A ten tails sun

[grankhain]

Sixteen degrees Celsius.

A human concept.

Demons had traditionally measured temperature in "cold-blood tolerance"—an archaic metric that involved submerging limbs in various substances and timing how long they took to go numb. Barbaric, imprecise, and utterly useless.

But Arden Sitri had adopted the French metric system five years ago, after reading Anders Celsius's works in a clandestine library in Paris. The decision had cost him three public lashes in Lilith's central plaza, ordered personally by the then-reigning Lucifer.

"A human system? In MY Underworld? Honestly, who had the breathtaking audacity to import such a mortal contraption into a realm that functioned flawlessly eons before the prey learned to stand upright? Truly, the gall of certain beings..."

The leather had bitten into his back three times. Once for each degree of "cultural heresy."

It had been worth it. Every damned lash.

Arden checked the thermometer embedded in the wall of the hospital's private wing. The instrument was German—blown glass from Thuringia, mercury purified seven times, scale engraved with watchmaker precision. He had imported it two years ago, wrapped in silk and hidden in a shipment of "exotic spices." The smuggler who brought it had died mysteriously three days later.

Some investments require protection.

The mercury gleamed silver inside the glass tube, marking exactly sixteen degrees. Perfect.

Arden knew the margins. He had calculated them obsessively for weeks before designing this wing of the hospital. Two degrees higher—eighteen—and visitors would begin to shiver, rubbing their arms, wondering with that vague discomfort mortals could never quite articulate why a hospital maintained such a hostile temperature. They would start looking for excuses to leave. Their visits would shorten. Their attention would scatter. Unacceptable for an observation environment.

Two degrees lower—fourteen—and his own instincts would begin to thaw. Sitri blood ran naturally cold; it was part of their lineage, part of what made them so effective as physicians and so dangerous as enemies. But "cold" and "frozen" were different states. At fourteen degrees, instinct began to stir. At twelve, it became hard to ignore. At ten... masks began to slip.

Sixteen was the equilibrium point. The razor's edge. The exact place where a Sitri could function with surgical precision without losing control of what lay beneath.

The marble beneath his shoes reflected his face with mirror-like clarity. Arden paused for a moment to study it. Dark hair, impeccably slicked back, not a single strand out of place—the kind of perfection that required twenty minutes each morning and an amount of hair product that would have scandalized his warrior ancestors. A neutral expression. The expression of an eminent physician.

Physician.

Another human word.

Demons had traditionally had "healers"—creatures who channeled demonic energy to close wounds and purge diseases. Or "alchemists"—madmen who mixed substances in bubbling cauldrons hoping for results that rarely came.

But "physician" implied something different. Science. Method. Understanding. Not healing because power flowed through you, but healing because you understood why the body failed and knew exactly how to fix it.

Arden preferred that. He preferred to understand.

His hand rose toward his hair. No. He stopped it midway. Not here. Not now.

But the hand didn't obey. It never obeyed when he was near her.

He adjusted a strand that didn't need adjusting. Once. Stop doing that. Twice. Arden. Stop. Three times.

A bad habit. One he had developed four-hundred-twenty-three years ago, when he met Vivienne Sitri at a clandestine conference on comparative anatomy among demonic species.

She had been sitting in the third row, wearing a dark blue dress, her hair gathered in a severe bun, taking notes with handwriting so precise it looked printed. And when the presenter—a pompous idiot who confused "traditional" with "correct"—had made an error in his diagram of a succubus's circulatory system, Vivienne had raised her hand.

"Excuse me. The left ventricle is inverted in your illustration. And the artery you've labeled as 'secondary' is, in fact, the main distribution pathway for vital energy. If any of your students attempted surgery based on this diagram, they would kill the patient in less than three minutes."

Her voice had been cold. Precise. Perfect.

And Arden had discovered, in that exact moment, that he wanted to dissect her. Not magically—surgically. He wanted to open her skull and study the neural connections that produced that impossible combination of beauty and intellect. He wanted to map every synapse, catalog every thought, understand how something so perfect could exist in a universe that favored chaos and mediocrity.

Since then, his hand went to his hair every time he was near her. Or thought about her. Or breathed the same air as her.

Twenty-three years. I still haven't finished dissecting her. Perhaps I never will.

To his right, something creaked.

Serafall was gripping her magical staff with both hands—not like a weapon, with the prepared lightness of someone who knows how to use it, but like a castaway clutching a piece of driftwood. With desperation. With need. With the strength of someone who knows that if they let go, they'll sink.

The metal of the staff—an alloy of lunar silver and meteorite iron, forged in the oldest foundries of the Underworld—groaned under the pressure. A sharp, painful sound. The sound of something being forced beyond its limits.

Serafall didn't seem to notice.

Her eyes—normally animated with that "living doll" sparkle that so disconcerted her enemies on the battlefield—were fixed on a point at the end of the hallway: the door to room 501. They didn't blink. They didn't move. They only watched, with the intensity of a predator observing its prey through cage bars.

Her "Satan uniform" was a masterpiece of contradictions.

At first glance, it appeared to be an almost exact replica of the porcelain dolls that human aristocrats collected in the salons of Paris and London. Pastel pink—the color of cherry blossoms, of spring sunsets, of innocence. Lace imported from Brussels, woven by nuns who dedicated years to perfecting each pattern. Silk ribbons that would have made any French court dressmaker weep with envy.

