Read Novel Full Chapter 1892: Listless Demon
Chapter 1892: Listless Demon
Her fist landed on his sternum, and the hall heard it. Deep and wet, the structural sound of a chest changing shape.
The blow lifted the Duke of Ravenshade off the floor of his king’s hall.
"RAVENCLAW-" The name came out of him as a roar.
Her knuckles shattered on the way through. She felt it happen, somewhere far away, and ignored it like all the other pain.
She had the Bloodfather’s buff, her class’s buff, thirty-eight tithes paid in, and a broken arm banked on top of them. All of it together, and Iris Ravenclaw still could not kill Tharion Ravenshade with a punch.
But she was more than strong enough to move him two paces.
Right into the gates of hell.
He went over the rim backward, rings flaring defiantly, still fighting, and the ember light took him.
He struck the black metal of another world still roaring, and words wrote themselves across his sight, patient and courteous.
[Welcome to the hell of the Demon of Vengeance.]
"I will not be taken out like this!" [Attainder] flared, and the script burst apart like a struck fire. "Ravenclaw!"
Despite having been tossed into the gate, Tharion was still more than powerful enough to fight back, best evidenced by the fact he wasn’t yet counted among hell’s residents.
Iris tried to close the gate but she couldn’t. Tharion was given the chance to escape until he was properly defeated.
So she opened her good hand.
"[Conscription]."
[The Demon of Vengeance conscripts all residents of hell.]
[Muster: 38/38.]
[Service is not compensated.]
The sigil down her spine reversed, and every coin her hell had ever paid her rained back down the cut, howling. The red of her eyes slowed, the color left her face, and she came down onto one knee at the rim, still spending.
The hall watched its executioner pay.
Below, thirty-eight bodies caught fire.
From every glowing district of her hell, his own machine came for him: Corvane pulled down off his pillar, hands cooked into climbing hooks, the chief clerk wrapped in cured sheets of his own written skin, the counts of the inner circle trailing pens from their opened wrists.
Thirty-eight residents, begging, weeping, and coming anyway.
"Stand down, you imbeciles!"
They apologized while their nails peeled the velvet off his arms.
He tore them apart faster than the domain could mend them, and the domain mended them anyway. Above, at the rim of the burning cut, six hundred nobles watched the most renowned duke of the realm drown in a pile of his own vassals.
They hit him as one burning body, because one will held every hand in it.
The Duke of Ravenshade went down under his own counts, his own clerks, his own collectors, roaring orders at the fire until the black metal closed over his ring-light. The last thing hell let him keep was the order half-finished in his mouth.
’All the way down...’ Iris whispered inwardly. ’Damian... Mom...’
The seam breathed shut.
Paper was still settling across the great floor of Vraven.
The scarred marble, the torn banners, the wrecked stacks of the crown’s evidence, all of it lay in absolute silence, and the flagstones where hell had been open were the only whole stones left in the hall.
And into that silence, her domain wrote the day’s accounting where every noble in the kingdom could read it.
[Resident: 39.]
It was over.
Eighteen years of rungs. The dying scum, the syndicate lords, the false Covenant, the count, and now the man at the very top... Done.
Every debt collected, every name crossed out.
She opened her hand, and a seam the width of a palm parted the air in front of her, private, angled for her eyes alone.
Down in the ember light, on the far border of her domain, a fat shape hauled itself up a glowing pillar, one hand-span at a time, screaming.
The man who had priced her family. The man who had used her brother. And somewhere far below, the man who had orchestrated it all from the shadows. She stood in the seat of the nation with their eternity in her hand, and she watched them suffer.
She waited to feel it.
The warmth of thirty-nine coals sat banked in her chest, steady as a hearth.
And it warmed nothing.
’It’s done,’ she told the dark where her brother lived. ’I got all of them.’
The scream went on below, the pillar glowed, and the hall breathed behind her.
’...So why does everything weigh the same?’
Nobody had warned her about the end of the road. Nothing was waiting for her here.
The seam whispered shut, and she stood at the end of the only road she had ever known, with nowhere left to put one foot in front of the other.
A large, warm hand settled on her head.
It came from behind, unhurried, and it did not pat or ruffle. It just rested there, heavy and sure, the exact weight of the one person alive who had been in the basement with her.
"Feeling empty?" Quinlan asked.
Iris said nothing.
She stared at the sealed stones with her arms hanging at her sides, one of them still bent wrong, and the silence she gave him was the loudest yes the hall had ever heard.
He didn’t take the hand away.
"Excuse me?"
The sound cut across the moment from five paces off: bright, offended, and profoundly unimpressed.
Ayame stood with her arms crossed and her head tilted, staring at Iris.
"I knew you were slow, but are you actually disabled? Have I been bullying a girl with special needs all this time?"
The samurai’s voice climbed with sheer disbelief. "You stood in a burned record-house and made a creed out of it. You said you’ll not stop until no child has to wait for help that never comes. Do you really think your work is done?"
Iris’s head came up.
"...Watch your tone before I beat you up, you slit-eyed cunt."
"Sure, come at me~" Ayame’s grin arrived, wicked and warm at once. "Thirty-nine tenants, and you think you’re finished. Your hell has one shitty little village in it, you tragic landlord. There’s a whole damned universe of deserving candidates out there, and you dare act listless?"
"She is right, you know," Lucille said warmly, drifting closer with the rest of the family, utterly at home on the royal floor. "The place looked quite spacious. It would be a shame to stop furnishing it."
"Group verdict~" Kitsara sang, five white tails swishing. "You’re amazing, we love you, don’t cry, and let’s go ruin a billion more scumbags!"
"Cry?" Iris muttered dryly, and the word sat wrong in her own mouth. "Me?"
Then a blonde comet arrived.
Blossom had held herself back for as long as dogkin physics allowed, and that time was over. She planted herself directly in front of Iris, tail going, hands balled into determined fists.
"Iris is Blossom’s good friend!" she declared, to Iris, to the hall, to the crown of Vraven, and every noble within earshot. "If Iris is sad, Iris should talk to Blossom! Blossom is a very good listener. Blossom listened to a whole trial today and only got confused four times!"
"...I’m not sad."
"Iris is about to start leaking," Blossom reported, pointing respectfully at Iris’s face.
"I’m not!" Iris’s hand came up and found her own cheek wet, and she stared at her fingers, utterly betrayed.
The girls did not laugh at her.
That was the remarkable thing, the thing a hall full of watching nobility would retell for years and completely fail to explain: the most dangerous group of women alive stood in a loose half-circle around one crying swordswoman, and every face in the circle was soft.
Quinlan’s hand left a single light tap on her head. It said everything.
Then he stepped up beside her and swept his free arm out at the great hall, at the shaken peerage, at the banners, at the whole velvet-and-gold breadth of the kingdom.
"Look at all this, my partner in crime." The Primordial Villain’s grin came down at her, villainous and fond in equal measure. "A continent of titles, and you’ve barely audited one duchy. I suspect even in Ravenshade you’ll find a lot more of them. We have a long, long road ahead of us."
Partner.
The title went through Iris Ravenclaw like dawn through a shutter.