On the way over, Yashiro gave Aki a long explanation of what E3 actually was: the substance that boosted a brave's powers, the thing in the syringe, the reason any of them could do what they did. She listened to all of it with the enthusiasm of a girl who had never once been told the boring part of anything.
They settled in a corner within sight of the Amber Thorns headquarters. Every access point was sealed off by guards. Aki decided that this was exactly the moment to strike, while the iron was hot — and inside, at that moment, Sarah was being brought before the dark lord in the most humiliating way available. Aki turned to Yashiro and asked him, brightly, to help her simply walk in through the front.
Yashiro argued against it, at length, listing everything that could go wrong and how each item on that list would turn their plan into a disaster.
At least the air-headed girl understood the important part: they were to avoid needless fighting at all costs. He made sure she was following along. He made sure, separately, that she knew her right from her left. Then he handed her a mask, which was standard brave equipment, and she put it on. With the mask on and her best impression of a grumpy ex's face underneath it, the two of them walked up to the guards and announced that they were reinforcements, just now getting back from robbing a bank.
The guard was paralysed before he understood anything was happening, and then Yashiro eliminated him.
Yashiro admitted it freely afterwards. There were other braves who could have got them through that door without killing the man. But the die was cast, and after injecting himself with E3, Aki followed him inside — largely in the hope of preventing any further bloodshed.
Speaking of bloodshed. Yukina had already reached the headquarters ahead of them, and the chaos she had caused in her infiltration was extensive enough to impress Yashiro, roughly as much as Aki's muscle-headedness did.
Impressed or not, he was certain Yukina would lose on her own. The Amber Thorns lord's ether perception was the exact counter to people with teleportation abilities; against him, a sneak attack was worse than useless. So Yashiro told Aki, very clearly, not to do anything at all in this battle. He meant anything. An ether perception like hers, in the hands of an amateur like her, was a hazard to everyone standing near it.
By the time they reached an upper floor, Aki made the unexpected decision to go the opposite way from Yashiro, on the grounds that there were more opponents down her corridor. It hardly mattered to him. He used his own ether perception and slowed the world down around him again, to devastating effect.
He also had to remind himself, in the middle of it, of what was important in his life. E3 could take a man's control away from him if he leaned on it too hard, until he behaved like any of the dark lords he was paid to hunt.
Fortunately, that did not happen tonight.
Further inside, the pair of them found themselves in a space so grand it baffled Yashiro and impressed Aki in equal measure. He was still checking that Aki was ready when the doors to the dark lord's court swung open and Yukina came through them, badly injured.
He did not want to do it. He relented to his own inner voices anyway and pulled Yukina out.
Once the injured girl was somewhere she would stay out of the way, Yashiro went in to face the dark lord alone. Sarah, naturally, was in a miserable state of her own, which came as a shock to Aki. Yashiro had come to her rescue, so he did not take kindly to her hostility — though from where Sarah was sitting he was simply another lapdog her father had sent.
The dark lord did not take kindly to any of this happening in his presence. He shut both girls up and turned to the business of intimidating Yashiro, who had already decided to eliminate him regardless. Unfortunately for the Lord of Amber Thorns, he had no dark lords operating under him to call on. On top of that, he carried a bounty of three million on his head, which meant that taking him down was simply easy cash.
Before the fighting even started, the count asked who had sent him.
Seeing how rattled the man was, Yashiro played it for everything it was worth, and then threw a smoke screen across the room. The gas was not poisoned — that was not the point of it. The point was that the count's ability depended on locating professional braves, and now the count could not locate anything at all.
With the count moving blind, and with Yashiro's own ability to bend time to his advantage, he crossed the room and took the man's arm off.
Before he could finish him for good, Yashiro watched the count regenerate the hand. It happened whether the count willed it or not — he had no control over it whatsoever. He killed one of his own guards in the middle of it, and then he turned on Sarah and Yukina.
Yashiro was livid at Yukina's stupidity for risking her life for her friend, and simultaneously aware that he had exactly one second in which the count was finishable. To take it, he would have to let both girls be cut down.
What came to him instead was his old master, Takami Kiyohito, saying that anyone can pretend they are not scummier than dirt as long as their life is not on the line — and Yashiro finally moved, and put himself between the count and the two girls.
Absorbing the hit did not solve his problem. He still had to find a way to eliminate the count from an abysmal position, and he was aware they were about to be hit again. He thought about casting his spell aside and was thrown across the room by the count before he could. Bracing himself to be finished off for good, Yashiro was surprised to find his life saved instead by Aki, who disarmed the count and then pacified him completely, ensuring their victory — a victory that could never have happened without her ability to read people's thoughts.
A few days later, Yashiro lost another round of cards to Ishino. He announced that he had figured out what his weaknesses were and that he would not lose again, and received from Joe the kind of comment that observation invites.
Speaking of which, Joe asked, what had happened to the Count of Amber Thorns?
Yashiro was not certain. As far as he knew, the count's arm never regenerated a second time before he was handed over to the academy.
Annoyingly for him, Ishino was intrigued by that regenerative ability. From what Yashiro had learned, braves and demon kings alike could regain lost limbs — but they lost the ability the moment the limb was cut off from blood flow entirely, which was precisely why everyone in this business still went around with swords and other medieval hardware. Beyond that, Yashiro could not shake the feeling that Thorns had been treating him like some organisation's errand boy.
When Ishino suggested they look into the case, Yashiro refused, since it would not get them any money.
With that aside, Joe took the opportunity to mock him for how much E3 he had put into himself on that mission, which, if he kept it up, would eventually turn him into a junkie. And if that were not bad enough, Yashiro then had to sit through Ishino calling him the commander of a bunch of schoolgirls — schoolgirls who had, self-evidently, learned nothing whatsoever from their teachers. It showed in how dense and stupid they were.
Ishino's suggestion that they work for the girls at a hundred thousand yen a month each did not move him either.
Joe, on the other hand, was not buying a word of it. Because if Yashiro had really refused a job like that, then none of the academy girls would ever show up here again.
They did. Just then.