Final Trial

Frankly, Mikado was shocked.

Awakusu-kai had just blown up Hitomi's front gate! No subtlety there...It made him wonder how long it would take the police to get there.

Either way, they let him step inside first, since he knew where the inugami was and what to do about it.

Actually, because his normal self couldn't see spirits, he had no clue 'where' it was, but had laid a good many energy chains around himself to trap anything spirit in nature which tried to approach him. The stipulation was 'harmful intent from a spirit force', which was an easy enough term for energy to react to—and by virtue of his own chains seizing the inugami, he knew where it was. Its snarling as it tried to break the chains created an odd, echoing sensation, like a sudden chill followed by sudden warmth, then a sudden chill again, and even Awakusu-kai's members shuddered at the sensation.

While he was in the process of turning the dog spirit into a white needle pincushion (with the energy bubble hovering above his head, visible only to him), Hitomi approached, flanked by the zombie guys—and growled when he found himself also caught in the chains. The zombies, however, were left untouched, and kept up their rather meandering approach, because they were only drugged with man-made drugs, not possessed by spirits or something else supernatural.

"You can attack the zombies. I'm almost done with the dog, then I'll work on Hitomi," Mikado commented absently to the men around him, attention on holding the struggling inugami with his chains. Still, the chains were starting to break...

They didn't need to be told twice, as most of the Awakusu-kai guys jumped at the zombie people quite eagerly, and only two stayed to literally guard Mikado. Those two were Shiki and the Young Head—the ones who had the most vested in probably killing Hitomi. It wouldn't surprise him if they did something so final, but he wasn't too keen on trying to stop them, either, now that he knew what kind of path the man would take.

As such, he just kept poking pins in the dog, hoping he'd get enough of them in with the intent to bypass its defenses before it broke the chains. He didn't know how many he needed, so he was going for 'the more, the better'.

"The great Awakusu-kai of Medai Group is taking orders from a child and even stepping down from a revenge kill?" Hitomi suddenly yelled, smirking. "How weak you've all become!"

The Young Head's calm, amused smile was chilling under the circumstances, as he said, "Well, you see, 'the kill' is still for us, but we prefer to let him level the playing field a bit, you know? It's been awhile, hasn't it, Masato?"

"Don't speak my name so familiarly, Awakusu!" Hitomi spat. "And what will a child be able to do to level the playing field?"

Right then, the inugami broke free of the chains and jumped at Mikado, so the boy knew it was now—or never. As he directed the bubble of light hovering above his head to pour its energy into the dog spirit through the needles, his hand extended in the direction he knew the dog was—

A sudden, piercing, agonized, grating howl split the night, making everyone there clap their hands over their ears and shudder from the chills the sound alone caused. Well, everyone except the zombies. Hitomi's eyes went to the place the howl had originated from in shock, knowing as Mikado did that it had indeed just died, even as both were wracked with chills and the older of the two suddenly spat up some blood. Some Awakusu-kai members who didn't have to fight the zombies right away stared at him in shock.

"What was that?" Shiki asked the blue eyed boy worriedly, reaching out a hand to steady the younger man, even as the chaotic sounds and motions of a battlefield rose around them, in earnest this time.

"The inugami is gone, the curse broken, but the one who created the curse still has a price to pay," Mikado replied, getting his bearings back and looking at the man. "And I think you know why you can't move forward, so make 'Lucifer' separate from you or I'll do it myself."

"Heh," Hitomi snorted. "You think you can do such a thing to him? To someone with so much power in his little finger he can tear down a hospital?"

"It's actually not hard, if you know the method," the boy replied dryly. "Though I'd never say I could destroy him—I know I can't do that—making him go somewhere else, like to the place where the rest of his form is, rather turns out to be simple. I just need to use the right kind of energy in the right way, and since I seem to have such an affinity to the spirit world without even being psychic, well..."

"Try it, then, but it won't work," the man smirked.

Because Mikado had seen the form of the merging earlier, he already had a pretty good idea of what to do—and it was similar to dealing with the inugami. Basically, if he used the needles and loaded Hitomi's body with energy from the bubble, 'Lucifer' would be forced from it. In this case, though, there was a good chance his needles would be removed, destroyed, or turned back on him if he made them visible, so he had to make them so narrow they couldn't be seen. Because there were no physical motions and there was no light show involved, it was actually easy to do such a thing with no indications, so long as he could be creative enough to manipulate the energy appropriately.