Her hair fell in perfect Victorian curls, each ringlet placed with mathematical precision, each wave calculated to frame her face in a specific way.

She had spent a small fortune importing all of it to the Underworld. In the middle of a civil war. When every coin was needed for weapons, troops, survival.

"A doll's dress? NOW? While our soldiers die?"

The Old Faction guard had been scandalized. They had called her choice "frivolous," "degrading," "a disgrace to the title of Satan."

And then she had walked onto the battlefield. In her pink dress. With her perfect ribbons. With her porcelain smile. And she had frozen three thousand enemy soldiers in less than ten seconds.

The ice was still there, months later—a monument of frost and death in the shape of an army, preserved eternally in the exact moment of their terror. Some of the bodies still had their eyes open. Still stared at the porcelain doll who had killed them while smiling.

Worth every coin.

"The temperature rose."

Arden spoke without looking at his daughter. His eyes remained fixed on the thermometer, watching as the mercury crept imperceptibly upward.

"Two degrees in the last thirty seconds."

The staff creaked louder—a sound like bones breaking.

"It's the ventilation system." Serafall's voice sounded flat, stripped of the artificial joy she usually wove into every word, stripped of the high, sing-song tones that made her enemies underestimate her, stripped of everything except the effort of maintaining composure. "It must have a problem."

"The system was checked this morning."

Vivienne walked on Arden's other side. Each step was measured, controlled—the exact rhythm of someone who has calculated the distance between each tile and decided precisely where to place each foot.

Her dress was mid-Victorian style, imported from London, tailored by the same seamstress who dressed British nobility. Black with gray details. Appropriate for the hospital setting. Professional in appearance.

Deceptive in intent.

Because beneath that dark fabric lay scalpels hidden in secret seams, vials of substances that had no name in any civilized language, and needles so fine they could slide between vertebrae without leaving a mark.

"Always prepared, dear?"

"Always, husband. A Sitri without tools is a dead Sitri."

"Three times, in fact," Vivienne continued, her voice as cold as the hallway should have been. "By our best technicians."

Arden stopped dead.

The movement was abrupt, deliberate—the kind of pause a predator makes before turning toward its prey. He turned to face his wife with a slowness that held nothing casual.

Their eyes met. Green against green. Ice against ice.

"Are you questioning the competence of my medical staff, dear?" His tone was soft, dangerously soft—the tone he used in interrogations, the tone that preceded questions no one wanted to answer, the tone that had made war criminals confess without needing to touch them. "How interesting. Especially coming from the one who personally supervised the cooling protocol for this wing."

Vivienne didn't stop. She didn't slow her pace, didn't show any visible reaction. She simply kept walking, passing her husband as if he were a particularly uninteresting piece of furniture.

"I don't question their competence, husband." Each word was enunciated with the precision of a scalpel making an incision. "I question their motivation."

She stopped in front of a glass panel in the wall—one of many that served both as windows into patient rooms and mirrors for the vain. Her reflection stared back at her: perfect, immaculate.

She adjusted a strand of hair that didn't need adjusting. Just like him. Just like their daughter.

We're so obvious when we're nervous.

"After all..." Vivienne let the phrase hang in the air, let the silence stretch, let her words find their way to everyone's ears. "A system that fails just when our daughter needs control... sounds almost like sabotage." Another pause. "Or a lesson."

A microscopic smile touched her lips.

"Pedagogy."

Arden let the word roll on his tongue like a sommelier savoring an exceptional wine. Pedagogy. From the Greek paidagōgia—the art of guiding the child.

"Humans have refined that concept wonderfully in recent decades. Johann Friedrich Herbart published his 'General Pedagogy Derived from the Purpose of Education' just fifty years ago. University of Göttingen. Fascinating read."

"Father." Serafall's voice cut through the air. "Please don't quote human literature right now."

There was something different in her tone, something that dangerously resembled a plea. Her eyes—those eyes that had watched door 501 without blinking throughout their entire walk—finally moved, shifting from the door to her parents. Arden saw the exact moment his daughter processed what was happening: comprehension arriving like cold water, the realization that she had been manipulated.

"Not when we're twenty meters from—"

"A lesson?" Vivienne interrupted, picking up the thread of conversation as if Serafall hadn't spoken. She turned to her husband, one eyebrow elegantly arched. "Arden, you wouldn't be so... pedagogical." A pause. "Not today."

"Wouldn't I?"

Arden adjusted his hair again. Once, twice. A microscopic smile—barely a curve of lips, barely a shadow of expression—touched his face.

"You yourself said you've waited three days, Serafall. Three days of constant vigilance by his bedside. I wonder... how many times did you check his vital signs? Every hour? Every thirty minutes?"

He kept walking. "Every fifteen."

The answer came from Serafall's mouth before she could stop it. Automatic. Instinctive. Revealing.

She closed her mouth immediately, her lips pressing into a thin line, her eyes widening with the comprehension of what she had just admitted. But it was too late.

"Every fifteen minutes." Vivienne repeated the words with the tone of a physician confirming a diagnosis, savoring them, cataloging them, filing them for future use. "For seventy-two hours." A pause. Her eyes—identical to Serafall's, icy green with veins of something darker—gleamed with something that wasn't disapproval. "That's... two hundred and eighty-eight checks."

The number floated in the air. Heavy. Undeniable.

