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
Kokabiel began to clap.
The sound of it rang out across the ruined courtyard, slow and mocking, echoing off the shattered buildings, and every defender on that blood-soaked field felt it crawl up their spines like ice water.
"Bravo," the Cadre drawled, alighting fully upon the earth, folding his ten black wings behind him. "Truly. Bravo, all of you. You have performed magnificently. And do you know the funniest part? I knew. I knew exactly what you were doing, from the very first moment." His crimson eyes glittered with cruel amusement. "You have been stalling. Holding back. Fighting just hard enough to stay alive and no harder, running down the clock like frightened little rabbits, praying that whatever precious backup you have called for arrives before I grow bored and squash you." He spread his hands. "Oh, I saw it. I have watched a hundred desperate armies do the very same thing across all my long centuries of war. And I let you. Do you understand? I let you play your little game, because watching you scramble and scheme and cling to your fragile hope was the most entertaining thing I have seen in centuries."
He rolled his shoulders, and the air itself seemed to darken around him.
"But my patience, at last, is spent. And my curiosity is not. So." A wicked grin split his ancient face. "Let us find out, shall we, what the celebrated peerage of the Gremory heiress is truly capable of, when there is no more time to stall and no more corners left to hide behind. Show me. All of it. Entertain me properly."
His hands came up, and from the air itself two swords of pure, condensed light took shape in his grip, blazing white-gold, humming with lethal power. And then he unleashed a portion of his killing intent, not the full crushing weight of it, but enough, a rolling wave of ancient malice that slammed into the defenders like a physical blow and made knees buckle, made breath catch, made the primal animal part of every soul present scream at them to run.
But they did not run.
Because that killing intent, terrible as it was, did the opposite of what Kokabiel intended. It reminded them, with brutal clarity, exactly what waited for the sleeping city behind them if they broke. And that thought, that single unbearable thought, hardened their fear into something like steel.
"Everyone," Rias said, her voice tight but unwavering, crimson power gathering around her fists. "This is it. Hold nothing back. We survive this, together, or not at all." Her blue-green eyes flicked to her pawn. "Issei. I need you boosting. Right now. Everything you have, as high as you can climb, and do not stop for anything. When the moment comes, I will need every drop of it."
"On it, Buchou!" Issei's gauntlet flared to life. [Boost!]
"Then," Rias said, and crimson annihilation bloomed around her like a cloak of living fire, "let's go."
And the battle for the fate of Kuoh began in earnest.
They came at him from every angle at once.
Kiba struck first, a blur of impossible steel, his holy-demonic blade leading and three more Sword of the Betrayer creations flashing into being around him and hurtling forward in the same breath. Beside him came Xenovia, dual-wielding, Durandal's raw destruction in one hand and Excalibur Destruction in the other, the two holy blades carving twin arcs of annihilating light toward the Cadre. Masomi flanked wide, his high-tiered holy sword steady in his grip despite the blood still soaking his robes, an exorcist trained his whole life for exactly this and refusing to let his wounds slow him. And Kenta came in low and roaring, drawing swirling flames from the core of Ignis Imperium and shaping them, with Adara's whispered guidance, into fiery spears wreathed in his own beast-Ki, four melee fighters converging on the monster from four directions at once.
And from range, the magic came.
Rias, Akeno, and Yumi had spread themselves in a loose arc behind the melee line, and they filled the sky between them and Kokabiel with death. Crimson bolts of the Power of Destruction, meant to erase whatever they touched. Akeno's storms, lightning arcing down in blinding sheets. And Yumi's Staring Green, emerald shafts of light loosed in rapid, precise volleys, her silver moonlight blazing brighter with every prayer half-formed on her lips.
Koneko and Issei did not join the assault. Koneko had planted herself in front of a swaying, exhausted Asia, a small immovable wall of a Rook, while Asia poured what remained of her strength into healing the cuts and burns that were beginning, slowly, to accumulate across her friends. And Issei stood apart, gauntlet blazing, jaw set, doing the single most important and least glamorous job on the field.
[Boost!]
Seven. The count climbed higher with every beat of his heart, and he fed the growing power down toward his King, and waited for the moment she would need it.
It should have been overwhelming. Four legendary blades and three gifted magic-users, every one of them fighting at the very peak of their strength, all focused on a single target. Against nearly anything else they had ever faced, it would have been the end.
Against Kokabiel, it was a game.
The Cadre laughed as he met them, and he met all of them at once. His two conjured light-swords moved faster than the eye could follow, catching Kiba's holy-demonic edge on one and Xenovia's Durandal on the other, holding both blades locked in the same instant. His ten great wings, far from being mere ornaments, became weapons and shields in their own right, sweeping and folding, batting Masomi's thrust aside with one black pinion while another swatted a volley of Kenta's fire-spears out of the air. And when Rias's crimson destruction and Akeno's lightning and Yumi's emerald arrows came screaming in from behind, Kokabiel simply spread the rest of his wings into a fanned wall of oil-black feathers, and the attacks broke and scattered against them like waves against a cliff.
"Yes!" he crowed, genuinely delighted, whirling through the storm of blades and spells with a dancer's grace, his swords never still, his wings never still, everywhere at once. "Yes, this is more like it! Come, little devils, harder! You will have to try so very much harder than that!"
Kiba pressed the assault, and here his Balance Breaker earned its terrible name. The Sword of the Betrayer could cut what neither pure holy nor pure demonic blade could, and against Kokabiel's conjured swords of light it made the difference count. Where Xenovia's holy edges met the Cadre's light and were simply matched, Kiba's holy-demonic steel bit, forcing Kokabiel to actually give ground before it, to respect it in a way he respected nothing else the melee threw at him. He forged and flung his impossible blades faster than the eye could track, a whirling storm of them, each one an anomaly that no defense had ever been keyed against, and for the span of a few heartbeats he was the only fighter on the field truly making the Cadre work.
But a few heartbeats was all. Kokabiel adapted, as beings of his age always did, learning the rhythm of the impossible blade, angling his parries so the anomaly's edge met the flat of his light-swords rather than their edges, and the advantage bled away as quickly as it had come. Skill and experience closed what raw novelty had opened, and the knight found himself, once more, merely one voice in a chorus that could not reach its target.
