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A gasp escaped Rias Gremory's lips, mingling with the dense smell of ozone, sulfur, and demonic blood that permeated the abandoned factory.
The Princess of Ruin took a couple of steps back, spreading her bat-like wings for balance. Before her and her nobility, the monstrosity that had once been a high-class demon roared, shaking the rusted steel foundations. It was a grotesque beast, an amalgam of bloated flesh, multiple scythe-like limbs, and eyes bloodshot with madness.
Rias gritted her teeth, channeling a sphere of Power of Destruction into her right hand, but fatigue was already beginning to cloud her vision.
To his left, Yuuto Kiba narrowly avoided a fatal slash, though a superficial cut on his cheek showed his speed was slowing. The usually stoic Koneko Toujou was breathing heavily after being thrown against a concrete pillar. Akeno Himejima floated in the air, unleashing incessant storms of lightning that barely managed to singe the Renegade Demon's thick skin.
And in the rearguard, Issei Hyoudou bravely stood in the way, using his body and the faint glow of his Boosted Gear to protect Asia Argento, who kept her hands illuminated with the emerald light of her Twilight Healing, healing Kiba and Koneko's wounds from a distance.
"Buchou!" Issei shouted, blocking a piece of rubble the monster had kicked toward them. "That thing won't fall! Its wounds are healing too fast!"
"I can't lose here," Rias thought, feeling a suffocating pressure tightening around his chest, a pressure that went far beyond the beast in front of them.
Two days remained. Barely forty-eight hours until Riser Phenex, with his immortal nobility, would set foot in Kuoh City to claim it as his wife. Rias desperately needed her team to gain real combat experience, to grow stronger for the impending Rating Game. She had tracked down this high-class Renegade hoping he would be the ultimate test to solidify her group.
But he had been wrong. He had underestimated the madness of his objective.
The Renegade let out a guttural laugh, a wet and nauseating sound that echoed throughout the factory.
"High-class meat!" bubbled the beast, raising its enormous arms toward the destroyed ceiling.
—. Eat, my servants! Bring me the redhead!
The factory floor was illuminated with dozens of corrupted magic circles, glowing with a sickly purplish hue.
Rias opened her eyes wide, horror chilling her blood. From within those circles began to emerge deformed figures: lesser chimeras, low-class street demons, four-eyed beasts, and gargoyles of cursed stone. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.
The upper-class Renegade was not alone; he had been raising a small army of abominations in the shadows of his territory.
"They outnumber us!" Akeno warned, completely losing her usual smile, and unleashed a beam that disintegrated two chimeras, only for five more to take their place.
Kiba sliced through three beasts in a flash of steel, but was quickly cornered. Koneko slammed her fist into the ground, raising a curtain of debris, but the tide of monsters continued its relentless advance.
"Get away from Asia!" Issei roared, throwing a powered-up punch at a demonic hound that tried to leap at the nun. The impact shattered the creature, but the recoil sent Issei sprawling to his knees, exhausted.
Rias unleashed two blasts of mass destruction, annihilating a dozen low-class renegades, but the magical expenditure left her with a sharp dizziness. They were suffocating her. They were cornering her in her own city.
"My pride doesn't matter now. If I don't do something, they'll be killed," Rias reasoned, swallowing her aristocratic ego as she watched Asia trembling with fear behind Issei.
I had to call for backup. I had to call the Student Council.
Rias quickly brought two fingers to her ear, concentrating her magic to activate the direct communication circle with Sona Sitri. She was going to plead for her help. She was going to beg Sona to bring her peerage and, hopefully, that damned bespectacled Pawn to clean up this mess.
—Sona, answer, this is an m... —Rias began.
But the phrase died on his lips.
Before magical communication was established, the very space at the center of the battlefield, right between the monster army and the Gremory nobility, was distorted.
The air whirred with a high-pitched frequency. An immense magic circle, a deep, brilliant blue that contrasted violently with the darkness of the factory, exploded onto the cracked concrete. The unmistakable emblem of the Sitri Clan spun around, projecting a pillar of light that forced the Renegade Demon and his army to a standstill, blinded.
Rias lowered her hand, stunned. Issei and Kiba covered their faces. Akeno stopped her lightning.
"Sona? How did she know we were...?" Rias thought, feeling a wave of indescribable relief.
The blue light dissipated abruptly, revealing the figure who had just teleported directly to ground zero of the massacre.
The silence that fell over the factory was absolute. Not even the lowest-class monsters dared to growl.
There, standing in the middle of the battlefield surrounded by blood, rubble, and murderous demons, was Yugo Hano.
He wasn't wearing his impeccable dark suit. He wasn't wearing his white shirt, nor his tight tie. The Sitri clan's deadliest Pawn was dressed in gray plaid cotton pajama pants and a rather loose-fitting black long-sleeved shirt. His glasses were slightly askew on his face, his black hair was completely disheveled, and his gray eyes exuded a level of lethargy and annoyance that defied human comprehension.
And as if her outfit wasn't enough to break all the epic tension of the moment, she was carrying a huge black, hairy bundle in her arms.
Tamal, the morbidly obese, three-headed infernal pug, lay on his back in the professor's arms, fast asleep, his three tongues lolling out and snoring peacefully, completely unaware of the dozens of bloodthirsty monsters surrounding them.
Rias Gremory's mouth fell open, unable to utter a single word. The high-class Renegade Demon blinked his multiple eyes, genuinely confused by the appearance of this human in pajamas.
Yugo Hano didn't even glance at the monster boss. Her gray eyes apathetically scanned the room until they found the blonde nun hiding behind Issei.
"Asia," Yugo said, his monotonous, sleepy voice echoing in the deathly silence of the factory. "Let's go home. I've been tossing and turning for half an hour and I can't sleep without my lap pillow."