Two hundred and eighty-eight times in three days. Two hundred and eighty-eight times Serafall had walked to the unconscious boy's bed. Two hundred and eighty-eight times she had verified his pulse, his breathing, his temperature. Two hundred and eighty-eight times she had found excuses to touch him.

"It took me six months to have that kind of access to your father." Vivienne's voice changed—no longer the clinical tone from before. Now there was something more, something warm, something that disturbingly resembled nostalgia. "I had to orchestrate three international medical conferences in the human world, fake two hospital emergencies, and bribe four secretaries just to be in the same room as him without raising suspicion."

She looked at her daughter and smiled.

It was a smile that held nothing maternal in the conventional sense. It was the smile of a predator recognizing another, of an obsessive greeting her successor.

"You have him unconscious and vulnerable less than twenty meters away. How fortunate you are."

The hallway seemed to grow colder—not from the ventilation system, which was still failing, the temperature still rising, but from the tension accumulating in the air like static electricity before a storm.

"I was being professional." Serafall's voice sounded different now, defensive—a tone Arden rarely heard from his daughter. Serafall was many things—obsessive, possessive, terrifyingly competent—but she rarely defended herself. She rarely felt the need.

Her hands tightened on the staff. The metal groaned. Cracks began appearing on its surface, silver lines snaking along the handle like veins in diseased flesh.

"As a hospital physician, it was my duty to—"

"'Medical duty.'" Arden made a sound—brief, almost inaudible. It wasn't exactly a laugh; it was something smaller, crueler, the sound a scientist makes when a test subject behaves exactly as predicted. "Another concept we adopted from humans. The Hippocratic Oath. Codes of ethics. The notion that a healer has obligations beyond payment." He stopped in front of her. "But your duty... Serafall, you're a Satan. You don't have medical duties. You have subordinates for that. What you have is an addiction."

The staff cracked. A long fissure ran through the metal from where Serafall's hands gripped it down to the crystal at its tip.

"And as a good father concerned about his daughter's health, I thought it appropriate to... evaluate your self-control."

The entire hallway flickered pink.

It wasn't magical light in the conventional sense. There were no flashes, no rays, no dramatic manifestations of power. It was subtler, more terrifying. For an instant—a fraction of a second that seemed to stretch into eternity—the entire space changed color. The white marble turned pale pink. The walls took on coral tones. The air itself seemed to tint, as if someone had spilled watercolor onto reality.

And then it vanished. As quickly as it had come.

But everyone had felt it. Everyone had seen.

Serafall stood frozen—not the stillness of someone waiting, but the stillness of someone containing something. Something large. Something that wanted out and was only being held inside by sheer force of will.

When she spoke, her voice was barely a whisper.

"Father." It wasn't a question. It was a warning. "Are you telling me you sabotaged the cooling system on purpose?"

"'Sabotage' is such an ugly word." Vivienne intervened, walking to stand beside her husband. A united front. Parents against daughter. Masters against student. "I prefer 'emotional calibration.' After all, if you can't maintain your composure in a hallway... how do you expect to maintain it in front of him?"

"Especially," Arden continued his wife's thought without pause or transition, as if they were two parts of the same brain, "considering our hero isn't an ordinary patient. He's a sensor. He reads emotions like we read a medical report. If you walk in there radiating unfiltered lust, he won't just notice it—he'll feel hunted."

"Serasfall, classify him correctly. Whatever theatrics he displays, he is no prey organism. All indicators place him firmly in the apex-predator category—alpha phenotype, dominant behavior set."

Serafall opened her mouth. Closed it.

Her hands trembled around the staff—the staff that now had visible cracks along its entire length, the staff that had been forged to withstand a Satan's power and was now breaking under the pressure of her fingers.

"You're... you're playing with me. Both of you. Right now. When I'm at my most—"

"When you're at your most vulnerable, yes." Vivienne nodded, the gesture slow and deliberate, like confirming an obvious diagnosis for a less brilliant colleague. "Because that, dear daughter, is exactly what Naruto will do without even trying. He will destabilize you. He will make you feel vulnerable. He will strip away all your masks with a single honest smile." She walked toward Serafall. Her steps were silent on the marble, her skirts whispering like secrets shared in dark rooms.

"Better that you learn to recover here, with us... than in front of him."

"Or worse," Arden added, adjusting his hair once more. "In front of the other clans. Imagine the Gremorys watching the great Leviathan reduced to a drooling teenager. The political embarrassment would be—"

"Irrelevant."

The word cut through the air like an ice blade.

It wasn't said—it was pronounced. With the finality of a verdict. With the weight of a death sentence. With the coldness of something that had stopped pretending to be human, or demon, or anything that knew compassion.

Serafall's voice had gone flat. Dangerously flat. The kind of flat that preceded avalanches, collapsing glaciers, ice ages that erased entire civilizations.

"If any Gremory dares to look at him with anything more than professional respect..." Her eyes met her parents'. They were no longer the eyes of a daughter speaking to her progenitors. They were the eyes of something ancient. Something that had existed before demons had names. Something that remembered when ice covered entire worlds and life was merely a failed experiment on planets too warm. "...I'll have to remind them why I hold the title of Satan."

A silence followed—not the awkward silence of a paused conversation, but the expectant silence of something that had just revealed itself.

Arden and Vivienne exchanged a look. Quick. Meaningful. Satisfied.

"Ah," Arden said finally. The syllable was small, almost casual, but it contained everything. "We've already reached that stage."

