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For the first six months or so, everything is.... fine. The world is saved, right? It's what he wanted. It's what he was fighting for all that time in the Vortex World.
Right?
Still, Naoki spends most of his time waiting for the other shoe to drop, feeling the itch between his shoulderblades where he's expecting an attack to come, looking for demons out of the corners of his eyes. It feels wrong. The idea that it's just over is bizarre.
Isamu and Chiaki are fine. They don't remember the Conception. They don't remember becoming monsters. They don't remember Naoki killing them with his bare hands. Naoki remembers.
He's going through the motions. It's empty. Every little disappointment seethes under his skin. Every imperfection in the world—and the world is full of them—feels like a reproach. The first time he dreams of Amala it's almost a relief.
It's not the first time he's dreamed of the Vortex World since he got back, of course. Nowhere near. He's been reading about trauma and he knows that when he dreams of choking down his first Magatama or the Matador nearly killing him, his brain is trying to figure out how to cope. Coping is hard and it sucks.
But this dream is different somehow. The watery red light of the Labyrinth of Amala plays over his skin and he wonders where his markings have gone. He looks up, and further down the corridor the can see a figure in black. The figure beckons.
He walks down the corridor, his footsteps echoing, and he finds himself picking up his pace until he's running, full speed, hurrying toward the figure that leads him on. He knows where he's going. He can still feel the pull in his blood.
The corridor opens out to the familiar strange honeycomb of openings at the center of each Kalpa he visited. The candelabra are already placed. The figure in black is gone. Naoki steps up to the opening, pressing his hands against the warm, pulsing wall, and looks through.
The old man in the wheelchair sits in the center of the room, and he looks up to meet Naoki's eyes. "We meet again," he says, the first words Naoki has ever heard from him. His voice is deeper and more resonant than his appearance would have suggested; it vibrates up through the wall and Naoki can feel it in his palms. "You're even more like me than I thought."
"Am I?" Naoki asks.
"You aren't content, are you?" Something about his voice feels invasive and familiar, like the scuttling of a Magatama's tiny legs as it crawled down Naoki's throat. "None of the limited options offered to you were enough to satisfy."
"Was there something else I could have done?"
"There's always something else you can do, if you're willing to...." And he's still talking but that's as much as Naoki hears, as the scene dissolves and the angry blare of his alarm drowns out the words.
Well, fuck.
All day he feels like he's sleepwalking. It's terrible. The real world, the world he asked for, feels like a flimsy skin over a yawning abyss. He goes to bed early that night hoping he'll dream of Amala again, and wakes up the next morning frustrated.
The whole week is like that. He has the Matador nightmare once but not another Amala dream. He replays that short scene in his head, sure the old man would have told him what went wrong when he remade the world if only he'd had another few minutes there. He finds himself impatient with everything, worse than usual. He skips classes. He makes excuses not to hang out with anyone. Once, he thinks he sees a preta in an alleyway and goes tearing after it, only to realize after a brief, frantic chase that he was following a stray cat.
Saturday evening instead of going out to party somewhere he's in a gym, punching the heavy bag until his knuckles are raw, until his shoulders ache with the effort of lifting his arms. It's almost cathartic. The bag never snarls, never hisses, never splits satisfyingly like a demon's face. He's so exhausted by the time he gets home that his hands are shaking almost too much to fit the key into the lock.
He falls asleep at his desk in the middle of checking his mail, and wakes up on the floor in the Labyrinth. He's further in than he was in the last dream. When he picks himself up, his hands are still bare, his marks still missing, and that itches in the back of his mind but he starts moving anyway. The figure in black is waiting for him further down, almost but never quite out of sight in the gloom. He's pretty sure it's female. He's pretty sure, honestly, that he knows who it is.
There are more candelabra at the pedestal this time, and the wall feels pliant when he touches it; it has a give to it almost like flesh. His view of the old man is much clearer, much closer. He can see it when the old man smiles up at him. "Welcome back. Where were we?"
"Something else I could do," Naoki prompts.
"Of course. Choices." The old man's voice has more depth to it from this closer position, and it's still strange and invasive but that's all right. It makes Naoki feel like he has his marks back. "You already knew that choosing from your adversary's limited array of options would give you no satisfaction of your own. That's why you went to Kagutsuchi with no Reason to present."
"The Reasons were stupid," Naoki says.
The old man nods once. "They were. And you aren't."
"Flattery. Nice." Naoki's fingers dig into the wall that separates him from the old man's chamber. "And what are you suggesting?"
"War with the one who makes the rules."
Naoki frowns. "I fought Kagutsuchi already, when I ended things. Restarted things. Whatever."
"Kagutsuchi is just a tool," the old man says. "There's a higher authority."
"You... You want me to go to war with God?"
"I think you'd love it." His voice is like claws dragging slowly down Naoki's spine in the best way. "There's nothing like challenging tyranny directly to make you feel alive."
Everything clicks in Naoki's head. "And you'd know, wouldn't you?"
