Summary: Sebastian at last confronts the Challenger (the mysterious demon who tempted him into the bargain of making a contract within a time limit), but things do not go as planned...with Ciel out of danger, Sebastian is off to confront other threats...

Thank you to Carrie for being super and betaing in 24hours after Microsoft Word ate my finalized document. You are the best. Thank you readers, all of you who guessed Agares' identity! Quite a few of you got the hint really~ well. :D

Chapter 25: The Challenger, Pulling strings

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"It isn't against the rules. Hardly affects the choices you made concerning your young…choice," Agares said, his voice cool and his face expressionless.

I reached out and took him by the shoulder, ramming him into a very handy pole (for telecommunications or some such thing. How useful they would have been for capital punishment in the past…you could hang a man at every stone's throw).

"Keep talking." I smiled.

"It would never have been a challenge if I did not. You would never remember this meal otherwise," he muttered, resituating my hand and pressing lightly into my shoulder.

Pain radiated from my wounds. "So the little mouse douses the bait with wine, and puts his greatest weapons on the line." My fingers danced up his arm, and I squeezed his shoulder in return. What would have looked like a friendly gesture hurt him so much that he cried out. "…bureaucracy, social media threats, and…what else could you possibly do?" I squeezed harder and smiled, thinking of his recent actions.

Agares grit his teeth. "You know very well what that child has to offer. You know that his reputation means the world to him. What I can do is hardly of question. I have made him into the—"

"You had nothing to do with that," I murmured. I dropped the smile. "He was beautiful before you touched him with your memory tricks and manipulation."

"Oh?" Agares smiled in sly satisfaction.

"What other damage have you done to Ciel Phantomhive?"

"Little Ciel," Agares repeated. His eyes stopped reflecting in his glasses, and I wondered at his true appearance. Hell can be a confusing place, and the shapes we take there are often misleading.

I shook such musings off. "You have interfered with the pathos of things. You have stretched this encounter long past its natural course. You have sullied the Aesthetics," I charged him.

"Have I done all that?" Agares' smile stretched against his teeth. "But the boy is a stubborn one. He would never have called you. He would never take you, no matter my little games." He stepped aside, redistributing my weight and slipping out of my hold so easily that I suspected he had been toying with me.

The realization was a sour one; this demon was not cobbled. He had no limits on his body here. I stared after him.

"Your aesthetics demand it," I reminded him. "If I am unsatisfied with our game…we should settle it now."

"Dissatisfied? With your own inability to make the Contract?"

I frowned at him.

"If we were to have a duel…" Surely, I thought, his lips twitched there. "It would solve nothing. It would only serve to amuse…" he stopped, corrected himself. "…amuse everyone concerned."

"Do you mean…" I began, but stopped.

While Agares laughed aloud, I felt his presence fade. Not as a spirit, a demon without contract, but the sly, shifting form of a demon moving faster than humans could perceive. Under the cover of a group of paramedics rushing into me, Agares slipped away.

Well. We'd have to settle this later. In my weakened state, I could not follow. The medics put their hands on me, locking me to this place with their determination to 'set me right.' Human hands can constrain one in ways indescribable.

The chance to follow passed, and I finally heard the gabbled words. "You're bleeding," one of them informed me. His voice was calm, slow, and impossible to argue with.

All around us civilians, police and paramedics rushed about. Some insisted on going home straight away (request denied), while other, apparently healthy individuals demanded a private ambulance to the hospital.

"Check for signs of difficulty breathing. Anyone with respiratory problems should seek medical attention. The criminals used pepper spray. If you have trouble breathing or seeing, seek a medical professional," someone intoned. I turned to see a young female officer speaking through a horn that muffled and distorted her voice, but simultaneously carried it farther than an unamplified human's voice ought to be able. I winced at the noise.

"He's in shock," the other one said tersely. I wondered if he were a paramedic or police.

"Sir, you need to come with us," the first one continued. "I'm Suzuki. Let me help you."

The second didn't wait to hear me out. "Can't you see his face? This guy doesn't understand a word you're saying," he said in Japanese. "He-ru-pu. You," he said with a thick Japanese accent, and he proceeded to attempt to get me to rest my weight on him.

I caught his wrist and pushed it away. I stood to my full height and smiled cruelly at the men before me. "I won't be going with you, I'm afraid. Help some of the actual victims. I'm fine," I told them in perfectly polite Japanese. If my eyes glowed a bit too bright, or my teeth were the barest amount too sharp, it couldn't have been helped. The humans were asking for it.

Suzuki frowned. "Sir, all persons with injuries are being treated."

The other one scowled, his temper breaking. "Hey, you. Tell us what you know about whatever's going on inside!"

I rolled my eyes. "Terrorists are trying to prevent people from leaving while they set off gas attacks. I don't know anything else."

Officer He-ru-pu looked at my bloodied shirt, and looked back to Ciel's costume, and dared to take a step closer. "We have some more questions for you sir. If your wounds aren't troubling you—"

Suzuki nodded slightly, and interrupted. "Yes... But he is still bleeding. Here…" he touched my chest, and suddenly I remembered.

"Ah." I looked down at the bloody mess of my shirt, and then I laughed. "Do you think I'm a terrorist? I'm afraid I actually was shot. But what kind of teacher would I be if I let a few injuries keep me from getting an asthmatic student out of a situation like that?"

Suzuki looked at me, impressed. "You're a teacher?"

Officer He-ru-pu snorted.

"The same one who was supposed to be with the fashion show kids, huh? Why didn't you get all of them out?" He said sullenly.

