Ren's days did get fuller.
But for him, that just meant they finally started to feel… proportional.
To his strength.
To his Dao.
To the way his Heaven hummed quietly above the world, twelve Fate Palaces fused into a single vault that could erase war gods with a thought—and yet spent most mornings making sure his girlfriends remembered to eat breakfast.
His schedule looked absurd written down.
Days were spent cultivation sessions with whoever he'd roped into experimenting with the new Soul Palace system. Or evenings that, somehow, always turned into movie nights, cuddle piles, private dates, or all three stacked together because devils didn't know what the phrase "slow down" meant.
And threaded through all of that, the quiet weight of his Heaven.
...
The manor adjusted first.
Rias, Akeno, Asia, Koneko—his first center of gravity—had always been a little clingy.
And now with his ever-expansive courting, that clinginess turned shameless.
Rias hooked an arm through his on reflex whenever they shared a hallway, claiming his side of the couch by sheer demonic will. Sometimes she didn't even look conscious of it; her body just had a setting called "Ren is near" and defaulted to contact.
Akeno developed the mysterious ability to appear at his shoulder whenever he stopped moving for more than thirty seconds. One blink—empty doorway. Second blink—Akeno, smile soft, eyes half-lidded, fingers tracing lazy circles on his chest if he let her.
Asia shadowed him like a small, determined sunbeam, hands always just shy of his sleeve, presence warm and earnest. She'd gotten taller, stronger, Soul Palaces humming with Twilight, but around him she still shone with that gentle, stubborn warmth that made gods feel guilty.
Koneko's tail looped around his wrist whenever they stood still, Touki a faint purr under her skin. She never said anything about it. She just… hooked in, as if anchoring herself to something that would not move.
He let them.
Then the others started leaning in harder too.
Serafall "just happened" to need more in-person briefings.
Calls that could've been messages turned into visits. Visits turned into her teleporting directly into the manor's lounge with stacks of documents and an arm already looping through his.
"Ren-chaaaan~ I need you to explain this whole 'merit loop' thing again," she'd sing, already grabbing a cushion. "And also, look at this new outfit idea I had for Levi-tan's show…"
Sona scheduled more study sessions that somehow involved him sitting between her and Rias while they argued about logistics literally over his shoulders, half their diagrams drifting through his Heaven because it was "more convenient" to pin them there.
Kuroka and Koneko began a silent war over his lap during movie nights.
No declarations. No rules.
Just Kuroka casually stretching across him like an oversized cat, tails curling around his waist—then the next night, Koneko arriving ten minutes early and simply sitting on him first, white ears flicking in quiet victory when Kuroka slunk in, eyes narrowing.
Penemue upgraded from "shamelessly flirting Cadre" to "Cadre who sometimes stole his pillows and pretended it was his fault," drifting into his room to "borrow" a book and, somehow, ending up draped across his bed making lazy conversation about magic theory.
Griselda allowed herself, with heroic effort, to message him first once in a while.
The first time she did, Gabriel watched her stare at the composed message for a full five minutes before she hit send.
[Are you free to discuss a possible adjustment to the training protocols for the Church's exorcists?]
Ren replied in thirty seconds.
[Sure. Want to come by the manor or want me to swing by Heaven?]
She'd had to sit down for that.
Irina learned that "I'm free this afternoon" was not a confession of weakness but a tactical declaration.
"Really? Really? Afternoon-afternoon, or like, 'for ten minutes between saving worlds' afternoon?" she demanded, eyes wide, wings flapping.
"Real afternoon," he said, amused. "Actual date-length time."
She nearly dropped her sword.
Xenovia discovered that "training" and "making out until we're both breathless" could, in fact, be part of the same schedule block.
"Ren," she said once, cheeks red, sword still in hand as she caught her breath. "Is this… efficient?"
"Extremely," he said, completely straight-faced. "You learn target focus and stamina. I get to enjoy your company. Everyone wins."
She muttered something about "unfair boss" and then dragged him down for another kiss anyway.
Ren took all of it in stride.
Limitless stamina and mental endurance meant he could run Heaven, teach cultivation, and soothe anxious girlfriends without his heartbeat ever leaving that calm, steady rhythm.
