Saito took us to Takezo’s car, which was another black Mazda. We got inside, and the car’s insides were nearly identical too, the car just being a lower-class model.

  He drove like Saito, perfectly by the speed limit. We quickly left the downtown though, speeding away from the suburbs.

  “This doesn’t look like the direction of a hotel,” I remarked.

  “It’s not. But the city has too many ears.”

  All right. I relaxed into the seat.

  He drove us into the farmlands, where a house stood alone by a patch of forest.

  We parked in a gravel lot behind a tall wooden wall, the kind that really reminded me of old samurai movies. Takezo led me through a sliding gate into what looked like a three-century-old house, all dark wood beams and rice-paper walls and a garden full of twisted pines and perfectly-placed rocks. It was so stereotypically Japanese it looped back around to being kind of awesome.

  “Nice place,” I said, kicking off my shoes in the entryway.

  “I wouldn’t even call it mine,” Takezo replied. “It’s a syndicate house, which no one wanted because it’s over a two-hour drive from here to the headquarters in the morning.”

  Right, Tokyo probably had a lot of traffic. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “Because you can walk through the portal.” He motioned me to enter.

  Inside, the house was minimalist, but there were swords everywhere. Katana on every wall, a rack of naginata by the shoji, a stand with a gleaming wakizashi by the low table.

  Takezo moved through the space like a ghost, barely disturbing the air. “And I want to know why. So, why can you walk through the portal, O’Connor?”

  I shrugged. “Isabella says it’s because I caught some cooties from a dog demon that got through.”

  “Nonsense. She surely had the dog dissected to atoms to find how it got through. If it were because of the demon, she would be walking through the portal herself.” He dropped a pillow next to a low table, and then knelt by a side.

  A bottle of sake already awaited us on the table, together with four cups. I sat down on the pillow. “Why can you pass through the portal?”

  He took one cup, raised it, and drank. Horns grew out of his forehead. “Because I am a demon created by Lucifer himself. There is no portal I cannot pass through, for there is no portal made from another’s power.”

  I stared at him, my mouth gaping. The level scanner told me he was thirteen because he was a demon made thirteen years ago. It wasn’t wrong. The ages of the succubi were all over the place for the same reason. And Saito was actually that old… though Isabella still handily out-levelled him.

  “The obvious explanation would be that you could be somehow related to Lucifer. But you aren’t, which makes me curious.”

  I frowned. “What makes you say that?”

  “I’ve met about four of Lucifer’s spawns over my life. Not demons, humans he sired during a one-nighter with their mother. They all have this specific feeling in their soul, which you don’t have. They’re also all incredible mages, which, well, you aren’t.”

  Ouch. That stung all the way into the heart. I drained my cup, refilled it, drained that one too, and poured myself another one.

  Takezo snorted. “An endurance build, heh? Why would you spec into endurance? Dexterity, willpower, and speed are so much better. Endurance is like the worst stat to focus on.”

  Damn it. It was one thing to think it myself, but his saying it out loud made it all the more real. “Circumstances forced me to… no, Isabella indirectly forced me to. I was dying, and could either put stats into endurance or die.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe she knows something we don’t.”

  “Or she just enjoys having a durable pincushion.”

  His laughter echoed through the air. He grabbed his cup and drank it dry. “You excel at that. It doesn’t really matter all that much though. Stats are just multipliers to the base. Have a high base, and you can do with a smaller multiplier. Plus, technique conquers all, in the end.”

  “Technique?”

  “Some call it mastery, but I call it technique. When two mages learn the same spell, they don’t necessarily cast it in the same way. One will be a tiny bit faster, creating a spell a tiny bit stronger than his stats should allow him to. This mage has a better technique. The same goes for all skills and abilities.”

  Isabella never mentioned that. Then again, she hadn’t mentioned many things. “How much difference can it make? Aren’t stats much stronger?”

