The Underworld did not have a sunrise.
It had a lightening — a slow shift in the perpetual deep that passed for sky, the darkness thinning from black to something closer to bruised violet before settling into the dim amber that served as day. Sairaorg had grown up with it. He didn't think about it. It was just the sky, the same way the manor's silence was just silence and his mother's room was just a room he visited every morning before he did anything else.
He dressed and went to her first.
The room was the same as it had always been since the sleep took her — two years now, or close enough that the difference didn't matter. The healer came twice a week and said the same things twice a week. The medicine arrived monthly from Yuki Snow in the human world, carefully packaged, no note, no invoice. His mother lay exactly as she'd lain the day before and the day before that, her breathing slow and even, her face still.
He sat in the chair by the bed.
He didn't talk to her. He'd tried that in the first months, when the silence had felt like something that needed filling. He'd stopped eventually. Not because he'd given up — he hadn't given up, and he wasn't going to — but because the silence had changed. It wasn't absence anymore. It was just the shape of this, the particular form his mornings took now, and he had learned to be in it without trying to fix it.
He stayed for ten minutes. He told her nothing and he told her everything, the way you could when there were no words involved.
Then he went to the courtyard and started training.
--DxD--
The training post was at the far end, half-shadowed by the garden wall. He'd been hitting it since he was nine — not because anyone told him to, but because it was the one thing in this household that pushed back without judgment. His knuckles had long since stopped bleeding. The skin had thickened and settled, smooth and pale over the new density underneath.
No Sacred Gear. No Power of Destruction.
The main family had made their position clear before he was old enough to fully understand it. Polite, the way powerful people were polite when delivering verdicts — no shouting, no cruelty you could point to, just a gradual cooling, a series of redirections, a succession of small unavailabilities that added up to one large unmistakable fact. They had written him off. They had written his mother off before him.
He hit the post. Once, twice, finding the rhythm.
His Touki moved with him this morning — that was the difference between now and a year ago, when it had been like trying to move with a coat soaked in water, dragging and uneven. Now it tracked his intention most of the time. Not always. Not cleanly. But it was responding to him rather than simply bleeding out of him, and that distinction mattered more than he could easily explain.
Riku had seen it before he had. It's not fighting you as much, he'd said, three weeks ago in the Snow training space. Not praise, just observation. Which was better than praise.
He ran the footwork pattern and pushed until the amber sky had deepened toward midday.
Then he went inside, cleaned up, and opened a gate.
--DxD--
The human world always felt different on arrival.
Not wrong. Just different — brighter, more immediate, the air carrying weight in a way the Underworld's didn't. He'd been making the trip long enough that the transition barely registered anymore. He stepped through into the lane outside the Snow manor, the gate closing quietly behind him, and Kairi was already at the front entrance watching him come up the path.
She had decided somewhere in the last year that meeting people at the gate was her role, and she performed it with complete seriousness. She was six and she had Riku's gravity in miniature — that quality of paying full attention that made you feel like the most important thing in whatever room she was in.
"You feel different today," she said, studying him.
He had learned not to be unsettled by this. "Different how?"
She thought about it with the focused look she brought to most things. "Heavy. But not sad heavy. More like — before a match."
He considered that. "That's probably right."
She nodded, apparently satisfied, and led him inside.
Riku was in the training space. He looked up when Sairaorg came in, read him in the way Riku read things — quickly, quietly, without making a performance of it — and then just moved to make room on the floor.
They trained for two hours without talking much. That was the nature of it between them now. The conversation happened in the work — in corrections offered and received, in the particular rhythm of two people who knew each other's tendencies well enough to push at exactly the right angle. Sairaorg's Touki was running cleaner today, the morning's practice still in his body. Riku noticed. He didn't say anything about it. He just adjusted the pressure accordingly.
At the end Riku sat back and looked at him with that calm, slightly older quality that had always been there — had been there when they first met, when Sairaorg had been nine and bleeding at the knuckles in an empty field.
"How's your mother?" Riku asked.
"Same."
Riku nodded. He didn't push further and he didn't perform sympathy. He just received it and let it be what it was. That had always been one of the things — Riku never tried to fix what couldn't be fixed. He just stood next to it with you.
Sairaorg was quiet for a moment. Then: "The main family sent a representative last week."
Riku was still. Just a moment. "About the succession."
"About the succession." He let that sit. "They were polite."
"They're always polite."
"Yes." He looked at his hands — the thickened knuckles, the new density. "I told them I wasn't finished yet."
Riku looked at him. That expression Sairaorg had learned to read over three years — not certainty exactly, but something that looked like a man who had already considered a problem from every angle and arrived somewhere quiet on the other side of it. "You're going to be the Rating Game champion," he said. "The clan will understand what it has when you get there."
"You say that like you know."
"I say it like I believe it." A pause. "There's a difference."
There was. Sairaorg knew there was. But there were moments — not often, but moments — when the distinction felt very thin when it came from Riku.
Outside the training space windows the afternoon light was doing whatever the human world's afternoon light did, gold and direct in a way the Underworld's amber wasn't. He had gotten used to it. Both versions of the sky felt like his now.
"Same time tomorrow?" he said.
"Same time," Riku said.
Sairaorg stood, picked up his jacket from the bench, and walked out into the corridor where Kairi was waiting — not listening at the door, just sitting cross-legged in the hallway with the patient certainty of someone who had known exactly when the conversation would end.
She looked up at him. "Better," she said.
He wasn't entirely sure if she meant the training or the other thing. He suspected she meant both.
"Yeah," he said. "Better."
He let her walk him to the gate.