My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 857: Sky Sovereign

Yuzuki watched him far below.

Her eyes tracked him with crystalline precision from a height that should have reduced humans to vague movement and cars to smudges of darkness. By mortal standards, seeing his face clearly from here should have been impossible.

But mortal standards were adorable little rules people invented before meeting beings like her.

Phei crossed the lobby’s grand entrance with three girls around him.

They fussed around him naturally.

There was no clinging spectacle, no cheap performance, nothing that would have made Yuzuki roll her eyes hard enough to require medical intervention.

It was worse than that, actually. More intimate. More comfortable. They moved around him like women who had already accepted where they belonged and had no intention of asking the world’s opinion on it.

Yuzuki narrowed her eyes.

’So these were his PheiCrush Simps leaders.’

A ridiculous name, truly catastrophic name that made one suspect civilization had survived far too long without proper discipline.

Then her gaze shifted to the car waiting outside.

The Rolls-Royce rested near the entrance like a shadow given wheels.

The car’s exterior had been dressed down just enough to pass as elite hotel transport for anyone too innocent or too poor to know better. But Yuzuki knew exactly what she was looking at.

A customized Rolls-Royce.

Two million dollars of hand-stitched comfort, armored discretion, silent engineering, and grandmotherly affection disguised as a borrowed hotel vehicle.

Yuzuki shook her head slowly.

’The Empress is absurd.’

She spoiled the boy so thoroughly it had crossed beyond affection and entered the territory of imperial policy.

The vehicle had been built around Phei’s comfort and taste, every detail shaped for him two years ago and she kept it here. The seating, spacing, materials, soundproofing, security, climate systems, interior lighting, probably even the texture of the seat stitching if the Empress had been in one of her more emotionally unreasonable moods.

And the worst part was that Phei did not even know.

He was being transported inside a grandmother’s love letter written in leather, metal, bulletproof glass, and enough money to make accountants start believing in prayer.

’Then again,’ Yuzuki supposed, ’if the Empress could not spend a fraction of her obscene fortune on spoiling her grandson, what exactly were all those trillions for? Charity? Sensible investments? Fiscal responsibility?’

Please. Wealth at that level existed so old monsters could turn affection into infrastructure.

The doors closed.

The Rolls-Royce pulled away from the hotel entrance, gliding down the long curved driveway with the smooth authority of something that expected the road to understand social hierarchy.

Other vehicles gave it space without needing to be told, which was correct. Even machinery, it seemed, knew when nobility was passing.

Yuzuki stepped forward.

Right to the edge.

The wind surged as if insulted by her audacity, screaming harder across the rooftop, wild and sharp and eager to tear. Then it reached her and parted.

It did not strike her body, claw at her skin or even steal the breath from her lungs much less drag her from the ledge.

The gale curved around Yuzuki the way a river curved around stone it had long since learned could not be moved. Her short skirt fluttered once. Her hair lifted lazily and settled back around her shoulders. That was all. The storm touched the world around her with violence and approached her with manners, which was wise of it.

Anyone watching from behind would have wondered how a girl could stand at the top of Infinity Chaos Hotel unbothered.

How the cold did not split her skin. How the wind did not snatch her tiny figure from the roof and throw her into the shining abyss below. How she could watch a man’s face from thousands of meters away with the calm accuracy of someone sitting across from him at dinner.

The answer was simple.

Simple, and deeply inconvenient for anyone who still believed the world was fair.

Yuzuki Hayashi was a Sky Sovereign.

One step from the Half-Divine rank/stage.

One threshold, one breakthrough and one silent crossing away from entering a tier of existence that most beings in the known dimensions would never touch except in legends, nightmares, or the final seconds before something wearing their enemy’s face killed them.

At her current rank, if she wished it, she could draw her sword and cut Infinity Chaos Hotel apart in two strokes. The great tower would fall in a storm of glass, steel, concrete, screams, and expensive interior design, collapsing floor by floor until the most valuable building on Hell’s Paradise Island became rubble beneath her boots.

