Chapter 139:
– Haru –
Carrion and I walked side by side down the wide stone corridor that connected the Demon Lord meeting chamber to the combat space below, and even from here I could see the scorch marks carved into the reinforced walls.
Rimuru's fight with Clayman had left deep gouges in the magicule-hardened floor, spiderweb fractures radiating outward from what looked like a central impact crater. Sif's battle had been cleaner but no less destructive. A section of the eastern barrier wall was simply gone, replaced by a smooth, cauterized edge where something extremely sharp had passed through solid enchanted stone like it was tissue paper.
That's my girl.
…Wait? What…?
The projection crystal mounted above the arena entrance hummed with a soft azure glow, confirming what I already suspected. Every Demon Lord still seated at that table was watching. Guy Crimson, Leon Cromwell, Frey, Dagruel, Ramiris, Valentine. Milim.
I couldn't hear her from here. The dimensional barrier separating the arena from the meeting chamber was designed specifically to contain Demon Lord-level combat, layers upon layers of ancient wards woven into the very architecture.
Sound, force, ambient magicule radiation, none of it was supposed to bleed through.
But I knew she was bouncing in her seat. I knew it the same way I knew when bread dough had finished its second rise or when oil hit the perfect temperature for tempura. Some things you just felt in your bones after enough experience, and Milim Nava's excitement was a force of nature that no ward in any dimension could fully suppress.
My tails wagged. All ten of them, swaying behind me like golden pendulums, completely betraying every ounce of composure I was trying to project. I caught myself three seconds too late and forced them still, but the damage was done.
Carrion glanced sideways at me with amber eyes that missed absolutely nothing. "She's got you trained," he said. Not mocking. Observational. One predator reading another.
"Nobody's got me trained," I replied, which was a bold claim from a man whose tails had literally just wagged at the thought of his girlfriend cheering for him.
Carrion snorted. It sounded like a large cat huffing through its nose, low and rumbling in a chest broad enough to use as a dinner table. The man was enormous. Not Dagruel enormous, but he had the kind of build that came from centuries of actual physical dominance, not gym memberships. His arms were thicker than my torso, corded with muscle that shifted under tanned skin like steel cables rearranging themselves with every step. His stride was loose but coiled, a predator who could explode into violence between one heartbeat and the next.
I respected the hell out of that. Any chef worth their salt could appreciate quality ingredients, and Carrion was built from nothing but premium stock.
We stepped into the arena proper. The space was massive, easily a hundred meters across, with high vaulted ceilings reinforced by interlocking barrier wards that pulsed with faint geometric patterns. The floor was some kind of treated stone, dense enough to absorb impacts that would crater normal bedrock. It hadn't been enough for the previous fights. Chunks of it were missing. A section near the far wall had been melted into glass.
I rolled my shoulders and turned to face Carrion, keeping my posture relaxed, weight balanced on both feet. "So. How do you want to do this? First to yield? Points system? Should we establish a safe word? I'm partial to 'chrysanthemum' but I'm flexible."
Carrion's response was his fist filling my entire field of vision.
Oh.
I tilted my head sideways and felt the displaced air from his punch rip past my cheek like a freight train, close enough that a few strands of golden hair near my ear were sheared clean off. The shockwave hit the barrier wall behind me and I heard the wards groan under the stress.
He was already throwing the second strike before the first one finished. A raking claw swipe aimed at my throat, fingers curled into hooks, nails dense and sharp enough to qualify as natural weapons. No wind-up, no telegraph, just immediate and overwhelming aggression launched from a standing start with zero warning.
Right. That's his answer. No rules. No boundaries. Just the wild.
Something stirred in my blood. My pupils narrowed to vertical slits without conscious input, and my vision sharpened until I could count the individual muscle fibers contracting in Carrion's forearm as his claw descended toward my jugular.
I liked it.
I caught his wrist with my fourth tail. The impact jolted through the golden fur and I felt the raw physical power behind the swing, genuinely impressive force that would have caved in a castle wall. My tail wrapped once around his forearm and held. Carrion's eyes widened fractionally. Not at being stopped, but at what stopped him. Not a tail casually intercepting a Demon Lord's killing blow with the kind of grip strength that came from supporting a thirty-foot fox body in mid-air combat.
"Those aren't just for show," he growled.