His Ancient Ming bloodline devoured fatigue as happily as it did hostile energy. The Immortal Soul Bone kept his mind sharp enough to juggle crises, romance, and teaching notes all at once.
For anyone else, it might have been exhausting.
For Ren Ming, it was heaven.
And some days, heaven smelled like dragonfire.
...
He found Tiamat in the Dimensional Gap.
Of course he did.
It was the one place that matched her mood: endless, raging, impossible to map by sane senses.
The Gap roiled around him in slow, restless tides—colors that weren't colors, distance that didn't mean anything to ordinary space. Great Red's dream-trails looped lazily through the void in the far distance, thick arcs of unreal light sliding across nothing, reshaping rules as they passed. The whole place hummed with a wild, hungry energy that made gods nervous.
Tiamat floated at the center of her own little storm.
Ren stepped onto a piece of nothing and made it solid.
The Gap pressed against him, testing, like an ocean trying to swallow a rock. His Dao answered. Heaven's weight tilted down—not crushing, not invading, just present. The madness of the Gap recoiled from that quiet, layered law, then bent, paths smoothing out around his feet.
He walked.
No magic circles. No fanfare. Just a guy in casual clothes and an invisible dome of fused Fate Palaces following after him like a second sky.
He stopped a short distance from her coiled bulk and tilted his head back.
"Busy day?" he called up.
Tiamat's head shifted. One enormous blue eye rotated toward him, slit pupil narrowing with faint interest.
"Human," she said, voice a low, amused rumble that made the Gap shiver. "Here to ask me for another favor?"
Ren smiled, lazy and sure.
"Favor is a funny way to say you want to hang out," he said. "But today's a little different for you."
She snorted. A curl of dragonfire rolled from her nostrils, washing over the nearby void. It didn't burn anything; the Gap simply refused to acknowledge that fire existed, and the flame bit back, refusing to be dispelled. The result rippled out as a clash of concepts, making space fuzz over.
"Oh?" she drawled. "What could someone like you possibly want from me, if not power?"
He met her gaze without flinching, hands in his pockets, standing on a single Dao-stabilized platform in the middle of pure insanity like it was a sidewalk.
"Now, now," he said, mouth quirking. "What did we say about this? I don't need your blood, or your backing, or your hoard. All I want is your time, like always." His eyes softened. "In your human form."
Silence stretched.
Then her body glowed. Blue dragonfire surged inward, scales dissolving into light. The Gap dimmed under the force of the transformation, currents stuttering as an ancient, deep-dragon aura compressed.
When it cleared, a woman floated where the dragon had been.
Long, straight pale blue hair spilled down her back. Dark blue eyes regarded him with cold, restless intelligence. A navy dress hugged a body that looked made to crush arrogant gods and idiots both. The lethal beauty of the dragon didn't disappear—it condensed, wrapped around her like a cloak made of sharp edges.
She crossed her arms under her chest.
"Say that again," Tiamat said.
Ren looked a little up now instead of far up.
"I want your time," he repeated easily. "Just you. Just Tiamat. On a date."
One of her eyes twitched.
"Do you even know what a 'date' with a dragon entails?" she asked flatly.
Ren's smile tilted, half amused, half warm.
"From everything we've already done together?" he said. "Yeah, I think I've got a pretty solid idea."
She stared another second.
Then she laughed—short, sharp, startled, like the sound had been pried out of her.
"You're unbelievable," she muttered. "Humans ask me for my blood, my fire, my backing. Not… this."
"Heh. Everyone's too cautious." Ren shrugged. "I thought you already knew—I don't give a damn about that boring stuff. What I'm asking for is harder to get."
Her pupils narrowed, interest sharpening.
"You really are dangerous," she murmured.
"So I've been constantly told." He extended a hand, palm open, tone light. "So. You coming with me?"
Tiamat looked at his hand. At the endless, featureless "freedom" around them that had, over centuries, become another kind of cage.
"…Fine," she said at last. "One date. If you bore me, I throw you into a white dwarf."
"That's fair," he said, entirely sincere. "Free orbital experience."
She stared.
"…You make the dumbest metaphors," she said.
"Don't worry," Ren replied. "I'm very good at backing them up."
He took her hand.
The Dimensional Gap folded.
...
