Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain
Sheathed Against Injustice?
Story Starts
-=&
Chapter 6.81
The Gale's Justice
Demands a Stakeout
"Tsch."
"Hmm."
Neze's ears perked. The sounds crackled through the resonance crystal wedged in her ear, relayed from the listening device attached to the collar of their current person of interest. Target? Mission objective? Subject designate? She'd never settled on the terminology, mostly because she'd only skimmed the operational manual. There had been an appendix on approved surveillance snacks near the back, and after that her attention had simply never recovered.
She turned. Behind her, the rest of the Familia had formed a loose ring around Kaguya and Ryuu in the corner of the Amber Veil, dispensing praise in enthusiastic whispers.
"The bit about the wax fingerprints—" Iska pressed both hands to her chest.
"The buttoned cuffs," Maryu echoed, mirroring her exactly. "Inspired."
"I merely reported what I observed," Ryuu muttered, staring at a fixed point on the wall that contained no people and therefore no witnesses to her existence.
"You solved a locked-room mystery through a god's unconscious body," Celty breathed. "Lady Astraea's novels don't even have that."
"They do now," Kaguya said, and drank.
"We should publicise this," Lyra suggested. "The proceeds can go towards paying off the mansion much quicker."
Alise coughed. "And we could use it to help those in need."
"Ah. Yes. That too." Lyra's tone filed the amendment under optional extras.
A few tables away, Lord Ganesha continued to bask. He had positioned himself at an angle that caught the lamplight, one fist on his hip, receiving congratulations from strangers with grave nods and the occasional "IT WAS NOTHING, FOR I AM GANESHA." Ardee stood at his shoulder. Her face was doing sums—years spent at that shoulder, divided by evenings like this one, carried over into whatever remained of her patience.
The crystal in Neze's ear crackled again.
"Shirou, the elf is Level 2, but the other one is from Loki Familia and he's Level 3," came Rose's voice, low and tight.
Neze went rigid.
"Ummm—goddess," she tried, whispering into the comms.
"Ahem."
"Ahem-hem."
Three separate coughs cut across the frequency. One of them was unmistakably Astraea's, gentle but implacable.
Heat crept up Neze's neck. Right. Protocol.
"Star One—everyone—it looks like someone is challenging Chef to a duel."
The effect was immediate. Every trench coat in the corner of the bar went still. Nine pairs of dark spectacles turned towards the door as one, which would have looked sinister if four of them hadn't still been holding jagamarukun.
"Yes, let's just ignore them, they're clearly drunk," Sophie's voice carried through the device, breezy and dangerous. "Plus, you can't fight a Level 3."
A ripple passed through the Familia. Neze watched the same thought land on every face in sequence: confirmation. It slotted neatly against everything they'd already surmised. Shirou had come from outside Orario, and Level 2 was where sheer effort took a person without the Dungeon's excelia. He dived the middle floors, as far as Rivira, and returned intact. And no deity had ever fought over his blessed name at a Denatus, because he had not levelled up whilst registered with the Guild.
Level 2. It all fitted.
"You are drunk," came Rose's voice, flat as a filing error. "Lowell, go home."
"I am not drunk! I am inspired! And I will not stand by whilst this—this nobody parades you through the streets!"
"Star One to all units," Astraea whispered into her collar. She stood by the corner booth with a wine glass in one hand and her spectacles gleaming in the lamplight, solemn as a goddess presiding over the fate of nations—which, in her defence, she technically was qualified to do. "Positions. Situation assessment."
What followed was, in Neze's professional opinion, the least subtle exfiltration in the history of covert operations.
The Amber Veil had precisely one exit. Nine women in identical long coats, identical wide-brimmed hats, and identical dark spectacles attempted to trickle through it casually, one at a time, at intervals of roughly four seconds, each of them walking as though they had read about walking in a book and were reciting it from memory. By the fourth trench coat, the remaining patrons had stopped drinking to watch. By the seventh, a man near the bar stood up to see what everyone else was watching. By the ninth, the proprietor had begun, quietly and without judgement, counting his spoons and considering whether raising his prices might discourage Orario's stranger elements.
