The words left Yuuta’s mouth before he could stop them, tumbling out like stones released from a collapsing wall.

"I want to learn aura."

The kitchen fell silent.

Erza’s hand paused mid-reach for her glass. Her violet eyes, which had been fixed on the curry rice cooling before her, lifted slowly to meet his.

She blinked once, as if she had misheard, as if the sounds that had left his lips could not possibly have arranged themselves into that particular order.

"...What?" The word came out flat, disbelieving.

"I am sorry. What did you just say?"

Yuuta did not look away.

His red eyes, still faintly glowing from the earlier confrontation, held hers with an intensity that made something in her chest tighten.

"I want to learn aura."

He said it again, slower this time, more deliberate, as if testing the weight of each syllable. The words sat between them on the table like a challenge.

Erza set down her fork. The metal clinked against the ceramic bowl, a small sound that seemed too loud in the sudden quiet.

"Why?" she asked, her voice carefully neutral.

"Why do you want to learn aura?"

Yuuta had prepared for this question.

He had been rehearsing answers in his head while stirring the curry, while dicing the onions, while pretending to listen to Elena’s chatter about her day. He needed a reason that would not raise suspicion.

A reason that Erza would accept without digging deeper.

"Like you just said," he began, keeping his voice steady,

"if demons really exist, if they are as dangerous as you claim, then I should be able to protect myself. It’s only logical Right?."

He watched her face, searching for any sign that she believed him.

His hands were clenched beneath the table, hidden from view, his knuckles white.

Erza sighed.

The sound was long and tired, pulled from somewhere deep, a breath that carried the weight of centuries.

She picked up her fork again, twirling it between her fingers, not eating.

"You do not have to worry about such things."

Yuuta’s chest tightened.

"What? Why?"

"Because." She paused, searching for words that would not come.

"Why are you wasting your time on things that do not matter? You do not need to learn aura. You do not need to protect yourself. As long as you are near me, no one will harm you."

She said it so simply, so absolutely, as if it were a law of nature rather than a promise.

As if her presence alone could shield him from every danger in every world. But Yuuta heard something beneath her words, something that sounded like goodbye.

His frustration bubbled beneath his skin, hot and insistent, pressing against his ribs like a trapped animal.

"But what if you are not here?" He leaned forward, his voice rising despite himself.

"What if a demon appears at the apartment and you are somewhere else? What happens then?"

Erza took a bite of her curry.

Chewed.

Swallowed.

Her movements were slow, deliberate, as if she was buying time.

"I have surrounded this building with a powerful barrier," she said, her voice calm, almost bored. "No demon can enter, Nor demon can even approach without triggering my wards."

Yuuta’s hands clenched into fists beneath the table. His nails bit into his palms.

"But what if the barrier fails? What if something stronger than your magic appears? What if."

"There are no ’what ifs.’" She set down her fork again, this time with more force. The clink was sharper, more final, echoing through the quiet kitchen.

"I have already thought of every possibility. I have prepared for every eventuality. You do not need to worry about demons or aura or any of this. I will take care of everything."

"Take care of everything?" Yuuta’s voice cracked. The sound of it surprised him, raw, desperate, nothing like the calm logical tone he had practiced.

"What does that even mean?" Yuuta’s voice rose slightly, disbelief cutting through his frustration.

"And in the first place, why did you add a barrier around the apartment? Why didn’t you tell me? What are you even planning?"

Erza’s jaw tightened.

She did not look at him.

Her eyes were fixed on her plate, on the cooling curry, on anything but his face.

Yuuta frowned, confusion breaking through his exhaustion.

"Why? Why can’t you share this with me?" he asked, his voice rising slightly, hurt slipping into it despite his effort to stay calm.

Erza closed her eyes for a brief moment, as if steadying herself. When she spoke again, her tone was softer, but still distant carefully restrained, like she was holding something far too heavy inside her chest.

"Do not be stubborn, Yuuta," Erza said quietly, her voice steady but softer than before. "I am trying to protect you, so do not worry. You don’t need to understand everything. Everything I am doing... I am doing for you."

"For me?" He laughed, a short, bitter sound that held no humor, that scraped against his throat like broken glass.

"How is any of this for me? You make decisions without asking me. You prepare roads I never asked to walk. You build walls around me and call it protection, but you never." His voice broke. He stopped. Swallowed. Forced himself to continue.

"You never ask me and Hide it from me...?."

The words hung in the air between them, heavy and sharp.

Erza’s hands trembled against the table.

"Stop behaving like children. I am doing what is best for you," she whispered.

"How do you know?" Yuuta’s voice rose, not in anger, but in something worse, desperation. The desperation of a man who could see the future.

"How do you know what is best for me? How do you know that I want any of this? That I want you to." He stopped again, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps.

"To decide my future without me?"

