“My Lady, it is almost time to begin,” said the girl. She was in a distinctive greenroom sporting a large, floor-length mirror across one wall.
Dealer name: Pavilion. Her long black hair was tied up at the back with a ribbon that stuck up like a pair of rabbit ears, and she wore a sexy party dress that looked far too mature on her young body.
Her specialty was auctions, or, to be more precise, it was the human connections one could make at a high-class event. After all, it was people who gave out money, and people who took it away. Thus, it was far more profitable to focus on networking and fostering a beneficial environment than on spending all that time crunching business numbers and statistics. That was what Pavilion believed anyway.
Humans were easy to manipulate simply by tapping into their fear and greed, unlike the noble Magistelli.
“My Lady?” Pavilion repeated, despite herself.
It was extremely rude for a mere human to insist upon a response from a Magistellus.
Pavilion, in her lavender outfit, was addressing none other than her own Magistellus partner, a Lamia woman with a human upper half and a serpentine tail. Her clothes resembled a tennis uniform, which was much more accommodating of the demon’s lower half than trousers would have been.
There was no response, but Pavilion didn’t seem to mind. Other people would say she’d gotten the master-servant relationship backward, but in her mind, this was how things should be. It was the other Dealers who had failed to realize it.
She stood before her demon mistress with a beaming smile.
“Now, before we let everyone gaze upon your magnificence, shall we take care of the finishing touches?”
Pavilion never trusted personal costumers or beauticians for this sort of thing. Nobody else was allowed to touch her mistress. The Magistellus usually had an air of aloofness, but Pavilion loved it when she simply sat there silently, like a small child, allowing her to fuss over her mistress’s sizable bust or the hem of her skirt.
“…”
Again, the Magistellus said nothing, simply gazing up and off to the side.
She was looking at the ceiling.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Wah!!”
Just then, the grate of a large square ventilation duct fell open, and a young girl tumbled out, her hair in long bunches.
✦ ✦ ✦
Pavilion had been caught completely off guard, but she didn’t have much time to come to grips with the situation. The next moment, the greenroom door swung rudely open, and in stepped a haggard young man.
“…I hate to say I told you so, Midori, but this isn’t an action movie and you aren’t John McClane. I know it looks fun, but those things aren’t made for people to use like passageways.”
“Oh, shut up!” the girl shot back. “You should be embarrassed, waltzing around the back rooms like you own the place! Who do you think you are, the Phantom of the Auction?!”
“Spare me.”
She must have hurt her back when she fell, because the girl in the twin tails stayed where she was on the floor. Pavilion, however, had her mind on something else entirely.
She recognized them. She recognized these bungling backstage burglars!
Pavilion hastily adjusted the bust and hems of the (dangerously oblivious) Lamia woman’s outfit, shouting, “I-it’s you two!! How did you get in here?!”
“Oh, listen to that. At least someone wants to hear the plan.”
“Yes, all right! I get it; I’m sorry I went into the ducts after you said not to! Geez, I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition!!”
There was an emergency intercom on the wall nearby, but Pavilion hesitated to push it. She was sure there had been two beefy PMC guards standing watch outside, which meant that Kaname Suou must have already taken them out without so much as a whisper.
She could call for reinforcements, but would she be able to hold out until they got here? That was the question. She stepped slowly away from the intercom in order to stand like a shield in front of her Magistellus.
“…What have you come here for, you Legacy bandits?”
“I think you should take a look in the mirror, personally. Although I suppose it wasn’t me you stole the Legacy from.”
“And right after you robbed me of those mil-spec drones! Over a thousand of them, too!!”
“There’s no such thing as a risk-free venture. You should know that by now,” replied Kaname unabashedly, before casting a glance around. “And judging by the look of things, I’d wager the Legacies’ true owner has yet to make an appearance.”
“Hmm?”
Pavilion was one of the twelve Zodiac Children—the Maiden’s Survival—though what exactly that meant was not yet clear. Kaname hadn’t expected to reach her before Takamasa. Something wasn’t right. Come to think of it, this had all begun with her, too, when Kaname and the Ag Wolves attacked her to steal #tempest.err. Back then, Kaname had made off with the Legacy, but Pavilion had managed to escape unscathed. She wasn’t just good at surviving. That wasn’t enough to explain her unnatural fortune. There had to be more to it than met the eye.
Her power wasn’t like the Lion’s Nose. For starters, it wasn’t even clear whether the girl herself knew about it or not. But what was certain was that the cold, heartless, numbers-driven AI society could not abide someone with such perfect timing and strength of resolve.
“I’m going to give you one chance,” Kaname told her. “Come with me and let’s get out of here. If you don’t, you’ll lose something more precious to you than your own life, forever. And that’ll be your fault, not mine.”
“Leave this ship? When the auction is about to start??? Surely you must be joking!! I don’t know what’s out there, but it sounds like it’s your problem. Leave me out of it! We’ll take care of ourselves, thank you very much. I couldn’t care less about what happens to you!!”
Well, at least he tried. Kaname nodded at the door he’d just come through and added, “…You know what happened out there, don’t you?”
“Ugh.”
“If I was after your life, both you and your Magistellus would be dead right now. And if I was Criminal AO, you’d have a lot more to worry about than that.”
Kaname sighed and locked eyes with the girl once more. He was the Reaper of Called Game. No one was more ready to take another Dealer’s life than he was. It was plain to see in his vacant eyes.
“I’ll say it again. You’ll lose something more important to you than your own life, and it’ll be all your fault.”
“Wh-what do you mean? You don’t need to remind me about the debt all Dealers face when they Fall.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
He wasn’t shouting, but his words carried an oppressive, almost fatal tone.
“Do you want to protect your Magistellus, Pavilion?”
“…”
“At this rate, she’s in for something a lot worse than the one-hour penalty of being Downed. Total loss. A fatal error. One mistake and she’ll be gone forever. As small as that chance might be, as long as it exists, you need to act immediately. All the money in the world won’t be enough to buy her back.”
“…Is there some sort of special anti-Magistellus Legacy or something?”
“It’s far worse than that. Remember the outage we had last month? The first in the game’s history. What Criminal AO plans to do is on a much larger scale. He’s out to destroy the entire game and take the Magistelli down with it. All of them.”
To be precise, the reason Takamasa sought to kill all the Magistelli was to get at the Mind, but Pavilion didn’t need to know that. She knew Criminal AO was a man powerful enough to design the Legacies, and she had a specific example from the past to draw from.
Above all, it was the threat to her beloved Magistellus that cut her deepest. The girl in the ill-fitting dress didn’t even stroke her slender jaw before replying.