ButcherPete
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Chapter 72: Soft Waters, Sharp Ideas
🕑 Added 2025-06-16 00:28:52 +0000 UTCOn a secluded mountain nearest to the fortress city, a hot spring was nearly silent, save for the occasional splash of a settling ripple and the distant hush of wind brushing overhead.
Baku sat deep in the mineral bath, steam curling around his shoulders as he sipped on a gourd of dreamwine. The heat seeped into his bones, loosening old fights, and older grudges. His eyes were half-closed, his usual scowl softened by warmth and wine.
“Too quiet lately,” he muttered. “Means too much thinking is going on.”
He wasn't wrong. He liked the silence, but he knew now that the silence in his territory was no longer the peaceful drift it used to be.
The mountain buzzed now in ways it hadn’t for decades. Bureaucrats, cultic rituals, trade delegations, ideological feasts. Layers of civilization piling over what used to be simple law and dream beasts.
Baku sipped again and frowned.
He’d never asked for it to change.
He’d protected this place with sweat, scars, and spilled blood. It was supposed to be a refuge. A fortress against the madness beyond the fissure.
Now?
Now it was evolving.
Because of her.
‘Hannya…’
He didn’t dislike it. That was the part that bothered him most. She was doing things he’d never even considered. Training dream-beast handlers. Rewriting faction etiquette. Feeding soldiers power through taste and symbolism.
She wasn’t just filling the fortress.
She was shaping it.
And he… was stepping back.
‘I wanted to protect her,’ he thought, tipping his gourd. ‘But I didn’t expect her to outgrow the sword before I even sheathed the damned thing.’
As he thought, a soft voice slipped through the mist behind him.
“Elder brother.”
Baku didn’t move. He didn’t need to.
He recognized the voice instantly.
Noh stepped through the pale curtain of heat like a shadow returned from some performance.
Gone were the paints, fans, layered silks, and geisha form. Her hair was tied loosely at the nape. Her makeup was wiped clean, showing two stars on both sides of her cheeks. A simple white robe clung to her frame, damp at the hem from the steam already catching it.
Barefoot, she padded closer, the sound barely audible on the warm stone.
He sighed. “You’re not my sister.” Baku said mildly. A clarification not typically made, not for devils.
“Not by blood,” she replied with a small grin. “But we’re bound by history. That counts more.”
She settled onto the rim of the spring, her robe parting slightly at the knee, legs dipped just below the surface. She made no move to speak, only sat close enough that the edge of her thigh brushed his arm when she shifted.
“You’re quiet.” she finally spoke.
“I’m relaxing.” Baku said.
“You’re thinking.”
“Trying not to.”
“And failing.”
He grunted.
“You always got like this before a siege back then.” she added softly.
“This isn’t a siege.”
“It feels like one. But slower. With more wine and meetings, and fewer dream beasts and sleepwalkers.”
She didn’t laugh at her own joke, just looked out at the steam rising in lazy coils, her profile and demeanor softer without the usual layers of performance.
Baku glanced sideways. “Why are you here?”
“Same as you,” she said. “Tired. Curious. A little lonely.”
She didn’t sound sad about it, just honest.
“I miss being a liar,” she added after a pause. “A full-time one. Not this… half-court, half-cult juggling geija.”
“Then stop.”
“I would,” Noh said, “if I thought anyone else could do it better. Those are the rules. You know that.”
They sat like that for a long moment. Not quite touching, but close enough that the steam between them felt shared.
Then Noh dipped her hand into the spring, swirling a small ripple outward. “She’s going to need territory.”
Baku glanced at her. “Hannya?”
Noh nodded. “She’s building too fast. She’s not just a guest anymore. If we don’t give her something to shape, she’ll start shaping things she shouldn’t.”
Baku exhaled through his nose. “You already picked a site.”
“I had a thought,” she said. “But I wanted to hear yours first.”
He sipped.
“Ragescar Valley.”
Noh turned to look at him, one eyebrow lifted.
“Mm,” she said. “Rough. Untamed. Lawless. Unclaimed.”
“She’ll like it.”
“You’re giving her a war zone.”
“She already lives in one.”
Their eyes met. Soft, uncertain, lingering.