Erza’s eyes glistened.

She looked away, her profile sharp against the warm light of the kitchen, her silver hair hiding her face.

"I am trying to protect you," she said again, but the words were weaker now, crumbling at the edges.

"From what?" Yuuta demanded. "From demons? From your world?" He stood up from the table, his chair scraping against the floor.

"You keep saying you are doing this for me," he said, his voice tightening as frustration and hurt finally broke through.

"But you won’t tell me what this is. You won’t tell me what you’re planning. You won’t tell me anything, and you expect me to just accept it? To just let you?"

His breath shook, his hands curling slightly as if he was holding himself together by force alone.

"You created barriers around our home and didn’t even tell me," Yuuta continued, his voice cracking.

"You hid it from me... like I don’t even have the right to know what’s happening around my own life."

Erza did not answer.

Yuuta’s hands were shaking now, not from fear, not from cold, but from the weight of everything he could not say.

He looked at her, at the tears gathering on her lashes, at the way her shoulders hunched, at the way her fingers curled into fists against the table.

Yuuta pressed on, his voice rising despite himself. "Why do you do everything for me? Why do you make decisions for me without asking? Why do you—"

He stopped. His throat tightened.

"Why?"

Erza did not look at him. Her hands were still on the table, her fork abandoned, her food growing cold.

"Why, Erza?"

"Because I love you."

Silence.

The words tore from her throat like a confession torn from a wound, raw, bleeding, unable to be taken back.

Tears rolled down her cheeks, hot and unstoppable, falling onto the table, onto her cooling food, onto her hands.

She had not meant to say it.

The words had clawed their way out of the prison where she had locked them, escaping through the cracks in her armor, demanding to be heard.

She had planned to leave quietly, to disappear into the night, to let him forget her. She had planned to give him a life of happiness and safety and never tell him why.

She had not planned to say this.

To admit this.

To give him the one thing that would make leaving impossible.

The apartment went silent.

Elena had stopped eating. Her small hands were frozen around her spoon, her red eyes wide, moving from her father’s face to her mother’s, trying to understand the strange, heavy words that hung in the air.

Yuuta had stopped breathing.

He stared at Erza, at the tears on her cheeks, at the tremble of her lips, at the way her hands shook against the table. She looked nothing like the cold queen who had frozen a port. She looked nothing like the ruthless dragon who had threatened to kill him on their first meeting.

She looked like a woman who had just confessed something she had been trying to hide for months.

And she looked terrified.

___________

Loctaion: Libeus Agency

Place: City Bank.

Sara turned back to the table.

Her violet eyes swept across the assembled captains, Erika, sharp and still; Elga, broad and brooding; Lily, pale and silent; Fiona, her face a mask of forced calm. The screens behind her flickered, casting cold blue light across the polished wood, illuminating the tension carved into every jaw, every brow, every set of shoulders.

"The situation," she said, her voice low and steady, "has escalated to the worst possible degree."

She gestured toward the screens.

Raven remained where she was, standing at the edge of the shadows, her crow mask gleaming under the fluorescent lights, the single silver feather on her forehead catching the glow.

She moved with the silence of smoke as she activated the display, her gloved hands rising to touch the controls.

Her expression was unreadable behind the mask, but something in her posture, the stillness, the weight of her presence, told the captains that what they were about to see would change everything.

The gathered data flickered to life.

Reports, fragments, and classified records stitched together over years of painstaking work, shadows following shadows, crows watching from the darkness while the world slept.

Raven had collected enough evidence to reveal a discovery no one in the room was prepared to face. The true reason behind the summoning.

And with that, the True Horror briefing began.

Every captain watched the screen flicker as Raven prepared to show what she had found. Erika leaned forward, her sharp eyes narrowing.

Elga’s massive hands pressed flat against the table. Lily’s pale fingers curled around the edge of her chair. Fiona sat frozen, her heart pounding, her mind already racing ahead to conclusions she was afraid to reach.

The footage began to play.

CCTV images, grainy at first, then sharpening as the AI enhanced them, filled the screens. Orphanages.

Children sleeping in rows of small beds, their faces peaceful in the dim light. Shadows moving through hallways, figures in dark clothing, their faces hidden, their movements precise and unhurried.

They entered rooms.

They lifted children from beds.

They carried them out, limp and silent, and disappeared into the night.

The footage shifted.

Different cities.

Different countries.

The same scenes playing out across the globe.

USA. China. Japan. Australia. Europe. Africa. The Middle East.

Every major city.

Every orphanage.

Every child taken.

More footage appeared. Luxury apartments. Penthouses overlooking glittering skylines. Men and women who had recently become wealthy, new money, unexplained money, money that had appeared in accounts overnight.

They walked through parking garages, through alleyways, through deserted streets.

Shadows followed them.

