(New Leaf) Canicular 8 (Patreon)

Koneko

Buchou and I were waiting patiently in one of the mansion's living rooms when Naruto-kun and Norika walked in through one of the sliding back doors, my plain-looking friend’s head swiveling slightly to take a subtly gobsmacked look around at the size of the place.

We’d teleported over when he had texted us to meet him here, saying that there’d been a situation and he was bringing a friend. For that friend to be Norika surprised me though. As far as I knew, she didn’t have any connections to the supernatural.

“Welcome to our home,” Rias stood up from the couch to greet the girl with a polite warmth. “Come on in and take a seat wherever you’re comfortable. You probably already know by now, but my name is Rias Gremory.”

Other than Naruto-kun’s sword missing its cane-sheath, the only sign that anything had happened to the two was a few extra wrinkles and scuffs of dirt on their clothes, mostly just on Naruto’s though.

Norika smiled slightly, some of the unconscious tension dropping from her shoulders when the door slid shut behind her. “It’s nice to finally meet you Gremory-senpai, my name is Amatsu Norika. Koneko-chan, Uzumaki-kun, and Akeno-senpai sometimes talk about you.”

“Only good things, I hope?” Rias asked with a wry smile, glancing between me and an innocently whistling Naruto-kun.

Norika just gave a slightly teasing smile of her own, regaining some color to her face in the welcoming atmosphere. 

Rias chuckled. “Anyways, let me get everyone drinks while you’re settling in. I have a feeling we’ll want to get comfortable before getting into it.

After she took our preferences and walked out of the room to the kitchen, Norika practically fell onto the couch beside me when her legs gave out, finally relaxing fully enough for the adrenaline crash to set in.

“I still remember my first time in a real combat scenario that threatened my life,” Naruto-kun said with a sympathetic smile as he sat down on the couch across from us, carefully laying his sword down on the center table to not scratch the furniture. “Even with years of training, I completely froze up and had to get saved by my teammate,” He chuckled. “Adrenaline is weird like that. Most people don’t know it, but the fight-or-flight response is actually the fight, flight, or freeze stress response. The fact that you were able to give me a callout in time is proof that you reacted better than I did my first time.”

“Uzumaki-kun…” Norika just sighed, slumping further back into the cushions with her arms crossed over her stomach. “No offense, but if I’m never there to witness a fight like that again in my life, it would still be too soon. I’m happy living as a normal girl. I’ll just stick to having tea parties with Mitsuri-chan, and watching you and Koneko-chan be cute together, thank you very much.”

I tilted my head, ignoring the feeling of warmth rushing to my cheeks at the last part of her comment. “How much does she know?” I asked Naruto-kun. “You didn’t explain anything in the text.”

My whiskered friend shrugged. “I didn’t ask. I was more concerned with getting here quickly and making sure she was alright up here after what happened.” He tapped a finger to his head for emphasis.

“You could just ask me… I’m right here you know…” Norika whined.

I reached up and patted her head like a puppy. “There there.”

She gave an uncharacteristic snort for a laugh, before freezing, a contemplative look on her face.

“... Koneko-chan is petting me, so it’s only fair if I can return the favor, right?” She muttered, before turning her head slowly to look at me, her eyes focusing on the top of my head with an intensity.

‘I’m in danger,’ I thought wryly.

Norika reached over with shining eyes to pat my head and-

“NyAaAh~?!” A weird sound escaped me.

-rubbed my ears?!

Somehow, despite having my nekoshou ears hidden right now, Norika’s fingers brushed through my fur, scritching my ears instead of passing through the sort-of empty space like they should have. I released their physical forms reflexively a moment later, still mentally reeling from the surprisingly odd feeling.

“Woah, how’d you do that Norika-chan?” Naruto-kun asked with a grin.

“I would like to know too.” Rias finally came back into the room with a tray of cups and a curiously amused tone of voice. Norika’s fingers paused in their ministrations as she looked behind us to watch my [King] approaching.

“I see the things other people don’t.” She said simply. “It’s hard to explain. Since I’ve always tried to ignore it and live normally, I don’t actually know much about any of it at all– just that these things exist hidden from the public and I can see through it for some reason.” She shrugged. “I’ve known you were all different than normal people from the start.

“Is that how you noticed the invisible Fallen guy earlier?” Naruto-kun said something really important just now, and my eyes snapped to him while Norika tensed slightly.

I began opening my mouth to get him to expand on that-

-But a purr came out instead, my eyes partially closing involuntarily when Norika continued her scritching in just the right place while she nodded at him in confirmation. “Mmhm.”

