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The silence in the vast underground training hall was broken only by Yugo Hano's measured breathing. The history professor adjusted his glasses and smoothed the wrinkles in his jacket, looking as composed as if he had just left a faculty meeting, rather than having endured nine consecutive biological nightmares.
In the corner, sitting on a mat next to Asia, Mittelt chewed a chocolate chip cookie, watching the scene with wide eyes. Her terror had lessened slightly; the monster had pinched her cheeks instead of tearing them off. For now, being the official "stress-relief toy" seemed like the best survival deal in Grigori history.
Up on the observation platform, Sona Sitri lowered her notebook. Her mind, a machine of tactical precision, was processing the overwhelming amount of military information she had just received, but something didn't add up.
Sona adjusted her glasses. Her violet eyes fixed on her Pawn.
"Nine new forms, Yugo," Sona said, her voice projecting clearly in the room. "Added to the ten we already knew from your old device, that gives us a total of nineteen operational transformations."
Sona crossed her arms, tilting her head with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.
—However, when you came into my office an hour ago, you were very specific. You said you had gone from ten to twenty-one. The math doesn't lie. Two are missing.
Tsubaki, Saji, and the rest of the nobility (Momo, Reya, Tsubasa, and Tomoe) exchanged nervous glances. Was there more to come?
Yugo stood motionless in the center of the arena. His gray eyes darkened slightly. He knew Sona's intelligence wouldn't let such a crude detail go unnoticed.
"You're right, Sona. There are two more to go," Yugo admitted, putting a hand in his pants pocket. "Number twenty-one… is an anomaly within an anomaly. It's a form I've permanently blocked. I won't use it, we won't train it, and I won't speak of it."
"Why?" Tsubasa Yura asked, unable to contain his tactical curiosity.
Yugo glanced at her sideways, with a coldness that froze the young demon's blood.
—Because if I release her and lose control for even a millisecond, there will be no Kuoh Academy, no Underworld, no planet Earth left to protect. Forget that number twenty-one exists.
The weight of that statement fell upon the Sitri nobility like a lead anvil. Sona swallowed hard, wisely deciding not to press any further on that cosmic time bomb.
"Very well," the heiress conceded. "I'll respect that limit. But what about number twenty?"
Yugo sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Number twenty was the Ectonurite. Ghostly (Zs'Skayr). He knew that thing's consciousness was awake inside the clock. He'd heard it laughing in his room. His original plan was simply to show them the hologram from afar to satisfy Sona's curiosity and then turn it off.
"Number twenty is… complicated. It's an intangible form," Yugo explained, raising his left arm. "Its biology is parasitic. I'll show you the holographic projection so you can record its physiognomy, but I'm not going to…"
Yugo turned the dial of the black and green Omnitrix.
The silhouettes flashed by until they stopped at the hunched, floating, tattered figure with a single eye and sharp claws.
But the instant Ghostfreak's hologram was projected, the air underground turned icy. A grayish, unnatural, hissing static began to flicker around the clock.
Yugo frowned. He tried to turn the dial back to turn it off, but the mechanical ring was completely stuck.
"Let me out..."
The voice didn't sound in the air. It sounded directly into the frontal lobe of Yugo's brain. It was a rasping whisper, like claws scratching a slate in the middle of a cemetery.
Yugo gritted his teeth, his survival instinct screaming at him to take off the watch. His right hand tried to move away from the dial.
But then, the sabotage happened.
A violent, completely involuntary spasm shook Yugo's right arm. His own fingers, moved by an invisible puppeteer hacking his nerve impulses from his left wrist, closed around the Omnitrix's core.
"No...!" Yugo growled, trying to resist.
It was useless. His own hand crushed the dial hard.
¡FLASH!
The light that flooded the room was not the bright, heroic emerald green they were used to. It was a grayish, pale, sickly glow, like moonlight filtering through the fog of a charnel house.
The magical lights in the training hall flickered and went almost completely out, plunging the room into an oppressive gloom. The temperature dropped below freezing. Sona's aura and her nobility became palpable.
In the center of the arena, the history teacher had disappeared.