...
Rias Gremory couldn't process the image before her. Her brilliant mind, that of a strategist and clan leader, was completely frozen.
Around them, the abandoned factory was a cauldron of imminent death. Dozens of drooling chimeras and beasts surrounded them, ready to tear them apart. The Renegade Demon of the upper class roared, thirsting for the blood of its nobility. And at the center of this apocalypse, Sona Sitri's Pawn, dressed in plaid pajama pants and holding a fat, three-headed, snoring dog, could think only of his bedtime.
"Kill him! Crush that stupid human!" roared the Renegade, recovering from his initial blindness and pointing one of his scythe-like limbs at Yugo.
The horde of low-class monsters surged forward, a tide of claws and fangs.
Yugo Hano didn't even flinch. His gray eyes, heavy with lack of sleep, shifted from the small figure of Asia—who was looking at him with a mixture of relief and concern—to the avalanche of renegades.
The professor let out a long, deeply exhausted sigh.
With a lazy movement, he raised his left arm and touched the dial of the strange black watch on his wrist.
Rias gasped. Issei had told her about a crystal monster, a colossal and unstoppable beast. The Princess of Ruin tensed her muscles, preparing herself to see a titan.
¡FLASH!
The emerald light flooded the factory, blinding the monsters for a moment. Rias covered her face, but as she lowered her arm, her expression was one of utter disbelief.
There was no colossus. In place of the professor in pajamas stood a tiny creature, not much bigger than a small child. It was made of what appeared to be white silicone, with black details and what looked like headphones integrated into its head.
"What is that? Is that tiny thing the monster Ise was talking about?" Rias thought, feeling disappointment and panic return. That little creature would be crushed in seconds by the renegade army.
But then, the white creature opened its mouth.
It made no sound, but its body began to vibrate. In the blink of an eye, the silhouette unfolded. From one, they became two. From two, to four. From four, to sixteen.
Rias's eyes widened in shock. Physical cloning was a high-level magic, an art that consumed obscene amounts of mana, yet she couldn't sense a single drop of demonic energy emanating from these creatures. It was pure cellular replication, breaking every law of the supernatural world as she knew it.
Before the demon horde could react, the "Echo Echo" clones organized themselves with frightening military efficiency.
One of the clones approached the three-headed dog that had fallen to the ground during the transformation, carefully picked it up, and moved away from danger. At the same time, another pair of clones ran straight toward Asia. They passed by Rias and Issei, completely ignoring them, as if the Gremorys were mere decorative statues. The two clones positioned themselves on either side of the golden nun, crossing their arms, forming a protective barrier just for her.
Rias felt a pang of indignation in her pride, but she didn't have time to utter a word.
The remaining clones on the battlefield began to multiply exponentially. Thirty, sixty, more than a hundred. They resembled an exercise in white ants infesting the factory.
The horde of renegades stopped, confused by the sudden invasion.
"Don't let them surround them! Crush them!" ordered the high-class Renegade.
But it was too late. The clones opened their mouths in unison.
A sonic scream, an acoustic frequency so devastating that the concrete floor began to pulverize, erupted in the factory. Rias covered her ears tightly, falling to her knees, feeling as if her eardrums were about to burst. Kiba and Akeno did the same, unable to maintain their balance against the wall of solid sound.
Yugo's tactics were masterful and ruthless. A small group of clones surrounded the high-class Renegade, bombarding him with screams that kept him immobilized, paralyzed by the acoustic pain. Meanwhile, the remaining clone army used their sonic waves as pressure shields, pushing, sweeping, and dragging all the low-class demons, crushing and piling them directly against their leader's massive body.
In less than ten seconds, the entire horde was trapped in one place, pressed against each other under the relentless prison of sound.
Suddenly, the screams stopped.
Rias looked up, still dazed by the ringing in her ears. The hundreds of clones converged in the center, merging once again into a single white figure.
The creature brought its hand to the symbol on its chest.
¡FLASH!
The green light shone again, and the factory's temperature plummeted, dropping below absolute zero in a single heartbeat. Rias felt her breath condense into a cloud of white mist.
In place of the small sonic creature, now floated a slender, dark, and ghostly being, its wings unfurled like a shroud of starry ice. Big Chill.
Rias had never seen such a creature. The entity exhaled. It wasn't a water spell or elemental magic; it was a blast of pure, physical cryogenic wind. Bluish mist enveloped the cluster of demons. The high-class Renegade tried to roar, but his vocal cords froze.
In a second, the mountain of monsters was petrified, transformed into a single, massive, unbreakable glacier of ice.
Princess Gremory trembled, not only from the cold, but from the demonstration of absolute supremacy. Three distinct life forms. Three powers that defied comprehension, executed without a single drop of sweat.
But Sitri's Pawn was not finished.
The ice entity touched his chest.
¡FLASH!
The third emerald light illuminated the ice. And this time, the creature that appeared nearly made Rias's jaw drop.
A red colossus over three meters tall, with four massive arms and four relentless eyes, landed heavily, making the ground crunch. Four Arms. The embodiment of kinetic brutality.
The adult Tetramand did not hesitate. He walked toward the immense glacier that held the enemy army.
He thrust his four enormous fists back, the muscles in his back tensing like industrial steel cables, and unleashed a quadruple punch straight into the center of the ice.
¡CRASH!
The roar was deafening. The glacier erupted. Millions of ice fragments, and with them, the frozen and shattered bodies of the Renegade Demon and his entire low-class horde, rained down on the factory like harmless glass flakes.
The threat that had cornered the entire Gremory nobility, annihilated in less than thirty seconds.
The red giant stood tall amidst the diamond dust, exhaling a heavy snort, reigning alone over the absolute silence of the ruins.