They reappeared over an ocean.
Not Kuoh's bay. Not Kyoto's rivers.
An open, empty stretch of sea far from human shipping lines. The sun hung low, painting the water in molten gold. Wind rushed up to meet them, salt sharp and clean, waves rolling in long, lazy swells.
Ren's Heaven slid closer.
Not crushing, not threatening—just a vast, invisible dome above the sky, its laws whispering to the world: Be still. Be safe.
Weather patterns smoothed. Waves calmed, shifting from rough chop to dignified motion. Any wandering sea monster or bored deity brushed against that unseen field and got the quiet, heavy suggestion that today was a very good day to nap elsewhere.
Tiamat hovered in the air, hair and skirt flicking in the wind.
"Romantic," she said dryly. "You brought a dragon to the sea. Should I take offense?"
"Not at all," he said. "I brought a dragon to a place big enough that if she loses her temper, it's just pretty spray."
She almost smiled.
"Careful," she said. "Flattery gets you eaten."
"That just sounds like a good time."
He stepped forward, barely a whisper of movement—and the air itself shaped under his foot, Dao lines sketching a platform. Another step, and the lines extended, weaving into a broad, invisible terrace in the sky.
Tiamat raised an eyebrow.
"Show-off," she said.
"Obviously," he replied. "Come here."
He gestured to the edge of the platform.
She didn't move at first.
Then, with that same dignity that made even other Dragon Kings hesitate, Tiamat walked forward until they stood side by side, looking out over the darkening water.
For a time, they just… watched.
Sea birds wheeled in slow arcs far below, then veered away without understanding why. The sun slid lower. Ren's Heaven dimmed its presence, letting the natural world breathe, just stabilized—a stage light lowered instead of blinding.
"…It's quiet," she said eventually.
"I'm cheating," he admitted. "Your aura makes lesser beings panic. I tuned the area so anything under Dragon King level just… doesn't get the urge to come close."
Her mouth curved.
"So this is a Ren Ming-brand nature preserve," she said. "For dragons and troublemakers."
"Basically."
She turned her head, studying his profile.
"You never once fear me," she observed.
He met her eyes, calm.
"Why would I?" Ren chuckled. "All I see here is an amazing woman."
"Arrogant," she said.
"Confident," he corrected.
Her lips twitched.
The wind tugged at her hair. A strand whipped across her face; she made a small, annoyed sound and brushed it back, fingers elegant and just a little rough from centuries of war.
Ren reached into his coat, pulled out a simple hair tie he'd lifted from Ravel's "emergency supplies" drawer earlier, and held it up.
"May I?" he asked.
Tiamat blinked.
"What."
"Your hair," he said. "It's going to keep attacking you."
"I can handle my own hair, human."
"I know," he said patiently. "I'm still asking."
She should have refused.
On principle. On pride. On habit.
Instead, after a long heartbeat, she turned around and tilted her head forward, giving him access.
Her hair fell like a waterfall.
Ren's fingers slid through it with careful, unhurried motions, gathering pale blue strands, smoothing out wind-tangles with a touch that was more massage than practical grooming. The texture was cool, like water that had forgotten to follow gravity.
"You're very quiet," she muttered.
"Enjoying the view," he said lightly. "And the excuse to touch you."
Her ears went a little pink.
"Tch," she said. "Shameless."
"Honest," he said.
He finished tying her hair in a loose knot at the back of her head. A few strands escaped; he let them, framing her face.
Tiamat turned back to him.
"Well?" she demanded.
"Beautiful," he said simply.
Her eyes narrowed, searching his face for the joke.
She didn't find one.
"…You're annoyingly good at that," she grumbled.
"At what?"
"Making sincerity sound like flirting," she said.
"Have you considered the possibility I mean every word I say?"
She clicked her tongue and looked away, back at the horizon.
"Don't look at me like that," she snapped.
"Like what?"
"Like you're seeing through all my scales," she said. "It's rude."
He chuckled.
"I like your scales," he said. "And the steel under them. And the part of you that pretends not to care about anyone but keeps showing up anyway when idiots play with power they don't understand."
Her jaw tightened.
He didn't push.
He just leaned against the invisible rail and let the silence stretch again, comfortable.