In its place floated a nightmarish apparition. Its body appeared to be shrouded in a grayish, lifeless skin, stitched with black lines along its deformed anatomy. Its hands ended in disproportionately long, razor-sharp claws. Its head was tilted downward, hidden in the shadows of the remaining skin.
Tsubaki instinctively took a step forward, positioning his body in front of Sona. Saji recoiled, colliding with Momo, both trembling uncontrollably from a primal terror that stemmed not from physical strength, but from an aura that reeked of death and decay.
"Yugo...?" Sona called, her voice losing some of its usual firmness.
The floating entity did not respond immediately.
Slowly, the head rose. In the center of the gray shroud, the skin split along a vertical black track. A single gigantic eye, a brilliant purple and pink, slid through the crack until it stopped in the center of the face, its feline pupil fixed directly on the Sitri nobility.
And then, the sound began.
It was not the dry, monotonous, and stoic voice of Yugo Hano.
It was a laugh.
—He... hehehehe... HAHAHAHAHAHA!
A deranged, shrill, and maniacal laugh echoed off the basement walls. It was the sound of pure madness.
Inside Yugo's mind, the dam had burst. Ten years of suppressing his trauma. Ten years of shutting down his own soul, of feigning apathy after murdering dozens of people, of swallowing blood and hiding his pain behind a mask of ice. The Ectonurite hadn't just taken control of his biology; it had fed on that immense, dark pool of psychological repression, releasing it all at once.
Yugo was intoxicated by Zs'Skayr's madness, and Zs'Skayr's consciousness reveled in the human's repressed hatred. They were a monstrous and sadistic symbiosis.
"Oh, how delicious!" hissed Ghostfreak, his voice sounding like Yugo's but distorted by a sepulchral echo. "So much fear! So much delicious, pathetic, juicy demonic flesh trembling in the dark!"
Saji, overcome by panic, raised his hand and fired a burst of magical fire from his Vritra line.
"Get away, monster!" shouted the blond man.
The flames struck the ghost's chest directly. But there was no explosion. The fire simply passed through the grayish shroud like smoke, harmlessly impacting the ground behind him.
Ghostfreak's single eye slid through the crack in his skin until it fixed on Saji.
"Fire?" the specter mocked, floating toward the stands. Its neck cracked at an unnatural ninety-degree angle, its head hanging grotesquely sideways. "Fire burns flesh, child. But I have no flesh. And you... you have a soul so noisy and so easily torn out..."
Before Tsubaki could intercept him, Ghost vanished into thin air.
A second later, it appeared directly behind Saji. The alien's icy claws physically pierced the young demon's torso, not causing a bleeding wound, but plunging his internal organs into a spectral cold that nearly stopped his heart.
Saji fell to his knees, suffocating, his skin turning blue from the intangible touch of death.
"Saji!" shouted Tomoe, invoking her magic.
"Don't attack him with elemental magic, he's intangible!" Sona ordered, her mind racing, though cold sweat beaded on her forehead. "Yugo! Control the transformation! I know you're in there!"
Ghostly withdrew its claws from Saji's chest, laughing uproariously as the boy coughed on the ground. The grayish entity floated slowly toward Sona. Tsubaki stepped in front of her, brandishing her magic naginata, but the ghost simply passed through the Queen and her weapon as if they were illusions, stopping mere inches from the President's face.
The smell of formaldehyde and cemetery dust hit Sona's face.
The Ectonurite's single purple eye moved frantically, scanning the fine features of the Sitri heiress.
"Yugo?" the specter whispered, madness dancing in his tone. "Yugo's feeling a bit under the weather right now, Princess. He was so bored… so repressed. He left me the steering wheel. Isn't he beautiful? Ten years pretending he's not a monster. But I know what's in his head! I see the massacres! I see the blood he spilled! HE'S DARKER THAN YOU ALL!"
Ghostly raised one of its claws, slowly bringing it closer to Sona's face. The entity wanted to tear her skin. Zs'Skayr's sadistic instinct demanded to feed on the pure demon's terror.
And for a second, Yugo's fractured mind, poisoned by the parasite's influence, enjoyed it. He enjoyed seeing these arrogant demons, who played with human lives as if they were chess pieces, paralyzed by the most basic and primal fear. He wanted them to feel the same helplessness he felt when he arrived in this world starving on the streets.
