for the best part of her favorite story. "Okay, okay. Tell me the rest. What happened next? Where did you convince him I had gone?"
Akeno's fingers had found their way into my hair at some point during the retelling, threading through the black strands with slow, rhythmic strokes that sent pleasant shivers cascading down the back of my neck. I could feel the warmth of her skin against my scalp and the gentle pressure of her fingernails tracing idle patterns that were probably absent-minded but felt deliberate.
"So after Riser put the first vial on the table," I said, staring at the ceiling to maintain what remained of my concentration, "I didn't just give him the answer. That would have been amateur hour. I did what any self-respecting con artist would do when they've got a mark who's desperate and stupid…" All of this learned from growing up POOR and hopping between foster homes of course…
"You made him work for it," Rias said while grinning.
"I made him pay for it," I corrected. "I did the whole performance. Scared little half-breed, looking over his shoulder, wringing his hands, mumbling about how Lady Sitri would kill me if she found out I'd been talking to anyone about her private conversations. I told him I couldn't possibly share more, it was too dangerous, I was just a lowly gopher and if anyone traced the information back to me I'd be destroyed. I even stuttered. I threw in a little tremor in my voice that Shizune would have been proud of."
"Ufufu. My precious otouto, a natural born actor," Akeno murmured from above me, and I could hear the smile in her voice without needing to see it.
"Riser didn't like being told no," I continued. "I think it might have been the first time someone beneath his station refused him anything, ever, even temporarily. So he reached into his jacket and pulled out a second vial. Set it next to the first one. Told me that two vials of Phenex Tears could buy me a new identity, a new life, protection from anyone who might come looking for a half-breed who talked too much."
Rias leaned forward, hugging her knees to her chest. "And you still held out."
"I still held out. I shook my head and told him that Lady Sitri had informants everywhere and that she would know. I whispered it like I was genuinely terrified, like Sona Sitri was some kind of shadowy puppet master with eyes in every wall, which honestly isn't even that far from the truth given how she operates. And Riser, who had clearly expected this transaction to cost him nothing more than a single vial and thirty seconds of his precious time, was now sitting across from a stuttering half-breed who was making him negotiate like a common merchant."
"I bet he hated that," Rias said with vicious delight. "And Sona is gonna be so mad when this all comes out, I can't wait to see her reaction!"
"He hated it so much that his neck started turning red from the effort of not incinerating me on the spot. But he wanted the information more than he wanted to preserve his dignity, so he pulled out a third vial, slammed it on the table hard enough to rattle the salt shaker, and told me that three vials was his final offer and that if I didn't start talking he was going to forget his manners and remind me what Phenex fire did to crow feathers."
"So you talked," Rias prompted.
"So I talked." I paused for dramatic effect because I had learned from the best, and Tsunade always said that the key to a good story was knowing when to let the silence do the work. "I told him that a few weeks ago, I overheard her speaking on the phone. She mentioned Lady Gremory by name, and she sounded concerned, like she was checking in on someone who was far away and difficult to reach. I told Riser I caught fragments, not the whole conversation. Phrases like 'southern hemisphere' and 'ley line interference' and 'so remote that even the Bael clan's tracking network can't get a reading.' I fed him pieces, not a complete picture, because a complete picture would have felt too convenient and even someone as incurious as Riser might have gotten suspicious."
Rias was practically vibrating. "And then?"
"And then I dropped the hook. I told him that the very last thing I heard before Lady Sitri noticed me and went silent was two words: 'southern ice.' And then I shut my mouth and let the most powerful force in the universe do the rest of the work."
"Which is?" Rias asked.
"A rich man's conviction that he's smarter than everyone around him." I grinned up at the ceiling. "I didn't say Antarctica. I never said the word. I gave him 'southern hemisphere,' 'remote,' 'ley line interference,' and 'southern ice,' and then I watched Riser Phenex's eyes light up with the self-satisfied gleam of a man who believed he had just deduced the answer through his own brilliant analytical mind rather than being spoonfed a trail of breadcrumbs by a gopher named Moe in a diner that serves expired ketchup."