After a while, Tiamat exhaled.
"Why me?" she asked quietly. "You have devils and angels and foxes and gods orbiting you now. What does a dragon king who spends most of her time alone in the Gap offer someone like you?"
He tilted his head.
"A woman who's seen centuries of stupidity and still hasn't given up on watching the world," he said. "Someone whose first instinct isn't to cling, but to stand beside. Someone who understands what it means to be… other."
His gaze flicked up, briefly, toward the unseen Heaven above, then back to her.
"Someone who looks at my Dao and doesn't just ask, 'What can it do for me,'" he went on, "but also: 'How does it fit with what I am.'"
Her breath hitched, too soft for anyone without his Dao-sense to catch.
"…You noticed," she said.
"I notice everything about you," he said. "You can see I'm a fast learner."
She snorted.
"You're impossible," she muttered.
"Pretty sure that's your line," he said. "Mine's: come here."
He opened his arms.
Tiamat stared at them like they were some new battlefield formation she hadn't trained against.
"I am not a pet dragon," she warned.
"I'd never insult you like that," he said. "I'm inviting a woman I respect to let herself lean on someone for five minutes."
Her eyes flicked away—to the horizon, to the endless stretch of sky with nothing to hold onto but her own wings and old anger.
"…Five minutes," she said.
She stepped into his space.
He wrapped his arms around her waist, drawing her in gently, giving her plenty of room to shove him away if the instinct struck.
It didn't.
She was cool to the touch—not cold, not distant, just… like mountain stone in starlight. Her aura pressed automatically, testing, tasting for weakness. His Hell Suppressing Physique took the pressure like it weighed nothing. His Dao curled around her presence, not subduing, not challenging—simply recognizing, acknowledging, folding her into the space he'd carved.
Tiamat's hands hovered awkwardly for a moment.
Then, slowly, they came to rest on his back, fingers bunching in his coat.
"…You're very warm," she said.
"I cheat," he murmured against her hair. "Closed-loop reactor, remember."
"I hate that I understand that metaphor now," she grumbled into his shoulder.
"Blame Myriad Origin," he said. "I'm innocent."
"Liar."
She felt his chuckle rumble through his chest.
They stood like that, floating above the sea while the world turned. His Heaven adjusted itself in the background, redirecting stray magical currents, making sure no curious god or dragon chose this exact spot to peek.
Gulls wheeled below, then settled on the water instead of bothering them. Distant clouds reshaped themselves along lines his Dao preferred, turning into soft, towering palaces of gold and white.
After a while, Tiamat shifted just enough to look up.
"Ren," she said quietly.
"Yeah?"
"Do it properly," she said, eyes challenging and a little too bright. "You asked me on a date. You don't get to stop at hugs."
His smile sharpened, then softened at the edges.
"Your wish," he said, "is my favorite kind of command."
He bent his head.
He didn't attack.
He didn't overwhelm.
He kissed her like he did everything else—with unshakable confidence and unhurried intent, as if there were infinite time and he planned to savor every beat of her wings.
Her lips were cool at first, then warmed against his. Her hands tightened, dragging him closer. For someone who had spent centuries pretending boredom at everything, Tiamat kissed like a dragon laying claim—possessive, annoyed at herself for wanting, and completely unable to stop.
He let her set the pace.
When they finally parted, the ocean below had turned to silver. Her cheeks carried the faintest hint of color; her eyes, usually narrowed in faint disdain, were wide and very, very alive.
"…I am going to destroy you if you ever tell anyone how much I enjoyed that," she said, voice low.
He brushed a thumb along her cheekbone, smile lazy and sincere.
"Relax," he said. "If any of them ask, I'll just say the mighty Tiamat deigned to tolerate me for a few hours."
Her mouth twitched.
"…Idiot," she murmured.
She didn't pull away.
...
Seekvaira Agares did not do casual.
She did timetables. Structure. Elegant, strict noblewoman posture and a sharper tongue than most devils dared meet head-on.
Underneath that, though… there was something else.
A flame that roared only when the subject turned to giant robots. An excitement so intense it cracked through her cool demeanor like light through stained glass.
Ren built the date around that.
He didn't take her to a restaurant or a ball.
He took her to a hangar.
