Chiyoda Ward, outside Sakuradamon, the Metropolitan Police Department headquarters.
An old man and a young girl, both carrying canes, were making their way along the sidewalk.
"What do you think of that new club president at SdS?"
Nura Rikuo was the first to speak.
Cane in hand, he ambled along just like any ordinary old man.
Only his excessively elongated head and the constantly active supernatural art shielding him from passersby's eyes revealed that this old man was anything but ordinary.
"You should have noticed something, shouldn't you, Princess?"
The person he addressed was Iwanaga Kotoko, a girl revered as the "Monster Princess," who walked the boundary between monsters and humans and offered solutions to both sides' problems.
Only the monsters knew that this princess was actually the human incarnation of the God of Wisdom, a monster-made deity created by the monsters and served by them, who had sacrificed an eye and a leg to wisdom.
That was precisely why Nura Rikuo had asked her opinion.
It was not merely because Iwanaga Kotoko had once mediated between the Nura Clan and the Metropolitan Police Department, easing their conflict and sparing the clan a future of extermination, but also because she was essentially something akin to the monsters' strategist.
"A monster."
The Monster Princess answered his question with an unexpectedly blunt word.
"The moment I saw Luo Shu, I realized that man was a 'monster.'"
"A monster who stands above humans and monsters alike."
"My 'wisdom' keeps warning me."
"Telling me to stay away from him, to stay away from calamity!"
Covering her artificial eye, Iwanaga Kotoko said gravely:
"Don't try to make an enemy of him, Nurarihyon. He's far more terrifying than either of us imagines."
Nura Rikuo froze, surprised that the Iwanaga Kotoko who had been chatting so cheerfully