"They're also extremely soft," I said. "My girls use them as pillows after sex…"
He ripped his arm free with a snarl and came at me again.
The next thirty seconds were pure, unfiltered beast-type violence. Carrion fought the way a lion hunted. No wasted movement in the technical sense, but nothing held back either. Wide sweeping claws designed to catch prey mid-dodge, lunging tackles that used his superior mass like a battering ram, knee strikes aimed at my ribs with enough force to fold steel.
Every attack carried the weight of centuries as the apex predator of his world, backed by magicule reserves deep enough to sustain this intensity for hours.
I dodged what I could and blocked what I couldn't. My tails moved independently, ten separate defensive lines that intercepted strikes from angles my arms couldn't reach.
Two blocked a double claw swipe aimed at my flanks.
One caught his knee before it reached my stomach.
Three more wrapped around a haymaker so devastating that the wind pressure alone carved a trench in the floor behind me, absorbing the impact across distributed surface area until the force bled away to nothing.
He was fast. Genuinely, respectably fast. In humanoid form, Carrion moved with explosive acceleration that would have overwhelmed most ultimate-class fighters.
Every lunge covered meters in milliseconds, and his recovery between attacks was almost nonexistent because he didn't pause between combinations. One strike flowed into the next with the instinctive fluidity of a creature who had been fighting since before most civilizations learned to stack rocks.
But I was faster.
Not by an embarrassing margin. Enough to matter. Enough to turn near-hits into clean misses and close blocks into comfortable interceptions. My body moved with the kind of reflexive precision that came from a yokai heritage optimized for speed over millennia, enhanced by a True Demon Lord evolution that had multiplied everything I already had. Where Carrion was explosive power and relentless pressure, I was precision. Angles. Reading the rhythm of his attacks the way I read the tempo of a kitchen during a dinner rush.
He drops his left shoulder before a lunge. Commits too much weight forward on the claw swipes. Recovers high after a missed tackle, leaving his ribs exposed for about a quarter second.
I catalogued his patterns the same way I broke down an unfamiliar ingredient. Texture, density, flavor profile, optimal preparation method. The analysis took about twenty seconds. By the thirtieth second, I knew exactly how this fight would end.
I stopped retreating.
The shift was subtle enough that Carrion didn't register it immediately. One moment I was flowing backward, deflecting and dodging, letting him control the pace. The next I was standing still, my feet planted, and his raking claw swipe met open air where my face should have been because I'd swayed just enough to let it pass.
Then I hit him.
My first punch took him in the floating ribs on his left side, magicule-enhanced, delivered with the kind of mechanical precision that came from understanding anatomy on a level most fighters never bothered with. I knew where the liver sat. I knew which intercostal muscles stabilized his breathing. I knew that a precisely angled strike to the gap between the ninth and tenth rib would send a shockwave through the surrounding tissue that no amount of surface muscle could fully absorb.
Carrion grunted. His body tried to fold around the impact point, and I was already throwing the second punch. Right side, kidneys, same surgical targeting. Then an uppercut to the solar plexus that lifted his feet off the ground by a solid inch.
I hit him six more times in the space of two seconds. Ribs, ribs, liver, stomach, chest, jaw. Not a brawler's combinations. A butcher's. Every strike landed exactly where I intended with exactly the force required, magicules channeled through my fists in controlled bursts that amplified the impact without wasting energy on flashy displays.
The final hit in the sequence was an open-palm strike to the center of his chest with three tails providing additional thrust from behind my shoulder, multiplying the force by a factor I didn't bother calculating. Carrion left the ground completely. He traveled backward at a speed that qualified as a low-level projectile, hit the arena wall, and kept going for another three inches as the reinforced stone cratered around his body.
Dust billowed. Stone fragments scattered. The wards on the wall flickered and stabilized.
I shook out my right hand. My knuckles stung pleasantly. Carrion hit like a truck, but he could take hits like a mountain, and the density of his muscle tissue at this level was genuinely remarkable.
In culinary terms, the man was wagyu crossed with an oak barrel. Incredibly dense, impossibly tough, and probably delicious if you knew how to prepare him.
Wait. No. Don't think about what Demon Lords taste like. That's weird. That's a weird thought. Moving on…
The dust cleared.