Technically, it had started life as one of Ajuka's experimental warehouses—a pocket dimension full of prototype magic circles, disassembled Regalia, and half-finished weapons whose blueprints made even devils with long life spans nervous.
Ajuka had grudgingly agreed to "loan" it for a day when Ren promised not to break the fabric of reality too much.
Now, the door opened into a cavernous space lit by soft overhead crystals.
And something else.
Seekvaira stepped through and stopped dead.
Her glasses flashed.
The hangar was full.
They stood in neat rows and dramatic poses.
Constructs inspired by the designs Seekvaira had doodled in the margins of her documents, sketched in the corners of her notes, and spilled out in frantic, enthusiastic info-dumps when she forgot to be composed.
Towering humanoid frames with sweeping armor. Sleek, knight-like silhouettes armed with lances and shields. Broad-shouldered artillery suits bristling with cannon-mounts. A few smaller, agile units built for speed and knife-range fighting.
Each metal giant glowed faintly with his Dao-essence: not fully functional war machines, but solid, climbable, pilotable shells with enough inner structure to move, fight, and feel like the real thing.
Some were almost exact copies of her pencil lines, translated into demonic alloy and invisible Dao frameworks. Others were extrapolations—"what this design would look like if she had another decade to refine it," as his Immortal Soul Bone had put it.
Seekvaira took one slow step forward, hand covering her mouth.
"…You…" she breathed. "You… made them."
Ren leaned against a nearby railing, hands in his pockets, watching her with open amusement.
"Technically, I manifested them," he said. "They're not permanent. The Dao essence will dissolve if I don't feed it. But they'll hold for as long as we're here."
She whirled around.
"That's not the point," she snapped, then visibly reeled her voice back in, spine straightening. "I mean. That is. But—"
She jabbed a finger at one of the larger constructs, eyes blazing behind her glasses.
"That knee joint is an original design," she said. "I only ever sketched it in my personal notes. No one else saw that draft."
"I know," he said. "You left the notebook on my table once. My Soul Bone doesn't like ignoring interesting patterns."
Her face flushed.
"You read my private schematics," she accused.
"I admired your genius," he corrected, completely unrepentant. "And then I made a playground."
He pushed away from the railing and walked toward her, the solid weight of his aura comfortably contained, like a mountain wrapped in silk.
"Seekvaira," he said. "Let's go break physics."
Her composure cracked.
For a second, the future head of the Agares clan vanished.
In her place stood a woman whose heart had just been tripped by a giant robot.
"…You realize," she said slowly, "that this is the single most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me."
"I had a feeling," he said.
...
They started with a cockpit.
The mech she chose wasn't the biggest or the flashiest.
It was one of her more refined designs—sleek lines, efficient armor, a focus on maneuverability and precision over raw brute force. Normal devils would have run straight for the giant cannons.
Seekvaira ran straight for the machine she'd spent the most time thinking about.
She ran a hand along its leg, fingers tracing the seams like she was checking for flaws in a lover's skin.
"…The balance is correct," she muttered. "Center of gravity… acceptable. You even accounted for the recoil on the shoulder mounts, how did you—"
"Immortal Soul Bone," he said lightly, tapping his spine. "I watched you explain this stuff once. The rest was pattern work."
She shot him a look that was half offended, half embarrassed, and ninety percent impressed.
"Get in," she said abruptly.
He blinked.
"Both of us?" he asked. "You sure? I take up a lot of narrative space."
"Get in," she repeated, ears tinged red now.
He grinned and obeyed.
The cockpit adjusted around them as they settled into the dual seats—her in front, hands sliding over the control surfaces like she'd been born to them; him behind, one arm braced casually along the back of her chair, not quite touching her shoulders.
The interior wrapped around them in smooth lines of metal and crystal. Demonic glyphs glowed on the panels, linked into unseen circuits of Dao that Ren had woven into the frame.
His Heaven's laws reached down and gently locked the hangar's space into a stable structure.
Ajuka's original connections—dangerous portals, experimental compression fields—were neatly sealed. In their place, Ren had built a contained battle realm around the hangar, a training space nested inside a pocket dimension.
His Dao threaded quietly through the mech's inner lines, linking with the control schema Seekvaira had sketched. He didn't override anything. He just smoothed the feedback, translating her inputs into motion without the usual drag of physical constraints.
