Mikogami Tenmei was a touch concerned. No, that was putting it too lightly. Mikogami Tenmei was troubled. Yes, that was quite a bit more accurate. To put it more precisely, the attendance of a single student gave him enough misgivings to end the ritual of marriage forever. That student's name was Aono Tsukune.

A number of years prior, the Exorcist had gone forth to find humans worthy of acting the bridge between the world of humans and the world of yokai so as to complete Akasha's vision of a world where humanity and monsters coexisted. One of the two humans selected was named Aono Tsukune, and he had been chosen for his unusual compassion and determination.

And then, eight years ago, he had promptly up and vanished off the face of the planet.

To say that Mikogami had been displeased that someone had gone and interfered with his master plan would be to put it lightly. Every time he sent out feelers to try and locate the boy, they had turned up nothing. This had continued until Toho Fuhai had stopped him, saying that one human would have to do. Mikogami had been quite irate, but in the end, took his old friend's advice and tried to make the best of it.

The point was that Mikogami had long since given up looking for Aono Tsukune, especially considering his parents' murder four years ago, two years after the mysterious arson in that same neighbourhood. And so when he saw Tsukune's name on the enrollment register, he had the distinct impression that he was being fucked with.

A little research into the Aono boy's circumstances told him that somehow, someway, he had wound up living with the Shirayuki family of the yuki-onna. Any attempt at digging further than that was fruitless. So Mikogami tried to make the best of a-well, not bad, per se, as yuki-onna didn't tend to be hostile towards humans, but certainly confusing-situation, and contacted the Snow Priestess, asking her politely why the location of Aono Tsukune had not been reported to him immediately upon its discovery. The exasperated response he got in return served as a very pointed warning that things were not quite as they seemed to be.

He had hoped that he would be able to glean from Tsukune himself where he had been for the past eight years, but that hope, too, was dashed, as when he attempted to get a discreet read on the boy during the welcome speech, all he had gathered from the attempt was a headache. It was as if something was protecting him from being analysed-something that scrambled the data and made it into something totally unrecognisable.

And then he got the reports coming in from the first two days of school: not only had Tsukune maimed Komiya Saizo-which wasn't exactly a bad thing, and certainly made Mikogami's life less of a constant series of chronic headaches-but also had, assumably, been responsible for the sudden spike in magical energy on campus that day.

Now, at least at first glance, the latter occurrence was a good thing as far as Mikogami was concerned, as it helped narrow down what exactly had happened to Tsukune, and what he had become after eight years spent in terra incognito, as it were. However, upon further scrutiny, it didn't make much in the way of sense. The only person he knew of who could have any hope of teaching Tsukune, who was not a natural-born witch or warlock (and yes, contrary to popular belief, there was a difference between the two), how to use magic was none other than Toho Fuhai, who had been as perplexed as he was as to how a seven-year-old human child had managed to slip through their fingers and disappear.

This left Mikogami with a set of data that suggested large gaps in his knowledge and comprehension of the current situation. First, Aono Tsukune had had to have become some sort of yokai himself if he had developed the ability to use magic-barring Hermetic magic, of course, which anyone with enough brains and sacrifices could do-but the kind of yokai he was was unknown to Mikogami. These two data points ran into conflict immediately, because the kind of yokai who were able to hide their type from someone like Mikogami were either more or less dead or not naturally able to use magic, and certainly never to the extent that Mikogami had sensed earlier that day..

And then there was the fact that he wore a Holy Lock, the inner nature of which had been impossible for Mikogami to discern. This confused Mikogami, because there were only three people he had known who could produce a Holy Lock, namely himself, Toho Fuhai, or-back when he had been awake, at least-the Shinso Alucard, who was well-known to have been otherwise incapacitated for the past two hundred years. And yet, for Tsukune to be bearing a Holy Lock that made him unable to tell what variety of yokai, he was reminded him of back when Alucard had been trying to explain to the other three of them-Fuhai, Tenmei, and Akasha-how a Holy Lock could be used as an aid either in turning humans into vampires, or in concealing one's yoki, and thus their true nature, entirely. That was, of course, centuries ago, back before Akasha had met and fallen in love with Shuzen Issa, back before Alucard had become the hate-filled monstrosity he was today, back when the four of them were inseparable.

