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Chapter 110: Unhealthy Obsession (Part 2)
🕑 Added 2025-08-18 13:00:23 +0000 UTCThe world seemed to freeze after Vainglory’s words quieted the abyss, leaving nothing but Hannya’s erratic pulse.
Her hand, mid-gesture over a thorn root, trembled. She pulled it back and stared at him, eyes wide, pink petals widening and quivering before she forced them back into their slow, trained rhythm.
The name of a devil mattered; it meant definition, potential, path. And in every page she had studied, every retelling she had memorized, Vainglory had died without a name.
She took a single step back, veil unmoving, posture still proud. Only the minute changes gave her discomfort away.
And Vainglory saw them all.
He watched the aura around her try to seal itself, smooth waves stacking in neat layers, then ripple at the edges where the agitation slipped through. He watched the red thread only he could see loosen from his sternum and hers, slackening and pooling in a ring at their feet like a spilled ribbon. He didn’t know what the thread signified yet, but he trusted correlation; the thread slackened as her composure threatened to break.
It wasn’t good.
Hannya closed her eyes once, drew a slow breath, and when she opened them again the petals in her irises were steady. “Did you give yourself that name… while you were down here?” Her tone was even, but her knuckles had gone white under the silk.
“No.”
“Then when did you start calling yourself that?” The question landed too quickly after the first.
He didn’t answer at once. His [All Seeing Eyes] measured her again; pulse high, breath leveled by force, aura control good…but fluctuations still spiking like static beneath the surface, 1.13…now 0.874.
The thread slackened another inch.
“Did someone give you that name?” she asked through teeth she held barely parted.
His eyes widened a fraction. It was a good guess, too good. The fluctuations jumped, the spiral blooming behind her like a weather front.
He chose his line carefully, using the best option for deescalation. “It’s none of your concern.”
The red thread gave a low pulse and its color dimmed, as if his refusal to answer had leeched the dye from it. Hannya didn’t see the thread, but something in her did. An instinct tugged, a small alarm in the bone. Her pupils stopped their quiet clockwise rotation. For a breath they were still. Then they began to turn counterclockwise, slow and deliberate.
“You’re hiding things from me.” she said in a low voice. A trace of steel under the velvet tone. But a manic edge peeked through, not loud, but unmistakable.
“All devils have secrets,” Vainglory replied, evenly. “You’re hiding things too.”
She paused. The admission took only a second. “You’re right.” But her aura didn’t smooth. The thread didn’t retighten. If anything, his neutrality made the flowing thread pull sharper.
“It seems,” she went on, tone calm again in a way that made his rings speed up, “we need to get to know each other better.”
He nodded, thinking three moves ahead and two moves sideways. How to take the pressure off the spike before the void song spiral behind her woke into something that could bite both of them. Parallel Opinion rapped on his mind from the outside, and before he could deny it, it slid in.
‘Offer a trade!’
It blurted, urgent and altogether too pleased with itself for some reason.
‘All Devils Listen to that! Secret for secret. Truth for truth. It will distract her with interest and stabilize her mood, and we might learn who she really is and how to steer her.’
Vainglory didn’t love the teaching tone, but the proposal fit. He knew information was tempting for all devils. He exhaled the smallest measure of air and said aloud, “A trade. A truth for a truth.”
Hannya’s eyes slowed, curious, calculating, then nodded. “Fine…good.” An easy way to confirm whether he was truly who she thought he was.
“You first,” she said, ready to get her answers immediately. “Who named you?”
“I named myself.” True, as far as his philosophy went. The angel had suggested it; he had simply accepted it. He did not lie.
The thread between them pulsed redder and drew taut by a little. Hannya’s shoulders eased a millimeter. Her instincts hummed, blood expressing truth. It made her feel a little better, enough that when she said, “Your turn…” the petal-lights in her eyes softened a bit.
“How do you know me?” Vainglory asked. He hadn’t planned to ask so soon, but leverage is best used while it’s real. “I don’t recognize you… and I don’t forget faces.”