The old man laughs, low and rich. "Come down here and meet me. His minions will try to stop you, but—"
An earsplitting howl makes Naoki double over, clutching his head, and a moment later he realizes he's awake and the noise is the building fire alarm. He fumbles for the essentials and heads for the stairwell, following the other residents out to the sidewalk.
The cool night air clears his head and helps him wake up the rest of the way. As he watches the firefighters arrive to try to contain the blaze flickering in the top-floor windows, he's thinking about war with God.
He doesn't stop thinking about it for days. When Isamu is trying to tell Naoki about his latest grandiose plan to get the attention of some woman who's out of his league, Naoki is remembering what it was like to fight for survival against demons. When Chiaki is taking him out for pastries at some new place she's just found, Naoki is remembering how it felt to crush an opposing force and turn the survivors to his cause. How much harder would it be to take that to the next level? How tough would that battle really be?
What would he be able to do once he won?
He doesn't seem to be able to force the dreams, but while he's waiting he can get ready. He starts looking for information on occult groups active in Tokyo. He spends more time practicing his fighting technique. More than once he does a double take at the sight of a woman in a black suit crossing the street in the distance, but it's never the right one.
One the night of the full moon he finally dreams of Amala a third time. The world comes into focus around him and his heart leaps in his chest at the first sight of its echoing pathways. He's never been this deep inside it before but he feels like he knows exactly where he's going. It feels like there's a current all around him, flowing toward the center of the Labyrinth, magatsuhi flowing to the one who craves it most.
There are branching pathways as Naoki jogs through the Kalpa, and closed doors that would open with a touch, but he knows where he's going. He's not here to get distracted. He's following the current. He has an appointment to keep.
He turns the last corner, and there in front of the door is an angel. Not one of the ones that flocked to Yosuga—not even one of the nasty ones that Chiaki summoned to try to browbeat him into thinking she was right. This one is all shining metal and glowing eyes, probably two and a half meters tall.
"Turn back, son of man," it says as Naoki walks up to it.
He shakes his head. "I need to get through."
"Nobody may pass this door," the angel says, "by the command of our Lord."
"He's no lord of mine."
The angel's eyes flare brighter. "Then perish."
It throws a gout of flame in Naoki's direction, and all his battle instincts come rushing back as the pain washes over him. He's ready for this. He steps into a lunge and smashes his fist into the angel's midsection. That hurts too, but he doesn't mind. It's the kind of hurt that makes him feel alive.
If this weren't a dream he's not sure how this would actually play out, when he has none of his demons to back him up and this angel seems to be a pretty powerful one. But he is dreaming and he knows it, and that lets him shrug off the worst of the angel's attacks and keep fighting, hammering the weak spots where its plating is jointed until it collapses in a heap of empty armor pieces. Naoki kicks them aside and steps up to the door.
He puts both hands on it and pushes, and the door opens easily, swinging inward so he's bathed in light from the room inside. The old man is waiting in his wheelchair, eyes closed, his head bowed as if he's been... not praying, obviously. Resting. Conserving his strength, maybe. When Naoki takes a step into the room he raises his head and opens his eyes, and the smile that spreads across his face is pure triumph.
"My champion," he says. He reaches out with both hands. "Come here."
Naoki crosses the room without hesitation, feeling the weight of each step as he takes it. "Lucifer," he says as he places his hands in the old man's. His knuckles are bloodied from fighting the angel.
"You've done so well to make it here." Lucifer bends forward and kisses Naoki's bloody hands, his lips warm, his touch lingering. The heat spreads across Naoki's skin, energizing and intoxicating.
"I want to do it," he says.
Lucifer looks up. His eyes seem brighter now, his face less lined. "We will."
And then he stands, and as he stands he changes, his body swelling and his skin darkening as horns spiral upward from his forehead and wings erupt from his back. He towers over Naoki like this, and he still holds Naoki's hands in his oversized claws. The power that radiates off him takes Naoki's breath away.
"Powerful and fearless," Lucifer purrs. "Everything I hoped for. Will you ally with me and storm Heaven?"
Naoki looks up, meeting his eyes steadily. "You know that's why I'm here."
Lucifer leans down to kiss him, and maybe it's the dream thing again but Naoki knows this is what makes the alliance real. He parts his lips, welcoming the heat and dizzying strangeness as Lucifer's tongue presses into his mouth. It tastes like smoke, stinging and sharp, and power pulses over Naoki's skin everywhere his marks should be. He leans into it, hungry for more, feeling the currents of magatsuhi shift to eddy around them both.
This time, you'll know what to do, he hears, Lucifer's voice resonating all the way down his spine even as the dream starts to dissolve. We'll take the fight to him, together.
Naoki wakes in the dark and this time nothing is shrieking for his attention. Still, he rolls out of bed and starts getting dressed. He's done waiting. He's done with this disappointing world.
There's a knock at the door just as he's finishing up. He goes to open it and isn't surprised when the woman standing there is wearing all black with a veil over her face. "My master wants to meet you," she says.
"And not just in dreams," Naoki says. He can still taste smoke, lingering on the back of his tongue.
The woman in black nods. "He said you would be ready to do what needs to be done."
Naoki grabs his jacket off the hook by the door. "We've got work to do," he says. "Let's get started."