Bofuri (The Strongest Shield Of Tensura)-Chapter 121 - One Hundred And Twenty One

"I am in love with this new body, Maple." The purple haired lady formerly known as Primordial Violet said with undisguised glee as she looked herself over, turning her hands this way and that. "Not only can it actually hold my full power, but I’ve gotten a few extra abilities I didn’t have before. Is this spirit magic I’m feeling?"

"First off, quit it with the whole Maple thing. Just call me Kaede." Kaede sighed. "And yeah. I found a way around the human sacrifice component of demon summoning by building a body that properly attunes to spiritual beings."

She crossed her arms. "Honestly it was an accident that I even made the discovery in the first place. One of my Ultimate Skills ended up taking control of an earth spirit, and when it did it fused with the spirit’s mineral body and produced something entirely new. I ended up calling it spirit metal."

As Kaede explained, the demoness opened and closed her hands into fists, feeling the response.

"The results were a bit insane, as you can imagine." Kaede continued. "It ended up giving rise to a completely new spirit race that I’ve called the Automaras. You’ve probably already noticed them flying around the capital. Anyway, spirit metal is incredibly conductive to both magicules and spiritrons, so there’s really nothing in this world that’s going to put a ceiling on what you can do. And since spirit metal is so adaptable it’s capable of growing on its own over time."

The demoness let out a low whistle. She was quiet for a moment, and then she raised one hand and began counting on her fingers.

"Okay so I just heard several mind blowing things and I need to go through them." She moved to the first finger. "First off, I’m pretty sure I heard you say Ultimate Skill. Skills, plural maybe?" She moved to the next. "Second, this spirit metal has spiritrons in it, which is incredible because spiritrons damage magical beings. Which means with this body, literally no holy type attack can affect me anymore." A satisfied pause. "Nice. Third." The next finger. "You made an entire race?" She glanced briefly toward the window where one of the Automaras drifted past the glass. "Fourth, the metal grows on its own?" She lowered her hand and looked at Kaede. "Damn. My master is seriously something else."

Kaede deadpanned at her. "You really want me to explain all of that right now?"

"Maybe later," The demoness conceded, still flexing her hand with quiet satisfaction. "The body is still amazing though." She looked up. "Is this what you used for Tomokashi as well?"

A flash of darkness moved through the room that had nothing to do with the light.

"I heard my name." Tomokashi materialized behind the purple haired demoness.

"No one asked for you, juggers."

"Aww." Tomokashi’s voice carried the particular warmth of someone enjoying themselves completely. "Don’t be so mean about it, little Wisteria-chan."

Wisteria, the Primordial Violet, went very still.

"I’ll fucking kill you," she said.

"Please not in my workshop." Chibari’s voice arrived from somewhere deeper in the room without her having looked up from what she was doing. She was smiling, which somehow made the shadows in the corners of the room feel slightly more present than they had been a moment ago.

Kaede passed by and placed a hand briefly on the blacksmith’s shoulder. "Go easy on them, Chibari." A small pause. "Even if they don’t deserve it."

She turned back to where her two demons were conducting their hostilities.

"Anyway." Kaede said. "If you want to actually understand what you’re working with now, talk to Chibari. She runs most of our military inventory and she’s the one who built that body of yours. She’ll know its capabilities better than I do."

Chibari set down her tools.

"After Kaede created the first golem for Tomokashi," she began, "I started looking into what spirit metal could do as a material. Weapons. Armor. The usual applications." She picked up a small piece of unworked ore from the bench beside her and turned it over in her fingers. "The problem was that almost no one in Maple Tree could actually use it properly. Spirit metal responds to spirit beings. Put it in the hands of a regular soldier and it’s just very expensive metal."

"The project stalled," Chibari continued. "Until Lady Kirara." She set the ore back down. "When she awakened, Lady Eve came with her. And Lady Eve..."

"Is the matriarch of the Automaras," Kaede supplied from somewhere to the left.

"Is the matriarch of the Automaras," Chibari confirmed. "Which means she can create more of them. Which means suddenly there were spirit beings in Maple Tree who could actually work with the material. The project had somewhere to go."

Tomokashi had drifted to the side of the room and was leaning against the wall with her arms folded.