Her veil shifted with a smile. “This is our first meeting,” she said, perfectly steady. “But I’ve known you for years. I’ve… watched you closely.”
She didn’t add how. The truth in it was clean. Vainglory’s eyes read no deception markers, breath and aura aligned with her current state.
But the blank space after the truth was the kind a careful person left on purpose.
“You’re leaving out a detail.” he said.
“So are you.” she returned, instantly.
‘So this was her game.’ Of course it wouldn't be easy. With devil’s, even with the truth, one can only expect half.
The tension in the air ratcheted up a layer. The spiral behind her grew with a subtle rule rotation, his eyes could still measure the twisting laws for now. It swelled in precise proportion within the unseen.
He filed the ratio and kept his voice mild.
“Ask.” He said.
“How long,” Hannya asked, “have you called yourself Samael?”
He opened his mouth to answer, unbothered…
And found there was none.
A clean slice of incredulity moved through him. Had it been a hundred years? A day after the necklace? Before his capture? His memories slid like plates that had been re-stacked under someone else’s hand.
‘Don’t keep her waiting! The truth is all she wants. We need more information.’
“I don’t know.” he said, and for once the words came out surprised.
The red thread shuddered, dimming. Hannya’s eyes lost their small shine. Joy that had been at her edges at some point in this meeting was simply… absent.
The thread began to loosen again, faster, pooling around their feet. Vainglory didn’t know what metric the thread used, but he knew loss when he saw it.
He turned the vector of the conversation, fast. “My question.” He let his voice carry a hair more weight, not command, just gravity. “How did you know I was down here?”
Hannya stepped forward once. Then again. The air between them warmed with their proximity, though neither could feel it.
“I knew,” she said simply, “the day I was born.”
Another veiled truth, he didn’t hide the way his rings spun, considering, processing. Only one explanation fit the claim, and it wasn’t a comfortable one.
“Fate mutation…” he muttered, making room in his mental map for it.
“Kikiki!” But Hannya laughed, soft and sharp, closing the last of the distance until the heat of his skin was not theoretical. “Wrong, I’ve no such thing. Fate itself showed me the world’s path. And that path was meant to be walked by me and Vainglory.”
The way she said the name did not point to him. The syllables did not want his presence.
He held very still, which is to say he honored every treaty with the thorns and the white chains while his mind went cold and fast. Behind her, the spiral sharpened and stretched. He felt for Parallel Opinion and found it already there.
‘Ask her about Piety next,’ PO urged, almost gleeful. ‘If she knows her, we know a bit more of the outside’s status. If it’s not, we learn more of her status at least.’
He found the question inefficient. Though, he didn’t need the advice. Hannya stepped in so close her veil brushed a breath from his cheek and asked for him.
“Did you accept a gift from an angel?” Her voice was low and clear. She didn’t even give him room to dodge. “From one named Piety?” she clarified, lips nearly at his ear.
His aura, steady through curses and pain, trembled once. He didn’t answer with his mouth. His thought went to the necklace tucked at the hollow of his throat under the battered plate.
The thought was enough.
The red thread pulsed, harder this time. Hannya’s instincts echoed the answer. The petals in her eyes spun so fast their edges blurred. Deep within each iris, a jagged spiral opened and began to turn.
Vainglory saw the invisible spiral behind her grow from problem to event.
“Preist-” he began.
She didn’t hear him. She ripped his broken chest plate away in one clean motion, steel plating crumpling like paper under her devilish grip. His torso now bare. The scars, the muscles, the six hollow stars circling his heart…and the gold pendant flashing on its chain.
Her gaze didn’t slide over him now, only locked on the simple gold medallion.
“No. No. No.” The words dropped from her lips like stones, one after another, too quiet to be for anyone but herself. “This isn’t how it was supposed to be. This isn’t-”
She reached out. Her palm pressed over his sternum; the pendant lay under her hand, metal cool against body heat. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no shock or flare, but she flinched anyway and snatched her hand back as if she’d been burned.
She stared at him without seeing him. Her face smoothed, then cracked, then smoothed again.
