The walk was my idea.
Nagi came because Nagi does not have strong opinions about where he is at any given moment, which makes him either the perfect person to bring somewhere or completely useless company depending on what you need. I needed someone to listen to me complain. He would do that. He would do it while staring at nothing in particular and occasionally making sounds that could mean anything, but he would be physically present, and right now that was the requirement.
The Shinjuku streets at four in the afternoon are genuinely offensive to the senses. Not in a way I hate. Just loud. All of it happening at once, the trains and the signs and the absolute wall of people moving in every direction like they each individually decided this exact spot was where they needed to be right now. Four centuries in the lower realms and I still can't fully process the way humans cluster. Back home, if that many things occupied that small a space, someone was about to start a war.
Here they were just buying coffee.
Nagi stopped in front of the convenience store two blocks from the apartment. He looked at the door. Looked at me.
"I'm not going in," I said.
He went in.
I waited outside with my bucket hat pulled low and my hands in my pockets. A woman walked past and did a double take at my face.
Nagi came out four minutes later with a bag that was already open, a rice ball in one hand and a bag of chips tucked under his arm. He handed me nothing. He started walking.
I fell into step beside him.
"He's doing it again," I said.
Nagi ate his rice ball.
"The whole thing where he just decides things and then announces them like they're already done. Like he consulted us. He did not consult us. He never consults us."
"Mm."
"He's older, fine. He negotiated the deal, fine. That doesn't mean he gets to wake up one morning and decide that I, specifically, need to attend high school. As a student. With homework."
The corner of Nagi's mouth moved slightly.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to say something."
"I was eating."
The street opened up into a wider stretch with a row of benches along one side. I dropped onto one. Nagi sat next to me with the unhurried quality of someone who had been planning to sit down eventually and this location was as good as any other.
He opened the chips.
The smell hit me immediately. Salt and something artificial that should not be appealing and was. I looked at him. He held the bag out in my direction.
"Not now."
He shrugged. Ate a chip. Looked at the street.
I pulled my bucket hat down another centimeter. Two kids on bikes went past too fast and one of them almost clipped a pedestrian and neither of them looked back. I watched this happen with the calm of someone who has seen civilizations collapse and can still find individual human chaos mildly funny.
"Kou gets to stream," I said.
Nagi chewed.
"He's sitting at that table building his entire brand from scratch in real time and Reiji is in there going good, good, you're doing great, keep accumulating. And Aoi gets to go with Reiji to meet the production teams. They're out there making actual connections and I'm being handed a school uniform."
"Reiji thinks the school will help."
"Reiji thought the coalition wouldn't reach our sector until the third quarter too and look how that went."
Nagi ate another chip. He had the energy of someone who found this conversation mildly interesting in the way he found most things mildly interesting, which meant he was paying complete attention and giving back almost nothing.
"Explain to me," I said, "what is so special about this school. Youtou High. As a concept. What does it have that justifies sending me there instead of literally anywhere else."
"Performing arts."
"I can perform. I've been performing since before their grandparents were born. I don't need a curriculum for it."
"Connections."
"Reiji said that."
"Reiji's usually right."
"That's not the point."
Nagi looked at me sideways. Not with any particular expression. Just with those grey eyes that always made me feel like I was being quietly filed away under a category he hadn't named yet.
"The point," he said, "is that you're annoyed you don't get to decide things."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
"That's not—" I stopped. "That's a contributing factor. It's not the whole thing."
Nagi ate a chip. Returned his attention to the street. He had the absolute audacity to look comfortable about this.
I sat back against the bench and looked up at the sky. Tokyo sky in the afternoon is this specific grey-white that isn't quite overcast but isn't quite clear either. Everything in this city exists in a middle state. The lower realms had no middle states. You were powerful or you weren't. You held your territory or you lost it. Clean lines.
Here everything bleeds into everything else and nobody seems bothered by it.
I pulled out my phone.
Three weeks ago I thought these things were beneath us. I remember looking at the human world from the observation points in my realm, watching them walk around with their little glowing rectangles, and thinking about how much they needed it. A demon doesn't need a device to access information. A demon reaches, and the information comes.
Except I'm in a world where reaching doesn't work and these things absolutely do.
The phone is a cheap model, the kind that Kou found on sale at an electronics shop and handed out to each of us without ceremony. Mine has a crack in one corner already from when Hibiki dropped it while refusing to admit he'd been holding it. The screen is bright enough that I have to tilt my bucket hat up slightly to see it without glare.
These things are going back with me when we leave. The whole realm is getting access. I don't care what it takes. Whatever they run on, we're importing it.