"There’s a difference though," Chibari said, "between what Lady Kaede used for Tomokashi and what I used for you." She looked at Wisteria directly. "The standard spirit metal is remarkable on its own. Conductive. Adaptive. Nothing else comes close to it as a base material, not even Magiore." A pause. "But refined spirit metal is something else entirely. When you work it properly, treat it correctly, give it time and heat and attention..." she stopped. Seemed to be choosing her words with the care of someone who didn’t use them loosely. "The potential is essentially without limit."

Wisteria looked down at her hands again.

"I heard it would be housing a Primordial Demon," Chibari said. Her voice was even, matter of fact, the way it always was. "So I made sure it was worthy of that."

"She poured her everything into it," Kaede said. "Imprinted her very world into it. Whatever that means. Her words."

Chibari was quiet for a moment. "I’ve studied under Kaijin. I worked with his brothers as well." She picked up her tools again and turned back to her work. "They’re exceptional. The best smiths I’ve encountered. I don’t think I’m at their level." A beat. "But this piece." She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.

The workshop was quiet for a moment except for the low ambient heat of the furnace and the distant sound of the capital going about its day outside.

Wisteria turned her hands over one more time. Slowly.

"You said you imprinted your world into it," she said.

Chibari didn’t look up. "Every smith does, whether they mean to or not." A small pause. "I meant to."

"Well," she said finally. "I suppose you’ve earned the right to be insufferable about it."

"I don’t intend to be insufferable about it," Chibari said.

"No," Wisteria agreed. "That’s almost worse."

Kaede watched the two of them for a moment.

"We leave for Walpurgis tomorrow," Kaede said. To the room in general. To herself, a little. "So if there’s anything you need from Chibari, now is the time."

Wisteria’s grin sharpened at the edges. She looked at Chibari. "Oh, I plan to. So about those extra abilities."

---

Risa Shiramine had stopped expecting the city to notice. That was the first thing law school taught you, underneath all the procedure and precedent and careful language about burden of proof. The city didn’t notice. The world didn’t pause. You won or you lost and either way the traffic continued and the convenience stores stayed open and nobody outside that courtroom would mark the difference.

She had learned to be fine with that.

She pulled into the parking structure at six forty-seven in the morning, which was earlier than she needed to be and later than she’d wanted. She’d been awake since four. Not from anxiety, she had long since stopped being anxious before cases in the conventional sense.

’I used to stay up until four,’ she thought, unbuckling her seat belt. ’Playing games. Eating whatever was in the fridge. Talking to Kaede about nothing.’

She got out of the car.

The client room was on the third floor. Her client was already there when Risa arrived.

Mitsuki Hayano was thirty-one years old and had the look of someone who had spent a long time being smaller than she actually was. She sat with her hands folded on the table and her eyes on the middle distance, and when Risa came through the door she looked up with the particular expression of someone who had learned to be careful about hoping for things.

"Good morning," Risa said, and set her bag down and sat across from her.

They went through it together one more time. Not because Risa needed to, she had the case memorized down to the page numbers of the supporting documentation, but because Mitsuki needed the going through. Needed to say the things out loud in this small neutral room one more time before she had to say them in a room full of people who would be watching her say them.

Risa made sure she listened. Asked the questions that needed asking. Kept her voice even and her face open and gave Mitsuki everything she needed from the woman sitting across from her.

’You’re good at this,’ she thought, somewhere underneath the listening. ’You’ve always been good at performing the thing people need you to be.’

She didn’t let the thought go anywhere. She rarely did.

When Mitsuki finished, her hands had loosened slightly on the table. That was the tell, Risa had learned to watch for it. The point where the recounting stopped being a thing being endured and started being a thing being carried, which was different, which was the point where people found they could stand up and walk into a courtroom.

"Are you ready?" Risa asked.

Mitsuki looked at her for a moment. "Are you?"

"Yes," Risa said. Simply, because it was simply true.

---

The courtroom was the thing she was actually good at.

Not the preparation, which was meticulous but mechanical. Not the client work, which she did well because she had learned to do it well. The courtroom itself, the particular geometry of it, the way information moved across the space between her and opposing counsel and the bench, the rhythm of examination and cross that most lawyers experienced as a procedure and that she experienced as something much closer to a game.

She had always been good at games.

’Stop’, she told herself. ’Not now.’

She didn’t let herself think about games in courtrooms. That was the rule. She’d made it in her second year of practice after she’d caught herself mapping a cross-examination onto a player versus player event she’d run seven years ago and had felt something in her chest that she didn’t have a clean name for and didn’t want to examine too closely.

