"I told you! I told you!"
Aoi's voice was high-pitched, cutting through the rolling thunder of the ongoing battle. She held her older sister with a grip so desperate her knuckles had turned a ghostly white, her small hands slick and trembling as she pressed a makeshift bandage against the blood-soaked tear on Ayaka's shoulder.
"You never listen!" she screamed. "Why don't you ever listen to me?!"
The earth beneath them groaned, vibrating as the fight escalated. Above, the sky had been replaced by a chaotic canvas of clashing energies. light spears, lightning, black void, and crimson flames tore through the sky and across the wasteland.
Explosions echoed around them, and in the distance, two figures moved. They were less like people and more like strokes of lightning, leaving afterimages of gold and black etched into the retinas of anyone brave enough to look.
That…
That was their father.
The girls couldn't truly follow the fight. Their eyes, though enhanced by their own burgeoning power, were too slow to track movements that occurred in the microscopic spaces between heartbeats.
To them, the combat was a series of sonic booms and flashes of light. But they didn't need to see the individual strikes to understand the terrifying flow of the battle. Every time a golden-black blur slammed into the ground, shattering the bedrock, armor sparking, breath coming in ragged, bloody gasps, they knew exactly who was winning.
Azazel, the Governor General of the Fallen Angels, a man who had survived the Great War and the fall from Heaven, was being dismantled and destroyed by a human, not even a fraction of his age.
Aoi turned back to her sister, her fear curdling into a sharp, defensive anger. "This is your fault!" she cried, her voice hitching with a sob. "I told you to stay away from the Fallen! I told you he was dangerous, that Dad would lose it if he found out!"
Ayaka flinched, not from the stinging pain of the wound, but from the raw emotion and unfiltered truth in her sister's accusation. "I… I just wanted to test myself… I didn't think he'd come here," she whispered, but her gaze wasn't on Aoi. It was locked on the horizon, wide-eyed and shaking.
Her mind was reeling, she had known her father was strong, and Rias and Akeno had told her so. But this? This could only be called a force of nature. This was the man she had been trying to defy in her teenage rebellion?.
"You didn't think Dad would come for us?" Aoi said, disbelieving, she had been expecting her father to show up from the moment they left, after all, he wouldn't leave them here once he found out they were gone.
"Ayaka! Aoi! Are you alright?!"
Rias and her peerage came rushing toward them. Behind them, Zeoticus and Venelana Gremory arrived. The elders of the Gremory House looked less like worried parents at the moment and more like seasoned generals.
"What happened?" Zeoticus demanded, his voice booming even over the quaking earth, though his eyes were fixed on the sky, tracking the atmospheric displacement.
No one answered immediately. They were all transfixed by the scene.
Aoi swallowed hard, her throat feeling as though it were filled with sand. "…Our father showed up," she managed to say. "He saw Ayaka injured… and he saw Azazel standing over her. I think he thought that Azazel hurt her, and He just... attacked."
She didn't even need to finish explaining. Rias and her peerage already knew Kenji's reputation for being protective, but they hadn't realized that for Kenji Takahashi, "protective" was synonymous with an instant "total existence erasure" policy.
"We have to stop them!" Rias said, her eyes wide with panic as she watched the literal destruction of her territory.
"How?!" Issei Hyoudou snapped, looking at his King in total disbelief. His Boosted Gear was pulsing a frantic green. "Buchou, look at that! One stray attack from that guy's sword and we're all dead! How are we supposed to stop that?"
As if to punctuate his point, a bolt of lightning, thicker than an oak, tore across the battlefield, followed by hundreds of light spears. Even from miles away, the heat of the discharge made their skin sizzle and the fine hairs on their arms stand upright.
"We focus on the civilians," Zeoticus said firmly, his voice cutting through the panic. "The shockwaves are reaching the nearby towns. Evacuate the outer rim. Contain the panic before the other Great King Houses think we're being invaded."
