Chapter 116: Chapter 116
The Hostess of Fertility.
"The Hundred-Woman Slayer? What kind of dreadful name is that?" Syr set down a glass with more force than it needed, scowling.
"Anyone who doesn’t know better is going to think Kiriya-kun is some Pleasure Quarter regular."
"It is a bit crude," Ryuu agreed quietly, hands still in the wash water. "But half the city’s already saying it. There’s not much undoing that now."
Syr puffed out her cheeks. "Those gossips are going to drag his whole reputation through the mud!"
Ryuu glanced at her sidelong. "You’re not bothered by the rest of it? That boy clearly cares for Goddess Hestia. Deeply."
"Oh. That." Syr’s annoyance softened into something smaller and quieter. "There’s nothing to be done about that, is there. She was there for him when he had no one. How could I ever stand next to a bond like that?"
Ryuu’s heart moved, and she half-opened her mouth — but Syr got there first.
"I’m not asking him to give anything up for me. I’d be happy just to watch from a little ways off. As long as he’s smiling, that’s enough."
Ryuu looked at the wistful set of her friend’s face for a long moment, and something thoughtful crossed her own.
...
That night, plenty of people across Orario were destined to lose sleep.
Kiriya, as it happened, intended to make sure at least one of them never woke up.
Once he was certain Hestia had drifted off, he slipped into the living room and called up a shadow clone.
"You know the job."
"Course I do." The clone grinned and drew a thumb across his own throat. "Anyone marked for midnight doesn’t get to see morning."
Then he was gone.
...
Midnight. The Pleasure Quarter.
The district that never slept had, for once, gone silent.
There was no avoiding it.
Every fighter the Ishtar Familia could put in a ring was flat on their back, bones knitting slowly even with Orario’s finest healers on retainer.
Tonight, not one of them would be standing.
And with the muscle out of commission, the handful of small fry left couldn’t keep a lid on anything — the moment Kiriya had walked off, the quarter’s uglier elements had started circling.
So Ishtar had shuttered the whole place and herded her prized "working ladies" into one guarded room, because assets were assets, and she could not afford to lose them.
The complaints had been loud.
She hadn’t spared them a thought. She was in a foul enough mood of her own without nursing the feelings of a crowd of men.
She paced her office with a cigarette, wearing a groove into the floor.
"That damned Sylvan. That damned Hestia. I’ll have it back from them in blood. Every drop of it!"
Each replay of the afternoon felt like it might crack her open.
She — the Goddess of Beauty, who could turn the heads of every living thing — had been called lesser than that pint-sized hearth goddess, in front of the entire city!
In all her long reign over Heaven and earth both, when had she ever swallowed an insult like this?
She needed her pride back.
The problem was simple arithmetic: what she had on hand wasn’t enough.
Even with Haruhime’s magic stacked on top of them, the Berbera weren’t in Kiriya’s weight class.
"Tch. Useless, the lot of them." She stopped pacing. "Looks like I’ll have to call those people in."
The Kali Familia.
They worked outside the city, but they had the firepower — a captain and vice-captain both at Level 6.
Layer Haruhime’s enchantment over that, and you had a force capable of tipping Orario’s whole balance over on its side.
She’d hesitated before, and for good reason: a god is easy to invite in and a nightmare to send back out.
The moment Kali entered the board, the game stopped being entirely hers.
But tonight had burned her reason down to the studs, and suddenly that price looked perfectly reasonable.
"I’ll split the profits if I have to. But Kiriya dies." Her voice came out low and ugly.
...
"Well, now. Not a shred of reflection in her."
From the dark at the edge of the room, the clone listened to her muttering and smiled to himself, soundless.
Against a creature like this, mercy wasn’t generosity.
It was negligence — toward his own life.
He reached out with his senses and found the slivers of wood seeded inside her.
Energy Perception lit them up clear as anything, like staring through a microscope cranked to full magnification.
"Goodbye, Goddess Ishtar."
He triggered Forest of All Things.
Splrk.
Mid-fantasy, Ishtar went rigid.
A tearing, white-hot pain bloomed out from her heart, and she felt it with horrible clarity — something inside her had simply come apart!
"What... is..." The whisper alone tugged at the wound, and blood welled up and spilled, far too much of it, far too fast.
Strength drained out of her limbs like water from a cracked basin, and the shock of it crowded out everything but a single rising note of fear.
’Am I... dying?’
She wasn’t ready!
Wasn’t willing — unwilling enough that her teeth bit clean through her own lip.
’I haven’t pulled that bitch off her pedestal yet. I haven’t taken that child. How can it end here, how can I—’
She forced herself toward the door, meaning to call the guards, the healers waiting just down the hall.
But this was no story written to spare her.
Two steps was all she got before her legs folded and the floor came up to meet her, and this time there was no getting back up.
Boom!
A vast column of light tore up out of the ground and split the sky, and every eye in the city turned toward it at once.
"That’s— that’s a return pillar."
"Another god? Sent back to Heaven?"
"That direction— isn’t that Ishtar’s—"
"No way..."
The Goddess of Beauty was gone.
And with her gone, the questions came thick and fast.
Would the Pleasure Quarter survive the night?
Would its lovely ladies open their doors come morning?
All of it, suddenly, uncertain — which was why, up and down the district, the lechers and regulars wore the stunned, hollow faces of men who’d just been orphaned!
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