"What stage?" Serafall didn't look away from door 501. She couldn't. She didn't want to. Every fiber of her being pulled toward that door, toward what lay behind it, toward the unconscious boy who breathed and bled and existed less than twenty meters from where she stood.

"The stage where you start categorizing the rest of the world into two groups." Vivienne's voice held the patience of a surgeon describing a tumor to a patient's family—clinical, professional, fascinated in a way that shouldn't be possible when discussing your own daughter's condition. "Those who are Naruto... and those who are not Naruto. And slowly, very slowly, the second group becomes... expendable."

"I don't—" Serafall began to protest.

"When I met your father," Vivienne interrupted—not brusque but inevitable, like a river finding its way around a rock; the rock might try to resist, but water always wins—"my best friend confessed that she thought he was attractive. Nothing inappropriate. Just a casual comment. 'That Lord Sitri has such beautiful eyes,' she said. While we were having tea. In my own parlor. Using the porcelain cups she had given me for my birthday."

Vivienne's tone was conversational, light, as if she were sharing a funny anecdote at dinner.

"Two days later, she had an accident. Nothing fatal—just enough to disfigure her face. Permanently."

The air in the hallway grew colder. Not from the ventilation system. From something else.

"Was it an accident?" Serafall's question came out softer than she intended.

"Statistically, accidents occur with a frequency of—" Arden began.

"Husband." Vivienne cut him off with a single word, but it was enough. "Our daughter asked something specific. She deserves honesty." She returned her attention to Serafall. Her eyes—those green eyes identical to her daughter's, those eyes that now gleamed with something that might have been love or might have been pride—didn't blink.

"No. It wasn't an accident. I reconfigured a piece of magical equipment. I calculated the exact angle, the precise temperature, the optimal exposure time for permanent damage without death."

She smiled. It was a soft smile. Maternal.

"Because she looked at what was mine."

Serafall said nothing for a long moment. The silence stretched between mother and daughter like a bridge made of ice and understanding.

Then, slowly, Serafall returned the smile. It wasn't her doll smile. It wasn't the rehearsed smile she used on battlefields. It wasn't any of the masks she had perfected over centuries.

It was something real. Something inherited.

"I understand," she said simply.

Two words, but they contained everything: the acceptance of what she was, the understanding of what she would become, the recognition that the blood flowing through her veins wasn't just cold—it was possessive, obsessive, capable of destroying worlds for the simple crime of looking at what it considered its own.

And the acceptance that she didn't want to change it.

"No." Arden adjusted his hair for the umpteenth time. "You don't understand yet. But you will."

He walked to stand directly in front of his daughter. Father and daughter. Green against green. Ice against ice.

"Last question before we go in. If Naruto woke up right now and asked you to abandon your title as Satan... to renounce your power... to become an ordinary civilian just to be with him... would you?"

The silence that followed was heavy, glacial, weighted with a question that had no right answer—that couldn't have a right answer. Because any response would reveal something. And whatever it revealed would be used, cataloged, filed.

Serafall's expression didn't change by a millimeter. Not a muscle moved. Not an eyelid trembled. Perfect. Immobile. Controlled.

"Of course not, Dad."

Her voice came out sweet, almost childlike—the tone of an obedient daughter answering an obvious question from her concerned father.

And her face transformed. The tension disappeared. The rigidity evaporated. All the internal conflict that had been visible seconds ago simply... vanished. Replaced by the most innocent smile in the world. The smile of a porcelain doll. Perfect. Terrifying.

The Sitri Matriarch looked at her daughter—really looked at her. Not as one looks at a subordinate, not as one looks at a political ally, not as one looks at a work in progress. As one looks at something you've created.

This being who had grown inside her for nine months. Who had emerged from her body screaming and covered in blood. Who had been hers before being anyone else's.

This perfect monster who had inherited the best—and worst—of both parents.

And she returned the smile. A smile of genuine love. Of maternal pride.

"Liar," Vivienne said softly, with infinite affection. "If that innocent monster asked you to kill us... you wouldn't hesitate to slit our throats from ear to ear."

Serafall didn't respond. She didn't need to. She just maintained her smile—her doll smile, her predator smile, her heir smile.

The temperature rose three more degrees. The German thermometer on the wall now marked nineteen degrees. Three degrees above optimal. Three degrees closer to the point where ice begins to melt.

Lord Sitri observed his wife and daughter. Two identical monsters looking at each other with absolute love and understanding. Two predators recognizing each other as equals. Two obsessives sharing the same lineage, the same blood, the same illness passed down from generation to generation.

And he felt something warm in his chest. Not pride exactly—more like recognition. The satisfaction of a scientist watching his experiment reach its expected conclusion. The certainty of a father watching his daughter become exactly what he always knew she would be.

He adjusted his hair methodically. Once. Twice. Three times.

"Humans even have clinical terms for people like us, did you know?"

Serafall frowned—a small gesture, almost imperceptible, but it broke the perfection of her doll mask enough to reveal genuine curiosity beneath.

"Terms?"

"'Sociopath.'" Vivienne pronounced the word with something resembling academic affection, as if describing a particularly beautiful species of flower. "From the Latin socius and the Greek pathos. 'Companion of suffering.' How poetic." She turned to her daughter. "Although technically, dear, we're not sociopaths."

