A light flashed before the demon's eyes, enveloping the dark creature in a blistering brightness.
The creature shrieked immediately, a cry as tormented as a banshee's.
"AAARRGGGHHH."
It retreated immediately; although the creature had a feeble weakness to light, its form seemed to differ from a shade's.
It featured some slight resistance to light, different to any regular shadow.
Though still, with light flashing on it so closely, half of its form reacted like skin under flame; the creature was half-scorched to death before immediately giving its all to flee from the demon trying to kill it.
The demon responsible for its defeat, a dark-haired boy, watched indifferently across from it with his red blade lowering in front of him.
Though it would be a mistake to interpret this disengagement as an unwillingness to fight.
The boy's eyes, like two deep bubbles of dark-amber cider, easily hid his boiling killing intent.
"I won't catch up to it; it can easily sink into shadows and disappear."
Just as he thought, the black figure soon sank into the floor, never to reemerge.
The road was emptier now, quieter.
The only indicator that anything had even occurred was a red car sitting on the street, with its hood caved in as if a massive slab fell on it.
The lights were dim, too dim to catch this boy standing ominously in the centre of the road.
Except for one person who didn't need that light.
On top of a tall apartment complex, a woman stood; she had an athletic frame accentuated by a tight black vest.
She had long black hair, falling straight down her back.
In the night, it felt like her hair blended into the shadows, suiting her dark eyes.
She watched the boy from the roof of the complex.
The sun Goddess.
Amaterasu.
Beside her, floating in the air next to her shoulder, was a golden, ornate mirror.
It had a series of cracks running through the polished screen.
"I can roughly hold 0.87% of my power in this form.Whatever that thing was, reflecting its attack caused my form to weaken and thus become too unstable to remain in combat any longer... "
She thought to herself from safety, her cold eyes immediately widening a fraction as she saw something.
The boy had suddenly turned in the street.
He turned behind him and looked up, his gaze lavishly dragging up the side of the apartment complex.
Even from all the way up on the roof, Amaterasu could tell...
He was looking directly at her.
The moment the boy locked eyes with her, she felt this strange feeling, like balls of cold light floating from her mind.
A long, silent moment passed.
Then suddenly he spun away, indifferently walking to leave the scene, disappearing down the depths of the road.
"This kid..." She thought to herself again.
"He contended my swordplay, knew what a shade was, and managed to face off against a creature even I've never seen..."
She huffed through her nose, suddenly recalling her earlier words.
"It doesn't belong to you."
Though now she was asking herself-
Was even she worthy of that blade herself?
...
The morning sun was a fine thing, hiding faint blue sparkles in the air, sweeping across the autumn skies and casting a well-needed light over a landscape of withered trees.
A dark-haired boy swept through the darkness under the trees, caused by the endless branches taking up air space, like a million hands reaching for sunlight.
"She seemed surprised I knew where she was." Julius thought to himself, recalling the previous night.
"Why wouldn't I keep track of her, in a battle of life and death, where she had been my opponent only moments before?" Julius questioned, his strategy like common sense to him, his philosophy untamed by heaven and earth.
"So what if she saved me? She obviously only did that to stand a better chance against that thing..." He assumed with a confidence so solid in his deductions that it felt more ethereal.
"Besides, it's not like I needed her help anyway." He affirmed to himself with rigidity like concrete, his expression as unchanging as stone.
He was dressed in a presentable cream uniform, currently nearing his school.
"My school." He suspended the thought the moment it presented itself in his mind, catching it and examining it.
It felt unusual to have a place he could call his, though maybe it was because he hadn't done so in a long, long time...
"Ah, I found you!" A vibrant sound called out, not a voice, but a sound perfectly designed to sound comedically fatherly.
Julius's expression immediately reacted with something dark festering beneath a plain expression on his face.
He turned over his shoulder to find a bright bundle of blue sparks shifting to merge into an oval stretching horizontally.
The oval quickly expanded as more blue specks gathered into the centre; within a breath's time, the shape was full of endless blue sparks.
A ring formed in the centre, made from more blue specks, like an iris, with flashy lashes made of more sparks.
"It always seems like you're trying to avoid me..." The eye presented a sound toward the boy, one of warm curiosity that sounded as if it was programmed to sound that way.