Carrion stood in his crater, bleeding from his mouth and from a cut above his left eye where the wall fragments had caught him. He rolled his neck, producing a series of cracks that echoed through the arena like snapping branches. Then he grinned.
It was the grin of a man who had just found exactly what he'd been looking for.
"Good," he rumbled. "That's good. You hit like you mean it. I was worried you'd be one of those pretty-boy lords who relies on magic and never gets his hands dirty."
"I'm a chef," I told him, relaxing my stance but keeping my weight balanced. "My hands are always dirty. Figuratively. Literally I'm very hygienic!"
Carrion laughed. It came out as a short, barking sound that shook loose pebbles from the crater around him. Then his expression changed.
"My turn," he said quietly.
Bones cracked and reformed. He grew. And grew. And grew.
By the time the transformation finished, Carrion stood roughly twenty-five feet tall in his beast form. A massive creature that was part lion, part tiger, and part something that had no earthly equivalent.
Just bigger. Faster. Angrier.
I whistled.
"That's impressive," I admitted.
Though my fifty-foot golden kitsune form with ten tails wreathed in blue foxfire is objectively cooler. Sorry. Not sorry. It just is.
For half a second I considered meeting him form for form. Shifting into my giant fox body and turning this into a proper kaiju fight, two colossal beasts tearing into each other while the arena's ancient wards prayed to whatever gods wards prayed to.
I decided against it. Two reasons. First, the arena had already taken significant punishment from the previous fights, and I wasn't confident the barriers could contain two Demon Lord-class transformations going at full intensity without collapsing the entire mountain on top of us. Second, and more importantly from a political standpoint, beating the self-proclaimed strongest bestial Demon Lord in his beast form while staying in my humanoid form sent a message that couldn't be misinterpreted.
The Prince of Beasts didn't need to become a beast to handle the Beast King.
Carrion roared. My fox ears flattened against my skull and my tails fanned out behind me for balance as I dug my boots into the stone to avoid sliding backward.
Then he charged.
If humanoid Carrion was a freight train, beast Carrion was an avalanche. He crossed thirty meters in a time frame that physics should have rejected for something his size, each stride eating massive chunks of distance, his claws gouging parallel trenches in the treated stone floor. His mouth was open, revealing rows of teeth longer than my forearm.
I stepped inside of his leading claw swipe, close enough that his foreleg passed over my head, and drove an enhanced punch into the inside of his front knee joint. The joint buckled. Carrion stumbled, momentum carrying him forward and over me, and I used three tails as springs to launch myself onto his back.
From there it became a different kind of fight.
Carrion was bigger, and in beast form his raw strength and speed had multiplied considerably. But his attacks were wilder now. More instinctual. It made him more dangerous in a straight line and significantly more predictable in a curved one.
I'd grown up around yokai. Half my mother's council members struggled with the same internal war between civilized mind and bestial instinct, and Yasaka had taught me from childhood how to read the signs. The slight delay before a pounce while the beast brain overrode the tactical brain.
Carrion swiped at me with a paw the size of a dining table. I ducked under it, felt the displaced air ruffle my hair, and punched him in the ribs with a magicule burst that made his entire flank ripple like water.
He twisted and caught me with a backhand that I couldn't fully dodge. His knuckles clipped my right shoulder and sent me skidding across the arena floor, boots carving parallel lines through the stone.
A claw rake followed immediately, catching me across the chest before I could fully recover. Carrion's claws were incredible natural weapons. They tore through Shuna's magisteel thread outfit like it was cotton, slicing four parallel lines across my chest from collarbone to ribs. The cuts were shallow. My magicule-reinforced body reduced what should have been fatal lacerations to scratches that barely broke the surface, thin lines of red already closing as my natural regeneration kicked in.
Carrion lunged again, jaws wide enough to swallow me whole.
I caught his upper and lower jaw with both hands, one on each, and held his mouth open through sheer magicule-enhanced force while ten tails anchored me to the ground like golden roots. His breath was hot and smelled like raw meat and old blood, which was actually less unpleasant than some of the things I'd encountered in professional kitchens. His teeth strained against my grip, massive jaw muscles flexing with enough bite force to pulverize a boulder.
"You need a mint," I told him through gritted teeth. "Seriously. I can recommend some herbal remedies."
