Chapter 767: First Princess’s Emissary
’That girl,’ he thought, not without a complicated mix of pride and resignation, ’is soon going to be someone else’s beautiful, terrifying problem long before she ever becomes mine again.’
And it seemed there was no helping it.
The princess had infected Yuzuki; whatever the eldest Ryujin Tiamat princess was — her temperament, her wildness, her particular brand of refined chaos that existed somewhere between aristocratic discipline and gleeful demolition — a bit of it had seeped into Yuzuki across the years they had spent together, and no one could do a thing about it.
The girl had gone away with the princess and come back remade in her image, and the remaking was, Hayashi had come to accept — having tried everything and been outflanked by genetics and influence in equal measure — permanent.
He quickened his pace.
Yuzuki was already halfway down the corridor, her stride unchanged, her hair swinging in that heavy dark metronome, that skirt doing its criminal best, the katana tapping its soft percussion against her thigh.
He walked faster, closing the gap by ten meters. His damp suit squelched quietly with each accelerated step — the sound deeply undignified, which the corridor’s acoustics, in their polished marble indifference, did nothing to conceal.
’Gods, that girl moves like she owns the air itself. And the worst part is she probably does.’
Yuzuki felt her father before he reached her.
Her shoulders shifted — barely, a tiny roll, the muscles along her upper back adjusting beneath the crop top’s loose fabric — and she glanced back over her shoulder with one pale blue eye visible past her bangs, bangs falling across the other eye in a thick dark slash, hiding it, and the visible eye found her father gaining on her and gleamed with pure, unrepentant mischief.
She grinned and immediately picked up speed.
Not running. Just — faster. Her stride stretched out, her hips rolling wider, the pleats flaring higher with each step and flashing more thigh than the corridor had any right to see.
Her hair streamed behind her in a long dark banner, the katana bouncing against her leg in double-time. She was enjoying this, immensely.
Her bare stomach flexed with each lengthened stride, the defined abdominal lines working beneath golden skin like living sculpture, and the crop top rode higher with the movement, showing another inch of toned midriff that the shirt’s designer had most certainly not budgeted for.
’Look at her laughing at me with every step.’ Hayashi walked faster.
Yuzuki walked faster.
He broke into a jog — squelching, undignified, his damp ceremonial suit protesting audibly with each stride, a middle-aged man chasing his own daughter down a five-star hotel corridor while still soaking wet from carrying a goddess’s energy on his back.
Staff pressed themselves against the walls as he passed.
A woman with a small dog scooped the dog up and stared. Somewhere behind him, he was fairly certain the room service attendant who had walked into his own cart was now watching this and feeling marginally better about his own afternoon.
Yuzuki seeing him running, broke into a skip — light and bouncing, her hair flying in a wild dark arc behind her, the katana swinging wide, her bare stomach flashing with each bounce, the pleats of her skirt fanning outward at the apex of each skip and falling back in lazy swirls around her thighs.
Her giggles sailed back down the corridor toward him in bright, unbothered waves.
She looked back at him while skipping and stuck her tongue out — pink, defiant, utterly delighted with herself.
"Keep up old man."
"Yuzuki!"
She laughed — bright, delighted, the laugh she had been perfecting since she could walk, the laugh of making her father chase her and never once being caught when she didn’t want to be.
He stopped.
Hands on his knees, breathing hard. His suit squelching. A small puddle forming beneath him — again — because the universe had apparently decided that Hayashi’s relationship with puddles was now a permanent feature of his professional identity.
Twenty meters ahead, Yuzuki stopped too — light on her feet, not even winded, spinning to face him with her weight on one hip, the katana resting against her thigh, her head tilted, her bangs falling across one eye in that soft dark slash.
She pouted at him. Fake. Exaggerated. Lower lip pushed out, eyebrows raised, the universal daughter expression for "aw, did you get tired, old man?"
Then she smiled — warm, genuine, the full version, the one she saved for him and almost nobody else — and it transformed her entire face.
The sharp cheekbones softened while her arctic eyes warmed into something that could melt steel.
The lazy smirk became something real and bright and completely unbothered, and it was so thoroughly her — the girl behind the blade and the beauty and the camouflage bangs — that Hayashi, standing in the corridor damp and winded and thoroughly outmanoeuvred, couldn’t even be properly angry about it.
He loved her so much it made his chest hurt worse than the Nether Energy had.
He would never tell her that.
Hayashi exhaled through his nose.
He was curious, she knew he was curious.
And she was not going to give him a single word.
The questions would stay where they were — lodged in his mind, turning slowly, unanswered, patient, accumulating interest the way all unanswered questions about Ryujin Tiamat women accumulated interest, which was to say: steadily, expensively, and with the quiet certainty that the bill would arrive at the worst possible moment.
Why was she back? She had been gone for years with the princess, living in whatever rarefied shadow the eldest Ryujin Tiamat daughter occupied — a shadow that moved across continents without announcing itself and settled over cities and operations and entire geopolitical situations with the quiet committed weight of an intelligence that did not require visibility to function.
Yuzuki had returned only once — briefly, without warning — when the Young Master’s powers had first awakened, appearing just long enough to help contain the aftermath before vanishing again into the princess’s orbit, leaving behind nothing but a few scrubbed security feeds and the faint bewildered memory of his men who were fairly certain their boss’s girl with a katana had been in the place and were completely unable to explain why.
’And now, weeks later, here she is. Not in Japan, where the princess had gone to meet her mother, the Empress. Here. On Hell’s Paradise Island. Alone. Carrying a katana and an attitude and offering no explanation for either.’
’Why here? Why now? Why not with the princess?’
’Unless the princess had sent her.’
Unless this — the arrival, the timing, Hell’s Paradise Island specifically — was not Yuzuki being carefree at all, but Yuzuki being her master’s emissary. The swaying walk and the bare stomach and the giggles and the tongue stuck out at her father — all of it a disguise worn so comfortably it had become indistinguishable from the girl wearing it.
And the sword was the truth.
He wasn’t sure.
But the eldest princess and Yuzuki were definitely plotting something. They always were. The two of them had been conspirators since Yuzuki was fourteen and the princess had looked at her and decided this one is mine, and in the years since, every major Ryujin Tiamat operation that required a light touch and a sharp blade had, at some point, passed through Yuzuki’s hands.
’What are they plotting?’
He didn’t know.
Twenty meters down the corridor, his daughter blew him a kiss — her full lips pressing together and releasing the gesture with casual affection weaponized at age six and refined ever since into something that landed like a small warm grenade — turned on her heel, and disappeared around the corner, her long black hair the last thing to follow.
A long dark sweep vanishing into the turn, the ends whipping around the corner’s edge a heartbeat after the girl they belonged to had already gone.
Hayashi stood alone in the corridor, damp and curious and outmanoeuvred by his own child.
He would find out eventually. He always did.
Just never soon enough.
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A/N: Here is our first impression on the first Princess, Melissa’s sister and Phei’s first aunt! And of course, her hot dangerous disciple and emissary. I am waiting for your comments and how powerful you think she is.
