Chapter 79: Paperwork
"Val- um, Y-Your Highness, t-thank you for-"
"You don't have to call me that," I replied dryly, glancing over my shoulder as Rias came walking quickly out of a magic circle with Akeno by her side, "Nothing's changed, even if I did beat the hell out of your brother."
I'd been having interactions like this a lot over the past day, which was starting to become annoying. Seriously, I've known these women for a while now, and even slept with most of them, yet they were too scared to call me by my name?
You would think I had just massacred half the pillars, defeated their strongest leaders, and taken over their entire race or somethin' crazy like that.
Which I had, so I guess their reactions were understandable.
"R-Right," Rias nodded, blushing slightly at my words, and hurried over to me, "Thank you for sparing him. I was worried during the fight..."
We were standing in my palace again, but in a different room than usual this time. It was a 'med-bay' of sorts, which was really just a couple of beds in a room.
On one of the beds sat the form of Sirzechs Lucifer, who was still unconscious, but decidedly not dead. Nearly a day had passed since our duel, and the man had lived after some healing from a couple of my fairies.
I definitely wanted to kill the Maou, considering he had been trying very hard to kill me, but it wasn't the best course of action. Doing so would lose me a strong subordinate, and just stomp all over a lot of the reputation I'd gained with the various devil women.
That reputation had already taken a minor hit from killing the pillar families - which was technically a joint effort between my runes and Katerea - but it wasn't substantial. While the devils as a whole were a 'faction,' it wasn't like they were one big family or anything.
The noble pillars largely didn't like each other, and it could be considered a political battleground for power. Alliances were made to bring families together and gain more power, and counter-alliances were made to spit in the face of those alliances.