Mikogami blinked twice, somewhat amused and somewhat irritated that he had allowed his thought process to digress to such an extent that he was actively reminiscing about those halcyon days when their little group was a unit-the four of them against the world. This seemed to be happening more and more often, which reminded Mikogami of the fact that his time was running out. Sealing away Alucard had taken too much out of all of them-Toho Fuhai spent his time as a stooped old man even as far as two hundred years later because of all the energy they had used in trying to restrain and subdue the rampaging Shinso.

And there he went again. Back to Tsukune-you're not dead yet, man, he thought to himself. Keep it together… On the subject of Tsukune, reports said that he seemed immune to the charms of their succubus student, Kurumu, and that he and Mizore were very close-lovers, in fact, some rumours insisted.

But this told him nothing. He sighed in frustration and walked over to one of the great windows that lined the walls of his office. The sky was overcast, which meant that the blood-red moon wasn't visible.

It was the perfect kind of night for those whose skills lay in chicanery, cunning, and just general wrongdoing-thieves, spies, and assassins.

The room wasn't bugged. Tsukune had swept the room nine times, and found neither sign nor indication of any kind of surveillance device. Feeling much more secure in his ability to act with impunity on his first solo mission, Tsukune locked the door and shut the window in his single room as he removed the false bottom of his extradimensional briefcase and took out the custom black long coat his master had given him. Now that he was alone, Tsukune dropped the pretense of appearing to be no different from any human, his hair turning silver and growing to his shoulders, his fangs elongating, and his eyes turning blood red. Then he tapped into his Shinso powers, encasing his body in a suit of natural armour that far outstripped the defensive qualities of steel plate. Donning the black long coat overtop the armour to obscure his figure, he at last took the mask out of the briefcase and fitted it to his face. The mask was a custom replica of the first mask he had worn on his first mission, back before he appeared to be no more than a normal human child of eight years. It was white and expressionless, with a red slash on the bottom near where his chin went, almost like a mouth, and a stylised purple lightning bolt over the right eyehole. That done, he walked into one of the shadows in the corner of his room-

-and wound up stepping out of the shadows in the school's main building.

Using his third eye, Tsukune swept every floor of the school, and, finding that the building was all but empty-the keywords being 'all but'-Tsukune decided that staying out of sight was not nearly as important as staying under the radar was. And so he smothered his yoki signature, and began to move through the school. Unfortunately, he couldn't keep his yoki smothered and still be able to shadow-walk, and so he resolved to do this the old-fashioned way, and made his way on foot throughout the school, every so often stopping to carve a symbol into the walls of the main building, taking care to keep in mind that the symbols needed to be both out of the way so that they wouldn't be discovered too early, and easily accessible so that they would be on hand if and when he needed to use them.

Floor by floor Tsukune went, carving symbols into the walls where they would pass unnoticed. The symbol itself didn't mean much to the uninitiated, which was precisely what he was counting on. When he got about halfway through the top floor, however, he stopped.

There, at the threshold of his office, was the Exorcist himself. He stared directly at Tsukune with his glowing eyes, but instead of the mischievous little smile that was usually there, now he was quite clearly frowning. "You know, you're very good. I almost didn't notice you." Tsukune stared at him wordlessly through the eyeholes of his mask, knowing that all the Exorcist would see were black pits where his eyes should be. "And it's quite an exemplary trick, masking your yoki. In fact, the only reason I knew you to be here was because you took a split second too long before you concealed it. Now, though, it's past curfew, so I'm going to have to ask you to remove your mask so that the appropriate disciplinary actions can be taken."

