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"Sorry, sorry, I'm truly, genuinely, deeply sorry—"
"You almost killed me."
"I completely forgot there was someone sitting in front of me when I activated it!"
Maverick's eyes had the specific vacancy of someone whose nervous system had recently filed a complaint.
The Noble Phantasm in question was La Black Luna — the Demon Flute of Panic. A gift from the good witch Logistilla, usually worn at Astolfo's waist in its compact form, expanding into a full-sized concert horn when activated. In the legends, it had driven off entire flocks of Harpies. Its sound could deliver shockwave-level impact to anything in range. Constitutionally fragile targets didn't just fall — they came apart.
The reason it was considered one of Astolfo's more "ordinary" Noble Phantasms was that it wasn't broken in the way his other Noble Phantasms were broken. It was Anti-Army class, significant yield, but against Servant-level opponents the raw damage output was underwhelming. Dragon Tooth Warriors and similar chaff? Effective. Servants? Insufficient.
Where it got genuinely terrifying was the secondary effect.
Exposure caused progressive hearing loss. Full exposure caused complete deafness — and deafness, in a sword fight between two evenly-matched Servants, could tip the outcome entirely. You lost spatial awareness. You lost the ability to track footwork by sound. You lost warning cues. It wasn't a killing blow, but it was the kind of edge that decided close fights.
Which was, Astolfo reasoned, exactly the kind of support Noble Phantasm useful for alerting allies scattered across a city.
The logic was not wrong.
The execution had issues.
Specifically: the Noble Phantasm, when activating, expanded to engulf Astolfo completely. Everything directly in front of him got the full output at zero distance.
Maverick had been directly in front of him.
[Survey]: Raise your hand if you had headphones on for this.
[MassivePain]: RAISE. I am raising mine. From the floor. Where I fell.
[Developer_Note]: Max, if you're reading this, there needs to be an audio warning. A big one. In capital letters.
[Liability]: Elizabeth's Noble Phantasm gives earworm damage and now La Black Luna gives actual hearing damage. This game is an insurance nightmare.
[WuaiPerspective]:Wuai.(The flute has been here the whole time. It was always going to happen. I knew and I said nothing. This is my burden.)
The street in front of them had been reduced to a horizontal plane of dust and fragments. Not dramatically destroyed — just... compressed, the air pressure and sonic concussion having done to the immediate environment what a rolling pin does to bread dough.
Maverick and Chen Ge, both having been in the blast vicinity, were on their knees coughing.
The dust had entered their noses. Their throats. The sensation was that of being slowly cooked from the inside, somewhere between boiling and seasoning, in a city already running five degrees hotter than it should have been.
[ViewerCount]: Wait, did the stream count just jump? Where are all these new people coming from?
[CrossStreamMigration]: Max's viewers heard the noise and came to investigate.
[NewViewer_Assessment]: Just arrived. Is the Streamer always like this?
[VeteranAnswer]: ...Yes.
[AnotherNewViewer]: I just wanted to watch Maverick. What is happening. Why is there cleaning being done.
[RageComment]: Max, if you keep putting these sounds in the game I am going to shove my headphones directly into your—
[Solidarity]: Count me in. Same destination.
[Philosopher]: The nutrition I was missing today has been replenished by this stream. I feel whole.
Maverick was still on his knees. Chen Ge had made it back to standing through sheer stubbornness. Astolfo was genuinely apologetic, which somehow made it worse, because you couldn't be angry at someone who was this sincerely contrite and also this completely oblivious to cause and effect.
Before Maverick could fully reconstruct his dignity—
Something moved in the dust.
Fast. Low. And extremely unhappy.
She came through the settling debris like a blade through paper, her purple robe trailing and her expression communicating, without ambiguity, that her nap had been interrupted and she was going to make someone understand why that was a problem.
[ShutenvFans]: SHUTEN IS HERE
[AngryShuten]: She looks PISSED. The "I was sleeping" pissed. The worst kind.
[AstolfoPOV]: Astolfo sees an angry beautiful woman charging at him and does what, exactly?
Astolfo's rationality was, by his own admission, basically vestigial.
But what he lacked in common sense he sometimes compensated for with a kind of animal grace that wasn't quite instinct and wasn't quite skill and produced results that defied explanation.
He dodged.
Clean, fluid, the specific lateral movement of someone who's been in enough situations to have developed reflexes that operated independently of their brain. Shuten-dōji's strike passed through the space he'd occupied and found air.
And then, before anyone had time to process what was happening, Astolfo had sat on her head.
Both legs locked around her neck. Both hands found purchase on her oni horns.
The horns, as it happened, were exactly the right shape and size for this purpose.
A silence fell over the immediate area.
Shuten-dōji went very still.
[Howling]: HE SAT ON HER HEAD
[UsingTheHandlebars]: THE HORNS. THE HORNS ARE BEING USED AS HANDLEBARS.
[PropheticChat]: Three chapters ago someone in chat said those horns were perfect riding handles. They were right. They were completely right.
[ShutenvReaction]: Shuten's face. SHUTEN'S FACE.
[WuaiSolidarity]:Wuai.(I understand her now. I understand exactly how she feels.)
"I'm going to kill all of you," Shuten-dōji said, in a tone that was no longer warm. It was the tone of someone who had arrived at a decision.
"Wait, wait, wait—" Chen Ge stepped forward with his hands raised. "We're here to discuss cooperation. Seriously. We all need to work together against Vritra — the dragon in the harbor, the one making it six degrees hotter every hour—"
"Then you kill your Servant first."
"Why would I do that? He didn't do anything wrong."
"HE SAT ON MY HEAD."
"I mean—"
"Kill your Servant," Maverick said, turning to Chen Ge.
"What? No!"
"Kill. Your. Servant," Maverick repeated, with feeling.
"SHUT UP," Shuten-dōji said. To Astolfo, specifically, who had opened his mouth to contribute. "You especially. Shut up."
Astolfo shut up.
Shuten-dōji stood there, both Astolfo and the indignity of the situation weighing on her, and surveyed the group — Maverick recovering his composure, Chen Ge attempting diplomacy, Astolfo seated on her head like he'd decided this was a reasonable place to be.
She was fully capable of dealing with all three of them.
She was also, she realized, being asked to help deal with a problem that was also her problem, given that the rising temperature was affecting her skin and her sake and her general quality of existence.
She ran the math.
She thought about Derek, who smelled bad and was presumably still running somewhere in the city.
She thought about the harbor and the mountain in it and the second sun in the sky.
She thought about the fact that she was standing in a demolished street with a pink-haired boy sitting on her head using her horns as a steering wheel, and that somehow, over the course of the last thirty seconds, the situation had developed a momentum that she was now inside of rather than directing.
Wait, she thought.
Why am I playing along with these people?
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