Chapter 917: Young Master’s Keepers: Ryuzen Raizen Hayashi
Chapter 917: Young Master’s Keepers: Ryuzen Raizen Hayashi
Because the rest of her was no contradiction at all on the surface — gold, holy, luminous, the textbook article — but threaded all the way through that light, low and sweet and deeply wrong, ran something dark.
Something that did not belong inside a being who glowed like that and yet had clearly made itself at home there and coiled comfortably in the marrow of all that radiance.
Angels did not carry dark power.
It was practically the entire premise of being an angel. And this one wore both at once and seemed entirely untroubled by the blasphemy of it.
Anahita, the woman was called.
And the moment Yuzuki had matched the name to the wings, the cold had crept back in — because she knew that name, and she knew its master.
This one was not the dragon’s; not in the slightest.
’This Anahita answered to the Heavenchilds. Anahita answers, specifically, to Marcus, and Marcus doesn’t seem the type to loan out his angel to guard the necks of his enemies.’
So whatever this radiant, horned, dark-veined thing was doing trailing Phei down from the hotel — it was not protection. It was positioning.
A blade laid quietly across the table, smiling, while the real game was still being dealt.
She flew just below Yuzuki now, near enough that — had Yuzuki possessed the strength — a single clean strike could have ended her before she finished a wingbeat.
Unfortunately Yuzuki did not possess that strength, not against this one.
The one small mercy in the whole arrangement was that Anahita couldn’t see her either — which meant the horned angel sat, like Yuzuki, somewhere below the Immortal Realm.
Brilliant. Lethal. But not yet beyond reach of a god’s intervention, if it came to that.
’Fuck, she’s hot, though.’
The thought arrived uninvited, and Yuzuki scowled at it on reflex, because admitting another woman outclassed her in anything — even this — went against her entire personal religion, and admitting it about an enemy was frankly treason against the self.
She amended it immediately, with great dignity:
’Below me, obviously. Marginally. And she works for the wrong side, which cancels the face and her hot curves out entirely. Hmph.’
As if Yuzuki Hayashi would ever, under torture, concede the point further than that.
The fourth shadow she knew best of all, and feared most of all, which was its own small private joke at her expense.
’Brother,’ She thought with a smile.
Ryuzen Raizen Hayashi was also one of the Young Master’s Keepers, as she’d taken to calling the lot of them — and Ryuzen was no mere blade in the set; Ryuzen was the reason the rest of the set could afford to be careless.
A faster killer than her. Cleaner. A monster wearing a man’s face and wearing it so well that strangers smiled at him on the street, which Yuzuki found endlessly, darkly funny, because smiling at Ryuzen was a thing you only got to do on account of him allowing you to keep the face you were doing it with.
A Demigod-stage powerhouse.
And the world did not seem to understand what those syllables meant until it was already too late to run.
He was on the road itself, down at street level, keeping pace with Phei’s car — and keeping pace did the thing no justice at all.
The asphalt behind him didn’t crack so much as remember him, each footfall pressing a shadow crater into ground that had been laid to survive decades of traffic and would now carry the ghost of his stride until it was repaved by light.
The air did not part for him. It fled as it tore itself open along the line of his body with a sound like silk being shredded by something that hated silk, a thin shrieking seam of displaced atmosphere that snapped shut behind him in little thunderclaps the mortals in the cars would feel as nothing more than an odd pressure behind the eyes, a sudden urge to roll the windows up.
His blade rode at his hip, and his hand rested on the hilt and Yuzuki knew, with the specific certainty of someone who had sparred against that hand and lost, that if he drew it the world on either side of the stroke would simply become two worlds, cleanly, before either half understood it had been divorced.
Each of his stride deleted the space in front of him; Deleted it — the distance between Ryuzen and the car was collapsing by the meter with every step, geography itself conceding the argument and folding up to get out of his way.
Yuzuki called it running. From where she floated, it was nothing of the sort.
Ryuzen was walking — just walking faster, that was all, a man strolling at a brisk pace toward an appointment he refused to be late for — and the obscenity of that was the whole point.
Because this, this earthquake on two legs that out-paced a speeding luxury car without troubling his breathing, was him being gentle.
He was throttled down to a fraction of a fraction so as not to liquefy the road or deafen the island.
If her brother had decided to genuinely run — to actually open up, even halfway — he’d have swallowed a full kilometer in two unhurried seconds and he would’ve left a vacuum behind him that would’ve imploded every pane of glass in the hotel and arrived at the horizon before the sound of his first step finished reaching it.
There was a weight to standing near a being like that.
A pressure.
The air around a Demigod did not behave; it leaned away, it held its breath, it carried a low constant hum that the oldest part of the brain recognised as the sound a predator’s territory makes.
Yuzuki had grown up inside that pressure, had eaten breakfast across a table from it, and even she — Sky Sovereign — felt the small involuntary shiver move down her back when she watched him move like this, and she let it come, because pretending otherwise would have been a lie even she was too proud to tell.
She called him Daddy’s little kitten making him deflate in front of crowds and she’d been winning that war since they were children and intended to die undefeated in it.
And she was also, quietly, bone-deep terrified of him.
Both things, at once, with no contradiction whatsoever.
That was simply what family was — loving a thing and knowing precisely what it could do to a city, and ruffling its hair anyway.
Four shadows.
Maybe five, if a girl was being honest enough to count Consort in the tally—
The Young Master’s Keepers; the whole ridiculous murder of them — strung out across sky and street and shadow, every one drawn after a single oblivious boy in a luxury car.
But Keepers was a soft word for it, a word that assumed they were all on the same side, and they were nothing of the sort.
They trailed him for entirely different reasons, and at least one of those reasons wore gold wings and answered to a man who wanted the dragon opened up and drained.
A Monster who wanted to keep him, in the way a collector keeps a thing under glass.
An angel with horns who served the Heavenchilds and smiled while she waited for whatever Marcus had actually sent her to do.
A Demigod brother sworn to the Empress, walking the road like a guillotine that had learned to pace itself.
And Yuzuki herself, sworn to the princess, sent to watch the Monster watch the boy — a watcher watching a watcher watching a watcher, the whole thing folding in on itself like a joke with no punchline, or worse, with one nobody had heard yet.
If even one thread in that knot pulled the wrong way — if the Monster moved early, if the angel’s dark half decided which half it answered to, if Ryuzen’s hand ever closed the last inch around that hilt — this beautiful, arrogant island was going to be baptized in blood before the night arrived.
And there were not enough of them on the dragon’s side of the tally to be sure of who’d still be standing when the water cleared.
Yuzuki exhaled into the high cold wind, fingers drifting to the scabbard at her hip.
She feared it. She just wasn’t sure, anymore, whether the thing curling in her stomach was dread or anticipation, or whether at the Sovereign stage there had ever really been a difference between the two.