But Sona Sitri did not back down.
Even though her legs trembled and the spectral cold burned her cheeks, the heiress of the demonic water fixed her violet eyes directly on the monster's single purple eye. There was no blind terror in her gaze; there was a protective fury and an unwavering devotion.
"You are not him," Sona declared, her voice, though low, resonating with the authority of a king. "You are merely a parasite toying with my fiancé's scars. Yugo Hano! Remember why you accepted my pieces! Remember the lighthouse! Remember the convenience store!"
In the corner of the lower level, Asia's small voice, full of panic but brave, cried out:
—Yugo-san! Please!
The name of Asia. The minimarket.
Like a bucket of ice water doused with madness, the core of Yugo's mind reacted. The small, warm light, the one Sona had seen and Asia had ignited, rebelled against the darkness of the Ectonurite.
Ghostfreak's arm, which was about to touch Sona's face, stopped abruptly, trembling violently.
"NO!" the distorted voice screamed, but this time it was Yugo fighting for control. "SHUT UP! GO BACK IN THE BOX!"
The spectral entity clutched its head, writhing in the air in a grotesque internal struggle. The purple eye moved erratically, searching for the groove beneath the folds of dead skin where the Omnitrix symbol lay hidden.
"Shhh! Let me hunt! Let me skin them!" roared Zs'Skayr.
"YOU'RE NOT IN CHARGE HERE!" roared Yugo.
With a superhuman effort of will, fueled by love for his new family and the iron discipline of his trauma, Yugo forced the ghost's left claw through his own shroud on his chest.
Sharp fingers found the Omnitrix dial and crushed it with desperate brutality.
RED FLASH!
The clock didn't flash green. The detransformation flash was bright red, an emergency safety mechanism activated by the clash of consciousnesses.
Ghostly dissolved into grayish smoke.
Yugo Hano fell heavily onto the observation deck balcony, landing on his knees at Sona's feet. His breathing was ragged, gasping, and agonized, like that of someone who had just surfaced after nearly drowning in the depths of the ocean.
Sweat soaked his white shirt. His hands trembled uncontrollably against the metal floor of the platform. The deranged laughter had vanished, leaving only a man exhausted and disgusted by the darkness he had just tasted.
Sona, ignoring Tsubaki's warning, dropped to her knees beside him. She placed both hands on the professor's shoulders, not caring that the spectral chill still emanated faintly from his clothes.
—Yugo... —Sona whispered, searching for his gaze.
The professor slowly raised his face. His gray eyes were wide open, his pupils dilated with adrenaline and the fear of what he had almost done. He adjusted his glasses with a trembling hand, swallowing hard.
He looked at Saji, who was still coughing on the floor, pale; at Tsubaki and the rest of the girls, who were watching him as if he were the devil incarnate; and then he looked at Sona.
A bitter, crooked smile, full of dark humor and self-contempt, appeared on Yugo's lips, the first genuine sarcastic smile he had shown after a fight.
"That one..." Yugo gasped, pointing at the clock now locked in a flashing red, "...that's the damn number twenty. The Ectonurite."
He leaned against the platform railing, slumping down with a heavy sigh, running a hand through his damp hair.
"I suppose," the professor added in a dry, sarcastic tone, trying to ease the monstrous tension in the room, "that you now understand why I said the training was only to test nine forms. That bastard doesn't pay rent in my head, and he's a terrible roommate. He's banned from the school program."
The room remained silent for a few seconds, until Sona, feeling the crushing pressure finally disappear, let out a long sigh that turned into a nervous laugh.
Tsubaki lowered her weapon, wiping the sweat from her forehead, and even poor Saji, still blue, let out a weak laugh from the ground.
The unyielding monster had revealed his madness, but for the first time, everyone knew that beneath those alien nightmares and the murders of the past, there was a human fighting tooth and nail not to hurt them. Yugo Hano was no longer a ghost without a past; he was their Pawn, and his mind, however broken it might be, was finally beginning to heal.
...