"Son..." The sound called out again, with an overly exaggerated sound like something that could only be heard through an actor on a television show.
It felt robotic, scripted, overly programmed, something trying to emulate raw human connection.
"This is the third time you've followed me to school. Are you going to make a habit of this?" The son responded with a clinical tone, indifferent to what the eye previously said.
"Well, that petite sun woman said little boys should be walked into school with their father... or something like that?" The eye answered with the same bright and vibrant sound.
"...Sounds like Sol is using this arrangement to befriend my father..." Julius kept the thought to himself.
"Alas, I cannot neglect my cosmic duties running around to look for my wee little child!" It continued with a chuckle like a robotic pulse.
It continued, in the same overly comedic banter, "Just like I don't want to have to crush that little lightning man for that time when he tried to strike you from his cute little mountain... What did they call it again?"
Julius sighed, "Mount Olympus..."
"Ah, yes, that thing! You should be careful of drawing so much attention to yourself. How long ago was that in your cute little human years? Four? If it wasn't for me, your beloved father, you would've been burnt to a crisp!"
Julius stood silently across from the grand glowing eye, a sight reserved for the few elite individuals, the rarest of entities, but a daily sight for this young man.
Actually, no, it was an annoyance to Julius.
Though Julius only let his mind collect disorganised thoughts before silently excusing himself.
"Oh, quiet as ever." The cosmic eye produced a sound that didn't reach a person's ears, but instead resonated through their bones, creating a strange feeling of telepathy.
The eye could not sense the intentions fostering within his son; an entity so many dimensions above in existence could not accurately understand such things.
It was the equivalent of Julius trying to understand ants; he could predict that the ants didn't want harm to them, but the specifics of 'could ants love, could ants hate ' were hard to tell.
To the cosmic eye, which shared a much greater difference in existence than Julius and an ant, could not understand love or hate.
In the grand scheme of things, they were insignificant.
The irony? Julius had the same reasoning.
By the time Julius stepped into the open grass clearing outside the school, the cosmic eye had already faded, as unaware as it was to beings of this planet, it could understand it best to not go in the open if it could be helped.
Julius passed the open gates, merging with a crowd of students, some with fangs, some with scales, as he walked through like a human in a fantasy world, finally reaching the mouth of the white presidential building to enter the school.
In the middle of the hall, two stood beside the lockers; one wore wispy pink hair like cotton candy, while the other had a black bob cut, with a knit hat pulled over his head.
"Hehe, little orphan, why are you even here? No one wants you in this school." A voice teased with malevolent laughter.
The one speaking at this moment was Fenrir; he had canines that glinted white when he smirked just so.
The one he was bullying was Nagiri, a poor, innocnent girl, who had done nothing to warrant this behaviour.
Yet she did it idly, with her gaze planted unsurely at her feet, her expression shifting with discomfort.
When Julius stepped into the hall, his eyes found the two with mild interest; between the two, he wanted to find out more about Nagiri.
Much like him, she possessed a knowledge that rivalled the entirety of the academy's.
Though more than that, Julius had previously made Falson dig up files on this girl, and not much was in them.
To see such a mystery in such a miserable state made Julius feel an intuitive wariness, before indifferently beginning to approach them, with a blank expression and the intention to pass.
Perhaps if it were Thurid here instead of Julius, she would've bottled Fenrir right here and then, or perhaps even that Gyasi.
Unfortunately, the one witnessing this was Julius.
He walked past without another thought, moving along leisurely like a ghost trailing down.
Fenrir noticed Julius out of the corner of his eye and instinctively lowered his voice for a passing moment.
Maybe it was because of the cosmic eye he saw in the headmaster's office, or because he saw Julius fight another student that Fenrir would never fight in a million years!
Perhaps even a new rumour spread about Julius turning a hydra into his dog.
Either way, this boy had subconsciously submitted without even knowing, and this mild, barely noticeable change was exactly what Julius had been wanting since he got to this academy.
Thus, Julius passed without a thought, his mind like a lily pond on some peak of a mountain that stood just beneath the heights of heaven.
He was calm.
Until Fenrir spoke again, just as Julius slipped past.
"Hehe, little orphan, even that boy wishes you'd burnt yourself instead of your mother when you were in the womb."
End of chapter 41