Chapter 38
P.S this story starts a few years before the start of our favorite DXD verse!
AND I DON'T OWN ANY DXD MATERIAL, ALL CREDIT TO THE ORIGINAL WRITERS!
"Talking out aloud"
'Thinking with ones mind'
"Spirits inside the sacred gears talking"
Without further delay, lets start the chapter!
Kuoh Academy
They came through the great doors of the academy's inner grounds in a tight, grim formation, and what they found waiting for them stopped every one of them cold.
The wide field at the heart of Kuoh Academy had been transformed into something out of a nightmare. Twin magic circles blazed against the earth, each of them vast, each of them wrong, their light a sickly, incandescent white that had nothing of the moon's clean silver in it. The first circle was the larger of the two, and at its center, suspended in the air and turning slowly like planets locked in a doomed orbit, hung the fragments of Excalibur, four shards of the holiest sword ever forged, drawn together by some terrible alchemical working and beginning, visibly, to bleed into one another, their edges softening and running like wax held too near a flame. The second circle sat off to the side, humming, drinking, a great hungry maw of a thing that seemed to be swallowing the wasted overflow of the first, the spillage of raw holy energy that the fusion could not contain, gathering it, compressing it, packing it tighter and tighter into a single terrible point of light.
And working the circles, moving between them with the fussy, delighted precision of a scholar at his life's great experiment, was an old man.
"Valper Galilei," Yumi said, and her voice came out in a low, shaking whisper that carried more hatred than a scream ever could.
He looked so ordinary. That was the obscene thing about it. A stooped, white-haired old man in scholar's robes, his lined face bright with the innocent joy of discovery, as though he were not standing at the heart of an atrocity but at the lectern of some grand university. This was the man who had built the Holy Sword Project. This was the man who had looked at a room full of frightened children, Yumi among them, Kiba among them, and had decided their lives were an acceptable cost for his research. This was the man who had signed the order that murdered them all, and slept soundly after.
"Ah," Valper said, not even looking up from his work, his voice reedy and pleasant. "Company. How nice. I do so love an audience for important work, and this is very important work indeed. The Genocide Archduke, some called me, back in the day. Terribly dramatic. I always preferred to think of myself simply as a man unafraid to ask the difficult questions."
Beside him, a second figure lounged against a broken section of wall, and where Valper radiated obscene cheer, this one radiated pure, gleeful malice. Freed Sellzen, the excommunicated exorcist, his white hair wild, his eyes fever-bright with anticipation, was watching the slowly-fusing Excalibur fragments the way a starving dog watches a butcher's window.
"Come on, come on," Freed crooned to the turning shards, ignoring the arriving Devils entirely. "Fuse faster, you beautiful thing. Papa's been so patient. The second you're whole, I get to start carving, and oh, oh, I have been looking forward to carving up some filthy little Devils for so long."
"The gymnasium," Koneko said quietly, and pointed. Beyond the circles, half the academy's outbuildings already stood in smoking ruin, the marks of a night of one-sided slaughter. "…They were waiting for us."
"No." A new voice rolled down from above, rich and cultured and dripping with delight, and every head snapped upward. "Not waiting. Hoping."
Kokabiel sat enthroned upon the empty air, thirty feet above the field, in a great seat woven of his own light, ten black wings spread lazily behind him like a monarch's cloak. He looked down upon the assembled Devils with the fond, proprietary satisfaction of a man surveying a party thrown in his honor, and when he spoke again, it was with the expansive good cheer of a host welcoming guests.
"You came! I am so pleased. I confess a small part of me feared you truly would try to run, and then where would we be?" He gestured grandly at the twin circles below him. "But no. Here you are, brave little Devils, come to die on schedule. Allow me to explain what you are looking at, since I do so hate for my audience to miss the artistry of a thing." His crimson eyes gleamed. "The first circle, the large one, is Valper's masterpiece. It condenses the holy essence of four Excalibur fragments and fuses them, slowly, into a single, whole, perfect blade. Three my faithful took from your church's little branches across the world; the fourth…" his grin widened, "…the fourth I plucked from that chestnut-haired exorcist girl myself, when I broke her earlier this evening. She fought rather bravely for it, in the end. Not that it did her the slightest good. A weapon not seen whole in this world since the age of legends, and I have assembled it from the scraps. That alone would be worth the evening." He leaned forward, savoring it. "But my dear Valper is a genius, and a genius wastes nothing. The second circle, you see, harvests the overflow. Every drop of raw holy power that spills from the fusion, all that lovely wasted energy, is being gathered, and compressed, and packed into a single point, until it becomes a bomb. A bomb of pure holy light, keyed to detonate the instant the fusion completes." His grin split his face. "Large enough, my calculations suggest, to erase the entirety of Kuoh. Every street. Every house. Every sleeping, worthless little human soul in it. Gone, in a single blinding flash of holy light."
The horror of it landed on the assembled Devils like a physical blow. Asia made a small, wounded sound. Issei's hands curled into fists.
"So!" Kokabiel spread his arms wide, delighted. "There is your evening, children. Stop it, if you can. Save your precious little town, if you are able. I do so hope you make it entertaining. I have waited two thousand years for a night like this one, and I would hate for it to be dull."
