Ari was lounging on her private balcony, one leg draped over the armrest of a chair that had reshaped itself specifically to accommodate that posture, watching the slow drift of distant stars past the edge of the void, when a thought occurred to her that felt suspiciously like ambition.
“System.” [Yes, host.] “Is there a way to pick which world an invitation goes to?
Instead of it being random.” [Yes, host.
Targeted invitations are possible.
They cost significantly more than standard cards.] Ari hummed, unbothered by the price tag on principle alone.
“I want to invite someone with a lot of food.
Like — an entire world built around it.” [I would recommend against a targeted invitation for that purpose.
Instead, consider opening an official food court, or booths available for guest rental.
You would receive the food you want at a lower cost than purchasing through the System Shop directly, and collect rent.] Ari sat up slightly, genuinely impressed despite herself.
“Huh.
Good idea.” She settled back down almost immediately, catching herself.
“But before that — do we even have enough points saved up to expand the city?
Actual expansion.
Not just buying things.” [Calculating…
Yes, host.
You have earned over one hundred thousand Void Points in recent transactions.
Expanding from the current size, Level Zero, to Level One will cost fifty thousand.] Ari sat all the way up this time, sharply enough that she nearly slid off the chair.
“Wait.” She stared at the panel.
“A hundred thousand?
From what?” [Guest sales, resale markups, and booth-adjacent revenue projections factored against current catalog turnover.] “…I don’t understand a single word of that, but wow.” She sank back into the chair, faintly stunned.
“And here I thought I was the capitalist in this relationship.
You systems fleece harder than I do.” [The System takes that as a compliment, host.] “It wasn’t entirely one.” She waved a hand before the System could argue the point further.
“Don’t upgrade yet.
I want to look around first, figure out where new buildings should actually go before we just throw money at empty space.” There was a brief, uncharacteristic pause.
[…Analyzing host’s vitals.
No illness detected.] The panel flickered, genuinely, comically confused.
[Query: what has prompted the sudden interest in going outside?] “Shut up,” Ari said, already standing.
• • The moment the mansion’s doors opened, her employees noticed, and noticing, meant abandoning whatever they’d been doing to converge on her with the barely restrained urgency of people responding to a fire alarm — Mary skidding slightly on the polished floor, Ai nearly colliding with a doorframe, both of them arriving with the wide-eyed, slightly manic energy of soldiers reporting a code they’d hoped never to see triggered.
“City Lord,” Mary said, arriving first, “is everything all right?” “I’m just taking a walk,” Ari said.
The collective gasp that followed could, under different circumstances, have shattered glass.
“What,” she said, “is with that look?” Nobody answered directly, though Ai’s expression suggested she was doing quiet, rapid math on how many days it had been since the City Lord had last set foot outside her own mansion, and arriving at a number large enough to be genuinely concerning.
Somewhere behind them both, Tsukasa poked his head out of the kitchen doorway just long enough to witness the historic event, blinked once, and retreated without comment.
Ari snorted, unbothered, and kept walking, her pace unhurried and entirely her own, until the mansion fell away behind her and the wide, star-flecked square opened up ahead, all the way to the gate.
• • Gojo saw her before she saw him.
He’d been leaning against the frame of the gate, technically waiting on Levi, who’d wandered off toward the Exchange Center to inspect something with his usual clinical suspicion, when a woman came strolling out from the direction of the mansion with the unbothered, unhurried gait of someone who had never once in her life felt the need to rush toward anything.
He straightened up slowly, blindfold still down, and watched her the way a man watches something he’s fairly sure he’s misjudged the scale of.
Black hair, dark as ink, catching flecks of something like violet in the starlight.
A face composed with the kind of effortless, symmetrical perfection, and ruby-red eyes that swept the square once, lazily, like she owned every inch of it — which, Gojo realized a half-second later, she probably did.
He pushed his blindfold up on reflex, both eyes uncovered, and looked at her properly, because very few things in his life had ever managed to be genuinely worth the extra attention.
Nothing was wrong with her.
That was the strange part.