Carrion snarled and shook his head violently, trying to dislodge me. I let go, launched myself backward with a tail-assisted jump, and landed fifteen meters away in a crouch.
Okay. Enough playing.
Blue foxfire flickered to life along my forearms and tails, not the full inferno I could unleash, but enough to visibly wrap my fists in cold azure flames.
Carrion charged again. All-in, maximum speed, maximum power, every ounce of his beast-form strength committed to a single devastating pounce that would bring all twenty-five feet and god-knows-how-many-tons of Demon Lord beast crashing down on my position.
I moved forward to meet him.
In the last second before impact, I stepped right. His leading claw carved a canyon in the floor where I'd been standing. My left foot planted, my hips rotated, and I drove my right fist into his solar plexus with everything I had.
The magicules in my fist detonated on contact!
The sound was less a punch and more a thunderclap.
A deep, resonating BOOM that silenced every other sound in the arena and made the barrier wards flash white with overload warnings. The impact cratered the floor beneath us in a perfect circle, cracks radiating outward like a frozen shockwave.
Carrion's beast form shuddered. Every muscle locked. His eyes went wide, pupils contracting back to pinpoints, and a sound escaped his throat that was half wheeze, half whimper, entirely involuntary. His massive body curled inward around the point of impact as his lungs emptied completely and refused to refill.
The transformation collapsed. In seconds, humanoid Carrion was kneeling on the destroyed arena floor, both arms wrapped around his stomach, mouth open, struggling to remember how breathing worked.
I stood over him.
I exhaled slowly and let my magicule output return to resting levels, feeling the pleasant burn of exertion in muscles I didn't use often enough. My shirt was ruined, my shoulder ached where he'd clipped me, the scratches on my chest itched as the last of them sealed shut, and I was fairly certain I had stone dust in places stone dust had no business being.
Good fight.
Carrion sucked in a rattling breath. Then another. On the third, he managed to look up at me with amber eyes that held no anger, no resentment, and no bitterness. Just the calm, steady recognition of a predator who'd met a bigger predator and survived to acknowledge it.
"You..." He wheezed, grimaced, tried again. "You hit like the world's... angriest... earthquake."
"That's a new one. I'll add it to the list."
He coughed, spat blood onto the arena floor, and slowly straightened his back. "The Prince of Beasts," Carrion said, and the words carried weight. "I concede. The title's yours. You're the strongest beast-type I've ever faced, and I've been fighting since before half the nations in this world drew their first borders."
I extended my hand.
Carrion looked at it for a moment. Then he grabbed my forearm in a warrior's grip and hauled himself up using my body as an anchor, which nearly dragged me to the floor with him because the man still weighed approximately as much as a small building even in humanoid form.
"Appreciate the fight," I said, meaning it. "I don't get to cut loose like that often. Most things I fight either go down too fast or they're cosmic-level threats where cutting loose means accidentally deleting a mountain or two..."
We started walking back toward the corridor. Carrion moved stiffly but under his own power, pride or stubbornness or both keeping him upright. I walked beside him at his pace, in no rush. The projection crystal above us dimmed as we left the arena's central zone, the broadcast ending.
Then I heard it. Through the dimensional barrier. Through the ancient wards specifically designed and calibrated by some of the most powerful beings this world had ever produced to prevent exactly this kind of sound leakage. Through stone and magic and the fundamental laws of acoustics.
"HAAAAARUUUUUU! THAT WAS AMAZING! DID YOU SEE THAT PUNCH? EVERYONE SAW THAT PUNCH! HE WENT BOOM AND THEN WHOOOOSH AND THEN..."
Milim Nava's squeal of excitement cut through the sound barriers like they were made of wet paper. The pitch alone should have been physically impossible to transmit through that many layers of magical dampening, but Milim's enthusiasm operated on a frequency that beat out all that.
Carrion's steps faltered. "Good luck with that one," he said, his bruised face splitting into a grin that probably hurt. "She's a wild one, that girl."
"You're telling me. Come on," I said to Carrion, adjusting my ruined shirt in a futile attempt at presentability. "Might as well face the music. And by music I mean Milim at roughly a hundred and forty decibels."
Carrion clapped me on the shoulder.
