The maids surprised me.
I hadn’t planned on them.
I’d been thinking about the east wing—collapsed, water-damaged, a mild disaster of sagging beams and creeping mold—and I’d thought, in passing, that I needed to fix it.
Then AM had chimed in with a suggestion, like a helpful librarian sliding a book across the desk.
I went with my gut and ended up creating something vaguely humanoid—two feet tall, eight in total—moving with just-a-bit-too-synchronized rhythm given their swarm nature.
Each had four arms, small nimble hands, and what I could only call a deeply focused look.
I pointed at the east wing.
They went.
I heard them working all afternoon—steady, unhurried, seemingly tireless—and by the time I checked at dusk, the mold on the ground floor had been removed with surgical precision, and two beams were braced with stones they’d gathered from the collapsed section of the outer wall.
I stood in the doorway and watched them work.
That night I wrote in the notebook, neater now:
– Veils — confirmed.
Small, adaptive, passive.
Light and aura both.
– Harbingers — confirmed.
Attention aversion.
Do not wear on wrist in library.
– Ward construct — prototype only.
Needs cloaking function before deployment.
– Maid constructs — unplanned but keeping them.
Possibly the most immediately useful thing I’ve made.
I underlined the last line.
Then added below:
AM learns from use.
The first version of anything is always rough.
The second is better.
The process works.
I closed the notebook.
Outside, I could hear the distant soft clicking of the maid constructs still working by moonlight.
The folder Ajuka had given me sat on the corner of the desk.
I’d read it three times.
Most of it was theoretical — Marbas family notes on void magic, energy signatures, the mechanics of negation as a force rather than an absence.
Dry academic work from people who’d died before they could apply it.
But the travel authorization was real, and it covered Beelzebub-controlled areas.
I unfolded the relevant page and checked the list of exit points.
There was one keyed to a dimensional anchor roughly two hundred kilometers from Kyoto.
The problem with knowing the future was that it turned out the future didn’t actually tell you where anything was.
I wanted to find Ingvild first, but finding her was going to be hard since I didn’t remember the general location.
What I did know was that there was a power which could alter the probability for me to find anything.
Telos Karma.
Momiji Nakiri’s Longinus.
I’d been putting off thinking about Telos Karma because thinking about it required thinking about Momiji Nakiri, and thinking about Momiji Nakiri was — complicated.
Nakiri family was involved in the chaos surrounding the ongoing Slash Dog incident that he had just found out from DevilNet.
The Nakiri family was one of the Five Principal Clans of the East.
I knew what she was.
I knew what the Gear was doing to her family politically.
I knew her brother Takeru, the clan head, and that Takeru would walk into walls for her if she asked, and that she knew it and hated herself for the burden she represented.
I also knew what Telos Karma could do paired with what I was building.
The combination wasn’t optional.
It was load-bearing.
I sat with that for a while.
Then I packed light, Ajuka’s travel papers — and went to bed early.
He boarded the inter-dimensional train
See you next chapter.