Fantaschiel!!

Everything happens for a reason. Fantastasia is lying on the floor coughing because she ate a cake laced with peanuts. Dezechiel is struggling to get up from a pool of his own blood because a bomb cleverly diguised as a present blew up in his face. And Lysterinn isn’t all that surprised because she was in on the job.

The man who introduced himself as Lacal Luth tears off his fake mustache.

“The truth is… my name is Hans von Lederkuchen!!”

Dezechiel manages to stand up on his own by gripping the wall. He looks at the man who plotted this entire incident. Only a single question comes to his mind.

“Who?”

“Eh?” This was not the reception the antagonist anticipated. In his mind, the weakened protagonist duo squirming around on the floor would cry out in surprise. After all, these two were his greatest rivals.

The sentiment was not shared though. On the long journey of these two goofballs, Hans von Lederkuchen was just another pretentiously stupid name you wouldn’t find in a calendar.

The villain laughs. “To think you’d keep your composure in an attempt to humiliate me, I must admit, you have guts, Dez-”

“Tsk, we should’ve checked with Rin-Rin to see if the cake had any of the 48 allergens Fan-Fan’s allergic to,” the angel cuts him short, completely ignoring his monologue. “Hey, Apfelkuchen or whatever, could you hand me some antihistamines? They’re in that little waistpack that flew off when the gift blew up.”

It would appear that the brown-haired swordsman has no idea what sort of situation he’s in. He doesn’t realize the cake was laced intentionally or that the gift was a trap for them, not Rin-Rin. To him, they’re just botching a job hard, as per usual.

Hans von Lederkuchen seethes. There’s no greater humiliation than your greatest rival not even knowing who you are. He stomps on the angel’s waistpack, crushing the syringes underneath.

“Dude! That’s not cool!” Deze begins to panic. “Do you know how hard it is to get away with manslaughter? I once broke a chair over Fan-Fan’s head in a heated pillow fight and almost caught murder attempt charge…”

Lederkuchen chuckles. “Finally, you recognize my…”

“Aaah, I didn’t do it intentionally though,” Dezechiel turns to Lysterinn, who eeps in surprise and backs up. “I’m not violent with women like that! Unless they want me to, of course!”

“As if anyone would do anything like that with you, pigeonshit,” Fan-Fan says in a shaky voice, slowly getting up from the floor.

Hans gasps. He let his guard down! Of course Deze wouldn’t be the only one to carry antihistamines on him! He failed to notice Fantastasia’s fashionable purse strapped right to her side because he was too distracted by the angel’s clueless attitude.

“Curse you, Fantaschiel!!” he namedrops the novel.

“Huh? What’s with that shitty lovey-dovey non-canon name? You sound like a fourteen year old girl shipping her two favorite characters!” Fan-Fan changes colors like a maturing tomato.

“That’s right! There’s nothing between the two of us! You trust me, don’t you, Rin-Rin?” Dezechiel desperately approaches the backing up girl.

“W-What’s the matter with you?” Lysterinn finally breaks her composure. “You’ve been acting weird ever since we met at the casino…”

Fan-Fan pricks her ears up. She just heard something funny.

“The casino? What casino?”

“Ah, you know…” Deze begins sweating like Christian Bale.

“This guy!” Lysterinn fumes, pointing aggressively at the brown-haired swordsman. “He followed me to a casino, then kept coming to my table whenever I switched them! I don’t think he even knew what was going on half the time! He tried to draw cards mid-round in Blackjack!”

Fantastasia loses her shit. “C-Casino? When we’re in crippling debt?!”

“T-That’s exactly why!” Dezechiel’s expressions change faster than British weather. “I wanted to double our paycheck to make end’s meet!”

“Wait,” Fan-Fan stops in her tracks, pondering with her finger to her lip. “They wouldn’t even let you into a casino if you had debt in the first place. They check your ID at the entrance…”

Deze backs up and gulps. He’s been caught like a fish in a net. If by a net, we mean financial embezzlement.

“I don’t know about any debt, but this guy definitely lost around 30,000 gold coins while playing next to me! He was downright horrendous at it all, even slot machines! And I didn’t think you could be bad at slot machines!!” And boy, did he suck at slot machines.

Wait, wait, something isn’t adding up. After all, if she recalls correctly, their debt was exactly…

“30,000 gold coins? So we didn’t get fined for destroying the town?” Fantastasia finally realizes what sort of monetary misadventure her companion undertook. “You put us in crippling debt just to impress some girl??”

Lederkuchen chuckles. This was all his evil ploy, after all.

“It isn’t just any girl, you see,” he smirks, “I laced his drinks with a love potion, after all!”

“You’re the worst,” Rin-Rin lifts her chin, looking at Deze with disgust in her eyes like he’s some small insect rolling shit on the floor. “No chance in hell I'd ever have any actual interest in you!”

Somehow, this remark hurts him more than his financial situation or the betrayal his lifelong acquaintance is feeling.

Hans shows off his evil villain laughter. The kind you know he practices for at least fifteen minutes a day.

