A/N: Pop-quiz! How many of you remember my euphoria over the word shahrokh in ch 12? As a recap, it means three things: a demon, a chess manoeuvre, and "a great gamble/opportunity". Now, you can figure out that chess manoeuvre by taking the word apart: shah = king, and rokh = rook. It's a move the king and the rook make together. And now, ladies and gentlemen; time to see if the king and the rook can pull this gamble off…

I do not own or profit from any of what Kazue Kato has created.


"Saburota-senpai is an awful teacher", Shiro complained in between strikes. "With Futotsuki-sensei, seals and wards were fun. With him it's just… lines and angles."

"You should study the subject, not the teacher." Easy for him to say, he didn't need seals to summon demons… "And you should keep that sloppy pose a bit more-"

Mephisto froze mid-strike in their sparring match.

"The wards…"

"Another one down?" Shiro asked, but knew the answer would be no. This was not a reaction to a torn ward.

A ghastly grin stretched the demon's lips.

"All went down. And I was just growing impatient~" Mephisto sheathed his sword. "You stay here." With a poof, he was gone.

"Like hell!" Shiro snorted, sheathed his own sword and ran.

The only keys he had was the one going to the practice range and the one going to the cram school. He took the cram school key out long before he reached the entrance to the underground base, and wasted no time slamming it into the lock and turning it.

It surprised him how he had… planned it. As he sped down the almost empty corridors, some unknown part of his brain presented him the step-by-step plan on what to do. Solomon's Seal had its centre in Deep Keep. Whatever it sealed was down there, and so were the saboteurs, and Mephisto. And the only ones who had keys to Deep Keep…

Shiro's mental map-reading was cut short by a huge lizard, setting doorframes on fire as it crawled leisurely through the corridor. For a salamander it wasn't that big, but it was still dangerous. He spat out the verses that would exorcise it while running and watched the salamander evaporate back to Gehenna in a gush of miasma.

"First sign the wards are down, huh?" He clenched his teeth and kept running. He knew exactly where he was going…

"Oi, Saburota-senpai!" Shiro threw the door to the classroom open. Saburota was there, thank the gods… "The key. Ghimmeh your key", he panted heavily. "To Deep Kheep."

"To Deep Keep?" Saburota didn't appear bothered by seeing him covered in goblin blood, or even aware that the school was being overrun with demons. He had just been about to pack up his drafting compass. "May I see your permit, Fujimoto-kun?"

"Look at me, you ass!" he snarled, so glad that he was taller than the guy he was yelling at. "Do I look like I have time to get a blasted permit?!"

"You look like one who needs to slow down and think about how you address your superiors. Protocol dictates-"

Shiro head-butted him and shoved a knee in his belly as he bent forward. Good thing Saburota was too entangled in regulations to ever think that a student might attack him.

"You can shove your protocol someplace." He dumped the half-conscious exorcist inside one of the warding circles the classroom was equipped with and dug out every key he could find in his pockets. "And by the way, you suck at this job."

He snagged a paper summoning circle from the portfolio on the desk – never knew what he might get himself into – and tried the keys one by one on the classroom door, until-

"This must be it."

Shiro hadn't had any particular image of Deep Keep, but this had to be it. It looked like a subterranean bank, with vault after vault grafted into the walls of the corridors, hidden behind massive steel doors adorned with seals. And in one of them, probably…

"How am I supposed to know which one it is when they all look the same…? And where are the guards?"

He ran along the main corridor, throwing glances down every one that branched off of it. He could only hope to spot a door with its seal broken. And hope his elephantine footfalls miraculously didn't alert the saboteurs. He found only one guard – spilled all over the floor from a clean cut straight across his torso. Two white streaks in his hair – a Todo…? Well, he was dead: better worry about the living. Whatever he meant by that.

"I don't have a goddamn clue what I'll do if I find it… if I can do anything…" His breathing was already heavy as he neared the end of the main corridor, where it made a sharp turn to the right. "I hope my brain's got a plan for that, too…" He rounded the corner and almost got his head cut off. "Oi, take it easy!"

Mephisto must have heard him coming a mile a way, with those ears of his. He had waited around the corner, sword at the ready, and halted just in time not to behead Shiro. The demon looked as surprised as he was: an expression that vanished quick enough.

"What are you doing here?" he snapped.

"Helping you catch the saboteurs; that's the deal we made."

"Eins, zwei, drei!"