Once he'd pushed several needles into the man—and used his restored shield to deflect a few bolts of random energy—he felt sure it would be enough. Deflecting things rather than trying to reflect or block them actually eased a lot of the pressure on his shield, which was also a relief to him. If it was really Hitomi throwing those bolts of energy, though, he realized the man had no idea what he was doing or how to go about it. Then again, unless he missed his guess, the man was using his own personal energy, not an outside and infinite energy source, which probably made a big difference in abilities and ease of use.

"Well, aren't you going to do anything?" Hitomi sneered above the chaos of the battle sounds around them.

With a decidedly serene smile, the blue eyed boy said, "But, Mr. Hitomi, I have been doing something the whole time."

He then shoved energy into the man through the needles, making the energy compress to pass through them, then expand once in the other body. Hitomi's eyes crossed for a moment, then he groaned and some kind of wave everyone felt rather than saw rose off him, creating another round of shudders. A quick shift to spirit form on Mikado's part just showed him the spirit he was after fleeing towards the far side of the mansion, even as the man looked up in something like horror, his face pale.

"Go for it, guys," Mikado told the two men with him, then turned and bolted in the direction he'd seen 'Lucifer' going.

"Now it's time for some payback for all our guys you killed," the Young Head said to Hitomi in a rather sweet tone which was creepy under the circumstances.

Putting that out of his mind, the black haired boy ran alongside the building, wondering—where was everyone? Surely a house as big as that would have servants, and what about any relatives of Hitomi's? Well, maybe he'd never married or had children, but there should at least have been servants...Unless those were now zombies? Well, it meant he could search for his target in peace, anyway, but it made him shudder to think what kind of man Hitomi Masato was if he really had used his servants that way—stopping him was a priority.

At about that point, Mikado began opening doors, searching for the spirit, but most of the doors he opened led to rooms, not halls where he'd find other doors. It took a few tries to find one which led to a hall, and as he walked down the hall, he thought it was probably the right one, the one he'd seen earlier when he'd taken a quick look at the situation. If he was right, it would take him close to the middle of the mansion, where the room on the right would be the one 'Lucifer' seemed to favor.

When he reached that area, however, he suddenly heard an explosion, then a whole series of them, and the ceiling began falling on him!

Suddenly, someone seized him around the waist and dragged him, shoving him down into the corner against the wall and covering him, even as noise and dust rose all around them. His heart was pounding so fast he thought the other person could feel it, too—then again, the other...man's...? His heart was beating just as fast as the boy's, and with their chests pressed together, there was no mistaking it. And once the noise and dust began settling, he realized the body laying on his felt decidedly familiar.

When everything was quiet again, a familiar voice said wryly, "See, this is what happens when you go off without me."

As the man pushed himself up to hover above Mikado with an amused smirk, the boy had to stare for a minute, then—without even missing a beat, he was pleased to say—he retorted, "And whose fault is that, Mr. 'Don't-Bother-Coming-Back'?"

"Yes, well, you really do get into too much trouble without me, even if it turned out to be decidedly productive trouble," Izaya smirked again, auburn eyes dancing. "You're just too interesting to leave alone, even for a budding deity like me!"

"Does that mean we're still—" the boy began to ask hopefully.

He was cut off by a deep, passionate kiss as the older man laid on him again, holding him close. More than the kiss, the almost desperate way Izaya held him was shocking, so he just let the man kiss and hold him as much as he liked, even returning the kiss—well, returning it as well as he could, which produced amusement from the older of the pair. Also, the boy himself practically felt starved for attention, or for the older man's, so had no desire to stop him, even when the hands roamed to places they shouldn't have been, especially not right then.

Noise startled them out of the moment, and Izaya pushed back from his younger boyfriend, sharp, auburn eyes scanning the damaged hall alertly. Mikado's eyes also scanned the area—and both saw men approaching them with knives and daggers in hand. As the blue eyed boy realized what was going on, he gripped the older man's arm as he was pushing himself up.

"Don't kill them—they're the rest of the comatose hospital patients," he told Izaya, also rising.

"Heh, you're expecting a lot of me under these circumstances," the auburn eyed man commented in a dry tone, drawing his switch blade as he rose to the balls of his feet to face them. There were almost a dozen, all told.

"Well, the sooner I can confront 'Lucifer', the sooner they should all collapse, so you can just hold them off while I find the spirit," the boy replied, drawing one of his spare blades, a switch blade he'd been keeping in his sock, and tapping Izaya's free hand with it. "Use that to help you, too."

Blinking in momentary shock, the man then gave a rather wry smirk and asked, "I don't suppose you'll ever tell me how many you have on you?"

"Nope," Mikado grinned.