"A lovely trick, swordsman!" Kokabiel called, batting three of the flung blades from the air. "Holy and demonic, wed in a single edge! Do you know how rare that is? How precious? Ohh, I could sell what lives in your soul to a dozen buyers who would start wars for it!" He laughed, spinning through Kenta's fire. "But a rare blade in an unready hand is still just a blade, boy, and yours is a very unready hand!"
At the edge of the field, near where Asia knelt healing and Koneko stood guard, two small creatures strained against the invisible leashes of their masters' wills.
Rassei, Asia's sprite dragon, had grown bold and strong since the Familiar Forest, and every fiber of his little draconic being howled at him to hurl himself into the fight. He was a dragon. Dragons did not cower at the edges of battles while their kin bled. He crackled and hissed and thrashed, sparks leaping from his scales, straining toward the melee.
"No, Rassei, no!" Asia caught him gently but firmly, pulling him back against her chest even as she worked her healing. "Please, please stay. This one is too big for you, sweetheart. Too dangerous. I couldn't bear it if something happened to you, I couldn't." Her voice cracked with the strain of the plea. "Let them handle it. Please. Stay with me. Keep me safe instead. Can you do that? Keep me safe?"
The little dragon threw what could only be described as a tantrum, thrashing and spitting sparks, deeply and visibly offended at being asked to sit out a fight of this magnitude. But he did not leave Asia's side. In the end, the bond between them held where the leash of command might not have.
Nearby, Keno the Bakeneko crouched low, tail lashing, her two tails bristling, her knowing eyes fixed on the whirling chaos where her master fought and bled. Kenta had taken a glancing blow, and she had felt it, the mischievous, prank-loving cat suddenly nothing but a creature who wanted to protect the young man she had, against all her own expectations, grown so attached to.
"Stay." Koneko's small hand came down on the cat's back, gentle but immovable, and there was a strange understanding between the two feline spirits. "You feel it too, don't you. That intent." The Rook's golden eyes were grim. "It's not a fight for us. Not yet. Kenta needs to know you're safe, or he'll fight worse. So we stay, and we watch, and we're ready." Keno gave a low, unhappy yowl, but she folded herself down beside Koneko, and stayed, though every line of her small body quivered with the need to help.
The battle raged, and it became, with every passing exchange, more and more clear that the defenders were not fighting an enemy. They were fighting a phenomenon.
Yumi and Akeno had begun to weave, moving with Rias in a constantly shifting pattern, throwing their magic at varied intervals and from varied angles, some attacks meant to genuinely wound, others meant only to blind or distract, to open a half-second gap that Kenta or Kiba or Xenovia or Masomi could exploit to land a real blow. It was beautiful, coordinated work, the kind of layered strategy that had won Rias her rating game against Riser. Against a lesser foe it would have carved a path to victory.
Kokabiel handled all of it, and he laughed while he did.
"Clever!" he crowed, catching Kiba's blade and using the momentum to spin away from Xenovia's follow-up, his wings scattering Akeno's lightning even as one conjured sword lashed out to force Masomi back. "Genuinely clever! The little Gremory trains her people well! But cleverness is a tool for closing a gap in power, children, and the gap between us is not a gap that any amount of cleverness can close!"
And here was the terrible truth of it, the thing none of them could see from the inside of the storm but which any observer might have grasped: Kokabiel was not using his full power. Not remotely. But he was no longer coasting either. Where at the start of the night he had toyed with them at a fraction of his true strength, now, against seven fighters and their legendary arms and their layered strategy, he had been forced to bring perhaps half of his real power to bear. Half. And with only half, he was holding all seven of them at once, blocking, batting, weaving, laughing, entirely in control.
The cruelest part, the part that would have broken lesser wills, was that even this was mercy. Had Kokabiel decided, in any single moment, to stop savoring the fight and simply end it, he could have killed every soul on that field with the very same output he was now spending merely to keep them occupied. He was not stronger when he wished to kill them. He was simply finished. The only thing keeping them all alive was that a two-thousand-year-old warmonger was having the time of his life.
"You feel it, don't you," Kokabiel said, almost gently, as he parried and wove and danced. "That creeping little certainty in your bellies. That no matter what you do, no matter how cleverly you strike, it simply. Does not. Matter." His grin was radiant. "That is despair, children. Drink deep of it. It is the truest thing you will ever taste."
"Together!" Rias shouted, refusing the despair with everything she had. "Akeno, Yumi, with me! Everything, right now, the big one!"
The three of them pulled back, and Rias reached deep into the wellspring of her Gremory blood, and crimson annihilation gathered in her hands, vast and roaring. Akeno poured her storms into it, lightning wrapping the crimson core in a crackling shell. And Yumi added her own light and her borrowed moonlight, silver and green threading through the whole terrible construct, the three of them pooling their power into a single attack built on the foundation of the Power of Destruction itself.
It left Rias's hands like the wrath of a small sun.
For the first time all night, Kokabiel stopped laughing.
The Cadre's crimson eyes narrowed, and he moved, planting his feet, bringing both conjured swords up and crossing them before him, and he met the combined attack head-on with a grunt of genuine effort. The collision lit the whole ruined academy in blinding crimson-silver light, the shockwave flattening what few structures still stood, and for a heartbeat, one single heartbeat, it seemed the attack might actually break through.
Then Kokabiel heaved, and with a roar of effort he batted the entire construct back the way it had come.
"Move!" Rias screamed.
But there was no time.
The attack, their own attack, came screaming back at the three of them with barely diminished force, and it would have killed them, all three, instantly and utterly. Rias could not dodge it. Akeno could not dodge it.
So Yumi and Akeno did the only thing left to do. They put themselves in front of Rias, and they held.
Akeno threw up every scrap of her defensive magic. And Yumi called Lunar Aegis to its absolute limit, the moon-silver barrier flaring to a size and brightness it had never reached before, drinking deep of Artemis's borrowed grace, a wall of lunar light thrown up against their own returned wrath. The two of them poured everything they had into that shield, every ounce of magic and will and desperate love for their King, and the attack slammed into it like a mountain falling.
The barrier held for one second. Two.
Then it shattered.
But it had done its work. The attack that broke through was a fraction of what it had been, its killing force spent against the shield, and instead of erasing all three of them it merely hurled them, Akeno and Yumi taking the brunt of it, their bodies flung across the cratered field to crash into the rubble, smoking and still. Rias, shielded by their sacrifice, was thrown back but survived, scrambling up with a cry of horror.