We walked together toward the sound of Milim's voice, two beast-type Demon Lords who'd entered that arena as potential enemies and were leaving it as something that might eventually become friendship. Carrion, the Beast King who'd held his title for centuries and lost it with more grace than most people managed when losing at cards. And me, the kitsune chef who had never wanted titles or territory or political power and somehow kept accumulating all three despite his best efforts.
The door to the meeting chamber loomed ahead. Behind it, I could hear not just Milim now, but Ramiris chattering excitedly, Cortana saying something in a measured tone that was probably an analysis of the fight's biomechanical data, and what might have been Guy Crimson sighing.
Here we go.
I pushed the door open.
A pink blur hit me in the chest at approximately Mach 2…
…I peeled myself out of the wall.
And I do mean peeled.
The ancient enchanted stone of the Demon Lord meeting chamber, which had presumably survived centuries of political disagreements, magical outbursts, and whatever else happened when you put the most powerful beings in a dimension in the same room, had formed a perfect Haru-shaped crater around my body.
Chunks of rubble fell from the wall and shattered on the floor below, and I dropped the last three feet to land in a pile of my own debris.
Shuna's magisteel thread outfit, which had already been shredded across the chest by Carrion's claws, was now also caked in pulverized stone dust, cracked in several new places where the wall impact had stressed the weave past its tolerances.
I've had this outfit for less than an hour. I need to send that woman a gift basket.
Milim stood in front of me.
She was doing something I had witnessed fewer times than I had fingers on one hand. Her index fingers were pressed together in front of her chest, tapping nervously. Her pink hair fell forward slightly, partially obscuring her face as she looked up at me through her bangs with those large eyes. Her shoulders were hunched inward, making her seem impossibly small for someone who could shatter mountains with a casual backhand.
She looked sheepish.
Milim Nava. The Destroyer. The woman who had punched a True Dragon over the horizon earlier today because he'd insulted me. She was standing in front of me pressing her fingertips together and doing the single most adorable guilty expression since this was now the second time today she ruined my outfit.
"Sorry about that," she said. Then she giggled. A tiny, musical sound. "Ehehe."
I can count on one hand the number of times this woman has apologized for anything. And at least two of those were about food. The time she accidentally ate an entire banquet meant for forty people. And the time she tried to "help" Enri in the kitchen and vaporized a cutting board with her grip strength…
"Come here," I said. I reached out and placed my hand on top of her head. My fingers settled into her pink hair, warm and impossibly soft, and I scratched gently along her crown. Not rough. Not patronizing. The specific pressure and motion I'd learned she liked best over the weeks and months of our relationship, the one that made the buzzing restlessness behind her eyes go quiet and the tension in her absurdly powerful body melt away.
Milim's eyes fluttered closed. Her shoulders dropped. She tilted her head into my palm and made a sound that I could only describe as pure, distilled contentment. "Ehehe... ehehehe..."
The soft, happy giggling of an ancient Demon Lord being pet by her boyfriend in front of an audience of the most powerful beings in the world.
Somewhere behind us, Ramiris whispered, "Oh my gosh, that's so cute I might actually die."
"You've died before," Carrion muttered from the doorway, leaning against the frame with one hand still pressed against his stomach. He was watching us with a smirk that said he understood exactly what he was seeing. "Multiple times."
"And it never gets less traumatic!"
Eventually, and with visible reluctance, Milim pulled back. Her cheeks were flushed pink, her eyes bright and warm, and her smile was the kind that could cause structural damage to anyone with a functioning heart. "You were so cool," she said, the sheepishness fully gone now, replaced by the boundless enthusiasm that was her natural state. "That punch at the end? The big one? BOOM!" She mimed the solar plexus strike with both fists. "Carrion went all whoooosh and then his beast form went pfffff and he was just there on his knees going..." She imitated wheezing, badly. "It was the best thing I've ever seen and I've seen a LOT of fights!"
"Thank you, Milim."
"You're welcome! I'm going to make everyone watch it again later. Rimuru's people recorded it, right? RIMURU! Did your people record it?"
Rimuru, who had been standing near the table with the relaxed posture of a slime who had successfully navigated an extremely stressful political event, raised a hand in casual acknowledgment. "Nice fight," he said, and the simplicity of it carried more weight than a formal speech. Rimuru wasn't a man who wasted words on flattery. When he said something was good, he meant it.
"I aim to impress."