"They just reclassified it," Arden intervened, his tone becoming animated in a way he rarely showed—the tone of someone discussing their favorite subject. "I read the latest Journal of Mental Science from London. March edition. They're developing a new taxonomy of mental disorders. 'Psychopathic personality,' they call it now." A small smile. "Apparently there are subtypes."

"And which one would we be?" Serafall asked. Her voice held genuine curiosity despite the tension still vibrating beneath her skin, despite door 501 still calling to her, despite everything. Because she was a Sitri. And Sitris always wanted to understand.

"Obsessive-possessive with functional social masking capacity." Vivienne responded immediately, without hesitation, as if she had been waiting for someone to ask that question for years. "With tendencies..." She paused, thoughtfully touching her chin. "What did that French psychiatrist call it? Ah, yes. 'Monomanie affective.' Affective monomania. Pathological obsession centered on a single object of affection." Another pause, looking at Serafall with maternal tenderness. "In simple terms, dear: we're not incapable of love. We love too much. So intensely that it eclipses our ability to consider anyone else as anything more than... potential obstacles."

"Humans understand it better than we do," Arden continued, his tone becoming almost admiring. "They've been cataloging these patterns for decades. Pinel, Esquirol, Pritchard... all building on each other's work. Refining. Improving. Understanding." He paused. "We, with millennia of existence, simply called someone like us 'intense.' Or 'dedicated.'"

"Or 'appropriately possessive,'" Vivienne added dryly. "As if it were a virtue."

"The old Satans considered it a virtue." Arden pronounced the title with unusual venom—real venom, the kind that accumulates over decades of humiliation, repression, and fear. "'True demons take what they want,' they said. Without method. Without understanding. Without control. Just brute instinct disguised as superiority." His jaw tensed. "They tortured me for suggesting that studying human psychology might help us understand ourselves better. They said it was 'lowering ourselves.'"

The words came out flat, cold, but there was something beneath them—something that burned despite the Sitri ice in his veins.

Silence.

Serafall watched both parents with an expression that was hard to read, processing and cataloging.

"So..." she said slowly, "you're happy the old Lucifer is dead? Not just politically—personally?"

Arden and Vivienne exchanged a long, meaningful, conspiratorial look.

"Three days ago," Arden spoke with almost clinical precision, "Naruto Uzumaki drove a something... through Lucifer's heart. I saw the battle records. I studied the energy trajectories, the tissue damage patterns." A genuine smile—small but real—touched his lips. "It was surgically perfect. A precise strike that destroyed the organ without wasting energy on collateral damage."

"Like a scalpel," Vivienne murmured. "Not like a weapon. Like a medical tool in the hands of an expert."

"Exactly. And when Lucifer fell, he didn't just free the Underworld. He freed me." Arden gestured at their surroundings—the hallway, the hospital, everything they had built. "This hospital. This equipment. These methods. Years ago, I would have been executed just for proposing this. Now it's the main medical facility of the new regime."

"Naruto didn't just kill a tyrant," Vivienne added softly. "He gave us permission to evolve. To openly admire what humans have achieved. To learn from them without fear."

Serafall looked at her own doll dress. The lace. The ribbons. The pastel pink that had scandalized the generals.

"That's why I wear this. Not just because I like it. Not just because it works tactically. It's because humans created something beautiful. Something that didn't need magic or demonic power. Just craftsmanship. Dedication. Art."

"And you dared to copy it," Vivienne smiled with pride. "In the middle of a war. Using the Satan's uniform to make a statement: 'The human is not inferior.'"

"Some of the old generals nearly had heart attacks when they first saw me," Serafall let out a bitter laugh. "They said it was 'degrading.' That I looked like a 'human doll.'"

"And then you froze their entire army," Arden recalled. "While smiling like a porcelain doll. It was... poetic."

The silence stretched for a moment—comfortable, familiar. The silence of a family that understands each other, that shares the same illness, that has accepted what they are and what they will be.

"Humans have terms for what I feel for Naruto too," Serafall said quietly. "Don't they?"

"'Erotomania,'" Arden nodded. "Described by Esquirol. The delusional belief that someone is in love with you, or should be, to the point of distorting reality."

"I don't believe Naruto loves me. I'm not—"

"Yet." Vivienne interrupted. "You don't believe it yet. But if you spend enough time near him... if your masks keep slipping... if your obsession grows unchecked... eventually, you'll start reinterpreting every interaction. Every smile will be 'proof.' Every friendly gesture will be a 'sign.'"

"Unless you learn to control it," Arden continued. "Humans have developed therapies. Cognitive-behavioral techniques. Ways to recognize distorted thought patterns and correct them."

Serafall stared at him. "Father. Are you... are you suggesting I get psychiatric treatment?"

"I'm suggesting you use the tools humans have developed for exactly this type of condition. Knowledge is power. And they have meticulously cataloged every variation of pathological romantic obsession that exists."

"Because they experience it too," Vivienne added. "It's not exclusive to demons. Humans can be just as obsessive, just as possessive. The difference is they study why. We simply... acted."

Serafall processed this. Her fingers slightly loosened their grip on the cracked staff.

"So... what I feel isn't... unique? It's not just because I'm a demon?"

"It's magnified by being a demon," Arden explained. "Your longevity means an obsession can last centuries without diminishing. Your magic means you can act on that obsession in ways humans can't. But the base pattern, the underlying psychology... completely human."

"That's why they fascinate us," Vivienne concluded. "Not because they're superior. Because they're us, distilled. Without magic to hide behind, without centuries to procrastinate. They live fast, feel intensely, and have learned to document every second of that intensity."

