The door opened and Givelle stepped out.
She had taken no more than fifteen minutes, but the difference was complete. Her hair was set, her clothes were immaculate, and the expression on her face had returned to normal
She now looked composed, with slightly raised chin and eyes that looked at things as though they were beneath her by default.
"Sit here and wait here until a servant comes to collect you." She said to him.
Kaito pressed a hand to his chest and bent at the waist in a slow, exaggerated bow. "Your every wish," he said, "is my command."
Givelle's expression didn't crack. She simply scoffed and walked out without looking back.
The door closed behind her.
Kaito straightened up and he stood still for a moment and looked at the room.
Stone walls. High ceiling with dark beams running across it. A window set deep into the wall with pale light coming through, furniture that was ornate in the way of things built for permanence rather than comfort. No electricity. No sound of traffic. Nothing familiar.
He sat down on the throne and in this moment of silence his mind began to process the actions of the past hour.
He was in another world, in a castle that appeared to belong to the demon realm, he had gotten a system, and in the first several hours of his arrival he had somehow managed to enslave the demon queen and shot his load down her throat.
He stopped that thought, reviewed it, and then let out a slow breath.
"I might be a crackhead," he said.
He had not even spent a full day here. He hadn't learned the language properly yet, hadn't mapped the building, hadn't understood the political structure, hadn't done any of the things a reasonable person in his situation would do first. A reasonable person would have needed time just to accept that it was real.
Kaito had instead managed to subjugate the demon queen.
He put his face in his hands and laughed.
He pulled up the system interface and stared at it.
The framework was clear enough. He had been dropped into a narrative with rules — a hero existed, summoned from somewhere else, and was moving through the world and conquering everything in his path.
He had been placed on the opposing side.
Which meant the question was not whether a conflict was coming. It was what happened to him if he lost it.
He turned it over, and neither answer he arrived at was comfortable. Instant death was the cleaner option, in a way — final, with no additional suffering attached. The other option was still death only slower.
His jaw tightened.
He was not going back to that. He had asked for a second chance and he had received one, and it was stranger and more dangerous than anything he could have imagined, but it was his, and he was not going to let it end the same way the first one had — quietly, without anything to show for it.
He would get stronger. He would do whatever the system required. He would beat the hero, armour and all.
He reviewed the system's mechanics again, more carefully this time.
The mana absorption clause was straightforward in its logic, if not in its implications. A fraction of power from each person he slept with, scaled to their existing strength. Which meant that the most efficient path forward was for him to constantly sleep with the most powerful women he could reach.
He glanced at the door Givelle had walked out of.
He was going to need to sleep with the demon queen. Professionally speaking of course.
He also made a mental note to be strategic about who else was in this world and how powerful they were, and filed that note under things to pursue with appropriate urgency.
Next his thoughts went out to the council of nobles currently deliberating about him.
He had almost managed not to think about it for a few minutes, and then it came back and settled in his stomach like a stone.
Givelle he had handled — or rather, the situation had moved in a direction that resolved itself, and he had been present for it. But the council was different.
The council was multiple people, with their own assessments and their own agendas.
He didn't know how powerful they were. He didn't know how they thought, what they valued or what they would ask him. He was walking into a room full of high-ranking demons who were presumably evaluating whether a human summoned from another world was worth their investment.
He took a breath. He became aware that he was rubbing his hands together and made himself stop.
"It can't be that bad." He thought. "If the system had chosen me that means I was their best shot and genuinely speaking, I fit the criteria for the person they need, I mean who can be a bigger loser than me?"
The knock came shortly after, and a servant entered and informed him that the council was ready.
Kaito swallowed , and stood up, and followed.
The hallway was long and built with the kind of intentionality that made a person feel small and Kaito felt a pool of hate bubble in his gut, he hated feeling small. They stopped at a set of double doors, and the servant stepped aside.
Kaito straightened his collar, decided that was probably the most preparation available to him, and walked in.
The room was a long oval with a table down the centre, and as he entered, every set of eyes in the room turned to look at him at once.
There were six of them, arranged along the sides of the table with Givelle at the head.
She was looking directly at him as he entered, her expression perfectly neutral, her posture the same as it had been when she walked out of the room earlier — composed, deliberate, untouchable. Not a single thing on her face acknowledged what had happened between them.
Kaito respected the performance enormously, and he nearly smiled but he quickly caught himself.
He found a chair across from the council and sat.
