His Return

The curse had flared on his arm: the debt was due. He came for Ryuji on the one day the school was full of witnesses.

He beat his son across the arena, sealed them in a cage of silenced air to ask why he was fighting in a half-form that wasted his mana, and then dropped the cage and broke his nose to test whether his friends would still stand by him.

They did. Nori took the Lord's hand off with the largest bullet he had ever compressed. Mimi reattached it. Kimiko and Reiko finally faced their old comrade for the first time in thirty-nine years, and lost.