Noh’s hand stayed beneath the water, fingers drifting idly. Her tone was lower now, almost affectionate.
“You think she’ll take it?”
“She won’t ask permission.”
“I wasn’t talking about the valley.”
Baku didn’t answer.
He didn’t pull away either.
The steam shifted again as Noh slipped fully into the spring.
She let the heat take her slowly, easing down with a quiet inhale until the water lapped at her collarbones. Her robe floated around her like a faded lily, loosening but never falling open, its folds clinging to her skin in ways that made the silhouette beneath more mysterious than revealing.
Baku didn’t look directly at her.
But he noticed the way her aura settled. Calm, grounded, like someone returning to a place she’d long missed.
“You always did prefer the quiet over the crowd.” Baku muttered.
Noh leaned back against the curved edge of the spring, half-smiling. “Like you. Only when the company was worth the silence.”
He snorted, but said nothing.
They let the warmth do its work. Silence passed comfortably between them, until Noh shifted the subject again, voice soft but edged with intent.
“She’s moving quickly,” she said. “Hannya, I mean. Faster than expected.”
“She moves like someone who’s already late for something.” Baku replied.
Noh traced the surface of the spring with one finger, watching the ripples distort the stars reflected above.
“She’s going to draw enemies. Not just from the council or the capital. From here. Inside.”
Baku grunted. “Let them try.”
“She might not need us soon,” Noh added, more carefully now. “Not you. Not me. Not even… Regina.”
That earned a faint flicker from Baku’s eyes.
Noh didn’t look at him, but she saw it all the same.
“Speaking of Regina…” she said, keeping her tone casual. “She’s been around more than usual. Eager, sharp. Still polishing her sword after patrols even when no one’s watching.”
Baku remained quiet.
Noh tilted her head toward him, lips quirking. “She still waiting on your approval, or… maybe something more?”
Baku took a long sip of his dreamwine and set the gourd down on the stone with deliberate care.
“She’s young.”
“So is Hannya.”
“Hannya’s not looking at me like I’m a stone wall she wants to leap on.”
Noh smiled faintly. “Regina sees you like a monument. Something old enough to matter. Something worth impressing.”
“She doesn’t know what she wants.”
“And if she did?”
Baku didn’t answer. His silence was answer enough. Earning a strange ripple of something deep down in the painted devil.
But Noh didn’t press. Not directly. She let the question hang, unfinished. It was less about Regina and more about watching the way Baku shifted when confronted with the subject.
So Noh told herself.
He’d changed, too.
He didn’t roar anymore. He didn’t laugh like a maniac. He didn’t even leer brazenly at the demonesses in the city any longer.
He simply watched, waited, guarded. Like he did years ago, but not at the gates of the dream world, but to the little devil rapidly growing.
Eventually, Noh said, “She’d follow Hannya into fire.”
“So would you.” Baku said.
“No,” she corrected gently. “I’d follow her into fire if she knew she was walking into it. Not if she’s pretending it’s sunrise.”
“You think she doesn’t know what she’s doing?”
“I think she knows what she wants,” Noh said. “But I’m not sure she knows what it’ll cost her. Or us.”
Baku reached behind him, scooped a handful of hot water, and poured it over his shoulder with a tired sigh.
“She doesn’t care what it costs,” he said. “That’s what makes her dangerous.”
“And what makes her necessary.”
Noh shifted closer, not enough to press against him, but enough to let the line between distance and contact blur.
“She doesn’t worship power like the others, warlords seeking domination.” Noh muttered. “She worships something else, a certainty. That’s what scares people. That’s what changes them.”
Baku closed his eyes for a moment. He couldn’t understand where all this certainty came from. Did she really have the fate mutation, and he couldn’t feel it? Was she following some rules or steps from her ancestral knowledge? He couldn’t gauge the truth from her actions.
After a beat, he spoke again. “She’s going to need somewhere to put all that certainty.”
“She’ll build her own shrine in Ragescar,” Noh replied. “But if we’re smart, we’ll lay the foundation before she decides to tear up the land herself.”
Baku cracked one eye open, meeting hers.
“She’ll reshape everything.”
“That’s the hope.”
He nodded slowly.
