POV: The grey cardinal
Three weeks prior.
The grey cardinal named Father Elias Vermeer walked calmly through the main church of the Vatican, his steps measured and quiet across the marble floor while sunlight filtered down through the great dome above him.
Though his posture was composed and his expression steady his mind was anything but calm as thoughts pressed against him like an unseen storm.
A cardinal stood among the highest ranks of the Church, second only to the Holy Father himself, entrusted with guiding doctrine, safeguarding tradition, and shepherding the faithful. A grey cardinal stood apart from even that august company.
Elias belonged to a fraternity that did not deliver sermons to crowds or appear in grand ceremonies, instead he operated in the shadows of the Church where neither praise nor honor awaited him, and he accepted this fully.
What need had they for recognition, when the Lord Himself was witness to their conviction?
His duties were harsh and absolute since he specialized in purifying particularly powerful evil spirits, commanding and coordinating the special exorcist forces, and ensuring the safe keeping of divine artifacts beneath the holy church so that no relic of great power could ever fall into misuse.
No great holy artifact under the Vatican could ever be deployed without his explicit permission or that of his peers. There were only few such men in the world, only five others who bore the hidden title of grey cardinal, men who rejected wealth and material reward in favor of pure spiritual service to the Most High.
He walked beneath Michelangelo's dome carrying another burden known to even fewer.
As one of the highest ranking members of the Church he was also among the few who were aware of the death of God. The mere thought of it sent a quiet ache through his heart as he remembered the day he learned that his Lord, the shepherd of mankind, had died once again to protect his flock.
A revelation that devastated him beyond measure and drove many others like him into madness. How could the Lord of Hosts, He who breathed life into Adam's clay, He who bore the cross and rose triumphant from the grave, He whose light stood as a bulwark against the legions of darkness that hungered for humanity, how could such a being perish?
Yet He had.
Humanity now walked as orphans beneath a wounded sky.
Father Elias Vermeer had sworn in that moment to remain faithful regardless, to believe in the Almighty as he once believed in man. He resolved that he would remain in this world and continue the work of the Lord, spreading his message to any who sought salvation or would hear him.
He had been given holy power, as many true servants were, and he wielded it as scripture instructed. He laid hands upon the broken and restored their flesh. He gave sight to those whose eyes had been dimmed by darkness of body or soul.
He spoke to the lost and found paths for them when they could no longer see the way. He guided those tempted by corruption back toward the fold, reminding them that mercy remained so long as repentance was sincere.
In every act he echoed the teachings he loved, believing with his whole being that the Church remained a bridge between humanity and God, a structure that must remain righteous lest it collapse and drag countless souls with it.
Deep within him lived the certainty that the Lord would return. Resurrection had once seemed impossible, and yet it had come to pass. Gods endured cycles beyond mortal comprehension, and the mightiest of them would not be extinguished forever. Whether the return came in centuries or millennia did not matter.
Until that day, the children of God were bound to protect one another and stand united against the dark.
His stride lengthened as he descended the steps leading beneath the basilica, away from sunlight and into the stone-veined depths of the Vatican. An alarm had reached him, one that spoke of a breach in defenses believed unassailable. The possibility gnawed at him even as he maintained his composure.
A dozen exorcists flanked him, the finest warriors the Church possessed, all grim and alert with weapons drawn and senses sharpened, resolved to destroy any heretic who had dared to invade the house of the Lord.
At the final gate, he removed a small locket from within his robes. Inside rested one of only three keys in existence, each bound to its bearer by oath and sacrament. He placed it within the lock, murmured the holy invocation, and felt the wards acknowledge him. Stone and sigil parted, granting passage.
The vault revealed itself in solemn silence.
This place was the most heavily protected location on the planet, shielded by the greatest experts of barrier magic and protective rites humanity had ever produced since the founding of the Church, and further protected by the angels themselves from the humblest choir to the seraphim of burning Glory and even by the archangel Michael.
At first glance, nothing appeared disturbed.
He moved among the reliquaries with reverent care, examining them one by one. Here lay the Titulus Damnatio, the weathered inscription once nailed above Christ's head, proclaiming in cruel jest His kingship. Humanity's blindness had been profound then, its sin heavy enough to mock the only one fit to judge it.
He moved deeper into the vault where countless relics were preserved. There lay a fragment of the staff of Moses said to have parted the Red Sea, a small vial containing the last oil used to anoint King David before his rise to the throne, the sandaled strap of the prophet Elijah preserved from the day he was taken into the heavens.