"AKENO! YUMI!"
They did not get up.
They lay crumpled where the blast had thrown them, and the sight of them wrung a fresh cry of horror from Rias. Akeno's elegant shrine-maiden garb hung in scorched ribbons, one sleeve burned clean away, the pale skin beneath mottled with ugly, spreading bruises and raw red scald-marks where the returned attack had chewed through her defenses. Blood ran from a split above her brow, matting a dark streak through her raven hair, and her breath came in shallow, ragged pulls. Yumi was no better, worse, perhaps; her battle-tied blonde hair had come loose and lay fanned in the dirt, her kimono-styled combat dress torn open across one shoulder and down her side, the fabric singed black at the edges. Deep bruises bloomed across her ribs and arms, one of them already darkening to the color of a thundercloud, and a thin line of blood traced from the corner of her mouth. The silver moonlight that had wreathed her all night, Artemis's borrowed grace, had guttered down to the faintest flicker, all but spent in that final, breaking shield. Two of the fiercest fighters on the field, reduced in a single exchange to broken, smoking heaps, breathing, but barely, and utterly unable to rise.
Asia was already scrambling toward the two fallen girls, her healing light flaring, but her stamina was nearly gone, spent hours ago in saving Irina and Masomi and everyone since. She could only do so much. She pressed her hands to Akeno and Yumi in turn, willing them to live, and managed, just barely, to pull them back from the edge, to ensure that neither was dying. But she could not wake them. She could not heal them whole. The two of them lay battered and broken and out of the fight, breathing but helpless, and that was the very best Asia's exhausted gift could manage.
Kokabiel looked upon the two fallen girls, and he laughed.
"Oh, how the mighty little moonlit thing has fallen!" he crowed, delighted. "And the thunder-priestess with her. Ohh, that was a good shield, girl, truly, I nearly felt that." His crimson gaze settled on Akeno's crumpled form, and something new and terrible entered his voice, a cruelty so specific, so personal, that it stopped even his own amusement in its tracks. "Akeno Himejima. The daughter of Baraqiel."
Akeno, barely conscious, flinched as though struck.
"Oh, yes. I know exactly who you are, girl. That face. Those eyes. You have your mother's look about you, and I could never forget Shuri Himejima's face if I tried." Kokabiel's smile widened, savoring it. "I have known who you were from the moment I laid eyes on you tonight. Baraqiel's daughter. The little half-blood the Himejima clan threw away. Oh, I have kept track of you for years." His smile widened. "Do you know, I have a lovely little dream. That when this is all over, I shall present your severed head to your dear father Baraqiel as a gift. Can you imagine his face? That staunch, tiresome supporter of Azazel's precious peace, holding the head of his own dead daughter?" He sighed with pleasure. "It would be the sweetest thing. Almost as sweet as the last time."
"…the last time?" Rias whispered, dread pooling in her stomach.
"Did she never tell you?" Kokabiel's eyes glittered. "Of course she didn't. She doesn't know. Not the whole of it." He turned his gaze back to Akeno, and delivered the words like slow poison. "Your mother. Shuri. That night the Himejima clan came for her, the night your own mother's family butchered her for the crime of loving a Fallen Angel and bearing his child, and left you homeless and alone until the Gremory girl scraped you up off the street." He leaned in. "Who do you think arranged that, little one? Who do you think whispered in the ears of the Himejima elders, and made certain your father was lured far away that very night, chasing a false report that the Grigori was under attack by the Old Satan Faction? A little skirmish I engineered from the shadows, purely to draw Baraqiel from his home at the crucial hour, purely so that no one would be there to save your dear, sweet, peace-loving mother."
The silence on the battlefield was absolute.
"It didn't work as I'd hoped, of course," Kokabiel continued, conversational, monstrous. "The whole scheme was meant to force Azazel's hand, to start the war I so craved. It failed. Azazel is a stubborn, cowardly peacemonger, and he would not take the bait." His grin turned vicious. "But I did get to kill Shuri Himejima. A staunch believer in her Baraqiel's foolish dream of peace, silenced forever. And that, girl, brought me such joy. It has warmed me for years. So thank you. Thank you for letting me tell you, at last, exactly whose hand set the fire that took your mother."
Akeno could not move. Her body was too broken, Asia's healing barely enough to keep her breathing. But tears streamed down her face, and from her cracked lips came a torrent of raw, wordless grief and hatred, curses spat at the monster who had just handed her the truth of her own mother's murder. And Kokabiel only laughed, unapologetic, feeding on every tear.
But the revelation did not only wound.
It ignited someone.
Kenta had gone very still, and then very cold, and the flames of Ignis Imperium guttered strangely around him. Because he knew that story. He knew it in his bones. A family, targeted. Someone who knew where they lived, who sold that knowledge to poachers. His grandfather, the protector who had taken them in, absent when the attack came. A mother murdered defending her child. A boy left with nothing, sold into a life of chains and blood.
It was his story. It was the story of the poachers who had come for his own family, of the mother who had died protecting him, of the years he had spent enslaved in the fighting rings of Europe. Kokabiel had just described, in loving detail, the exact shape of the wound Kenta carried in his own soul, and done it while laughing.
And something in the young Kuroshishi began, very quietly, to burn.
"Kiba! Xenovia! Masomi! Fall back, all of you, now!" Rias's voice cracked across the field, and there was iron in it, and grief, and fury. "Take a breath. Let me buy you one. Issei, transfer! Everything you've got, to me!"
"BOOSTED GEAR GIFT!" Issei roared, and all the power he had spent the long minutes hoarding, boost stacked upon boost, came surging out of him and down the link into his King.
Rias Gremory ignited.
Crimson power exploded around her, redoubled and redoubled again by Issei's transferred boosts, and for the first time all night the heiress of Gremory stepped forward to face the Cadre not as one voice in a chorus but alone, and she did not look small doing it.
"So the little sister of Lucifer comes to play herself." Kokabiel's grin sharpened with interest. "Let us see it, then. Let us see what earned you that pretty little title. Show me the Crimson-Haired Ruin Princess."
She gave it to him.