Heedless to my speech, the actual paramedic urged me to sit on his gurney and tore at my shirt. He started visibly at the gunshot wounds. He looked rather funny, and distinctly disturbed. It was laughable.

I smiled pleasantly, keeping my gaze on the other officer.

"Sir, you need to stay very still while we put pressure on the—" he said slowly, firmly.

The other officer fidgeted awkwardly on his feet, alternating between leaning closer to see the details and looking away, embarrassed to realize he insulted a clearly injured man. But he also seemed suspicious. Most humans, after all, couldn't survive wounds like that. "He can't be..."

"Tokyo will end!" A voice interrupted, breaking all of our concentration. Though most native news persons were filming away from the scenes of chaos and (albeit limited) carnage, there was no lack of amateurs holding cellphones to record, and one apparent freelance cameraman. They immediately turned their attention toward the fanatic.

I turned to see a severely bandaged figure surrounded by police, bellowing out his words. "Tokyo will end, and I shall become—"

But news persons were not the only ones in the vicinity. The police quickly mobilized, and he was overcome by a quick moving officer.

He was not so easily deterred. I watched with acute interest as he continued to spew the terrorist's doctrine. "I shall become Father to all those children in the New Tokyo." His voice was as loud as any preacher's, but his face was cast in shadow. "Aaaah, aah," he cried, as handcuffs were forced around his hands.

Was he in pain? The thought made me smile.

"Sir..." the medic Suzuki said, without much force. He seemed momentarily overwhelmed by the situation, panic blocking his training as effectively as anything I might say.

"Quiet." I pulled the shirt back over my wounds distractedly, and looked into the scene. There was a familiar person with flaming red hair about to be taken away, and I had no idea how he'd gotten there. Had so much time passed?

"Father!" Joker, being held tightly by no less than three police, lurched towards the bandaged figure. He was forced to the ground, his face pressed close to the pavement.

Father suddenly stopped, and his scarred, bandaged face split in an approximation of a grin. He stepped free from the officer, and began to laugh, half shaking with his guffaws.

So he is mad after all.

He spoke with utter conviction. "I wanted to be wrapped in the same darkness as those special, beautiful people. We will change Tokyo, and make them our princess, and I shall be beautiful and dark as that beautiful child—I want to touch him before he becomes as cold and distant as the moon."

Curious. I wonder if the Phantomhives would have any information on this...possibly religious group. Perhaps they could shed light on those enigmatic words.

I was forced out of my reflection as the paramedic started jogging with me still on the gurney. "I need an occlusive dressing! We've got a gunshot victim, three bullet wounds to the torso—" I looked down to see more blood emerging from the wounds. Ah, yes. I needed to get out of sight before the idiots realized my true nature.

"Stop jerking me around," I ordered him, and oddly enough, he did. But not at my words, no, he stopped so he wouldn't run crashing into another blood-soaked figure. I smiled at the small figure in front of me.

"Sebastian." Ciel's voice was hard, and it carried straight to my heart. "What are you doing over there?"

The medic turned to Ciel. "Get out of the way. We need to hurry." At Ciel's look, he tried another tactic. "Do you know this gentleman?" He asked quickly. "He needs immediate medical treatment—"

"What?" Ciel demanded.

There was a small flurry of movements as the three 'servants' from the Phantomhive family caught up with their little master.

Mei-rin and Finnian visibly balked at my wounds, but Bard was more interested in staring me in the eye. Soon he turned away, looking instead to the little child.

"You should be on your way to the hospital," he said gruffly in English. "You need a breathing treatment."

Ciel brushed the comment aside. "What's wrong with him?"

"I am in no need of medical treatment," I interrupted smoothly. "If you could spare me a new shirt, good sir, I will be perfectly all right."

Bard looked at me again, his eyes sharp. In the patchy sunlight, they reflected and clouded like turquoise. In another era, this man might have been... but he was speaking. I turned my attention back to him. "If you've been shot," Bard interjected, "you need to lie down and do what he says." He jerked a finger at the paramedic.

"I'm afraid that is out of the question. It's not as bad as it looks..." I looked to Ciel, wondering if he would back me up.

To my surprise, Ciel did.

"He'll be better off with you and Tanaka." Saving his life might have more benefits than I suspected.

"It is fully within my rights to decline treatment," I remind them, though I was only half sure that that was actually the case.

To accent my point, I stood up from the stretcher, and accepted only a bandage. I tried to drop the bloody mess of bullets as inconspicuously as I could manage, but to no avail. Bard winced.

"This is not a good idea," he grunted. But he willingly lent himself as a walking crutch, and looked irritably at Ciel for instruction.

The unlikely Finnian delivered the plan of action in rapid-fire Japanese. "Ciel, we need to get to the ambulance for you too, you know. We have to be at the hospital so you can recover, and your dad knows where to look for you, and... and all that."

Mei-rin nodded enthusiastically.

"When did you all get here anyways," Ciel whispered, watching the man called Father warily. He seemed more shaken and disturbed by that single man than he had been by a handful of clowns with guns.

"Roof. Special entry permit granted by Tokyo Special Assault Team." The answer was more a reply to "how" rather than "when." It was rather suspicious, I thought, how they could respond to the situation so quickly?

Ciel must have felt so as well, for he raised an eyebrow. "So that's why so many of the performers are down here now..."

Well damn. It seems that all my prospective influence I could have had over Ciel because of my minor role of hero would be overshadowed by these incompetents after all.

Perhaps Ciel would see me favorably in Hospital. After that, there would be words to be had…with the boy, and more importantly, with the demon.

All good things in time.

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tbc...

thoughts? This poor sick author would love to know what you think. I'm sure inspiring conversations are good medicine!