Outside, the other mechs hummed faintly, reacting to his Heaven's presence like metal instruments vibrating when the orchestra tuned.
The hangar doors opened.
Or rather, the walls bent.
Space peeled back in a smooth curve, revealing a sky too wide to fit inside a normal facility.
"Ready?" he murmured.
Seekvaira's heart thudded.
He could feel it through the thin space between them, through the subtle tug of Myriad Origin circulation he'd taught her in passing as "stress management." She'd taken to the breathing exercises quickly, using them to keep herself from verbally murdering certain other noble heirs.
Now, as she wrapped her fingers around the controls, that same circulation steadied her.
She inhaled.
"Let's fly," she said.
...
Outside, the pocket dimension's sky unfolded into a vast, simulated battlefield.
Floating platforms at different heights. Obstacle towers like skyscrapers half-crumbled. Drifting "asteroids" of condensed Dao-essence that moved along pre-set paths, hard enough to smash through a building, soft enough to not kill anyone if Ren didn't let them.
Ajuka's monitoring arrays flickered in a parallel layer, already preparing to write an angry report about how this was supposed to be a storage space.
Ren let his Heaven's laws brush the edges of the realm, anchoring it, preventing any stray blast from tearing the whole thing open.
Seekvaira moved.
The mech leaped.
Weight, inertia, thrust—everything translated perfectly under her hands. No lag. No mushy response. The machine responded like an extension of her body.
Her serious expression shattered.
Her eyes lit up.
She dove.
The mech dropped like a stone, only to flare its thrusters and skim sideways along a floating platform's underside. She rolled, weaving between drifting obstacles, the giant frame dancing with a grace that made Ajuka's long-range cameras twitch in disbelief.
She fired.
Concussive rounds of condensed demonic power boomed across the fake sky, slamming into target drones that had manifested along the edges. They detonated in bright bursts of harmless light, the recoil absorbed by the frame's joints—the very joints she'd once worried about in the margins of a notebook.
Laser lines traced graceful arcs, leaving glowing trails in the air before fading.
Artificial gravity hummed and shifted.
Ren fed energy into the system without fanfare, using a sliver of Myriad Origin's closed loop to recycle spent power back into the mech's core. Every time her reserves should have dipped, they refilled, matching the rhythm of her breath.
Seekvaira laughed.
It wasn't polite.
It wasn't measured.
It was exultant, sharp with joy, the sound of someone whose inner world—usually all ledgers and duties and strict expectations—had suddenly been given permission to just play.
"You're terrifying," she said over the comm, eyes blazing behind her glasses. "Do you know that?"
"Flattered," he answered easily. "Angle thirty degrees, three o'clock. Try that knee joint you were worrying about."
She yanked the controls.
The mech twisted, tucked, and slammed into a complex evasive maneuver that would have crumpled lesser frames. The joint held. The machine absorbed the force, redistributed it, came out of the spin with momentum to spare.
Seekvaira made a choked sound.
"…Perfect," she whispered.
"Of course it is," he said. "You designed it."
Targets appeared.
Ren didn't spawn boss-type enemies or anything too ridiculous. Just enough threat to force her to think—faster drones swarming from multiple vectors, sniper platforms pinging her with long-range shots, heavy suits lumbering in from the edges.
Her tactical mind snapped fully into gear.
"Three heavy units at seven o'clock," she muttered. "Drones forming a pincer. Sniper platforms… tsk, cheap shot."
She moved.
The mech vaulted onto one floating tower, used it as a springboard to flip over the swarm. She rotated the torso mid-air, cannons tracking separate targets, firing in precise bursts that took out the snipers first.
Ren watched over her shoulder, one hand resting loosely at the back of her seat.
He could have made the machine dance for her.
He didn't.
He just nudged the world.
A drifting Dao rock shifted just enough to give her a jump point when she needed it. Gravity flexed in a narrow corridor, letting her mech slide through an otherwise impossible angle. Waste energy from her shots flowed back into the core instead of bleeding out as useless heat.
Myriad Epoch True Self Canon quietly carved every success and failure into her Soul Palaces as tiny Dao Fruits—future instincts waiting to ripen.