For the space of her heightened state, Rias Gremory fought a Cadre of the Grigori one-on-one, and she held. Her Power of Destruction roared from her hands in searing crimson waves, forcing Kokabiel to actually parry, actually weave, actually work. She was fast, augmented far beyond her natural limits by the boosts singing in her blood, and she was skilled, every hard lesson Marid had beaten into her in that mountain training camp coming to bear at once. She did not land a blow, not a real one, the gulf was simply too vast for that. But she made him move. She made him take her seriously. And for a handful of shining, defiant exchanges, the heiress of Gremory held back a monster still fighting at half his terrible strength, entirely on her own.
"Marvelous!" Kokabiel laughed, and there was real admiration in it now, batting aside a crimson wave that would have leveled a building. "Truly, girl, you have earned that famous name! Sirzechs would be proud! You are everything the little sister of that fledgling Lucifer should be!"
But the boosts could not last forever.
Rias felt the borrowed power begin to drain, the heightened state guttering like a candle at its end, and in the moment it failed her, Kokabiel struck.
The blow caught her across the body and sent her tumbling, her crimson aura snuffed out, and she crashed to the earth, dazed and spent, the great effort of holding a Cadre alone having cost her everything she had. Kokabiel loomed over her, a light-sword raised, that terrible grin fixed in place.
"A wonderful showing," he said. "Truly. Now die."
They would not let him.
Kiba threw himself between the Cadre and his fallen King, holy-demonic blade flashing. Xenovia came with him, both holy swords blazing. Masomi, bleeding, tireless, flanked wide. Koneko abandoned her post and hurled her small monstrous frame into the fray. They fought to protect Rias, to avenge Akeno, to hold the line one moment longer, throwing everything they had left at the monster.
Kokabiel swatted them down like insects.
It was almost lazy. A sweep of his wings sent Koneko flying. A flick of a light-sword battered Xenovia back. Kiba's impossible blade was parried and the young knight kicked away, Masomi's thrust caught and the exorcist hurled aside. In moments the four of them were on the ground, scattered, struggling to rise, none of them able to so much as slow the Cadre down.
And Kokabiel, standing amid the wreckage of their defiance, turned his cruel amusement toward the two who had not yet fought him directly.
"And you two." His crimson gaze found Kenta, struggling up from where a wing had clipped him, and Issei, gauntlet still blazing, both of them trembling, not with fear, but with a rage so total it had locked their bodies rigid. It was not horror that held them frozen. It was fury, cold and shaking and volcanic, the fury of two young men who had just watched this monster brutalize Rias, break Akeno, and laugh as he confessed to murdering her mother. They were not hanging back. They were holding themselves in place by the last thread of their control, and that thread was fraying. "The lion and the Red Dragon Emperor. I have been watching you both this whole time, hanging back, letting others bleed for you. The dragon boy, hoarding his little boosts. The lion, licking his wounds." His voice dripped with contempt. "Tell me, does it not shame you? A city full of innocents about to die, your friends broken all around you, the one who murdered this poor thunder-girl's mother standing right here laughing, and you two simply. Stand. There." He spread his hands. "Where is your vengeance, little beasts? Where is your fury? Or do you leave even that for others to carry?"
The taunt landed, and it was meant to wound, and it did.
But it did not wound the way Kokabiel intended. It did not make them despair.
It made them decide.
"I would be careful, Fallen, if I were you."
The voice rolled out warm and crackling across the ruined field, and it came from the ring on Kenta's hand, and Kokabiel's head snapped toward it in genuine surprise.
"You stand there so very pleased with yourself," Adara continued, and there was a dangerous edge beneath the warmth now, an ancient thing uncoiling. "Mocking my host for holding back. But you should be careful what you wish for, warmonger. Because I do not think you are remotely ready for what comes next. Push a lion too far, and you will meet the beast beneath the fur. I would very much enjoy watching that lesson, personally."
Kokabiel stared at the ring, and his eyes lit with a hungry, delighted fascination. "…A soul. A living soul, within a Sacred Gear, speaking of its own will, communing with the world outside its host." His grin stretched wide. "I did not know such a thing existed. Oh, but that is precious. A Gear like that, why, that must be a Longinus, or a hair's breadth from becoming one. How wonderful. I have found treasures upon treasures on this field tonight."
"You would do well to heed her, Fallen."
A second voice, deeper, vast, ancient beyond reckoning, rolled from Issei's gauntlet, and the green jewel blazed as it spoke.
"I am Ddraig, the Red Dragon Emperor, and I have grown tired of your gloating. You crow about the might of the Fallen. You forget your history, little Star." The dragon's voice was cold with contempt. "The Dragons humbled your kind once, in the age when your wings were new. We can do it again. So mind your arrogance. It has a way of getting Fallen Angels killed."
Kokabiel's face split with the widest, most rapturous grin of the entire night.
"The Red Dragon Emperor speaks!" he breathed. "Oh, this night simply gives and gives. Very well, then, Ddraig! Very well, little lion's ghost! Show me! Show me what you have been hiding! SURPRISE ME!"
And they did.
Issei Hyoudou stopped hoarding his power, and let it out.
"Draig," he gritted, "how long can I hold it now?"
"Five minutes, partner. All that training bought you two more. Make them count."
"Then here goes everything." Issei thrust his gauntlet skyward, and the boosts that had been climbing all night detonated outward in a wave of crimson-green power. "BALANCE BREAKER!"
Light and scale and armor erupted from the Boosted Gear, flowing over him, encasing him head to toe. When it settled, Issei Hyoudou stood transformed, clad in the sleek crimson armor of the Scale Mail, green jewels glowing across its surface like living eyes, the incomplete Balance Breaker of the Red Dragon Emperor. He was faster now. Stronger. The raw domineering presence of Ddraig himself radiated from every plate of that crimson shell. It was not the true, finished power of the Sekiryuutei, not yet, but it was a mountain beyond anything Issei had ever wielded.
Beside him, Kenta roared, and the roar was not human.
The young Kuroshishi's massive frame swelled larger, and larger still, black fur sweeping across his body, his features shifting toward the leonine, great claws lengthening, a dense, nigh-impenetrable hide hardening over dramatically swollen muscle. This was Kenta's second form, his most powerful shape short of the berserker state he refused to name, and the raw physical power that rolled off him now made the very ground tremble.
