One Sunday night, Ayano Aishi found herself staring down at a sheet of paper, a writing utensil in hand.
The tip of it hovered immobile over the paper, the words that she wanted to write down clear in her mind, but something inside her rendering her capacity to express herself null.
The idea had come to her close to a month ago, to write a love letter to the object of her affection and confess this way after pining in the shadows for so long.
Yet, even after staying up late into the night many, MANY times to try writing it all out, she found that she couldn't.
She sighed, holding her head.
"I know what it is." She told herself.
She knew exactly what it was, and it frustrated her to no end.
As though to cement it, the tension present in Ayano's body only briefly left when she heard the familiar rumbling of her phone on her desk.
'Hey.'
The info-broker had texted her this simple message, and Ayano breathed a sigh.
'Hello.'
The simple greeting between these two had become almost routine to her, and Ayano understood that this girl - "Info-chan", she called herself - was part of the reason she could not bring herself to write the letter.
'There's another girl pining over your precious Senpai.' Info-chan said.
This was her life now, Ayano thought bitterly.
Was it truly so much to ask, that she'd have to go through so much trouble, just to have a chance at feeling genuine emotions for the rest of her preferably long life?
'Who?' Ayano asked with a blank expression.
A group of people crowded out of what looked like a dimensional rift, the last pair being a young man who was supported in his shared gait with a young woman about his age.
"Close it, close the gate!" The young man exclaimed frantically, and a hand seemed to push itself out of the rift, trying to claim the escapees before the rift closed.
What proceeded was said hand getting severed once the rift was closed, the pair collapsing to the ground in exhaustion as with their peers.
The young man looked back at the sound hitting the floor, seeing the demonic hand laying on the floor, before it began clawing itself forward.
Yells of panic filled the room as the one who'd closed the portal brandished a metal bat and began to savagely beat the hand into the floor.
"Die, die, DIE!" She yelled over and over to the hand until it was only a broken lump of flesh.
When it was over, she sighed, before looking to everyone.
"... How did the rescue go?" She asked her friends curiously.
"We uh... we got further in than before." The young man said. "They're starting to get a bit more frantic about it though."
"Crap." She cursed under her breath.
The rescued party was panting and giving labored breaths.
"Thank you," one person said, "thank you."
"... We'll take you all home." The young man said, and they did so.
The Flame Demon's face had always been indecipherable to anyone looking at him, for obvious reasons, yet this made it even more off-putting whenever someone would fail in their missions, report it to him, and then be met with silence for several long, tense moments.
In this case, the prison guards were of no exception to this.
"Another escape?" He asked, at long last. "I'm starting to wonder why I left you alive, if not for your competence."
When he had taken over the Demon Realm with his newly minted lover Sakura, he didn't imagine it to be so difficult to have such power.