Guy Crimson spoke from his seat at the head of the table. He hadn't moved during any of the preceding chaos. Not during Milim's tackle. Not during my architectural excavation. Not during the head-patting.
"Well fought," he said. The words were measured and unhurried, carrying the authority of someone who had no need to raise his voice for the entire room to fall silent. "Both the matches tonight and the evening's proceedings as a whole. Rimuru Tempest, you have addressed the matter of Clayman decisively and without unnecessary collateral. Haru, the fox chef, you have answered a formal beast-type challenge with skill and restraint that speaks well of your character." He paused. Took a sip of wine. The pause felt deliberate, theatrical in the way that only someone who had been performing for millennia could manage. "Both of you have proven yourselves worthy of being named Demon Lords. Your titles stand unchallenged." His gaze swept the room once, confirming that no one present intended to dispute this. No one did. "I declare this Walpurgis adjourned."
I stared at him.
Wait.
I blinked.
What?
"That's it?" The words left my mouth before my brain could apply any kind of diplomatic filter. "We're just... done? Meeting over?"
Guy's eyebrow rose by approximately two millimeters, which on his face was the equivalent of a theatrical double-take. "Were you expecting something more?"
"I don't know. Closing statements? Maybe some light bureaucracy?"
Ramiris floated over to my shoulder. The tiny fairy Demon Lord had apparently extracted herself from her hot pot bowl at some point during the fights because she was no longer dripping broth, though I noticed a small piece of mushroom still stuck to her wing. She planted her hands on her hips and looked at me with the exasperated patience of a teacher explaining something very obvious to a very slow student.
"We get together every couple of years," she said, as if this was the most self-evident thing in the world. "Mostly just to say hi and stuff. Catch up. See who's still alive, who's evolved, who's plotting against who. Sometimes someone does something dumb and we deal with it." She jerked a tiny thumb toward the arena corridor where Clayman had met his end. "Like that. But yeah, that's basically it."
"The most exclusive and powerful gathering in your entire world," I said slowly, "is a potluck with occasional murder."
"When you say it like that it sounds way less prestigious," Ramiris huffed. "There's also the political posturing! And the veiled threats! Those are very important traditions!"
All that stress. All that preparation. The outfit, the cooking, the political calculations, the mental contingency plans for seventeen different disaster scenarios. And the Walpurgis Banquet is essentially a biannual check-in where ancient monsters eat snacks and sometimes kill each other over disagreements.
If someone had just told me that from the start, I would have been perfectly calibrated for this event. This is literally just a dinner service with difficult customers. I do this every day!
Valentine rose from her seat. The vampire Demon Lord moved with the fluid, unhurried grace of someone who measured time in centuries and saw no reason to rush through any of them. She stopped near me. Her dark eyes assessed me with an intensity that felt less like scrutiny and more like appraisal.
"I will consider visiting your restaurant," she said. "Fox chef." The phrasing was deliberately noncommittal. The tone was not. Valentine had already decided she was coming.
"Door's always open," I said.
She held my gaze for one more second, then turned and walked away. Her attendants followed. The chamber's exit swallowed them in shadow and they were gone.
I glanced toward Leon Cromwell's seat….
It was empty.
The man had vanished the instant Guy said "adjourned," possibly before the word had fully left Guy's mouth.
I've met hermit monks with better people skills.
Carrion had already departed as well, accompanied by his retainers. He'd caught my eye on the way out and given me a single nod. Warrior to warrior. Beast king to beast prince. And then a small grin.
Frey left shortly after with her hawk-featured attendant, the one who'd repeatedly complained about my selective serving policies. She inclined her head toward me as she passed. Not warmth, exactly, but acknowledgment. I'd fed her the best meal of her extremely long life and she wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
Dagruel simply stood up and walked out, each footstep shaking the floor, his bathtub-sized bowl left conspicuously empty on the table.
Then a voice I didn't recognize spoke from beside Guy Crimson's chair.
"Milim."
The voice was cool and precise, carrying the particular authority of an eldest sibling who had been managing family chaos since before the concept of "family" had been invented. I turned to look at the speaker and my fox senses immediately screamed at me with the same intensity they reserved for beings that existed on a fundamentally different scale than everything around them.
She smelled like dragon.
True Dragon. That's a True Dragon. That's THE True Dragon. The eldest one. Velzard.
