Beasts of DxD

by UnitySullano

Summary:

When ten avatars of mankind’s deepest sin, art torn from thine own worlds and cast upon a whole new realm, the world doth stir in silent dread. Unknown to Heaven and Hell alike, these incarnations of ruin awaken. Strangers seeking purpose, power, or penance. Amidst false peace, calamity walketh unseen. Thus begins the unwrit gospel of the end.

Chapter 1: Cometh, Beasts

The ground was green and clean. Grass nestling below his feet and shadow over cascading flowers. The air weaved past him, but his gaze remained fixed on the forest surrounding them.

There would be no need for trees here, for the flowers would keep the light from falling upon their paths, giving them a warm golden glow in the early morning hours. The sun was rising, its rays painting over the world.

The sky above was a brilliant blue, with clouds that stretched all across the horizon to meet above him and laced with clouds. There were no signs of rain, yet he felt droplets brush his skin and begin to fall to the earth like some fleeting memory of heaven itself.

It reminded him of what the world outside looked like in some ways, but it still felt foreign and unfamiliar to his senses.

Angra Maniyu did not know how he got here, nor where here even was. The most he was certain of was that he'd somehow ended up with the most dangerous, infuriating, and, in some twisted way,  exciting bunch in all of his existence as the greatest evil.

Behind him, people who defied simple classification as "human" wandered around; some bickered, exchanged glances, while others kept a way distance from each other.

They were all just as baffled as he was about where they came from, and why are they here.

He had no idea what brought these beings together, let alone what led them to be summoned to this place, gathered most bizarrely.

He had asked a few questions, mostly about how they came here, but they either ignored him entirely or simply answered that they didn't know as well. As far as anyone could tell, this place was an alternate reality of some sort, similar to the timeline-diverging mystery they used to call Lostbelt.

No one knew how or why exactly there was another world existing differing from the previous ones. This wasn't like the Singularities with a Holy Grail to keep them stable, for it did not reject history, or those Lostbelts with a Crypter to preserve humanity, it had not been pruned.

The sun did not blind him.

Light should burn. That was the second sign. Light always burned him. He had walked in shadow too long to mistake warmth for kindness, radiance for divinity. But here, now, it only was. Not the sun of the Age of Man. Not even the burning sky of the Grail's corrupted dreams. Pale, without wrath. A sickly gold, as though borrowed from memory.

He was lying in the grass.

No, he corrected himself. Shirou Emiya was lying in the grass. That distinction was vital, even now. Especially now.

His fingertips moved first, curling against the soil, feeling its texture with the wariness of something long ago and betrayed. It was Earth, yes, but not the Earth. He did not need the full use of his limbs to know this. He did not need magecraft, nor clairvoyance. The truth seeped through sensation alone. The leyline beneath his body was too still, too orderly, like the practiced smile of an old enemy. The od of the world, its breath, its heartbeat, its memory, ran false in his nerves.

That was worse.

His lips parted and he turned his head sideways across the ground. His gaze landed upon the next anomaly.

Her.

Depending on which face she wore for the day, she was beneath the shadow of a half-bloomed tree. She hadn't noticed him yet. Or perhaps she had, and in her usual cruelty, chose to linger in the fallacy of solitude before acknowledging him. She was barefoot, as ever, but her heel did not quite kiss the grass. She floated always slightly like even gravity found her poisonous.

She looked irritated.

That, at least, was familiar.

She had not yet changed into her grander form. No Lust Demon Queen. No Devourer of Heaven's Pleasure. Just her. A face, eyes, shape of someone familiar. The Beast that masqueraded as a girl who once only wanted love. He supposed, absently, that he should say something.

Words were not currency here. Not yet... and there were others.

Motion rippled through the glade in the sense of others pressing down upon the plane of existence. Powerful entities, one by one. Not even hostile in the way mortals understood hostility.

No.

This was disdain. Divine, ancient, innate disdain.

Even without his full senses, even weakened and torn from the core of his conceptual existence, he could taste it.

A dreadful maternal warmth, now soured by her awareness of the world. The kind of being that fed simply by being perceived. He could not see her, yet, and he could feel her presence like brine soaked into flesh. She would be nearby, and she would not be happy. She had always abhorred separations. She would be calling already. Not aloud and yet. But inwardly, to children she would never birth in this world.

Ah. There was the furnace.

A presence like star-forged will, shaped by the cruelty of necessity. The shadow of Solomon's corpse, still trying to become what it could never be: salvation. And failing again. He could feel that presence coiling. Calculating without true wisdom, only function. The King of Men Who Refused to Be. No doubt the magus-beast knew something was wrong already. He would be burning internally, less from rage, more from confusion, which was far worse for his type.

Another lustful being.

He would not look at her.

One cannot look into the abyss if one is already composed of it. Not when the abyss has lips, and breathes your name like a confession.

Instead, he pulled himself upright. Slow, unsteady. He let his human host's muscles struggle, not for lack of power, but for memory. Shirou had never stood in this world. Therefore, he had not. There was poetry in it. Cruel poetry, but he found he enjoyed such things more these days.

His shadow stretched behind him.

No anchors. No Holy Grail system to feed upon. No Counter Force to reject his breath. He was free, technically. But freedom without purpose was the same as emptiness.

And yet, he was calm. Unlike the others.

They had begun to speak.

Not with tongues, not all of them, anyway. Some did not require that primitive medium. Goetia had no voice, merely intent filtered into structured resonance that appeared verbal. Tiamat vocal without form. Kiara's laugh was predictably the first sound to truly split the air, that sweet little trill that meant she was already inventing names for everyone's suffering.

Only she, still standing beneath her tree of false bloom, remained quiet. Her gaze found his now, and for a moment there was something like recognition.

That was enough.

One thing was certain; the word Beasts.

Evil of Man, they were called.

Beasts. Calamities that exist to threaten Humanity as a whole.

They are considered some of the most powerful and malevolent beings, they are not mere monsters, but the embodiment of humanity's collective sins and existential threats. The darkest aspects of human nature Humanity tries to bury.

Each one of them embodies a specific form of human evil or disaster. Destructive tendencies, insatiable desires, and other profound negative traits.

Imagine a world where the very essence of humanity's darkest fears and desires takes physical form. These manifestations are known as Beasts.

Picture a lonesome battlefield where the sky is perpetually dark, and the air is dense with a menacing presence. Here, a towering figure emerges from the shadows, its form shifting and writhing as if it were made of pure darkness. This is an example of a Beast, a creature born from the deepest recesses of human despair and enmity.

One such Beast might be the embodiment of humanity's insatiable greed. It can take the form of a colossal dragon, with glittering scales, and its eyes burning with an unquenchable hunger. Wherever it goes, it leaves a trail of desolation, consuming everything in its path, driven by an endless desire for more.

Currently, it seemed to have been nothing but blissful ignorance from the moment they fell asleep before opening their eyes.

Now, all that's left is to figure out the puzzle behind the situation before them.

He could almost feel the very ground tremble under the weight of so much raw malevolence. The peace was fragile. A mere spark could set it all ablaze.

He did not move to join them. Nor did he recoil. He was amidst the chaos of god-monsters, of death-bearers, and world-devourers, with the borrowed face of a boy who once made broken promises. And when he finally spoke, it was not to declare authority. It was not to demand reason.

It was a murmur.

One not even they could hear.

"So," he popped up finally, breaking the silence. "What do we do about this?" Angra referred to the entire, very dangerous situation.

Said situation means a fight that can destroy the reality of existence can break out at any moment.

"What indeed," a feminine, but sensual, voice purred out amidst the crowd of inhuman. Her smile was as soft as a mother's and as wretched as sin, her eyes dipped in half-lidded satisfaction.

The desirable woman Beast III/R continued, "Perhaps a little sparring unless? It might be nice to see some muscles rippling… oh, especially on the men~"

The word was dagger-like.

Beside her, the woman with cosmos for a hair's expression soured and gritted her teeth in annoyance. Kama had heard. And when the former goddess of love moved, it was like storm clouds about to rupture.

Her bare feet struck the soil with intent now. The tree behind her had begun to wilt.

"Enough from your lips, Sessyoin," she spat out.

"Flirtation is wasted when your charms are hollow. And he doesn't entertain pests. One word out of place... I'll burn you alive."

Kiara only smirked. "What's the matter? Scared of a little bite from a woman like me~? Even after all the gods you killed to become this beautiful, you're still territorial. How curious. How small."

The space collapsed between them as her eyes flashed with something that twisted across the spectrum, bearing down like divine edict.

"I incinerate you before you show your little fangs!"

She lunged forward, form blurring between girl and goddess, sin and flame, a streak of wrath crowned in illusion. Her foot cracked the earth behind her, a shockwave following her steps, towards the Beast III/R, while the rest of the group watched in anticipation. However, before she was able to touch anything, Angra seized her wrist and threw her backward before Kama could even hiss her outrage, body twisting midair like a flung ribbon of wrath causing her body to collide with one of the trees, shattering the wood in pieces, and splintering branches as the tree toppled and fell over to face behind Beast III/L. She landed awkwardly on her stomach, completely uninjured as she stood up and brushed the dirt off of herself.

His hand tingled from the unexpected density of her Spirit Core. Even weakened, she was an idle threat. But what struck him more was how easily he had done it. How casually. That wasn't just muscle memory. That was his.

He admired his new strength. Frankly, he was glad he won over his other half when they were merging. The Other had been consumed.

For the briefest of moments, he allowed the corner of his lips to twitch upward in recognition of a truth: he was stronger now. More whole. The All of the World's Evil had sought to devour itself, and he had been the one who remained.

Angra ignored everyone's looks while he took cautious notice of Beast I, someone who was about to step in if not for the Avenger to set things in his hands.

He would've naturally just stood by and watched the bickering scene, but not when Kama was closer to arguably the most powerful being of the group than he'd like. That was reason enough to intervene.

The golden-haired Human King Goetia regards indifferently,

"Enough."

In a matter of seconds, everyone had fallen silent, as they saw who had spoken up, booking no further arguments.

It wasn't much, but it was enough to instantly stop the argument between the Beast III/L and R, and allow Goetia to address the circumstances. Goetia did not raise his voice because he did not need to. The moment he chose to speak, the air accepted it as doctrine. All things fall to entropy, and Goetia was entropy given thought.

