Requiem
By Dan'yu
Chapter Four: Koemna
For nearly seven millennia, he had been a conscious being, an apparition of Reikai, neither fully alive nor fully dead, neither lethally mortal nor eternally immortal. For nearly seven millennia, he had been smothered by his father's shadow, his endless millennia of legacy, of power and majesty he could never hope to measure up to. For nearly seven millennia, he had served the King Enma, his father, as caretaker of Ningenkai, the human realm, the mortal realm, from which he continuously drew his needed subordinates, those powerful in Reiki and moral sense who could help him to protect the mortal world, and in that sense he created the Reikai Tantei.
He wasn't strong. For all his power, all his immortality, all the authority and privilege that came with his birthright, he was pathetically weak. He must be, to continually have the need to send others to do his dirty work. It was the same way with every Reikai Tantei he had selected in the past, and every one he would choose in the future. He who weighed life and death in his hands every day could not face it himself, for he was a coward and a hypocrite.
He wasn't supposed to feel. Of all his father's lessons, that one was the most clear. He was not supposed to feel for the mortals that he judged, nor those who served as his tools, but he did feel for them, and his punishment would be his eternity, forever with the guilt gnawing at his traitorous heart. He had failed Shinobu, and now he had failed Yusuke.
For Yusuke's sake, for the sake of humanity itself, he would not let himself be weak again. He had to be strong. He could not fail again.
The world could not afford another failure from their protector.