His Six Eyes could parse the architecture of a face down to the atom if he let them, could pick apart symmetry and proportion and find the flaw that always, always existed somewhere — except this time, there wasn’t one.
Just a lazy, unbothered kind of beauty that looked like it would never once bother chasing him, and somehow that made it so much worse.
He pushed off the gate frame and closed the distance without any particular concern for how much space he was supposed to leave between them, leaning down slightly, close enough that his shadow fell over her, close enough that Ari could see the pale, startling blue of his eyes without needing to search for them, grinning with the easy, practiced charm of a man who had never once needed to work for anyone’s attention before.
“Well, hello there,” he said.
“Who do we have here?” Ari tilted her head up, and somewhere deep inside her, a completely different Ari — one who had apparently been dormant her entire life up until this exact moment — sat bolt upright and began screaming into a pillow.
(No.
Absolutely not.
We do not do this.
We are LAZY.
We are UNBOTHERED.
Sit back down.) “Call me City Lord-sama,” she said, finally, proud of how steady it came out.
“City Lord-sama,” he repeated, testing the syllables like they were the punchline to a joke only he could hear.
His grin widened, slow and delighted, and he dipped his head just slightly lower, close enough now that she could feel his breath when he spoke.
“Huh.
So the mysterious, allegedly terrifying ruler of Void City is actually just—” his gaze dropped, slow and unhurried, tracing the line of her face like he was memorizing it for later, “—this.” Somewhere behind her, entirely without permission, the System pulled up a small graph.
[Host.
Cardiac output: rising.
Rational thought: declining.
Correlation appears…
significant.] “This,” she said flatly, refusing to let a single flicker of it reach her voice, “is a person.
With a name.
That you don’t get to use yet.” He didn’t straighten up, didn’t put a single inch of respectable distance between them, just kept leaning there with his usual boundary-free ease, both eyes fixed on her like she was the single most interesting discovery of his entire life.
“Okay, City Lord-sama.
Question.
Does the actual ruler of this place normally just — wander out to the front gate unescorted?” Ari shrugged.
“That’s not a no,” Gojo said, delighted.
“It’s not a yes either.” “The woman who owns an entire dimension-spanning city, personally worth—” he did the mental math with visible enjoyment, “—more than everyone else here combined, times infinity, was bored, so she wandered down to the gate.
That’s the most powerful person alive having main character energy and I love it.” Ari let him have it.
“I get told that a lot,” Gojo added when she said nothing further.
Ari just raised an eyebrow.
“Mostly by people right before I ignore them and keep talking anyway.” He tilted his head, studying her the way he might study an unsolvable equation he’d genuinely enjoyed being handed, and something in his expression shifted — the performance easing back, just slightly, into something that looked, for one unguarded second, almost real.
“You’re doing that thing, though.
Where you say something dismissive and it’s supposed to make me back off, except you haven’t actually told me to leave.” Ari opened her mouth to deliver something suitably unbothered and produced, instead, a small, undignified noise that she chose to immediately and permanently deny ever making.
[Host.
Your response time has degraded by point-eight seconds.
Heart rate elevated.
Would you like me to intervene?] Don’t you dare, Ari thought, with as much venom as a woman could summon while a man with the bone structure of a divine punishment was leaning eight inches from her face, close enough that she could count the individual pale lashes framing eyes that looked at her like she was the only interesting thing in an entire multiverse.
She didn’t tell him to leave.
She just shrugged again.
“Ooh.” Gojo pressed a hand to his chest like she’d wounded him, delighted rather than deterred, and something underneath the grin — something warmer, more genuine — flickered through for just a moment before he covered it again.
“Not a no.
I’m gonna go ahead and take that as a not-no.” “She’s standing right here,” Ari said.
“I noticed.” His voice dropped, just slightly, just for her.
“Believe me, I noticed.” A low, unimpressed voice cut in from a few feet away, entirely unbothered by whatever moment the two of them had apparently been building.
“You’re being obnoxious.” Levi had arrived without either of them noticing, arms crossed, watching Gojo with the particular flat disapproval of a man who had clearly seen this exact routine performed on someone else already and hadn’t enjoyed it the first time either.