He stepped forward with the deliberation of one who had calculated the number of steps it would take and the effect each step would have on the curvature of space-time around him.

"Cease your petty squabbles," his voice was low, and it was clear to everyone that it was unyielding. "This display is neither productive nor appropriate given the reality we currently occupy. If you are capable of thought beyond primal performance, then I suggest you employ it. Immediately."

He did not look at Kama, who had risen already with her pride unshaken but smoldering beneath the eyes. He did not acknowledge Angra, who had already returned to his leaning posture like the whole episode had been an inconvenience at most. And he certainly did not address Kiara, whose smile grew wider at being ignored as if that was specifically the seduction she sought.

"You are all aware of the aberration," Goetia continued. "This world is not ours. But more critically, it is not incorrect either."

A faint attention. Even Draco tilted her head with just enough disinterest to signal interest.

"This is not a Singularity," he elaborated. "Nor is it a Lostbelt. It does not possess the characteristics of pruning, there is no deviation point, no tree of possibility from which it broke away. Nor is it a distortion requiring correction by the Counter Force or Chaldea. Instead, it is a coherence. A fully intact and consistent worldline. Entirely distinct. Not identical to a hole in the standard temporal axis, but rather, a parity. A complete sphere of reality seamlessly integrated into the Quantum Time-Lock."

"How so? How is that even possible?"

She stood farthest from the rest, partially by instinct, partially by distaste. She had been Director of Chaldea once, and even if she had become something far beyond the frailty of a human body, the hints of her scientific pride still clung to her like remnants of a broken command seal. She did not like not knowing and she hated being corrected.

"You're saying this world is within the Lock? That it's secure, yet not from our History? That's... no, that contradicts the model. The Foundation of Humanity can't support two self-sustaining systems."

Goetia turned his gaze to her with a look akin to dissection. It was the stare of a being who saw everything she was, from her previous mortality to her divine transmutation, and judged it ultimately beneath the problem.

"You are naive, U-Olga Marie. The multiversal structure you observed as Chaldea was merely one level of interpretation. The Holy Grail War system permitted only a fraction of the true nature of reality to be perceived. Even with full access to the Root, you could not comprehend the absolute structure because the Grail itself, this time, has provided no conduit. There is no informational linkage to it. No response from the Throne. Not a single verification."

He began pacing.

"If it were the Counter Force, we would have received confirmation. If it were Gaia or Alaya, they would have anchored us to a cause. But this world contains no cause. It did not summon us with purpose. It received us, passively, as though the universe expected us. Similar to puzzle pieces already shaped to fit."

U-Olga opened her mouth again, possibly to demand a refutation, but Goetia spoke over her before the breath fully formed.

"You have been summoned here by design. That is the true horror of this place. It is whole. Functional. Defensible. But it is not our Proper Human History. We are intrusions here as parasites that should be here by a logic we cannot see."

He waited to let them process it.

"That is why there is no rejection. No force attempting to correct our presence. A time-lag degradation was not even felt. The Lock accepts us, which means this world operates on a principle entirely foreign to our former truths."

Angra snorted.

"So what you're saying," he said "is that we've been kicked into a perfect little hellscape where we don't belong, but everything around us is too polite to point that out?"

His voice was amused, but his eyes were not. They watched.

"Lovely. Here I thought I was finally going to wake up in a proper nightmare."

Goetia ignored him.

"There is no World Egg here. No Human Order Foundation we can access, Grail Registry, Throne connection, not even distortion residue to suggest an outside force at work."

"Hah," Angra exhaled, half-laugh, half-yawn. "Honestly, if I had a coin for every time some omniscient plane of existence decided to pluck me out of oblivion and toss me into another messianic mess for its amusement, well, I wouldn't be rich, but I'd have a damn good pile for the irony."

He wasn't surprised or concerned, his voice was the rasping drawl of someone who had long since ceased to be amazed by the theatre of cosmic absurdities. And beneath that tone, that bleary sarcasm, there was the grim sort of familiarity that came only to those who had seen too many beginnings, too many "first chapters" that weren't their own, always invited, never needed.

He tilted his head backward, looking up at the branches.

"It's like the universe never gets tired of using us as a metaphor. 'Look, it's humanity's original sin, again! What will he do this time? Kill a world? Birth one? Cry in a corner while his better halves clean up the mess? Every day feels like 'Let's toy with humanity's sins' day. I ought to start charging royalties."

There was the faintest scoff, one so subtle it could've been missed, but not by Angra, whose ears had always been attuned to disdain.

"If we are here by amusement, then this world has an unusually refined taste in torment. It selected not just abominations, but contradictions. You, who embody failure. That one—" she gestured briefly toward Kiara with a nod so slight it could've been mistaken for the wind, "—who embodies indulgence. And the rest of us. Icons of collapse."

She didn't smile. Draco never did. If the others postured or played, she only observed unfazed, but not unfeeling.

"Conceivably it summoned us not for spectacle, but for inevitability. Our presence is not a disturbance here. That alone implies intent. Purpose."

"Entertainin' purpose," Angra shot back with a grin, "the sort that ends in fire and little moral epilogues that no one reads. I bet the trees have eyes here, too. They always do."

Entertainment. Yes, it was something Angra could get by.

"Would you both shut up for once and actually take this seriously!?"

U-Olga scowls, arms crossed, as she looks between them, steeped in incredulity at their apathy because she demanded order as a coping mechanism for chaos. Her eyes, once trying to mirror the analytical gaze of her past human self, now burned with frustrated divinity. "Fun? Entertainment? None of you are taking this seriously. We're in some unknown world, and none of us have the slightest clue how or why. We are not in some allegory, we are not pieces on a board, and I, would rather not be someone else's plaything."

Angra turned to her, eyes half-lidded, mouth stretching into that wide, wolfish grin that wasn't quite friendly but wasn't hostile either; it was the kind of expression worn by someone who had never believed in rules, only opportunities.

"You'll forgive me, princess, if I find the idea of anyone not being someone else's plaything a little optimistic. Especially coming from someone who spent their past life as a bureaucratic meat shield for a world on life support. We're all someone's pawn, Ms. Alien. The trick is to pretend you're the hand moving the piece."

Her gaze was venomous. He chuckled at that.

"Aaaaahhhh..."

Someone else had a troubled face. Her eyes grow distant, lost in thought.

Goetia frowns, watching her intently. "You propose another theory."

"Aaahhhh..."

It wasn't a word, not in any tongue, but the sound meaning. Her children understood, and though they might feign impatience or weariness, they all turned toward her, if only slightly. Fou stepped forward beside her with a chirp, ears twitching like antennae tuned to something none of the others could yet hear.

The Mother-Beast's eyes, soft and wide and endlessly ancient, drifted toward the far edge of the forest, where the hills broke into a distant horizon, and beyond the line of trees, the faint edges of stone and steel kissed the sky in angles.

Buildings. Modern.

Overhead, the air pulsed. Not with pollution, nor electricity, nor synthetic ritual. It thrummed with mana.

Old mana. Thick, fertile, divine.

The kind that had no right to exist past the Fifth Age.

"Aahhhh," she murmured again, and the intent filtered through slowly, like light finding shape beneath water. This place... it is still the Age of Gods.

It did not need to be said outright. Her presence spoke in rhythms of nature, in the instincts buried deep within divine memory. She recognized it because she had birthed such landscapes once, long before Man began carving his name into stone.

"There's... skyscrapers. Tech. Satellites, probably."

His eyes narrowed. "Mana like this doesn't belong in a world that can Google its apocalypse."

There was no room for contradiction in Draco's mind, and yet this was one. Two realities layered like oil and water. And the surface tension hadn't broken.

Goetia hum at this, glancing around the forest.

"We should stop treating this moment as some ethereal parlor room for idle musing. We have nothing. No summoner, anchor, and directive. Whatever force, divine, profane, or otherwise, that plucked us here did not give us purpose. We were brought... and left. That in itself should be our only unifying certainty."

In his former state, such words would have manifested as fire from Heaven. Now, they simply were blunt and dry.

"And whether you wish to play the roles of sulking children or tragic icons of human vice, I do not care. But do it while walking. Don't assume our power will operate here as it does elsewhere."

He gestured toward the structures visible on the far horizon, towers of glass and steel catching dawnlight like spears of memory piercing into a world that remembered gods as fiction.

"That direction is civilization. In whatever form this world defines the term, it is where knowledge must reside, and until we determine the shape of the laws here and know what kind of system dares to house Beasts, we are blind."

His fingers curled slightly inward, as if suppressing the instinct to issue commands rather than propositions.

"We are weakened. Isolated. And though it offends you all to admit it, I know you understand the basic strategy: separation ensures conflict; unity ensures data. For now, we cooperate. Not because I demand it, but because anything else is foolish, and none of you are fools."

Angra's smile widens, amused. It was transparent to him that everyone was getting a show from Goetia's authority. "Fine, fine. Then, O mighty Human King, where do you propose we go next?"

Angra had always known when to resist and when to follow because he delighted in watching them unravel.

Goetia surveys the landscape—

"I'm sorry, he's leading?"

—as he considers the best course of action, ignoring U-Olga whose body recoiled before her mind processed the offense.

Her voice cracked with outrage at the absurd implication that had just been casually swallowed without protest. She didn't even hide it. There was no diplomacy to her tone, only sheer disbelief. Her eyes darted from face to face, trying to gauge the silent consensus, or lack thereof, and finding, with horror, that no one seemed inclined to correct the course. Not even Tiamat, who had chosen silence over sentiment.

"He just... declared we follow him? And you're all just going along with it?"

It wasn't that she expected a vote. She wasn't naïve enough to believe democratic process held sway among entities whose concept of leadership had usually been synonymous with dominion. But to her, to the Olga Marie who had clawed her way from the fractured mirror of humanity into something more, the idea that Goetia could casually step into the seat of command, that he could slip the crown back on as if no one had remembered why it was burned off in the first place, was intolerable.

She made a sound—half scoff, half exhale—and muttered something about madness and authority and hypocrisy. But no one moved to argue, and that silence itself became a reply she did not enjoy.