As the men moved forward to attack him and Izaya, the black haired man quickly made sure they had to keep their eyes on him—he'd knocked three out with a single, quick, unexpected spin. Thankfully, the three he knocked out were exactly the three the boy needed out of the way so he could get into the room on the other side of the hall, where there was a one-foot-high and two-foot-wide gap from the damage. He dove for it even as the three men were still falling, and Izaya took up a guard position outside, all without any spoken words between them—they just knew.

When Mikado first got into the room, it was by falling about two feet to the floor, head first, where he suddenly had a feeling he needed more energy, active energy, from his bubble to shield himself with. Some kind of power flared under him as he dragged the energy from the bubble to surround himself in a wave-like, flowing energy, and the attack which should have done something to him apparently just got dragged away by the moving energy. Rather than hearing a curse, he felt a scowl from 'Lucifer'. He was just very thankful creativity was high on his list of natural skills, or he'd have been in major trouble 'fighting' on the fly as he currently was.

By then, though, he'd gotten his bearings, so sat up and looked around, seeing the room he'd dropped into before, and 'Lucifer' standing in it, looking decidedly tangible.

"I'm surprised to see anyone so tangibly using that power these days," the man commented in something like confusion.

"I have a lot of resources and I like to do research, so I found out about this," the boy replied in mild amusement. "And I don't even need to be religious to use it, so it's especially useful, don't you think?"

"So you fixed the damage of one arrow. Why didn't the other two reach you?" the spirit man suddenly asked after a silence, his expression decidedly cross.

"I was being shielded by a Dullahan at the time, but she hadn't been fast enough to protect me from the first one," Mikado explained honestly.

"Oh, really?" the man asked with a raised brow. "I didn't know they ever left their homeland."

"She probably wouldn't have if her head hadn't been stolen," the boy agreed.

"Why are you here? It isn't to talk, I know that much," 'Lucifer' commented.

"If you're a spirit, why can I see you?" the blue eyed boy asked instead of answering the question. He'd rather thought his reason should be obvious.

"Powerful spirits can appear just as tangibly as any physical human, but 'appearing' as such and 'being' tangible are two different things. I'm no less spirit just because you can currently see me with your eyes," the man-spirit shrugged. "You're being decidedly colloquial for someone who came to challenge me."

"Exactly who challenged whom?" Mikado asked dryly, and the spirit blinked. "But I suspect you were actually interfering because you wanted Hitomi stopped, before he could do any serious damage to the population. Even if you're the Christian devil and a powerful evil, maybe you're not actually entirely evil, because a tester, like a teacher, isn't generally 'evil'."

'Lucifer' snorted, then laughed and commented, "Yes, everyone does seem to think I'm Satan as well. I'm not surprised you couldn't find anything different. But a Dullahan should have known I'm not Satan, and she should have told you so."

"You're—wait, what?" Mikado asked in puzzled surprise, trying to wrap his brain around what he was hearing. "What are you talking about?"

With a malicious grin—which the boy was shocked to find held pain under it—the spirit told him, "I am Lucifer. I am an Archangel who chose an 'evil' path, or a path taken as 'evil' by my kind, so I became a Dark Archangel, or a demon. Satan, the devil, is my boss, my superior, in a sense, though I'm following my own path at the moment. And yes, he was originally supposed to be a tester of people, and not necessarily evil, but...things are out of everyone's hands now. And regardless of all that, I clearly intended you harm and nearly killed you more than once, so why would you turn around and say I'm trying to stop another evil? By my own admission, I'm evil, myself, so I'd have no reason to stop evil."

For several minutes, Mikado sat there and puzzled through the man's words, then gave a bit of a grin and said, "For someone so powerful and so evil, you're not trying very hard to kill me. At least you're talking properly with me this time."

"I'm beginning to wonder where your mi—" Lucifer began with a deep scowl.

"In this land, you're Hachiman, aren't you? He's a teacher who places respect and honor above killing or any evil, so here, you don't have to be evil," the blue eyed boy cut him off in a simple, calm tone. He was very much hoping he wouldn't have to progress beyond words to try to stop the man—he may have prepared for the eventuality of needing a more forceful method, but he didn't actually want to use it. "By Hachiman's personality, you wouldn't want someone like Hitomi in power, and you'd do everything you could to draw attention to him so he could be stopped—even if that meant helping him for a bit."

The spirit made a frustrated sound and sent more energy flying at the boy, so Mikado drew the flowing energy from the bubble around himself again. Like the first time, the energy dissipated, and he got to his feet.

Suddenly, Izaya slipped into the room, saying cheerfully and almost like he was chirping, "I got them all, Mikado! Thanks for the extra switch blade!"