"I AM GANESHA."
That idea was almost an assurance.
Neze went eighth. She kept her eyes forward and her tail absolutely still inside her coat, which took more discipline than any Dungeon expedition she'd ever been on.
Outside, the evening air of the pleasure district hit her—lamp oil, perfume, spilt ale, and beneath it all the situation unfolding eleven steps from the door. They clustered in the shadow of the awning. Across the street, faces had already begun to turn towards the group of identically dressed figures huddling in formation.
"Follow my lead," Astraea whispered.
Neze looked over. Her goddess had raised one hand to her chest, pinky and ring finger curled down, the remaining fingers extended and pointed skyward in a gesture Neze had never seen in the operational manual, any combat treatise, or indeed anywhere. Her other hand held a jagamarukun.
"Nin-nin!"
She threw it at the street.
It hit the cobbles and splattered. A single greasy jagamarukun, spread across the pavement in a sad golden star.
"…"
"…"
Somewhere in the silence, a passing chienthrope slowed, looked at the potato croquette, looked at the nine trench coats, and quickened her pace considerably.
Then Lyra sighed—the long, load-bearing sigh of a prum whose life had been assembled entirely from moments like this one—reached into her coat, and threw one of Asfi's actual jagamarukun. Alise threw hers half a heartbeat later with an enthusiastic "Deploying!" that defeated the entire purpose of a covert deployment.
Smoke erupted across the street. Proper smoke, thick and grey and billowing, and the coughing started at once—passersby, a lamplighter, at least one off-duty adventurer swearing about Evilus before someone assured him it smelt like potato. Two more jagamarukun-shaped charges sailed in from somewhere in the formation and the whole corner of the district vanished into fog. Neze wondered how and why Asfi had made the smoke smell like the popular fried snack of Orario."
"Wait," Astraea said, her voice rising with genuine alarm. "I just littered!"
"Don't worry, goddess—"
"Ahem."
"Don't worry, Star One Justice Actual," came Ryuu's voice through the crystal, strained with the dignity of a woman salvaging what she could. "I have cleared the jagamarukun. Your conscience is clear."
"Excellent work, Star Three Bunny."
The noise Ryuu made over the comms was not a word in any language Neze knew, but it conveyed a great deal.
"We double back," Astraea declared, "and leap to the roofs."
They doubled back. The smoke bought them the alley behind the Amber Veil, and the Familia poured through it at speed—coats flapping, hats clamped to heads, Kaguya somehow not spilling a drop from her glass. Ahead of Neze, Alise scooped their goddess into a princess carry without breaking stride and took the wall in two bounds. Astraea squealed—actually squealed, wine glass held aloft in one hand, the other still frozen in that inexplicable finger arrangement—as they cleared the eaves and landed on the rooftop of the bar.
Neze followed, claws finding purchase on the shingles, and had barely straightened when—
"Latch!"
Her spine snapped straight of its own accord. "Yes!"
"Report!" Astraea commanded, adjusting her hat with her free hand as Alise set her down.
Neze turned to the street below—and nearly faltered. For one heartbeat she could have sworn Shirou looked straight up at her. Not at the rooftop. At her. One eyebrow rose a fraction, clearly judging, the same look he had worn behind the curtain the day they had declared their justice in full formation.
Then his attention slid back to the two men in front of him, and Neze exhaled and told herself she'd imagined it.
'He definitely didn't see us. There was smoke. And we doubled back.'
She took stock of the challengers instead.
The werewolf was the bigger problem in every sense. Broad through the shoulders, a head taller than Shirou, with storm-grey fur running up his forearms and ears, and a jaw that looked as though Loki had chiselled it herself and then lost interest before reaching the brain. His shirt bore the wear of a working second-tier adventurer and the wine stains of a man who had not been working tonight. His tail lashed behind him in slow, aggravated sweeps, and even from the rooftop Neze could smell the drink coming off him in waves.
The elf beside him could not have been more different. Slender, silver-haired, immaculate in a Dionysus Familia doublet with the grape-cluster clasp at the throat, he had arranged himself in a three-quarter turn towards the nearest street lamp. The angle was rehearsed. The lighting was rehearsed. Even his indignation had good posture.