Goetia, for his part, did not acknowledge her. He had long since calculated her rebellion as a constant background noise. Necessary, perhaps. But irrelevant to forward motion.

"I proposed observing humans." Angra raised a hand.

U-Olga scoffs, muttering under her breath, "Oh sure, because watching humans is always enlightening."

"Don't pretend you're above observation," Angra retorts with a mocking smile. "After all, they're not exactly uninteresting creatures, are they?"

Heh. Angra snorts.

The humans in general. Race of infinite potential.

Born into a realm governed by mortality and the bounds of flesh, yet possess an inherent drive that propels them beyond the limits of the ordinary. Their fragile existence imbues them with an acute awareness of time, making each second precious and every action weighty.

Within this limited lifespan, they find ways to achieve the extraordinary. From building civilizations, exploring unknown realms, crafting art and language, and even daring to understand the fabric of existence itself.

Contradictingly, they're capable of great kindness and relentless cruelty. But it is their resilience that defines them, for humanity has proven that it can weather the harshest of storms, rising again and again from the ashes of war and disaster.

Possessing minds that seek to understand and hearts that dare to believe, humans constantly push the boundaries of their reality.

It is this unyielding spirit and potential to grow, evolve, and transform that enables them to stand toe-to-toe with even gods, challenging divine authority and forging their own destiny.

Whether the same applies to them in this world remains yet to be seen.

Will they be just like the arrogant Magi, the Crypters? Or like the foolish Master of Chaldea?

Koyanskaya's eyes glint with feral and her fox ears perked up. "I, for one, am curious to see how these humans view the world... or, better yet, how they react to us."

The Beasts, upon hearing these words, turn towards each other with an uncertain expression.

No matter whether they accepted their state, there was no point being complacent, and thus, they had agreed to follow a lead, and were reluctant to Goetia.

.
.
.
.
.

They moved, not like a group, more like a procession of separate storms, each carried on its own wind, untethered by cohesion, straying in directions only tangentially aligned. But somehow, Goetia walked first, and none challenged this, at that moment, that leadership was not about belief but initiative. And if he declared himself the tip of the spear by simply stepping forward, then so be it. No one else could be bothered to feign the interest.

Goetia did not wait for consensus. Consensus was for those who doubted. Rather, he walked in a straight line, his eyes on the pulse beneath the landscape, the silent throb of the planet's vascular system, alive beneath the crust.

"This world's structure is..."

The thought spiraled into him, folding inwards into layers of comparison, what he could observe and what was simply absent.

"...wrong."

Not in the sense of disorder or a broken leyline bleeds chaos into the fabric of magical thermodynamics, but wrong in its order. Too seamless for his liking. Almost made him think as if the world had not merely survived its Age of Gods, but swallowed it, digested it, and made it a permanent fixture of reality. In his world, the leylines were chaotic veins; interconnected yet fragile, reliant upon historical continuity and human proximity. Magecraft, thaumaturgy, even the Divine Mysteries, they were scaffolds, built atop the ruins of a discarded Golden Age.

But here...

"There is no scaffold."

It was integrated. Harmonized. No trace of segmentation between divine ley-energy and natural spiritons. The Age of the Gods had not receded here, it had never left. It lingered, not like a ghost or a fossil, but like bone marrow, intrinsic to the world's marrow. The leyline beneath his feet pulsed with confidence. An arrogance, almost. A living system that did not need humanity, nor their feeble rituals. The planet itself was closed-loop. A perfect divine circuit.

"A coherence model. No—more than that. A divine geopattern bound not by humanity's collective unconscious, but by myth as fact."

He hated it. Not because it offended his principles, but because it complicated them. Systems like this defied his capacity for intervention. There was no tilt and leverage. This world was a solid sphere of mythologically enshrined law—a law not written by the Age of Man. The Age of Gods was not past here. It was present. Simultaneous with the Anthropocene.

And it meant one thing above all else: this world had no use for the Human Order of Proper Time.

Behind him, the group unraveled further.

Angra veered off with a lazy wave of his hand, trailing toward a distant stream that glimmered between thickets of green with all the innocence of an untouched mirror. He was amused by the delusion of their temporary truce.

"I'm going for a wash," he called back, not bothering to look over his shoulder, "assuming the water doesn't try to baptize me or something poetic."

Kama followed with feline ease.

"What a tragic little creature," she purred toward Goetia's back, though she knew he wasn't listening. "Strutting like a mechanical Solomon, pretending authority was the same as relevance. Let him have his little crusade. We'll drink from the stream and mock him when he's wrong."

Her footsteps were silent. Her eyes, brighter than blood. She trails Angra for only proximity. She found his darkness amusing, because it was different from hers. It hated differently.

Tiamat wandered. The earth parted slightly beneath her, reeds curling toward her bare feet like the arms of infants. Her voice hummed, a low, rising "Aaahhhhhh—".

Elsewhere, a cry pierced the calm.

"I was dragged here!"

Koyanskaya Vitch's voice rang across the glade like a gunshot fired into a dinner party. She was not distant—no, she had made sure to remain visible. Except her posture was sharpened by irritation, the professionalism in her bearing now clashing with the wild disarray of her new surroundings.

"Dragged into some half-baked dimensional trash heap, with mud on my heels and nothing but murderers, deviants, and walking psychosexual metaphors to keep me company."

She snarled the last part like a customer reviewing a failed product, and dusted her coat with disgust. She refused to go toward the stream, though her skin prickled with the urge to clean. The look she shot at Goetia could have curdled diamond.

"If this is a boardroom," she muttered, "then you are all bankrupt. I want out of this economy."

Fou vanished.

One moment, he was pawing the grass beside Tiamat's left ankle, ears perked toward something only he could hear, and the next, the universe blinked and forgot him.

Her feet stomped deliberately over the soil, her hands gestured emphasis, slicing invisible angles into the air, as U-Olga ranted.

"Filthy. Filthy dimensional mapping! I should have known something was off the moment my own spine tried to twist in reaction to the local gravitic gradient! The curvature of spatial fold here is too exact—you can't even simulate this degree of atmospheric suspension in a low-energy field without a suppression algorithm in place, which means—which means—the whole planet is cheating!"

No one answered her. Her voice floated into the foliage and died there in the way one ignores a weather report after being caught in the rain.

Goetia kept walking.

The leyline beneath him curled in on itself, stacked, like folded lattice, recursive, embedded. He hated it.

"This world is too legible. Something designed it not for freedom, but for permanence."

He would find the source. Or the authors. And then, maybe, this world would begin to make sense.

---

Petals thickened, stems pulsed, and in her wake, moss darkened to purple-black, as sin had been introduced as a nutrient to the ecosystem and the flora had, reluctantly, begun to adapt.

She had lagged behind. Or perhaps she had simply drifted, she did not walk so much as she slid.

Kiara said nothing, but her smile, faint and sweet as a sleeping curse, held intent.

In the distance, a group, half a dozen of humans along a marked trail, ignorant of the presence that had already noticed them. Her eyes dilated from the presence of desire, theirs. A scent and a thought. A fantasy never spoken aloud. That was all she needed.

"Like ripe grapes, ready to ferment into something far more delicious."

One of the hikers shivered. Another paused, glancing left as if something had brushed his shoulder, though no wind stirred. The third, a woman, laughed nervously and told a joke she didn't finish. The trees behind them closed just a little tighter.

Wherever Kiara went, life learned to reconsider itself.

---

Not far, though removed by geography and temperament, Angra sat near the stream's bend. It was shallow and clear. He let the water trickle across his fingers. In this world, reality felt curated.

Kama lounged nearby, her legs lazily dipped into the current, her arms outstretched in catlike repose. The way her hair floated slightly on the water's surface made her seem more spiritual than flesh.

"So," she cooed, without turning, "how do you find our new prison, Angra darling?"

He didn't answer at first. His hand remained in the water.

"It's... quiet," he muttered eventually, might be because he needed to hear it. "Too quiet in something already has."

Kama rolled onto her side, kicking her feet gently, causing small ripples.

"Mmm, poetic. You mean to say it feels like someone's already won the game and now we're just playing catch-up in the epilogue?"

Angra smirked, dryly.

"Something like that. Doesn't help that this world seems designed to suppress us specifically. I've been listening and feeling, and... All the World's Evil isn't quite responding like it should."

That earned her attention.

"Oh?"

"Normally, it pulses. It's like having a scream in your chest that grows louder in certain spaces, cities, crowds, old battlegrounds, holy places... Here, it feels like the world hears that scream and just turns the volume down."

He withdrew his hand from the water, examining his palm. It was just unremarkable. Usually, the world hates him. Even when it forgets him, it remembers to hate him. That's normal and familiar.

"It's being filtered. That's the best way I can put it. Not suppressed entirely, I'm talking about repackaging. This world recognizes the concept of evil but prefers its own interpretation."

Kama laughed, long and sultry.

"One might almost think you're feeling inadequate. How unflattering."

"Misplaced," he said flatly.

The reflexive recoil he expects from the land, from nature, even from the damn water, all the emotional response, it's just... gone.

Kama didn't answer immediately. She tilted her head slightly. When she did speak, her words unspooled slowly, warmed on her tongue first.

"You're trying to feel it, aren't you? That collective loathing you wear like a skin. The sin of man turned into spiritual atmosphere."

The water whispered past their limbs, the forest continued to wrench quietly under Kiara's look elsewhere. Kama laid her cheek against her arm.

"Do you care?" she asked, suddenly.

"About being forgotten? Replaced?"

He didn't answer right away. His gaze lingered on the reflection in the water... his face, which wasn't really his. A boy's face. A hero's face. He had stopped being surprised by it long ago. But even now, he still didn't recognize it. Or maybe he just refused to.

"Not really," he said at last. "I was never trying to be remembered. Just trying to make them remember. What they did. What they buried. What they pretended didn't happen."

Silence.

"Still, I find it rather charming in its own chaotic way. This world is clearly built on myth layered over modernity, on gods who refuse to die and mortals who pretend they've outgrown them. The tension is almost erotic." She chortle at her own phrasing.