Swallowed them.

They were never seen again.

The footage kept coming.

Dozens of clips.

Hundreds.

Each one showing the same thing: demons moving with purpose, with coordination, with a speed that suggested they had been waiting for this moment.

The captains were shocked.

They knew demons used children.

They knew demons kidnapped humans after a certain period of contact, that was standard demonic behavior, the cost of dealing with darkness.

But the scale of what they were seeing was different. This was not isolated incidents. This was not random predation. This was an operation.

Erika’s jaw tightened. "Why are they doing this now? Why all of a sudden?"

No one answered.

Elga’s scarred face darkened. "And where are they taking them? We have satellites. We have drones. We have agents in every major city. How can we not know where they are going?"

Lily’s voice was barely a whisper. "We don’t know. We never knew."

The silence that followed was heavy, pressing against the walls of the High Order Meeting Room.

Fiona stared at the screens, her mind racing.

The children.

The wealthy.

The pattern.

The demons moving all at once, as if they had been waiting for a signal, as if something had triggered them.

Yuuta wife, she thought. Did she do this? Did her declaration of war make them move?

But she said nothing.

She kept her face still, her hands steady, her thoughts hidden.

No one truly knew anything about where these children went.

For decades, the Agency had tried to uncover the truth, tracking demonic movements, interrogating captured demons, analyzing magical residue.

They had found nothing. The children vanished into a void that their technology could not penetrate, their magic could not follow, their agents could not survive.

But if Raven was showing this now, it meant she knew.

Raven stepped forward, her crow mask catching the light, her voice low and smooth.

"As you can see," she said, "demons all over the world are active. For a century, we searched for why these demons were kidnapping children and why they were allowed to make contact in the first place." She paused, letting the weight of her words settle.

"My Shadow Crows were able to find out how the demonic world has been working under humanity’s eye."

She looked at each captain in turn.

The red glow of her mask’s eyes seemed to brighten, then dim, like embers breathing in a dying fire.

"This demonic world," she said, "is so horrifying that we believe they have their own army. Superior power. Superior organization. Superior resources. They have their own base, a demon king castle, hidden somewhere beyond the reach of our satellites, our spies, our magic. And they are moving."

The other captains stared at her in awe.

It sounded like fantasy. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

A castle? Hidden from every satellite in the sky? The USA had agencies.

Russia had agencies.

China had agencies.

So many countries had tons of satellites watching every corner of the globe, monitoring every anomaly, tracking every heat signature. How could a demon king build a castle without being detected?

Erika spoke first, her voice sharp with disbelief.

"That is your belief. There is no way a castle or any base could be hidden from our eyes or from other agencies. We would have seen it. Someone would have seen it."

Raven’s voice did not waver. Her mask turned toward Erika, and the red glow of her eyes seemed to intensify.

"What I spoke is exactly the same words I received from the high demon I captured and tortured to death," Raven said.

"He spoke and revealed this information to me before he died. He told me everything, the castle, the army, the preparations. And he told me the demonic world is on high alert."

The room went cold.

Fiona’s heart skipped.

High alert? What did that mean? Her mind raced, connecting dots that had been scattered across years of investigation.

The sudden demonic activity.

The timing.

Declaration of war.

The silver-haired Women cold certainty that she could end the demonic era alone.

She knew, Fiona thought. Somehow, she knew they were already moving.

She knew they were already preparing.

She knew.

She forced herself to stay calm. To keep her face still. To not let the other captains see the fear creeping up her spine.

Elga leaned forward, his massive frame casting a shadow across the table.

"High alert? What does that mean? Why would they be on high alert?"

Raven did not answer immediately.

She let the silence stretch, let the tension build, let the captains squirm under the weight of their own unanswered questions.

"As you know," she said finally, "demons sell drugs and demonic pills to warlords, gangs, and corrupt governments. That has been their primary source of income for centuries, funding their operations, expanding their influence, keeping themselves hidden." She paused.

"But recently, demons have stopped supplying all of a sudden. No new shipments. No new deals. The black markets are drying up, and our contacts are reporting panic among the human collaborators."

The captains exchanged glances.

"And at the same time," Raven continued, "they have increased the kidnapping. More children and More wealthy contractors, More souls collected than ever before."

She paused again.

The silence was killing them.

Erika’s voice was tight. "What does that mean, Raven?."

Raven said nothing.

She stood still as stone, her crow mask revealing nothing, her silence more terrifying than any words.

The captains looked at each other, confused, afraid, desperate for answers.

Finally, Sara spoke.

Her voice was cold. Absolute. The voice of someone who had seen the evidence and could no longer deny the truth.

"Which means," she said, "the Demon King has decided on world domination."

To be continued.

Author’s Note:

Just a small clarification The barrier Erza placed was first introduced/referenced in Chapter 47.

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