Chapter 178: When Did You Get the Idea That I'd Stopped Using Kyōka Suigetsu?
Loki stared at the figure that had appeared behind him and felt something he experienced very rarely and liked very much less: the specific vertigo of a plan that had been running smoothly discovering a floor it hadn't accounted for.
He turned and looked at the person he'd been holding at knifepoint.
An Asgardian palace guard looked back at him. Not Ethan. A guard in full armor who had been standing at his post and was now being released from the grip of the God of Mischief with the expression of someone who was going to have an interesting story to tell later.
Loki let go. Straightened. Rearranged his expression into something that didn't show what he was actually feeling, which required a brief but genuine effort.
"I didn't realize you could use illusions," he said to Ethan. The tone was complimentary in the way that a knife is complimentary when it turns in your hand.
He had been played. In front of Odin. He filed this fact in a location that was going to require considerable processing later.
I was careless, he told himself. Just careless. The sword — he used the sword. He had to say the incantation, there was a visual cue, I simply didn't notice in time. Now that I know the mechanism, it won't happen again.
He looked at Ethan with the composed calculation of a man constructing a new plan over the ruins of the last one.
"I'll concede the round," he said. His smile had come back, which meant he'd decided something. "I suppose you should put that sword away."
This was a trap shaped like generosity, and they both knew it.
Ethan looked at him for a moment. Then he reached into the air — the sword materialized in his hand as though it had been there all along — and he made a show of returning it to wherever he kept things. The gesture was deliberate, cooperative, entirely accommodating.
Kyōka Suigetsu is never not active once it's been released, he thought, but he didn't say it. He just watched Loki's face.
Loki gave him about two seconds and then moved.
He was fast — genuinely fast, and the illusion he deployed was good, the real Loki vanishing while a copy stepped forward in a different direction, a misdirection layered over a misdirection. The dagger reappeared at what he was quite certain was Ethan's back.
He pressed it home.
"Without your sword," Loki said, with the satisfaction of a man who has just closed a trap, "you've lost. It seems I'm the superior strategist after all."
A pause.
Then Ethan's voice came from behind him.
"I'd be careful about that knife, if I were you," Ethan said, conversationally. "I know you don't like your brother. He's a bit much. But you can't actually stab him in front of Odin and your mother."
Loki turned.
And looked at the person he'd been holding at knifepoint.
Thor stared back at him with the expression of a man who had also just realized he'd been standing somewhere he hadn't intended to stand.
Loki released his brother. Stepped back. Stood very still for a moment.
He ran back through everything he had perceived in the last thirty seconds — every sensory input he'd checked, every magical frequency he'd scanned for. He was the God of Mischief. He had been detecting illusions since before he could reliably walk. He had felt nothing. No disturbance, no signature, no evidence that Kyōka Suigetsu was operating.
Which meant one of two things: either his ability to detect illusions had simply failed, or the illusion had never stopped.
Ethan's voice, from across the hall, carried the specific warmth of someone who had been waiting to say something:
"When exactly did you get the idea that I'd stopped using Kyōka Suigetsu?"
Loki stood there.
The question had no good answer.
He knelt — quickly, with the practiced grace of someone converting necessity into dignity — and addressed Odin. "Father. This was a misunderstanding. I had no intention of—"
Odin waved it off. He wasn't particularly concerned about Loki's knifepoint excursions right now. He was thinking about something else.
He had come closer than he was comfortable admitting to being fooled himself. His advantage was that this was his palace — his territory, his ambient awareness, the accumulated magical sensitivity of a being who had inhabited this space for millennia. That had let him catch the edges of what Ethan was doing.
Without that home advantage, he wasn't certain he would have noticed.
He looked at Ethan and revised several assessments simultaneously.
The sword wasn't the source. Or rather — it was the trigger, the release mechanism, but the complete sensory hypnosis that had been running since the incantation in Chapter 176 was operating at a level that didn't require the physical blade to maintain itself. It was woven into perception itself, and perception didn't check for the sword. It just perceived.
Odin had assumed the sword was a prop. A tool Ethan used to make people think the illusion was external. He'd congratulated himself on seeing through it.
He had not seen through it. He had seen through one layer of misdirection that had been placed precisely so he would find it.
Interesting, Odin thought, in the way that people who very rarely encounter things they can't immediately categorize think interesting.
Meanwhile, Thor had crossed the hall and arrived next to Ethan with the directness of a man who has decided something.
He put a hand on Ethan's shoulder.
"Brother," Thor said — and he meant it in the way that Asgardians meant it, which was an elevation, a recognition, a statement of regard — "what's your name? I've never seen anyone out-trick Loki before. You're a real fighter."
The system chimed:
「DING!」「Congratulations, Host! Thor has been added as a Friend — Current Level: ★!」「Attribute Gained: Right to Wield Mjolnir!」
Ethan stood there for a moment, feeling the notification settle, and looked at the hammer.
That's unexpected.
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