"I'll handle it," Venelana said, already turning back toward the estate. "I'll get the barrier specialists, I'll call the capital, I'll contact Sirzechs—"
"I doubt that will be necessary…" Zeoticus muttered, a bead of sweat rolling down his forehead.
The power flooding the air was so vast and heavy that he had no doubt every devil in the underworld was feeling the fight at the moment. The entire Underworld was currently vibrating.
"Let's go," Rias said, taking a step forward despite the trembling in her legs.
"Rias, you can't be serious," Akeno said sharply, her usual composure shattered as she grabbed her friend's arm. "That fight… isn't something we can interfere with."
"I can't just do nothing!" Rias shouted back. "This is Gremory territory! As the heir, it is my duty to maintain order!"
The ground quaked with such sudden violence that Rias was thrown off balance. They watched in stunned silence as a massive chunk of land, a piece of the Underworld larger than Kuoh, was ripped clean from the crust. It rose into the air, spinning slowly, casting a shadow so vast.
"…Dear God," Xenovia whispered, her hand trembling as she gripped the hilt of Durandal.
"Rias-senpai…" Gasper stammered, his eyes darting around frantically as he tried to merge with Rias's shadow. "I don't think… I don't think we can help."
The massive floating island rose high into the sky before it started to descend with speed, before it was suddenly struck by a spear of light larger than a building.
In a silent, blinding flash, the city-sized mass of earth was pulverized into fine dust, raining down on the battlefield like gray, choking snow. Then, suddenly, a trench formed across the landscape.
The onlookers went dead silent. The scale of the power was no longer something they could rationalize.
"…Forget the top forty," Akeno muttered, her voice hollow and devoid of its usual playfulness. "…He's definitely top ten."
Then, Azazel was sent into the earth, and Kenji descended from the clouds like a dark omen.
"Big brother—!" Rias breathed in relief when her brother came and stopped the human from killing Azazel.
Sirzechs Lucifer had arrived. For a single heartbeat, the tension in Rias's chest eased. Her brother was the ultimate authority, the strongest devil to ever draw breath, the hero of the Civil War. He would fix this. He would talk the human down and restore the peace.
Then, Sirzechs was punched in the face.
The strongest devil in existence was sent hurtling backward, skipping across the landscape like a stone across a pond, shattering stone and earth until he slammed into a mountain.
Rias froze. The world had stopped making sense. Her brother had just been… discarded like a common nuisance.
She watched in horror as Sirzechs returned from the rubble and rushed back to Kenji. The "kind" big brother was gone, replaced by the Satan of Destruction at that moment.
Grayfia tried to flank Kenji, her ice magic freezing the very moisture in the air into crystalline spears, but Kenji didn't even deign to turn his head. A casual wave of his hand sent a shockwave that shattered her ice into mist and sent the strongest Queen flying toward the horizon.
Sirzechs and Kenji faced each other. The two were talking about something, but she couldn't hear any of it. The world seemed to hold its breath.
Then—
BOOOOOOM—!!!
The sky lost all color, turning into a monochromatic void of gray as the two absolute forces collided. The pressure slammed into the onlookers, forcing everyone, even the powerful Zeoticus, to their knees, cracking the stone beneath them.
"W-What… what's happening…?" Ayaka gasped, her lungs burning as she clawed at her throat. It was like the air itself felt too terrified to enter her body, her body struggling to breathe properly.
Suddenly, the crushing weight vanished. A soft, pale blue barrier formed around the group, saving them. They looked up to see Serafall Leviathan standing above them. Her usual "magical girl" persona was gone, replaced by a sharp gaze.
"What happened?" she asked, her voice low and dangerous, lacking any of its usual melodic lilt.
No one answered. They were all too busy gasping for air and trying not to vomit from the spiritual nausea.