Then, more to himself, “I just wonder what shape we’ll take when she’s done.”
~~~
The halls of the Superbia estate were gilded in pride. Literally. Every column bore gold frames. Every mirror was enchanted to reflect only one’s best angle. Every servant walked as if on stage, as if knowing they were part of a legacy too grand to question.
And yet, for all its splendor, the inner sunroom was oddly quiet today.
“Come now, my mountain,” purred Lady Virelle Superbia, seated like a queen upon a plush satin couch, her long fingers combing gently through the thick black curls of the young man sprawled across her lap.
Showeuff. Massive, broad-shouldered, face flushed with embarrassment, he groaned low in his throat and buried his face deeper into the folds of her dress.
“She mocked me, Mother.” he mumbled. “She looked at me like I was a footnote, an extra.”
Lady Virelle tsked softly and pressed a palm to his cheek. “No one of merit mocks a Superbia. If she mocked you, child, she was broadcasting her own inferiority.”
“She had spells, Mother, hundreds of em. And that cursed mist. And those eyes. She-she made the whole room bend around her like she was gravity itself.”
“You are gravity,” Virelle insisted, straightening his posture with a maternal firmness. “You are a black star in the night sky. All things should orbit you.”
“I tried to assert myself, look cool, be strong.” He muttered, “but she spoke first, catching me off guard. Like it was her right. I looked lame!” his voice rising in anguish.
Lady Virelle sighed, stroking his jaw like she was polishing her favorite trophy.
“Pride is not something you demand to be acknowledged, my darling. It is something so obvious, so radiant, others cannot help but kneel before it. If she did not kneel, then clearly she is blind.”
“She raised the price of dream cores on that old devil’s mountain. To my face.”
“You’re still speaking of her, dear. You’re keeping her alive by naming her.”
Showeuff looked up st his mother slowly, gazing at her beautiful face, but he was too ashamed to admire her. He soon looked down and spoke.
“…Dozeuff screamed afterward.” he admitted pitifully.
Virelle smiled tightly. “Of course he did. Poor boy’s always been delicate. Not like you.”
They sat in silence for a moment, the warmth of the sun filtering in through crystalline windows painted with their family crest, a lion rising from a smoldering inferno.
Then a voice echoed from beyond the arched threshold.
“Lady Virelle.”
They both looked up as a tall, thin devil glided into the room, robed in layers of translucent blue-gray linens. His every motion suggested a creature who had never rushed a day in his life.
“Lazmer Acedia,” Virelle said smoothly, rising halfway in greeting. “It’s been too long.”
“An unfortunate truth,” Lazmer said with a languid bow. “But I see the Superbia estate is as radiant as ever. And your son…”
He glanced at Showeuff, who was now sitting upright but sulking.
“…is a growing legend, I’m sure.”
Showeuff offered a stiff nod, recovering a bit of posture but not pride.
“Come,” Virelle said, gesturing toward a seat opposite. “We were just lamenting recent provincial unpleasantness.”
“Ah,” Lazmer said, settling in, “I heard the whispers. A rising fog. And a girl with many names.”
“Too many. The fog devil, the mountain tyrant, the pink haze… the cannibal.” Virelle said coolly.
“And too few titles,” Lazmer added. “A lowborn upstart masquerading as a lawgiver.”
“She is dangerous…” Showeuff mumbled.
“That makes her predictable,” Lazmer replied, sipping from a goblet a servant quickly offered him. “People who rise too fast always create their own collapse. They spend all their cleverness climbing and none on building a place to stand.”
Lady Virelle tilted her head. “And if she finds footing?”
Lazmer smiled faintly. “Then we simply remind her what happens to towers that try to rise above the capital.”
He raised his glass.
“So, to her instability.”
Lady Virelle clinked hers gently in return.
Showeuff, at last, began to smile again.
Lazmer set down his goblet and folded his long, pale fingers over one another. His movements were always slow, always deliberate, like every sentence was being weighed against the cost of speaking it.
But this time, he didn’t need to craft drama.
He need only speak the truth.
“We’ve received word,” he said lightly. “The Dog of the Capital left from the mountain… with his tail between his legs.”
Showeuff stiffened. “What?”