The atmosphere in the basement of Kuoh Academy had gone from being like a psychological horror film to a strange and uncomfortable post-war silence.
Yugo Hano, still kneeling on the observation balcony, let out one last heavy sigh and slowly stood up. His joints protested slightly, but the demonic energy from Sona's pieces did its work, stabilizing his heart rate. He dusted off his trouser knees and adjusted his glasses, which had become slightly crooked during his internal struggle with the Ectonurite.
He looked at Sona, who was still close to him, breathing a sigh of relief. The professor gave her a silent nod, a gesture of genuine gratitude for her having been the anchor that kept his mind from being dragged into the abyss.
Then, their gray wells rose towards the ceiling of the immense underground training hall.
Twelve meters high, stuck like two flies on a spider web of ultra-resistant alien polymer, Raynare and Kalawarner hung upside down, moaning and writhing uselessly.
"I have to let go of the employees of the month," Yugo muttered in a dry, tired tone. "Their shift starts at six in the morning, and I'm not going to pay them overtime for sitting on the ceiling."
Under the astonished gaze of the Sitri nobility, Yugo raised his left arm. He turned the dial of the recalibrated Omnitrix a few times, familiarizing himself with the new holographic interface, until he found the silhouette of the volcanic rock colossus. He wasn't going to use Swampfire for this; he preferred the thermal precision of the original.
He crushed the dial.
¡FLASH!
Emerald light bathed the room, and the dry heat of magma filled the air. Fire (Pyronite) stood tall on the platform. Without wasting a second, the alien raised both hands toward the ceiling. He didn't unleash a destructive blast of flame, but rather two thin, precise beams of concentrated heat, blue like an industrial blowtorch.
The beams severed the anchors of Spider Monkey's web with surgical precision, melting the polymer without touching a single feather of the Fallen Angels.
—Aaaaaah! —Raynare and Kalawarner screamed in unison, plummeting towards the hard sand floor.
¡Thump! ¡Thump!
Both women crashed onto the mats, bouncing a couple of times before lying sprawled out, dizzy and groaning in pain.
Fire lowered his arms and struck the symbol on his chest. FLASH! Yugo Hano reappeared, adjusting the cuffs of his white shirt.
He descended the stairs slowly, walked to the center of the arena, and with a fluid, utterly ungraceful movement, grabbed Kalawarner by the waist and tucked her under his right arm like a sack of flour. He did the exact same thing with Raynare under his left arm. The two ancient assassins, too exhausted and terrified to complain, simply hung limp, letting out muffled whimpers.
Yugo walked towards the corner where Asia and Mittelt were watching the scene.
The professor stopped in front of the small, blonde goth girl. He looked up at his own head and then at the fall.
—Up. The gothic hat doesn't put itself on —Yugo ordered with absolute apathy.
Mittelt didn't hesitate for a millisecond. Driven by the purest instinct for survival, the little Fallen Angel leaped nimbly, landed on the human's shoulders, straddled his neck, and clung to his black hair with both hands.
"Gothic hat installed, Master..." Mittelt squealed in a trembling voice, trying to make herself as small and light as possible.
Asia stood up, dusting off her skirt and grabbing her bag with a smile that lit up the gloomy basement.
"Shall we go home, Yugo-san?" asked the golden nun, completely unfazed by the sight of her guardian carrying three supernatural entities as if they were hand luggage.
—Yes. I need a coffee and to forget that the number twenty exists— Yugo replied, turning to head for the exit.
He began walking toward the heavy doors of the basement. The Sitri nobility, still on the platform, watched him march past in stunned silence. The man who had just nearly unleashed a ghostly apocalypse now looked like an exhausted family man returning from the supermarket.
But, three steps from crossing the threshold of the door, Yugo stopped dead in his tracks.
The soles of his shoes squeaked against the floor. He remained completely still, as if someone had pressed the pause button on a video player.
The silence in the room grew heavy again. Asia tilted her head, confused. Mittelt swallowed, afraid he'd pulled too much of a hair.
On the platform, Sona Sitri felt her stomach lurch.