"A Level 3 werewolf from Loki Familia," Neze reported, "and a Level 2 member of Dionysus Familia have challenged Chef to a duel."
"Do we intervene?" Celty asked over the crystal.
"Negative," said Lyra. "We observe. That's the entire operation. Observing."
"But according to target designate: Wolf," Neze added, "she does not recommend Chef fighting the Level 3."
She glanced sideways. Kaguya had produced a fresh bottle from somewhere inside her coat—new label, almost certainly purchased from the Amber Veil on the way out, because of course she had found time—and was topping up her glass with a steady hand.
"Just as we surmised," Kaguya said, nodding to herself. "Level 2. It makes sense."
Down in the street, the situation was deteriorating in the specific way situations deteriorated when Sophie was involved.
"And you, Aldric," Sophie said, her voice carrying up from the crystal and the street both, layered with an exasperation so worn-in it had gone smooth. "Should I report this to your captain?"
The elf drew himself up to his full height, one hand pressed to his chest, silver hair catching the lamplight at an angle he had visibly practised in a mirror.
"Lady Sophie! Moonbeam of the Guild's northern counter! She whose smile has been proven to brighten the day of every member of the fairy race! Whose silver hair could rival the moon itself in splendour! Whose eyes—"
"Aldric."
"—are twin pools of springtime's—"
"Aldric."
"—unfathomable—"
"Aldric, I have rejected you several times already. When will you take a hint?"
The elf winced as though struck. The werewolf—Lowell, apparently—patted him on the back with rough solidarity and pressed a bottle into his hands, one drunk fortifying another for the campaign ahead.
Then Lowell rounded on Rose, and Neze's ears flattened in advance, because she could already smell where this was going. Literally. She was a werewolf. The whole street was a werewolf, as far as this particular subject was concerned.
"And you, Rose! Everyone can smell it, Rose! The whole district can smell it! You're in oestrus, and this unknown, unranked, un-everything vagrant is—"
Rose growled. Not a warning growl. The other kind.
Neze pressed both hands over her own ears, which achieved nothing, because the crystal was inside one of them.
Aldric, meanwhile, had taken a long pull from the bottle and found his courage at the bottom of it. "Twelve rejections," he declared, eyes blazing, "is merely the twelfth step upon the staircase to acceptance!"
"That is not how that works," Sophie said. "That is not how anything works."
"I have watched over you since last year, Rose!" Lowell pressed on, gathering speed the way a barrel gathers speed on a hill—downhill, unstoppable, towards something solid. "Every season! I know your habits! I know that when your time comes, you and your friend visit the establishments of this district to see to it discreetly—which is why I have stood guard over the pleasure district all year! Vetting it! No hired companion of this quarter is worthy of you—I have checked! Personally! Extensively!"
The street absorbed this.
Several people in the vicinity turned to stare at him. A woman leaning in the doorway of the establishment opposite folded her arms with deliberate slowness, and Neze watched recognition travel down the lane from door to door like a lit fuse. Both challengers had the look of regulars, she decided. After tonight, Lowell was going to be charged extra for the rest of his natural life, and the surcharge would be itemised as something specific like public stupidity, romantic nuisance, or just being Lowell.
"He just confessed to a year of surveillance," Lyra said over the crystal. "In public. As a defence."
"To be fair," said Iska, "so did we. Sort of. Today."
"We are professionals."
"We threw potatoes at a road."
"Isn't that blasphemy? Apologise to Justice Actual!"
"Sorry!"
Astraea only chuckled as she sipped her wine.
"—and especially not this human!" Lowell thundered on, immune to the street's judgement. "I can smell it, you know! You've already marked him!"
Silence, for one perfect second.
"He said it out loud," Alise whispered over the crystal. "He said it in the STREET."
"He's dead," said Lyra. "He just doesn't know it yet. Look at her ears."
Neze looked. Rose's ears had gone from flat to something beyond flat—pinned so hard against her skull that they had functionally ceased to exist. Somewhere in the Guild's archives there was a form for what was about to happen to Lowell, and Rose was going to fill it out herself, in triplicate, as the perpetrator.