"Don't go bullying Veldora so much," Velzard said, her eyes fixed on Milim with an expression that blended sisterly exasperation with genuine warning. "He's dramatic and foolish and his taste in literature is embarrassing, but he's still my younger brother. If you keep launching him over horizons every time he says something you don't like, eventually he'll land somewhere I'll have to spend actual effort retrieving him from."
Milim grumbled something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like "he deserved it" but didn't push back further. Even Milim, who feared nothing in creation, seemed to recognize that arguing with the eldest True Dragon about her sibling required more energy than it was worth.
Velzard's gaze shifted to me. Those glacial blue eyes conducted an assessment that lasted approximately one and a half seconds and felt like it lasted far longer. Whatever conclusion she reached, she kept to herself. She turned back to Guy, who had finished his wine and set the glass down with a soft clink.
"Shall we?" he said, rising from his seat.
Velzard said nothing. She simply placed her hand on his offered arm, and the two of them vanished. No flash of light, no dramatic portal, no lingering magical residue. One frame they were there, the next they weren't. The kind of teleportation that said "we could make this look impressive if we wanted to, but we've been alive so long that showing off feels tedious."
The chamber fell quiet.
The enormous table, which had hosted negotiations that shaped civilizations and had most recently hosted my hot pot, sat empty except for scattered bowls, abandoned chopsticks, and a faint residual aroma of chrysanthemum and bone broth. My portable cooking station was still set up where I'd left it, the burner extinguished but the pot still warm.
It was just us now. Me, Milim, Rimuru, and our people. Oh, and Ramiris I guess but she looked like she was scoping out if there was any food left…
The tension that had been holding the room together simply... dissolved. I felt my shoulders drop.
We looked at each other.
"Those guys are weird," Rimuru said.
"Incredibly weird."
"But chill, I guess? Mostly?"
"Guy's chill in the way that a volcano is chill between eruptions. Leon is chill in the way that an empty room is chill. Ramiris is..." I glanced at the fairy, who was attempting to climb back into her hot pot bowl. "Ramiris."
"That's fair." Rimuru scratched the back of his head. "Valentine's going to show up at your restaurant within a week. You know that, right?"
"Counting on it. I'm already planning a menu. Vampire palate probably skews toward iron-rich proteins and deep, complex umami profiles. Maybe a rare wagyu with a blood orange reduction. Black garlic. Something with depth."
Rimuru stared at me. "You just fought a Demon Lord beast king to submission and you're already planning your next dinner service."
"Priorities, Rimuru."
He shook his head, but he was smiling.
The sound of deliberate footsteps pulled my attention sideways. Cortana was walking toward me. There was no other word for it than strutting. Each step was measured, heel-to-toe in those midnight blue heels, her hips shifting with a rhythm that was equal parts calculated and natural. She was still wearing the bunny outfit. Of course. The low-cut top pushed her generous breasts upward, and each confident step sent them bouncing in a way that was blatantly, unapologetically intentional. The diamond-shaped cutout at her stomach revealed blue skin where binary code occasionally rippled in cascading lines, and the tall bunny ears on her head somehow managed to look both ridiculous and devastatingly sexy at the same time.
Don't stare. Don't stare. You're in public. There are people. Important people. Rimuru is right there.
I stared.
She stopped in front of me. Close.
Her eyes dropped to my chest. My very exposed chest, where Carrion's claws had torn Shuna's outfit into ribbons and the wall impact had finished the job. Four parallel scratch marks, already healed but still faintly pink, ran from my collarbone to my lower ribs.
Cortana raised one hand and pressed a single finger against my skin just below my collarbone. Then she dragged it slowly downward, tracing the path of the longest scratch with deliberate, feather-light pressure. Her touch was warm. Warmer than I expected.
"That," she said, her voice pitched low enough that it was technically private despite the fact that we were standing in the middle of a room with multiple people, "was a really great fight."
"Thanks. I try."
Her finger reached the bottom of the scratch and paused at my lower ribs. She didn't remove it. Instead, she traced a slow, lazy circle on my skin, her luminous blue eyes locked onto mine.
"I collected a lot of data during your match," she continued. "Heart rate escalation patterns. Magicule distribution efficiency. Musculoskeletal stress responses. Combat kinematic analysis." She leaned in, close enough that I could feel her breath against my jaw, and the word that followed was delivered with the kind of emphasis that turned clinical vocabulary into something entirely different. "Exciting data."