The laugh that tore free was bright and loud… and unmistakably wrong; Vainglory felt the edge of it and knew. The laugh wasn’t happy. It was anger and anguish forced through a cheerful shape.
“Kikiki! After all that training,” she said to the space between them, to the narrative she had lived in her head, “after all the preparation, all the pain and humiliation… Kikiki! I’m still six hundred years too late.”
He didn’t understand the timeline, the target in her sentence, but he understood ‘too late’. An objective failure. He opened his mouth to speak, a small warning, a small plea to bring her back from the edge.
“Priestess-”
“Shut up,” she snapped, sudden and sharp. The smile she wore with it was wide and unhinged. “Shut up, you worthless dog!”
The words sliced the air and left the taste of iron.
“I came here for Vainglory,” she said, sweetness returning to the surface with grotesque ease. She lifted a hand and willed a weapon into it. A katana, long, pitch black, and elegant, but the teeth along its edge were brutal, serrated, meant to catch and chew. The black lacquer of the scabbard drank what little light there was.
She leveled the point at him. “And you,” she said softly, almost kindly, “are not Vainglory.”
She laughed again, and the laugh echoed with madness. “Kikiki! You don’t even have your heart.”
He held her gaze. The red thread was a pool now, a puddle connecting their feet, its color washing in and out with her breath from grey to red. Behind her, the spiral was a storm.
He turned calculation into kindness, or perhaps the other way around. “Priestess,” he said, and let the name be gentle, “listen to me.”
She didn’t, not even for a second. The sword dipped; her stance lowered into a draw, hips angled, thumb resting on the guard, elbow loose but ready. The mist around her ankles shivered, then stilled.
“Since there’s no Vainglory,” she said to no one, or to a version of him that wasn’t standing here, “there’s no point.”
Her eyes were hollow and far away, pupils turning the jagged spirals.
“Don’t worry, my love,” she whispered, to her idea, not to him. “I’ll protect your memory… and then I’ll follow.”
The air rumbled and vibrated. The spiral began twisting horrifically, red threads filling the area and spreading rapidly.
Vainglory did three things very quickly and very quietly.
First, he checked the white chains, tension, angle, flex; cataloguing exactly how much give his chest had, how much the thorns in his shoulder and ribs would allow him to lean or twist without punishing him into stillness. Not much. But not zero.
Second, he brought Parallel Opinion back to heel. The ability had been beating on the door of his mind, yapping while he tried to reason with the devil woman. He let it in for one line of help.
‘Burn it!’ PO said at once, voice stripped of jokes. ‘All of it. The essence of glory you kept for evolution, dump it now. Curses are gone; you can brute force out. You’ll take damage, but if she tips into full Void Song without your heart to block it, you, and everything else goes with her. Move. Now.’
Third, He measured Hannya’s stance, breath, and the way the spiral behind her was coiling at breakneck speeds. He then saw a pink light in the hidden world, a polaroid flash, for half a breath that seemed to save this moment for eternity within the twisted ethereal veil.
DING
Parallel Opinion’s calculus was ugly. In a way, however, it was also correct.
Reasoning with her was no longer an option, he knew that. He needed to find a way to escape.
He didn’t argue. He did not look away from Hannya’s eyes.
“Forgive me.” he said, not fully to her.
His irises then turned a blinding gold.
The three inner rings spun up like gears on a well oiled machine, and a low, bright aura rolled off him, an overbearingly dense gold, like a disciplined sunrise. Heat built under his skin, pressure gathering behind his bones. The pendant at his neck trembled against his sternum as it tingled; he ignored it and opened the core he had hoarded for a day that never arrived.
The power hit the chains first.
White links that had endured centuries under order law did not break so much as fail, one after another, hairline fractures appearing where his golden aura found misaligned edges and drove them apart with precise bursts. The first snap sounded like a quiet bell in a dead church. The second was louder. By the third, the air itself seemed to flinch.
Hannya jerked at the sound. For half a breath the spirals behind her stuttered, shocked out of their rhythm as if finally seeing what they've been searching for; but then her pupils tightened and the manic glitter leapt higher. “Oh?” she breathed, laughter hanging on the word. “So your act ends here?”