"And isn't that the perfect place for us? For Beasts who were always meant to emerge when the boundary between man and god was weakest? I think, we were summoned because this place doesn't know how to choose a side."

Angra looked away. His mouth curled. It still feels wrong. This world absorbs sin. Rewrites it and doesn't confront it from assimilation.

She knew what was running in his mind.

"You think that's worse?"

"I think it's alien. And I don't trust what I don't understand. Where would I run?" he murmured, voice low, almost gentle now. "We're not here by choice. Even if we were, this world would fold us into itself before we could fold it. That's the feeling I can't shake. That it's not a world you conquer. It's one that conquers you by letting you live inside it, long enough to forget who you are."

The stream passed between them.

"Then let's make it remember." she whispered, brushing wet fingertips through her bangs as she reclined further back. "You sound almost motivated."

His only reply was to exhale through his nose and lean further back into the grass, arms behind his head as he'd already committed to his next nap. One eye remained open, however.

"Don't get hopeful. I'm just watching the cracks. When you spend eternity being evil, you learn to recognize when the cracks in the world aren't natural. You watch where it warps, where it flinches. This place flinches because something doesn't want us to learn how to open the door from the inside." He twitched his foot, letting the stream wash the grime away from his heel.

Kama gave a half-laugh, half-moan, twisting her body to lie sideways, her elbow propping her up.

"Then shall we knock, or shall we burn the house down?"

"Neither. We wait until the owners open the door themselves."

"How boring. So typically you."

He shrugged.

"Patience is a sin, too."

He had said too much already. He knew it the moment the words left his mouth. The instant something in Kama's smile had grown too thoughtful. She was many things, whimsical, wrathful, erotic in expression and execution.

He didn't distrust her, per se. That would require the presumption of a prior trust to be broken. He simply knew what she was. What they all were. Proxies for humanity's disfigurements, shaped into walking theology. Every smile they gave, every laugh, every gesture of friendship, these were all performances on a crumbling stage, each actor waiting for their cue to decide if this play would end in fire or silence.

Before Kama could retort with another veiled insult wrapped in silk, the grass behind them rustled. Angra turned his head, and Kama already had her lips curled before the figure even breached the tree line.

Tiamat stepped into view.

Or rather, lumbered, but not clumsily. She glided while the world itself bent forward to welcome each step. Her eyes were blank in a way that suggested emotion lived behind them, in a form not easily parsed by language or reason.

"Aaahhhhh..."

A single note.

Kama tightened her eyes and sat upright, her tone clipped.

"Well. If it isn't our mother. How sweet of you to come down here."

Tiamat tilted her head.

"Aaahhhhh..."

Angra raised a brow. He understood her tone more than her words. That was the strange thing about Beasts: language was not their native form of communication. Sin, hunger, despair—those were clearer than syllables.

"She's asking if we've found anything," he muttered, barely lifting a finger toward Kama. "Or rather, if we're as lost as she suspects."

Kama scoffed. "Let her worry. She's better at brooding than strategizing."

Tiamat gave another sigh-like moan, this one deeper, more drawn out. The tone almost seemed regretful.

"Aaahh... ahhhhhh..."

"We know that." Angra answered with a joyless grin. "You didn't ask to be here either. You want your sea, your children, your silence. I get it."

Tiamat did not nod. But the tilt of her head returned to neutral.

That was affirmation enough.

Something snapped into the space between them. A vacuum made flesh.

"Fou!"

The white blur launched from the canopy and landed directly on Angra's chest. He groaned in sheer disbelief.

"Oh for the love of—what are you doing here, you little cryptid?"

Fou's tail flicked with pristine menace. He gave a chirp, no, a judgment.

"Fou."

"Very informative," Angra grunted.

Kama arched an eyebrow as she scooted backward.

"Great. Just what we needed. The moral compass with paws."

Fou growled.

"Fou..."

Tiamat leaned down slowly, cupping one hand before the creature, who allowed her presence.

"Aaaahhh..."

"Yes, yes, he's special," Kama muttered. "We all are. That's the problem."

Angra tapped his fingers against his ribs, Fou now nestled on his stomach as though having declared a sleeping claim.

"Four creatures who shouldn't coexist, lounging like it's summer vacation, in a world that probably already has a plan to sterilize us. Lovely."

Kama's voice dropped.

"And not one of us trusts the others."

Silence.

Even Fou didn't chirp.

Tiamat did not respond. Although maternally, none of them would accept her touch. Angra finally exhaled and reached up, placing one hand on his forehead like an exhausted teacher watching his worst students debate ethics.

"This is going to fall apart the moment one of us makes the first real move."

Kama flicked her hair.

"We can just make sure it's not a stupid one."

"Fou."

A warning. Or a wish.

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.

The wind changed course.

That was the first thing he noticed. Goetia did not waste cognitive cycles on something so transient, but the consistency of it. It moved with patterns that had no business existing.

He had walked only forty meters from where the others had scattered, alone, as the air around him was far too alive. He stopped beside an oblong stone nestled in the roots of a misshapen pine tree and placed his hand upon it.

Leylines.

If this world was shaped by mystery, then the blood beneath its skin was divinity itself.

No. Not divinity. Integration.

Goetia closed his eyes. Within his mind, structures rose; grids of luminous latticework that had once covered the Earth in the Age of Gods. Unlike this world, leylines served as the oldest architecture, the raw algorithmic code beneath reality's skin, flowing from the Primordial Sea and branching upward like veins in a child of the planet.

They were computational. Arithmetic. Imprinted by myth, but obedient to a master system.

On the other hand...

"The logic is corrupted," he murmured aloud.

He could see it, even with his weakened clairvoyance dulled by this realm's resistant structure. The leyline grid of this world bent around settlements, not nature. The nodes coalesced near urban sprawl. Magical pressure didn't recoil from human civilization, it congealed with it through absorption.

In his world, the Age of Gods had ended because humanity rejected the Mystery. In this one, the Age of Gods refused to die.

That changed everything, because It is a preservation.

"The theological structure of this dimension has not undergone the erosion expected by anthropocentric dominance. Rather, the pantheons remained embedded in sociological consciousness, surviving and thriving as co-entities to human development."

He clicked his tongue, a rare tick of disapproval.

"I despise complications."

He raised a hand again, flexing his fingers in the air, attempting to visualize the leylines beneath them as spiritual architecture. There was no Root here. That much was certain. But that did not mean there was no origin. The power flowed in fractal spirals, not linear paths. Cyclical, ritualistic. Not logical. But powerful. Wild.

"As if the divine never ceded to man," he muttered, gaze narrowing.

He now understood, in part, why the Beasts had been summoned here in such a weakened state.

This world did not recognize the end of Mystery. To the subconscious foundation of the realm, they were not apex threats, but external anomalies. Anomalies which could not supersede the world's own metaphysical design. Beasts of the End required a proper Age of Man to be born fully into power—this place was not that.

"An open-ended fusion. This world's theological timeline operates under a multistratified continuity model," Goetia muttered as he began to walk again, voice cold, analytical. "The Judeo-Christian mythos, Hellenic deities, Norse, Hindu, Shinto—all present. Not in mythological memory. In active function. Pantheons integrated, rather than eroded. Theology embedded in political structure. Religious concept given institutional inertia."

He paused. His footsteps crunched softly over brittle needles.

"I must assume all local deities are aware of us by now."

He stared into the sky in anticipation. Calculation.

"Then the question is not when conflict will arise, but how it will be permitted to escalate."

He ran the simulations in his head.

Assuming localized gods possess direct access to leylines, they will have operational dominance within sanctified territory. Given their likely omnipresence in cultural centers, cities become pressure zones. If Beasts act without discretion, they will be interpreted as invaders and purified accordingly.

Goetia did not fear purification.

He feared inefficiency.

"No combat engagement until tactical advantage is secured," he muttered aloud, mentally categorizing each Beast's current disposition.

Kiara would destabilize any attempt at discretion, driven by her narcissistic hunger for validation through spiritual invasion. Kama would obey whims over instruction—worse if she sensed divine presence in a male form. Tiamat could not be relied upon for covert action. Vitch—useless personally threatened. Fou was already missing. U-Olga—

He winced.

As if summoned by thought alone—

"—filthy mammalian sludge!"

The shriek shot through the trees, followed by the sound of a distant rock violently imploding.

"This dimension is wretched! A static sewer of degenerate laws and unoptimized spatio-temporal currents!"

Goetia turned, expression unreadable, eyes half-lidded.

Beast VII crashed through the treeline, one hand dragging a tree branch she had clearly torn off in a fit of incoherent frustration. Her face was red, her hair disheveled, and her figure sparking at the joints as though her body itself refused to obey the laws of this world.

"Did I consent to being trapped in a 3D mudball?! Did I?!"

She threw the branch behind her and stomped toward him.

"You! You pretend not to hear me, but I know you're thinking something smug. You're always thinking something smug. Say something! SAY—"

"You are inefficient."

U-Olga froze mid-rant, mouth slightly open like a corrupted data stream receiving corrupted feedback.

Goetia continued without turning to face her.

"As we are now, combat with any local god-figure would result in fragmentary loss. Collateral damage to the environment would yield immediate theological retaliation. And you are incapable of stealth. Therefore, you will not engage. You will observe."

"I—what—YOU—"

She growled. Literally.

Goetia ignored her.

He had already begun rewriting plans. The first required identifying which faction in this world held the dominant theological infrastructure—Heaven, Hell, or something altogether stranger. The second required testing leyline compatibility through an external medium. And the third...

He paused.

"We might need humans."

This world still believed in them.

The word left his mouth like ash. Unwanted. But necessary.

If this world was alike to their own.

And Beast I was never one to underestimate belief.

Chapter 2: Soil Doth Tremble, Beasts

"I knew I smelled a tantrum."

"And electrical sparks. Hm... Must be a day ending in 'y',"

The sound of heel clicks approached from the undergrowth like a serpent coiling through silk. Koyanskaya cooed, stepping lightly over a broken branch.

She emerged in full designer flair, not a speck of dirt daring to cling to her heels. Behind her, walking with a posture stiff as ice yet lithe as a blade, came another.

"You're loud." Draco said flatly at U-Olga. "Reminds me of some doomed larva screaming at the tide."