I pulled up the browser and typed in: Youtou High School notable students.
The results were immediate. I scrolled past the school's own website, past a few social media aggregators, and stopped on a fan forum thread titled: youtou elite tier ranking updated 2024 who do you agree with.
I opened it.
The first name on the list was someone called Kousei Arima. The post had a photo, a kid who looked about my apparent age, dark hair, serious face, the kind of person who has clearly spent more time indoors than out. The writeup was substantial.
Piano prodigy, practically grew up on stage, stopped performing for a few years after some kind of incident and had recently come back to competition. There was a whole timeline.
Comments in the thread called him a genius at a level that makes you feel bad about your own life which, fair, but also these people have no reference point for actual supernatural talent.
Below his entry was a link to his older sister's profile. Kana Arima. Child actress, currently still active, apparently had a period where her career stalled and had been rebuilding momentum.
Her photo was different from her brother's. She looked directly at the camera like she'd decided before the photo was taken that the photo would go how she wanted it to go.
I filed both of them somewhere in the back of my head and kept scrolling.
The next section of the thread was titled something that made me pause.
The Goddesses of Youtou.
I looked at this heading for a moment. Then I looked at Nagi.
"This school has students they've named goddesses."
Nagi reached into his chip bag. "Mm."
I scrolled down.
The first name was Frill Shiranui. The thread had a full breakdown. Actress, apparently multi-talented in the way that means she can actually do multiple things rather than just being packaged as someone who can. There were clips linked, stills from productions, a few screenshots from industry publications calling her one of the most complete performers to come out of the school's current generation.
Her photo showed someone who understood exactly what a camera was for and had made peace with that knowledge young. Sharp. Not in an aggressive way. In the way of someone who keeps track.
The second name was Marin Kitagawa.
Her photo loaded and I stopped scrolling.
Model. The thread said model but the photo made that word feel insufficient. She had her own billboard in Shibuya, apparently multiple, and there were links to the campaigns. Silver hair, a face that the camera genuinely did not know how to be neutral about, and this quality in the way she carried herself that made every surface she stood on look like it was specifically designed for her to stand on.
The thread called her the school's most visible public figure, and looking at the linked billboard photo, I understood why. You can't walk through Shibuya ignoring that face. It doesn't allow it.
The third entry was Minami Kotobuki.
Her photo loaded.
I tilted my phone slightly.
"Nice tits," I said.
Nagi leaned over and looked at the screen.
He chewed his chip slowly. Looked at the photo. Looked at me. "What you think, Nagi?"
He considered this with the gravity he applied to all things, which was none and also all of it at once.
"She looks comfortable," he said.
I stared at him. "That's what you got from that."
"She's not performing for the camera."
"She absolutely is. She's a gravure model. That is the job."
"She's performing but she's comfortable doing it." He sat back. "Different thing."
I looked at the photo again. He wasn't wrong, exactly. There was something in the way she looked at the lens that wasn't put on. Like the performance and the person had been the same thing for long enough that she'd stopped tracking the difference.
I closed that tab. Opened the one about Marin again for a moment. Closed it.
Opened it again.
"You're going to come to school eventually," I said, mostly to myself. I meant the phone. I also maybe meant the girls on the phone.
Nagi ate another chip.
"The school makes sense," I said. I didn't say it loud. It was more in the direction of the street than at Nagi, but he heard it because he hears everything and just chooses what to acknowledge.
He said nothing. Held the chip bag out again.
I took one this time.
The chip was aggressively salty and tasted like the artificial version of something that was probably fine in its original form. I ate it.
Reiji was right about the connections. I know he's right. I knew it before I left the apartment. Four centuries of territorial strategy tells you when someone is making the correct move and Reiji has been making correct moves since before most of the group existed.
I pocketed the phone and looked at the street.
"These students," I said, "are going to be insufferable."
Nagi shook the chip bag to get the crumbs. Looked into it. Satisfied with the results.
"Probably," he said. He folded the empty bag neatly, which was something I'd noticed he always did, this careful folding of things that were already finished with. He tucked it in his pocket. "But you'll be fine."
"I'm always fine."
"You'll be interesting, then."
I pulled my bucket hat back down. "I'm always that too."
Nagi stood up. Looked at the direction of the apartment. Looked at me.
"Still want to walk?" he said.
I didn't move for a second. Sat there with the late afternoon light doing what it was doing and the city doing what it was doing and three days sitting somewhere between me and the rest of whatever this was going to be.
"Yeah," I said. "Little longer."