Chapter 758: Yuzuki Hayashi...
Hayashi had lowered himself into the chair the instant the penthouse stirred to life, the dampness of his clothes clinging like a second, treacherous skin.
The people he’d called had arrived not as servants but as shadows given form—pairs of men and women clad in the obsidian weave of the family’s, gliding through the suite with the lethal grace of scalpel blades dancing across living flesh.
These were no regular people like some mere cleaners summoned by coin or complaint.
Their steps fell in perfect synchrony, each footfall claiming the exact space the last had abandoned, as though the air itself had been rehearsed into submission.
Their very spines were so straight like drawn swords, shoulders squared beneath fabric that hid more muscle and menace than any tailor’s art could confess.
The very atmosphere bowed aside for them, parting with reluctant reverence, the way a river yields to submerged reefs that could gut a hull without warning.
A man who knew the world’s darker currents would have recognized them at once: not housekeepers, but exorcists of a higher order—bodies trained until instinct became scripture, minds sharpened to carve away the rot of gods without so much as a tremor.
They cleaned methodically and silently.
Wiping surfaces already immaculate, tracing walls with slender instruments that thrummed at frequencies meant to rattle the bones of divinity itself—vibrations that slipped past the ear and lodged in the skull, making teeth ache and arm-hairs rise like soldiers at attention.
They cleaned the lingering energy of the Nether Goddess with the bored familiarity of veterans who had mopped up worse.
Each of their movements carried the quiet collegiality one reserves for old, reliable enemies.
Energy or magic contamination and cleansing? Just another Tuesday’s stain.
But the singular presence anchored beside Hayashi’s chair eclipsed even their eerie precision.
A young man, barely into his twenties, wore the same black uniform as though the cloth had sworn fealty rather than mere employment. He was tall and broad-shouldered yet lean as a coiled whip and he stood with the effortless menace of a blade resting in its sheath—content, for now, not to taste blood.
His hands hung loose at his sides, not relaxed but deliberately still, the kind of stillness a predator maintains when it has already decided which throats to open and is merely waiting for the signal.
His face was handsome with dark eyes unreadable as deep water, jaw clean and sharp, hair drawn back tight enough to expose the lethal architecture beneath. He breathed slow, blinked rarer than a man ought, and the space around him felt heavier, warmer, faintly pressurized—like the world itself strained to contain whatever monstrous potential he kept leashed beneath that calm exterior.
The cleaners flowed around him as fish skirt a reef in black depths: aware, without conscious thought, that this particular rock went far deeper than the eye could fathom.
Hayashi, still seated and still dripping, turned to him with the weary authority like a king who has seen empires rise and fall before breakfast.
"How did everything go?"
The young man inclined his head—a crisp, unhurried bow calibrated to the exact degree his father’s teaching, training and his position in the family demanded.
"Everywhere has been cleansed, Hayashi-sama. Hallway, elevator, lobby sensors. All footage purged after copies were sent to the Empress."
Hayashi’s nod carried the weight of ancestral mountains, pride settling into the lines of his face like fresh-forged steel.
"And the—"
"The affected children have been cleansed of the Nether Energy with discretion," his son cut in smoothly, voice low and certain as a guillotine’s fall. "All of them. None will bear lasting effects of the Goddess’s lethal energy. The infants are stabilized: their families remain blissfully ignorant."
Hayashi exhaled, shoulders loosening as though the penthouse’s very foundations had sighed with him.
"Good. That’s good." A damp hand scrubbed across his face. "We cannot afford any of them turning into one of the Nether Goddess’s Unfinished."
A low chuckle drifted from the far side of the penthouse, laced with the dark, velvet amusement of someone who had watched the entire divine circus from the cheap seats and found it mildly entertaining.
"Yeah, that would be quite the family portrait, wouldn’t it? Tiny Unfinisheds gnawing on the curtains."
The voice belonged to neither the cleaners nor the son.
The speaker leaned against the floor-to-ceiling window like the glass itself had been carved to cradle her, one shoulder pressed to the pane, arms folded beneath a chest that defied gravity and reason alike.
She had been there the entire time, of course—unannounced, unnoticed, because she did not enter rooms; she simply allowed them to become aware of her presence when the mood struck.
Hayashi grimaced, the expression said so much of a father whose patience had filed for early retirement. "Stop joking about serious things."
She giggled—a bright, crystalline sound that sliced through the lingering ozone of divine residue like a stiletto through silk.
"I’m not the one who said it." She pushed off the glass with liquid grace, hips swaying in a rhythm older than sin itself. "Also—not my fault some pampered royalty can’t keep their cosmic tantrums on a leash."
"Yuzuki!"
Hayashi’s snapped at her, his voiced cracked like a whip.
Hayashi’s tone carried the precise frequency of paternal exasperation stretched to its limit and then some.
His son spared her the briefest glance—equal parts warning and reluctant acknowledgment.
And Yuzuki Hayashi... gods below, she was not merely pretty.
Pretty was for porcelain dolls and painted courtesans.
Yuzuki was a fucking catastrophe wrapped in warm golden skin and hot yet subtle curves... she was a beauty that could make a saint renounce his vows mid-prayer and a devil reconsider his retirement.
She was stupidly, ruinously, soul-crushingly hot that stopped hearts, rewired brains, and left grown men standing slack-jawed, wondering if language had always been this difficult.
Her hair was a living waterfall of: jet-black, impossibly thick, tumbling past her shoulders in a heavy, glossy cascade that caught the penthouse lights and turned them into liquid midnight, that swayed when she moved, heavy enough to imagine the weight of it wrapped around a fist, cool and silken against fevered skin.
Straight bangs framed her face like a deliberate taunt, slightly off-center, softening features that had no interest in mercy, her face was made of high, razor-sharp cheekbones carved shadows that begged to be traced by fingertips—or teeth.
Her small, straight nose and jawline that tapered to a delicate chin, yet promised it could cut glass made her face more pronounced with pale arctic blue eyes against her sun-kissed gold skin, heavy-lidded and cool as winter steel—held the lazy confidence of a woman who had stared down gods and found them wanting.
Yuzuki’s lips were full, plush, the lower one plush enough to invite worship; they rested in a faint, crooked half-smirk that whispered filthy promises and dared you to call her bluff.
Small gold hoops glinted at her ears. A thin chain kissed the hollow of her throat, drawing the eye downward like an arrow to forbidden treasure.
She was slim-waisted of course... yet lushly built, the white cropped shirt she wore nothing short of criminal.
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A/N: What do y’all think?