"Kenta." Adara's voice was quiet in his mind, careful. "You know there is more. The last form. The beast. Against a foe like this, do you wish to—"
No, Kenta answered at once, firm and immediate. Not that one. Not unless there is truly nothing else left. In the berserker state I can't tell friend from enemy, Adara. I could kill our own people. That form is the very last resort, and only if every one of us is going to die anyway. His golden eyes fixed on Kokabiel. I'll beat him as myself. Or I won't beat him at all.
"…Good," the fire-serpent said softly, and there was pride in it. "That is the right answer, my lion. Then let us do it as ourselves."
Kokabiel drank in the sight of the two transformed Devils, and the shift in the air was real. Where before they had been beneath his notice, mere pieces on the board, now they registered. Issei in his Scale Mail, Kenta in his full Youkai form, each of them had leapt from the middling ranks to stand somewhere in the mid-to-high tier of high-class Devil strength, no small feat, a genuine and impressive climb.
It was nowhere near enough.
Kokabiel sat, by any honest reckoning, in the very middle of the Ultimate-class. The gap between a high-class Devil and an Ultimate-class Cadre was not a gap that transformation closed. It was the gap between a strong man and an avalanche. And every being on that field who understood power understood, in that moment, exactly what they were watching: two young Devils reaching the summit of what they could be, and finding that the summit still stood in the monster's shadow.
But Kokabiel did not sneer at it. He grinned, wide and genuine and delighted, and something almost like respect flickered in his ancient eyes.
"There it is," he breathed, twin light-swords blazing to life in his hands. "There is the fire I wanted to see. It will not save you. But by all the dead gods, children, it will be fun." He beckoned, wings flaring wide. "Come, then. The dragon and the lion. Show me how the next generation dies."
They hit him together, and for the first time all night, the fight looked like a fight.
Issei came in fast, faster than he had ever moved, the Scale Mail turning his desperate courage into genuine speed and power, his armored fists hammering at Kokabiel's guard while Draig's voice thundered encouragement in his skull. Kenta struck from the other side, a mountain of black fur and Ki-wreathed claws, each blow carrying enough raw force to shatter stone, his flames roaring around talons that raked and tore. They coordinated on instinct, dragon and lion, one high and one low, one fast and one strong, giving the Cadre no still moment, no clean angle, forcing him to actually engage on two fronts at once.
And Kokabiel, to his own evident delight, engaged.
He let his conjured swords wink out of existence.
"No," the Cadre said, grinning, cracking his knuckles as the light-blades dissolved. "No, I think not. You two have earned something better than my swords. Two beasts who fight with fist and claw? Then let us do it properly. Bare hands. Let me feel it."
And he met them with his own two fists.
He was still better. That never changed. His bare hands turned aside Issei's armored fists and caught Kenta's raking claws with a martial artist's impossible precision, long centuries of unarmed mastery written into every block and counter, his wings a constant shifting wall at his back, his experience reading their every move a beat before they made it. When Issei overcommitted, a wing swept his legs and a palm-strike hammered him from the air. When Kenta bulled forward, Kokabiel simply stepped inside the charge and drove an elbow across the lion's jaw. The Cadre was simply more, in every way that could be measured, matching two transformed Devils with nothing but his hands and still toying with them, and both young Devils felt it in every jarring exchange, the sheer, grinding, hopeless gulf of it.
But they did not stop. They did not break. And that was what shocked Kokabiel.
They fought with an intensity and a tenacity that no reckoning of their power could have predicted. Every time he battered them down, they got up. Every wound he dealt, they answered with another furious assault. Issei took a slash that would have felled a lesser fighter and laughed through the pain, boosting again, coming back harder. Kenta took a blow that cracked his hardened hide and drove straight back in, roaring, refusing to yield an inch. They had no right to still be standing, no right to make a Cadre of the Grigori work for a victory that should have been effortless, and yet there they were, bleeding and battered and utterly unbroken, and slowly, exchange by exchange, they wrung from Kokabiel something he had not offered anyone else that night.
Respect.
"You two," the Cadre said, and for once there was no mockery in it, only a strange, fierce approval as he parried and struck and parried again. "You should be dead. Both of you, three times over. And still you come. Still you burn." He caught Kenta's claw and hurled the lion back, spun to bat Issei from the air. "I have killed more warriors than you could count across my long centuries, and I tell you truly, most of them had less fire in them than you two whelps. What a waste, that you were born too late and too weak. In another age, you might have been magnificent."
"Do not listen to a word of it, partner," Draig growled through the armor, even as Issei reeled from a wing-strike and forced himself back to his feet. "He praises you the way a man praises a fine meal before he eats it. It is not kindness. It is appetite. Every warmonger since the dawn of the world has learned to love the ones who make the killing interesting." A beat, and then, grudging, the ancient dragon added: "…Which is not to say the praise is false. You have earned it, both of you. I have hosted a great many, partner, and few would still be standing here. Now stop preening at a compliment and move your feet, before the compliment becomes an obituary."
Issei laughed, ragged and breathless inside his cracking armor, and moved. Kenta, hearing Adara's own bark of encouragement in his skull, roared and drove forward once more, and the two of them threw themselves back into the impossible fight, buying seconds with their bodies, spending everything they had on a battle they could not win but would not lose cheaply.
At the edge of the field, Xenovia struggled up, gripping her blades, her eyes fixed on the desperate battle. "I have to help them—"
"No." Masomi's hand closed on her shoulder, hard, halting her. The young exorcist's face was grim. "Look at it, Lady Xenovia. Truly look. The gap between you and the thing they are fighting is even wider than the gap between them and it. If you throw yourself in now, you will not help them. You will become one more body they have to protect, one more opening for Kokabiel to exploit. You will get them killed." His grip gentled, but did not release. "Rest. Recover. Watch for the moment you can actually matter, and be ready when it comes. That is the harder discipline, and tonight it is the one we need. Let them have this."
Xenovia's jaw clenched, every warrior's instinct screaming at her to charge, but she made herself stop. She made herself watch. And she hated it.
The fight dragged on, and it was a thing of terrible beauty, and everyone who could still watch, watched. The dragon and the lion against the Star of God, two children at the peak of everything they were, hurling themselves again and again at a monster from another age, and making him earn it. It would be told and retold for years, that fight, by everyone who survived to tell it. Not because the two of them won.
Because they refused, with everything in them, to lose easily.
Issei felt his time running out.