“Uhm, no, actually, angels are immune to all sorts of earthly poisons, love potions included,” Fan-Fan claims with a deadpan expression. “This pigeon-brained skirt chaser acts like this around any girl who wags her tail a little.”

“Stop comparing me to pigeons, you hard-headed ram!” Dezechiel skips defense against facts and goes straight to defending against insults.

“You’re right, I should,” the demon girl presses her index finger into the angel’s chest, “pigeons at least have wings unlike your plucked ass!”

“Oh now you’re just attacking me,” he gets up in her face. “What’s up, daddy cut your horns so now you can’t ram me?”

“Oh you’d loooove for me to ram you, wouldn’t you now?” Fantastasia dispels his insult with a witty remark amplified by a smirk.

“Yeah, I would!” he destroys her with facts and logic.

“Haaaa?!” The demon girl’s face takes on a similar color to her contact lenses.

Hans von Lederkuchen tears his hairs out in frustration. Every single ploy he’s brewed up, they’ve ruined. But he’s still got a few more aces up his sleeve.

That’s right, Dezechiel is still heavily wounded. He only needs to take care of the weakened girl. As slowly as possible, making little to no noise, he slips another love potion out of his pocket.

“Ah, by the way, demons are also immune to love potions,” Fan-Fan turns to the villain with an absolute poker face. “So that thing’s useless, you know.”

“Damn you, damn all of you!!” Hans cries out, tossing the glass bottle across the room.

“Ah,” the Hans-proclaimed Fantaschiel couple unanimously watches the concoction fly over their heads, then crash straight into the unassuming cyan-haired girl.

Fantastasia dashes straight at Lederkuchen. Her spear with all sorts of keychains rings throughout the room while the tip pins Hans to the wall. The self-proclaimed main villain gushes out blood, watching in horror as his schemes have been stopped once again.

Deze bolts straight for the projectile victim. He takes the stunned Lysterinn into his arms, carefully running his fingers over where the bottle hit her on the head.

“Hey! Rin-Rin? Do you hear me? Are you alright?”

The hazy girl slowly opens her eyes. The first thing she sees is the angel’s worried expression.

“Huh? Where am I? You are…?” her voice is weak. She’s almost like a flower on the verge of wilting.

“Ah, I’m glad you’re alright! I’m Dezechiel, don’t you remem-mphhh?”

Fantastasia pulls the spear out of Lederkuchen’s abdomen. The man topples to the floor in a very theatrical way. Chances are he practiced this too.

“Deze, is she ok? She got hit on the head and- HUHHH?!”

The moment Fan-Fan turns her head around, an unfathomable sight presents itself to her. The cyan-haired girl, who was so repulsed just a few moments ago, is now tongue kissing her partner like a kraken devouring a cargo ship… full of kraken food.

“Heh? Ah? Uhm? Eh? Eeeeeeh?” the demon girl panics, her pink hair flailing as she fidgets from one side to another. Between the fluid leaking out of her enemy’s stomach and her face, it’s hard to tell which is a more genuine shade of red.

Hans von Lederkuchen smiles. Finally, he’s gotten back at them at least this way. This puppet has now run its course.

“Farewell, Fantaschiel. Until next time.” The invisible string above his limbs are sliced in an instance and the body topples to the floor like a piece of junk. The human features of the carcass begin to turn more and more inhuman until they’ve fully become that of a wood-carved doll.

Lysterinn finally breaks apart, her feeble hands still grasping the brown-haired boy by the nape.

“Dezechiel, I like the sound of that, hehe.” How does someone’s voice sound so innocent, yet lustful at the same time?!

“Let’s get married tomorrow,” the angel proposes without any hesitation.

“Wait a second!!” Fan-Fan runs right at them, splitting them apart with both of her hands. Deze simply grabs her by the wrist and looks her in the eye.

“Fantastasia, it is improper to mingle in the affairs of another couple. ‘Thou shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.’” His sudden change of mindset isn’t in line with his aforementioned casino trip and following expenditures in an effort to impress a random girl, but that’s the less important thing right now.

“Huh? What the fuck does covet even mean? And you’re not my neighbor’s wife! And I’m a demon on top of that! Stop quoting pretentious things you don’t live by!!”

“My dear Fantastasia,” he talks sweeter than a diabetic’s blood sugar level, “everyone can be restored to light if they repent before God’s omniscient eyes. I’m not the same person I was a few seconds ago.”

“Darling, who’s this girl?” Lysterinn looks up at the angel.

“Don’t worry, my soon-to-be wife, just an old acquaintance,” Deze dismisses Fan-Fan’s existence with that explanation while offering his newfound love a hand to get up.

Fantastasia fumes. She swings her spear above her head, charging straight at Dezechiel.

“LOVE POTIONS! AREN’T!! CONSENT!!!” she yells, whipping him over the head with the blunt edge.

“Oh, love!” the angel gasps before his knocked out body hits the floor like a wet noodle.

“My dear!!”

Fantastasia turns to the enchanted lass who eeps and backs off. Then, just in case, she whacks her on the head too.

The pink-haired demon girl slumps down over the two limp bodies and sighs. “Idiot, don’t just go proposing to someone like that.”