She focused on the courtroom.

Opposing counsel was competent and adequately prepared and had clearly decided that Mitsuki’s credibility was the thread to pull. That was the conventional approach. Risa had anticipated it in February, had built her preparation around it, and executed it the way she executed most things, without visible effort, which was its own kind of pressure.

She didn’t watch Mitsuki while she testified. She watched the bench. She watched opposing counsel. She watched the specific quality of attention in the room and read it the way she read everything, continuously and without appearing to.

The thread opposing counsel pulled did not come loose.

It never did, when Risa had already found it first and reinforced everything around it.

She made her closing argument standing still, which was a choice. Movement implied energy implied performance. She had learned early that juries found stillness more convincing than emphasis. She spoke at a pace that was slightly slower than felt natural and let the weight of what she was saying occupy the space the delivery left open.

---

The verdict came at two seventeen in the afternoon.

The defendant was found Guilty.

Life sentence, no parole eligibility for twenty-five years.

The defendant’s counsel requested a conference. The judge sustained something. There was language and process and a whole lot of administrative machinery being put into motion.

Risa was aware of all of it.

She was also aware of Mitsuki beside her, who had gone very still at the word guilty and then had begun, quietly and without apparent intention, to cry.

Afterward, in the corridor outside, Mitsuki turned and put her arms around Risa. "Thank you," she said, into Risa’s shoulder. "Thank you, thank you, thank you..."

Risa put her arms around her and held on and said the things that needed saying. "It’s over. You did well. You were so brave." She said them with warmth because she meant them, because Mitsuki had been brave, because it was over, because those things were true.

And underneath it, quiet and persistent and entirely separate from the moment she was present in...

’There was nobody,’ she thought. ’When Kaede went missing. There was nobody who came to find me in a corridor and held on and said it was going to be okay. There was nobody who made sure it was.’

She didn’t let it show. She was very good at not letting things show.

She held on until Mitsuki was ready to let go, and smiled when Mitsuki pulled back and laughed through her tears, and said the right things and meant most of them, and watched her client walk toward her waiting family.

She watched until Mitsuki disappeared around the corner.

Then she stood in the corridor alone for a moment and did what she always did when there was nothing left to perform, she let her face do whatever it wanted, which turned out to be nothing in particular. Just still. Just tired.

Her phone had three unread messages. She knew without looking who two of them were from. Her paralegal. Her supervisor. The third she didn’t need to look at either, because she already knew the shape of it.

It had arrived at six this morning. She had read it once in the parking structure and then put her phone away and gone upstairs and done her job.

#It’s not that I don’t care about you#, Nao had written. #I do. I just feel like I’m always, I don’t know how to explain it. Like there’s a room in you that’s always locked and you’re always standing just outside it and I can never tell if you’re trying to get in or trying to keep everything else out.#

Risa had read it and thought, with flat recognition, ’that’s accurate.’

She hadn’t said that. She had written something that was true and insufficient and had put her phone away.

This was the fourth time. Four people in eight years who had tried and found the same locked room and eventually stopped trying. She didn’t blame any of them. She had tried too. She had been present and attentive and had genuinely wanted it to work.

The problem was not that she was incapable of love. She knew that.

The problem was that she had already used the part of her that knew how to do it without thinking, the part that didn’t require effort or management or the careful maintenance of presence. She had used it early, completely, on a girl who had disappeared one morning eight years ago and had not come back, and every person since had been asking her to give something she no longer had a surplus of.

She was aware this was not a healthy way to think about it.

She was also aware it was true.

’You’d laugh at me’, she thought. ’Four times, Kaede. I really thought this might actually be the one.’

She stopped. ’No I didn’t.’ She picked up her bag and walked toward the elevator.

---

The parking structure was quieter at this hour than it had been in the morning. The city outside was doing its late afternoon business, the particular density of sound that came with the end of the working day, but up here on the third level it was mostly concrete and exhaust and the distant sound of traffic.

She heard them before she saw them, which was the habit of someone who had spent years in a game where hearing things first was the difference between evading and taking damage.

’Stop’, she told herself again. ’Not games. Not now.’

She rounded the pillar and saw her car and saw the two people standing beside it.

A woman in her late fifties, the kind of tired that had settled into her features and made itself permanent. A young man beside her, looked to be in his mid-twenties.

She stopped walking.

She knew who they were before they said anything. She had been doing this long enough.