The Scale Mail was beginning to flicker at its edges, the five minutes nearly spent, and Issei knew, with the cold clarity of desperation, that when it failed he was finished. So he made a choice. A gambit. All or nothing.
Draig. The Dragon Shot. Everything we've got left, all at once.
"…It will end your time, partner. There will be nothing after."
I know. Do it anyway. It's the only shot we've got.
Across the fight, Issei's earlier Dragon Shots had landed on Kokabiel more than once, glancing hits, never fully powered, but they had stung. They had made the Cadre flinch. And a fully powered one, everything Issei had, poured into a single blast?
It might, just might, do something real.
"Kenta!" Issei roared through the armor. "Give me an opening! One shot!"
Kenta understood instantly, and threw himself at Kokabiel in a furious, all-out assault, a storm of claws and fire that forced the Cadre to commit both hands to the block, drawing his guard in tight and pinning his attention on the lion, opening the line. And Issei reared back, both hands coming together, the whole of his remaining power screaming down into a single point of crimson-green fire.
"DRAGON—"
The blast built, blinding, immense.
"—SHOT!"
It roared across the field, a lance of pure draconic annihilation, everything Issei Hyoudou had left, hurtling toward the Cadre—
—and Kokabiel, with centuries of battle-honed experience written into his every reflex, simply was not there. He moved, wings snapping, sliding out of the blast's path with a hair's breadth to spare, and the Dragon Shot screamed past him into the ruins beyond and detonated harmlessly.
And Issei, spent, his gambit failed, his armor already crumbling, hung in the air utterly defenseless.
Kokabiel smiled, and a ball of condensed light bloomed in his hand, and he hurled it at the helpless Red Dragon Emperor.
Kenta did not think. He simply moved.
The lion hurled himself into the light's path, between the blast and his falling friend, and in the last instant he threw up everything he had: a barrier of Ignis Imperium's flame, conjured with Adara's frantic help, and over that his own beast-Ki wrapped around his body in a final desperate layer of protection.
The attack struck them both.
The explosion swallowed the two of them whole, and when it cleared, Issei crashed to the earth, the Scale Mail shattering off him in a burst of dissolving crimson light, blown clean out of his Balance Breaker, his gambit spent and his power gone. He was still conscious, barely, dazed and gasping and utterly drained, but he could not so much as lift his head. And Kenta, who had shielded him, who had taken the brunt of it so his friend would live, dropped to one knee with his left arm hanging dead and useless at his side, every nerve in it burned out, the limb ruined despite every precaution he had taken.
But he was alive. And so was Issei.
And Kenta, one arm dead, chest heaving, looked up at the Cadre through the smoke, and he was not finished. Not yet.
Sprawled and drained where the blast had thrown him, Issei dragged himself the last few feet to the swaying lion and pressed a trembling, gauntleted hand to Kenta's shoulder. "Transfer," he rasped, and through that touch the last scraps of Boost still guttering inside him flowed out and into the Kuroshishi, not much, barely an ember, but everything Issei had left to give, passed to the last one standing.
Kenta felt it settle into him, and he smiled a grim, bloody smile.
Adara, he thought. One more. Everything I have left. The wings, focus it all on the wings.
"His wings are his shield and his sword both," Adara breathed, understanding at once. "They are how he blocks, how he strikes, how he weaves out of every attack untouched. So burn them, my lion. Take those wings away from him, and for the first time all night, you will give the rest an opening in his defense to actually exploit."
Kenta reached down into himself, past the pain, past the dead arm, and drew together everything he was in a single, focused act. His Senjutsu, the flow of life-energy he had been quietly mastering, poured into his one good hand. Ignis Imperium answered, Adara's fire braiding through it. And Issei's transferred Boost amplified all of it, folding power upon power, until in Kenta's remaining hand a sword of living flame took shape, white-hot, roaring, a blade forged from Ki and fire and dragon's gift all at once.
But Kokabiel would see it coming. The Cadre was too fast, too experienced, to be caught by a straightforward strike, even a desperate one.
Which was why it was not straightforward.
"Keno!" Kenta roared. "NOW!"
The Bakeneko, who had been coiled and waiting at the field's edge, who had strained against Koneko's restraint for exactly this moment, exploded into motion. She streaked across the battlefield, a blur of black, and launched herself at Kokabiel from behind, a yowling, spitting fury of claws and Youjutsu.
The attack did not hurt the Cadre. Of course it didn't; a familiar's strike was nothing to a being like him. But it did not need to hurt him.
It only needed to make him turn.
For one single instant, Kokabiel's attention snapped backward toward the sudden threat at his spine, and in that instant, Kenta struck. The flame-sword came down with everything the lion had left, all his Senjutsu and all his fire and all of Issei's borrowed dragon-power behind it, and it did not aim for the Cadre's body.
It aimed for his wings.
The blade of living flame swept through the base of Kokabiel's wings, and where it passed, oil-black feathers caught and burned, fire roaring up three of the great pinions before the Cadre could react. Kokabiel screamed, a sound of genuine, shocking agony, his wings his pride and his defense and now three of the ten of them wreathed in Senjutsu-fed flame that would not simply be brushed away.
He wrenched away, beating at the fire, roaring in pain and fury, and for a moment, one glorious moment, the great and terrible Cadre of the Grigori was reduced to a thing flailing at its own burning wings.
Kenta, swaying on his feet, one arm dead, the flame-sword guttering out in his hand, looked up at the burning, screaming Cadre and grinned through the blood.
"What was it you said, earlier?" the lion rasped. "That all of us together couldn't so much as ruffle one of your feathers?" He spat blood, and his golden eyes gleamed with fierce, defiant satisfaction. "How are the wings feeling now, Kokabiel? Ruffled enough for you?"
Kokabiel got the fire out.
It cost him. Three wings hung charred and ruined at his back, smoking, useless, and the pain of it still burned through him. But he got it out, and when he turned back to face the swaying, one-armed lion who had dared to do that to him, every trace of amusement was gone from his ancient face.
For it was not merely the pain. It was that there was pain at all. Kokabiel could not remember the last time a foe had drawn genuine, lasting hurt from him, the kind that lingered, the kind that scarred. He had to reach back through long centuries to find it: to a stretch of grey water off the German coast in the middle of a human world war, and a single duel against a mountain of a paladin named Vasco Strada, the one and only warrior in an age who had ever truly made him bleed. And now, tonight, a half-broken lion cub barely out of his youth had reached across all those untouchable centuries and done it again.