U-Olga twitched like a kettle about to burst.

"Oh, please," she snapped as stepped toward them. "You two—you two have the gall to show up and call me loud? Coming from a fox who sells death in pink boxes, and a carbon-crusted firebrand with a messiah complex?"

Koyanskaya gave a dramatic sigh, fanning her fingers over her heart as if scandalized.

"You wound me. Here I thought you liked it when people visited you in your dirt playground."

"Don't try to play coy," U-Olga growled. "You're just here to sniff around and preen. Let me guess, Vitch, already plotting which local warlord to bed and blackmail?"

Koyanskaya's eyes sparkled.

"Sell to. There's a difference. But I see you're already preparing your CV for the local junkyard. A shame that no one's buying emotional scrap metal these days."

"Filthy vermin!" U-Olga roared, hair practically standing on end, one hand crackling with distorted light.

"Oh, she's serious now," Draco muttered. "At this rate, she'll start quoting technical specs like they're gospel. What was it again; 'spatio-temporal transcendence through quantum ascension'?"

She tilted her head with a surgical stare.

"A failed god in denial of her failure. Pathetic."

That was the strike.

U-Olga froze. Her eye twitched, her mouth parted. It was now personal.

"Funny coming from the Beast who swore to protect 'humanity's future'... and let her own faith burn with the rest of Rome. Tell me, Draco, what color were your followers' eyes as they screamed for salvation?"

Draco's pupils contracted.

Silence cut through the clearing like a drawn blade.

"Ah. Touched a nerve," U-Olga hissed. "What's the matter? Is the 'tsundere' act short-circuiting? Need a second to process all that failure?"

Koyanskaya tensed subtly beside Draco. Even she didn't grin now.

U-Olga pressed forward, all fire and wire and venom.

"Or maybe you'd rather talk about you, fox. You—oh, yes—you're fun. How many families did you incinerate in 'good humor'? What was your record again? Eighteen thousand in a night? Or was that the 'beta test'?"

The fox's smile twisted.

"Still keeping tabs, Marie? Cute. For someone who claims godhood, you're awfully obsessed with mortals."

Just as Koyanskaya's ears twitched in hostile readiness, and Draco's feet moved to a ready stance, the atmosphere collapsed like a door being flung open.

"Ahhhh—"

Tiamat stepped forward. Behind her bounded Beast IV, hopping lightly onto a low rock.

"Oho? Are we playing already?"

Angra's lazy and casual voice in its mockery slid through them as he and Kama emerged together. Her eyes took in the scene with mild disdain and glee.

"Wow, girls. I leave you alone for what, ten minutes?" Angra said, arms stretched wide. The absurdity. "And you're already digging up past sins like we're at a funeral with wine."

"I was enjoying the drama, but now it's getting petty. We're supposed to be Beasts, not schoolgirls throwing shade in homeroom." Kama added, smirking with one hand on her hip.

U-Olga spun, face blazing, but Angra cut her off with a lazy wave.

"No, no, don't even. Don't start shouting. You're like a cursed foghorn."

He sighed.

"Goetia already thinks you're a waste of server space. Don't give him reason to uninstall you."

"Excuse me—?!"

Fou yawned audibly.

"Ahhhhh…"

The sound from Tiamat stops everyone still. There was no warning in the way she stood with a reminder that her silence was not ignorance but a patience.

Draco brushed imaginary dust from her sleeve. "Enough. I have no interest in wasting words on lesser minds."

She turned on her heel and walked off without another glance.

Koyanskaya clicked her tongue and followed after her with a swing of her hips, tail swaying smugly.

"Well. That was fun. Let's do this again never."

The clearing slowly emptied as only Angra, Kama, Tiamat, and Fou remained along with U-Olga. No one said anything.

Beneath their banter, their masks, and their egos, none of them had forgotten what they were. Beasts, no matter how they smiled or smirked or taunted, never trusted each other.

"Tch."

"Tsk?"

"Hmph."

Step. Step.

Heads turned when they saw that they hadn't even disappeared fully into the tree line.

Draco's footsteps came back first in a quick advance. Koyanskaya followed shortly behind her, and though her lips curled into their usual smirk, something displeased tugged behind her eyes.

"Change of plans." Vitch announced with a falsified sweetness, twirling a curl of her hair as she stepped into the clearing again.

Kama's eyebrows raised. Draco simply gestured behind her with one pale hand.

A slow rustle crept through the trees.

A perfume from a crushed flower reached their senses as  Kiara Sessyoin emerged barefooted, but cloaked in nothing but veiled grace and the suggestion of sanctity twisted into sin.

Behind her were dozens of humans. A child. A few men. Two women.

Mouths agape. Limbs loose. Unfocused eyes gleaming faintly violet. They followed as if in procession.

It was a congregation with no prayer. Only worship.

At the pace of a lover, slow and savoring, her half-lidded eyes shimmering with divine disinterest fell at each Beast in turn, as though she were simply taking attendance at a garden party.

"Oh. You're all gathered. How fortunate." she breathed, voice like warm wine and honey on a dying tongue.

She raised a hand lazily to her cheek.

"I thought perhaps you'd be bickering somewhere else in the woods like starving rats, but no... you're right where you belong. All in one lovely little place. So convenient."

Angra leaned his elbow against a tree.

"...Well that's ominous."

"Says the walking anti-Christ," Kama muttered. She narrowed her eyes at Kiara with a loathing that wasn't even masked. "What did you drag those in for? A dance? What, will we just observe you cosplay as salvation?"

Kiara tilted her head and smiled.

She turned slightly, and with a languid gesture, brushed her fingers along the cheek of one of the men behind her. He didn't blink. Didn't flinch. His eyes didn't see her. Or anything, for that matter. He did shiver.

"They were simply available. I couldn't let a resource go unused." she murmured.

"Resource?" Kama's lip curled.

"Information," Kiara said. Her smile sharpened into something beautiful and cruel. "Don't look at me like that. We are in a foreign land, are we not? One not tethered to the familiar rules of the Throne or the Root. There is no history of us here. Memory and Authority included."

She walked slowly past Tiamat, dragging her fingers across the air beside her, never daring to touch. She stopped, then turned, her arms held open.

"So I've decided to educate myself."

"By hypnotizing the first batch of locals you found?" Angra raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. "You're not subtle."

"I'm not obligated to be," Kiara replied without pause. "Subtlety is for insects. I am a concept."

She turned her gaze skyward.

"Their minds are primitive as all humans do. But they know things. They feel this place's rules, even if they cannot name them. The things they dream of, the fears they bury, the gods they still whisper to when they think no one hears…"

She smiled again, but it was hollow now. Robotic. Once, a priestess tried to recall the emotion behind a sermon she'd given a thousand times.

"They may not know the truth, but even lies can map a land. And oh... they carry so many beautiful, confused lies inside them."

Koyanskaya tapped her heel against a root.

"You gonna dissect them for it, or just moan their sins into the dirt?"

Kiara didn't answer. Instead, she placed one hand against a captive's forehead. The man's body twitched. Her fingertips glowed faintly violet.

"It's not dissection," she said softly. "It's exegesis."

Draco exhaled sharply through her nose. Her glare bore into Kiara with that of a frozen steel.

"You shouldn't tamper with the local minds. Not until we understand the nature of this dimension's spiritual hierarchy. Their gods still walk here. Their laws may bind us."

"Mm," Kiara hummed. "I can walk carefully. Over their broken thoughts."

Fou let out a low groan from atop Tiamat's arm. Beast II's placid gaze fixed on Kiara's followers.

She did not like them.

"Aaaaaaaah…"

The sound was lower now. Barely a breath.

Angra pushed off the tree. "Guess Goetia's not going to like this. You playing church leader while the rest of us are still figuring out whether this world wants us dead or chained."

Kama scoffed beside him.

"She doesn't care. She's not capable of caution. Not really. She just mimics it while looking pretty."

Kiara offered no defense. She only knelt gracefully beside one of the humans, resting her head against his shoulder as though he were a pillow.

"You are extracting information."

The owner of Goetia's flat voice came to a stop before the group, look panning across the assembled Beasts. He regarded each of them with the same indifference.

His gaze settled, inevitably, on Kiara.

"Good. That spares me the redundant effort of tracing psychic echoes."

Kiara's lashes fluttered, and she offered a pleasant, vacuous smile.

"You're welcome to sample the meal," she cooed, gesturing toward her kneeling, blank-faced congregation. "Their minds are easy to part open. Like ripe fruit, some more pungent than others."

"Spare me the metaphor," Goetia said curtly.

With a gesture, an energy lit into a ring. A line of golden light expanded from his palm and circled the group. Instantly, the ground beneath them shimmered in a geometric grid as an artificial leyline anchor.

"I will facilitate an optimized mental relay. Your minds will not touch. They will pass through mine."

"Ugh. Why do you say things like that? It sounds like I'm going to get mentally violated." U-Olga groaned.

"Only if your mind is structured like Kiara's." Goetia responded without pause. "In which case, contamination is inevitable."

"I'm honored." The woman herself purred, reclining lazily against her enthralled subject. "Though I do recommend gentle entry. The walls are quite thin."

Draco muttered under her breath, "Filth."

Koyanskaya faked a yawn.

"If we're done flirting, let's plug in. I'm ready to see just how dumb these locals are." Angra said loudly.

The ring of light pulsed once. Just once.

And in that second, every Beast saw.

They saw Kuoh City.

A modest urban sprawl. Modern Japanese infrastructure layered over Japanese dirt. Mana in the air, the ground hummed with interwoven barriers such as artificial regulations and leaky gates.

The school known as Kuoh Academy was prominent in several minds. A Catholic-looking building with suspiciously high mana flux in its periphery. That alone suggested multiple focal points of power.

They saw neon signs. Convenience stores. Train stations. Shrines on corners. But beneath it all was an odor of the Moonlit World.

Possibilities were starting to form in their minds that, here, the supernatural mingled freely. Unchecked. Institutionalized.

In dreams, whispers of Devils. Fallen Angels. Gods walking in daylight. Some memories repeated the same names too often to ignore.

Deaths were common.

Bodies found drained. Mangled. Exploded from within. Witness accounts blurred. The police were silent. Nighttime became a hunt.