  “Nobody knows.” He refilled his cup. “I saw the recording of a few of Lucifer’s fights, even against some of the strongest mages of the Secret Societies. He didn’t use any massive spells, any reality-warping abilities, no, he fought mostly with basic weapons and simple abilities. But he was absurdly fast and could execute those abilities without slowing down. I’ve met hundreds of men who can use the same spells, have the same abilities, and could theoretically do everything he did. I know people who can move faster than he did. Yet I’ve never seen anyone do both at once outside of him.”

  Hmm… “Can I see it?”

  “No. I’m not allowed to see it either, just did so by sneaking into the forbidden archive.”

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  Well, that was a shame. I couldn’t imagine what a fight between two top-level mages looked like. Sure, I witnessed how Isabella demolished my mother and her squad, but that was only one top-level mage fighting. “If Lucifer is gone, and you are a demon created by him… what do you do, then? Just wait for your master to return?”

  “Spot on.” Takezo shook his head, and his horns vanished into dust. “I have no purpose. There’s no one I can even ask. I’ve never met another Lucifer-made demon, and I’ve heard only three of us exist. We were made for a purpose never told to us, and I’ve never even met my creator. Old records in the forbidden archive are the only things I know about him. Since I know nothing about him, I can’t even begin to fathom why he created me, and for what purpose.”

  “What if there was no purpose?”

  “He always had a purpose. If one creates demons for no purpose, one creates either none or thousands. But not three. Three is too specific a number.”

  “Well, if it helps, my dad made me because they got drunk with my mom one night, and I’m not sure he even knows she got pregnant from that. Or at least, he didn’t know until way later, at which point he didn’t care anymore.”

  “You humans have it easy. Your life is limited, you can have children, you need to eat, and so you need to make a living. In its rough and heartless way, reality provides purpose to your days. But I’m a demon. I don’t need to eat, I can’t reproduce, and even if I die on earth, my soul will retreat to Hell and reform there. There’s no purpose to my existence. The more I think about it, the better I understand the succubi. If I am to live forever, I might as well have a lot of sex. That’s always fun. But it doesn’t fulfil me at all. Nothing does.”

  In a way, I understood him. My search for my father was mostly a proxy reason, an excuse to join the Secret Societies. “How about we try to get Francesca out of the realm behind the portal, then? That’s not a grand life’s goal, but it’s something we can try to do. It’s not like anyone can order us around once we’re on the other side of the portal.”

  He took a moment to think. “That works, I guess. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.” He finished off the sake bottle by pouring us each the last cups. “Have you seen any decent swordsmen around your corpo?”

  “Where did that come from?”

  He got up and drew his sword. Not into a stance though, just to show it. “One of the things with being a demon is that I barely get tired. So, I’ve already done more sword-fighting training than a human can do in a lifetime. I’ve stopped making progress years ago, and whenever I fight someone, be it in a spar or in a kendo match, it’s completely one-sided. By that, I’m at the practical limit of how one can fight with a sword.”

  “And yet it’s not enough.”

  He nodded. “Every time I try to imagine fighting Lucifer in a swordfight, I lose. I’ve seen his recorded fights so many times I can create a perfect mental image of him, and I can never even touch the image.”

  “Can’t you fight how he does?”

  “No, because he combines the sword with spells and physicality I don’t have. That I can’t have. What I need to do is to update my swordsmanship in the same manner, to elevate it through a combination of spells and other skills. But that would require me to decide on what skills to focus on, ones that are combinable with swordsmanship.”

  Wait, that sounded like he also couldn’t decide on a build. For a completely different reason than me, but still with the same result. “Truth be told, I haven’t allocated any non-system skills. I can’t decide.”

  He frowned. “Wait, you haven’t taken even the Devil’s Gaze? That’s a literal must-have for everyone.”

  Shadow?

  The world froze, and Shadow appeared, leaning against the wall. “What, need advice on how to proceed with your new boyfriend?”