“Well, it seems like it’s even more important for us to hear your news than you thought.” Rias set the tray on the table and sat down next to Naruto-kun with an interested look. “We met with an interesting pair of individuals just a bit before you messaged us, individuals who I believe will be relevant to the situation.”

“Alright,” Naruto-kun nodded with a light shrug. “I kinda hoped Kiba would be here to hear this and give his input too, but I guess we can rope him in whenever he’s free.”

“Of course.” Rias agreed, sitting straighter in focus.

“So it went like this…”

(Several minutes of explanation later)

“And she asked you to take it? Just like that?” Rias had a satisfied smile of victory on her face as she spoke, while I furrowed my brows in concentration.

Concentration that was being heavily distracted by my awareness of Norika’s eyes snapping to my swishing tail whenever it appeared in her vision with something bordering what I would call hyper-fixation. For someone who was “good at ignoring things she saw”, she sure did drop the act entirely now that her pretext of ignorance to my extra traits was gone. She barely even reacted when told the sword they’d encountered was a fragment of the real, original, Excalibur.

Nope, she just wanted to keep petting me.

Buchou and I had switched spots during the recounting of events when Naruto-kun mentioned his self-injured ankle, so now I was sitting next to him, hand-in-hand to heal him.

If our fingers had laced together at some point, the other two hadn’t called us out on it, though Rias smirked teasingly.

She almost definitely could have healed his ankle herself without worry, but after that first scare when Akeno did so months ago, we agreed that it was safest if he only received healing from a senjutsu user whenever possible to not take chances.

Ironically, Akeno was now almost at a level with her senjutsu sensory skill that she could be added back onto that very short list of people.

Until then though, it was up to me. And I had noticed something interesting...

“Yeah, she didn’t want anything to do with it.” Naruto nodded with a solemn frown, his fists clenching audibly to my ears. “The Fallen apparently slaughtered his way through all their workers when he went and picked it up. She said she only arrived as he was leaving, and she’s pretty fast, so he had to have done it in a hurry to beat their emergency response time. It probably wasn’t just a bloodthirsty maniac deciding to kill them out of some twisted sense of amusement, since it was so thorough. It was planned.”

It wasn’t really a ‘thing’ that I noticed, but more like a feeling of ‘there’s nothing there’. It was similar to that first night at the warehouse, but different, for two reasons.

The first, was that this felt– strangely– comfortably warm compared to what I’ve experienced of normal holy aura, even while my senses couldn’t directly, well, sense it.

“That’s… that could be important.” Rias grimaced at the news. “... Let’s set that to the side for a moment though. Before that, where did you leave Transparency? We need to make sure it’s safe and secure before anyone else finds out about any of this.”

The second…

Naruto-kun opened his mouth with amused eyes, but I had finished tracing the path of the aura by following the side effects of it moving through his body. There was a trail of cells brimming with the brightest, most warm and welcoming energy I’ve felt before, even more than Kurama’s, leading from a spot just between his fourth and fifth gates, up to his shoulders, and down both his arms.

“It’s on the table,” I answered, getting a confused glance from Buchou when she looked at the obviously mundane cane-sword.

Norika giggled when the blonde pouted at my interruption, but an unmistakably holy aura suddenly filled the room a moment later anyway. Despite that, it somehow didn’t feel uncomfortable or dangerous to me in the slightest.

“W-wait, what?” Rias did a double-take at the legendary sword appearing on the table in front of her, stumbling over the first word in surprise. “You’re telling me-?!”

The moment I’d laced my own chakra through his body, I’d noticed the pipeline-like gap where my energy was disrupted. When I’d then synchronized my chakra with his being– a new trick I’d figured out recently, effectively doing the same thing the mysterious sage must have done to share their lifeforce with him– the connection between him and the sword had popped into my perception like lifting a veil. That trail of his chakra, previously hidden within the aura of Transparency, extended from his free palm to the slender holy sword beside his cane-sword

“... Yeah,” I nodded at my [King] distractedly. “It didn’t reject him.”

Along the path of flowing energy in his body, the piecemeal parts of his chakra network I’d previously fit back together showed signs of being nudged back out of place (I nudged them back), even as the surrounding cells were recovering to healthier states than I’d ever seen them. Normally his chakra coils were supposed to be what directed his energy, but it seemed like Transparency had decided that it would just do it itself, using its Light to make a path for the connection to work. For the first time, I felt what my friend and sensei’s own chakra felt like, almost losing focus on the world around me as I basked in it.