"I asked… what happened?!" she growled, her aura flaring in a cold, icy blue. Imagine being in the office and then feeling the power of her friend rising rapidly, at first she thought it was just a friendly thing when she sensed it was in the gremory territory. After all, what Fool would attack Sirzechs ' sister in the underworld of all places, and Azazel's being there when she sensed didn't help.
"L-Lady Serafall…" Grayfia approached from their left, limping, her silver hair matted with blood and dust, her maid uniform torn in several places.
"Grayfia?!" Serafall rushed to her side, her eyes widening. Grayfia was never injured. Grayfia was untouchable. "What is this?"
Grayfia leaned heavily against the barrier, her eyes fixed on the sky where her husband was currently locked in a struggle. "…A monster," she whispered.
Serafall listened, her expression hardening, as Grayfia explained the arrival of Kenji and the terrifying fact that Kenji had just tried to execute a Governor General and a Devil King.
With Sirzech and Kenji
Sirzechs realized the truth now. When Kenji said he was going to kill him, the human wasn't joking.
Sirzechs raised his hands, catching the razor-thin edge of Kenji's blade. He had to coat his palms with the Power of Destruction just to keep the steel from biting through his skin. The force of the strike behind the blade was so immense that the air behind Sirzechs exploded in a cone of compressed force, carving a new canyon into the Gremory land.
He twisted his grip, attempting to shatter the sword with raw, destructive energy, when the blade simply vanished.
THUD.
A fist slammed into Sirzechs' ribs. sending him flying back, his internal organs vibrating from the shock, but he stabilized instantly, his eyes glowing a lethal, glowing crimson that promised only annihilation.
"Ruin of Extinct!"
A wave of pure, concentrated destruction surged forward. It was a crimson tide that erased whatever it touched.
"Black Hole."
Kenji didn't bother to dodge. A sphere of darkness manifested in his palm, growing until it met the red tide. The two powers slammed together in a stalemate. The sky split in two, half-red, half-black, like a visual representation of the end of the world.
Sirzechs narrowed his eyes. Interesting. Their powers were different, yet somewhat identical.
He summoned hundreds of destruction orbs, each one small but capable of vaporizing an Ultimate-class devil instantly. Kenji answered in kind, manifesting black spheres of gravity. They collided in mid-air, consuming and destroying one another in a chaotic, beautiful symphony of annihilation.
"…So this is what my enemies feel like when they face me," Sirzechs muttered, a grim realization settling in.
Then, Kenji stopped. For a microsecond, he was perfectly still.
The next moment, his speed increased tenfold. He bypassed the orbs entirely, appearing inches from Sirzechs' face. His sword reappeared in a horizontal slash designed to decapitate. Sirzechs raised a shield of concentrated ruin—but the sword vanished again before impact.
A spear of void-black gravity formed in Kenji's other hand and lunged forward with the weight of a mountain. Sirzechs twisted his body mid-air, a feat of incredible agility, but the spear grazed his side, taking a chunk of his regal robes and a layer of skin with it.
Sirzechs exhaled, a long, slow breath that released a plume of crimson energy. He pushed Kenji back with a massive, omnidirectional flare of power, creating a desperate pocket of distance.
"…I truly didn't want it to come to this," he said, his voice becoming eerily calm. His body relaxed, his posture becoming strangely limp. Then, a sound like cracking glass filled the air, resonating through the entire territory.
Thin, glowing red lines appeared across Sirzechs' skin, pulsing like a heartbeat. The "shell" of his humanoid form began to flake away. Power, raw and absolute, began to leak out from the cracks.
The sky turned a deep, viscous blood-red. The Underworld itself began to tremble.
Even Kenji paused, his golden eyes narrowing as he sensed the shift.
"…So you were holding back this entire time," Kenji said, but he already knew that.
Sirzechs stepped forward. He was no longer just a man with red hair. He was the embodiment of the end. The Power of Destruction didn't just surround him, he was Destruction.
"This is as far as you go, Kenji Takahashi."
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