A splinter of the doorframe of the house where the angel spoke to the Virgin Mary; the cracked clay cup used by Mary Magdalene when she washed Christ's feet with her tears; the scroll fragment written by Habakkuk that survived the burning of his village; a silver ring worn by Saint Agnes as she walked to her martyrdom.
A shard of stone from the cell of Saint Peter when he was imprisoned in Jerusalem; the dried reed once held by John the Baptist when he preached repentance in the desert, and many other great and lesser relics from saints and prophets whose names had almost vanished from common memory yet whose faith had shaped the world.
Each artifact stood untouched, its holiness unblemished.
He stood before the Regnum Doloris, the crown of thorns pressed upon Christ's head in cruel mockery and now preserved as a symbol of the weight of humanity's sins.
He felt the exorcists behind him grow uneasy as reverence and dread mingled in their faces, for everything seemed untouched and that absence of disturbance only deepened his concern.
At last, Elias reached the far end of the chamber, where a colossal reliquary stood alone. The seals upon it were older than many nations, reinforced by vows sworn in blood. He placed his hands upon it, drawing upon the strength granted by faith refined through loss. The lid responded, opening with a sound like distant thunder.
He looked inside.
The world seemed to tilt.
Elias staggered backward, his composure breaking for the first time as the exorcists raised their weapons, eyes wide with alarm. They stared into the reliquary and found only emptiness where presence should have been overwhelming.
"W-what happened?" one of the exorcists said in a voice torn between horror and rage.
"Lignum Aeternum has been stolen," Father Elias proclaimed calmly, for panic would serve no purpose now.
The true cross upon which Christ himself had been crucified, the cross that could bind even gods, was gone.
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POV: Serafall
The day could not get any worse.
A beam of fire charged at her at terrifying speed from every direction at once, converging into a roaring tide that sought to drown her existence beneath a sea of incandescent destruction. Serafall snapped her fingers.
The flames froze mid-motion, the raging inferno crystallizing into jagged ice along with the offending creatures that had dared to assault her, their howls silenced forever within frozen tombs.
She looked upon the anarchy unfolding before her. Countless demonic creatures pouring down upon her family's territory in endless swarms, each beast and malignant spirit more aggressive, more reckless, and more suicidally frenzied than they ever were under normal circumstances.
She observed with a detached gaze as one particularly massive demonic beast lunged at a tall humanoid entity composed of shadow and flame, only for the creature to slice the beast apart with a whip of fire and an echoing roar that shook the battlefield itself.
They are attacking each other now, thought Serafall with a hint of schadenfreude, genuinely pleased to see that these abominations were still incapable of the coordination their apparent objective would require.
A small comfort in an otherwise catastrophic situation.
She had temporarily assumed Sirzechs' position as the Satan of Domestic Affairs due to his absence and the absolute, escalating disaster the Underworld had become in the meantime.
A civil war with twelve great houses already involved; a widespread revolution fueled both by reincarnated devils and long-oppressed lower-class devils; and the unchecked rampage of religious fanatics whose crusade to cleanse the Underworld of all they deemed sacrilege against their god had reached such an extreme peak that there was no city untouched by their fervor and chaos.
Even House Gremory's territory was suffering despite being the house that had produced the strongest devil in history.
As if that were not enough, Rating Game players had begun to rampage, either joining the rebels or throwing their lot in with the fanatics after the revelation of the King Piece conspiracy. Then there was the kidnapping of Sirzechs' son and the absence of the strongest devil when he was needed the most, alongside a mountain of other crises she was certain were multiplying by the second.
And now this.
She had been forced to cut short her diplomatic visit to Yasaka, where she was meant to discuss the recent attacks on yōkai tourists by religious extremists and work toward calming tensions, only to rush back to deal with this situation.
And yet it seemed fate itself had decided to mock her, because the moment she returned to the Underworld all demonic creatures and evil spirits had entered a state of nihilistic frenzy, launching coordinated assaults against Pillar territories in massive swarms and annihilating everything in their path.
This had never happened before. While demonic beasts and evil spirits did occasionally attack devils, especially those foolish enough to wander alone through the untamed wilderness of the Underworld where such predatory entities lurked. They had never formed massive, interspecies hordes that moved with cohesion toward a single objective.
Demonic beasts were, by nature, extremely individualistic and egotistical – creatures that would rather die than cooperate meaningfully with another of their kind, and even the briefest alliances always ended with the beasts tearing one another apart, for demonic energy itself despised order and harmony, and with their low intelligence these creatures often acted in ways actively detrimental to their own survival.