“I’m charming,” Gojo said, without breaking eye contact with Ari.
“You’re loud.
There’s a difference.” “You’re just mad you got here second.” “I’m not competing with you.” “You absolutely are,” Gojo said, finally turning to look at him, grin sharpening into something considerably more pointed.
“You walked over here the second you noticed I was talking to her.
That’s competing, Levi.
That’s textbook competing.” “I walked over here because you were being obnoxious.
Keep up.” “Sure.
Sure.
Whatever helps you sleep.” Gojo leaned back against the gate post, entirely unbothered, arms crossed behind his head.
“For the record, I saw her first.” “This isn’t a claiming ritual.” “Feels like one from where I’m standing.” Levi’s expression didn’t change at all, which somehow read as more dismissive than any actual retort could have.
“Tch.” Ari’s gaze slid sideways, and whatever composure she’d been fighting to hold onto simply gave up entirely the moment she actually looked at him.
Sharp gray eyes.
A jaw that looked carved rather than grown.
The kind of clean, economical handsomeness that didn’t need to try, standing there with his arms crossed like he had no idea what he was doing to her, or worse, knew exactly and didn’t care.
She stopped bothering to hide it.
She just looked between the two of them, slow and unhurried.
“Is this normal where you two are from?” she asked finally, mostly to herself.
“Do people just — look like this?
Both of you?” Gojo grinned wider.
“I get that a lot.” Ari’s eyes tracked back to Levi, lingering, not caring how obvious she was being about it.
Then, with the flat, clinical seriousness of a woman filling out a very important survey: “Are either of you gay?
I’m asking for professional reasons.” A full beat of silence followed, in which Gojo’s grin froze in place with the specific rigidity of a man recalibrating his entire understanding of the conversation, and somewhere behind Ari, invisible to everyone but her, a tiny chibi version of the System keeled over sideways in a dead faint.
[Host.
That question was not on any approved script.] “…No,” Gojo said slowly, though the grin came roaring back within a second, sharper now, delighted by the sheer audacity of the question rather than offended by it.
“Very much not.
Why, is that a deal-breaker?
Should I lie?
I feel like I could pivot.” Ari shrugged.
Levi’s expression didn’t so much as flicker.
“No,” he said, in the exact same tone he’d use to confirm he took his tea without sugar.
“You didn’t even sound offended,” Ari said.
“I’ve been asked stranger things.” Ari tilted her head, one eyebrow raised.
“Doesn’t matter,” Levi said anyway.
Gojo, meanwhile, had drifted a half-step closer during all of this, tilting his head to match hers with the ease of a cat deciding a lap looked comfortable enough to claim.
“You know,” he said, “for someone allegedly terrifying, you sure do stare a lot.” Ari kept looking.
He leaned in anyway, closer than before, resting one forearm loosely against the gate post beside her head, entirely unbothered by the lack of invitation.
“Staring’s basically an invitation where I’m from, you know.” “Mm,” Ari said.
“Could be,” Gojo said cheerfully, “if you asked nicely.” Levi watched the entire display with the flat, weary patience of a man who had apparently already resigned himself to putting up with this indefinitely.
What held his attention, though, wasn’t the staring, or the flirting, or even the fact that his travel companion was draping himself over their City Lord like an oversized housecat — it was the fact that she hadn’t actually told either of them to back off.
She hadn’t told them to stay, either.
There was something in that — the dry humor, the refusal to be pinned down even while visibly rattled — that struck Levi as considerably more interesting than her face, beautiful as it undeniably was.
“You’re not what I expected,” he said, mostly to himself.
Ari raised an eyebrow.
“Someone more like him.” A brief, pointed look toward Gojo.
Ari let the corner of her mouth curve, faint and unreadable, and left it at that.
The corner of Levi’s mouth moved, almost imperceptibly, in a way that wasn’t quite a smile but wasn’t nothing either.
• • Word of the encounter reached the rest of the guests long before Ari did.
By the time she finally wandered — with Gojo trailing after her at a distance he seemed to consider perfectly respectable and everyone else considered deeply suspicious — toward the Exchange Center, Sheldon, Naruto, Harry, Sakamoto, Cinderella, Anya, Tanjiro, and Robin had all gathered near the entrance with the particular tense curiosity of people who had heard a rumor and desperately needed to confirm it.