The victims held no logic for it. But the Beasts did.

They recognized territorial feedings. Predator routines. Kill-zones.

It was not unlike the Age of Gods, except now, it was done beneath electricity and smartphones.

Memories from the eight enthralls come and go.

"... Not too dissimilar from ours." Goetia said aloud.

"Kuoh..." Kama murmured, tongue curling over the unfamiliar syllables. "I'm sure it's not mapped on any Mage Association record."

"Because this is not our world." Goetia replied. "It resembles ours, but the historical and thaumaturgical architecture is inconsistent."

"So. Foreign dimension confirmed." Angra stretched, groaning. "Figures."

Not a moment later as he paused, his eyes narrowed.

"Oh. Oh no."

He smirked. A slow grin spread across his face.

"Hey. Everyone saw that pervert's memories too, right?"

A silence.

U-Olga's face twisted in horror.

"Ugh—what was that!? That filth was thinking of his teacher during PE class—and the nurse's office!?"

"You should've seen what he thought about that Occult Club president." Angra continued gleefully. Kama thought she was looking at a gremlin who found a cursed jewel. "That wasn't a dream. That was cinematography."

"You're enjoying this." Kama muttered.

"Like a hot spring of suffering." he replied with zero shame.

Koyanskaya rolled her eyes. As much as she dislikes mentioning it, they landed in some pathetic porn-world city named Kuoh. Puberty is apparently stronger than Mystery here.

"There were also clear signs of spatial manipulation and sealed zones." Draco added, ignoring the immaturity. "The city is warded. Meaning it is owned. Someone with Authority is managing it."

"There is a prospect we are being watched. If they have not made contact, they are either evaluating us or underestimating us." Goetia concluded.

His rings pulsed once, ending the link. The light flickered and retracted.

The humans dropped like puppets with cut strings. Kiara exhaled, pleased.

"So do we explore this lovely Kuoh, or we can wait for its caretakers to discover their guests?"

Tiamat stared silently at the unconscious humans.

"Aaahhhh."

Fou chittered once, head tilted.

Angra cracked his neck, grinning like a devil.

"If the caretakers are like that guy, I vote we go find them."

.
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.
.

The sunset was nearing judging from the dipped star from the horizon. The Beasts walked leisurely. Subtle in presence, cataclysmic in potential.

They moved as a loose formation, orbiting each other in temporary mutual interest.

"So, Japan. Land of the shrines and temperamental sun-goddesses. Any reason we're not being fried by divine judgment yet?"

Tiamat was trailing behind at the rear. Fou clung to her shoulder. Kiara danced barefoot through the foliage, humming a song with obscene lyrics. Koyanskaya holds the hem of her spotless suit like a noble lady avoiding puddles. Kama drifted near the middle, arms crossed. U-Olga Marie complained under her breath. Draco kept to the front, rigid.

Angra strolled alongside Goetia, arms folded behind his head, whistling.

"Because we haven't made enough noise," Koyanskaya replied, heels tapping briskly against a root. "And because I know how to avoid getting stepped on by a Kami's sandal."

"You sound proud of that."

"I am proud of that. You don't survive as long as I have in this country without learning to kiss the floor at a thousand-degree bow angle."

"You're basically a corporate shrine fox with Wi-Fi," Angra drawled. "What's your take on Amaterasu, then? Is she the smiling sunbeam or the nuclear dictator?"

Koyanskaya gave him a look over her shoulder, expression suddenly flat.

"Amaterasu," she said crisply, "is a sovereign with absolute jurisdiction. If she even thinks we're a threat, she could call down ten thousand divine enforcers before we blink."

"Aaahhh," Tiamat murmured.

"Exactly, mommy dragon," Koyanskaya said. "I vote we don't test the waters with the Japanese sun herself."

"If... she's on the same page as the one we're familiar with, then yes." Kiara mentioned. For all they know, different worlds housed different rules, right? Gods and deities are not exempted.

"So we agree," Goetia interjected, tone brisk. "Subterfuge is preferable to confrontation. Even weakened, we are noticed. The leyline inconsistencies alone will alert any domain-sensitive divinity."

He paused to gesture toward the skyline. The city lights of Kuoh were now visible through a thinning of the trees.

"I propose reconnaissance." Goetia continued. "No displays of power. No structural interference. Above all, no emotional outbursts."

U-Olga groaned loudly.

"You just eliminated everybody's skill set."

"Incorrect. I am a specialist in observation and deduction."

"And zero human tact," Kama muttered.

"Tact is an inefficient communication method. I deceived and outsmarted Chaldea beforehand."

"He has a point," Angra admitted, "but it's annoying how much he knows it."

Kiara tilted her head toward the city. They're getting closer now.

"So what do we do when we get there? Attend the school? I would have to see the uniforms first. Pretend to be emotionally unstable transfer students?"

"You'd fit right in," Kama said without looking at her.

"We divide into small cells," Goetia said. "One or two individuals each. Investigate points of interest: the school, the shrine, the city center. Avoid detection. We learn the factions active in this dimension before we act."

Draco clicked her tongue.

"And when they act first?"

There was no need to answer that question; everyone already knew the answer.

"Then we respond proportionately." Goetia answered coldly. "But I remind you all: gods are not merely entities here. They are systems. Killing one might trigger retribution from the entire regional metaphysics."

"Right, so basically, no touching the locals until we know which ones explode when poked." Angra said.

"Precisely."

Tiamat softly whined.

"You'll get to destroy something eventually, Mom." Kama said, patting her gently on the arm. "Think of this as foreplay."

"Feels like a parade of forgotten gods in a land where divinity had never left..." muttered Angra.

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To the students of Kuoh Academy, Sona Shitori remained the unshakable pillar of order. The brilliant and composed Student Council President whose reputation was as spotless as the school itself.

In contrast on this particular day, beneath the illusion of pristine stability, her thoughts grind against each other with the weight of accumulated pressure.

The room was quiet. Sunlight filtered through the windows in long golden slants, warming the floorboards and casting her silhouette over a stack of administrative documents. She had already reviewed the updated student council budget, finalized the teacher rotation schedule for the next term, and even preemptively corrected three grammatical inconsistencies in the school's draft newsletter, all within the hour. Routine, order, detail... those were the mechanisms by which she kept her mask flawless. She had always believed that discipline of the mind and duty of structure could drown uncertainty.

But today, for the first time in months, she found herself staring at the surface of a form without reading its words.

There were few things in the world more infuriating to her than uncertainty, and fewer still than uncertainty paired with inaction. It was not in her nature to dismiss anomalies, especially not ones that could so cleanly bypass the safety layers she had calculated over Kuoh City like a quiet general managing a silent fortress.

The pen in her fingers did not move.

Because something had changed.

In everything.

It had begun yesterday.

Sona's eyes flicked toward the window. From her office, she could just barely make out the edge of the trees that bordered Kuoh's suburban spread. Somewhere in that direction, somewhere not far, there had been a distortion so profound that the very fabric of the supernatural world had buckled for a breathless moment. It had not lasted more than a minute, and yet… that minute had felt as if it had never ended.

She remembered it vividly.

A sudden avalanche of something beyond comprehension, pressing down on every soul attuned to the supernatural. It had struck her while she was organizing student reports, and the second it happened, her vision had fractured into screaming shades of black and crimson. There had been no physical attack, and observable phenomenon that one could describe through the lexicon of magical sciences.

She felt the unfurling of something ancient, elemental, and profoundly wrong.

A sickness of the world. A curse of existence and the dread stench of sin.

Her hands had trembled, truly trembled, for the first time since her first demonic promotion. The air had tasted of burnt sulfur and endless funerals, and in the deepest marrow of her being she had felt as if she was being judged by something neither divine nor demonic, something older than even morality itself.

She had screamed mentally, in her soul.

The pressure had faded after less than sixty seconds, but what remained was a psychic afterimages of a phantom of agony like a scar that hadn't fully formed. Her peerage had all been affected. Tsubaki had collapsed. Momo had gone into a panic. Reya had broken into tears she didn't understand. The others had each suffered in silence, but she could read their shaken expressions. They were devils. They were used to evil. But not that kind of evil. Not whatever this was.

Even Rias had felt it. Sona had gone to her not long after the event, her own control steadied only by force of will, and what she found in her crimson-haired friend's face was not a hint of pride but deep fear.

She had visibly trembled when Sona had entered the Occult Research Club, the Gremory Heiress already halfway into a summoning circle, lips pale, irises glassy with the sheen of someone who had brushed shoulders with something fundamentally wrong. That night, neither of them had offered bravado.

Rias hadn't known what the presences were, but she had felt them. Her voice had cracked when she spoke, afraid that even naming the sensation might summon it again.

To her, it was like… being digested like they were were food. Or sins being absorbed.

Sona had not responded at the time. She had simply watched as Rias's brother's familiar arrived not five minutes later, a sign that even Sirzechs Lucifer had felt it across the dimensional fold. Whatever had occurred was not localized, it was dimensional. The air, the sky, the leylines had been distorted and then forced to forget.

None of them had forgotten.

The pen in her hand taps against the paper.

The problem was not merely the horror itself. It was that no one could explain it. Her own sister had sent only a vague report indicating "temporal interference" and "non-quantified evil signatures," which was as much of a confession of confusion as Serafall ever made.

What bothered her most was the lack of response from the Shinto. This was Japan. The leylines of this country were older than the Empire itself. She had studied the territorial spirits, the layering of shrines, the spiritual harmonics maintained by the local pantheon and even the formal agreements of non-interference when Devils operated under formal territory acquisition.

There was no origin known.

Even so... they all knew that something had arrived.

Not one. Many.

Sona didn't trust instinct. But even the rational part of her brain could no longer dismiss the sensation: that the boundaries of their world had been breached by monsters.

The kind that could not be reasoned with. That did not belong to the cosmic chessboard of the Three Factions which are the Angels, Fallen, and Devils. That had never once cared about the rules of the supernatural.

Her pen scratched faintly as she wrote something absent-mindedly in trance:

"Presences do not match divine, demonic, or any resonance. External category. Possibly extra-cosmic? Prepare internal lockdown protocols."