Loki Familia was collecting a citation for harassment of a Guild employee, that much was certain. And if Neze's reading of Sophie's demeanour was correct, Aldric's captain would be receiving a report annotated in the margins.
Beside Neze, Ryuu and Celty had both turned beet red beneath their hats. Ryuu's hand had drifted to her hip—to the sword beneath the coat—found only a pocket of greasy jagamarukun, and closed around one anyway with lethal intent.
By unspoken agreement the Familia had migrated two rooftops along for a better angle on the exchange, settling along the ridgeline in a row like theatre patrons in the cheap seats. Astraea moved down the line distributing jagamarukun—the edible ones, Neze confirmed with a discreet sniff, because after tonight one could not be too careful—and everyone accepted them without taking their eyes off the street.
"Itadakimasu," said Kaguya, before Astraea had even reached her.
Below, Sophie made her move. She seized Shirou's arm and shoved him bodily towards Rose, who stiffened—and did not step away.
"How dare you get in the way of Rose's ardour!" Sophie announced to the street at large. "And besides—don't you think they'd make adorable red-haired, golden-eyed half-werewolf children?"
Neze inhaled her jagamarukun and almost choked on it.
Lowell went apoplectic. His fur stood on end from wrist to ear and his mouth worked without producing language, cycling through several beginnings of words and committing to none of them.
Rose and Shirou were the shade of their hair—maybe a touch brighter.
Aldric, by contrast, relaxed entirely. His whole bearing softened into delighted comprehension. "Ohh. So tonight you are here to facilitate this date—"
"Hey!" Lowell rounded on him. "Are you siding with the human?!"
"Oh, it does look like it'll be fun." Sophie wrapped herself around Shirou's other arm and beamed. "I'll tag in after he's taken care of Rose's needs."
Somewhere on the ridgeline, Celty made a sound like a kettle. Ryuu had stopped breathing altogether. Astraea sipped her wine with the focused calm of a scholar taking field notes, and Kaguya murmured, "Compelling opening act," into her glass.
And then the doors of the Amber Veil burst open.
"WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS? FOR I AM GANESHA!!!"
-=&
Ryuu grabbed her ears with both hands.
They were radiating heat from everything that had been declared in the last few minutes. Her extremities ran cold, so her palms should have worked as compresses.
She had failed to account for her right hand.
The grease from the jagamarukun she had crushed—collected, she corrected herself, collected on behalf of her Goddess—transferred itself to her ear in one warm, oily smear.
Ryuu stared at the middle distance and contemplated the life choices that had delivered her to this rooftop.
She had no cloth. She had a sword she was—for some reason—itching to draw, spectacles she could barely see through in the failing light, and a coat with more concealed pockets than any garment had a right to possess, none of which contained a handkerchief. Athena Familia had thought of everything except the possibility that an agent might need to wipe her hands.
So she used the coat.
She dragged her palm down the lapel in two long strokes, the way a child did after eating with their fingers, and felt years of elven dignity leave her body through the soles of her boots.
When she looked up, Goddess Astraea was watching her.
Her Goddess said nothing. She simply held Ryuu's gaze over the rim of her wine glass, eyes bright with something that was absolutely not divine wisdom, and tilted the glass a few millimetres in salute.
Ryuu's ears went hotter. The grease did nothing to help.
Below, the doors of the Amber Veil had finished disgorging their god.
Lord Ganesha emerged into the lane, drink still in hand, and planted himself in the centre of the street as though the cobbles had been laid for that exact purpose. Ardee trailed half a step behind him, jaw set, one hand already rising towards the bridge of her nose before anything had happened yet.
"WHAT IS THIS COMMOTION?"
"Lord Ganesha!" Aldric swept into a bow so deep his forehead nearly met his knee. "We are here to challenge this—"
He straightened. He gestured at Shirou.
Nothing followed.
Lowell also gestured at Shirou. Also produced nothing.
The two challengers turned to each other, then back to their target, expectant, as though the man might be persuaded to introduce himself out of politeness.