"I thought I separated you two already. Your dependence on each other is disgusting," Lucifer scowled at them.

"No offense, but you have no right to judge us after the Hell you've put us, and Mikado in particular, through," Izaya replied, tone and expression going cold as he looked at the spirit. "I have no reason to like you, and I have my own agenda, thanks. Besides, mutual assistance isn't necessarily dependence, and you misunderstood the situation if that's what you thought it was. And I still fully intend on making you pay for all the trouble you've caused me and my Queen."

With a snort, the spirit asked, "You think you can?"

A moment later, energy was shooting at Izaya, but it wasn't like the energy he had been throwing at Mikado before then. It seemed like fire, and electricity, and cold, all at once, and maybe even other things he couldn't define—and for some reason, it scared the boy. He jumped, putting himself between Izaya and the energy, even as he pulled as much of the moving energy around him as he could. How had those powers become tangibly visible when they hadn't been before, and why did it scare him so much?

Not long after, he had his answer, as not all of the energy was actually taken away—rather, while a lot of it dissipated, he was still tangibly hit by some of those powers, and he screamed in pain as he began falling. Izaya caught him and called out with worry, but he couldn't respond right away, as though he was in some kind of tunnel and there was nothing there he could actually associate with, nothing there to ground him. In other words, powers made physical weren't so easy to block. To quote Masaomi, 'well, that sucks.'

Blood dripped down his chin. It hurt almost as much as the energy arrow had, but this time, it was his physical body feeling the pain—and it was much more practical to let his cold self take over. He was starting to understand a little bit why he had that other 'self', and a large part of it was to compensate for the pain he loathed feeling. It didn't change the amount of pain he felt, but the cold side of him dealt with it better, regardless of what his normal self was able to do, so he let his other self get control of the pain for him—it was clear the 'battle' wasn't over yet.

A minute later, as Lucifer was about to send off several more of those balls of very real power and Izaya was about to set him down so he could attack the spirit with his blades, Mikado was able to get his bearings and get his body moving again. His movement was so sudden no one was expecting it, and as it turned out, the pain from the prior attack had turned into a boon, since he wasn't brave enough to deliberately cut his own finger or palm open, not for any reason.

Really, all he had to do was dart forward as he pulled the paper he'd drawn the seal on from his pocket, even as he wiped his chin with his other hand. As he got to Lucifer, he shoved the paper against him with his now-bloody hand, then whispered, "In the name of the Universal Creator, activate and bind!" He'd chosen the term 'the Universal Creator' because any and every religion had a being acting as a creator of the world and the universe, but each 'creator' varied fairly extensively, so it was a generic term he could use to cover his bases. Alternately, most societies also had an evil force which viewed itself as a 'god', so choosing the term 'universal creator' negated those false 'gods' from being able to answer or intervene.

The first thing he glimpsed was Lucifer's shock, and the second was how the spirit recoiled from the seal as bands of energy tangibly rippled around him.

After a moment, however, the seal paper fell away from Lucifer and the spirit stood straight again, making the teen wince and brace himself—only to hear an amused sigh as the man said, "So you made your own preparations."

Looking up, Mikado replied in amusement, "Of course I did. What did you expect?"

"Well, I suppose there's still something worth saving, then, even if only a very few can make any difference," the spirit commented. "A seal like that would have a hard time holding one of the Archangels, but you used it well enough for it to hurt, so I'd better call my game quits before you do me serious harm." He then looked up at Izaya as well and said, "And stop hiding things from each other if you intend to benefit most from any kind of relationship you may have. If you don't start being honest, you will become dependent in the worst possible way—which would greatly hinder both of you, in all aspects. Testing others is one thing—but even that needs to have limits."

A moment later, he'd vanished, leaving both men to stare in shock at the place where he'd been standing.

"...Mikado...did...a God...just say I'm approaching my games the wrong way?" Izaya asked in a stunned voice.

"...It rather sounded like it, didn't it?" the boy asked in mild amusement, then suddenly felt exhausted, so dropped to the floor on his knees, even as he found a shadow passing over his eyes.

"Don't go passing out now," Izaya told him dryly, picking him up and carrying him to the hole in the wall. "You at least have to get out of the room, first."

"Right..." the boy agreed, gathering enough energy to pull himself through the hole, where Izaya picked him up again.

The man managed to keep him awake all the way to his home in Shinjuku, and even right into the bed, where Mikado found he just didn't want to stop Izaya that time.

The end!

Feel free to stick around for the Epilogue, though! It'll be up next week.

And please let me know if I've missed something so I can make sure everything's addressed in the Epilogue!