And all of it came from one little structure; the same gate that Kurama’s energy usually pulsed out of, with the parts of Naruto’s chakra network surrounding it seeming to be– if not fully, then at least mostly– healed by now, the rejuvenating properties of Kurama’s Yang passively doing my job better than I could currently.

“This Light…” Rias leaned forward in deep curiosity, slowly reaching a hand out towards the blade. “It’s not setting off my sense of danger…”

“Should it be?” Norika asked curiously, no longer totally entranced by my cat-like features. “Oh! It’s because your energy is naturally dark, right?”

“Huh?” Rias snapped out of her revery and looked at my classmate, before it dawned on her. “Oh, right, I forgot you haven’t been taught the major details yet.” She released her bat-like wings. “I am a devil from the Underworld, heiress to the Gremory clan referenced in the Ars Goetia of the Christian mythology. The short of it is that most religious pantheons and mythologies are real to some extent, though many of the details that humanity has recorded have either changed over time or were incorrect assumptions from the start. For example, accepting the souls of contractors as payment for a deal has been heavily frowned upon in devil society for centuries. We mostly deal in money, services owed, and other commonly tradeable goods nowadays.”

She returned her attention to the sword as Norika hummed in understanding. “Back to your question though, you’re half right. Dark-aligned beings like Devils and Youkai are weak to light in general, both natural light and the magical element, but Holy Light specifically is outright anathema to Devils, its Holy aspect being so poisonous to us that it can destroy our very souls.” Buchou tilted her head, fascinated. “By all rights, I shouldn’t be able to feel so at ease while being this close to one of these blades…”

“It’s because of Naruto-kun,” I stated, metaphorically poking at the connection just a tiny bit.

“Me?” He asked with a scrunched up expression of confusion. “What am I doing?”

I nodded, tilting my head. “You can’t feel it I think because it’s not flowing through your pathways, but Transparency’s power is pulling it out of one of your gates to make the connection, and it looks like your chakra is changing the Light to not hurt us.”

“Haaaaahhh…” He let out a massive sigh of relief. “That’s actually really relieving to hear, ya know? I wasn’t even sure that fixing my coils would have brought it back at all at this point, since I haven’t felt a hint of anything in all this time.”

I squeezed his hand reassuringly, getting a warm grin from him.

“That’s great news, and I’m happy for you,” Rias interjected, “but we should get back to the more urgent details of the night, and then worry about getting Norika-san home before her family can worry too much.”

“Oh no!” Norika gasped, getting all of our heads snapping in her direction. “My groceries! I dropped them in the park– I need to call my parents and tell them I’ll be late!”

She stood and rushed out of the room and into one of the hallways while pulling out her phone, and the three of us let out sighs of relief, relaxing at the false alarm.

“So…” Naruto-kun began after a moment of silence. “You were gonna catch me up to speed?”

“Right.” Rias cleared her throat, before giving him the rundown on the two exorcists and their mission.

“Wait wait wait, hold on…” Naruto-kun held his arms up in front of him, crossed in an ‘x’ shape. “Stop. You mean to tell me that someone stole three Excaliburs from the Church, brought at least one of them to Kuoh and maybe-tried-to frame the Five Principal Clans while tensions are already rising between you and them, and the church decided the best way to get them back or destroy them was to send more Excaliburs?” He asked incredulously.

While he was speaking, I idly kept track of how far Norika was wandering while speaking with her family in case she got lost. I tried not to eavesdrop on her tooth-rottingly sappy conversation with her mother while noting that she was basically on the other side of the building at this point– and now she’s going up a staircase. When Naruto finished speaking, I quoted what Shido Irina had said.

“‘Only an Excalibur can stand up to an Excalibur.’ Their words.” I said blandly, my opinion on that statement’s reliability obvious.

“Of all the stupid… ” He facepalmed, dragging his hand down and stretching the whiskers on his cheeks. “It’s like someone in the church wants to kick off a war or something. That, or they’re really just dumb enough to take the Fallen’s bait.”

“Back up for a moment; you think they were trying to frame the clans?” Rias asked with a raised eyebrow. “Not that I disagree necessarily, but what evidence makes you say that as opposed to them simply sneaking in to use the clans’ sealed storage in secret, or a betrayal after working together to smuggle the blade here?”