For a moment, the weight of it threatened to crush them all. And then, of all people, it was Kenta who broke the silence, and he did it with the worst possible thing he could have said.
"That's the whole plan?" the Kuroshishi rumbled, folding his massive arms and squaring his shoulders with a confidence that, in hindsight, everyone present would agree he should have kept to himself. "A mad old man, a rabid dog, and some circles? Then this is simpler than you think, Cadre. As long as you keep your feathers planted on that throne and stay out of it, we stop the old man, we break the circles, we deal with whatever rabble you throw at us." He cracked his knuckles. "And then all of us together deal with you."
Rias closed her eyes. Yumi's hand drifted to her brow. Somewhere, Issei made a small strangled noise.
Kokabiel stared down at the young Kuroshishi for a long, delighted beat.
Then he began to laugh.
It was not the cruel, sharp laughter from before. This was something worse, a rich, booming, genuinely amused belly-laugh, the laugh of a man who has just heard the funniest thing in a very long time.
"Oh, marvelous," the Cadre wheezed, wiping at his eye. "Oh, that is precious. 'Deal with me.' The little lion cub thinks that if I simply sit still and behave, the children might band together and deal with me." His laughter cut off all at once, and his voice dropped into something cold and vast and absolute. "Let me correct a misunderstanding, cub, before your ignorance embarrasses you further. It is not that I might win if I chose to fight. It is that every single Devil standing on this field tonight, all of you together, at once, with everything you have, could not so much as ruffle a single feather of my wings. You could not scratch me. You could not bruise me. You could throw yourselves against me until you died of exhaustion and I would not feel it. The gap between us, little cub, is not a gap you close with courage. It is not a gap at all. It is a chasm, and you are an insect standing at the bottom of it, shaking your little fist at the sky."
Kenta's golden eyes blazed, and a low, furious growl built in his chest, black fur beginning to ripple up his forearms as the insult struck home—
"Easy. Breathe." Adara's voice crackled through the Kuroshishi's mindscape, dry and unhurried, the voice of a partner rather than a comforter. "He wants you angry, you great stubborn thing. It is the oldest trick in creation. An angry warrior is a sloppy one, and a sloppy warrior charges a Cadre and gets himself splattered across a courtyard, and then I am left haunting whatever hapless soul inherits me next. I have grown fond of this particular arrangement, Kenta. Do not go ruining it out of wounded pride." A crackle of dry humor. "So bank the fire. He will get everything that is coming to him, and you will be standing here, alive and insufferable, to watch it land. Your King is on his way. Marid does not lose, and he does not abandon his own, and the Lucifer's forces ride behind him. Hold the line until they come, and do not, whatever else you do tonight, give that preening peacock the satisfaction of seeing you rattled."
Slowly, with visible effort, Kenta forced the growl back down and the fur to recede, though his jaw stayed clenched tight.
Fine, he told her privately, the promise cold and quiet beneath the banked rage. I'll bank it, Adara. I'll hold. But mark my words, that peacock is going to answer for every word of that, and when Lord Marid puts him on his knees, I want to be standing right there to watch.
"Now that," Adara purred, satisfied, "is the spirit."
"But where are my manners," Kokabiel continued, his good cheer flooding back. "You wished for something to fight, little cub. Allow me to provide. Consider it… the entertainment for the evening. My gift to myself."
He snapped his fingers.
The air across the field tore. Rifts of darkness split open in a wide arc before the twin circles, and from them, Kokabiel's forces stepped forth, and the confident set of Kenta's shoulders slowly, visibly, began to sag.
They came in numbers. Ten Fallen Angels with two wings apiece, dark-clad and cold-eyed, light-spears already crackling in their hands. Behind them, larger and radiating a far deadlier pressure, came a single four-winged Fallen Angel, a captain-class fighter whose mere presence made the air feel heavier. And loping out of the rifts on either side came three enormous hounds, black-furred and red-eyed, each the size of a warhorse, snarling with three heads apiece and a hunger that had nothing natural in it.
"Cerberus pups," Akeno breathed, and there was real fear in her voice. "Kokabiel, those are, those are the guard-hounds of Hades himself—"
"Pups," Kokabiel agreed cheerfully. "Barely weaned. A mere shadow of what their sires can do; grown, a single Cerberus could level a city on its own. These three are hardly stronger than your middling Devils. But three of them, set among the rest?" He spread his hands. "I think you will find them lively."
But it was the last figure to emerge from the rifts that truly stole the breath from the assembled Devils.
He was broad and brutal, his form wrapped in that familiar, hateful aura of raw beast-Ki, his eyes the same flat, cruel yellow they all remembered. Zill. The recurring nightmare of Kuoh, the beast who had maimed Kiba and Akeno in the earliest days, the monster Marid himself had once fought in a lightless mine, stepped out onto the field with a slow, rolling swagger and a grin full of teeth.
"Zill," Rias hissed, and half her peerage tensed at once.
And then they saw what the Fallen Angels carried, and the horror deepened. Clutched in the grip of several of the two-winged Fallen, bound in crackling nets of dark magic and struggling weakly, were familiars. Dozens of the small, frightened creatures of the Familiar Forest, the very ones Rias's peerage had trekked to that strange wood to seek out not so long ago.