My fourth tail twitched. Cortana's eyes flicked to it and a smile spread across her face. The smile of a woman who had catalogued every involuntary response my body made and knew exactly which ones meant what.
"My lord was amazing." Sif's voice came from my right. Closer than I expected. She had moved from her position behind my chair with the silent precision of a warrior closing distance on a target, which in this case was the approximately eighteen inches of space between me and Cortana that she apparently considered contested territory.
She stepped into that space now. Not subtly. With the deliberate, armored weight of a True Goddess of War who had been watching a blue-skinned woman in a bunny costume run her finger down her lord's bare chest for approximately fifteen seconds longer than she deemed acceptable. Her dwarf-forged armor caught the ambient light of the chamber, the polished metal and strategic gaps gleaming, and her dark eyes were fixed on Cortana with an intensity that could have been used to forge weapons.
"Your combat instincts were flawless," Sif continued, addressing me but angled so that her shoulder was between Cortana's wandering finger and my chest. "The way you read his patterns and dismantled his offense systematically. Your adaptability when he shifted to beast form. The restraint in staying humanoid to make the political statement. It was..." Her voice softened, and something genuine and warm broke through the warrior's composure. "It was an honor to witness, my lord." Then, without breaking eye contact with me, she added in a whisper that was clearly, deliberately loud enough for Cortana's enhanced hearing to catch: "Slutty bunny AI."
Cortana's finger stopped its lazy circles on my skin. Her eyebrows rose. She leaned back just enough to look past my shoulder at Sif with an expression of pure, unfiltered incredulity.
"Excuse me?"
"I said nothing."
"Your exact words were 'slutty bunny AI.' I have perfect audio recall. I could play it back for you if you'd like, with timestamps."
Sif's jaw tightened. "Then perhaps I did say it. And perhaps the observation has merit."
Cortana's scoff was a masterwork of indignation. She placed one hand on her hip and gestured at Sif's armor with the other. The armor that covered exactly enough to qualify as armor and not a single square centimeter more. The armor whose revealing design had been justified by three very nervous dwarves claiming "thermal regulation" while Haru tried not to laugh.
"You're wearing a metal bikini that a blacksmith designed specifically to show off your legs, your stomach, your arms, and approximately seventy percent of your cleavage, and you're calling ME the slutty one?"
"My armor is a functional combat chassis designed by master dwarven smiths with centuries of metallurgical expertise."
"Your armor is a thirst trap forged in a volcano and you know it!"
Sif's cheeks colored. Not much. Just enough to confirm that Cortana's assessment had landed somewhere in the vicinity of the truth.
"The thermal regulation properties are well-documented," Sif said stiffly.
"Uh huh. And the way you positioned yourself between me and Haru just now was thermal regulation too, I suppose?"
"Protective positioning is a standard bodyguard protocol."
"You're not his bodyguard tonight. You're his attendant. And attendants stand behind their lord's chair, which is where you were until I started touching him."
They glared at each other across the narrow space that contained my body. I stood between them like a man caught between two weather systems, one arctic and precise, one electric and calculating, both of them fundamentally concerned with the same central question of who got to stand closest to me.
Milim, who had been vibrating quietly at my side this entire time, chose this moment to wrap both arms around my left arm and press her entire body against me with the territorial confidence of a Demon Lord who outranked everyone in the room by several orders of magnitude.
"You're both being silly," she announced. "Haru's mine first. I called dibs. Centuries ago probably."
"You called dibs three months ago," Cortana corrected.
"Centuries in Milim-time!"
Rimuru caught my eye from across the room. His expression was the complex blend of sympathy, amusement, and profound gratitude that it wasn't him that I had come to recognize as the universal male response to watching a friend navigate multiple possessive women.
"Good luck," he mouthed silently.
Thanks, buddy. Really helpful.
I looked at Milim clinging to my left arm. At Cortana's finger still hovering near my chest. At Sif standing close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from her skin through the gaps in her armor. Three incredibly powerful, incredibly beautiful, incredibly competitive women who had all decided that the immediate post-Walpurgis moment was the appropriate time to establish territorial boundaries.
My tails wagged.
All ten of them, golden and traitorous.
XXX