“The Fallen targeted Norika twice in the fight at first, so I originally thought that he was after her for some reason,” he explained with a frown, “but when he was bleeding out in the end and had one last chance during a moment of distraction, he tried to take me out with him instead of her, even though I’d already reacted to his spear attacks earlier with no real problem.”

Naruto-kun scratched his cheek, looking up at the ceiling in thought. “I think he only tried to take her out at first because she could see through his invisibility and could help me fight him, but I was his real target. After he’d killed all the warehouse workers, I was the last loose thread. If he killed me, he probably thought chances were high you guys would accuse the clans of working against you with the church or something, and the clans would probably blame the ‘damned devils’ for the massacre while ignoring the ‘government dog’ Shinra girl saying they’ve got the wrong idea.”

“But you lived, and now they have a body as proof for who actually did it.” Rias completed the thought process. “I see your point, but allow me to offer an alternative perspective of sorts.”

Naruto-kun tilted his head her way as if to metaphorically pass the mic.

“All of those assumptions could still be true,” Rias admitted, “but what if it’s all a diversion for some other objective? After all, even if it had worked out the way they wanted, these Fallen would have still had possession of up to three Excaliburs, with two ‘spares’ so helpfully delivered to them on a platter by the church.”

“I mean, sure,” he agreed with a shrug, “but what the hell would they even need three or more of these swords for that they couldn’t just do with their own Holy Light powers? They’re supposed to be angels even if they’re Fallen, right?”

“Within some limits, Holy and Demonic swords tend to scale higher in potency the stronger their wielders are, so the Fallen you faced almost certainly wasn’t a good example of just how much of a game changer this Excalibur could be,” Buchou explained. “If these are truly the actions of a smaller splinter faction breaking away from the Grigori like we think, then having these weapons could potentially legitimize a handful of decently-strong leaders, who wouldn’t otherwise be able to effectively control their subordinates.”

“Oh, I get it!” Naruto-kun smacked a fist into his palm in understanding. “That makes more sense. It’s like how some ninja steal village artifacts when they go rogue, so they can make themselves the leader of whatever bandit group they join.”

“Dealt with that a lot?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Like, three or four times at least. Two of the times were powerful swords, too.”

Sometimes I wondered how the hell he managed to get up to so many ninja adventures already at our age, but then I remembered that everything about him was absurd. In a good way.

Sometimes.

“But wait-” he got our attention again, “I just realized- the exorcists you met said the church tracked the Excaliburs here, right?”

He got a nod from both of us.

“The Fallen have to have known that they could be tracked when they first stole them, if they really were baiting the church into sending the other two, and probably even know how it works, whatever the tracking method is. Chances are, they know how to track these things too.” He looked between us before his eyes dropped down to the sleek, one-handed longsword. “Until now, Transparency was invisible, and probably hidden in a sealed chamber at the warehouse.”

Our eyes followed his to the faintly glowing artifact.

“Oh dear,” Buchou said with a put upon sigh, having been about to lift her tea cup to sip from.

“Shit.” I summarized helpfully.

I launched myself at the far side of the room with chakra strings streaming from my fingertips, while Naruto-kun lunged for the hilts of his swords, new and old, just in time for a rapid barrage of dozens-to-hundreds of crimson-red Light spears to begin blasting through the walls. The dozen or so signatures that appeared on the edge of my range a split second earlier were all almost identical matches to the first one I had sensed that day at the warehouse.

I swung my arms and fingers widely at high speed, weaving my strings around in a controlled chaos to snag and sling away any of the spears that would have struck the people behind me. I had a limited number of stings I could control and not enough practice against this type of attack, so I had to let more than a few get past me to redirect some of the more dangerously close ones, and a bunch of furniture was getting destroyed in the process, including my third-favorite TV.

Oh well. The place was going to need some serious remodeling after this anyway.

The thundering impacts and falling bits of shattered masonry around us were almost deafening as windows shattered, metal groaned, and air was rent with my motions, and yet somehow I still managed to hear the soft sipping of liquid as my master continued drinking her tea.

‘Really?’ a vein throbbed on my temple as my eye twitched. One particular spear managed to ‘slip’ through my coverage, and I was rewarded with a sound of shattering porcelain and splattering liquid.

“Really?” A wave of red-tinged black rose up in a wall, consuming the entirety of the room in front of me and pushing outward, halting the flood of Light spears from reaching us. “I wanted to savor that.”

I glanced back at my master and let my threads dissipate as she stood up and erased the remains of the cup handle in her fingers with a wisp of her power.

“Oops.” My voice was deadpan as I responded, meeting her eyes with an even stare. “My bad.”

