Chapter 39
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
The battlefield had become a symphony of violence, and every player in it was fighting for their life.
At the far edge of the churned and cratered field, two beasts were locked in a war that neither could seem to win.
Kenta and Zill had been trading blows for what felt like an eternity, and the fight had settled into a brutal, grinding stalemate that neither of them had expected. Zill fought the way he always had, with a savage, murderous abandon, a willingness to maim and kill that gave every strike a lethal edge, no hesitation, no mercy, only the raw, ugly hunger of a predator that lived to hurt. Once, that had been more than enough. Once, that bloodlust had let him carve through opponents who fought with restraint.
But Kenta was not the same Kuroshishi who might once have fallen to that.
Weeks of merciless training under Marid had sharpened the young lion into something far more dangerous than raw strength. Where Zill was all fury, Kenta had learned control, learned to read a fight, to bank his own rage and let it feed his precision rather than drown it. And through it all, Adara's voice threaded steady and constant in his mind, a running current of guidance and dry encouragement.
"Left, he telegraphs the left," the fire-serpent murmured as Zill lunged. Kenta pivoted, and the killing blow whistled past his ear. "Good. Now his flank is open, and he is too angry to notice. There. Bite."
Kenta's flaming claws raked across Zill's ribs, and the beast howled, staggering back, and for a moment the two of them stood apart, chests heaving, blood on both of them, neither able to land the finishing stroke.
"You've gotten good, whelp," Zill snarled, wiping blood from his jaw, and there was genuine, grudging fury in it, the anger of a bully discovering his victim has grown teeth. "It won't be enough. I have killed things older and stronger than you will ever be."
"Maybe." Kenta rolled his burning shoulders, golden eyes steady. "But you won't kill me. Not tonight."
They crashed together again, fury against skill.
And this was the shape of it, exchange after grinding exchange: Zill fighting to kill, holding nothing back, every strike aimed to end the fight in a single savage blow, his beast-Ki wreathing his claws in a haze of raw murderous intent. And Kenta refusing to give him that opening, weathering the storm, turning aside what he could and taking what he could not on his hardened Kuroshishi hide, waiting, always waiting, for the tiny gaps that Zill's fury opened and his own discipline could exploit.
"He is stronger than you, my stubborn lion," Adara noted with clinical calm as Kenta ducked a blow that would have taken his head. "By a margin. Do not let that trouble you. Strength is not the whole of a fight, and he does not know how to think. He has spent his whole existence winning through sheer savagery, and it has made him lazy. You have spent your every waking hour these past weeks learning at the side of one of the cleverest fighters you know. So out-think him. He cannot beat what he cannot predict."
He's not making it easy, Kenta thought grimly, catching a raking claw on his forearm and feeling it score even his hardened hide.
"Nothing worth doing is easy, you great sulking thing. Now, watch his breathing. He gathers Ki in his chest before the heavy strikes; you can see it, that little hitch. There. There. When he does it next, do not block. Slip it, and put your fire in the gap."
Kenta obeyed. When Zill's chest hitched and the beast lunged with a Ki-charged haymaker meant to shatter bone, the Kuroshishi did not meet it. He flowed around it, a half-step of hard-won footwork, and drove a fist wrapped in Adara's flame squarely into the beast's exposed side. Zill roared, more in shock than pain, staggering, and for the first time in the fight Kenta saw something in those flat yellow eyes he had never seen there before: doubt.
"You see it now, don't you," Kenta said quietly, settling back into his stance, unhurried, implacable. "I'm not the easy prey you remember. I'm not going to lose my head and give you the opening you want. I'm just going to keep hitting you, and hitting you, and every time you swing wild, I'm going to make you pay for it. That's the whole plan, Zill. Patience. And I have so much more of it than you do."
Zill snarled, and threw himself back into the fray, and the stalemate held, two beasts locked in a war of attrition, Zill's bloodlust and killing intent perfectly matched against Kenta's growing skill and Adara's patient guidance, neither yet able to bring the other down.
Nearer the center of the field, a very different fight was going very much worse.
Freed Sellzen had the fused Excalibur now, whole and blazing in his hands, and the mad exorcist had become a whirlwind of holy death. Xenovia, Masomi, and Kiba had thrown themselves against him together, three blades against one, and it should have been enough. It was not. The complete Excalibur amplified Freed's already considerable skill into something monstrous, and worse, the man fought with the gleeful, unpredictable savagery of someone who felt no fear and valued no life, not his enemies' and not his own.
"Come on!" Freed shrieked with laughter, batting aside Xenovia's Excalibur Destruction and forcing Kiba to leap back from a whistling counterstroke. "Is this it? Is this really it? Three of you, three, and you still can't put down one humble little servant of the Lord? Oh, this is embarrassing for you! Papa expected so much more!"
It was Kiba he singled out. It was always going to be Kiba. Freed could smell the rage boiling off the young knight, the desperate, unfocused fury of a man who had waited years for this moment and was letting it consume him, and Freed, cruel to his rotten core, played it like a fiddle.
"You especially, pretty boy," the mad exorcist crooned, ducking under Kiba's increasingly wild swings. "You hate this sword, don't you? I can see it. It's making you sloppy. All that lovely rage and nowhere to put it." He laughed, high and cracked. "The Holy Sword Project, right? One of the little lab rats that got away? Ohhh, I've read the files. You should thank me, really. Without dear old Valper's work, you'd never even have existed."
"Shut up!" Kiba roared, and threw himself forward in a blind, furious charge, all technique abandoned—
—which was exactly what Freed had been waiting for.