  I noticed my level. Sixteen. When did that happen? I haven’t paid any attention to the levels, as the system didn’t work beyond the portal. It clearly somehow counted the experience though. Then again, experience wasn’t just combat experience, but just general experience at being a mage. Just me spending the evening around Isabella probably got me half a level from breathing the same air she did. I had other matters to attend to now though. “No. Where’s the Devil’s Gaze on the skill tree?”

  “Level one Void Mage skill.”

  I made the skill tree appear in front of my eyes. When I studied the tree, I started from the end spells, the pinnacle, so I didn’t really pay attention to the early parts of the tree as I assumed they would just be pathing skills to the good stuff. But by what Takezo told me, that wasn’t how the tree worked at all. Even the strongest mages that have ever existed mostly fought with low-tier skills, just executed with perfect technique.

  There, I found the skill. I read the descriptions:

  ‘Skill: Devil’s Gaze.

  Usage: Unlimited, drains energy when active.

  Effect: Shift’s vision to Devil’s Gaze, which reveals all energies to the user’s eyes.’

  “Do all energies include magical ones?”

  “Obviously. That’s a part of all.”

  Right, yeah, a skill that allowed me to see magic was an absolute must-have. That would allow me to recognize other mages, see traps, and just generally interact with the magical aspects of the world like an active participant. At a single skill point investment, I had to take this.

  I focused on the skill node and allocated the point to it. My vision shifted. As if watching a movie while floating inside of it, I saw young Shadow sitting on a rock, dressed in a long leather coat, with a cowboy hat, and guns holstered at his waist.

  Shadow’s voice narrated into my mind. “When I was seven, my father left us. I invented this spell to find him. When I did, he shot me.”

  The imagery vanished, the time unfroze, and I sat back on the pillow while Takezo was downing his last cup of sake. In front of me floated a guide on how to use the skill.

  I grabbed mine because I needed a drink. The skills from the System weren’t some arbitrary spells and abilities the System came up with. They were spells invented by real people, real mages, and made accessible through the System.

  I focused on the guide to use the skill. First, reach inwards for my power. Okay, basic magic stuff, not hard. Then, pull the power into my gaze, and twist it inwards. Not difficult.

  Finally, stabilize the energy. Okay, that’s still basic.

  The world’s colors shifted to my eyes, inverting. And in the sea of white and black, colors emerged, magical energies that the common gaze couldn’t see. Takezo’s body glowed with a faint crimson aura.

  My hand had a barely visible, purple-ish aura to it. Half of the weapons on the display racks had a magical energy trapped within them. Magical swords, especially the katana that Takezo held in his hand.

  Holy fuck. I emptied my drink. “Got more sake?”

  “Yes, but for special occasions. I don’t usually drink.” Takezo sheathed his blade. “Plus, you should go to sleep.”

  Yeah. I needed to do that, and I also had to give a fresh, long look at the early parts of the skill tree. Tiredness hit me, and I realized the shifted vision drained a lot of magical strength really fast.

  Well, that made sense, given how ridiculously useful it was to see other people’s magic.

  I ended up sleeping in a surprisingly comfortable bed in his guest room.

  Takezo wasn’t kidding about the three-hour drive to work.

  We left at five in the morning, so I really had only like two hours of sleep and arrived after eight. Strangely enough, I didn’t wake up lightheaded. It’s been a long time since that happened.

  We all met at what was apparently Saito’s office, a neatly arranged room with old paintings and statues.

  Isabella sat on a sofa, cleaning up her nails, looking fresh and ready. “And, so the youngsters arrive, only half an hour late.”

  “The traffic was terrible,” Takezo remarked faster than I could stop him.

  “Then you should have left earlier.” Isabella smirked at him. “And I don’t remember allowing you to stand in my presence today.”

  Takezo drew a sharp breath and slightly lowered his posture, as if preparing for a fight. “You cannot be serious.”

  “I could be. And I could force you to crawl after me for the whole day if I ever so pleased. But I am feeling merciful today, so I will leave it for tomorrow. You two will be going into the portal today.”