Serafall looked at door 501. It was so close now. So close.

"Do you think Naruto... understands this?"

"He understands," Vivienne continued the thought, "that if you walk in there radiating unfiltered obsession, he won't just notice. He'll catalog it. And depending on his previous experiences with... intense people... he might run."

The hallway flickered pink for half a second—just half a second, but enough for the temperature to drop ten degrees instantly, for frost to appear in the corners of the walls, for everyone's breath to become visible.

"He won't run." Serafall's voice was flat, definitive—the tone of someone who has made a decision and accepts no alternatives. "I won't allow it."

"That," Arden adjusted the glasses he wasn't wearing—a phantom gesture from another life, when he still pretended to be ordinary—"is exactly the type of thinking humans would classify as 'concerning.'"

Serafall looked at him. Then, surprisingly, she laughed.

It was brief but genuine—a sound that broke the tension like a ray of sunlight piercing storm clouds.

"Father, you just spent ten minutes explaining to me that I'm clinically obsessive using human terminology. And now you're telling me my obsession is 'concerning'?" Another laugh. "I think we passed 'concerning' several diagnoses ago."

Vivienne let out an elegant laugh—a sound like silver bells, beautiful and terrifying.

"She's right, dear. At this point, we're simply... calibrating the level of pathology."

"And making sure it's functional," Arden added. "Humans distinguish between 'obsession that ruins your life' and 'obsession you channel productively.' You, dear daughter, need to be in the second category."

"For your own good," Vivienne said.

"And for Naruto's," Arden added. "Because if you truly love him, as humans would define love... you don't want to destroy him with your obsession. You want him to flourish by your side."

Serafall closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The icy air of the hallway filled her lungs—cold, clean, calming.

"Humans... have answers for everything, don't they?"

"Not answers," Arden corrected. "Frameworks. Vocabulary. Tools for thinking about thinking. We demons have lived millennia on pure instinct. They, in mere decades, have built entire libraries about why they feel what they feel."

"Admirable," Serafall opened her eyes. "Terrifying. But admirable."

"That's why we won the war," Vivienne said simply. "Because we understood that copying humans isn't weakness. It's intelligence."

Serafall nodded slowly. Then she looked at her parents with an expression that contained something new: challenge.

"So... one last question using your beloved human terminology. If Naruto, with his understanding of human psychology, diagnosed me as 'obsessive-possessive'... do you think that would drive him away?"

Arden adjusted his hair. Once. Twice.

"It depends," he said finally. "On whether he's also a little obsessive."

His eyes gleamed with something that might have been humor or calculation.

"Humans have a term for that too: 'Folie à deux.' Shared madness. When two people with compatible pathologies mutually reinforce each other."

Vivienne smiled—a disturbing smile, the kind that appeared in nightmares.

"And if Naruto turns out to be the type of person who... responds positively to obsessive devotion... well. Then you two really are perfect for each other."

Serafall looked at them both. Then, slowly, she smiled.

It was her porcelain doll smile. Perfect. Unsettling. Beautiful.

"I suppose it's time to find out."

Arden nodded, walking toward door 501. His steps resonated on the marble with a finality that hadn't existed before.

"Mask first," he reminded her. "We all wear masks. The key is knowing when and how to let them slip."

Serafall closed her eyes. She breathed.

When she opened them, the transformation was complete. The obsession had been carefully packaged. The tension had been stored in some internal drawer. The predator had been locked behind bright doll eyes and porcelain smiles.

"Naruto must be bored!" she shrieked in a high-pitched voice. The tone was perfect—childlike, enthusiastic, the tone of a girl excited to see her friend, not of an obsessed Satan about to enter her prey's room. "Let's go see how my favorite hero is doing!"

But her hands were still trembling slightly. Barely perceptible. But there.

Arden opened the door. The wood creaked softly—the sound of possibilities opening, of destinies converging, of something beginning.

"Nineteen degrees," he murmured, glancing at the thermometer one last time.

The mercury gleamed silver, three degrees above the optimal point.

"Humans would say that's 'comfortable room temperature.'" He smiled. "We know it's the exact point where ice begins to melt."

They entered.

The oak door swung open with the soft groan of well-oiled hinges—a small, intimate sound, the kind you only hear in hospitals and confessionals and other places where life changes without making noise.

"Naruto!"

Serafall's voice filled the space, possessing the rehearsed sweetness of a Parisian salon hostess—perfect in tone and volume, calibrated to convey enthusiasm without being overwhelming, designed to make the recipient feel special without feeling hunted.

"Your little Sera has come to—"

The sentence hung suspended in the air. Like a piano note no one bothered to finish. Like a heart stopping mid-beat. Like the world pausing.

Room 501 was empty.

The silence was the first thing that struck Serafall. Not the normal silence of a hospital room—that silence had texture: the hum of equipment, the drip of IVs, the whisper of sheets adjusting around sleeping bodies.

This silence was different. Heavy. Dense. The kind of silence found only in rooms where life had recently departed. Where something had been present moments ago and no longer was. Where the echo of an existence still vibrated in the walls but the source of that echo had... vanished.

The dark velvet curtains danced in the breeze. The window was open. Not ajar, not slightly separated from the frame—open. Completely. The curtains flowing in and out like fabric lungs breathing the night air.