Rias's blood ran cold. The familiars that were stolen. She had reported the theft to Onii-sama herself, upon returning from the forest, a strange and troubling crime with no clear culprit. And here was the answer, at last. Kokabiel's forces had taken them, and by the vacant, pained way the little creatures thrashed against their bonds, Rias understood with dawning horror what had been done to them.
"They're being controlled," she said grimly. "Mind-magic. Those poor things are being forced to fight for him."
Kokabiel merely smiled, and said nothing, and let the truth of it sink its teeth in.
Slowly, as one, the entire group of Devils turned to look at Kenta.
It was The Look. Every one of them wore it, that particular flat, exhausted, deeply unimpressed expression that translated, with perfect clarity and no words at all, to: why did you have to open your mouth.
Kenta grimaced, hunching his massive shoulders. It did not help that inside his own head, Adara had entirely given up on comfort and moved on to open mockery.
"'This is simpler than you think, Cadre,'" the fire-serpent recited gleefully, in a mincing imitation of his own voice. "'We deal with the rabble, then we deal with YOU.' Oh, that has aged like milk in the sun, you ridiculous lion. Beautifully done. Truly. Whatever possessed you? Was it the pretty speech you'd been saving up? Ohhh, I am going to be telling this one for CENTURIES—"
"Not now, Adara," Kenta muttered under his breath, mortified.
Zill rolled his heavy shoulders and fixed the assembled Devils with a slow, hateful grin, his flat yellow eyes moving across them one by one.
"Little Devils," the beast rumbled, his voice like grinding stone. "You have no idea how long I have waited for this. I remember all of you. The lightning girl. The pretty swordsman I carved up. And now here you all are, gathered in one place, with nowhere left to run." He flexed his clawed hands. "I am going to teach you a lesson tonight. A lesson in exactly where creatures like you belong."
"You've tried to teach us lessons before, Zill," Rias said, and to her credit her voice did not waver, the iron of a King holding steady in the face of an old terror. "We beat you once. We will beat you again."
Zill's grin widened, and something ugly and amused flickered across his brutish features.
"You beat me?" He barked out a harsh laugh. "Is that the story you tell yourselves, girl? Let me correct your memory. You did not beat me. I was brought down in that mine by Marid Gremory, with a cheap shot and a fistful of tricks in the dark, and by no one else. Not one of you children laid a hand on me that mattered." His yellow eyes gleamed with cruel satisfaction. "And I do not see him here now, do I? I do not see your clever crimson savior anywhere on this field. So who exactly is going to beat me tonight, little Devils? You? You? There is no Marid here to fight your battles for you this time."
The words landed like a slap, and Rias felt them strike home in her own chest and in the chests of every one of her peerage. It was a wound to their pride, precise and cruel, because there was a thread of truth woven through it, and truth was what made it cut.
"I have heard so much about this Marid Gremory." Kokabiel's voice drifted down from his throne, lazily interested. "The clever son of the Lucifer. The one who plays at being a merchant and a diplomat. I confess, I had rather hoped to meet him tonight; I do so enjoy killing the ones with reputations." He sighed theatrically. "But it seems I am to be denied. Word reached me that the boy fled Kuoh entirely the very moment he learned I was involved, scampered off to play at peace with the Greek pagans rather than stay and defend his own precious city. How disappointing. How very like a Devil." His crimson eyes glittered. "All that reputation, and at the first sign of a true predator, he runs."
Rias's mind, even through her fear, went sharp and cold. He knows. Kokabiel knew about the Olympian meeting. He knew about Marid's absence, and the reason for it, in precise detail. That was not the knowledge of a mere warmonger throwing an angry tantrum in a border town. That was intelligence. Deep, current, frighteningly specific intelligence about the innermost workings of Devil politics and the movements of the Gremory heir. Someone is feeding him information, she realized, and a chill ran through her that had nothing to do with the killing intent in the air. Someone on the inside. She filed the thought away, locked it down tight, and promised herself she would carry it to Onii-sama the very instant they lived through this nightmare.
It was Yumi who answered the Cadre, and she did it without a flicker of doubt.
"Be careful what you wish for, Kokabiel," she said quietly, stepping forward, her chin lifted and her voice carrying clear across the ruined field. "Lord Marid did not run from anything. He is coming. He is on his way to this field even now. And when he arrives, he is going to defeat you."
Kokabiel's face lit up with genuine, delighted enthusiasm.
"Is he now?" The Cadre practically purred it. "Oh, that would be wonderful. Truly, girl, you have no idea how much you have just improved my evening. Do you understand what it would mean, if I killed the son of Lucifer and his little sister on the same night, on Devil soil, with my own hands?" He laughed, giddy with the thought of it. "War. Glorious, total, inevitable war. There is no possibility, none, that a spineless coward like Sirzechs Lucifer sits quietly while his son and his sister are butchered. Kill those two, and the peace shatters, and the fire I have dreamed of for two thousand years finally, finally burns again." He beamed down at her. "So please. Please. Let him come. I will be waiting with open arms."
Yumi did not flinch. If anything, something in her went quieter, and steadier, and more certain.