Rias fell backward onto the bed and screamed into her pillow. "Rias Gremory is hiding in Antarctica!" she howled into the fabric, her voice muffled and shaking with laughter, her bare feet drumming against the mattress. "He thinks I'm in Antarctica! Riser Phenex thinks I fled to the bottom of the world!"
"He practically sprinted out of the diner," I said.
"Ufufufu." Akeno's laugh was a low, melodic sound that vibrated through her thighs and into my skull in a way that was deeply distracting. Her fingers paused in my hair and I felt her shift slightly, her body angling so she could look down at my face from above. I met her violet eyes and found them shining with something warm and fierce and proud, an expression of such open, unguarded adoration that it made my chest tighten in a way I wasn't prepared for. "Do you know what makes this even more delicious, Rias?"
Rias rolled onto her side, still wiping her eyes. "Tell me."
"Riser is a fire devil," Akeno said, and the sweetness in her voice carried an undercurrent of venom that she reserved exclusively for the man who had treated her King like property. "His entire bloodline, his physiology, his demonic energy, every fiber of his being is oriented around heat and flame. The Phenex clan doesn't just prefer warmth, they are fundamentally uncomfortable in cold environments. Extreme cold doesn't kill them, their regeneration prevents that, but it suppresses their fire, dulls their senses, and makes every moment feel like wading through mud. Riser Phenex is going to spend the next several weeks searching research stations at the bottom of the world in negative sixty degree blizzards, his flames sputtering, his perfect hair frozen solid, his expensive shoes full of snow, looking for a woman who is currently..." She gestured around the warm, comfortable dorm room with its takeout containers and scattered textbooks and the faint scent of the lavender candle Rias liked to burn. "Sitting right here."
Rias pressed her face into the pillow again and made a sound that was somewhere between a scream and a cackle, her shoulders shaking.
Akeno looked back down at me, and her expression shifted into something quieter but no less intense. Her fingers resumed their path through my hair, slower now, more deliberate, tracing along my temple and down the curve of my jaw before returning to card through the strands at my crown. "You've become quite the cunning man, otouto," she said softly, her violet eyes searching mine with an attention that felt like standing under a spotlight. "Our mother would be so proud of you. I am so proud of you."
She's looking at me like that again. That look she gets sometimes when she thinks I'm not paying attention, except right now I'm literally lying in her lap staring up at her face and she's not even trying to hide it.
I filed the moment away in the growing mental folder labeled "Things About Akeno That I Don't Know How to Process Yet" and deflected the only way I knew how. By ignoring it with an included smirk.
Akeno smiled, but her eyes didn't quite let me go.
The mood shifted when Rias sat up again. Rias held my gaze for a long moment. "Thank you, Blake," she said, and meant it with every fiber of her being.
I was about to respond with something casual to ease the emotional weight in the room when Akeno leaned down over me. Her long black hair cascaded around my face like a curtain, blocking out the dorm room and the desk and the vials and Rias's grateful expression, until my entire field of vision was nothing but Akeno's face inches from mine, her lips curved in a smile that was tender and mischievous and something else entirely that I couldn't name and wasn't sure I should try to.
She pressed a slow, lingering kiss to my forehead.
Her lips were soft and warm and stayed longer than they needed to, long enough that I could feel her breath ghost across my skin and catch the faint scent of her perfume, something floral and subtly intoxicating that I had never been able to identify.
When she finally pulled back, it was only by an inch, her mouth still close enough that I could feel the warmth of her words against my forehead.
"My precious otouto deserves a reward for being so clever," she whispered, her voice pitched low and intimate in a way that sent my heart rate spiking into territory that made me re-evaluate our current relationship. "Ara? I wonder what your reward should be…?"
XXX
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