The mad exorcist sidestepped with contemptuous ease, and the flat of the whole Excalibur cracked across Kiba's skull with brutal force. The young knight crashed to the ground, his demonic swords scattering from his grip, and before Xenovia or Masomi could reach him, Freed had planted a boot on his chest and leveled the shining blade at his throat.
"There we go," Freed sighed, delighted. "That's better. Stay down, little lab rat. Papa's not done playing yet."
"Kiba!" Xenovia surged forward, but a lazy sweep of the Excalibur forced her back, and Freed's grin only widened.
"Well, well. So this is what became of one of my little investments."
Valper Galilei's reedy voice drifted across the field, and the old scientist shuffled forward from his circles, peering down at the pinned, defeated Kiba with the detached, clinical curiosity of a man examining a failed experiment.
"You survived," Valper observed, cocking his head. "Extraordinary. Statistically, none of you should have. And what have you done with that gift of survival, boy? Grown strong? Grown wise? No." His lip curled with contempt. "You threw yourself at a superior opponent in a blind rage and got yourself pinned like a common brawler. Pathetic. A waste."
Kiba struggled beneath Freed's boot, his eyes burning with impotent fury, and Valper savored it.
"Do you want to know the truly funny part?" the old man continued, warming to his cruelty. "The other children. The ones who didn't survive. Your little friends, your brothers and sisters from the project." He smiled, thin and cold. "They died for nothing. Do you understand that? Nothing at all. Their sacrifice, their suffering, the whole grand experiment, and here is its sole surviving product, a mediocre swordsman flat on his back in the dirt. If you could see them now, boy, all those dead children, they would weep to know what they died to produce. You are the reason their deaths were meaningless."
The words struck Kiba like physical blows, and something in the young knight's face began to crumble, the rage curdling into despair, the light going out of his eyes. Because it was the exact fear that had haunted him his whole life, spoken aloud at last by the very man who had murdered them. They died for nothing. And it's my fault.
"Oh, but I did find a use for them in the end." Valper's cruelty took on a note of scholarly pride now, and he reached into his robes and withdrew a small, glowing crystal orb, pulsing with a soft, sickly holy light. "Waste nothing, that has always been my creed. When those children died, I harvested the residual holy energy from their bodies, the very thing that made them suitable for the project in the first place, and I crystallized it. This." He held the orb aloft, admiring it. "Do you know what this is, boy? This is the key to everything. This little marvel is what allows an ordinary human to wield a Holy Sword. Freed there could never have held Excalibur without one of my crystals purifying him first, making his unworthy flesh compatible with the sacred metal. Every drop of power in this orb was pulled from the corpses of your friends."
He turned the crystal in the light, and for just a moment, something almost wistful crossed his lined face.
"And do you know the first thing I did, once I perfected them? I wielded an Excalibur myself." His voice softened with an old, private hunger. "When I was a boy, that was my every dream. To hold one of the holy swords, to be found worthy of it. But I had no aptitude, no talent, none of the sacred spark the church demands. They told me I would never touch one. Never." His fingers closed around the orb. "And then I made these. And I held Excalibur in my own two hands at last, an old man's fingers wrapped around a child's impossible dream, made true by my own genius where God and church both said it never could be. Do you understand what that felt like, boy? To take the thing they swore I was unworthy of, and seize it anyway?"
"So that's it, then." Masomi's voice cut across the field, low and hard, the young exorcist watching the old man with open disgust from where he guarded Kiba's flank. "All of it. The murdered children, the atrocities, the Genocide Archduke. You became this, this monster, because a little boy couldn't have his toy. You twisted yourself into something evil chasing a childhood dream you were never meant to have."
Valper regarded him, entirely unbothered.
"…Perhaps," the old scientist allowed, with a small, indifferent shrug, as though Masomi had remarked on the weather. "Perhaps that is how it began, once, long ago. Does it matter? A man is not the seed he sprang from." His pale eyes hardened, and the wistfulness curdled into something colder and far more dangerous. "Because the dream is finished now. I have held the sword. And in its place I have found a far worthier purpose to spend my remaining years upon. To tear down the towering hypocrisy of the church and of Heaven itself. To expose the rot at the heart of the faithful who cast me out for the very sins they commit daily behind closed doors. That is my goal now, exorcist. Not a boy's dream of a sword. A dying man's dream of justice. And tonight, with Kokabiel's war, it finally begins."
His hands trembled with old fury as he went on, the grievance pouring out of him now, the wellspring of everything he had become. "And do you know how the church repaid my genius? How Heaven thanked me for the breakthroughs I bled for? They excommunicated me. Branded me a heretic, a monster, the Genocide Archduke, and cast me out to die. And yet! And yet, they kept my research. They locked me out and burned my name from their records, and then went right on using every discovery I ever made. Cowards, every last one of them. They wanted the fruit and washed their hands of the tree that bore it. So do not lecture me about the dead children, boy. Your precious church spent them just as readily as I did. They simply lacked the honesty to admit it."
And then, with a careless flick of his wrist, Valper tossed the last crystallized orb toward the fallen knight, letting it roll to a stop in the dirt beside Kiba's head.
"There. A memento. The last of them, and everything that remained of the children who died so that I might learn. Choke on it."
"Kiba!"
The voice cut across the battlefield, clear and fierce, and it was Yumi's.
She could not come to him. She was still locked in her own desperate dance with the four-winged Fallen Angel, wreathed in Artemis's silver moonlight, giving ground and taking it in a whirl of light-arrows and lunar barriers. But even mid-fight, even with her own life hanging on every parried blow, she had heard Valper's cruelty, and she would not let it stand.