In response, Tsukune melted into the shadows, where he could use his shadow-walking ability to give himself an edge.

"So, you want to do this the hard way, huh?" asked the Exorcist, sounding more tired than anything else. If Tsukune hadn't lived through the last eight years of his life, just knowing that Mikogami Tenmei existed would have terrified him, and the Exorcist's exasperation would have seemed genuinely intimidating to him. As it stood, however, all he saw when he looked at the Chairman was an old, burnt-out fighter who sought to prolong his life with Holy Locks. The fact that said old, burnt-out fighter was still an S-class yokai didn't even phase him; he'd taken out S-classes before, and when the fact that he was covered in three Holy Locks was taken into account, Tsukune hypothesised that taking Mikogami down would not be especially difficult.

With that in mind, he conjured discs of dark energy and began throwing them, causing Mikogami to gain some distance-and put him right next to another shadow. Tsukune took advantage of this and secured a line around Mikogami's legs before slipping back through the shadow, pulling Mikogami off of his feet. Once the Exorcist got back on his feet, Tsukune pressed the advantage he had just made for himself, coming in quickly with hard and fast punches so that the old kishin would not be able to regain his footing so easily.

Cognisant that the last thing he wanted to do in a match against a fighter as experienced as the Chairman was to slip into a pattern, Tsukune feinted a punch, but then dropped low and swept Mikogami's feet out from under him. Tsukune sprang back up, grabbed Mikogami by the collar of his white robes, and threw him face-first through the floor to the next level down.

Changing tactics, Tsukune stepped through one shadow on the top floor to one on the floor immediately below it. He could sense Mikogami's yoki grow more and more out of control, like a midsummer blaze, and knew that he would have to be more careful. Two hundred years past his prime or not, Mikogami Tenmei was still one of the Three Dark Lords, and so with that in mind, Tsukune frantically tried to construct a plan of attack.

The first phase of the fight had been relatively simple only because Mikogami thought him just another student, perhaps one suffering from a moderate to severe case of chunibyo, and not a trained, if a bit green, assassin. Tsukune knew what he was doing when he capitalised upon that underestimation, and attacked him not with his armour-plated body, but with the Exorcist's own complacency-a complacency born of him being secure in the notion that there was no one who dared attack him given what he had done two hundred years prior. The Exorcist had left himself open to attack through his complacency, and Tsukune had punished him for it. It was now, when the dying kishin had begun to take him and this fight seriously, that things got awfully dicey, and more than a little dangerous.

Tsukune checked what he had. There was a list a mile long of spells-combat spells, utility spells, cantrips-that were at his disposal. He had his ace in the hole, which he was only supposed to use in case of emergency-which this fight had yet to devolve into, but he liked to keep his options open anyway-he had kunai of maybe a dozen different metals and alloys, he had more lines, which he wanted to use only sparingly because the gossamer thread that his lines were made of wasn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination, he had his martial arts training, and he had Nemo. That wasn't exactly a short list; the problem was that it also wasn't exactly an inexpensive list. He had no doubt that Nemo would consider the kishin to be a worthy foe to be used against-in fact, he felt Nemo quiver in anticipation of being used to fight his current opponent, which was a strange sensation given that Nemo was not physically manifested, and so the sensation of her vibrating could be felt in Tsukune's very soul. She hungered for Mikogami's blood, his very soul. Unfortunately, the process that seemed to be required to obtain it and thereby sate her hunger was far, far too dangerous for Tsukune to at all feel comfortable risking, at least at this stage in the game.

One thing he did have that he could use with relative impunity was the discipline of obtenebration. He had that, at least. And with that came an idea. And if he was lucky, he would be able to escape relatively unharmed and unharried.

The lights went out, and the corridor was plunged into complete darkness. Were Mikogami Tenmei in any fit state to do so, he would question his opponent's motives-after all, it wasn't like he didn't have night vision. His eyes glowed, for heaven's sake, and besides, what kind of self-respecting S-class yokai didn't have the ability to see in the dark? Again, were he in any fit state to do so, Mikogami would have to laugh at the pure lunacy of it all.