"Then let me offer you one piece of advice, Cadre," she said, "and you may do with it as you please. Do not be surprised when Lord Marid deflates that overinflated ego of yours." Her grey eyes were calm and unafraid. "You are not the first great and terrible thing to look at my King and see something small. You are not the first to decide he would be an easy kill. Better men than you, older and stronger and far less arrogant, have set out to end Marid Gremory, absolutely certain of their victory." A small, cold smile. "Every one of them is defeated. And tonight, Kokabiel, you are going to join their number. You simply do not know it yet."
A ripple of shock ran through the assembled Devils, and it was aimed not at Kokabiel but at Yumi. Because there was no bravado in her voice. No desperate hope. She had spoken of her King's power the way one states a simple, settled fact, and the sheer certainty of it, the glimpse it offered of things about Marid that even his allies did not fully know, sent a strange thrill down more than one spine. Better men have tried to kill him and failed. Every one of them is dead. Just how strong, exactly, was the crimson-haired boy they had all come to lean on?
But before anyone could truly process the weight of what Yumi had said, Kokabiel moved.
It was almost lazy. A flick of one hand, an idle gesture, the sort of motion a man might use to wave away a fly. And a spear of light the size of a felled tree simply appeared in the air beside him, blazing white-gold, and hurtled down across the field faster than thought—
—and struck the academy gymnasium dead center.
The explosion was deafening. The entire building simply ceased, erupting into a roaring bloom of searing light and shattered concrete, the shockwave washing over the Devils and forcing them to shield their faces, and when the smoke cleared there was nothing left of the gymnasium but a smoking crater and a scatter of burning debris. It had been the work of a single, careless flick of Kokabiel's wrist, less effort than most beings spent on a sneeze, and the casual, absolute power of it was more terrifying than any speech could have been.
"There," Kokabiel said pleasantly, into the ringing silence. "A small demonstration, so that we are all clear on where we stand." His grin turned wicked as his gaze settled back on Yumi. "And I will tell you what, girl, since you seem so very fond of your King. I like you. So here is my promise to you. When the rest of your friends lie dead around us, I am going to keep you alive. Just you. I am going to keep you breathing right up until the moment your precious Marid finally works up the courage to show himself, and then, girl, I am going to make you watch." His voice dropped into a caress. "I am going to string his broken, defeated body up where you can see it, and I am going to let you look upon exactly how much good all your pretty faith in him did. Won't that be nice?"
Kokabiel's forces laughed. It was an ugly, jeering sound, the Fallen Angels and Zill and even the snarling Cerberus pups joining in a chorus of cruelty, delighting in the destruction and in the horror written across the young Devils' faces.
Issei stood frozen amid the jeering, his eyes fixed on the smoking crater that had been the gymnasium, and inside his own skull, panic clawed at him.
Draig, he thought desperately, his awareness slipping inward toward the vast green presence that dwelled in his arm. Draig, this is impossible. Look at them. Ten Fallen Angels, and a captain, and three of those Hades hounds, and Zill, and the old man, and freaking Freed, and Kokabiel just blew up a whole building without even looking at it. There's seven of us and half of us are hurt. How are we supposed to fight ALL of that? How do we not just… die, right here?
For a moment the dragon was quiet. Then his voice rolled through the mindscape, low and steady and, oddly, almost patient.
"Breathe, partner. You are counting the whole board and frightening yourself with the number. Stop. Count the board the way a warrior counts it, not the way a victim does." The great green eyes gleamed. "Look again. The old man does not fight; he tends his circles. Freed does not move until his blade is whole. And Kokabiel, mark this, Kokabiel is not going to lift a finger against you tonight, not seriously. He said as much, did he not? He wants entertainment. He wants to lounge on his throne and watch. A warmonger starved for two thousand years does not gorge on the appetizer, partner. He savors it."
So… what does that mean?
"It means your true enemy tonight is not Kokabiel at all. It is his army. The Fallen, the hounds, the beast. Nothing more." Draig's voice hardened into something almost encouraging. "And that, partner, is a fight you can actually survive. You do not need to defeat a Cadre. You need only to defeat the things he sent, hold this field, and keep the monster amused and seated on his throne, until help arrives. Beat his little army, and you buy your hour. That is the whole of the task. It is survivable. Do you understand me? For the first time all night, the odds are merely terrible instead of hopeless."
Something in Issei's chest loosened, just slightly, and he grabbed onto Draig's cold logic like a drowning man grabbing a rope. Okay, he thought. Okay. Beat the army. Keep him entertained. Hold on until backup comes. We can, we can maybe do that.
"…It galls me," Draig admitted then, and there was a rare, grudging edge of wounded pride in the ancient dragon's voice. "I will be honest with you, partner, because you should know. It sits ill with me, all of this. Waiting. Holding. Praying for another's strength to come and finish what we cannot. A Heavenly Dragon does not wait for rescue. In my age I answered to no one, relied on no one, and here I sit counseling my host to stall until help arrives like some, some frightened footsoldier. It is a bitter thing." A slow exhale. "But it is the right thing. Tonight, it is the only thing. Pride that gets its host killed is not pride, it is stupidity, and I did not survive to see this age by being stupid. So we swallow it. We hold. We wait. Because the alternative is worse."
…What's the alternative? Issei asked, without quite meaning to.
For a long moment, the dragon said nothing at all.