"Do not listen to him, Kiba!" she shouted, loosing a shaft of green light that drove her opponent back and bought her the breath to speak. "Do not believe a single poisoned word of it! He is a liar, and a murderer, and he does not get to tell you what our family's deaths meant!"
Kiba's eyes, dull with despair, flickered toward her.
"I stayed behind!" Yumi cried, and there was old grief in her voice now, grief she had made her peace with long ago, laid bare for her brother's sake. "When the project fell, when the others died, I survived, the same as you! And I have never once regretted it, Kiba, never, and do you know why? Because you lived. Because one of us got out. And our brothers and sisters, the ones who didn't make it, they don't regret it either! I knew them! They loved us! Every one of those children would have given up their chance at life a thousand times over if it meant that you got to keep yours!"
She parried a savage blow, staggered, recovered, kept speaking, because this mattered more than the fight.
"They did not die for nothing! They died so that you could be here, alive, standing, free! And they do not think less of you for surviving, they never could!" Her voice cracked with fierce love. "So get up, little brother. Get up, and stop letting the man who killed them tell you what they wanted. You carry them now. All of them. Carry them forward, and live!"
For a long moment, Kiba lay still beneath Freed's boot.
And then, slowly, his hand crept across the dirt, and closed around the glowing crystal orb Valper had so carelessly discarded.
The moment his fingers touched it, the world changed.
Light flared, soft and warm and achingly gentle, nothing like the harsh holy glare of the Excalibur, and Kiba's eyes went wide. Because he could feel them. In the crystal, in that last remnant of harvested holy energy, he could feel the echoes of the children who had died, faint and fading but unmistakably there, their desires, their hopes, their love, all of it pouring into him in a single overwhelming rush. They were not angry. They were not disappointed. They were only, endlessly, proud of the brother who had lived, and their final, wordless wish washed through him like sunlight through water: live, and be free, and remember us not with grief, but with joy.
Kiba began to weep. And he began to rise.
The crystal orb dissolved into motes of gentle light and sank into his skin, into the very core of his Sacred Gear, and something impossible began to happen. The demonic power of his Sword Birth, the dark, devil-born magic that let him forge blades from nothing, reached out and seized the holy essence of his dead friends, and instead of the two annihilating each other as every law of nature said they must, they merged.
Freed's boot was thrown off as Kiba surged upward, and a new sword formed in his grip, and every combatant on the field who could see it recoiled from what it was.
"Sword Birth," Kiba breathed, and then, louder, ringing with a certainty he had never known before, he gave the impossible blade its name for all of them to hear. "Balance Breaker. Sword of the Betrayer!"
"…Well now," Draig murmured in Issei's mind, and there was genuine astonishment in the ancient dragon's voice. "That should not be possible, partner. Look. The holy and the demonic, woven into a single blade. Two elements that have unmade each other since the dawn of creation, and that boy has just forced them to hold hands. That crystal, the holy energy within it merged with his devil's Sacred Gear, and the collision birthed an anomaly. A Balance Breaker unlike anything I have seen. Remember this moment, partner. You are watching a legend being born."
"By all the old fires," Adara breathed in Kenta's mind, equally stunned. "A holy-demonic sword. The swordsman has done the impossible. The holy remnant of the fallen and the demonic gift of the living, fused where they should have canceled. His grief made a weapon that the laws of the world say cannot exist."
The blade Kiba held was beautiful and terrible, a longsword whose edge shimmered with two opposed radiances at once, holy light and demonic dark braided together along its length, neither consuming the other, both burning in perfect, impossible harmony. This was Sword of the Betrayer, the Balance Breaker of Sword Birth, and with it, Kiba could forge blades that carried both natures at once. Holy energy, anathema to Devils, bound seamlessly with the demonic power of his own kind, each element holding the other in perfect balance, so that he, a Devil, could wield a holy edge without it ever turning against him. And a blade woven of two opposing natures that the whole of creation insisted could never coexist was a blade against which nothing had ever thought to raise a guard, no ward keyed to stop it, no defense prepared for a thing that was not supposed to be. It answered to neither side of the great divide, because it had been born of both.
Kiba raised the impossible sword, and his tears still fell, but his eyes were clear now, clearer than they had been in years.
Across the field, the defenders who could spare a glance stared in open wonder. Issei had frozen mid-motion, his gauntlet forgotten, staring at his friend with shining eyes. "Kiba," he breathed. "Kiba. You did it. You actually did it." There was no envy in it, only fierce, uncomplicated joy for a friend who had finally, finally found his way out of the dark. Even Xenovia, hardened warrior that she was, felt something catch in her throat at the sight of it, at the raw, redemptive beauty of a broken man made whole by the love of the dead.
And in the quiet of two separate mindscapes, two ancient spirits marveled together across the distance.
"He should be dead, you know," Adara said softly to Kenta, and there was something like reverence in the old fire-serpent's voice. "By every law I have ever known, the instant those two energies met inside him, they should have torn him apart from the inside. Holy and demonic do not merge, my host. They war, always, unto mutual annihilation. And yet." A crackle of wonder. "Grief did what physics could not. His love for the dead was the crucible, and it held. I have lived a very long time, and I have never seen its like. Mark this night, Kenta. You will tell your grandchildren you stood on the field when the Sword of the Betrayer was born."