Yugo's mind, freed from the adrenaline, the madness of Zs'Skayr, and the strain of the transformations, finally had the bandwidth needed to process the audio recording of the last ten minutes. His eidetic memory repeated the scream that had brought him back to sanity.
"You're just a parasite playing with my fiancé's scars!"
Slowly, with the stiffness of a rusty gear, Yugo turned his neck. His gray eyes, still hidden behind the gleam of his glasses, searched for Sona Sitri on the upper balcony.
"Sona," Yugo called. His voice was flat, but it had an edge of genuine disbelief that no one had ever heard from him before.
The Student Council President tensed. The blush she had managed to suppress during the chaos returned with a treacherous force, staining her cheeks and the tips of her ears a bright crimson. Tsubaki covered her mouth with one hand, looking away, while Saji blinked, confused.
"Y-Yes, Yugo?" Sona replied, trying to maintain her usual icy tone, failing miserably.
The professor tilted his head, completely ignoring the fact that he had two women hanging from his armpits and a third sitting on his head.
"A moment ago, when my brain was being hijacked by a psychopathic space sheet... maybe the audio filter failed due to lack of oxygen." Yugo paused, squinting. "But... I think I heard the word 'promised'?"
The silence that followed was absolute. Even Raynare and Kalawarner seemed to hold their breath in the professor's arms.
Sona Sitri, the tactical genius, the heir to the demonic water, opened and closed her mouth like a fish out of water.
"Well... I..." Sona stammered, adjusting her glasses with a quick, nervous movement. "It's... a matter of tradition in House Sitri. A formality. A legal technicality of the Underworld, really."
Yugo stared at her for five long seconds. Her brain connected the dots with terrifying speed. She remembered their first formal encounter. The bet. The glass chessboard. And Grey Matter massacring her in fifteen moves with a Sicilian Defense.
—Chess—Yugo said, in a flat, revealing whisper.
Sona looked away, staring at a wall, unable to meet his gaze. "Chess. My family's rule dictates that... I can only marry someone who can intellectually defeat me on that board."
Yugo was left processing the information. He had sold his soul, become a demon, promised to train an entire nobility, and earned Grigori's enmity... but apparently, the greatest collateral damage had been caused by a fifteen-centimeter-long, big-headed frog.
A dry, ironic, and completely graceless laugh escaped the professor's lips.
"I got married for a panic button and a literature club budget," Yugo muttered to himself, coming to terms with the absurd comedy of his existence. He had accepted that he would never see his real family again, but he hadn't expected to acquire a demonic wife as an accidental bonus.
Sona took a step towards the railing, her aristocratic pride trying to regain control.
—Like I said, it's a technicality, Yugo. You don't have to worry about... immediate obligations. It's just a title.
Yugo Hano looked at her. The existential emptiness in his eyes had vanished, replaced by a dry humor and a mature resignation. Despite his surprise, there was no rejection in his gaze. Sona had saved him from madness. She had given him the pieces that healed his lungs and had kept Asia's secret. If the price to pay was dealing with demon politics as the fiancé of a brilliant strategist, it was a deal he was willing to accept.
"Fine," Yugo finally said, turning toward the door with his three slaves in tow. "But let me make this clear, Sona: I'm not paying for the wedding. And I'm still your Pawn. Good night, President."
Without waiting for a reply, Yugo crossed the threshold, closely followed by a cheerful Asia who waved goodbye to the nobility with her hand.
The heavy steel door closed with a metallic clack.
On the platform, Saji broke the silence, staring at his King with saucer-sized eyes.
—Kaichou?! YOU'RE ENGAGED TO THAT MONSTER?!
Sona Sitri, her face burning with a furious blush, turned around and glared at her blond Pawn with the most terrifying look she had ever summoned.
"Genshirou Saji, if you say a single word of this outside this room, I'll send you to clean the school swimming pool with a toothbrush for the rest of your immortal life!" roared Sona, striding furiously towards the exit.
While the Sitri nobility came to terms with the fact that the most dangerous man in Kuoh was now officially part of the family, on the city streets, the "fiancé" walked back to his convenience store, carrying his personal demons, accompanied by a saint, and vaguely wondering how on earth he was going to explain to his students that their history teacher was now engaged to the Student Council President.