Chương 44: Chapter 40 - The prettier the girl, the darker the secrets

At two in the morning, the island was peaceful. I pondered whether I actually needed a statue for Yushi. Summoning her wasn't a problem. She functioned just fine, by what I could see. And the materials Yushi needed were the problem. Temple wax, ofuda paper, purified shimenawa rope, a silver spirit bell, dried white chrysanthemums, and incense ash from a temple that had been active for at least two hundred years. If I could take a week-long vacation in Japan, I could collect all of those.

But that wasn't on the menu, at least not if things went reasonably well. I pulled on my connection to Yushi. With a giggle, she appeared near me.

"Damian-sama."

"I've got a mission for you. I'll go see a woman now. Go scout her out, especially before I arrive and after I leave."

"Your wish is my eternal command." She bowed slightly and faded. I didn't even tell her whom. Ah, well. She could figure it out. The dome rose ahead, the curved roof catching starlight. I walked in. Emergency lighting bathed the interior in a low amber hum. Three pods were occupied, their tops sealed, holographic vitals ticking quietly above each. Late-night re-grinders chasing better floor rolls. The tribunes sat empty, the massive replay screens dark. Cassandra's workstation glowed at the far end.

She wasn't behind it. She was sitting on its edge, legs crossed, the Forgotten Tome open in her lap. Hair down tonight, loose past her shoulders. No severe bun, no station-keeper posture. She was reading, actually absorbed, spectral text pulsing faintly green on the page. She looked up when my footsteps hit the floor. Surprised, in a genuine way, too. A smile took over her lips. For a moment, before she reset the face into neutrality.

"Has the app not been working? I haven't noticed any messages from it."

"I'm sure it works just fine. Not sure when I'll get to test it though." I kept walking.

"It's also been a while since I last set my tower coins on fire." The callback landed. Her lips curved, the crooked left-side smile, the real one. She closed the tome, keeping one finger between the pages.

"And here I thought you'd forgotten about me entirely."

"That isn't a worry. My tower coins won't waste themselves."

"I don't waste anything. The luck merely doesn't swing in your favor. I merely observe with an appropriate amount of sympathy." She uncrossed her legs, letting them hang off the workstation's edge.

"Your dives have been quite eventful, as far as I have heard." I stopped a few feet from the workstation.

"You've been watching." Something flickered across her face. The briefest crack in the mask, smoothed over so fast that if I'd blinked I'd have missed it.

"I monitor all divers. Especially when one doesn't return." She turned a notch more serious.

"How did they stop the extraction?"

"With an iron nail. An obviously enhanced one. I didn't have time to analyze it."

"I'll need that nail."

"As I retrieve Sarah, I'll get it for you." She smiled.

"I'll wait for it. Now, since you aren't grovelling for leniency about the debt you now have toward me, I suppose you are here to bring me something." Back to business.

"How much debt relief do I get per rare item?"

"Fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per rare item is the current going rate. The Sands haven't yet priced any uncommons, given you've brought none." That wasn't half bad. Thirty-ish items would erase all my debt, and would guarantee thirty-ish reasons to meet Cassandra, because i obviously wasn't going to bring multiples.

"I have a couple. But first, I need to procure a few things, and I wondered if you wouldn't have the necessary connections." I told her the item list. She raised an eyebrow.

"What are you building, a Shinto shrine?"

"Something similar. I've got a new summon, who happens to be a Japanese ghost." Both eyebrows now.

"That is new." This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"My summoning isn't restricted to demons."

"But you did pull her from Hell, didn't you?" What gave her the idea? I narrowed my eyes.

"Why would you think that?"

"A ghost can be a type of demon. I even met one in my past." As with quite a few other weird beings, most likely.

"Can you source it?"

"I can source all of it." She looked up at me, and the professional mask was back, but beneath it sat something else.

"These are rare, specialized items, and some of them are sacred. Acquiring them requires favors I'll need to call in."

"Name your price."

"Tower coins?"

"If that's what you want." She slid off the workstation. The motion was fluid, unhurried, and it brought her around to my side of the holographic interface. Her side. My side. She was crossing the barricade.

"I don't want tower coins. I don't go into the tower." She stopped a foot from me.

"I'll take all your rares regardless. The Golden Sands demand it, and you know better than to argue."

"Then what?"

"An honest answer." She held up one finger.

"One question. No deflecting, no lawyering, no charm." Her crimson eyes locked onto mine.

"One truth. That's my price." I studied her. The lawyer in me bristled at a blind contract. The terms were one-sided. I couldn't evaluate the cost without knowing the question, and she knew that.

"Depends on the question."

