I want to thank firerock laser for joining my Patreon. I would have liked to upload a chapter of the fic he follows, but since I don't know how, all I can do is thank him through this spam.
Okay, I used the first line so you can read it. If it's not too much trouble, could you go to my Patreon and donate for my breakfast? It's not an obligation, and I won't stop uploading; I'm just asking for a little help. Obviously, the Patreon is about five chapters ahead. Please be kind. Support this poor soul.
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The immortal flames of Riser Phenex went out along with the glow of his teleportation magic circle.
The arrogant aristocrat had left, swallowing his fury and wounded pride, but not before accepting the terms established by Grayfia Lucifuge. Ten days. The Gremory Clan and their new low-class "temporary reinforcement" would have exactly ten days to prepare for the Rating Game that would decide the fate of the Princess of Ruin.
Grayfia gave an elegant bow toward Rias.
"I will inform Sirzechs-sama of the agreed terms. Rias-sama, I wish you luck in your preparations," said the silver-haired maid before disappearing into her own magic circle.
The overwhelming pressure that had been suffocating the Occult Research Club finally dissipated.
Rias dropped into her chair, exhaling a trembling sigh. Issei collapsed onto the floor, breathing as if he had just run a marathon. Asia clasped her hands together, relieved that no one had been hurt, and Akeno smiled with barely concealed fascination.
In the center of the room, Yugo Hano had already returned to his human form. He adjusted his glasses, brushing a thin layer of ash from the sleeve of his white shirt.
"Good. You have ten days to stop being useless," Yugo declared in his usual monotone, turning toward the door. "I'll handle Riser. You make sure his peerage doesn't massacre you in the first five minutes."
"Hano-sensei..." Rias called him, her voice loaded with overwhelming gratitude. She rose from her seat. "I... I don't know how to repay you for this."
"You already did. The favor has been collected, Gremory. We're even," he cut her off, without any emotional tact.
He was about to turn the doorknob to leave for Saturn when his ears—still retaining part of his demonic sensory sharpness—caught a sound in the distance.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Fast footsteps. Many footsteps. Echoing through the hallway of the old building, heading directly toward the club door.
Yugo froze. His tactical mind processed the information at the speed of light.
The thermal clash between his pure plasma flames and Riser's immortal fire had been colossal. Although the room had endured, the temperature fluctuation had surely triggered every magical alarm in Kuoh Academy.
"Shit," Yugo hissed, stepping two paces back from the door. "It's Sona. She's coming with her peerage."
Rias paled. "Sona? But if she sees you here..."
"If she sees me here, she'll know I was involved in a private meeting of your clan and deduce my intervention in the Rating Game ahead of time," Yugo reasoned quickly, his gray eyes scanning the room urgently. "Sona is territorial and paranoid. If she thinks I'm conspiring behind her back with her rival, I'll have the entire Student Council interrogating me and watching me twenty-four hours a day. That will ruin my tactics. I can't let her see me."
"Escape through the window!" Issei suggested, panicking.
"If I fly out as a manta ray or break through the wall, Sona will sense the magical signature of the escape and connect it to me. It has to look like I was never here," the professor refuted.
Yugo looked around. The clubroom was spacious, but it lacked any real hiding places. There were no closets large enough, under Rias's desk was too obvious, and the curtains were half-scorched.
The footsteps were getting closer. They were less than ten meters away.
The retired assassin looked at Rias. His eyes lowered, in a purely clinical and analytical manner, toward the generous cleavage of the Princess of Ruin.
Rias, noticing the direction of his gaze, blushed furiously and covered her chest with both hands.
"H-Hano-sensei! What are you looking at at a time like this?!"
"Gremory, forgive me in advance. And whatever happens, act natural," Yugo ordered with sepulchral seriousness.
"Eh?!" Rias, Issei, and Akeno exclaimed in unison.
Yugo wasted no time explaining. He brought his right hand to the Omnitrix dial. In his mind, he visualized the tiny fifteen-centimeter creature Sona had complained about so much, but which the Gremory had never seen in action.
He slammed down on the core.
FLASH!
The emerald light shone for a fraction of a second.
Where the tall and fearsome history professor had stood before, a tiny humanoid alien had now fallen to the floor. He had grayish skin, a disproportionately large bulb-shaped head, and large green eyes without pupils. He wore a small black-and-white suit with the watch symbol on his chest.
Grey Matter.
Issei rubbed his eyes. "A... big-headed frog?"
Grey Matter paid no attention to the insult. With agility powered by his tiny size and amphibian muscles, the Galvan made an Olympic jump from the floor, bounced off the edge of the mahogany desk, and launched himself directly toward Rias's chest.
"Kyaaa!" Rias shrieked, startled, as the small alien skillfully slipped into the neckline of her school uniform, diving into the deep and dark abyss between her breasts.
"SENSEI?!" Issei bawled, falling to his knees, crying tears of blood from pure envy. "THAT'S MY DREAM! I HATE YOU! YOU'RE THE TRUE HAREM KING!"
"Silence, idiot, and behave," Grey Matter's tiny, high-pitched voice buzzed, muffled from inside the president's blouse.
BAM!
The door of the Occult Research Club burst open.