"There is more to it than sentiment, partner," Draig rumbled to Issei, ever the pragmatist even in awe. "The holy element from that crystal did not merely coexist with his Sacred Gear. It bonded with it, wove itself into the demonic lattice of the gift and became something neither wholly one thing nor the other. An anomaly. A true fusion of opposites. Do you understand what that means for a blade, partner? A holy sword cannot cut what is holy. A demonic sword cannot cut what is demonic. But a blade that is both at once?" The dragon's voice gleamed with grim satisfaction. "It can cut anything. There is no defense in all creation keyed against a nature that should not exist. Your friend just became one of the most dangerous swordsmen alive, and he does not even know it yet."
"I'm sorry," Kiba whispered, to the fading warmth of his friends. "I'm sorry it took me so long. Thank you. All of you. I'll carry you the rest of the way." He turned to face Freed, and there was no more blind rage in him, only a terrible, settled calm. "I finally understand. I don't need to avenge you by throwing my life away. I need to live well, and fight for the people in front of me. Starting now."
While Kiba was being reforged in grief and love at the field's heart, the rest of the battle raged on around them, and it was the quiet, unglamorous work of three of Rias's people that kept the whole desperate effort from collapsing.
Akeno had turned the sky above Kuoh Academy into a killing field. The two-winged Fallen Angels had come at her in a coordinated swarm, ten of them wheeling and diving, light-spears flashing, and against a lesser opponent the sheer numbers would have overwhelmed. But Akeno Himejima was no lesser opponent. Her storms rolled across the heavens in sheets of crackling power, arcs of lightning leaping from cloud to target with lethal precision, and the Fallen learned quickly and painfully that the open sky belonged to her.
Still, ten was a great many, and even Akeno could not watch every angle at once. Which was why she was not alone.
Koneko had gone up with her, in a manner of speaking, launching herself skyward off Rias's transportation platforms and off the sheer strength of her Rook's legs, meeting the diving Fallen with devastating physical blows that shattered light-spears and sent their wielders spinning from the sky. And below, anchoring them both, Asia held the line she was born to hold, her Twilight Healing reaching up to mend the scorch of every light-spear that got through, her barriers blooming to turn aside the shots that would have struck Akeno from her blind spots.
"Koneko-chan, on your left!" Akeno called, and the small Rook twisted in midair to smash a diving Fallen from the sky just as Asia's barrier flared to catch the spear the other Fallen had aimed at Akeno's exposed back. The three of them fought like a single organism, storm and fist and shield, and one by one the two-winged Fallen fell, until the swarm that had darkened the sky was reduced to a scattered, desperate few.
"Go," Akeno told Koneko and Asia, wiping sweat from her brow, the last handful of Fallen fleeing before her lightning. "I can finish these. Kiba and the others need every blade they can get, and Asia, they'll need your healing before this night is done." She loosed a final, sky-splitting bolt. "Go. I'll be right behind you."
And so Koneko and Asia peeled away toward the center of the field, and Asia's gentle light and Koneko's monstrous strength were suddenly, crucially, available exactly where they were needed most, the quiet arithmetic of a well-run peerage turning the tide one small decision at a time.
The change in Kiba was instant and total, and it lifted the whole flagging fight against Freed like a tide coming in.
"Kiba!" Xenovia's golden eyes went wide at the sight of the holy-demonic blade, and then, fiercely, she grinned. "So you've finally stopped feeling sorry for yourself. Good. Then let me stop holding back as well." She planted her feet, raised Excalibur Destruction, and closed her eyes. And then, softly, reverently, her lips began to move in prayer. "Holy Mother, full of grace, look upon your servant in her hour of need. Lend me your strength, and let the blade of the saint answer my call, that I may raise it in defense of the innocent." Her eyes opened, blazing with conviction, and she thrust out her free hand toward the empty air. "Come forth… Durandal!"
Light blazed, and a second blade answered her call, wrenched from a pocket of sacred space, the legendary sword Durandal, its raw destructive power so immense it warped the air around it. Xenovia caught it in her off hand, and now she stood dual-wielding, Excalibur Destruction in one fist and Durandal in the other, two holy swords blazing, a warrior-maiden at the peak of her terrible art.
"Masomi!" she barked. "On your feet, senior! We finish this together!"
And the injured Masomi, who had been holding himself upright through sheer will, blood soaking his robes, pushed off the ground and rejoined the fray, his blessed blade steady in his grip. "I never left, Lady Xenovia," the young exorcist gritted out, a grim ghost of humor in it. "Merely… conserving my strength."
"Impossible." Valper Galilei had gone rigid, his rheumy eyes fixed on the destructive blade in Xenovia's off hand with an expression of pure scholarly disbelief. "That is Durandal. The true Durandal, wielded bare-handed, with no crystal, no aid, no purification of any kind. That cannot be." His voice climbed, agitated. "In all my decades of research, in every candidate the church ever produced, I never once identified a single soul with the natural aptitude to so much as touch that blade without being consumed by it. It was the very reason I built my project, the reason I harvested those children, because the gift to wield the holy swords was so vanishingly rare! And this girl simply, simply lifts it, as though it were hers by right—" He trailed off, staring, the foundations of his life's work visibly cracking before his eyes.
High above it all, upon his throne of light, Kokabiel watched.
The Cadre had not moved. He had not needed to. He simply sat with one leg crossed over the other and his chin propped on a fist, drinking in the whole unfolding spectacle below, and with every passing moment his grin stretched a fraction wider. A broken swordsman reforged into something that should not exist. A girl lifting a legendary holy blade with a whispered prayer. His pet genius's certainties crumbling to dust. The children he had come to slaughter for sport refusing, again and again, to simply lie down and die as they were meant to.
