Even the na had a particular quality to it — smooth on the surface, with sothing sharp underneath if you pressed too hard. It was the kind of na that criminal organizations in this world gave themselves when they wanted to be taken seriously without being imdiately threatening. A velvet glove. The iron inside was implied.
I’d spent enough ti with this ga to know their history better than most people walking these streets probably did.
They had started as a mid-tier trafficking operation about sixty years ago, mostly black-market artifacts and restricted magical components. Nothing remarkable. The kind of organization that rose and fell without leaving much of a mark. What changed them was a deal — a single contact with a being from the demonic hierarchy, a minor broker who served one of the Lords of the lower rings. The terms of the deal were never fully recorded, but the result was. Within a decade, the Velvet Gang had gone from a mid-tier operation to one of the most feared underground forces in three city-states.
The secret was demonization.
Not full possession — that was a different and far less stable process. This was sothing more surgical. Their upper mbers made contracts with demons, accepting a fragnt of demonic essence in exchange for a catastrophic increase in physical power and magical output. The process wasn’t painless. Rumors suggested it wasn’t fully reversible. But the results were undeniable. A demonized D-rank fighter hit with the force of a solid C-rank. A demonized C-rank beca sothing that gave even B-rank hunters pause.
That was why I needed them.
Not as an enemy. Not as a raid target. As a resource.
"Two things," I murmured to myself as I moved through the city’s outer district, the skyline of the rural quarter spreading out ahead of in the early afternoon light — low buildings, narrower streets, the kind of neighborhood where people minded their own business as a survival strategy. "Find the sword technique. And beco a demon."
The second one was the part that I knew would raise objections if anyone could hear my thoughts. It sounded extre. And maybe, by any ordinary moral frawork, it was. But I’d played this ga enough tis to understand what was coming. The threats in the later Chapters weren’t things you could face with good training and a strong heart and a well-tid power of friendship. They were things that required a fundantal change in what you were.
The original main character in the ga had found this out too late.
I didn’t intend to make the sa mistake.
The cab I’d taken dropped at the edge of the district, and I walked the rest of the way. The shift in atmosphere was gradual but unmistakable — the streets here were quieter, the people fewer, the kind of stillness that ca not from peace but from practiced discretion. Everyone here was doing sothing they’d prefer not to have witnessed. That made them easier to move around.
I’d changed out of my academy uniform in an alley before getting in the cab — nothing dramatic, just plain practical clothing that didn’t announce where I ca from. The uniform of Astraea Academy wasn’t a mark of prestige here. It was a mark of target.
The man stationed at the side entrance of the building was heavyset, scarred in the specific pattern that suggested he’d been in real fights rather than sport ones, and had the particular blankness of soone who had stopped finding any of this interesting a long ti ago. He looked over once, the way people here looked at everything — assessing threat level, not identity.
"Here to register?" he asked.
I nodded.
He slid a ledger across the surface of the barrier between us. I signed — not my na, a working alias I’d chosen carefully — and paid the entry fee from the card my mother had given . The Draven family fortune was sothing the original Kael had apparently given almost no thought to. His focus had been on his lack of talent. He hadn’t paid much attention to what that wealth actually represented.
I’d reviewed it. The Draven family, despite sitting at the Count tier of nobility rather than the higher ranks, had made themselves indispensable in a way that pure political power could never quite achieve. They were investors — major ones — in the technological infrastructure that underpinned modern life in this world. Their partnership with the dwarven engineering guilds was decades old and had produced the luminite grid, the transit fraworks, the secure artifact communication lines that nobles and rchants alike depended on. The Draven family was not impressive at court. They were essential everywhere else.
The black card my mother had pressed into my hand before I left could buy almost anything within reason. The magic mask I’d acquired from a specialized storage vendor that morning had cost more than most students spent on equipnt in an entire sester. It sat now in my bag, waiting.
The registration complete, I pocketed my copy and turned away from the gate, moving toward the motel I’d booked — a quiet, unmorable place two blocks east that asked no questions and kept no logs worth reading.
The entrance to the Velvet Gang’s underground fighting circuit wasn’t the gang’s actual headquarters. That was deeper, and reaching it required either an invitation or a reputation. The tournant was the latter path — the legitimate route, if anything about this could be called legitimate. Fighters registered, fought, were observed. The ones who showed interesting qualities got noticed. The ones who got noticed got approached.
That was how it worked. That was how it had worked in the ga, and I had no reason to believe it had changed.
There’s a dungeon inside one of their base branches in this city, I thought, staring at the motel ceiling while I ran through my preparation. I found it during one of my later playthroughs by accident. A Celestial-grade technique, locked behind conditions I couldn’t et at the ga. But I’m not the sa as I was in the ga.
The Celestial Sword’s first form — Guiding Light — I already knew. It was the entry point, the technique that proved aptitude. Every form beyond it built on that foundation. If I could access the vault, I would have the blueprint for sothing that no other living swordsman in this world currently practiced.because it had been lost.
I sat up and reached for the magic mask.
It settled over my face with a faint shimr. The effect was complete — a stranger looked back at from the small mirror on the motel wall. Different jaw, different eyes, different cast to the skin. Nothing that would fool a high-ranked hunter with detection abilities, but more than sufficient for this.
I tested the draw of the blade I’d brought — not my best weapon, nothing that could be traced to the Draven family or Astraea Academy. Plain steel, solid weight. Enough.
I can’t win the whole tournant, I reminded myself. That’s not the point. But there was a specific incident during this event — soone, whether by accident or deliberate summoning, pulls a mid-tier demon into the arena. The chaos that follows is the opening I need. In the ga it was a disaster. For , it’s a door.
I sheathed the blade. Stood. Adjusted the mask.
By the ti I walked back out onto the street, it was evening. The city’s outer district looked different at night — the luminite streetlamps cast longer shadows out here where the grid was less maintained, and the kind of people who moved through these streets after dark were different from the dayti crowd. More alert. More dangerous. More interesting.
I followed the route I’d mapped, arrived at the narrow entrance alley, and joined the stream of fighters and spectators filtering into the underground venue.
The crowd around was almost entirely D-rank. That wasn’t a surprise. C-rank fighters had more to lose and more options — they didn’t need underground circuits to find challenges. The people here were either desperate, ambitious, or both. So were young, so were scarred veterans of fights the official circuits would never have sanctioned.
All of them, in so sense, were waiting for sothing to change.
I found my position in the holding area for registered fighters and settled in, watching, cataloguing, filing information away with the particular focus of soone who already knew the script but needed to track the live performance.
First, I thought. Let the night begin.
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