The stillness was absolute. That thick kind of stillness that settled in empty spaces, that accumulated like dust in abandoned places, that weighed on the shoulders of whoever found it.

The canopied bed dominated the center of the room—a bed worthy of a lord, with a carved mahogany frame, columns rising toward an embroidered silk canopy, Egyptian linen sheets imported at gold prices from Cairo workshops. The kind of bed Serafall had personally selected because nothing less than the best was acceptable for him.

It was unmade.

The blankets had been thrown aside violently—not with the carelessness of someone getting up half-asleep, but with violence. As if something had torn the sheets from the body they covered. As if the person in that bed had fought against them before breaking free.

A chaotic disturbance in a room designed for order.

Arden entered first. His steps were silent on the black marble floor, his eyes—those scientist's eyes that cataloged everything—scanning the room with the efficiency of a surgeon assessing a wound.

His hands, gloved in white leather, didn't search for a pulse. There was no one to take one from.

They went straight to the sheets.

He touched them. A brief, professional brush—the kind of contact a physician makes a hundred times a day without thinking.

"Cold."

The word fell into the silence like a stone in still water.

He raised a hand to his hair. Automatic. Nervous. He smoothed an imaginary strand—a gesture that betrayed the crack in his facade of infallible physician, the small fracture in the wall of control that Sitris maintained between themselves and the world.

"The thermal dispersion suggests the body left the bed more than half an hour ago."

Half an hour. Thirty minutes. Eighteen hundred seconds. Time enough for someone to take Naruto. Time enough for him to disappear. Time enough for everything to go to the proverbial hell.

Vivienne glided toward the open window. Her movement was silent, fluid, like an elegant specter crossing a room that no longer contained life. Her skirts brushed the marble floor without a sound.

Sshe stopped before the window. Her eyes scanned the frame, the sill, the space where the curtains fluttered.

"No trace of blood." She ran a finger along the dark wood of the frame. "No signs of struggle." She examined her fingertip. "Displaced dust." Her eyes dropped to the floor. "Barefoot prints. He went out through here."

"Through the window?" Serafall took a hesitant step, her lace dress rustling softly with the movement—a sound that would normally have been imperceptible but now seemed deafening in the room's silence. "We're on the third floor. The fall..."

"Or the flight," Arden corrected, adjusting his hair again. One, two quick touches. "Or someone lowered him."

At that moment, the hallway resonated with firm footsteps. Quick. Determined. Real.

Sirzechs Gremory appeared in the doorway.

He wasn't dressed as a warrior—no armor, no sword, none of the symbols of power he normally bore in crisis situations. He was dressed as a young Lord: impeccable red frock coat, perfect cut, fabric that cost more than most lesser demons' annual salary. An aristocratic posture—straight back, relaxed shoulders, chin slightly elevated. And that charming smile he used to disarm the court at masquerade balls.

In his hand, a bottle of aged wine. Bordeaux. Special reserve. Probably older than some human countries.

"Naruto!" he exclaimed, raising the bottle like a trophy. "I hope you're thirsty, because this Bordeaux has your name—"

Sirzechs's smile froze. It didn't disappear gradually, didn't fade—it froze, like water turning to ice, like movement stopping dead, like the world pausing.

His eyes registered the room. The empty bed. The rumpled sheets. The open window. The expressions on the Sitris' faces.

Behind him, two more figures stopped short.

Ajuka Beelzebub—with a jeweler's monocle over his left eye, a relic of his obsession with examining things closely. A leather-bound notebook in his hand, filled with equations and diagrams only he understood.

Falbium Asmodeus—with his military uniform unbuttoned, the top buttons open as if he'd stopped caring about appearances days ago. Deep circles under his eyes. The look of someone who hadn't slept in weeks, not days—weeks.

"Where is he?"

Sirzechs's voice had lost all its salon warmth. Completely. Now there was something different in it—something that cut, something that burned. The edge of a dueling saber being unsheathed.

"Vanished." Vivienne turned from the window. Her face was a perfect porcelain mask—unreadable, not a single visible emotion. "Admitted under guard. Sedated with restriction seals. And yet, he's not here."

Ajuka snapped his notebook shut. The sound was like a gunshot in the room's silence.

From his vest—a vest covered in secret pockets, each containing some artifact or tool or weapon—he produced a small box. Brass and crystal. Tiny gears visible through the transparent walls, turning in patterns that defied conventional mechanics. A glowing green stone at its center—jade, but not normal jade. Altered jade. Jade that contained something.

The Evil Pieces prototype.

"The King," Ajuka murmured. His fingers manipulated the device's mechanical dials with watchmaker precision. "The piece is tuned to his soul frequency through sympathetic resonance. If he's in this plane, the crystal will glow."

Click. Click. Click.

The gears spun faster. A low, constant sound—the sound of something searching, something trying.

The gears whirred frantically—faster and faster, like a heart racing in an emergency.

But the crystal remained dark. Black as coal. Black as an abyss's mouth. Black as nothingness.

"Mechanical failure," Sirzechs said, stepping closer. The gas lamp flames in the hallway flickered violently at his presence—responding to the energy emanating from him, to the barely contained fury vibrating beneath his lord's facade.

"My machines don't fail, Lucifer." Ajuka's voice contained something rarely heard in it: fear. He rapped the box with his knuckles—a frustrated, desperate gesture, completely beneath someone who prided himself on his control. "There's no signal." His face was pale, paler than it should be. "It's as if the 'Naruto variable' has been... erased from reality's equation."

