I want everyone to know that I used to have a throne.
Not a metaphorical one. An actual throne. Black stone, carved from the bones of something that screamed when we took them, set on a dais high enough that everyone who approached me had to look up. I had subjects. I had power that made lesser demons step off the road when I walked past. I had a realm.
Now I have a futon that smells like Kou's cologne and a view of a convenience store.
Two weeks. It has been exactly two weeks since the Goddess of the Heavenly Court decided that six demon lords with legitimate territorial claims constituted a "threat to the cosmic balance" and dropped us into the human world like unwanted houseplants. Two weeks since I landed face-first in a Shinjuku alley at two in the morning with no money, no followers, and Hibiki's elbow in my ribs.
I would like to formally state, for the record, that we were winning that war.
"We were not winning that war," Nagi said from somewhere behind me.
I turned around. He was lying on the floor with his arm over his eyes, not asleep but not not asleep either. His white hair fanned out under his head. He had not moved in four hours. I had not said anything out loud.
"Stop that."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're reading my face."
"Your face is loud."
Across the room, Hibiki made a sound that was technically not a laugh. He was sitting on the windowsill with his legs hanging outside, a piece of bubblegum working slowly between his teeth, watching the street below with the focused hostility of someone who had decided the whole city personally owed him something. His blonde hair caught the afternoon light and made him look, infuriatingly, like someone you'd see on a magazine cover. The red in his eyes did not look human in direct sunlight. He knew. He did it anyway.
"We were definitely not winning," he said. "Stop rewriting history."
"Whose side are you on."
"Mine."
Aoi looked up from the corner where he'd been doing push-ups for the last forty minutes. Green hair pulled back, jaw set, a thin sheen of sweat across his collarbones. He had that look he got sometimes, the one where he was watching the rest of us with something sharp behind his eyes, tallying something internal that he never shared out loud.
"You were winning," he said. To me specifically. Then he went back to his push-ups.
I pointed at him. "Thank you. See. Aoi gets it."
"He was agreeing with you to bother Hibiki," Nagi said, still not moving.
Aoi did not confirm or deny this.
Kou was at the table with every notebook we owned spread open in front of him, three pens uncapped, a half-eaten rice ball forgotten at his elbow. His blonde hair was a disaster. He'd been awake for what I could only estimate was thirty hours based on the state of those notebooks and the very specific kind of focus he got when he was chasing something. Blue eyes tracking his own handwriting like it might try to escape.
"If we go the social media route first," he said, to no one, to everyone, to the general concept of ambition, "we need something that pulls numbers in the first seventy-two hours or the algorithm buries us. We need a hook. Something that makes people stop scrolling."
"Demonic charm," I offered.
"We can't go full demonic charm. Reiji said low profile."
"Reiji says a lot of things."
"We need a plan that works in this world with what we have at human-adjacent levels of power." He tapped his pen against the table twice. "The fan conversion rate in this country is insane. If we can crack into the idol market the ceiling on what we absorb is basically unlimited. But we need infrastructure. An agency. A debut. We need—"
"Reiji to do his job," I said.
The room went quiet in that specific way where everyone agreed with me but nobody wanted to say so out loud.
I leaned back against the wall and looked at the ceiling. Low ceiling. The whole apartment was low. Everything in this world was smaller than it needed to be, more crowded, louder in the wrong ways and quieter in the ways that mattered. Back home the sky above my territory was red at night from the ambient heat of the lower planes and I could stand on the edge of my stronghold and feel the weight of every soul sworn to me like a second heartbeat.
Here I could feel the hum of the vending machine two floors down.
Power works differently in the human world. The Goddess explained this with the cheerful condescension of someone delivering bad news that genuinely delighted her. Demon lords run on devotion. Fear is efficient back home, she said, and she said efficient the way you say a word in a language you find amusing. Fear generates devotion fast. But in the human world fear doesn't hold the same way. What holds here, what actually accumulates and converts and builds into something sustainable, is love. Parasocial, absolute, screaming-in-an-arena love.
Fans.
She wanted us to get fans.
I want it stated again, for the record, that I used to have a throne.
"He's been in there for six hours," I said. To the closed door at the end of the apartment's single hallway.
Nobody responded.
"That's a long time to be on the phone."
"He negotiates slowly," Kou said, writing something down. "He wants the terms to favor us."
"We don't have terms. We have an apartment that fits inside my old bathroom and two weeks until our operating funds are completely gone."
"Then he's negotiating fast."
The door opened.