"You ordered skewers from my Rivira establishment three nights ago," Shirou said flatly, though his ears still glowed from Sophie's earlier provocation. "Yakitori. Extra tare."
Aldric turned red. "I was distracted at the time."
The challengers passed the single bottle they were sharing between them and took a swig each. Then they resumed waiting, patient as fishermen, for their opponent to supply his own name.
"Bite me," said Shirou.
"We are here to challenge Bite Me in the name of—" Lowell's voice cracked mid-declaration. "Hey. That's not a name!"
Over the frequency, Noin made a noise like a punctured bellows.
Shirou looked to Sophie, who shrugged with her whole body, thoroughly enjoying herself. He looked to Rose, who could not decide between meeting his eyes and avoiding them, and so alternated between the two at speed—though Ryuu noted, and filed away without comment, that Rose had taken hold of his sleeve. By the thumb and forefinger. The smallest quantity of holding that could still be legally described as holding.
Shirou exhaled through his nose.
"First name Mario. Last name Mario." A beat. "Mario Mario."
Goddess Astraea giggled over the comms.
Ryuu turned her head very slowly. Her Goddess—the divine embodiment of justice, truth, and law—was laughing at perjury. Openly. Into a resonance crystal.
"A false name given to fools is not a lie," Kaguya murmured on the frequency, refilling Astraea's glass with the last of the bottle. "It is proper operational contingency."
Below, Lowell threw his arm skyward. "Lord Ganesha! We are here to challenge Mario Mario in the name of LOVE!"
The god surveyed the scene before him: two young men mid-challenge, two furious Guild employees, one red-haired vendor standing like a man attending his own funeral. The elephant mask tilted. Considered.
"Lord Ganesha," Ardee said quickly, quietly, "we should de-escalate—"
"A DUEL!" the god thundered, delight dawning across every visible celch of him. "A DUEL OF PASSION!"
"My lord—"
"TWO YOUNG HEARTS, DECLARING THEMSELVES BEFORE THE HEAVENS! REFUSING TO HIDE THEIR LOVE BEHIND POLITE SILENCE!" Ganesha's fist met his chest with a boom that rattled the nearest shutters. "GANESHA HAS SEEN A THOUSAND FESTIVALS AND TEN THOUSAND CONTESTS, AND HE TELLS YOU NOW: THERE IS NO TRUER OFFERING TO THE GODS THAN PASSION HONESTLY DECLARED! GANESHA CONDONES THIS DUEL!"
"My lord—"
"GANESHA CONDONES IT PASSIONATELY!"
"My lord—"
"Can he do that?" Celty asked, on the frequency.
"He's a god," said Lyra. "'Can' and 'allowed to' are the same word to him."
Down in the street, Shirou had given up on the god entirely and turned to the only other level-headed person in attendance.
"Two against one," he said to Ardee, "seems unfair."
"ALL IS FAIR," the challengers announced in unison, "IN LOVE AND WAR!"
"WELL SAID!" boomed Ganesha, who had not understood a word of it.
The crowd assembled with terrifying speed. Orario crowds could smell free entertainment three districts away; this one materialised in under a minute. Patrons spilled from the Amber Veil, drinks in hand, bodily negotiating for the good sightlines. Windows opened along both sides of the lane. Somewhere towards the corner, inevitable as sunrise, a street vendor had already set up and begun selling skewers to the spectators.
Through the listening device pinned to Shirou's collar, everyone on the frequency could hear him muttering to himself. The words came in fragments—low, aggrieved, mostly incoherent—but the general shape of it involved a poor choice of holiday destination, an unspecified "she", repeated with rising bitterness.
"Lord Ganesha," came Ardee's next attempt, pitched for the god's ears alone and utterly failing to stay there, "we are here to keep the peace."
"AND WHAT IS PEACE," Ganesha replied at parade volume, "IF NOT LOVE, RESOLVED?"
Ardee lowered her hand from the bridge of her nose, looked at it, and put it back.
Ryuu sympathised. Deeply. Wordlessly. Ardee served a different god, walked a different path, wore a different crest—and yet the two of them were bound by something older and truer than any Familia emblem: the shared burden of being the responsible one. Of standing beside chaos and holding the paperwork.