"…Oh, this is good," the Star of God murmured to the empty air, his crimson eyes bright with a delight that had not dimmed all night, only deepened. "This is better than good. This is the most alive I have felt in two thousand years." He watched Kiba's impossible sword flash, watched Xenovia's Durandal blaze, and something ancient and hungry stirred behind his smile. "Surprise me again, little ones. Please. Keep surprising me."
Three against one, and now the three were something else entirely.
Freed felt the shift, and for the first time all night, the mad exorcist's manic grin began to falter. "No," he muttered, backpedaling, the fused Excalibur suddenly feeling less like a trump card and more like a target. "No, no, no, this isn't, you were losing, you filthy little—"
They gave him no time to finish.
It was a thing of brutal, beautiful coordination, three warriors who had found their rhythm at last. Kiba came in low and fast, his holy-demonic blades, and now there were several, forged and flung and forged again, forcing Freed to twist and parry and give ground, his footing crumbling. Masomi pressed from the flank, tireless despite his wounds, cutting off every avenue of escape. And Xenovia, dual-wielding, was an unstoppable engine of holy destruction, hammering at Freed's guard with blows that shook his arms in their sockets.
The end, when it came, came fast.
Freed, cornered and desperate, swung the fused Excalibur in a last wild, killing arc, all his mad strength behind it. Xenovia met it head-on. Durandal and Excalibur Destruction crossed before her in an X, catching the whole Excalibur's blade between them, and with a scream of holy metal she held, muscles straining, halting the fused sword dead in its arc. "NOW!" she roared.
Masomi moved like a striking snake. His blessed blade flashed low, and in a single clean stroke he severed both of Freed's legs at the knee. The mad exorcist shrieked, his balance gone, toppling—
And Kiba stepped through the opening, his holy-demonic sword rising, and brought it down upon the fused Excalibur where Xenovia held it pinned. The Sword of the Betrayer, a blade that was both holy and demonic, that answered to no single nature and so could cut what neither pure holy nor pure demonic could, sheared through the completed Excalibur in a single, ringing stroke.
The holiest sword ever forged, restored at last after an age, shattered into a thousand falling shards of dying light.
Freed hit the ground, legless, disarmed, his shattered weapon scattered around him, and the madness in his eyes finally gave way to raw, animal terror.
"No!" he screamed, scrabbling backward on the stumps of his legs, leaving a smear of blood across the churned earth. "No, no, please, wait, we can, we can talk about this, right? Mercy! Have mercy! You're the good guys, aren't you? The good guys don't, they don't just—"
Masomi walked toward him, unhurried, blessed blade in hand, and his young face was set like carved stone.
"Mercy," the exorcist repeated quietly, and stopped before the sobbing, broken man. "You beg me for mercy. You, who cut down innocents across the world for sport. You, who murdered priests and nuns and laughed while you did it. You, who would have carved every soul on this field into pieces not an hour ago and savored every scream." His grey eyes were cold and clear. "You did not grant mercy to a single one of them, Freed Sellzen. Not one. And so I will not grant it to you."
"P-please—"
"It is not to me you should be pleading in any case." Masomi raised the blade. "If you have any prayers left in that rotten soul, spend them now, and spend them upward. Beg mercy of the God of the Bible, for your fate hangs now between survival and damnation, and it is His judgment, not mine, that will decide which side of that balance you fall upon." A pause. "I would not hold out much hope, were I you."
The blade fell.
Freed Sellzen died with a prayer he did not mean half-formed on his lips, and Masomi lowered his weapon, and did not flinch, and did not celebrate. He simply closed his eyes for a moment, murmured something too soft to hear, and turned away from the body of a man who had earned his end a hundred times over.
"…That was mercy of a kind, you know," he said quietly, as much to himself as to anyone, sheathing his blade with a steady hand. "A quick end. Far more than he gave a single one of his victims. I take no joy in it. But I would do it again without hesitation, and I will not pretend otherwise, or dress it up as something cleaner than it was. He was a rabid animal, and rabid animals must be put down before they can savage anyone else. That is the whole of it."
Kiba, standing nearby, his own holy-demonic blade lowered, regarded the young exorcist with a new and complicated respect. He of all people understood the weight of that particular arithmetic, the cost of taking a life even when the life richly deserved taking. "You carry it well," he offered.
"I carry it because I must," Masomi replied simply. "Someone has to. Better it be someone who feels the weight of it than someone who does not." He looked out across the field, to where a monster still waited on a throne of light. "And this night is far from over. Save your respect, swordsman. We are all likely to need a great deal more of that grim arithmetic before the dawn."
Valper Galilei had watched the whole thing unfold, and his face had drained of every ounce of its scholarly smugness.
"That's, no. No, that is not possible." The old man stared at the holy-demonic blade still burning in Kiba's grip, and his voice climbed with genuine, mounting alarm. "Holy and demonic energy, coexisting. In a single blade. Sustained. They should annihilate one another on contact, the two elements cannot, they cannot share the same space, it violates every principle, every law, every, every—" He began to pace, muttering, his brilliant, broken mind seizing on the impossibility and worrying at it like a dog with a bone. "Unless. Unless the fundamental relationship between them has changed. But that would require, that would only be possible if, if the governing will behind the holy element were, were somehow absent, or altered, or—"
His eyes went very wide.
"…No," Valper breathed, and all the color drained from his face as a truth decades in the making assembled itself behind his eyes. "No, that would mean. The reason the systems have been degrading. The reason the fail-safes, the reason, oh. Oh, I see it now. It's so obvious. The God of the Bible is—"
A spear of light punched through his chest.