What remained was murder.
"…You," the Cadre said, very quietly, and then he unleashed the full and undiluted weight of his killing intent, and it fell upon the battlefield like the end of the world.
Kenta, scared to his very core, feeling that ancient malice press down on him like a mountain, still lifted his chin and gathered the last dregs of his power around himself, defiant to the end. He knew what was coming. He could not stop it. He met it anyway.
Kokabiel brutalized him.
There was no artistry to it now, no savoring, no game. It was pure, furious retribution, a Cadre making an example of the whelp who had marred his pride. Blow after blow rained down on Kenta, hurling him across the courtyard, breaking his hardened hide, driving him into the earth. Keno shrieked and threw herself at the Cadre again, trying to protect her master, and Kokabiel backhanded the small familiar with casual, brutal force, sending her flying across the field, and would have followed it with a killing spell had Asia and Yumi, the latter barely conscious, not thrown up a desperate joint barrier at the very last instant to shield the tumbling cat.
And the others came. Of course they came. Rias, Kiba, Xenovia, Masomi, Koneko, everyone who could still stand hurled themselves at the Cadre to stop the massacre of the young lion, and they fought with everything they had left. But it was not enough. It was never enough. Kokabiel, enraged now, lashed out with attacks that were no longer restrained, no longer merciful, strikes meant to kill, and it took the frantic, desperate coordination of every remaining defender working together just to survive them. Rias and Akeno and Yumi shielding Asia as she worked to heal the battered Keno. Xenovia crossing Durandal and Excalibur Destruction to block a light-blast that would have vaporized three of them. Kiba's blades turning aside what Xenovia's could not. They were not fighting to win anymore. They were fighting, second by desperate second, simply not to die.
And they were losing.
Kokabiel stood in the center of the carnage, wreathed in killing intent, his ruined wings smoking at his back, and he looked upon the broken, scattered, exhausted defenders, and he was done. Done playing. Done savoring. Done being entertained.
"You have been a wonderful evening's sport," he said, and his voice was cold and final. "Truly. But it ends now. Every one of you dies tonight." He stalked to the fallen form of Kenta, dragging himself up on his one good arm, and seized the lion by the collar, hauling his battered body up off the ground with contemptuous ease. He would not name what Kenta had done to him. He would not give the whelp the honor of it. "Starting," he said flatly, "with this one."
A sword of blazing light took shape in the Cadre's free hand, and he drew it back over Kenta's dangling form.
And, lost in his bloodlust and his fury, Kokabiel did not notice the intricate purple magic circle that had, silently, begun to trace itself into being upon the ground beneath his feet.
The light-sword began to fall.
And the world, for the space of a single held breath, went slow.
It was not something Kokabiel had done. It was the barest thing, a hair's breadth of drag in the air around him, his descending strike hitching by a fraction of a heartbeat, no more, a slowness so slight that against a being of his power it should have meant nothing at all. And it very nearly did. Time itself, in a small and perfect sphere around him, had been slowed, but only by the thinnest sliver a spell could manage against a Cadre, just enough of a wrongness that his ancient instincts registered it, just enough to jolt him out of the red haze of his bloodlust and make him feel that miniscule hitch in the world. It could not stop him. It could barely touch him.
But it did not need to stop him. It only needed to buy a single heartbeat, one breath in which the Cadre's certainty faltered and his guard hung open.
That was all the distance someone needed to cross.
A fist caught Kokabiel across the face.
It was not a light-augmented blow, nor a magical one. It was a simple, physical, devastatingly precise punch, thrown with perfect form and monstrous power, and it caught the Cadre of the Grigori square across the jaw and sent him flying, tumbling and skidding clear across the ruined courtyard, his killing strike broken and Kenta torn loose from his grip. And in the same instant, the lion's battered form was caught and pulled clear of danger, out of the monster's reach at last.
Kokabiel came to a halt in a spray of shattered earth, and pushed himself up, and turned, his ruined wings flaring, his face a mask of pure fury at the interruption—
—and found a young man standing where the killing blow should have landed, crimson hair stirring in the hot wind, lightning-blue eyes fixed on the Cadre with a cold, still, terrible calm.
"…Marid," Rias breathed, and something in her chest that had been clenched tight for hours finally, finally cracked open.
He had come. He had actually come.
And he had not come alone.
The light was still settling from the transportation circles that had bloomed across the field, and out of it, one by one, the others resolved, and the sight of them stole the breath from every defender who could still see.
To Marid's right, a mountain of a young man cracked his knuckles, and the raw, restless power of the Great King's line rolled off him in waves. Sairaorg Bael. To his left, a girl in glasses lowered the hand that had traced the purple circle, her time-magic still shimmering faintly in the air where it had touched the Cadre. Seekvaira Agares. A cold-eyed young man of House Glasya-Labolas, unhurried and unbothered. Dagon. The sharp, elegant, dangerous smile of Cleria Belial. And striding onto the field from the direction of the barrier she had, until moments ago, been holding, came Sona Sitri, her violet eyes hard as flint, having abandoned her post the instant she felt her strongest allies arrive to finish this. Her peerage held the great containment barrier still, sealing the war within these grounds; the city behind them remained safe. But its King had judged, in a single cold calculation, that her blade was needed here more than her hand on the wall, now that the wall would hold on its own momentum a while longer.
"You look terrible, Rias," Sona said, not unkindly, as she took her place among them. "All of you do." Her glasses caught the moonlight. "Fortunately, we are very good at cleaning up messes. Even yours."
Not one Devil come to the rescue.
The entire rising generation of the Underworld. The Big Eight, minus one, standing shoulder to shoulder on a moonlit battlefield of blood and ruin.
The exhausted defenders stared in dawning, disbelieving hope. Rias. Kiba. A barely-conscious Akeno. Xenovia and Masomi. It was not possible. It was not possible that the strongest young Devils of their entire generation had all come, here, together, for them.
And Kokabiel, staring at the arrayed might of the next generation of Devil royalty, slowly, wonderingly, began to grin.
"…Oh," the Cadre breathed. "Oh, you cannot be serious. You cannot possibly be serious."
He climbed fully to his feet, and he laughed, and it was the most delighted, most rapturous sound of the entire long and bloody night.