"…Let us simply hope," Draig said at last, and there was something in his tone Issei had never heard from him before, something that might, in a lesser being, have been called dread, "that it does not come to that. Now. Enough talk, partner. Your King is about to give orders. Listen to her, and live."
While Issei wrestled with his fear and Draig's grim counsel, Yumi did something else entirely.
She did not flinch from Kokabiel's cruelty. She did not rise to his taunts, or shrink from his promise to make her watch her King die. Instead, in the middle of that ruined and terrible field, surrounded by monsters, the young Devil simply closed her eyes.
And she prayed.
It was not the frantic prayer of a frightened girl. It was quiet, and deliberate, and shaped by the patient words a goddess had taught her in a sunlit hall a world away. Lady Artemis, Yumi prayed, her lips barely moving, her face turned up toward the full and silver moon that hung serene above all the carnage. Huntress. Light of every hunter lost in the dark. I do not ask for victory, and I do not ask to be spared. I ask only for the courage to stand. There is a monster before me tonight, and I mean to face it without flinching, in defense of the people I love. Lend me the bravery to do it. That is all. That is everything.
And the moon, it seemed, was listening.
A soft, silver radiance began to gather around Yumi, faint at first, then unmistakable, a cool lunar light that clung to her like a second skin and set her blond hair shining as though lit from within. It was not her own power. It was something cleaner, and older, and utterly other, the borrowed grace of a goddess answered through a prayer offered on the night of the full moon, exactly as she had been promised.
Upon his throne, Kokabiel went very still.
The Cadre's lazy amusement flickered and died, replaced by a sharp, disbelieving frown, and then by open shock. His crimson eyes narrowed on the silver light wreathing the young Devil below, and when understanding struck him, he actually sat forward on his throne of light.
"That is—" he began, and for the first time all night, there was something other than contempt in his voice. "That is Godly energy. Divine grace. On a Devil." His eyes flicked upward, to the moon, and back. "How. How. A Devil cannot touch the holy without agony, let alone wear the favor of a pagan god like a cloak. What are you, girl? What in all the hells did you do?"
Yumi opened her eyes, and they were calm, and clear, and entirely without fear.
She raised her hands, and her two Sacred Gears blazed into being.
The first bloomed across her left forearm, a graceful bracer of silver-white light that unfolded outward into a shield of pale, moon-colored radiance, its surface rippling like the reflection of the moon upon still water. Lunar Aegis, her barrier gear, and tonight, drenched in Artemis's borrowed grace, it shone brighter and stronger than it ever had, a wall of lunar light ready to turn aside any blow.
The second manifested over her right hand, a slender, elegant construct of green-glowing energy that resolved into the shape of a drawn bow, and along its string a shaft of pure, concentrated light was already forming, a brilliant emerald arrow humming with lethal potential. Staring Green. Its arrows could not fell an Ultimate-class being, Yumi knew the limits of her gift, but against a high-class enemy, or a captain of the Fallen, each shaft could carve deep and true.
Silver light at her back and green fire at her fingertips, Yumi lifted her chin and stared up at the Cadre of the Grigori without so much as a tremor, defiance written in every line of her.
And Kokabiel, staring down at the impossible sight of a Devil crowned in a goddess's moonlight, threw back his head and grinned, wide and wicked and hungry, like a man who had just been handed a far better toy than he had dared to hope for.
"Oh," he breathed. "Oh. You are going to be my favorite, girl. I can already tell."
"Enough talk." Rias Gremory stepped to the front of her people, and crimson power flared to life around her hands, and whatever fear still lived in her chest she buried beneath the cold, clear voice of command. "He wants entertainment. Fine. Then we give him a fight he wasn't expecting, and we hold this field until help comes. Listen closely, all of you, because we do this smart or we don't do it at all."
Her eyes swept the battlefield, and her tactician's mind, honed against a lifetime of rating games, divided the enemy and matched her forces against them in the space of a breath.
"The Cerberus pups are brute strength and durability. That means power and numbers. Issei, Koneko, you're our heaviest hitters; you take them head-on. Asia, with them, stay behind and keep them alive and shielded, no matter what. I'll anchor that fight with my Power of Destruction; those hounds are exactly the sort of thing my gift is made to erase." She turned. "The Fallen Angels are speed and range. Akeno, your storms are worth more against them than anything else we can put in the sky; take the ten two-wingeds and turn the heavens against them. Masomi, I know you're hurt, but you're an exorcist trained against exactly this kind of enemy; fight at Akeno's side and watch her back."
Then her gaze found Yumi, wreathed in her silver light, and settled, at last, on the four-winged captain of the Fallen.
"Yumi. The captain is the most dangerous thing on this field short of Kokabiel himself. Can you take him?"
"I can hold him," Yumi said simply, and there was no doubt in it at all. "Lady Artemis's moon is with me tonight. Give me the four-winged Angel."
"Then he's yours." Rias's eyes moved one final time, to the hulking, grinning form of Zill. "Which leaves—"
"Zill is mine." Kenta's voice came out as a low, rolling growl, and there was no arrogance left in it now, only cold, focused purpose. "That beast and I have a debt between us, and tonight I collect every last ounce of it. I am going to make him answer for what he did in the mine. Tonight I put him down. Do not argue with me, Rias. This one is mine."