But Mikogami Tenmei was not in a fit state to do so. His pride had been wounded, and it cried out for vengeance, which was unfortunate, because had he been paying enough attention, he would recognise a few things about his current opponent-things he hadn't seen in nearly three hundred years. But as it stood, he was nearing his berserker state at a frightening speed, and as such not in a fit state for reason, rationality, or simple deduction. He tried desperately to reign himself in, as he knew in the back of his brain-the part that still cried out for patience and observation if not civility-that if he allowed himself to be goaded into his berserker state fully, then he would lose as certainly as the snow on Mount Fuji.

Somewhere in his enraged mind, he noticed that it was getting steadily more and more difficult to walk. His opponent was up to something…

Damn it, he's getting suspicious. I have to lure him in… thought Tsukune as he examined the situation. His scheme, he knew, was truly harebrained and he was not at all certain that it would even slow the kishin down, let alone stop him as it was supposed to. Even so, he wouldn't find out if he didn't try, and so he moved to get the Exorcist's attention, throwing three silver kunai and four cold iron at him. The still-robed yokai quickly acknowledged the direction from which the kunai were coming, and began to charge, his sanity hanging by a thread and not even close to being in control. It appeared to Tsukune that his plan would work flawlessly, but at that moment, as if the entirety of Murphy's Law was dropped onto his shoulders, Tsukune fucked up, for lack of a more apropos phrasing.

Years later, Tsukune would still not be able to pin down exactly what went wrong; the most he could do was narrow it down to two things. Either the realisation of victory being in his grasp caused him to hesitate for a few crucial picoseconds, or he had made a slight miscalculation concerning the length of the Exorcist's stride, but the next thing he knew was that a punch slammed into him with all the force of an out-of-control lorry carrying live ammunition to the allied front. He felt the horrible sensation of his steel armour cracking, and then had the dreadful realisation that not only was it giving, but that there was enough force behind the punch to keep going into his side, pulverising his organs.

Tsukune's eyes went wide behind the mask, and suddenly his blood coated the inside of it as he vomited it. He was barely able to utter the word to cause his trap to snap closed before he hit the wall and left a sizeable crater in it, leaving his head feeling fuzzy and heavily concussed. He got to his feet with a Herculean determination, and then, with what little focus he had left, summoned the sword.

The weapon now known as Nemo was a strange one to many who looked upon it; as his master had explained, she had taken on the form of a duelling sword. His master's precise words after explaining that to Tsukune were something along the lines of "An elegant weapon from a more civilised age." Her tsuka was black, but her blade was the colour of the reflection of the moon in a motionless pond. Her length came out to one metre exactly, and unlike tachi or katana, the curve to the blade was very slight, and the blade itself was only sharp along the outer edge. It was this blade that came into being in Tsukune's grasp, hungry for battle and the thirst for blood.

Taking the closest approximation to a proper stance he could manage through the pain of his injuries from which his blood seemed to flow still, even as the wound worked to close itself, Tsukune charged into the Chairman, the kissaki of the blade pointed directly at the Exorcist's body, which was bound up in an intricate spider's web, the strands of which were formed out of darkness itself.

His aim, however, did not account for his injuries. As he came close, the blade shaking in his grasp and nearly blinded by pain, the blade stabbed through the Chairman's chest, missing his heart by a hair's breadth. Tsukune realised his mistake, and instead of trying to hit the heart a second time, he pulled Nemo, drenched in blood, from out of the kishin's body. Once she was free, Tsukune spun and slashed through where he supposed the Exorcist's hamstrings might be to cut off the Chairman's ability to pursue him, and thus discover whose face lurked behind the porcelain mask, blowing his cover and causing his first solo mission to end in failure. That done, Tsukune stumbled and shuffled back to the nearest shadow to take to Mizore's room. He couldn't help speed up the regenerative process, but, as he had learned time and again over the past four years of their lives, she could.