Valper Galilei looked down at the blazing shaft of light protruding from his sternum with an expression less of pain than of profound scholarly disappointment, as though the universe had interrupted him at the worst possible moment. Then the light flared, and the Genocide Archduke crumpled, and the mind that had murdered a room full of children in the name of knowledge went dark forever.
Every head snapped upward. Kokabiel lounged upon his throne of light, one hand still extended, a lazy, satisfied smile on his face.
"Kokabiel!" Rias shouted, horror and confusion warring in her voice. "Why? Why would you kill your own ally? What was he about to say?!"
The Cadre began to laugh.
It was not his usual cruel amusement. This was something deeper, richer, a laugh of genuine, dark delight, the laugh of a man savoring the single funniest thing in all the world. He laughed until he had to wipe his eyes, and the sound of it, in the sudden silence of the battlefield, was more chilling than any threat.
"Oh, you children," he finally managed. "You precious, ignorant children. Do you know, the most entertaining part of this entire evening, the thing I have savored above all else? Watching those two exorcists fight so desperately. So bravely. Praying between blows, invoking His name, ready to lay down their lives for their Lord." His grin turned vicious. "All for a master who isn't there anymore."
Xenovia went very still. "…What did you say?"
"Do you want to know what old Valper worked out, in his last moments? The secret that got him a spear through the heart before he could share it?" Kokabiel spread his arms wide, and delivered the words like a killing blow. "The God of the Bible is dead. He has been dead for a very, very long time. He fell in the Great War, in its final hour, when the mightiest powers of the age all threw themselves at one another at once. The four original Satans. The two Heavenly Dragons, the Red and the White. And the God of the Bible Himself. They tore one another apart, children, all of them together, in a single catastrophic battle. When the dust settled, the Four Great Satans lay dead, the Heavenly Dragons had been struck down and sealed away into the Sacred Gears they haunt to this very day…" his crimson gaze flicked, pointedly, toward Issei's gauntlet, "…and the God of the Bible was simply gone. That is the great secret at the heart of the world. That is why the swords degrade, why the miracles falter, why a demonic blade can hold holy power without being unmade. There is no one left minding the shop. Your Lord is gone, and He is never, ever coming back."
The words detonated across the battlefield.
Asia Argento collapsed. She simply folded, her legs giving out beneath her, her hands flying to her mouth, tears already streaming down her face, the entire foundation of the faith that had sustained her through every cruelty of her life crumbling to dust in a single sentence. Xenovia dropped to her knees in the dirt, Durandal and Excalibur Destruction falling from nerveless fingers, staring at nothing. And Masomi stood frozen, shell-shocked, his lips moving soundlessly, his face a mask of desperate denial, as though if he simply refused to believe it hard enough, the words would cease to be true.
It was Xenovia who broke, in her shock, and blurted out the impossible thing.
"…That's a lie." Her voice shook. "That's a lie, it has to be, because, because Gabriel. Gabriel said God was still alive." She was babbling now, grasping at the wreckage of her faith. "When Marid and the Seraph were making that deal, when Gabriel came down to Kuoh, she spoke of God, she spoke as if He, she said He was—"
Kokabiel snorted, and opened his mouth to sneer—
But before he could, a gentle hand came to rest on Xenovia's trembling shoulder.
It was Yumi.
"Xenovia," she said softly, and there was such quiet compassion in her voice that the blue-haired exorcist's head came up. "Listen to me. Gabriel was not lying to you. She would never." Yumi knelt beside her, meeting her devastated eyes with steady kindness. "But when a Seraph speaks of 'God' in these late days, she does not always mean the Father who fell in the war. She means the one who holds His office now. The one who took up the burden of Heaven when its maker was gone, and has carried it ever since, keeping the whole system running by sheer will so that souls like yours and Asia's would never have to know the truth and lose hope." Her voice was as gentle as she could make it. "The Archangel Michael. He is the acting God now, Xenovia. He has been for a very long time. That is who watches over you. That is who answers your prayers. Heaven did not abandon you. It simply changed hands, quietly, so that the faithful would not despair. You have not been praying to nothing. You have been praying to him."
For a long, terrible moment, the battlefield hung suspended in the weight of it.
The revelation had struck the two exorcists to their very foundations, and the internal war raging behind their eyes was more brutal than any blade could inflict. Everything they were, everything they had been raised to be, every prayer whispered in the dark, every sacrifice offered up, every life laid down, all of it built upon a Father who had been dead and gone for longer than they had been alive. It was the kind of blow that broke people. That hollowed them out and left nothing behind.
Asia wept quietly on the ground, and Issei was already moving toward her, and Xenovia knelt frozen in the dirt, and it seemed, for a moment, that Kokabiel had won something far more important than a battle. He had cracked their spirits.
But Masomi recovered first.
The young exorcist drew a long, shuddering breath, and then, slowly, deliberately, he bent and retrieved his blade from where it had fallen, and straightened, and there was something new and hard and unbroken in his grey eyes.
"…It doesn't matter," he said.
Xenovia's head turned toward him.
"Do you hear me? It doesn't matter." Masomi's voice gathered strength with every word. "Let the Father be dead. Let Archangel Michael hold the office. Let the great secret be everything the Cadre says it is. It changes nothing about the man I chose to be, or the duty I swore to keep." He turned to face Kokabiel, and lifted his chin. "I did not become an exorcist because I feared a watching God. I became one to protect the innocent. To stand between the weak and the things in the dark that would devour them. That was always the reason, whether the Father lives or lies dead in a battlefield ten thousand years cold." His grip tightened on his sword. "And there is an entire city of sleeping innocents behind me right now, every one of them about to die if that monster gets his way. That is reason enough. That has always been reason enough. In their name, God or no God, I am going to stop you, Kokabiel."