Though in fairness, the responsible one's hat usually sat on Shakti's head, and Ardee had merely been conscripted into wearing it tonight. She was holding the line admirably regardless. Ryuu felt a flicker of pride on Shakti's behalf.
And below—Rose, standing in the street, holding a strange man's sleeve by two fingers whilst a drunken werewolf announced her oestrus cycle to the entire pleasure district. Beside her, Sophie. Ryuu's own adviser, assigned by default years ago because Sophie only took elven advisees and the Astraea Familia was too small to warrant dedicated Guild staff of its own—and who had, somewhere along the way, become considerably more than an administrative arrangement.
Ryuu owed them intervention. She owed them rescue.
"Godde—"
Before the first cough could even sound over the comms, Ryuu had corrected herself. The protocol reflex had been drilled into the Familia so thoroughly over the course of a single afternoon that it now fired pre-emptively, like a sneeze the body commits to before the dust has even arrived.
"Star One. Justice Actual."
Ryuu closed her eyes. Counted to two.
She did not turn her head to acknowledge the warm glow of approval radiating from her Goddess's direction. She also ignored the sound of Astraea taking another sip, and the quiet clink of a bottle rim against a glass as Kaguya topped her up.
The clink cut off early.
"Oh—it's finished." Kaguya held the empty bottle to the last of the light, confirmed its betrayal, and stowed it inside her coat with a practised motion that suggested the coat already contained several of its fellows. "Let me resupply. We must maintain field morale."
Lyra sighed. "Might as well make a night of it. Buy extra. I'll join in."
"Who else requires their morale boosting liquid rations?"
Along the ridgeline, hands went up. Ryuu counted them and stopped counting when the number exceeded her capacity for disappointment. Even Celty's hand had risen halfway before Maryuu pushed it back down.
"Star One. Justice Actual." Ryuu kept her voice level through what she considered heroic effort. "We should actually do something."
Kaguya chose that moment to deploy.
She stepped off the roof edge with her usual grace and landed with rather less of it—a stumble, half a hop, one hand slapping the wall for balance—directly at the front of the very building they were using for the stakeout, in full view of the crowd's outer ring. Not behind the building, where she would have drawn no attention. The front.
Purple trench coat. Fedora. Dark spectacles. Dusk.
Kaguya straightened, adjusted her hat by the brim with two fingers, and walked through the assembled onlookers towards a cheaper bar down the lane, ignoring every eye she gathered along the way. Somebody near the skewer vendor applauded uncertainly, on the assumption that she was part of the show.
Ryuu watched her go and felt the muscle beneath her left eye announce itself.
Then she saw Alise and her Goddess exchange nods.
Dread arrived before understanding did.
"Star One to Latch and—" Astraea paused delicately. "—whichever of you settled on Anvil."
"Anvil confirms," said Iska.
"Ember confirms," said Maryuu, serene. She had lost the coin toss for Anvil three streets ago, declared Ember the superior name anyway, and had spent the intervening hours enjoying the peace of a war she insisted she had won.
"Latch confirms," Neze grumbled. She had asked, twice, why the amazon got the cool name. Neither asking had produced an answer.
"Latch, Anvil—these challengers belong to Loki and Dionysus Familias. A sanctioned duel requires witnesses of appropriate standing from each."
Ryuu's mouth opened. "That is not what I—"
"Goddess—Star One—that's halfway across the city—" Neze started.
"You are the two fastest agents on this roof, and justice," Astraea said, with total sincerity and a mouthful of jagamarukun, "demands proper procedure."
There was no answering that. There had never been any answering that. Their Goddess could pronounce the word justice in a way that closed arguments the way a portcullis closed gates, and the fact that she was currently doing it in a fedora with potato in her cheek changed nothing.
Ryuu sighed—she had lost count somewhere around fourteen—and, because efficiency was a habit she could not switch off even when it worked against her, heard herself say:
"Riveria Ljos Alf was last seen near the jagamarukun stall by the textile district. With the golden-haired child. That covers Loki Familia."