Evil spirits, on the other hand, were different, possessing intelligence that could rival devils themselves and occasionally exerting control over demonic beasts as tyrannical kings or masters. And even they too were deeply egotistical and consumed by greed, incapable of forming stable societies or long-term cooperation.
She gazed upon the towering creatures of shadow and flame leading vast armies of demonic beasts, her suspicions regarding the nature of this disaster hardened into certainty.
Someone was controlling these beasts.
It was an obvious conclusion, yet hellish creatures rarely followed logic. She needed to be certain. The knowledge itself offered little comfort, because understanding that these engines of destruction were being guided by an unseen hand only deepened her unease rather than alleviating it.
It was clear that someone desired the complete collapse of the Underworld regardless of cost and was deliberately pouring fuel onto a structure already consumed by fire, and trouble seemed to pursue them relentlessly, clinging like flies to spoiled milk.
I have no time for this shit, thought Serafall with growing irritation. The evacuation protocols should be nearing completion by now.
As a being at the level of Satan, she could eradicate every one of these beasts within seconds. The true problem lay in the fact that they were manifesting in areas of high devil population density, severely restricting her options.
Unleashing her full power would annihilate innocent devils along with the monsters, an outcome she refused to accept under any circumstances, as every devil's life was precious.
For that reason she had ordered a full evacuation to clear the battlefield so she could act without restraint, a process that had been difficult at first due to the unprecedented nature of the crisis.
But after resolving the same situation across three separate territories within the past four hours, she and her subordinates had already refined and implemented an efficient protocol to evacuate civilians with maximum speed and minimal casualties.
Damit juka-chan, this would have been much easier if you were here.
Serafall looked up at the falling sky, the fracture point that connected the first and second circles of hell, a wound in reality that should have collapsed long ago and caused the two dimensions of the underworld to crash into each other.
An event that would have led to incalculable destruction and loss of life, and the only reason this cataclysm had not yet come to pass could be traced to a single individual.
Ajuka Beelzebub.
The one devil considered Sirzechs' equal, the stillness to Sirzechs' storm, the abyssal depths to his raging inferno, the calculated flow of water shaping reality over time to the overwhelming flame that erased everything in its path in a single moment.
And despite being absolute opposites in nature and temperament, they understood one another with an intimacy forged by centuries of friendship. Ajuka was the miracle worker, the greatest mind the devils had ever produced, a being who noticed the sky itself failing and the second circle bleeding through into the first and acted without hesitation, stabilizing a wound in reality that should not have been survivable.
Even so, he could not permanently solve the issue, because the cause was still active.
Sirzechs was fighting there, and had almost certainly released his true nature.
Serafall had witnessed that form once before, the being revered and feared as destruction incarnate, and even now the memory clung to her thoughts and crept into her nightmares. Despite knowing with absolute certainty that Sirzechs would never harm her, the fear was instinctive, primal.
Far more terrifying was the fact that someone was out there in the second circle engaging him in battle without being instantly erased, and the number of beings capable of such a feat could be counted on two hands with fingers to spare, a thought that filled her with a quiet hopelessness as she imagined such entities conspiring against the devil race in its current fractured state.
Falbium should be finished by now.
They had divided the territories experiencing these incursions among themselves to deal with the crisis as efficiently as possible, with Serafall taking the western domains and Falbium handling the east.
With the Underworld drowning in chaos and more and more voices questioning the competence and might of the Satans, it was vital to demonstrate to the people that their rulers were still present and protecting them.
She sensed a familiar presence approaching and turned to see her adorable little sister standing several meters behind her, accompanied by several high-ranking commanders of House Sitri, her presence grounding in a way no battlefield ever could.
"Lady Leviathan," So-tan reported with her usual seriousness. "The evacuation has been completed. The civilians are en route to the capital and the other safe settlements we prepared."
"Good work, So-tan," Serafall replied cheerfully, genuine praise lacing her voice. Her gaze softened as it lingered briefly on her sister, who had insisted on helping defend Sitri territory despite everything, a decision that filled Serafall with pride so intense it bordered on painful.
She rose into the sky and gathered her demonic energy, compressing it into a small sphere saturated with the ice magic she was renowned for. She released it toward the vast stretch of land crawling with demonic creatures.
The temperature plummeted instantly, the air turning so lethally cold that even high-class devils would freeze to death within seconds. Ice swallowed her vision as the land was consumed by an apocalyptic winter that stretched as far as the eye could see, and every beast rampaging through her family's territory was frozen solid, their existence ending in absolute stillness.