"When the little moonlit girl told me her precious Marid was coming, I thought it too good to be true!" he crowed, drinking them in like a starving man at a feast. "The son of Lucifer, come to die on my blade, his death alone enough to shatter the peace and light the war I have dreamed of for two thousand years! I thought, surely, surely it is a lie, surely he will not truly come!" He spread his arms wide, taking in the whole assembled Big Eight. "And instead he brings me the future. Every last one of the so-called greatest Devils of the coming age, the heirs and heiresses of the great houses, gathered in one place, all of them mine to break!" His crimson eyes blazed. "Do you have any idea what a gift this is? Kill all of you, here, tonight, and there is no peace left in all creation that could survive it. The Great War begins again atop your soulless little husks, and it begins tonight!"
His gaze swept the gathered youths, and caught on an absence.
"Though I count only seven of your vaunted Eight," he observed, amused. "Where is the last? The Astaroth boy, Diodora?" He chuckled. "Absent. How wise of him. The only one among you clever enough not to walk into his own grave. I shall have to kill him another day."
Marid had not moved. He had not summoned so much as a flicker of demonic energy. He simply stood there, having lowered the fist that had felled a Cadre, his lightning-blue eyes fixed on the monster with a cold that had burned away every trace of the easy charm the Underworld knew him for.
"You put your hands on my Rook," Marid said, and his voice was quiet, and flat, and stripped of all its usual wit. "You made an heiress of my house bleed. You looked at my friends, at people I would set the world on fire for, and you called them entertainment." He took one step forward, and the temperature of the ruined courtyard seemed to drop. "You have spent this entire night looking forward to killing them all. To burning this city. To your beautiful, precious war."
He rolled his shoulders, and something began to gather around him.
"So let me correct the one misunderstanding you still cling to, Kokabiel." His eyes were terrible in their calm. "You keep speaking as though the question tonight is how many of us will die. It is not. The only one who dies on this field tonight is you. I am the King of my peerage, and I do not, ever, stand by and watch my people be hurt. You have hurt them a great deal. That debt comes due now."
Kokabiel's grin only widened, wild and hungry and thrilled beyond measure.
"Bold words," the Cadre said, and he laughed, low and delighted. "Tell me, son of Lucifer, are you not just a touch too confident? You stand there, a boy, propped up by a handful of half-broken children, and you promise me my death?" He spread his ruined wings, and his crimson eyes gleamed. "I was spilling blood on battlefields before your mother drew her first breath, before your father was so much as a whisper of a name. I have crossed swords with the mightiest powers this world has ever produced. I stood against the God of the Bible Himself in the last war and I walked away. And you think a little borrowed bravado can save you against a true superior?" His laughter sharpened into something cruel. "That is not courage, boy. That is delusion of the very highest order."
Marid did not so much as blink.
"You mistake me, Kokabiel," he said quietly. "This is not bravado. I have stood before beings more powerful and more dangerous than you will ever be, and I am still here to speak of it. My confidence does not come from the people at my back, formidable as they are." A cold, certain light entered his lightning-blue eyes. "It comes from knowing, precisely and without a shred of doubt, what I myself am capable of. You should not have hurt my people. Now allow me to show you why."
For a heartbeat Kokabiel simply studied him, this cold, unbowed boy who answered a Cadre's threats without a flicker of fear, and whatever he saw there only deepened his hunger. His grin split wider still, and twin light-swords blazed to life in his hands, his ruined wings and his whole seven remaining pinions flaring wide.
"Marvelous," he breathed. "Then come, son of Lucifer! Come, all of you, the pride of the Devil nation! Show me what the future is made of! Let us begin the Great War tonight!"
And the Devils answered.
Rias rose, and crimson annihilation cloaked her once more. Sona stepped forward, and cold blue power gathered at her hands. Dagon Glasya-Labolas surrounded himself in a deep, roiling green, and Cleria Belial in shimmering gold, and Seekvaira Agares in deep, imperial purple. Sairaorg Bael, who had no demonic energy to summon, reached up and tore away the restraints that bound his monstrous physical power, and the sheer pressure of it became visible around him, a clear, warping distortion in the air like heat above a fire. And at the center of them all, Marid Gremory drew forth the aura that even his closest allies had rarely seen, and it rose around him black and silver, dark and gleaming, the power he had hidden behind a decade of deflection, uncoiling at last.
Seven of the strongest Devils of the coming age, arrayed in their full and terrible colors against the Star of God, on a moonlit field of blood, with a city sleeping unknowing behind them and a war for the fate of the world hanging in the balance.
The true battle was about to begin.
Chapter End
AND THAT'S THE ARRIVAL WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR!!! Oh, I have been sitting on this scene for MONTHS, you have no idea. The entire Big Eight (minus our boy Diodora, who's off doing... whatever Diodora does) descending onto the battlefield to save the day? CHILLS. I hope it hit for you the way it hit for me.
But first, let's talk about the brutal middle of this chapter, because WOOF. Kokabiel stopped playing, and everyone paid for it. That reveal about Akeno's mother, that KOKABIEL orchestrated Shuri's death, lured Baraqiel away, engineered the whole thing to try to force the war... that's been a dagger I've been waiting to twist for a long time. And the way it mirrors Kenta's OWN past (betrayed, family targeted, sold into the fighting rings) is exactly why it lit HIM up more than anyone.
And KENTA AND ISSEI. My boys. They knew they couldn't win. They fought anyway. Issei's failed Dragon Shot gambit, Kenta shielding him and losing the use of his arm, and then that INCREDIBLE last trick, Senjutsu + Ignis Imperium + Issei's transferred Boost, using Keno as a distraction to burn three of Kokabiel's ten wings? 'How are the wings feeling now, Kokabiel? Ruffled enough for you?' after the Cadre bragged that they couldn't ruffle a single feather?? That's the payoff, baby. Kenta got BRUTALIZED for it, but he made the Star of God SCREAM. Nobody can take that from him.
And then, just as it all falls apart... Seekvaira's time magic, Marid's punch, and the whole next generation standing shoulder to shoulder. Note the auras, everyone got their color! And Marid's black-and-silver is FINALLY out in the open. That mysterious power he's been hiding since the mine? You're about to see exactly what it can do.
Next chapter: the Big Eight vs Kokabiel. The gloves are OFF. It's going to be an absolute spectacle.
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!
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