Mizore was almost asleep herself when she heard Tsukune step out of the shadows and into her room in the middle of the night. His step was light and almost inaudible, but over four years of living together, she had developed an ear capable of hearing his footsteps. He walked in a bit, and promptly collapsed against her wall. The yuki-onna was wide awake in record time, and walked over to the wall and turned on the light switch so that she could see the kind of shape her lover and only friend was in. She gasped in horror at the extent of the damage.

The first thing she noticed was the gaping hole in Tsukune's armour, which continued into the approximate area of his vital organs. It looked as though he had tried to 'tank' a .50 calibre bullet from a state-of-the-art military sniper rifle at point blank range. What was worse was that the wound was not regenerating as it should have been. Or perhaps it was, and the original wound had been much worse. Regardless, Mizore knew on sight that whatever the wound had looked like originally, he probably wasn't going to make it anyway, what with the tremendous amount of blood he was losing. No! She refused to let it happen-to let Tsukune fade away and die this night.

The first thing she did was to put pressure on the wound so that it would stop bleeding, but apparently, too many of his organs had been ruptured, because all she got for her efforts were hands stained black with his blood. It was no good. Without his ability to regenerate, it seemed that his wounds were just too extensive for him to survive the night, even with proper medical attention.

Mizore, however, contrary to her surname and her appearance, was no shrinking violet, no gormless flower to sit and wilt away while the one she cared about the most in the world suffered and died. Mustering up her determination, she gingerly removed the strange mask he was wearing, and almost had to look away as she saw how ashen his face looked-how sunken his scarlet eyes, how limp his silver hair. She bore it, though, because her lover's life now depended on her fortitude and will to act. She took his head gently in her hands and directed it to the crook of her neck. "Drink," she commanded, managing enough self-control to not allow her voice to waver. The fact that he did not resist made her more worried than anything else about this horrifying situation; normally, he was hesitant almost to the point of stubbornness to drink from her.

When he bit down on her neck, she bit back a cry of pain. This was not the erotic experience she had come to associate with Tsukune's occasional feedings. Iit lacked the intimacy of the act, lacked the unhurried familiarity she had grown accustomed to experiencing. This was desperate, almost animalistic, but she cared not; she cherished the pain all the same.

He drank deep, deeper than he ever had before, as if he was desperate to get more and more into his body, and Mizore spared a thought to remark to herself that if she was indeed bearing witness to the true magnitude of his need for blood, then he had been disengaging without getting even half the blood he truly needed out of fear for her safety. Filing that little uncomfortable realisation away for a later date, she watched as the more he drank, the faster and faster the wound began to mend itself and close, and when it was entirely healed, it left not even a scar behind.

He eventually pulled away, and when Mizore looked down at her lover, she was relieved to see that the blood she had given him had been enough to save his life, as his face began to lose its gaunt construction and ashen skin, his silver hair regaining its vitality and the eyes becoming no longer sunken deep into their sockets. Of course, he went limp a moment later, but Mizore remained calm enough to ascertain that it was sleep he needed now, and that he was no longer in grave danger of dying.

Having discovered this, she, with some difficulty, stripped him of the strangely heavy black leather long coat and managed to get him up and into her bed. She stowed the mask and the coat away beneath her bed so that it would not be discovered by the wrong person, and then slipped into bed beside him, just holding him until the gentle and weak light of morning came.

Mikogami Tenmei was exhausted. His whole night after he had calmed down sometime around an hour after his mysterious assailant had made his exit had been spent attempting to find his way out of the ingenious trap that assailant had left him in the previous night. If nothing else, the trap was A-grade work, if only because he had managed to fall for it. Of course, his enthusiasm for the excellent trap began to diminish rapidly as he was forced to humiliatingly crawl back to his office, given that neither of his legs were able to support his weight. But finally, he had managed to get into his chair and send out a call for assistance to his once-best friend to whom he had not spoken physically for at least half a century by this point.