Reiji walked out looking exactly the way Reiji always looked, which was like someone who had decided a long time ago that he would never give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him rushed. Grey hair falling past his jaw. Red eyes behind those glasses that I was personally convinced existed for psychological effect. His collar was still perfectly straight. He looked around the room, took in Nagi on the floor, Hibiki in the window, Aoi doing push-ups, Kou's chaos at the table, and me, and his expression did the thing it always did, this micro-shift that was not quite a smile and not quite disdain and somehow communicated both.
He was the oldest of us. By a significant margin. This fact had always annoyed me and continued to annoy me with great consistency.
"Well?" I said.
He straightened his glasses. "I've secured us an opportunity."
"An agency?"
"Better."
"A contract?"
"Better."
I stared at him. "Reiji. I am two seconds from—"
"From what?" The not-smile got fractionally more visible. "Sit down, Akira."
"I'm already sitting."
"Then sit differently. You look like you're about to start something."
"I am about to start something."
Even Nagi sat up for this. Hibiki pulled his legs back inside from the window. The room had that quality now where everyone was pretending not to pay attention while paying complete attention.
Reiji reached into his jacket. He pulled out an envelope. White, official-looking, with a seal I didn't recognize on the front. He held it the way he held everything, like the object was lucky to be in his hand.
He held it out to me.
I took it. Looked at the front. Read the name of the institution printed there in clean formal type.
I read it again.
"Youtou High School," I said.
"Performing arts track." He folded his hands. "Enrollment begins in three weeks. I've arranged admissions for you, Hibiki and Nagi. The industry ties that school has are significant. The alumni network alone would give us access to contacts it would otherwise take us a year to build."
The room was quiet.
I looked at the letter. Back at Reiji. At the letter again.
"You," I said, "want me. Akira. Former lord of the Sixth Demonic Plane. To go to high school."
"I want my favorite little brother," he said, with the tone of someone who had specifically prepared this sentence, "to go to high school, yes."
"I had subjects."
"You had sixteen-year-old energy then and you have it now. This changes nothing."
"That is not—" I stopped. Started again. "That is not the point. The point is that this is humiliating."
"The point," Reiji said, "is that Youtou High produces idols. It produces the kind of visibility that takes other acts years to build. One year in that school and we have everything we need to debut properly. The fan infrastructure alone—"
"High school," I said again.
Hibiki made that sound again from the window. This time it was definitely a laugh.
I turned on him. "What."
"Nothing." He was looking at the street again. The corner of his mouth was doing something against his will. "Just thinking about your locker."
"I will end you."
"You can try. During free period, maybe. When you're done with homeroom."
Nagi had fully sat up now. He was looking at the letter in my hand with an expression that was, for Nagi, practically animated. "Does it have a pool," he said.
"It has facilities," Reiji said.
"I need more than facilities."
"It has a pool."
Nagi lay back down. "Fine."
Kou had already pushed half his notebooks aside and was looking at Reiji with the specific attention he gave to anything that smelled like an angle. "The industry contacts. How deep do they go?"
"Deep enough."
"Names."
"Later."
"Reiji—"
"Later, Kou." He looked back at me. The not-smile was gone now. He was just watching me with those red eyes that had never once, in the entire span of my existence, given me information I didn't earn. "I know what you're thinking."
"Do you."
"You're thinking this is beneath you."
"Because it is beneath me."
"Everything is beneath you. That's never stopped you from doing what needs doing." He took the letter back from my hand, turned it over, set it on the table next to Kou's notebooks.
"We need power. Power in this world comes from people. People in this world come from schools, from stages, from the kind of visibility that accumulates into something that actually feeds us." He paused.
"Unless you'd prefer to keep living off that ambient devotion you've been skimming from the women who shop at the convenience store downstairs."
I had been skimming ambient devotion from the women who shop at the convenience store downstairs.
"That's not the point," I said.
"The letter has your name on it already. Enrollment is confirmed." He turned and walked back toward his room. "Class starts in three weeks. Get your uniforms sorted. And Hibiki," he said, without turning around, "if you blow a bubble in a classroom I will personally—"
"Yeah yeah," Hibiki said.
The door closed.
I looked at the acceptance letter sitting on the table. Youtou High School. Performing Arts Track. My name printed there in clean, ordinary, human type. Akira Hoshino. Sixteen years old. Student.
Nagi was lying back down. Aoi had returned to his push-ups. Kou was already writing something in a new notebook with the focused energy of someone who had already decided to win at this too.
Hibiki blew a bubble. It popped against his own face.
I stared at the ceiling again.
I used to have a throne.