The woman looked at her. Something moved through her face that was too complicated and too raw to be a single thing. "You’re her," she said. "You’re the one who..." Her voice caught. "I’ll never see my son again. Do you understand that? I will never..." She stopped. "It’s your fault. All of it. You stood up there and you..."

Risa looked at her.

She felt the grief in the woman’s voice. She registered it accurately and completely. She did not look away from it.

"I understand that you’re in pain," she said. Her voice was even. "I need you to move away from my car."

"You don’t care," the woman said. "You don’t care at all..."

"Please move away from my car."

The young man moved first. He lunged at her with a yell as he covered the distance between them fast, faster than most people would have, his right hand coming up with incredible speed.

Risa was faster.

She had always been faster. That was the thing about eight years of being a lawyer, of sitting in offices and courtrooms and client rooms, it had not made her slower. The reflexes that had made her something close to untouchable in a game were still there, still precise, still operating at the speed that had earned her a reputation she’d never entirely known what to do with.

She moved and he didn’t connect. Instead, she grabbed his arm and twisted, before kicking out his legs from under him and then he was on the ground looking up at the concrete ceiling with the expression of someone who had not anticipated this outcome, and Risa was standing and her breathing was even and she looked at the woman and said, again, "Please move away from my car."

She didn’t see the knife.

That was the thing she would think about afterward, in the brief window of afterward that was available to her, she hadn’t seen the knife. She had read the son as the threat, which was correct, which was the obvious read, which was exactly what she would have done in a game against an opponent who understood misdirection.

She felt it enter her left side, just below the ribs.

She looked down.

The woman was already stepping back, the knife still in her hand, her face doing something that had moved past rage into a kind of horrified surprise, as though she too had not entirely decided to do what she had just done until it was already done.

Risa sat down. Not a choice exactly. Her legs made the decision and she followed it, her back finding the side of her car, the concrete cold through her jacket.

’Huh’, she thought.

The city noise continued below. The traffic. The indifferent continuous sound of a world that did not pause.

She had read once, in something she couldn’t now remember, that your life was supposed to flash before your eyes. She had always been skeptical of this. It seemed too convenient, too narrative, the kind of thing people constructed after the fact because the alternative, that the end was just the end, no summary, no highlight reel, was harder to hold.

But something was happening.

Not exactly a flash. More like drift. The way a game screen went when the connection was dropping, images arriving without the urgency they’d had when they were present.

The inside of a dorm room at three in the morning, blue light from two screens, the smell of instant noodles. ’What do you mean you put all your points in defense? Kaede, you can’t...’ Laughter. Her own laughter, which she had not heard at that pitch in a very long time.

A café in Shibuya, during their second year of university, Kaede’s hands wrapped around a cup that was too hot and her face doing the thing it did when she was happy and didn’t know what to do about it, which was the most Kaede expression that existed and which Risa had spent eight years trying not to reconstruct too precisely from memory because the precision of it was its own kind of damage.

The last morning. An ordinary morning. Kaede’s voice on the phone saying she’d be there at seven, they’d have the whole day, it was going to be good.

Seven had come.

Seven had gone.

Eight years of seven coming and going without Kaede in them.

’I would rather be anywhere else’, Risa thought, with the clarity that seemed to come with blood loss. ’Any world. Any version of this that has Kaede in it. I would trade every case I’ve ever won, every verdict, every grateful client...’

She stopped the thought.

She was aware of voices now. The young man, back on his feet, saying something to his mother that had panic in it. Footsteps. Someone running.

She looked up at the concrete ceiling.

’Does it’, she thought. ’Does life actually flash. Is that what this is.’

She wasn’t sure.

What she was sure of was that it wasn’t her career she was seeing.

It wasn’t the verdicts or the courtrooms or the careful accumulated record of eight years of being very good at a thing she had chosen partly because it was a way to keep moving and partly because someone had to do it and partly because she had needed, after Kaede, something that asked everything of her so there was nothing left at the end of the day to turn toward the thing she was trying not to turn toward.

What she was seeing was a game she hadn’t played in eight years and a girl with dark hair and a shield bigger than she was and the specific quality of warmth in a dorm room at three in the morning.

’Bring it back.’ She said, her own thoughts slurring. ’Those days in Maple Tree. When you were Maple and I was Sally.’

’I just wanna be Sally again and hang out with my best friends.’

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{Request Confirmed}