Vainglory ignored her. He set his jaw and pivoted within the little slack he was stealing from the world. Every movement cost.
He went to the thorns.
Pain lined his nerves. He pushed a sheath of gold along their paths, not enough to obliterate them, just enough to numb edges and cauterize the purchase in his flesh. His fingers curled; his forearms corded; his devil blood trembled forceful command. He counted down without speaking.
Three.
Two.
One.
He wrenched.
Flesh tore clean, The thorns came free in screaming inches, shoulders first, then ribs, then the long, ugly spike that had been resting near his empty heart. Blood poured from the wounds, black and slick; the threads seemed to drink it before it reached the floor, leaving only a metal tang in the air and the hollow ache of space where the branches had been.
He did not fall.
Golden aura held him upright, licking along the grooves thorns had left, healing the worst of the leaks with stubborn light. He drew breath again, short and savage.
Then, he stood.
Chains hung in broken collars around him. Spikes lay like shedded fangs near his feet, hissing from the aura dominating it. The six black stars over his heart stayed hollow, one still half-filled, a small, humiliating reminder against his skin. The pendant shone and dimmed, a petty star shining gold in the dark expanse.
Across from him, Hannya stared, stunned for a heartbeat, eyes wide, mouth a shocked ‘O’ behind the veil. And then the shock broke like a dish.
She laughed.
It wasn’t joy. It was sharp, high, and dangerously pleased with the current story. “Kikiki! I knew it,” she said, lowering her stance, left foot sliding back, hand dropping to the serrated katana’s guard. “Done pretending, are we? You dare use his power, impostor?”
Her aura flared, manic rows of petals whirling; the invisible spiral behind her swelled as if delighted to have a reason to sing. The red threads at Vainglory’s feet recoiled from the heat of his aura and lay stunned, color dimming, a line of accusation he did not recognize.
Vainglory’s vision stayed bright and clean inside the pain.
His eyes took her in the way a blade takes a whetstone. Steady, unyielding, and without hurry.
Makeup perfect. Shoulders proud. The collar loose where she had adjusted it, chest lifted with the force of her breath. The mist coiling at her ankles like a trained animal, beginning to spread. The katana’s teeth catching what little light there was and giving none back.
He felt the wound-tracks, the new space in his ribs, the way his breath was no longer a negotiation but a tax, healing would take a while.
He let his hands lower, palms half-open, not defensive, not inviting. The golden aura curled tight to his skin and across his fingers, no longer a flare but a controlled glow.
‘Kill her fast!’ PO urged, shouting now. ‘Before the Song wakes fully. Before your essence bleeds out. There’s no room for mercy, she’s not worth it!’
He didn’t answer. Not even in his own head.
Hannya’s laugh rang again, sweeter yet much worse. “You’re very bold, mongrel!” she said, the words tender and cruel at the same time. “Throwing supremacy around like you were born with it.” Her eyes narrowed, tilting, as if she could make the gold peel off his bones by will alone. “You dare touch Vainglory’s power, impostor?”
The last link at Vainglory’s wrist cracked and fell with a small, decisive sound.
He rolled his shoulders once; pain licked up his spine and swallowed through his clenched teeth. The aura steadied. The rings in his eyes turned with that same slow, exact motion Hannya had already learned to recognize, measurement shifting to readiness.
“Enough.” he said, voice level. It wasn’t loud. It carried.
Hannya’s veil lifted on a grin that showed too much teeth. “Yes,” she said, almost tender. “Enough indeed.”
She sank the last inch into her draw. The serrated blade sheathed in its scabbard, hungry and ready to feed.
Vainglory set his weight, bare hands empty, golden aura tight, the thorns’ abrupt absence screaming through his body. He did not look at the pendant. He did not look at the sea of thread. He watched her eyes and the small muscles at the base of her thumb.
The Abyss held its breath.
“Let’s end it all here.”
Click
Comments
Wintermelody
Thanks for the chapter
Aune
Secondary chapters inbound with pizza ?