“My home was just attacked, and yet my cute little [Rook] won’t even let me enjoy a cup of tea to sooth my mind,” Rias sighed dramatically, before getting serious. “Uzumaki-kun seems to have left during the chaos, likely to go find and protect Amatsu-san.”

She was right. He’d slipped away from my senses completely while my back was to him. Not even my sense of smell noticed him leave. I belatedly realized that those facts didn’t surprise me at all, as if I’d already known; instead, they just made me want to pout.

‘... Annoying.’ I kept my expression flat.

That sword was too OP in the hands of a ninja, plz nerf.

Rias tilted her head, looking up at her power past me. “They seem to have stopped wasting their time with ranged attacks.”

“Meh.” I shook my head and walked over to stand beside my [King], feeling the group split into two. One group of Fallen swooped down, converging on this section of the mansion, while the other spread out around our home with Light energy building up around them, condensing into levitating spears aimed at the building’s windows and exits while on standby; one for each cardinal direction, and one high above us on overwatch.

“Here.” I reached up above my head to put my hand on her shoulder, connecting to her demonic power to share my mental impression of where all the Fallen were with her. “Get ready.”

The group of approaching Fallen were quick but methodical, clearing rooms simply and decisively by throwing explosive spears of Lightthrow doors and moving on. It was lucky that Norika was on the other side of–

‘What?’

I couldn’t sense my other human friend now, either.

Either she’d somehow been killed already, even though none of the attackers had hit that side of the building and were focusing down on this room specifically, or more likely…

‘Seriously too OP. Plz don’t nerf.’ After all, it was our party member who had it now.

Rias closed her eyes and lifted one hand straight up above her, finger-gun style, and a marble of destructive power condensed at her fingertip, more and more demonic power being packed into the tiny space. With her other hand, she made a sweeping gesture in front of her, and the wall of Destruction was sucked back towards her, swirling around the marble as it absorbed the remaining energy from the defensive use of her power, the orb small and dark enough that even some devils would struggle to see them at this time of night.

Buchou’s brows furrowed and she bit her lip in concentration at this level of control and multitasking. For a long time, she only really trained her demonic power and clan trait for sheer power and flexibility, trying to  live up to the shadow that her absolute powerhouse of a siscon-brother cast by making the use of her Destruction come to her as naturally as breathing. She’d never been as good of a spellcaster as Sona or Akeno though, so while her training worked, she’d ended up neglecting the more structured and precise aspects of her control even as she could casually wave her hand and erase a building without a thought.

That training habit began to change after all but losing against Riser, only tying by the skin of our teeth basically by luck.

Five seconds after I shared my senses, and the Fallen arrived.

Two of them raced into the room from either end of the connecting hallway, spears in hand. Another turned the corner from the connected kitchen. One came around the back and was flying through the shattered glass back door. An “X” was slashed through the wall where the TV used to be before the fifth and final Fallen burst through like the kool-aid man, duel-wielding a pair of the red spears.

Rias smirked despite the mental strain, opening her eyes as she curled her thumb like a gun hammer dropping.

“Bang.”

The glowing marble split into several dozen red-tinged beams, five for each of the crows here and outside; head, heart, liver, and thighs. Lines of Destruction were traced over the world, half of them passing through the mansion as if the structure didn’t even exist, all of them racing towards their targets.

Within a second, five of the ten Fallen winked out instantly to my senses, with another two fading fast. The two rushing from the hallway dropped dead, their momentum sending them crashing across the rubble-covered room with perfectly circular holes bored through their bodies. The one approaching from the back door just barely managed to shift his head to the side, dodging instant death, just to succumb to the slightly-less instant death of a pierced heart, liver, and femoral arteries.

The two others that rushed us got off much lighter. Kitchen-guy, having been the least prepared, was the lucky one that Rias had decided to capture for interrogation, and had his shoulders, spine, and the base of his wings pierced, dropping him to the floor limply.

Kool-aid man, having been dual-wielding Light spears, had managed to block and stall the Power of Destruction for just long enough to twist out of the way and survive with no injury.

Until my fist slammed into his cheek, sending him flying back through the wall he came in from and three more beyond that with a snapped neck, killing him instantly.

That left just a single other survivor.

“Koneko-chan, do you mind cleaning up the last one too?” Rias asked me over her shoulder as she walked over to the paralyzed one.

“Mm.” I looked straight up, staring not with my eyes, but with my senjutsu, at the fallen hovering directly above us, the one who’d somehow dodged all the beams aimed at him. A small surge of compulsion magic left Rias and entered the two-winged fallen on the floor.