Sona sat back and adjusted her glasses.

Her heartbeat had not slowed since yesterday.

The door opened with a click.

Her Queen of the Sitri peerage, Shinra Tsubaki, stepped inside. Her long black hair was tied today with a navy ribbon at the base of her neck, and her uniform was, as always, without a single wrinkle, every button and fold aligned, her shoes polished to a mirrored sheen. And all of that perfection, like Sona's own, was merely a uniform of discipline.

Tsubaki closed the door with her heel and approached silently, setting the folders down she was holding. She did not speak at first, only studied her King for a long moment... long enough to notice what others never could.

The slight tremble in Sona's right hand.

It was faint. Tsubaki had seen that hand hold blades of demonic force without so much as a quiver. She had seen it lift heavy grimoires, command rituals, even sign documents with Nobles. That hand, now hovering above her desk like it feared touching the world, was a sign.

"...Yesterday again..." Tsubaki said softly.

Sona did not look up immediately. Her hand slowly retracted, fingers curling slightly inward before she lowered them to her lap, hidden beneath the desk like a child ashamed of being caught. She exhaled.

"I haven't stopped thinking about it," her voice carried the weight of disquiet she could no longer compartmentalize. "Not even for an hour and in sleep. That surge of power wasn't something that could be charted, or analyzed and neutralized with containment wards. It wasn't even power in the way we understand it."

Tsubaki didn't sit at a comfortable distance. She folded her hands before her. "... It felt like drowning in something that wanted us to remember and suffer."

"Yes." Sona replied, almost immediately, almost too fast, and then again slower, "Yes… suffer. I can't even describe it with malevolence. It was closer to inevitability with the act of suffering itself was hard-coded into the presence."

Her eyes drifted to the files before her but did not read them.

"I don't know what to do about it, Tsubaki."

And there it was. The confession. Quiet. Awful. Naked.

Tsubaki's breath changed.

She had been with Sona long enough to know how rare that statement was, how catastrophic it would be if spoken aloud in the wrong place or before the wrong audience. Sona Sitri didn't admit uncertainty. Even when facing Rias's recklessness. Even when bearing the legacy of the Sitri household and her sister's terrifying political orbit. Even when making decisions that would affect the fates of devils under her protection. After yesterday, her mind, so attuned to strategy, to variables, to data, could find no frame in which to place this experience.

"I reviewed the leyline diagrams from the Underworld," Sona continued, tone laced with the frustration of futility. "Compared them with the supernatural readings recorded by Serafall's scouts, even had an encrypted report sent from our observer satellite. The result was nothing but a sudden flare. Then silence."

The room fell into a suspended hush. Neither of them dared break with any rationalizations.

They don't know what to say.

Something flashes outside. A flicker at the edge of the senses.

Sona's head turned slowly toward the window, drawn by the almost imperceptible tug of aether as something brushed against the spiritual latticework of Kuoh like a soft paw leaving deep footprints on fresh snow.

She stood, her feet warbled for a bit, and crossed the room to the window.

There was nothing but the usual street outside, from students chatting, leaves fluttering in the mild wind, the sound of a bicycle bell, and someone shouting about a lost lunchbox.

Until a blur.

Small. White. Fluffy.

Her first impression, of course, was that it was some kind of pet. Maybe a dog someone had dressed up for a local cosplay event, or a squirrel on steroids. It was about the size of a small canine, but more rounded, and its gait was distinctly more feline than canine, springy, wild in a way that could never be described as merely cute. It bounded across the road without regard for traffic, darted past a stunned old man at a takoyaki stand, and vanished down an alley.

But it wasn't the creature that made her blood freeze.

It was the residue.

In the split second, its form crossed her peripheral vision, it left behind a trail—no, a scar—of energy. Residual magic clung to the air like fog, heavy and dense. She could feel it now, even through the protective wards layered into her office, like a tremor of heat rolling off a furnace, or the radiant aftershock of an explosion. This wasn't the mana of a mere familiar, it doesn't even compete with the reinforced shroud of a yokai. It was purer than either. Wilder. Raw and mythic and violently potent.

Enough magical energy to destroy a building casually. As if by existing, it bled power.

Sona's pupils constricted. She inhaled, then exhaled sharply, and by the time she focused again, the thing was gone.

"Tsubaki," she said quietly, not taking her eyes from the glass. "Did you feel that?"

Her Queen was already at her side. "I did."

They said nothing more.

Because they both knew, deep down, that whatever had come to Kuoh, something alien had already begun to stir.

---

The city was loud.

His ears weren't hurt of course. Fou had long since learned to dull his senses to the clamor of human life, especially the flavor found in Japanese towns where shrines coexisted with vending machines and high schoolers sprinted across roads as if immune to mortality. Just but in a way that unsettled his nose. The stink of unwashed ambition, hormonal dissonance, the waft of canned caffeine on sticky fingertips, dog urine on lampposts too low to matter, and behind it all, that high-pitched hum of leylines thinned by centuries of overuse. Humans were always using things they didn't understand. They didn't understand magic, didn't understand gods, didn't understand themselves. And despite all of it, they continued building their cities on old bones and older sins like it was all just a coincidence.

Fou's paw pads made light sounds on the sidewalk, so delicate that even dogs failed to notice him unless he wanted them to. He could move with a whisper, or with the strength of collapsing heaven, depending on mood. Right now? Whisper. There was no one in this city who could catch him if he didn't want to be caught, but because it was more amusing to watch the humans fail to see the divine sprinting past their ankles. Their obliviousness was a theater of its own.

It had been… what now? A day? Since the Others were summoned here.

If "summoned" was even the correct word. Fou wasn't sure it was. "Dragged" might have been better. Or "vomited." The whole ordeal had smelled like bad prophecy and old blood.

That chaotic arrival, that clumsy thud that fractured space and air and spirit all at once, had left the Beasts, himself included, in a condition he would charitably describe as "rude." Disorderly. Scattered. Tiamat had been the only one with any modicum of composure, if not sanity, and even then, that had been purely maternal instinct, her endless, inescapable coding to cradle things whether they deserved it or not. She had cradled him, literally, within minutes of arrival, smothered him to her chest like some twitchy, traumatized cat-child while the others postured or argued or simply blinked into existence wondering why the stars had changed shape.

Fou had not complained. It was warm. She smelled like old oceans and damp stones. He hadn't missed that.

And then Kiara had found people. The wrong kind of usual kind. Kiara had smiled.

It was never a good thing when that lecherous woman smiled at humans. Not that Fou had stopped her. Why would he? Let the sins of the past sin themselves out.

He hadn't watched, per se. Watching implied care. But he'd noted it. And once Kiara was done, once her strange, undulating theology had left behind the usual twitching, grateful corpses, Fou had gone to those corpses and taken what he needed. Humans were funny in the way their minds clung to meaning even in the last few seconds before obliteration. He had lapped it up with his nose, drawn their lingering cognition out of the ether before it faded, and what remained gave him enough to sketch out the world they now found themselves in.

The supernatural loitered beneath Kuoh, but subtly, like a secret cult with too many Instagram followers. There were devils here. Angels. Half-lings and quarter-things. None of them are relevant, yet. But enough to make the others twitchy.

So they had settled.

It was easier than expected. One of Kiara's less-broken playthings had owned a house. Suburban. Two floors. Wide lawn, though a bit brown at the edges. Enough space for all of them. Tiamat had taken the living room couch immediately, stretching across it like some ancient aquatic beast rediscovering the sensation of cushions. Goetia had silently taken the attic—Fou had no idea what he was doing up there, but the air sometimes crackled, and the lightbulbs often cried. Kama was in the bathtub. Fou didn't ask.

The refrigerator was full.

That had been the surprise.

Good food, even by human standards. Refrigerated yakitori. Packs of raw tuna. A whole cake. Someone had cared about this house, or had planned to share it. Or had been trying to forget something sweet. It didn't matter. It was his (theirs actually) now. Fou had dug into the second tier of the fridge and devoured a bowl of soft-boiled eggs. It was what the creature would have wanted.

He did not miss the creature.

Now, he was running because he felt like it.

The city was wide. His paws were fast. The sky was crisp. He was bored.

That changed precisely two seconds ago.

He had noticed the bat.

Small. Too small to be wild. Not the right-wing pattern either. Magical construct. Lesser Familiar. Carried a scent not of its own, but of a summoner. Female. Devil-kin. Nearby. Watching. Observing. Amateurish.

Fou did not like being watched.

He paused. On the edge of a trash bin. Let his tail twitch once. Twice. Let the bat draw close. Let it imagine it was clever.

"Fou!" A greeting.

Paw.

Just one. Delicate. Simple. Casual.

He did not swat. He did not leap. He did not even shift his stance.

He patted.

And the bat exploded.

Not in blood or feathers. That would have been boring. No, its form spiraled through three consecutive buildings. Office. Ramen shop. Apartment complex. Each wall buckled inward, rippling outward in precise concentric rings, as reality itself had been flicked on the nose by something that did not abide surveillance.

Fou watched the crash trail with ears perked.

The quiet crunch of cinderblock ruins settled into themselves.

He turned and trotted off unbothered.

He would be home before the others even realized he left. Maybe, just maybe, he'd nap on the couch with Tiamat's tail draped over him like a wet blanket made of love and seaweed.

The stolen house came into view.

Fou slipped through the open window at the back. The glass pane had been left ajar—his doing, of course, from earlier that morning when the notion of running overtook him with the same intensity that once prompted divine spirits to incarnate. The world was full of such urgencies. Impulses. Itching behind the soul's bones.

No one bothered to turn on the lights. Electricity was a courtesy to humans. Not necessity. And besides, the flicker of the television, which was set to some endless local news segment that no one was listening to, cast just enough of a pallid blue across the living area to give shape to the congregation of monsters pretending, poorly, to be domestic.

Tiamat's limbs had long since lost their sense of territory, spilling over the cushions, knees pressed into the coffee table, one arm flopped against the floorboards with fingers curling. She made no sound save her usual breathy hum, an "Aaahhhh" that could convey maternal calm, alert wariness, or unspeakable sorrow, depending on the pitch.