There came no poof. No pink smoke. Mephisto was about to snap his fingers again, but halted: the sharp, dark claws had pierced the fingertips of his gloves. An expression flashed across his face that made Shiro's bones shiver.

"The audacity…!" He growled – actually growled – and tossed the gloves as he set off running.

"You've lost your powers? How?" The breath seethed in Shiro's throat: keeping up with Mephisto's long legs very nearly had him bust a lung. "Just what the hell's going on?"

"My powers have been sealed." He skidded around a corner into a side corridor. "There are very few seals that can accomplish such a thing, but they exist. If you know what you're looking for. Meanwhile; barriers, keys, defences – everything dependent on my power: poof." There was dark humour curling in his voice. It was getting worse up there, no doubt. If fear of Mephisto's powers was what kept demons off the premises, and those powers were gone, then…

"How do we get your powers back?" Shiro wheezed in one breath, running like he'd never run before in his life.

"Not we. I." Mephisto swung the sword's handle at his head; if Shiro hadn't been training with the demon regularly, he would never have been able to read the signs in time to duck and skid under the blow.

"Oi, knock it off! If the school's in danger I wanna help!"

"Not with this." Mephisto's eyes were different – hell, all of him was different. His voice, his posture, his-

A convulsion shook the demon's body, and he coughed…

"Is that… miasma?" Shiro stared as Mephisto clamped a hand over his mouth.

The demon didn't reply. He didn't look healthy to begin with, but now… This was not good, not good: all colour drained visibly from his skin, and he was shivering, face taut from fighting some form of invisible pain. He ran on in the same direction, but he was a lot slower.

"You better tell me what's going on, quick." Shiro caught up easily and slung one of the demon's bony arms over his shoulder to support him – not that there was much to support. "Does this have something to do with Solomon's seal being broken?"

"That? That's not the seal. It's the mirror, a link to the real seal." Mephisto's voice was barely a whisper, strained as if he were trying hard not to throw up as they staggered onwards. "The real one is in a pocket dimension, a third dimension where Assiah and Gehenna tangent. The seal around the Academy kept the pocket dimension closed to physical interference, but open for magic to pass through." He stifled a cough in his hand, miasma seeping out between his fingers. "If that seal is removed the pocket will open, giving access to the real seal."

That looked to be what they were headed for: smack in the middle of the corridor, there was an oddly shimmering surface… orb… thing? Shiro couldn't focus his eyes properly on it: it was a lot like the rippling illusion created by warm asphalt, giving the impression there's water on the road up ahead.

"I can't cross that", Mephisto growled, pulling Shiro to a stop outside a warding circle drawn around the shimmer. "They came well prepared… Destroy it."

"If you tell me what you've sealed in there."

And to his surprise, the reply was immediate. And very short. And the last thing he would've expected to hear.

"Me."

"What? But you're here…?"

"It seals my heart, the source of my power. Can't fit all of it in a physical body, it would disintegrate…" The thin body shivered and quaked next to Shiro.

"There's something he's not telling me." That aside, he was already spilling way more than he ever had before, and way more than he really wanted to. "And what's happening right now is…?"

"Not that I have any previous experience of it", he coughed again, "but I think I'm being exorcised."

If what he said was true, it changed everything. If Mephisto wasn't a villain who kept a gargantuan monster of a demon stashed away in his basement…

"I was wrong." Shiro scraped his katana over the lines and broke the ward.

They phased through the rippling surface, and Shiro recognised clearly the sensation of being magically transported across space. It was slower than when Mephisto did it; a warm, melting feeling, and a stretching of his being that that made his skin - made every part of his body - crawl. The world around them blurred, then became the kind of textureless, confusing mish-mash of shifting landscape Shiro recognised from das Labyrinth des Limbus. And from the direction of a pulsing light around a bend, they heard a voice chanting.

"I don't recognise any of that", Shiro whispered, brow furrowing at the foreign tongue. "The hell's he chanting?"

"That's Aramaic…" Mephisto breathed, eyes huge in his greyish face. "But… I destroyed the-" More miasma welled up before he could check the cough, and little black globs fell to the ground with a sickening sizzling sound. "My fatal verses…!" he croaked out.

Fatal verses? Actual fatal verses? They existed, even for the Kings?

"Weren't you immortal?" He did not like Mephisto's rapidly deteriorating condition.

"Only if my heart is out of harm's reach… and it isn't…"