Serafall surveyed the frozen wasteland and smiled.
She vanished from the sky and reappeared near her sister and the soldiers of House Sitri. In stark contrast to the ice-covered devastation behind her, the land where they stood remained lush and green, untouched by frost or cold, a flawless boundary marking the precision and overwhelming control of her magic.
"As expected of Lady Serafall," one soldier said in awe.
"She truly operates beyond standard parameters," another added.
"So this the power of a Satan," another muttered. "incredible."
"Sometimes I forget that beneath that cheerful persona is a being capable of erasing entire nations," someone whispered, unable to fully suppress the tremor in their voice.
More whispers followed, layered with reverence and instinctual fear at having witnessed a Satan-level being unleash her power. Serafall felt the familiar sting of discomfort at their gazes. She had never liked that fear, not even during the height of the civil war when she had killed countless devils and earned a reputation as a boogeyman whispered about in terror.
A magical girl should inspire hope, love, and friendship, not submission or trembling obedience. Yet fear always followed when her true nature was revealed, and it was the reason she could never form genuine connections beyond her fellow Satans, because everyone else placed her on an unreachable pedestal.
Everyone except one.
"Will this become a permanent ice wasteland?" her sister asked calmly.
Sona did not fear her, nor did she idolize her, and she had always seen through the veil of isolation surrounding Serafall and dragged her out of it through sheer love and boundless enthusiasm.
She was the reason Serafall had become a magical girl at all, a decision born from the desire to embody the love and friendship her sister offered so freely when others could only stare in awe or terror.
There was a flicker of fear on Sona's face now, the natural response of self-preservation, but it was quickly swallowed by her absolute faith that her sister would never harm her and loved her beyond measure.
"Nope," Serafall replied cheerfully.
She snapped her fingers, and the frozen wasteland began to thaw, the demonic beasts dissolving into steam as the ice melted away to reveal trees and plant life beneath, stripped of leaves as though the cold had drained them of vitality. It would take time and magic to fully restore the land, but it would not remain a wasteland.
"The beasts are being controlled by someone, aren't they?" Sona asked, her perceptiveness as sharp as ever.
"Obviously," Serafall replied seriously. "This isn't natural behavior at all. They're far more aggressive and completely lacking in self-preservation. Something has definitely frightened them badly. But don't wor—"
She stopped mid-sentence.
She stopped as a sudden pressure rolled over the land, sharp and overwhelming, a presence approaching at terrifying speed, vast and hostile, the air itself trembling as though reality were recoiling from what was about to arrive.
"Sister, what's—" Sona began, her voice laced with sudden fear, before her legs gave out and she dropped to her knees under the unfathomable weight of the demonic pressure bearing down upon them.
All the other soldiers collapsed to their knees as well, some losing consciousness outright as their bodies simply gave up under the weight of what pressed down upon them. While those who remained awake, Sona among them, began to scream as though their very souls were being flayed, their nerves igniting with agony like thousands of needles driven simultaneously into flesh.
Their minds buckled under the sheer terror of standing in the presence of what they instinctively understood to be the absolute pinnacle of the devil race, a being whose existence alone erased any lingering illusion of safety or hierarchy and replaced it with raw awareness of their own insignificance.
Serafall reacted instantly, erecting a barrier infused with her demonic power that pushed back the bloodlust saturating the air like a toxic miasma, shielding Sona and the others from being crushed further beneath its weight.
She looked toward the source of the ominous feelings and saw a figure hovering in the sky. A brown haired woman with twelve bat-like wings of the devils spread behind her, and Serafall recognized her face at once yet could not reconcile the person she remembered with the twelve winged being before her, the difference between what Katerea had been and what she now was creating a kind of cognitive dissonance that made her head ache.
"As expected," spoke the twelve winged she-devil. "You quickly dealt with all those beasts. Truly, worthy of the title of Leviathan. But this is the hour in which the steward is cast down and the bloodline is reclaimed, for the prodigal daughter has returned from exile, and the inheritance that was taken in rebellion shall be restored unto its rightful heir."
Serafall took back her earlier evaluation. The day could indeed get worse and it clearly had. Just when did satan-class beings become such a common sight?
First Kokabiel and now Katerea stood before her and she feared how many others might be waiting beyond the horizon.
"Katerea," Serafall said calmly while assessing her options. "I would say it is a pleasure to see you again, so healthy, but I'd be lying. Your timing is, to put it mildly, inconvenient."