Just when Mikogami was beginning to think that perhaps his friend wasn't coming, there was a polite knock on the door. "Come in," Mikogami said.

A short old man opened the door and strode into the Chairman's office. His hair was long and white, and it seemed that every minute patch of exposed skin was home to a new system of wrinkles. His ears were long and pointed, and a pair of sunglasses adorned his squat face, while even then a long, eastern-style pipe rested in between his jaws. The man in question the Exorcist recognised immediately as Toho Fuhai, doing much the same thing Mikogami himself was with his Holy Locks in attempting to suppress his energy enough to prolong what little time he had left on this earth. "Was there a reason you called me all this way away?" the crotchety yasha asked curtly, reminding Mikogami that he and his friend hadn't been on good terms ever since Akasha merged with Alucard.

Mikogami nodded, his mischievous smile nowhere to be found. "I encountered someone sneaking through the school after hours," the kishin began.

"Probably a student on a dare," Toho Fuhai scoffed in his whiny, gravelly voice.

Mikogami shook his head. "No… If it had been a student, then we wouldn't be having this conversation, in all probability," the Exorcist said with some degree of authority. "A student could not have left me unable to walk the way this intruder did." He sensed Toho Fuhai's eyes widen behind the circular sunglasses, and took it as his cue to continue. "I need two favours from you, old friend. First, I need you to heal my wounds"-Mikogami gestured to the wound on his chest that was weeping blood even still, staining his usually impeccable white robes-"and then I need as much information as you can give me about this invader.

Toho Fuhai walked around Mikogami's desk and then helped him out of the ruined white robes in order to better get a look at his injuries. Looking at them from afar, they seemed to be normal, run-of-the-mill injuries-although any weapon that could harm one of the Three Dark Lords was hardly anything approaching run-of-the-mill-but up close, they gave even the great Toho Fuhai pause. "How were these wounds inflicted?" asked the yasha with a tone suggestive of growing dread as he continued to examine them for some hidden detail, almost as if their very existence terrified him.

"The intruder had a sword," said Mikogami. "Strange-looking, like the result of some odd mesh between Eastern and Western smithing philosophies."

Toho Fuhai was silent for a long, pregnant moment. Then he returned his attention to Mikogami's injuries, and when again he spoke, he began in a carefully neutral, level tone. "I'm afraid this is beyond my skill to heal, Tenmei," he told his friend of three hundred years. Before the kishin could ask, the yasha raised a hand for silence. "This intruder. What can you tell me about them? Clothes, demeanour, everything."

"He looked like he was making a fashion statement," began Mikogami. "And it was a he. Wore a long leather coat. Black. Under that, he was wearing a full set of armour. Also black."

"Was he wearing a mask?" Toho Fuhai asked. "A mask of wood or porcelain that renders the eyes impossible to see?"

"Yes," Mikogami confirmed. "Why…?"

"It was the Black Swordsman," Fuhai interjected. "Wielder of the Black Sword."

"How do you…?"

"No other weapon inflicts injuries that can subdue even a kishin's regenerative power," Fuhai explained. "No other weapon possesses the malice and power necessary to accomplish such a feat. And no other weapon chooses its wielder the way the Black Sword does."

"Well then," said Mikogami. "I'm sure you'll be happy to know that I managed to wound him. A punch to the lower abdomen nearly put him on the ground."

"Very good. You inflicted a mortal wound. That's step one," Fuhai joked mirthlessly as he continued to take stock of the damage. "What about two through ten?"

"There's one more thing I can remember about him," Tenmei said at last. "When he fought me, it was like when Alucard and I would spar, back before that whole mess two centuries ago. And his armour… It wasn't like armour at all. It was more like…an exoskeleton." Mikogami paused, and when there was no response forthcoming, he looked to his friend, only to see him with a stricken expression on his face, his pipe hanging out of his mouth limply.