“Now then, tell me who-”

I narrowed my eyes at the ceiling, my wings popping out of my back as I bent my knees. 

“-you work for and what-”

I jumped, flapping my wings at the same time to surge upwards, and blasting through multiple floors almost instantly. 

My eyes narrowed further when a huge burst of power pumped out from the Fallen, while remaining impressively well contained close to his body. They went from the same level of strength as the other four-wingers, to easily tripling or quadrupling in strength in an instant, and when I punched through the roof in the next split-second, I saw why.

Holding a bolt of shining red energy that was more like a burning star given shape than an actual spear, the man hovered in the air on three pairs of raven wings, darker and fuller than any of the other five Fallen I’d seen inside. Unlike the others who wore uniforms with the same eight-pointed star symbol Naruto-kun described, He wore a basic black cloak, with the hood up and a plain white porcelain mask hiding his face.

His arm was reared back with the unstable and crackling spear above his head, intent clear the moment his aura dismissed my presence, instead reaching out towards his Fallen comrade (pun intended).

‘... This is gonna suck.’

I banked hard as he threw, channeling as much chakra and demonic power through my body and rearing back my own fist as the spear broke the sound barrier while shooting down towards me– or more specifically, down towards my master and the captured Fallen.

My master who, for the most part, relied on me and Akeno to handle the peerage’s extrasensory needs while she focused on training her demonic power. Meanwhile, this man was good enough at containing his power that I’d be surprised if she could sense him even if he was in the mansion, nevermind how high up he was right now.

I only barely managed to intercept the attack, since the sharp maneuver meant I lost most of my momentum. Still, when I swung my fist, I timed it just right, blasting a wave of chakra out of my knuckles at the same time.

The bolt of Light exploded violently, a blinding flash of red light and concussive force knocking me back in the air and making my exposed skin itch from exposure to the tainted holy energy. The majority of the energy from the attack was knocked off course, and instead going straight down into the mansion or straight out to the side from my hit, went down at an angle and seared most of the grass and hedges of our back yard a smoking black.

I blinked twice to get the spots out of my eyes, and just barely felt the six-winged Fallen’s aura blink out with the signature feel of a teleportation spell.

“Dammit.” I muttered.

‘Next time, I’ll beat him to a pulp.’

I tucked my wings to freefall down towards the smoking lawn, only spreading them just in time to catch enough air to soften my landing so that I didn’t damage the patio. I pulled out my phone as I walked to the shattered glass door to begin texting Akeno, in order to let her know we’d need to get into contact with some of our contractors ASAP. Both the construction kind, and also the landscaping kind.

Stepping foot into the room though, I paused when I saw Buchou slowly pacing around the room with her own phone to her head, a dial tone reaching my ears. To the side, a slowly fading spear of red Light that gave off almost no residual energy was sticking straight up out of the floor, right where the paralyzed Fallen’s head used to be, now just a headless corpse.

Rias saw where I was looking and pursed her lips. “It came down just- Hold on one second please Akeno-” She put a hand over the receiver and tried again. “It came down just after that explosion happened, like, less than a second.”

“Sorry…” I found myself looking down, not wanting to see her disappointed expression. “I didn’t sense the second one. My bad.”

“Don’t worry too much about it,” she waved a hand dismissively. “It wasn’t your fault. If that explosion was anything to go by, that one was much more powerful than the rest of them, and good at hiding it. It only makes sense that they had a trick up their sleeve you weren’t expecting. No, the real problem is that, after seeing them in person, it occurred to me that I think I have an idea who this group might be working for. But I’ll share my suspicions later, when we can all regroup.”

Just then, I heard a loud sound crackling over the other end of her phone.

“Akeno, are you there? What happened?” Rias asked with some serious concern.

The next second, the distant, delayed boom of thunder reached us from the direction Akeno had been patrolling in.

“Rias, we might want to call everyone together sooner, rather than later,” my [Queens] voice said over the phone.

We looked at each other, friend to friend instead of [King] to [Rook].

“Ominous as fuck,” I deadpanned, hiding any worry I felt.

“No kidding,” Rias gave an obviously nervous chuckle, giving away just how serious she expected the situation to be. “You can say that again.”

I didn’t.

With how things were going, I half expected our mansion to outright explode if I so blatantly tempted Murphy like that.

At least Naruto-kun and Norika got away, I think.

I hope.

ᓚᘏᗢ