"Dibs on the Nine Hell," said Iska, instantly, and was airborne before the sentence finished landing.
"Oi—!" Neze's protest chased her across the gap and caught nothing. "You can't just—it was just getting good down there—" The rest dissolved into wolfish grumbling as she turned the other way, towards the far side of the city and whatever corner of it Dionysus Familia called home.
Two coats detached from the rooftop line and were gone, hats clamped to heads, coat-tails cracking behind them like banners.
Ryuu watched them go.
Then her own words caught up with her, the way an arrow loosed carelessly catches up with the archer's conscience.
Riveria Ljos Alf. Last seen by the textile district. The very elf they had fled from this afternoon—fled, at speed, through an alley, under a Code Vermillion, specifically so that Riveria Ljos Alf would not see them dressed like this. And Ryuu had just supplied her location, freely and precisely, to an agent who was now sprinting across the rooftops of Orario to fetch her.
To bring her here.
To this street. Where Ryuu Lion stood at dusk in a trench coat, a fedora, and dark spectacles, on a roof, above a love duel, holding a pocketful of crushed jagamarukun, with grease on her ear.
Her stomach performed a slow, deliberate descent through the building beneath her.
Of all people. She could have endured Ganesha—Ganesha noticed nothing that was not shouted at him. She could have endured half the gods in this city. But Riveria Ljos Alf was measured, and dignified, and everything the word elf was supposed to mean before Ryuu's homeland had soured it, and Ryuu respected her in the reluctant, load-bearing way one respects a standard one has failed to meet. The High Elf's gaze would travel over the coat. The hat. The spectacles. It would not need to say anything. It would simply catalogue, and Ryuu would carry the memory of that cataloguing into her grave.
"Star Three Bunny," Astraea's voice came, warm as a hearth. "Your breathing has changed. Report."
"Nothing to report, Star One."
"Mm." A sip. "Justice sees all, you know."
"Then justice," Ryuu said, before she could stop herself, "might have mentioned something before I gave directions."
Her Goddess laughed—a bright, unguarded sound that the resonance crystal delivered directly into Ryuu's ear, and which several of her Familia sisters echoed down the line with varying degrees of muffling. Alise didn't bother muffling at all.
Ryuu, for the umpteenth time that evening, sighed. She tightened the trench coat around herself, pressed the fedora down until the brim sat a finger's width above the spectacles, and confirmed by touch that the dark lenses remained squarely in place—the entire ensemble arranged in the desperate hope that no one below, or shortly to arrive, would put a name to her face.
Then she turned back towards the devolving scene.
Below, the crowd had organised itself with the ruthless efficiency Orario reserved for exactly two activities: fleeing monsters and gambling. A broad-shouldered pallum near the skewer vendor had appointed himself bookmaker and was calling odds over the heads of the throng.
"Three to one on the challengers! Seven to one on Mario Mario! Twenty to one the Guild lady kills the werewolf before the duel starts—no, madam, you can't bet on that, you're the Guild lady—"
Valis was already changing hands.
Ryuu looked up towards the opposing building—and met a pair of eyes she hadn't noticed until now.
Asfi Al Andromeda crouched on the far rooftop, notebook in hand, pen paused mid-stroke. Her expression held the specific weariness of a woman whose god had instructed her to observe and report on anything entertaining, and who had been writing without pause for the last quarter of an hour.
Their gazes held for a moment. Two women. Two rooftops. Two gods they hadn't asked for. The treaty between them, ratified silently in the warehouse hours ago, renewed itself without a word.
Behind Ryuu, a thud announced Kaguya's return. She had left for a bottle and come back with a crate. A full crate, tucked under one arm, balanced against her hip the same way she balanced her katana—second nature and faintly threatening.
Kaguya set the crate down, withdrew a fistful of valis from her coat, and pressed it into Maryuu's palm. "Put this on the Guild staff," she said.
"Which one?"
"Both. But especially Wolf."
And yet another trench-coated figure came falling from the skies—or rather, from the rooftops of the pleasure district, coat billowing, hat already lost to the wind somewhere over the last three buildings.
-=&
End