Givelle introduced them by name and title in turn,
Ryouma was broad through the shoulders, his arms were folded, and he had the look of someone who had decided what he thought before the meeting started. He was a Duke.
Haruka, the woman at the far end, was dressed in robes of a different style from the others. There was something quieter about her attention, as though she was listening for things underneath what was being said. She was a High Priestess, not a Duke.
Takeshi, Arata, Shingen, Nobuo werethe remaining four, they were all Dukes, and they all had varying degrees of interest on their faces.
When the introductions were done, silence settled over the table, and everyone looked at him again.
Ryouma spoke first.
"He looks thin," he said, not to Kaito directly, but to the table in general, the way you commented on a disappointing purchase. "How old is he?"
"His age is not the relevant factor," Givelle said.
"His build is relevant.." Ryouma's eyes moved to Kaito again. "We were told the summoning would bring us something capable of countering the hero. I'm looking at this and I don't see capability. I see a liability."
"He is newly arrived," Givelle said. "His power is not yet —"
"Then what use is he now?" Ryouma said,
"Potential that cannot be demonstrated is indistinguishable from the absence of potential. If he cannot show us something today, there is nothing to evaluate."
He looked at Kaito directly for the first time.
"I want to duel him," he said
Givelle's expression did not change, but something in her stillness shifted slightly. "That is premature."
"The other lords agree with me, I think." Ryouma glanced along the table, and a few of the Dukes gave slight nods, and one gave a more explicit one. "Let him demonstrate what he has. If it is sufficient, we proceed. If it is not, we have our answer."
"He has not yet had time to —"
"Your Majesty." Ryouma's voice was respectful in structure and dismissive in substance. "With the greatest deference. You summoned him. The decision to bring him here was yours. But the council's function is to assess what serves this realm, and we cannot do that without evidence. Let us see what he can do."
The table was quiet.
Givelle ooked at Ryouma, and then at Kaito.
"Fine," she said.
They moved to one end of the room, where there was enough space for what this was going to be, and the council arranged itself along the edges to watch.
Kaito did not have a plan. He understood this about himself clearly and calmly as he squared up across from Ryouma, who was taller than him, broader than him, and had the relaxed posture of someone for whom physical confrontations were not new situations. He had magic he didn't know how to use yet, a system he was still learning to read, and no combat experience in either lifetime.
He had time to think: 'this is going to go badly.'
Then Ryouma moved.
It was fast — not inhumanly fast, but fast enough that the specific movements didn't fully register, and then Kaito was on the floor, and his cheek was against the cold stone, and his mouth tasted like copper.
The room was quiet.
He lay there for a moment and took stock. Nothing broken, probably. Everything hurt in the general way of a hard fall and a harder impact.
Ryouma's voice came from above him, still carrying that same reasonable, unenthusiastic tone.
"He is too weak," he said. "This achieves nothing for us."
Kaito pushed himself up.
He did it slowly because his arms were shaking slightly, and quickly enough that he was standing before anyone said anything else. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the blood on his knuckle, and then he looked at Ryouma.
He did not say anything. He catalogued the face, the voice, the posture, the particular quality of indifference in the man's eyes, and then he made himself a promise.
'I swear by all the gods in this world, I will kill you someday.'
The silence in the room had taken on a particular texture, the kind that preceded a conclusion, and Kaito recognised it and did not like what it was moving toward.
Then Haruka spoke.
"It is too early to dismiss him."
"We have seen him in one condition," she continued, "at one moment, on the first day of his arrival. That is not a sufficient sample from which to draw a final conclusion." She looked at the table rather than at any particular person, her hands folded in front of her. "I propose we give him a month. At the end of that month, we assess again, with full knowledge of what he has been able to do in that time. Then we decide."
Ryouma looked as though he had several things to say, and then appeared to calculate something, and said nothing.
The other Dukes exchanged glances. No one contradicted her.
Givelle looked at Kaito for a brief moment and then looked away.
"A month it is then," she said.
Kaito looked at Haruka across the table.
She had given him a chance when the room was moving toward closing the door on him, and apart from that, she was absolutely beautiful, her milky juggs were prominent despite the fact that she was dressed chastly and almost completely covered up.
He looked at her, and something warm and deeply inappropriate rose in him, and he made another silent promise to himself.
'You've been kind to me, therefore I'm going to be kind to you as well… I'm going to fuck you silly.'
His mind went to back to the matter at hand. He had only one month to become something worth keeping.
He straightened up, wiped his mouth one more time, and decided that was more than enough.