Sona Sitri stood in the doorway, her breathing slightly agitated. Tsubaki, Saji, and the rest of her peerage appeared behind her, weapons ready. The President's violet eyes swept across the room, analyzing the burned curtains, the smoking desk, and the sweat on the Gremory faces.
"Rias," Sona said, her icy tone cutting through the tension. "My familiars detected a massive thermal energy spike coming from your club. Heat exceeding standard demonic parameters. What the hell happened here?"
Rias, who was as rigid as an ironing board and trying to hide the fact that a fifteen-centimeter alien genius was currently using her bra as a tactical trench, forced a diplomatic smile.
"S-Sona. What a surprise," Rias stammered, instinctively crossing her arms beneath her chest, which caused a slight readjustment in Grey Matter's fleshy prison. "I-It's nothing to worry about. Riser Phenex just left. We had a... heated discussion about our engagement. You know his fiery temperament."
Sona narrowed her eyes. She entered the room, followed by Tsubaki, and sniffed the air.
"Riser Phenex?" Sona tilted her head, suspicious. "I know the aura of House Phenex flames, Rias. This doesn't smell like immortal fire. It smells like superheated plasma. It smells like..."
Sona stopped, her eyes scanning every corner of the club. She was searching for a tall figure in a dark suit and glasses.
"Rias. Where is my Pawn?" the Sitri heiress asked, her voice becoming dangerously low and territorial.
While Rias tried to formulate a believable lie, deep within her cleavage, Grey Matter was experiencing his own existential crisis.
Trapped between the immense and incredibly soft mountains of the Princess of Ruin, surrounded by the scent of vanilla and nervous sweat, the Galvan's super-advanced brain was working at full speed to avoid going insane. The darkness was almost total, except for the faint green glow of his own Omnitrix illuminating Rias's pale skin.
"This is surreal," Jose thought in Grey Matter's form, feeling the girl's accelerated heartbeat rumble against his tiny body.
His superior Galvan intellect analyzed the situation with a mathematical coldness that contrasted hilariously with his surroundings.
"A little over a few weeks ago, my only objective was to assassinate this woman in cold blood to prevent the canonical plot from destroying Kuoh. I considered her acceptable collateral damage. A disposable piece of fiction."
The small alien adjusted himself slightly, trying not to suffocate when Rias took a deep breath to answer Sona.
"And now, not only am I putting my life at risk to save her from an arranged marriage, I am literally using her as a tactical hiding place. My alien brain has the ability to calculate asteroid orbits light-years away, and I am using it to calculate the exact angle at which I must breathe so I don't die crushed by Gremory's attributes."
Grey Matter sighed internally.
"The universe has a sick sense of humor. And anime is, definitely, a mistake."
Outside the padded prison, the diplomatic tension continued.
"Hano-sensei?" Rias let out a nervous laugh, trying to maintain her composure. "I haven't seen him all day, Sona. I suppose he must be at his store. Why would he be here?"
Sona stared at her for a long and agonizing minute. The two childhood friends held each other's gaze in a cold war of lies and suspicion. Sona knew Rias was hiding something from her, but without physical proof of Yugo's presence, she could not accuse her of kidnapping her fiancé/Pawn.
Besides, Issei was in a corner crying comically in the fetal position, Akeno was smiling with disturbing amusement, and Asia was looking at the ceiling while whistling very unnaturally. The Occult Club was an incomprehensible circus.
Sona sighed, adjusting her glasses with resignation.
"Very well, Rias. If you say it was Riser, I'll believe you. But if you need help with him... you know you can count on the Council."
"I appreciate it, Sona. I'll keep you informed," Rias replied, exhaling internally.
Sona turned around and walked toward the door. "Let's go, Tsubaki. We have to keep patrolling. And if you see Hano-sensei, tell him he has a mountain of overdue reports to sign."
The club door closed. The footsteps of the Sitri peerage gradually moved away until they disappeared completely.
Silence returned to the room.
Rias Gremory dropped to her knees on the carpet, completely red with embarrassment. With trembling hands, she slightly pulled open the collar of her blouse.
Grey Matter poked his large grayish head out of her cleavage, breathing fresh air for the first time in five minutes. The tiny alien propelled himself upward and jumped agilely, landing on the mahogany desk.
The small being shook off his clothes, looked at those present, and brought his tiny hand to the symbol on his chest.
FLASH!
Yugo Hano was back. He adjusted his glasses, fixed the collar of his shirt, and looked at Rias, who was still on the floor covering her face with her hands.
"Good acting, Gremory. You nearly suffocated me three times, but we managed to fool the strategist," Yugo said with total naturalness, ignoring Issei, who was still clawing at the floor from envy.
The professor turned toward Asia.
"We're going to the store, Asia. The afternoon shift is about to end, and Raynare doesn't know how to close the register."
Yugo began walking toward the door, opening it calmly, as if he had not just declared war against an immortal nor hidden in a student's underwear.
Rias, Akeno, Koneko, Kiba, and Issei watched as the man who was going to be their savior walked away down the hallway. He was apathetic, cynical, ridiculously powerful, and, apparently, lacked any sense of human shame.
"Definitely..." Rias murmured, her cheeks still burning. "...he is the strangest and most terrifying ally in this world."