Seekvaira might not know the names.
Her body understood the results.
"Left, now," Ren said lazily.
She obeyed on reflex.
A moment later, a barrage of enemy fire shredded the space she'd just vacated.
She hissed between her teeth.
"You could at least pretend this is hard for you," she said.
"It's your show," he replied. "I'm just the stage crew."
She snorted, but her shoulders relaxed just a fraction.
Minutes stretched.
They fought through waves, her mecha carving bright trails through the simulated sky. Sometimes she wove among enemies like a dancer; other times she anchored herself and turned into an immovable turret, raining precise fire across the field.
Not once did the frame falter.
Not once did Ren let the environment betray her.
When she finally docked the mech back in its berth, the cockpit eased into stillness.
Silence fell.
Her hands stayed on the controls for a moment, fingers trembling minutely.
Then she turned, twisting in her seat to face him.
"You did all of this," she said softly. "For me."
"Yes."
Her eyes searched his face, looking for the catch, the hidden political angle, the debt he might call in later.
She didn't find anything but calm pride and that relaxed affection he carried like a second skin.
"…Why?" she asked.
"You spend too much time being the scary, efficient noble," he said. "The woman who threatens to kill Zephyrdor if he misbehaves, who holds her territory and her responsibilities together with sheer will."
His hand slid down, resting lightly on the back of her seat, not quite on her shoulder.
"I wanted you to have a day where you didn't have to be anything but a girl who loves giant robots," he said simply. "And to show you that I see that part of you too."
Her throat worked.
"That's… stupidly unfair," she said hoarsely.
"I specialize in unfair," he replied.
Her composure cracked.
She reached up, grabbed the front of his shirt, and pulled him down.
The kiss was awkward at first—she misjudged the angle; her glasses almost jabbed his cheek. He adjusted, cupped the back of her head, and met her halfway.
Seekvaira kissed like she piloted: precise, focused, all-in once she committed.
Her fingers clenched in his shirt, dragging him closer over the small gap between seats. The cockpit's ambient lights reflected in her lenses; when she finally broke away, they were fogged slightly.
"…I am very inexperienced at this," she muttered, cheeks blazing.
"You're doing great," he said, voice low and sincere. "We can practice until you feel like an expert."
She squinted at him.
"That was almost a bad line," she said.
"Almost," he agreed. "You still smiled, though."
She huffed.
"…Shut up," she said. "And stay. We're not done test-running the shoulder mounts."
"Yes, ma'am."
He stayed.
...
They spent the rest of the "date" swapping between piloting, tweaking code, and kissing between simulation runs.
Sometimes Seekvaira ranted at length about obscure mecha trivia, hands carving diagrams in the air while Ren listened with honest interest, asking just enough questions to keep her going.
Sometimes he pointed out tiny inefficiencies in her designs—places where waste energy could be caught and fed back into the frame, where her own budding Myriad Origin circulation could hook into the mech's systems.
Once, when she pushed too hard and nearly overloaded the core, his Heaven stepped in—quietly redirecting the surge into the training realm's boundary instead of letting it backfire.
Ajuka's long-range monitoring arrays quietly logged the readings.
Later, staring at the insane figures, he would pinch the bridge of his nose and mutter about "children breaking the universe."
For now, it was just the two of them in a cockpit, wrapped in the glow of control panels and the steady hum of a machine born from her dreams and his Dao.
When they finally stepped back out into the hangar proper, Seekvaira took one last, lingering look at the rows of mechs.
"Will they… stay?" she asked quietly.
"For a while," he said. "They're tied to my Heaven. As long as you want to come back and play, I'll keep the pattern anchored."
She pressed her lips together.
"That's dangerous," she said. "You're telling a mecha otaku she can come pilot giant robots whenever she wants."
"I'm counting on it," he said.
Her ears went red again.
She adjusted her glasses just to have something to do with her hands.
"Thank you," she said finally, voice soft and formal and completely sincere. "For today."
He smiled.
"Anytime, Seekvaira. Seriously. Just say the word."
She hesitated.
Then, in a rare breach of her own rules, she leaned in and kissed his cheek—quick, precise, like stamping a seal on a document.
"Then I'll take you up on that," she said.