Chapter 916: Young Master’s Keepers: Monster’s True Realm Rank
’What,’ Yuzuki thought, with the slow dawning clarity of a woman watching a farce assemble itself in real time, ’the actual fuck is this.’
She was cursing, she was aware she was cursing which she didn’t do so much in English, but she felt entirely justified, because — how to put this with the dignity her station theoretically demanded?
— they were all behaving like heat-seeking missiles. Every last one of them were locked on, trailing, drawn helplessly along the same vector toward a single oblivious point of gravity in a two-million-dollar car.
To appreciate the full absurdity of it, one had to back up exactly thirty seconds ago.
The moment Phei had stepped out of the hotel and folded himself into the Rolls and the moment the convoy glided forward toward whatever destination Yuzuki could not have cared less about if she’d been paid in Sovereign-tier artifacts to care — four shadows had moved with him.
But not coincidentally or loosely. Together, with the grim coordinated purpose of a funeral procession that hadn’t yet decided whose funeral it was.
The first shadow was her own. Though shadow was generous, and frankly insulting.
Yuzuki hung high above the island, hands planted on her hips, akimbo, drifting through the open blue with the lazy entitlement of a being for whom gravity was a polite suggestion she occasionally humoured.
Her katana rode at her hip where it always rode, dark scabbard tapping idly against her bare thigh in the high thin wind.
The cropped white shirt fluttered against her stomach; the short pleated skirt snapped and flared around her thighs, baring more of them to the empty sky than any sky had earned the right to see.
Flight was, she’d decided long ago, the single finest perk of having clawed her way to the Sky Sovereign stage — better than the running speed or the way rooms went quiet when she walked into them.
Up here she was sovereign in the literal sense and she answered to weather and nothing else.
The clear daylight could barely conceal her — daylight never hid anyone the way the night did, and she preferred the night for exactly that reason — but she’d flown so absurdly high that no eye below would find her regardless.
A speck against blue, if that.
And while the world couldn’t see her, she could see all of it perfectly, every detail laid out crisp and close as though she stood in the middle of the street with her nose an inch from the car’s window.
Of course, some of them could have seen her.
The stronger ones.
She was, by her own honest reckoning, weaker than nearly everything else trailing the dragon today, and a being of sufficient rank would have plucked her out of the sky like a fly off a wall —
— if not for the artifact.
The concealment piece the princesses had given her.
It did two beautiful things at once: it tucked her neatly out of the perception of beings she had no business surviving, and it let her perceive them in return — the hidden, the cloaked, the patiently lurking, all the way up to the Immortal Realm.
A two-way mirror she stood on the safe side of. Mostly.
Which brought her to the second shadow.
The Monster.
There she was, folded into the shadow between one of Phei’s own people — riding the gaps in his retinue’s shadows like something poured into a mould.
Yuzuki could see her clear as anything.
But that was the thing about the Monster, the thing that made the cold settle into Yuzuki’s spine and refuse to leave: who was to say the Monster wasn’t simply letting herself be seen?
Letting Yuzuki know exactly where she sat, down to the inch, purely because it amused her to be watched by someone she could unmake in a blink.
The creature was many things. Subtle, patient, elegant, but above all of it, beneath all of it, the Monster was spiteful — and spite of that caliber did not hide when it could instead lean against a doorframe and smile.
No one knew the Monster’s true rank.
’No one living, anyway.’
But Yuzuki had done the grim arithmetic, and the sum kept landing in the same dreadful neighborhood: the Monster was in the latter stages of the Higher Immortals
At least. Possibly worse, she might even be a in the Transcendent Immortals: Great Immortal God, Supreme God Immortal, Sovereign Concepts Immortal or be in the Ancient Realm itself!
Still — Yuzuki wasn’t worried; couldn’t afford to be.
Her orders were clean and merciful in their simplicity: watch.
Just to observe the Monster’s movements, exactly as far as the spiteful thing deigned to permit her to observe them, and not one step further.
Do not confront. Do not intercept. Do not, under any circumstances, mistake yourself for the hunter in this mission.
Yuzuki had read that last unwritten clause for herself, in the smile on the glass, the night before.
The third shadow she did not know — not by name, not at first, which turned out to be the part that mattered.
A woman.
Yuzuki had only clocked her after spotting her gliding in Phei’s wake, and she’d been frowning at her on and off ever since, because the woman made no sense.
She poured light.
There was no other way to say it. She came down the sky like something the sky had been built to hold up with radiance spilling off her in slow golden sheets, the air around her gilded and trembling, every mote of dust she passed catching fire with borrowed glory and drifting down behind her like the tail of a comet too gentle to fear.
Her wings were the centerpiece of it: they were vast; one golden, burning — not consumed by the fire but composed of it, each feather a long tongue of soft white-gold flame that furled and rippled with every unhurried beat, throwing warm light across the rooftops below as though dawn had detached itself from the horizon and gone for a stroll while the other wing was dark as night!
She was, in the plainest and most reluctant terms Yuzuki could summon, resplendent. The kind of beautiful that made the chest ache before the brain caught up to wonder why.
And rising from the crown of that glory, plain as a curse written across a prayer: a pair of dark horns.
’Since when,’ Yuzuki wondered, genuinely affronted on behalf of theology itself, ’do angels come with Gold and Dark wing and horns?