“He challenged the devil girl. The kineater. The one who consumed Suziana.” Lazmer smiled thinly. “And he failed. Publicly.”
Lady Virelle lifted an eyebrow. “Left, or retreated?”
Lazmer didn’t blink. “He was made to leave. The girl forced the exit, politely, of course. With enough ceremony that the public can pretend it wasn’t a dismissal.”
Showeuff stiffened in his seat. “We sent him as a gesture of judgment.”
“We sent him as a test,” Lazmer corrected, voice smooth. “And he failed. Or rather, she passed. With clarity.”
“She embarrassed him,” Virelle said, letting her fingers idly toy with the edge of her gown. “And by extension, the capital.”
“No.” Lazmer sipped. “By extension, us.”
Showeuff looked between them, unsettled. “She shouldn’t have had the power to refuse a mandate like that. Not from three factions.”
“We underestimated how much authority she’s consolidated,” Lazmer said, his tone calm, but clipped. “Or perhaps how little Baku cares for mandates these days.”
Virelle’s gaze sharpened. “It wasn’t just our Pride faction. The Pleasure faction approved the writ. And your Dream faction drafted the terms, Lazmer.”
Lazmer inclined his head. “The intent was unity. A shared hand, and she slapped it aside.”
“She’s becoming a faction of her own.” Virelle said.
“She’s becoming a problem.” Lazmer corrected.
He rose slowly, gracefully. He moved like a figure in a dream, elegant, but always slightly delayed, as if the air slowed around him to give his gait more room.
“For ten years,” he said, walking toward the sunroom’s wide window, clasping his hands behind his back. “we have prepared to assert full infrastructural control over the fissure. The dream core supply was meant to transition to regulated hands.”
“Our hands.” Showeuff muttered.
“Our design,” Lazmer corrected. “A predictable stream. Calibrated extractions. Clean dispersal into the capital council’s reserve markets. Instead, we now have a cult leader masquerading as a governor. Raising prices, inventing rituals, and branding supply lines with her own symbol.”
“And Baku,” Virelle added, “was supposed to fade into irrelevance.”
Lazmer turned back, his face sharp now. “Instead, he’s risen. Stronger than before, from the sounds of it.”
Showeuff’s brow furrowed. “What are we going to do about it?”
Lazmer smiled faintly, the kind of smile that meant danger. “First, we slow her. Then, we isolate her. Then, perhaps, we remove her.”
“And Gula? Her territory is near there.” Virelle asked carefully. Taking action so far from their territory and so close to that monster could cause issues.
“The Queen of Feasts can’t act directly,” Lazmer said. “The cannibal's proximity, intentional or not, has disrupted her eastern absorption lines. Her feaster cults are stalling. She’s stuck balancing too many plates to focus on something as small as this, and I doubt their alliance is any more than a tribute to that woman's stomach.”
“Good,” Virelle said. “The Hazy Mountain’s been getting too cocky.”
Lazmer returned to his seat and picked up his goblet again. “Which is why we need a new approach. Not force. Not mandates.”
“Then what?” Showeuff asked.
“A neutral envoy,” Lazmer replied. “Unaligned. Non-military. Just enough political weight to provoke reaction.”
“You want the girl to overstep.” Virelle said, understanding.
“She will,” Lazmer said confidently. “Because she’s bold. She’s young. And she still thinks she can win without shedding blood.”
“She might…” Showeuff muttered.
“Not if we control the narrative,” Lazmer replied. “We bait the mask into slipping. We gather the right ears. We present it not as a threat, but as instability. Instability that needs…correcting.”
“And the moment she strikes too far…”
“…We declare oversight. And the mountain is no longer hers.”
Virelle raised her glass. “To patient corrections.”
Lazmer clinked his gently. “To the end of improvisation.” he corrected.
Comments
Butch Perterson
lololol that was oddly specific, yet oddly perfect
ShadowTycho
Noh x Baku is fun, I like thier "old Amish couple sitting on a porch watching the rain come in" dynamic
Butch Perterson
lol it's more meant in the sense that she's not looking to march on the capital XD
Cosmoros Subs
These guys are clowns, she literally ate a person. Wdym she doesn't wants to spill blood.
