Dragon Raja

36 - The Devil Inside

Notes
This chapter contains mature/explicit content. Minor descriptions of sexual content. Please read at your own discretion.

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The only thing left of Renata that Y/N had was a note of departure.

We will meet again, it read. Written with swift strokes of a pen, the familiar curve of her letters, and the telltale signature that read her name hastily scribbled at the bottom.

It reminded Y/N—who had forgotten briefly—that it was not Renata who left the note.

Zero left in the dead of night, when Takamagahara's music drowned out the sound of Y/N's bedroom window opening. Exiting through the front doors would cause an intervention, mainly because Zero knew the Ace Team would try and stop her—and not because they wanted her to stay.

Because everything they seemed to do, they did it for Y/N.

And even a fool could understand that their closeness was not that of malice or made up of lies.

Zero was against them holding secrets from Y/N, especially one of the caliber that she was destined to save the world. A secret that even she knew would ultimately crush Y/N's entire being. She was against it.

Yet it took only one look at the people Y/N called her friends, and Zero realized that what may have been a shallow, pitiless operation in the beginning, had turned into something honest and tender.

She wanted to test the Ace Team—are you truly worthy of loving her?

But they insisted that their fondness for Y/N was true—it was just a matter of—how in the hell do they get their vengeance-seeking principal to lay off using her as a tool?

Hilbert Ron Anjou was a man driven by his desire to wipe out the Dragon Raja clan. Zero knew he cared for his students, to the extent that he treated them more as humans than as weapons like the other professors. But treating them as such and viewing them in the same light were two different sides of a coin. She understood the risks they'd all be taking if Y/N was left in his care.

The thought of Y/N being encased in glass, wires tangled across her limbs, screens full of data, and her life being drained away by a man driven by his hatred for the dragons. It sent a shiver down her spine and left certain bitterness in her heart.

It reminded her of how they were at Black Swan Bay. And Zero would die one more time before she let Y/N return to the life of a lab rat.

But if push came to shove, and the Ace Team still had not come clean to Y/N about their secret, Zero knew with one hundred percent certainty that she would keep Y/N safe from Anjou's hands.

Hence, the note she left for Y/N was nothing more than a reminder that she would come back.

And so, as Y/N held the note between her fingers, she put her trust in Zero's words. That indeed, they would be reunited once more.

-

There was an unfamiliar silence that echoed across Takamagahara. From the way she could hear her shoes tapping against the dark tile, she assumed the club had gone out of business. Save for the few day drinkers hunched over at the bar. The only other explanation for its emptiness was most likely because Basara King and Ukyou were off the schedule for the day—their posters weren't posted by the main entry.

She wandered around the hall, even searched the dance floor but found she was the only one that occupied the main lobby.

But a drowsy smile curled upon her lips when she caught sight of her friends gathered in one of the private booths, accompanied by Chime Gen.