And Yuzuki would still be there.

Standing at the end of it with her skirt neat, her sword clean, and her expression mildly inconvenienced.

That was the power of a Sky Sovereign.

Though in truth, comparing her power in this way was an insult to everyone involved.

Infinity Chaos Hotel, magnificent as it was, remained architecture.

She remained a calamity pretending to be a girl.

Yuzuki gave the hem of her skirt a quick habitual tug, the reflex of a woman wearing something short in high wind even when the wind knew better than to touch her, then lowered herself onto the very edge of the rooftop.

Her legs dangled over open air.

Thousands of meters below, the resort spread in glittering miniature, all roads, towers, lights, terraces, and polished arrogance. The Rolls-Royce had already become a dark speck gliding toward the city’s perimeter, carrying Phei and his women away from the hotel.

Yuzuki watched it shrink into the distance with her weight resting back on her palms, legs swinging slightly, posture relaxed enough to make the entire scene look obscene.

Other girls sat like this on park benches.

Yuzuki Hayashi sat at the edge of the sky.

Tonight, she had dressed for something, though not for the rooftop. Later, perhaps. A meeting. A movement. A role inside a plan not yet ready to breathe in public.

The black leather skirt rode high and tight, its glossy second-skin fit molding to the lush flare of her hips and the smooth, powerful length of her thighs with possessive intimacy.

Moonlight slid over the polished surface in liquid ripples, turning every shift of her stance into a slow, deliberate provocation — the hem whispering against bare skin, threatening to ride higher with the smallest movement.

Above it, the dark lace bralette fought a losing battle against the full, heavy swell of her chest.

The delicate webbing stretched taut over ripe, generous curves, doing far more to frame and accentuate than to conceal.

With each slow breath the fabric strained, the intricate patterns pulling tight across the upper swell, the lower curves threatening to spill free at any moment — a calculated, sinfully lazy display that promised everything while offering nothing.

A cropped leather jacket in deep, near-black green hung open and careless from her shoulders, its cropped length framing the elegant dip of her waist and the soft, subtle plane of her stomach.

Silver hardware caught the light at collar and cuffs with every idle shift, the metallic glint flashing like the edge of a hidden blade — quiet, expensive warnings wrapped in luxury.

She looked like money that had long since stopped caring about rules. Expensive. Dangerous. And utterly, hotly bored by the very idea of consequences; the trouble who didn’t dress to kill... she dressed knowing she would be remembered long after she left, a lingering, exquisite ache in the memory of anyone foolish enough to underestimate her.

Yuzuki Hayashi — and she wore the night like it had been tailored just for her.

Her sword lay beside her on the concrete, the dark scabbard resting within easy reach.

Close enough to be touched.

Close enough to end lives.

She looked relaxed. Carefree, almost. A beautiful young woman sitting above the world, watching city lights and distant cars as if the night had invited her to rest.

She was none of those things.

But the illusion was flawless.

That was the art of Yuzuki Hayashi.

Anyone could swing a sword if they were trained well enough and emotionally damaged in the right direction. Yuzuki’s danger lived in the ease of her deception, in the way she could sit with her legs over the edge of the tallest rooftop on the island and look like an idle girl enjoying the view while her mind held a mission sharp enough to cut through bloodlines.

Whatever she and the eldest princess had been plotting during the years they had spent together, whatever shape their private design had taken behind closed doors, Yuzuki would keep it hidden behind calm eyes, smooth breathing, and the pretty mask of a girl in leather waiting above the world.

The Rolls-Royce vanished deeper into the lights below.

Yuzuki’s gaze remained on it a moment longer.

Then she smiled faintly.

Like a smile a blade might have worn if steel ever learned patience.

The night moved around her.

The wind kept screaming.

And the Sky Sovereign waited.

****

A/N: This Yuzuki scene is right after after the Lucienne part...