Rias held his golden gaze for a moment, then nodded. "Then he's yours. Everyone, on my mark—"
"How touching." Valper's reedy voice cut across the field, bright with academic malice. The old man had looked up at last from his circles, and there was a new and terrible gleam in his eye as his gaze fell upon the bound, struggling familiars in the Fallen Angels' grip. "But before you begin your brave little battle, children, I wonder if you might indulge an old scientist. You see, I have a hypothesis. Concerning the malleability of demonic-adjacent creatures under sustained magical domination. And what better test subjects than these charming little familiars, and what better control group than the Devils they might be turned against?" He smiled, thin and cold. "Release them. Set the little beasts on their former masters. Let us see what the data shows."
"With my blessing," Kokabiel drawled from his throne, waving a lazy hand. "Do proceed, Valper. I am curious as well."
The nets of dark magic binding the familiars flared, and the mind-controlled creatures were flung forward, dozens of them, their small faces vacant with enchantment, hurtling toward the Devils as unwilling weapons—
"Asia!" Kenta barked. "Now!"
"Y-yes!" Asia's hands flew up, and she called out, her voice ringing clear across the field. "Rassei! Come!"
"Keno! To me, girl!"
Two flashes of light answered them, and two familiars of their own leapt into the fray.
The first was a small, sinuous dragon, blue-scaled and crackling, that materialized in a snap of electricity above Asia's head, Rassei, her sprite dragon, the shy little creature she had bonded in the Familiar Forest. Except he was not so little anymore. He had grown, visibly, since the Phoenix rating game, longer and broader and brighter, and the crackle of power around him had deepened from a spark into a genuine, humming charge.
The second was a cat. A sleek, black, two-tailed cat with knowing eyes and an air of enormous dignity, Keno, Kenta's Bakeneko familiar, a Nekomata spirit far older and far more powerful than her domestic shape suggested.
And together, the two small familiars did something extraordinary.
Rassei reared back, drew a breath that seemed far too large for his small body, and roared, a dragon's roar, ancient and commanding, a sound that carried the raw dominance of his bloodline and rolled across the field like a thunderclap. And Keno, in the same instant, loosed a low, resonant yowl that shivered with layered Youjutsu, a Nekomata's cry pitched to command lesser beasts. The two sounds braided together, the roar of the dragon and the summons of the ancient cat, and struck the charging, mind-controlled familiars like a physical wall.
The little creatures faltered. Their vacant, enchanted eyes cleared. The domination-magic that had seized them, crude and forced as it was, simply could not stand against the natural, overwhelming authority of a true dragon and a Nekomata spirit combined, and one by one, the familiars sank down, cowed and gentled, dropping out of their attack and huddling in submission upon the grass, freed from the compulsion and no longer any threat to anyone.
"Now, Rias!" Asia cried.
"On it!" A great crimson transportation circle bloomed beneath the huddled familiars, and in a flash of Gremory light, the whole frightened, freed lot of them vanished, whisked away to safety far from the battlefield and Kokabiel's reach.
Valper Galilei stared at the empty grass where his test subjects had been, his mouth slightly open, his careful hypothesis undone in the span of ten seconds by a cat and a lizard.
"That, that is not, the variables were, that should not have—" the old scientist sputtered, genuinely thrown for the first time all night.
And from his throne, Kokabiel laughed, delighted anew, thoroughly entertained by the sight of his pet genius's meticulous little experiment going up in smoke.
"Oh, Valper," the Cadre chuckled. "Outdone by a housecat. Marvelous. Simply marvelous. Do not sulk; the night is young." His crimson eyes gleamed as they swept across the assembled Devils, their teams set, their gears blazing, their fear mastered and turned to grim resolve. "Now. Shall we begin?"
The Battle on Kuoh Academy
The field erupted into chaos.
Rias's strategy, born of desperation and a lifetime of tactical training, proved its worth within the first minute, and the shape of it was this: they did not fight to win, not yet. They fought to endure, and they fought together, and above all they fought around the small, glowing anchor of Asia Argento, whose gifts, quiet and unglamorous, turned out to be the thread that held the whole desperate tapestry together.
Because Asia was not only healing anymore.
Marid had seen to that. In the grinding weeks of training before the Phoenix rating game, the crimson-haired King had all but forced his methods upon Rias's peerage, and chief among the things he had drilled into a reluctant, gentle Asia was this: a healer who can only heal is a healer who dies first. He had taught her barrier magic. Made her practice it until she wept with frustration, made her learn to raise walls of defensive light on instinct, and Asia had hated every moment of it and never once understood why it mattered.
She understood now.
As the three Cerberus pups lunged at Rias, Issei, and Koneko with jaws that could shear through steel, it was Asia's barriers that saved them again and again, shimmering domes of defensive light springing up an instant before each strike landed, blunting the monstrous force of the hounds just enough. And it was Rassei, her sprite dragon, grown bolder and stronger, who wove through the melee at her command, loosing crackling bolts of lightning that did not kill the great beasts but slowed them, marginally, a half-second of stagger here, a flinch there, buying Issei the opening to land a Boosted haymaker on a snarling snout, buying Koneko the heartbeat she needed to drive a devastating punch into a hound's flank, buying Rias the clean line of sight to loose a bolt of the Power of Destruction that seared away one grasping paw entirely.