And Xenovia, hearing him, found the broken pieces of herself and slowly, painfully, began to put them back together into a new and different shape.
"…He's right," she whispered. She reached out and closed her hands around Durandal and Excalibur Destruction once more, and pushed herself to her feet, swaying, and then standing firm. Her faith in the God of the Bible was shattered, perhaps beyond mending. But in its place, forged in the ruins, something else was rising. "My faith in the Lord may be broken. I don't, I don't even know what I believe anymore. But I know this." Her golden eyes blazed with new, fierce purpose. "There are innocent people in this city who will die if we fail. Children. Families. People who have done nothing wrong. And I will not let that happen. If I can no longer fight for God, then I will fight for them. For the innocent. That is a thing worth believing in. That is a thing worth dying for." She hefted her twin blades. "That will have to be enough. And I think, maybe, it always should have been."
Something passed between the two exorcists then, Devil and Cadre forgotten for a heartbeat, a shared and wordless understanding of two souls who had lost their God tonight and found, in the wreckage, a reason to go on anyway.
Kokabiel watched the two of them reforge their broken resolve, and rather than anger, something almost like admiration flickered across his ancient face. "…How very stubborn," he murmured. "I take away the ground beneath your feet, and you simply build a new floor in midair. How human of you. It is almost a shame I will have to kill it out of you."
While the exorcists remade themselves, Yumi rose from Xenovia's side, and turned back to the fight she had never truly left.
The four-winged Fallen Angel had recovered from her earlier arrows, and it came at her again, fast and cunning, its four wings making it a blur of dark motion. But Yumi had been studying it this whole long fight, and she had learned its rhythms, and she had learned, above all, its single great weakness: for all its speed at range, the creature was arrogant in close, over-confident in its superior strength, certain that no low-class Devil could match it blade to blade.
So Yumi gave it exactly what it wanted.
She let her Lunar Aegis flicker, feigned a stumble, and drew the Fallen in close, baiting it into the melee it so hungered for. The captain took the bait with a triumphant snarl, closing the distance, drawing back a light-spear for the killing thrust at point-blank range—
—and Yumi, who had never intended to win this at sword's length, simply raised her right hand, where Staring Green already blazed, and loosed three shafts of concentrated emerald light directly into the Fallen Angel's chest from an arm's length away.
At that range, there was no dodging. There was no deflecting. The arrows of pure light punched clean through the four-winged Fallen, and the creature's triumphant snarl became a gurgle of shock, and then it was falling, dead before it struck the ground, undone by its own certainty that a girl wrapped in the moon could never be a threat up close.
"You should not have come near me," Yumi said quietly to the dead thing, moonlight still shining softly around her. Then she turned, and walked, unhurried and unbroken, to take her place in the line forming against the true enemy.
One by one, they gathered. Rias, crimson power blazing. Akeno, descending from the sky, the last of the two-winged Fallen dealt with, Koneko and a battle-worn Asia at her side. Issei, his gauntlet glowing. Kenta, breaking off his stalemate with a snarling Zill to stand with his friends. Kiba, holy-demonic sword in hand, reborn. Xenovia and Masomi, faith shattered and remade, blades ready. And Yumi, crowned in silver light.
Battered, exhausted, shaken to their cores, but unbroken. They formed their line, and they turned as one to face the monster on the throne.
Kokabiel looked down upon the assembled Devils and exorcists, this ragged, bloodied, unbowed line of children who had endured everything he had thrown at them and were still standing, and slowly, a wide and genuine smile spread across his ancient face.
"Do you know," he said, and there was something almost fond in it, "I truly did not expect to enjoy this evening as much as I have. I came for slaughter and spectacle, and I have received both, but this," he gestured at them, "this I did not anticipate. My little army, undone. My grand plan, in pieces. My best sport, dead at your feet. And still you stand there and glare at me." He laughed softly. "It has been a very, very long time since anything surprised me. Thank you for that, whelps. Truly."
He rose from his throne of light.
"You have earned something, I think. You have earned my attention. And so I have decided: I shall dispense with the theater, and the games, and the watching from on high. I shall come down there myself, and I shall fight every one of you at once, with my own two hands." His crimson eyes gleamed with terrible anticipation. "It seems only fair. You have entertained me so beautifully. The least I can do is give you the honor of dying to a Cadre personally, rather than being ground down by his leftovers. Besides." His smile sharpened. "I find I am curious how much longer you can keep surprising me."
"No!"
The snarl came from the side, and Zill came lurching forward, bloodied and furious, planting himself in Kokabiel's path as the Cadre began his descent. "You promised, Cadre! You gave me your word! The Devils are mine! I have waited to repay them for my humiliation, to wipe out the shame of that mine, and you will not steal my—"
Kokabiel did not even look at him.
There was a flick of the wrist, so casual it might have been an afterthought, and a spear of light lanced across the field toward the beast. Zill, for all his fury, was fast, his years of Ki mastery lending him reflexes few could match, and he twisted, and he very nearly dodged it entirely.
Very nearly.
The light-spear punched through his shoulder, and Zill screamed.
It was not the wound itself. The wound was survivable. It was the nature of it, the searing, alien agony of holy-tinged light burning through a body built on beast-Ki, a poison his power simply could not process or expel. The pain overwhelmed him utterly, white-hot and total, more than any amount of raw strength could push through, and Zill's scream choked off into a gurgle as his legs buckled. The old nightmare of the mine, the beast who had haunted Kenta's people, toppled sideways into the churned earth and lay still, unconscious, felled not by any Devil but by the ally who had promised him vengeance and delivered betrayal instead.