Katerea chuckled. "Don't worry, it won't be for long, it is a day where you will pay for all your sins."
Had those words come from the Katerea of the past, Serafall would have laughed them off without hesitation, but as she met the gaze of the twelve-winged demon and felt the visceral hatred burning within her eyes, she understood that this threat carried a terrifying sincerity she could not afford to dismiss.
Serafall glanced at Sona and the other soldiers who were still on their knees, trembling from the lingering aftereffects of Katerea's bloodlust even though the pressure itself had already faded.
She could not fight Katerea while still protecting them, which meant she had to find a way to send them all away so she could confront her properly.
"Send them away, Serafall," Katerea said with pride. "I have no intention of using them to handicap you. I want to fight you in nothing less than your absolute best."
Serafall suspected some kind of trick or a ploy to make her lower her guard so she kept her senses on full alert while nodding to Sona and the others to teleport to safety, and to her surprise Katerea simply waited without interference until they had all vanished.
It seemed that it was not only Katerea's power that had undergone a transformation, and Serafall found herself unsettled by the shift in her old enemy's demeanor.
"Thank you for your kindness Katerea," Serafall said sincerely.
"Spare me your gratitude, you imbecile," Katerea sneered. "I am here to kill you after all."
"Oh I have no doubt," Serafall replied. "But I am nonetheless grateful for the good sportsmanship."
"I wonder if you will still be grateful when I bathe in the blood of your family after I kill you," Katerea mocked.
Serafall unfolded her wings and flew toward Katerea, the two women beginning to circle each other in the air like predators on the verge of clashing.
"If," Serafall replied with confidence.
Katerea chuckled. "I am impressed to see your pride still intact after the absolute mockery that your kingdom has become, by yours truly," Katerea said with a mocking bow.
"Figured," Serafall said calmly. "The old satan faction is manipulating the events from the shadows. I couldn't believe it at first since it didn't fit your usual modus operandi. Subtlety was never your strength, after all. It's like seeing an old dog learn new tricks."
"Why thank you," Katerea said almost sincerely. "Though I cannot take all the credit. It belongs mainly to my master who showed me the error of my ways and taught me to be better."
"Your master," Serafall said with alarm. "...the prince of hell?"
"Who else?" Katerea laughed.
This was bad news, no scratch that this was horrible news and among the countless terrible things Serafall had learned over the years this felt utterly devastating - like kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach.
The reason they had won the last civil war was that Rizevim had not cared about underworld politics at the time and now Katerea was saying he was actively playing a game and that all the chaos had been his doing.
All of it suddenly made sense.
The prince of hell wanted his throne back.
And Serafall would be damned if she let him have it without a fight.
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POV: Ajuka Beelzebub
Being a Satan sure is troublesome.
Ajuka's attention should have been distributed elsewhere, because by every reasonable metric his current allocation of time was inefficient. The number of active crises demanding intervention increased along a curve that was linear in visibility and exponential in consequence.
Each unresolved variable propagating two more in a classic compounding pattern that any systems analyst would have flagged as unsustainable.
Instead he was here, carrying the sky so that countless innocent devils do not die.
At first glance the problems seemed completely unrelated, and he forced himself to list them in sequence to search for coherence.
The assassination of the heir of a pillar house that had ignited a civil war, the sudden rise of religious fanaticism, the rebellion of lower class and reincarnated devils, the king piece conspiracy that had driven a wedge even among the high class, the kidnapping of Sirzechs' son, and finally the hormone induced rampage of demonic creatures in hell, and he asked himself what any of these had to do with one another.
Each of them could occur naturally in isolation, with the exception of the madness of the demonic beasts. The nobility of the underworld existed in a constant state of political friction where assassination of heirs was a known risk rather than a shocking anomaly.
Sirzechs' true brilliance lay in his ability to navigate these hostile dynamics with minimal loss, but Sirzechs was absent and so the stabilizing constant was gone.
The religious fervor had always been present, an unavoidable consequence of the original Satans being woven into the cultural memory of the underworld as both rulers and gods. Each of the four bearing entire cults devoted to them.
It was one of the reasons they had accepted those titles in the first place to present an illusion of continuity and normality so that the masses would not fracture in rebellion even if they understood on some level that resistance would be futile.
The other three crises however were largely of his own making, and Ajuka did not avoid that conclusion. When he created the evil pieces he had known they would create a permanent underclass that would eventually rebel if mishandled. While measures had been proposed to mitigate this outcome they had not been implemented with the urgency they deserved.
