Chapter 226: I, Stark, Am a Clever Little Fox
Yukari came very close to producing something she hadn't produced in several thousand years — a genuine, involuntary spit-take.
Mating season. Where had he gotten mating season from? She was a youkai sage. The concept simply did not apply to her the way it applied to animals. From the moment of her existence, the phrase had never been relevant.
She opened her mouth to say this.
"I've always wondered," Ryū continued, with the curiosity of someone genuinely puzzling through a question, "how you've managed across all these years when those periods arrive. Do you just endure it? Can you actually hold out that long?"
"THERE IS NO MATING SEASON! The Youkai Sage does not have a mating season! Where do you even — who told you—"
She caught herself. Too loud.
Several pairs of eyes had drifted over from nearby positions. The Chat Group members who'd been looking elsewhere were now looking here, expressions occupying a range from thoughtful to ostentatiously neutral to one or two people nodding slowly as though pieces were falling into place.
Tatsumaki, who had been floating a few centimetres off the ground on psychokinetic instinct, extended one finger and poked Kaguya in the arm.
"Little Kaguya," she said, in a voice that was not actually very quiet, "you seem to have acquired a rival. And a formidable one at that — aggressive, direct, no subtlety whatsoever. Your approach, by contrast, has been quite gentle. At this rate, Yukari-senpai is going to run circles around you."
Kaguya made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
"Should you maybe take more direct action? I could help you strategise. I haven't personally been in a relationship, but I've seen enough. Watched probably fifty romance dramas and films at this point. The theory is solid."
Kaguya's face had taken on a colour that suggested either fever or a different kind of elevated temperature.
"This is my professional assessment as Tornado-nee, by the way — you can't just let senpai dominate the field like this. You need to—"
Kizaru leaned over and said quietly, "You might want to lower your voice."
Tatsumaki blinked. Looked around.
Every face in the vicinity was oriented toward her.
She cleared her throat once and resumed her previous altitude in silence. The extra centimetres of height off the ground contributed nothing to the situation but she maintained them anyway.
Josuke, standing nearby, was wearing an expression of mixed feelings.
The group Admin's natural female magnetism was a genuine phenomenon. He'd observed it over the course of the group's history and the data was clear. Every female member of the group had, to varying degrees, some kind of reaction to Ryū that exceeded what you'd expect from a normal group relationship.
And Josuke remained here, being a normal young man with normal attributes.
Why is there such a gap? He's just a bit better looking. A bit. That's all.
It's fine.
It's completely fine.
The small interlude resolved itself into the background as time passed. Tony had apparently found the right leverage points with Thor, because the Asgardian who'd descended into the crater as a deflated former god had emerged with something that looked increasingly like renewed purpose. Tony had moved through whatever script he'd prepared and the result was visible.
The two of them were now interacting with the warmth of people who had known each other for years.
Ryū watched this and shook his head, not with disapproval — with something closer to admiring resignation.
Tony Stark convinced a several-thousand-year-old thunder deity to treat him as a close friend in approximately forty minutes. That's a specific and impressive skillset.
He had no intention of intervening in the Destroyer plotline. That encounter was necessary. Thor needed to go through it. Whatever growth came out of that confrontation couldn't be bypassed from the outside without preventing the development that came after, and preventing Thor's development served no one. Certainly not the future Avengers configuration Tony was already building toward.
Also: no Points for defeating the Destroyer.
That observation did meaningful work in the decision.
Let Tony assist. Good for team-bonding. Good for the long game.
The group drifted back toward the villa over the following hour. There wasn't much left to do at the small western town — the hammer had been lifted, the thunder god had been processed, the Ancient One had come and gone without incident. The S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives would file reports. Coulson would eventually reach Fury.
This had, in fact, already happened.
In the S.H.I.E.L.D. director's office, Nick Fury sat with a one-page summary of approximately a thousand English words and spent considerably longer than one might expect reading it.
Visitors from another dimensional reality.
He'd known strange things. He'd built his career on the catalogue of strange things that happened in the world and required management. He'd encountered entities, artefacts, technologies, organisms — the breadth of unusual was something he navigated professionally.
Visitors from other dimensions was a new column in the spreadsheet.
He turned to the problem practically.
Strong-arm approach: excluded. The report described a group that had produced localised seismic effects and atmospheric manipulation with apparent ease. "Walking nuclear devices" was Coulson's phrasing, with the caveat that the term was probably underselling it. Approaching a group fitting that description with a strong-arm posture meant S.H.I.E.L.D. came apart before the day was over.
Wait and observe: the most defensible option. They'd said four to five days and then they'd leave. If that was true, the problem resolved itself. If it wasn't true, he'd have to go himself and have a conversation.
He wasn't confident about his odds in that conversation.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose and thought about Tony Stark.
Stark appeared to know these people. Or to have become acquainted with them recently. Either way, there was a relationship there that hadn't existed before, and that relationship was probably the most useful angle available.
Getting anything useful out of Tony Stark was a project of its own.
He's a capitalist with no particular incentive to cooperate with me and every incentive to know more than he tells me. Fury exhaled. Still. Worth a try.
He made a note and set it aside.
Tony Stark, unaware of this planning session, would not have been troubled by it even if informed.
Less than four days remained in the group activity. The five days had passed in the way time passed when everything was comfortable and the company was interesting — quickly, and with the feeling that there had been more to do than time to do it.
Tony had spent, by the end, approximately four hundred million dollars.
He had prepared this amount specifically for the occasion.
He had no regrets about any of it.
The maths were simple. Wolffy had given him a small invention — a casual gift, an aside, the kind of thing Wolffy apparently produced when thinking about something else. Properly developed and brought to market, the commercial applications of that one invention represented at minimum twenty billion dollars in addressable opportunity.
Four hundred million to host a gathering that kept those relationships warm was not an expense. It was the most efficient investment he'd made this quarter.
"I," Tony Stark thought, watching the group settle back into the villa for their final evening, "am genuinely a very clever boy."
He considered this conclusion for a moment.
Amended it.
"A very clever man. Obviously."
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Hollowborn
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you