Kenta stared at his fallen enemy, robbed of the reckoning he had waited for, and Kokabiel chuckled at the look on the Kuroshishi's face.
"Oh, do not look so cheated, cub," the Cadre said, alighting at last upon the battlefield, folding his ten black wings behind him, and the sheer, crushing pressure of his presence at ground level made every Devil there take an involuntary step back. "He was a tiresome, small-minded creature, forever whining about his little grudges. You are far more interesting than he ever was. In fact…"
His crimson gaze swept the line of defenders, and it settled, deliberately, on two of them in particular.
It settled on Kenta, the lion who had matched a beast blade for blade and refused to break.
And it settled, longest of all, on Yumi, the girl wrapped in a goddess's stolen moonlight, who had killed a captain of the Fallen and never once shown him fear.
"…some of you," Kokabiel said, and his smile was hungry and delighted and utterly without mercy, "have genuinely caught my interest. The lion, and the little moonlit huntress most of all. I confess, I came here tonight expecting nothing but inferior sport, and instead a handful of you have made me curious. Do you understand what a rare and precious thing that is? To make a being of my age curious?" He rolled his shoulders, and terrible power began to gather around him. "I am going to enjoy taking you apart. Slowly. So that I can savor exactly what makes you so interesting before the light goes out of your eyes."
High above the ruined field, unseen and unfelt by any of the exhausted combatants, the great artificial moon of the Underworld had a distant cousin here in the human world, the true full moon, and beneath both of them, a countdown ticked relentlessly toward its end.
Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes until the reinforcements from the Underworld tore through the sky. Thirty minutes until Marid Gremory reached the city he had sworn to protect.
Thirty minutes to survive a Cadre of the Grigori, on foot, face to face, with everything they had left.
Kokabiel spread his hands, and grinned, and the true battle, the one that would decide everything, began.
"Now then, children," said the Star of God, stepping forward onto the blood-soaked field. "Entertain me."
The pressure of him at ground level was a physical thing, a weight that pressed down on lungs and knees and will alike, and every defender on that field felt the terrible truth of it settle into their bones: everything before this had been the appetizer. The army, the hounds, Freed, even the revelation that had shattered their faith, all of it had merely been the warmup. This was the real fight. This was the thing they had been holding on for, the thing Draig had warned Issei about, the thing no one of their years was meant to face and survive.
Rias drew a slow breath, and gathered her crimson power, and did not let her people see her fear. "Thirty minutes," she said quietly, so only those beside her could hear. "We hold for thirty minutes. Together. Whatever it costs. Marid is coming, and my brother's forces behind him, and all we have to do, all we have ever had to do, is still be standing when they arrive." Her blue-green eyes swept her battered, unbroken line, her precious people, and something fierce and unbreakable settled over her. "So we stand. We do not break. We do not fall. Not tonight."
"Not tonight," Kiba echoed, his holy-demonic blade rising.
"Not tonight," Yumi agreed, moonlight flaring bright around her.
Issei cracked his knuckles, terror and resolve warring in his chest and resolve, barely, winning. Kenta rolled his flaming shoulders. Koneko set her small feet. Akeno's lightning crackled. Asia's healing light gathered, steady and warm. Xenovia and Masomi raised their blades, faith remade into something that could not be taken from them.
And Kokabiel, Cadre of the Grigori, Star of God, warmonger of the age, looked upon that unbroken line of children who would not yield, and smiled the widest, most delighted, most terrible smile of the entire long and bloody night.
"Wonderful," he breathed.
And then he moved, and the true battle began.
Chapter End
AND WHAT A CHAPTER! Honestly one of the most emotional ones I've ever written, and I am so, SO happy with how it came out!
Let's talk about the big one: KIBA'S BALANCE BREAKER. Sword of the Betrayer, the holy-demonic sword, finally awakened, and I wanted it to come not from rage but from LOVE, from finally hearing his siblings tell him it was okay to live. Yumi getting to be the one to reach him, big sister to the end, even mid-fight against a four-winged Fallen? That's the payoff of their whole relationship. I cried a little writing it, not gonna lie.
And then Freed gets got. Kiba, Xenovia (DURANDAL UNLEASHED, dual-wielding baby!) and Masomi taking him down together, and Masomi's cold, righteous execution ('the one you should beg mercy from is the God of the Bible')... oh, that line is going to hit different in about thirty seconds, isn't it. Because—
THE SECRET IS OUT. Valper figures out God is dead from the holy-demonic sword's very existence, and Kokabiel kills him before he can say it, then reveals it himself just to break the exorcists' spirits. God of the Bible, dead since the Great War, killed alongside the original Satans. And that gut-punch reveal that Gabriel wasn't lying, she just meant MICHAEL, the acting God... Yumi gently explaining it was one of my favorite little moments. The way Masomi and Xenovia rebuild their faith into something new (protect the innocent, God or no God) is the heart of this whole arc for me.
And Kokabiel, that magnificent monster, betraying Zill with a casual light-spear (RIP you won't be missed buddy), and singling out Yumi and Kenta as the ones who've 'caught his interest'... he's finally coming down off that throne. Thirty minutes on the clock. The REAL fight starts now.
Next chapter: the defenders vs Kokabiel, face to face. It's going to be brutal. Hold the line, everyone.
As ALWAYS, please please PLEASE leave a comment and let me know what you thought! Constructive criticism is hugely appreciated, if something felt off or you spotted a plot hole, tell me! Your comments genuinely fuel these chapters.
Until next time, stay safe and have fun!
DGZalama out!
Words:- 8100