The exploitation of the king piece system by elite families to preserve dominance in the rating games was something he himself had once encouraged during the civil war when he offered neutral houses the means to multiply their power tenfold or even a hundredfold to draw them into the anti Satan coalition.
A tactic that had succeeded in the short term and failed in the long term because he had never ensured those tools could not be abused afterward.
There was no use in dwelling on roads not taken, he thought calmly.
The Kankara Formula continued to operate in parallel within his mind, maintaining separation between dimensional layers whose intersection would result in cascading annihilation while also sealing every region where demonic beast density had exceeded critical thresholds.
What concerned him was convergence.
Five major destabilizing phenomena were rising within overlapping temporal windows, and the probability distribution for such synchronization under random conditions was effectively negligible.
Independent variables simply did not align with this level of precision without a unifying cause.
Correlation implied coordination.
Ajuka shifted his attention from surface events to their deeper topology. Every complex system contained an origin point, a node where influence vectors converged, a spider at the center of a web that exerted force across multiple axes while remaining distant from the visible chaos.
The most logical action would be to locate that node, remove it, and then resolve the cascading failures in sequence, and he allowed himself a brief moment to consider what outcome this orchestrated disorder might be meant to achieve and what purpose lay beneath such sustained anarchy.
Then he heard a whistle, a sound that should not have been audible at such distance even to devil senses, which implied that it was not transmitted through air at all and was directed at him alone, carrying no effect beyond revealing its point of origin.
It came from the capital of the underworld, Lilith.
He vanished from the sky and reappeared atop the tallest structure in Lilith, where the source of the signal waited.
Ajuka found himself unexpectedly taken aback by the figure before him; a tall dark haired young man with brown eyes sitting on the edge of the building with careless grace that appeared entirely natural to him, dressed in a dark coat and otherwise casual clothing.
Ajuka analyzed the being in front of him and reached a conclusion that made the surrounding noise of the city fade from relevance.
Haruki Yamashiro had become an ultimate class being.
How is this possible?
"Haruki Yamashiro," Ajuka said calmly as he arrived a few meters away from the boy.
"Amazing," Haruki replied, studying him with open fascination. "To be able to carry the sky while sealing multiple regions and still hold a conversation. Your Kankara Formula truly is impressive."
Ajuka concealed his surprise at how easily the boy perceived the full scope of his work and chose a safer line of dialogue.
"Sirzechs has been looking for you," he said.
"I am sure he has," Haruki answered without concern.
"Why?" Ajuka asked, watching him closely.
"Why what?" Haruki said, a trace of amusement in his eyes.
"Why did you do all of this?" Ajuka asked. "I don't understand how this would help you achieve your goal."
"Oh? And what makes you think I had anything to do with it?"
"I consider you to be a smart person," Ajuka said calmly. "I would appreciate the same courtesy in return."
"Oh, I do consider you smart," Haruki said with a quiet chuckle. "indulge me though. How did you reach that conclusion?"
"A leap of logic," Ajuka replied. "Your interview in the past was a calculated attempt to incite unrest through your status as the reincarnation of Lucifer. Given your dissatisfaction with the current system, you required a catalyst for large scale social change, and you sought it by radicalising every faction in the underworld.
"With the reincarnation of their creator openly condemning the present order, each group interpreted your words in accordance with its own ideology and began attempting to cleanse or enlighten factions that did not align with their worldview. There is one thing I do not understand however."
"And that would be?" Haruki asked, looking entertained rather than threatened.
"Why you believe Sirzechs has to be removed," Ajuka said, narrowing his eyes.
"Considering your own theory that I seek to cause social change and that Sirzechs stands at the head of the order I dislike," Haruki replied calmly, "wouldn't he naturally be my greatest obstacle to any such change?"
"Possibly," Ajuka conceded. "But you are neither irrational nor stupid. You would have no greater ally than Sirzechs if you wished to enact meaningful change."
"Come on now, Ajuka. How long have you and Sirzechs been in power?"
"Five hundred seventeen years," Ajuka answered.
"And how long have the evil pieces existed?"
Ajuka already understood where this was going, yet answered anyway. "Approximately the same amount of time," Ajuka replied.
"And yet," Haruki continued calmly, "reincarnated devils still possess the same rights they had at the beginning. Which is none. Where was this great champion of change you claim Sirzechs to be?"
Ajuka exhaled slowly. It was clear Haruki was not interested in genuine discussion. "We were searching for a realistic solution to that particular problem," Ajuka said.
"Realistic?" Haruki sneered. "You mean a miraculous solution that would not upset the status quo?"
