My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 757: Hayashi’s Powers

He clapped his hands... the sound split the penthouse like a gunshot — a single percussive crack that ricocheted off marble, glass, and vaulted ceiling and returned from every surface at once.

The air obeyed and two vast magical circles erupted into existence.

One behind him. One before him... both monstrously big.

They rose from floor to ceiling in twin rotating discs that swallowed his body whole and stretched wall to wall, encompassing the entire penthouse in their slow, grinding revolution.

Each circle measured fifteen feet across, spinning in opposite directions so their counter-rotation produced a low harmonic drone that vibrated in the teeth, in the chest, and in the small bones behind the ears.

Their gold pale light bled into their black ominous light across their surfaces — they did more than blending as they warred like old blood darkening into rust, like tarnished ore seeping through volcanic stone, each color claiming its territory in a silent, endless pigment war that had been raging since before either shade had a name.

Seven concentric rings nested inside each circle, every ring spinning at a marginally different speed, every ring carrying its own inscription.

And along those rings, symbols and runic-characters hurtled so fast they smeared into continuous rivers of luminous script spiralling inward toward a single searing point at the centre of each circle — the characters individually illegible, collectively screaming, the sheer velocity of their rotation carving visible friction-heat along the tracks where inscription met edge.

The faded filaments of gold veined through fields of abyssal black.

Where the two colors collided the air itself warped and bent, heat-haze shimmering along the boundary in long rippling bands that distorted the penthouse into something fever-dream and wrong.

Pale smoke bled from the outer edges in slow, lazy tendrils that climbed toward the vaulted ceiling and dissolved — the circles’ own exhaust, the waste-heat of two cosmic-tier engines idling before the real work began.

Hayashi stood between them — a small, drenched man trapped inside two grinding wheels of ancient light — and the circles began to drink in the fog of the Nether Energy.

The fog was actually being dragged in black-violet haze that ripped away from the furniture in long spiralling ribbons, tore free of the silk curtains with an audible hiss of fabric releasing something that had been clinging to it like a lover who refused to let go, peeled off the windows in thick sheets that left the glass weeping with condensation beneath.

It streamed toward the circles’ burning centres in dense, twisting columns so concentrated they cast shadows, briefly occluding the recessed lighting like storm clouds swallowing a low sun.

The penthouse itself shuddered.

Marble vibrated under Hayashi’s shoes in a fine high-frequency tremor that ran through the stone the way a tuning fork’s vibration runs through the table it rests on as the fog seemed to be fighting back — thickening, resisting, pressing against the pull with the blind, stubborn fury.

Hayashi’s jaw locked hard enough to creak.

By the fifth second his suit was damp, sweat blooming across his shoulders and chest in dark spreading patches that turned the ceremonial black fabric even darker.

By the tenth he was drenched — the black cloth plastered to his frame in wet, clinging sheets, salt-and-pepper hair flattened against his temples in dark streaks, sweat carving clean rivers down his neck and dripping from his chin onto the marble in a steady, obscene rhythm that sounded, in the grinding silence between the circles’ revolutions, like a metronome counting down toward something inevitable.

His body was cooking from the inside.

Every pore was dumping heat and water as the raw Nether Energy poured through him — through whatever impossible thing he carried in his blood that let him survive what should have killed him — filtered, stripped of its lethality, and vented out through the circles into whatever abyss he was routing it toward.

His veins burned while his vision pulsed.

The grey light in his irises flared brighter with every second, the displacement pushing further, the last human register retreating deeper into whatever cosmic shelf the grey light was drawing from.

The circles ground faster. The symbols screamed along their tracks, the smeared rivers of luminous script blurring into solid bands of light that hummed at frequencies the human ear registered only as pressure in the teeth and chest and small bones behind the ears.

By the fifteenth second the fog was thinning, natural light bled back through in warm amber bands, the city glow reclaiming the windows inch by inch, the bruised violet retreating from the glass in slow, sullen surrender.

By the twentieth, the air was clean and the penthouse gleamed once more.

Marble shone wet beneath the recessed lighting — the condensation left behind by the fog’s violent departure catching the warm amber light and scattering it in small prismatic bursts across the walls.

Silk hung unstained and weightless... every trace of the Nether Energy fog — every prowling tendril that had made itself at home in the penthouse’s vast expensive interior — had been ripped out of the space and devoured by two circles that had, in the span of twenty seconds, consumed enough raw Nether Energy to kill every living thing on this floor, the floor below, and possibly the floor below that.

The circles collapsed finally as gold and black light folded inward — the seven concentric rings decelerating in sequence, the outermost freezing first and the innermost last, the symbols halting mid-revolution in frozen script that held its position for a single suspended heartbeat before the entire structure crumpled into nothing with a resonant hum that pulsed once through the marble and went still.

Hayashi’s knees gave out and hit hit the marble at the same time like a wet, graceless slap.

He knelt there in the puddle his own body had produced, hands braced on his thighs, chest heaving, the ceremonial suit squelching against his skin with every breath.

The puddle spread beneath his knees in a slow, committed circle that the marble’s polished surface did nothing to absorb.

His reflection looked up at him from the wet stone — grey-lit eyes, drenched hair, grinning, because he had just arm-wrestled a goddess’s leaking divinity and won on points.

And then — because the man was, beneath the suit and the grey-lit eyes and the decades of impossible service, fundamentally and irreducibly himself — Hayashi looked down at the puddle, looked up at the gleaming, pristine penthouse, and grinned wider.

"Well," he said aloud, to no one, to the unconscious goddess behind the bedroom door, to the building itself. "Hayashi-san seems to have something in common with the Young Master’s angel boy today."

He laughed — a short, exhausted bark, he thought, like a man who had just bench-pressed a mountain and wanted someone to know about it.

"The Prince of Puddles. And now the Manager of Puddles." He wiped his chin with the back of his hand, the motion leaving a wet streak across his sleeve.

"At least mine is honest work."

He fished his phone from inside his jacket — the fabric squelching as he moved, the sound deeply undignified, which he chose to find amusing rather than humiliating because the alternative was admitting that the most powerful hotel manager in the world was kneeling in his own sweat on ten hundred-thousand-dollar marble — and typed with wet fingers.

He could have cleaned the puddle himself if he summoned what little remained in him and burned the evidence off the marble with a gesture.

But he had nothing left.

Pulling the Nether Energy out of this penthouse had been like carrying a mountain on his back and holding it there while the mountain tried to crush him, and now that he had set it down, his body was cashing in every debt at once and the only currency it accepted was sweat and stillness and the wet indignity of kneeling in his own mess on the most expensive marble in the building.

He would wait for housekeeping.

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A/N:I want your thoughts for both Chapters... the Mirror Dimension and Hayashi’s character.