Falbium, who had been watching from the doorframe with tired eyes—eyes that had seen too much, that had calculated too many probabilities, that had stopped being surprised long ago—sighed. The sound was long, heavy. The sigh of someone who already knows the answer and doesn't want to say it.

"It's not a failure. It's an extraction."

Everyone looked at him.

"Think about it. The Old Faction despises upstarts. If they wanted him dead, they would have left the body exposed—to send a political message, to prove they could reach in here. To reach him. If they took him without leaving a trace... they want him alive. Or they want us to lose our minds looking for him."

Serafall walked slowly toward the empty bed. Her steps were different now—not the rehearsed steps of a Satan, not the calculated steps of a stalking predator. They were small steps. Hesitant. The steps of someone who doesn't want to arrive where they're going but can't stop moving.

She stopped before the pillow and stared at it, studied it. The shape of his head was still impressed in the soft linen—a depression in the fabric where his skull had rested, a small groove where his neck had curved. The mark of someone who had been there and no longer was.

Serafall extended a hand. Trembling.

She touched the pillow.

The fabric was cold.

"They said if I controlled myself..." Her voice sounded fragile, like glass under pressure, like ice too thin over water too deep. "They said if I used patience, if I studied his mind... he would stay."

A tremor ran through her shoulders.

Arden tried to intervene. He stepped forward, his hand going to his hair again—one, two, three quick touches—and his mouth opened to speak.

"Serafall, the parameters have changed. This is an unforeseen situation—"

"To hell with your parameters!"

Serafall spun around. The facade of the perfect lady shattered—not like a vase breaking, gradual, with fragments falling one by one. This was instantaneous. Total. Like a dam bursting. Like a volcano erupting. Like something that had been contained too long finally breaking free.

There was no explosion of light. It was more visceral.

The room's temperature dropped—not gradually, but all at once. So drastically that the mercury in the wall thermometer contracted until it disappeared into the bulb. So rapidly that the moisture in the air turned to ice crystals that floated for a second before falling to the floor like solid rain.

The window glass cracked. Crack. The sound was dry, definitive—like a bone breaking. The cracks spread from the center outward, fractal lines of destruction drawing themselves on the glass as if an invisible hand were writing something.

"They took him..."

Serafall looked up.

And her eyes... her eyes were no longer those of a young noblewoman. No longer those of a porcelain doll. No longer those of a Satan playing at being something she wasn't.

They were the eyes of an ancient beast. Something that had existed before demons had names. Something that remembered when ice covered entire worlds and life was merely a temporary error on planets too warm. Something that had been sleeping. And was now very, very awake.

"My sun."

The words emerged like a contained roar.

"They took him."

"Serafall." Sirzechs spoke. His voice held a warning—but also something more, something that resembled recognition, the understanding of someone who knew that fury, who had felt it, who was feeling it now.

His own crimson aura began to manifest—not as flames but as an absence of light. The gas lamps in the hallway dimmed. The shadows in the corners deepened. Reality itself seemed to sink around him.

"Maintain your composure. You're a Satan."

"I was a Satan to protect him."

Serafall hissed. The word "was" hung in the air. Past. Finished. Irrelevant.

She walked toward the window. Ice formed beneath her patent leather shoes with each step—not as frost but as permafrost. Thick. Permanent. White footprints on black marble that wouldn't melt for hours.

"Lock down the city," she ordered. And her tone admitted no reply. It wasn't a suggestion. It wasn't a request. It was winter speaking. It was the ice age decreeing its will. It was something ancient that had stopped playing at being civilized. "I want every carriage, every airship, and every transport circle inspected. If anyone tries to take anything larger than a rat out of Lilith... freeze them."

She climbed onto the window sill. The icy wind stirred her perfect curls—those curls she had spent hours arranging, those curls she had designed to impress him—and the lace of her dress.

"I'm going out. And if I find whoever took him... there will be no trial. Only silence."

Serafall let herself fall into the darkness.

There was no elegant flight—she didn't deploy wings, didn't invoke magic circles, didn't do any of the things a Satan would do to descend with dignity.

She fell. Like an ice gargoyle descending on its prey. Like a predator that had stopped pretending. Like something that hunts.

She vanished into the capital's fog.

And the cold she left behind didn't dissipate. It spread.

Sirzechs stared at the empty window—the space where Serafall had been seconds ago and no longer was, the cold still crawling along the walls, the crack in the glass that wouldn't repair itself.

The wine bottle was still in his hand.

He squeezed it. Harder. Harder.

The glass exploded.

The dark liquid spilled, mixing with the blood from his gloved palm, staining the white silk red and purple, dripping onto the black marble floor.

He didn't clean himself. He didn't look away from the window.

"Ajuka. Prepare the legions."

His voice contained a terrifying calm—the kind of calm that preceded storms, wars, the destruction of everything that stood in the way.

"Falbium. Wake your spies."

Finally, he turned. He looked at Arden and Vivienne—at the parents of the ice creature who had just launched herself into the night, at the scientists who had studied the human mind and applied it to demons, at the only ones who might have any idea how to track someone who didn't want to be found.

"Find him. Before she freezes the entire Underworld..."

A pause.

Sirzechs looked at his bleeding hand. The blood dripped onto the floor. Red. Hot. Alive.

"...or before I burn it to its foundations."