“That’s her?” Naruto said, a little too loudly, craning his neck.
“That’s the City Lord?” “Small,” Sheldon observed, adjusting nothing about his tone whatsoever.
“I expected someone taller, statistically, given the power differential.” “She’s beautiful,” Cinderella breathed, hands clasped together with unguarded delight, actual sparkles practically materializing around her the way they only ever seemed to when she looked at something she found genuinely lovely.
Sakamoto said nothing at all, but the faint, approving incline of his head suggested he considered the City Lord’s aesthetic entirely satisfactory.
Robin studied her with the calm, assessing curiosity of a woman cataloguing a new and interesting variable.
“So this is the mind behind all of it,” she mused.
“I confess, I expected someone colder.” Harry, standing beside Naruto, simply stared for a long moment, quiet in the way he got when something mattered more than he wanted to admit out loud.
“She’s got Gojo-san following her like a stray cat,” Tanjiro pointed out, with the gentle bewilderment of someone still adjusting to how casually everyone here seemed to take the impossible.
Anya, perched on Harry’s hip where she’d more or less installed herself over the last day, studied Ari with wide, unblinking eyes and declared, with total six-year-old confidence, “Pretty lady.
Anya likes her already.” “She also,” Naruto added, squinting harder, “looks like she’s fighting off a full-body allergic reaction to that guy standing next to her.” Which was, everyone present silently agreed once they actually looked, an extremely accurate observation.
None of them said anything else for a moment, all eight of them simply watching their City Lord approach with an entirely new, entirely mutual understanding settling over the group — whatever they’d each individually imagined ruling an entire dimension-spanning city ought to look like, it hadn’t been this.
• • Behind the group, half-hidden near the mansion’s entrance where they’d trailed after their City Lord against her explicit instructions, Mary and Ai watched the whole encounter unfold with matching expressions that had nothing to do with horror and everything to do with quiet, simmering suspicion.
“Who,” Mary said, very evenly, “do either of them think they are.” “I know,” Ai said, arms crossed, eyes narrowed at Gojo’s forearm still braced against the gate post beside Ari’s head.
“Look at him.
Draped over her like that.
As if he’s earned the right.” “The tall one hasn’t even smiled at her properly and he’s already standing there like he owns half the square.” “City Lord could have anyone,” Ai said, with the flat, absolute conviction of a woman stating a law of physics.
Mary’s mouth pressed into a thin line.
“They’re attractive.
I’ll grant them that much.” “Attractive isn’t the same as worthy,” Ai said.
“Ari-sama is the single most beautiful, most extraordinary being either of us has ever laid eyes on.
She built a city out of nothing.
She’s kind, in that lazy, roundabout way of hers.
She has ruby eyes.
Do either of these two have ruby eyes?” “No,” Mary said.
“Exactly.
So no.
Not good enough.
Next.” “To be fair,” Mary said, watching Gojo lean further into Ari’s space with visible professional concern, “they are extremely handsome.” “I said what I said,” Ai replied, unmoved.
“Handsome isn’t the bar.
The bar is Ari-sama, and Ari-sama has no bar, because nothing has ever cleared it.” “The tall one does have very nice hair.” “Mary.” “I’m simply making an observation.” “Keep your observations to yourself,” Ai said primly, eyes still narrowed on the gate.
“We are not here to admire the competition.
We are here to make sure the competition understands, clearly, early, that Ari-sama is not some prize to be won by whoever happens to show up looking like that.” “Agreed,” Mary said.
“Completely.” Neither of them moved to intervene.
Neither of them looked away, either, tracking the scene with the same narrow, assessing focus a hawk gives something it hasn’t decided yet whether to consider prey.
“We should keep an eye on them,” Mary said finally.
“Both of them.
Closely.” “Very closely,” Ai agreed.
Mary, torn between professional duty and the distinct urge to march over there and physically insert herself between her City Lord and at least one blindfolded jerk, chose, for now, to simply keep watching.