"Keno! The legs!" Kenta bellowed from across the field, mid-brawl with Zill, and his clever Bakeneko darted low, a streak of black among the thundering paws of the Cerberus, raking at their hocks and heels with claws sheathed in Youjutsu, nipping and vanishing and reappearing, a maddening distraction that split the hounds' three-headed attention exactly when they could least afford it. Every time a Cerberus turned to snap at the infuriating cat, it left its guard open to the Devils, and every opening was one the Devils, working in perfect concert, ruthlessly took.
It was close. Every exchange was a hair's breadth from disaster. But the crucial, almost unbelievable fact of it, the thing that kept a flicker of hope alive in Rias's chest as the minutes ground on, was this: not one of them had been seriously hurt. Asia's tireless barriers turned aside the killing blows. Asia's healing light mended the cuts and bruises the instant they were dealt. Rassei's harrying bolts and Keno's darting claws kept the enemy perpetually a half-step behind. The Devils were not winning, not exactly. But they were holding, and they were whole, and against a force that should by every measure have slaughtered them in moments, that was a miracle written in the quiet, unglamorous magic of a girl who had learned to build walls.
Across the field, the other fights raged.
Akeno had taken to the air, and the sky above Kuoh Academy had become a storm. Her lightning, laced with the holy heritage she so rarely spoke of, tore through the ranks of the two-winged Fallen Angels, and Masomi fought at her back with the grim, wounded ferocity of an exorcist who refused to fall, his blessed blade turning aside the light-spears that Akeno's storm did not, the two of them an unlikely and lethal pairing, Devil and exorcist guarding each other's blind spots against a common foe.
And Yumi danced with the captain of the Fallen.
It should not have been a contest. A four-winged Fallen Angel was a fearsome thing, a captain-class fighter who had cut down warriors far more experienced than a low-class Devil bishop. Kokabiel had assigned the captain to Yumi with a specific, cruel intent: he had wanted to see the defiant girl broken, had wanted to watch the light go out of her, had savored in advance the moment her pretty confidence shattered against a foe she could not match.
He did not get it.
Wreathed in Artemis's silver moonlight, her Lunar Aegis turning aside blows that should have killed her, her Staring Green loosing emerald shafts that punched through the captain's guard and drew hisses of pain and fury, Yumi kept pace. More than kept pace. She fought with a grace and a steadiness that had the four-winged Fallen snarling in disbelief, her borrowed grace and her own hard-won skill braiding together into something far greater than a low-class Devil had any right to wield. Blow for blow, arrow for spear, the swordmaiden of the Holy Sword Project held her ground against a captain of the Grigori and did not give an inch.
Upon his throne, Kokabiel watched the girl he had meant to break refuse, stubbornly, gloriously, to break, and his frown of displeasure slowly, despite himself, curled back into a grin of genuine interest.
"…Well," the Cadre murmured, leaning his chin on one hand. "Well. Perhaps I underestimated you after all, little moonlit thing. How interesting."
And at the far edge of the chaos, two beasts collided.
Kenta and Zill met like an avalanche meeting a mountain, and the sheer, brutal force of it cratered the earth beneath them. There was no artistry to this fight, no dancing grace like Yumi's, no clever teamwork like the melee around the hounds. This was old and personal and ugly. Zill fought with the savage, contemptuous confidence of a beast who had bested this city's Devils before, his Ki-wreathed claws raking, his heavier frame bulling forward, and for the first exchanges he pressed Kenta hard, sneering all the while.
"You've grown, cub," Zill snarled, catching one of Kenta's clawed strikes and hurling him back. "Bigger than the last time we crossed paths in the dark. But bigger isn't stronger. You're still just a whelp playing at being a lion—"
Kenta hit the ground, rolled, and came up transformed. His first form flowed over him in an instant, his forearms erupting into massive black-furred claws, his hide hardening into that nigh-impenetrable Kuroshishi armor, and when Zill's next blow landed it skidded off him, drawing no blood at all. The beast's sneer faltered.
"You remember the mine, then," Kenta said, low and cold, and there was no arrogance left in his voice now, none of the swagger that had summoned this whole nightmare. There was only a promise. "Good. So do I. I remember every moment of it, and I have been waiting to settle what you started there ever since." He surged forward, and this time it was Zill giving ground, this time it was Kenta's claws finding purchase, tearing a first ragged line across the beast's hide and drawing a startled howl of pain. "You picked the wrong night to come back, Zill. Adara, lend me your fire."
"With pleasure, my host," the fire-serpent purred, and flame the color of a banked forge came roaring to life along Kenta's claws. "Now stop talking and put this animal down. And do try not to gloat about it after; you have quite embarrassed yourself enough for one evening."
Despite everything, Kenta grinned, and threw himself back into the fight, fire and fury against the old nightmare of Kuoh, and this time he was the one advancing.
Schk… Schk
They had been holding for long, grinding minutes, sweat-soaked and gasping but unbroken, when two new figures came hurtling out of the dark at the field's edge, and the Devils' hearts leapt.
"KIBA!" Issei roared, ducking a Cerberus's snapping jaws. "Xenovia! You're alive!"