"No. You agree before you hear it. Otherwise, it's just a conversation." Classic contract structure. She was forcing a trust trade, control for access. The exact inversion of what I'd been doing with gifts and persistence for weeks. The power dynamic flipped, and she knew it, and she wanted me to know she knew it. I could walk. The materials were important, but not irreplaceable. I could source them through other channels, given enough time and money, neither of which I had in abundance. Or I could trust her.

"Fine." She blinked. The agreement landed faster than she'd prepared for. I saw it, the recalculation behind her eyes, the slight parting of her lips as her planned response to my expected resistance became unnecessary. She'd built a negotiation tree, and I'd skipped to the last branch.

"You agreed quickly."

"You asked for honesty. Deliberating would have undermined the spirit of the deal."

"You're reckless with not just money." I shrugged. She held my gaze for a long moment. Whatever she'd planned to ask, my fast agreement had shifted the weight of it. She was recalibrating, not the question, but how much of herself she was about to reveal by asking it.

"Is anything between us real?" The dome hummed. The three occupied pods ticked along, holographic vitals steady. The Pacific whispered through the walls. I looked at her. She looked at me. There was nothing playful in her expression. The correct question. I opened my mouth to answer. Cold air swept through the dome. The temperature dropped three degrees in a single breath, and a giggle echoed off the pod casings like wind through a cracked window.

"Ku ku ku…" Yushi materialized between us, floating upside-down, fan spread across the lower half of her face. Her translucent blue form caught the emergency lighting and scattered it into faint prismatic arcs across the floor.

"Damian-sama." She righted herself with a lazy spin.

"As your loyal servant, I am obliged to warn you about the pale princess over here." Through Yushi's half-translucent form, I could see Cassandra's glare.

"Oh, really?" Yushi floated between us in a slow, inspecting orbit around Cassandra.

"Ku ku ku… Very beautiful. Very refined. Very… old energy, for someone so young." Cassandra kept glaring at her.

"I'm twenty-six."

"Of course you are," Yushi said, tone not so subtly mocking. She turned to me, fan covering her smile.

"Damian-sama, her heartbeat changed when you walked in. It was quite noticeable, even from the corridor. Hi hi hi…"

"Thank you, Yushi."

"You're welcome. It's still elevated, actually. Shall I monitor her for you? I could provide real-time updates—""Try it," Cassandra said. She tried to sound calm, but the words cut the air like a promise of murder. Yushi giggled.

"Oooh, scary, scary. You are giving cute Yushi a heart attack." Winds blew through the dome.

"Anyway," I said.

"We are fine here. You may leave."

"Of course, Damian-sama. But for the record, your negotiation technique would benefit from fewer interruptions." She faded, translucence becoming transparency becoming nothing. The cold faded with her. The dome settled. The amber hum returned. The three pods ticked. Cassandra kept glaring, this time at me.

"Your new servant is going to be a problem."

"She's enthusiastic about the new opportunity."

"She announced my heartbeat to the room."

"Was she wrong?" Cassandra's jaw tightened.

"You are the one who has yet to answer the question." Indeed.

"It is real to me. I have nothing to prove to anyone, including to myself. I don't play games." A smile spread over my face.

"As you have seen on my climbs, I can be accused of many things, but deceptive subtlety is not among them." Cassandra looked at me. For a moment, she looked at me the way she'd looked at the sunrise. Unguarded. Almost frightened. Not of me. Of the fact that she believed me. She stepped forward.

"I will arrange the delivery of the items." She stood so close I could have kissed her. The geometry was right. The proximity. The silence. Instead, I turned her hand over and pressed my lips to the inside of her wrist. Slow. Deliberate. Not the move she expected. Her pulse beat against my mouth, fast and real and nothing like a performance. Her breath caught. A small sound, barely there, swallowed by the hum of the dome. I let go.

"I'll leave you to your work then." She looked at her own wrist. The spot where my lips had been. Something complicated crossed her face, too many layers to parse, but the topmost one was a loss of control. I smiled and turned to leave.

"Damian." I stopped at the dome's edge. Looked back. She stood by the workstation, the tome in her arms again. The moonlight caught her silver dress, her hair, and her crimson eyes.

"Never mind." She looked away, intensely studying the tome. With a grin, I walked out. I could give her the items from the tower tomorrow since I wasn't diving anywhere tomorrow, anyway. On the way back, I stopped by the railing on a bridge between the platforms. Wind blew the hardest in here, but the spot also had the best view. I pulled on Yushi's connection. Within a few moments, a cold breeze brought Yushi, who floated next to me.

"Damian-sama?" I glanced at her with a side eye.

"Cassandra and everything about her is to stay private. Tell nothing to Ashy nor Astarielle." She giggled.

"I keep secrets better than a corpse drowned in a pond. I also saw the pale princess's phone after you left, and she's got a suspicious number of messages with one name. Tomorrow, ask her about Hutriel."