"Then what should we have done?" Ajuka asked. "Cause anarchy as you have?"
"I am simply saying that if you had more than five centuries to enact change and this is all you have to show for it, you are either grossly incompetent or you never truly wished to change anything."
"I see," Ajuka said. "What do you intend to do then? How does this help you achieve your goal?"
"You seem convinced that you already know my goal."
"Based on everything I have learned about you, you seem driven to change how reincarnated devils are treated, unless of course this has all been an act from the beginning," Ajuka replied.
"Oh? And what sort of act would that be?"
"An act designed to conceal your true nature," Ajuka said.
Haruki regarded him with interest. "And what do you believe my true nature to be?"
"A psychopath hellbent on sacrificing others in pursuit of power," Ajuka replied calmly. "You know, that little incident involving the fallen angels has been rather curious to me. Do you know why?"
"Nope."
"You were newly reincarnated then," Ajuka explained, his voice steady. "You had no sacred gear and no ancient magical bloodline to speak of. Yet when you returned after dealing with the fallen, you were suddenly high class in power."
Haruki met his gaze without flinching, his expression relaxed. "Hmm," he murmured. "Very curious."
"Indeed," Ajuka agreed. "More curious is the fact that this increase in power occurred while you were standing amid the ashes of the fallen you had just slaughtered. A curious man might wonder how that came to be."
"And what conclusion has this curious man reached?"
"A unique ability," Ajuka replied. "Something that allows you to increase your demonic power by sacrificing something in return. Though such an ability would be too vague and powerful to exist without restrictions, so it would require conditions to balance it, perhaps something like orchestrating an event with precision and guiding it toward a predetermined outcome. Which would explain how you led the fallen angels into a chase that ended in a specific location that you had likely designated as the altar for their sacrifice."
For the first time Ajuka saw shock cross Haruki's face, after which Haruki began to laugh with deep and almost hysterical amusement.
"You deduced all of that from a second hand report?" Haruki asked once he caught his breath, genuine admiration in his voice. "You truly are a genius."
"I had often wondered what your ultimate objective might be," Ajuka went on. "To be honest, you were not among my initial suspects for the chaos engulfing the underworld, not even within my top ten. You were simply too weak at the time to plausibly orchestrate events of this magnitude."
That much was true. His initial suspect had been Rizevim and the remnants of the old Satan faction.
"And based on all that," Haruki said, tilting his head slightly, "what do you think my goal is?"
"We will address that shortly," Ajuka replied. "First allow me to explain another peculiar detail. After your battle with Riser Phenex you vanished completely without leaving any trace behind. Given your behavior up to that point, the logical conclusion would have been that you fled from your king and became a stray devil."
"But?" Haruki prompted.
"But you reappeared exactly one week after the extinction of the vampires," Ajuka said, continuing his relentless analysis. "You were the mole, were you not?"
"The mole?"
"The one who infiltrated the vampires," Ajuka clarified. He saw a shock flash across Haruki's face again. "You were the one who dismantled the vampire barrier from within."
"That is an insane leap in logic," Haruki replied calmly. "It could easily be a coincidence. More likely than not."
"I acknowledged that from the start," Ajuka replied with a faint smile, now certain in his reasoning. "It was the same leap in logic that led me to believe you are responsible for the chaos unfolding in the underworld. Vampires are objectively worse than devils in their treatment of humans. Considering your personality, you would have had the perfect motive to orchestrate their eradication."
"Wait," Haruki said, genuinely puzzled. "Isn't that kind of contradictory? You accuse me of being a psychopathic murderer, yet in the same breath claim I would feel righteous anger toward vampires simply because they treat humans poorly?"
"Psychopathic toward those you deem less than human," Ajuka replied evenly. "You engineered the downfall of the vampires, which likely elevated you into an ultimate class being. The sudden exponential rise in unrest throughout the underworld following your return supports this theory."
"Truly fascinating," Haruki chuckled. "Your theory has so many holes I don't even know where to begin."
Ajuka knew that. He could see the gaps himself, the leaps of logic, the absence of concrete proof. By every rational measure, it was far more likely that someone else was responsible, and that Haruki's involvement was coincidence layered upon coincidence.
And yet his heart refused to let the idea go.
It was strange. Ajuka was a being governed by logic above all else. Emotion and instinct rarely influenced his judgment. Experiencing this quiet insistence, this pull toward a conclusion he could not fully justify, was unsettling.
Was this how Sirzechs and the others felt all the time? Guided by intuition and emotion rather than pure reason?