They were battered, both of them, bloodied and staggering, bearing the marks of their earlier flight from Kokabiel and whatever they had endured in the dark hours since. But they were alive, and they were here, and they came into the battle without breaking stride, blades already drawn.
Xenovia Quarta hit the field like a falling star, Excalibur Destruction blazing in her grip, and with a single, tremendous, two-handed swing she brought the holy blade down upon the neck of the nearest Cerberus pup. The great hound had no time even to howl. The Excalibur's edge, holy and merciless, sheared clean through, and one of the three monstrous guard-dogs of Hades simply died, its massive body crashing to the earth and dissolving into black motes. "One," the blue-haired exorcist gritted out, already wheeling toward the next threat. "Where do you need me, Devils? I will not be picky tonight."
And Kiba, Kiba was a blur of steel among the Fallen Angels, his demonic swords flashing, and there was a terrible focus in him, a knight fighting not with his usual cool precision but with the raw, driven intensity of a man with far too much rage to spend and far too little time to spend it. He cut down one two-winged Fallen, and then another, carving Akeno and Masomi breathing room, before his gaze snapped across the field to where Yumi still traded blows with the four-winged captain.
The captain, it had become clear, was the real threat, and even Yumi, moon-blessed as she was, had begun to strain against him; the Fallen's four wings made him fast, and his experience made him cunning, and he had begun, slowly, to turn the exchange in his favor, probing for the opening that would end her.
"Yumi!" Kiba was already moving, already sprinting across the churned earth toward his fellow survivor, his sister in all the ways that mattered, his blade rising to cut the captain down from behind—
And then the world went white.
It came from the great fusion circle at the field's heart, a sudden, blinding, silent flare of pure holy light that washed across the entire battlefield and froze every combatant, friend and foe alike, in their tracks. When it faded, when the Devils could see again through the spots dancing in their vision, the four fragments of Excalibur no longer turned separately in the air above Valper's circle.
They had become one.
A single sword hung there now, whole and terrible and perfect, its long blade drinking the moonlight and blazing with a holy radiance so pure and so vast that every Devil on the field flinched back from it, their very natures recoiling. Excalibur. Whole again, for the first time in an age. Restored.
And beside the fused blade, Freed Sellzen was already reaching for it, his face split into a rictus of ecstatic, blood-mad glee, his fever-bright eyes fixed on the assembled Devils with a hunger that promised nothing but slaughter.
"Yes," the mad exorcist breathed, his fingers closing around the hilt of the whole Excalibur, and the blade flared brighter still at his touch. "Oh, yes. Finally. FINALLY. Do you feel that, little Devils? Do you feel how holy it is?" He began to laugh, high and cracked and utterly deranged, leveling the shining blade at the horrified group. "Papa's home. And now the real fun starts. Now I get to cut every single one of you into tiny, screaming, filthy little pieces!"
Valper Galilei clasped his hands together in scholarly delight. And upon his throne of light, high above the ruined and blood-soaked field, Kokabiel threw back his head and laughed and laughed and laughed, the fused Excalibur blazing below him and, off to the side, the second circle, the bomb, humming louder now, swelling with the overflow of the completed fusion, ticking down toward the annihilation of an entire city.
The Devils of Kuoh stood frozen in horror, and the night, which had already been the longest of their lives, had only just begun to show its teeth.
Chapter End
AND WE'RE OFF! The battle for Kuoh Academy has officially BEGUN and oh, I have been waiting SO long to write this one!
So this chapter was all about setting the board for the big fight: Valper's horrifying two-circle plan (fuse the Excaliburs AND turn the leftover energy into a city-killing bomb, because of course), Kokabiel lounging on his throne treating the whole thing as dinner theater, and our heroes realizing just how badly outmatched they are. Poor Kenta and his BIG mouth, though. My man really said 'this'll be easy' and summoned an entire army into existence. Adara is never going to let him live that down, and honestly? Fair.
Some big moments I loved writing: Draig walking Issei off the ledge with cold dragon logic (and that ominous little 'let's hope it doesn't come to that'... hehehe), and YUMI. Yumi praying to Artemis and getting wrapped in the moon's blessing, summoning Lunar Aegis and Staring Green, and going toe-to-toe with a four-winged captain that Kokabiel SPECIFICALLY picked to break her? That Artemis seed from the Olympus arc is REALLY paying dividends now. And her faith in Marid ('better men have tried to kill him, every one of them defeated')... what could she POSSIBLY mean by that? Ohohoho.
And Asia! Remember all that barrier training Marid forced on her during the Riser arc that she hated? Yeah. THAT'S why. A healer who can only heal dies first. Combined with a grown-up Rassei and the ever-magnificent Keno, our support squad is the real MVP keeping everyone alive.
Kiba and Xenovia are back, the Excalibur is FUSED, Freed has his shiny new murder-sword, and that bomb is ticking. Next chapter, things get so much worse before they get better. Buckle up.
As ALWAYS, please please PLEASE leave a comment and let me know what you thought! Constructive criticism is hugely appreciated, if something felt off or you spotted a plot hole, tell me! Your comments genuinely fuel these chapters.
Until next time, stay safe and have fun!
DGZalama out!
Words:- 8400