"Am I wrong?" Ajuka asked Haruki.
Haruki did not answer immediately. He looked thoughtful, eyes drifting briefly toward the sealed sky above them.
"And where does the Hero Faction fit into this?" he said. "You know how much I despise them, so why would I ever help them massacre the vampires?"
"Either you were blackmailed or you reached some form of understanding," Ajuka explained. "Strictly speaking, the Hero Faction claims to act in the name of saving humanity, which would not necessarily contradict your own principles."
"It is remarkable how easily a person can rationalize events after already settling on a conclusion," Haruki said soberly. "Let us assume you are correct. What do you believe my goal to be?"
"Power," Ajuka answered without hesitation. "If the underworld is left without any force to oppose you, without order and without Satans to restrain you, then you are free to sacrifice as many devils as you wish to increase your own strength, and with that perspective your actions begin to make sense, including your attempt to spread chaos and your desire to remove Sirzechs from the board."
It was a flimsy explanation even to his own ears, yet Ajuka felt absolute certainty in it.
"I see," Haruki said quietly. "Everyone carries their own version of another person within their mind. Your words have never been truer, Serafall."
Ajuka frowned internally. Why mention Serafall? According to his information, Haruki and she were not particularly close, aside from a single diplomatic mission they had once shared.
"You are not entirely wrong, Ajuka," Haruki continued. "I am responsible for the fall of the vampires and for the chaos that now grips the underworld, though not for the reason you believe."
"Then why?" Ajuka asked, finding no satisfaction in being partially vindicated.
"You simply cannot see it," Haruki replied with a sudden grin. "What lies further ahead, the dreams of a far future. It is unfortunate that both you and Sirzechs must die for it to come to pass."
"And how do you intend to accomplish that?" Ajuka asked coldly.
"With them," Haruki answered.
Ajuka expanded his sensory field at once in search of any hostile presence, yet detected nothing.
"Can't you hear it, Ajuka?" Haruki asked.
"Hear what?"
"The thunder."
Thunder erupted across the sky, filling the air with roaring lightning that struck all around Ajuka, though none of it touched him as he neutralized each bolt through instinctive control of his power.
A towering figure suddenly stood beside Haruki, well over seven feet tall, broad shouldered and powerfully built, with blazing red hair that fell to his shoulders and a massive hammer held casually in his grip, while divine might radiated from him with such intensity that there was no mistaking the identity of the intruder.
"Thor," Ajuka said.
"Greetings unto thee, Satan in green," the god of thunder proclaimed, his voice heavy with authority, before turning to Haruki. "The Allfather has gone to intercept the Satan Asmodeus as you requested." Haruki acknowledged this with a nod.
Ajuka recalled the list Azazel once compiled in his usual joking manner, ranking the strongest beings in existence by combat potential alone, a flawed list by many measures, yet still a useful measure of danger.
Thor of the Aesir stood among those few at the pinnacle, a god whom even Ajuka could not confront lightly.
A purple portal then opened at Haruki's right, and from it emerged a presence that Ajuka recognized instantly, as though the world itself was announcing the identity of the newcomer.
In that moment the mystery of how Tezcatlipolca had sustained the separation of the vampire dimension was resolved in Ajuka's mind, since such a feat demanded infinite energy, and the answer now stood before him.
The eldest son of Adam gazed upon Ajuka with a detached expression.
"Cain," Ajuka said. "Many wondered what became of you, whether the death of the one who cursed you finally allowed you to die as well."
"It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Ajuka Beelzebub," Cain replied calmly. "Fate, however, is rarely so merciful."
"Gentlemen," Haruki said as he unfurled his wings, "I shall leave him in your capable hands."
Haruki vanished into the air at tremendous speed. Ajuka made no move to pursue him.
He could not.
Not with the two beings who now stood before him.
AN: In case you're wondering why the True Holy Cross exists when Incinerate Anthem is already a Sacred Gear, I took inspiration from the fact that the original Holy Grail exists separately from Sephiroth Graal and is kept by the Church. So by that same logic, there could also be an original version of the True Cross, which I imagine would be heavily guarded by the Church.
Also, I was extremely annoyed by Incinerate Anthem's abilities. I mean, purple flames? Why? It already has the perfect thematic explanation for being a sealing weapon, it was the weapon used in Christ's crucifixion. With a bit of magical logic, you could easily say it has the power to bind or seal divine beings, which would naturally place it at Longinus level. I genuinely don't know what Ichibumi was thinking when he gave it fire abilities instead.
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