Fou landed on the hardwood with a small pat, then trotted directly to her, bypassing everyone else. He leapt onto the couch without ceremony and pressed himself to the warm nook beneath her ribs, her hand instinctively rising to cradle his fur.

"Fou."

"Aaahhhh."

Which meant, in this case: Welcome back. Did you eat. Did you see anything. I missed you.

The others barely acknowledged his arrival. Or rather, they had, but in ways subtle or disdainful.

Seated like a queenly idol against a pile of imported pillows in the corner, Kiara offered him an amused sidelong glance that barely lasted a heartbeat before she returned to stretching her legs.

Koyanskaya was perched by the kitchen counter sipping a can of imported peach soda with a disgusted look that didn't match the fact she'd already consumed three. She gave Fou a nod, the kind she might offer to a client she couldn't kill just yet. The kind that said, I acknowledge you. I might shoot you later. But only if the paperwork goes through.

U-Olga Marie was on the floor, half-lounged and half-sprawled in a contorted position that suggested she'd tried to make a throne from old beanbags and failed. Her eyes were half-lidded, legs stretched stiff, muttering complaints about integrity, micro-lifeforms, and "the absolute barbarity of contemporary infrastructure."

And then, of course, there were they.

Angra and Draco.

Sitting together like a contrast painting, one all slouch and grin, the other posture and glower.

Angra had taken up the recliner, the most obnoxiously human piece of furniture in the room, with his legs flung over one arm and his back twisted against the other, in what appeared to be the least efficient position to relax in but most efficient for irritating others. He was dressed—somehow, somewhere, he found clothes; a long-sleeved baseball shirt of white and cobalt, the sleeves pushed to his elbows, showing tattoos that glowed faintly in low light, ancient glyphs coiled around a body that had once carried all the sins of the world and now carried none but his own smugness. Jeans. Fitting. Tight. Possibly stolen.

Draco sat opposite on a mat she had taken from the adjacent tatami room, cross-legged, her posture straight enough to shame steel, her arms crossed beneath her chest, and her entire bearing that of someone who refused to sit on anything made by human hands.

Angra was speaking. Naturally.

"I'm just saying," he said with the tone of someone who was about to say something intentionally provocative, "that the term 'devil' seems suspiciously recycled."

He gestured vaguely toward the screen, where a paused frame showed a group photo of Kuoh Academy's student council. "I've seen a lot of demons. Been called a lot of names. 'All the World's Evil,' for one. Occasionally 'That One Bastard.' But even I never bothered to rename the same concept across cultures like this."

Draco didn't sigh. She exhaled in disdain, which was her version of sighing.

"That is because you're content with simplicity. The kind that breeds stagnation. You wrap yourself in mockery like a cloak and believe that makes you profound."

He grinned. "Oh? So I'm not profound now?"

"You are fungus with teeth," Draco replied flatly. "And these Devils are no more than shadows of a long-dead language given adolescent form. Their magic is practical, which is the most insulting kind. Efficient. Transactional. Summonable like a call girl. That they borrow the name of the 72 is an offense to even Goetia's hollow dignity."

Angra raised a finger. "Correction. Goetia is hollow dignity. Hollow being the operative term."

Fou flicked an ear and snorted. This conversation was far too symmetrical. Like a Möbius strip of contempt and intellectualism. He pawed lightly at Tiamat's stomach. She cooed.

"They wear forms of youth. They manipulate love. They traffic in contracts. One thing they have in common is that they have no order. No hierarchy befitting the term 'Demonology.' They do not even aspire to cruelty. They are not evil, not truly. They are… what humans think evil ought to be. Clean. Measurable. Red-tinted. Aesthetically branded."

Angra laughed suddenly, it could've come from someone watching a burning building and betting which floor collapsed next.

"Gods. You're so mad about them being unworthy of their name, you sound like you want to be summoned yourself. Do you miss the Old Testament that bad? Shall we slap you in a school uniform and see if a pervert offers you a pact?"

Draco didn't respond. Which was her version of saying she was considering it and planning his execution.

"Fou."

Which meant: The bat's master is watching now. They'll come.

Tiamat hummed low in her throat.

A creak of the stair was heard from upstairs. Kama descended one step at a time barefooted.

She wore a soft violet off-shoulder sweater, oversized and draping, exposing one pale collarbone and the implication of skin beyond just enough. Her black shorts shimmered faintly with golden stitching that looked like ritual symbols turned into high fashion. Her hair, still damp from a recent shower, clung to her neck in fine strands, slick and blooming like wilted flowers.

She looked both lazy and sculpted, like a deity who had chosen to cosplay a pop idol and succeeded far too well.

Her eyes immediately narrowed at Kiara first sight.

Fou mentally groaned, knowing a bicker will be expected.

"Still alive, I see," Kama said sweetly, venom curling at the edges of her tongue like a prayer laced with cyanide. "A shame. I thought surely the sofa would have devoured you by now. I hope you finally found someone whose ego outshines yours and perished of spite."

Kiara didn't turn at the unexpected attacker. She smiled as she stretched her arms above her head, arching her back like a cat lounging in sunlight, her voice a lull of self-love dripping from cherry-glossed lips.

"Oh, Kama, projecting your insecurity through attempted insults, is touching. You are such a child trying to learn that fire burns and still reach for it."

"I am fire." Kama hissed, stepping down the last stair, hips tilted with that dancer's sway that looked natural and impossible all at once. "And if I burn, it's because the world deserves it."

"Nestled in the very filth you claim to loathe. Love? Oh, you are too lonely to admit the truth."

Kiara closed her eyes. She prepared to come back if Kama ran her mouth again.

No response was heard, however. She looked over and found the other girl at an unexpected predicament.

Kama was not moving.

Her mouth froze mid-retort.

And every ounce of venom melted from her frame as her gaze fell, no, locked—onto him.

Onto the male sitting with the Whore of Babylon.

It was as if she had seen a ghost wearing borrowed skin. No longer the being known as Angra Mainyu, nor the vessel of All the World's Evil who mocked the world with every breath.

In her eyes, it was someone else.

The long-sleeve shirt. That familiar hue of blue and white. The jeans; straight, simple, exactly uncanny in the right way. The casualness of it. The thoughtless, unironic wearing of something that should have been meaningless that it wasn't.

Not to her.

Because she had seen that outfit before.

Not in this world and this face. But within her. Within the vessel she had devoured so completely she sometimes forgot where she ended and where Sakura began.

Sakura.

And him.

The boy who dreamt to be a hero.

He who had smiled with burnt hands and a dozen quiet lies. The one who had cooked meals with comforting precision. The one who had promised that even someone like her could be saved.

It struck her all at once, like a spear of light plunging into a pond of oil. Her breath caught in her throat, her eyes almost blurred. So still that even Kiara fell silent, turning to her with narrowed eyes, who was wondering what performance Kama was about to enact now.

She only looked at him.

And for the first time in centuries, perhaps ever, her expression was no longer twisted with contempt and in superiority. A soft and haunted fragility in a way that only things not meant to break could be.

The room quieted as everyone noticed the changed in persona.

The others blinked.

Kiara's eyebrows lifted.

Draco turned slightly, visibly displeased but confused by the sudden emotional shift.

Even U-Olga stopped muttering long enough to glance up from her pile of pillows.

Angra, for his part, blinked slowly.

He gestured lazily at his own chest. "What? This?" he said, grinning. "I know it's a good look, but you're staring like I just stepped out of a dream. Careful now, Kama. You keep looking at me like that and I'll start thinking you've got a thing for me."

He winked.

He winked.

It was the kind of wink meant to provoke. To needle and embarrass. To stab at the hypocrisy of so-called goddesses and watch them flinch.

She didn't respond.

She stared a moment longer…

"…Maybe I do."

The words came slow. Dreamlike.

Her voice, when it left her lips, was the sound of someone remembering something they didn't want to remember, and not fighting it for once.

Angra froze.

No quip or snide remark prepared. He stared at her, mouth slightly open.

Kama turned away without another word, stepping calmly past the stunned Kiara, past the others, and entered the kitchen. She moved towards the shelf and opened drawers, pulling out pans and knives and cutting boards. Her hands moved with domestic grace, which was somehow more terrifying. She was cooking.

"What the hell…" Koyanskaya whispered from the counter, soda halfway to her lips, her usual act breaking with visible confusion. "Is this a bit?"

"No," said Kiara slowly. "She's remembering someone else's love."

"Aaaahhhh."

Fou flicked his ears and curled tighter in her lap.

And Angra, the man who laughed at salvation and scoffed at sincerity, looked down at his own shirt, as to him, it had become a mirror. And in that mirror, perhaps, he had seen a boy who had once wanted to save everyone.

A boy who died long ago.

Or perhaps hadn't.

He frowned.

The groaning of the attic door interrupted his thoughts.

The light in the corridor dimmed unnaturally, Goetia descended the narrow stairwell, expression unreadable, golden irises devoid of fatigue, even as the air hissed faintly behind him with the remnants of ritual symbols dissolving in his wake.

As he stepped onto the landing, the smell of sulfur, candlewax, and ozone clung to him like ritual incense trapped in a robe that had long since been burned.

"External magical presences have congregated within proximity of the property's threshold," he stated, descending fully into the living room as he addressed the others. "Four total. Not civilians. Structured magical signatures. Ritual patterning inconsistent with human sorcery. Supernatural origin. They seem to be in a covert observation. Proficiency is abysmal."

There was a pause.

Then he tilted his head.

"As such, I calculate a 97.1% probability that they are beneath our concern."

Nobody moved.

After all, they all already knew.

Draco didn't even look up from the spot she had claimed by the window. She had sensed it five minutes earlier, but as always, she was disinclined to react to nuisances when annihilation was the more efficient option.

"They're still here?" she said, her tone cool and distant, as though speaking about insects that had failed to die after being poisoned. "Eliminate them. We've tolerated enough irrelevance for one day."

"I disagree," said Kiara, reclining now across two cushions, one leg lifted and delicately crossed over the other, like a goddess waiting to be worshipped. "We extracted such delightful information from the last batch of humans. And these, being non-human, may offer even more revelations. I would so love to peel back their intentions, one layer at a time. Politely, of course."

Draco's expression didn't change, though her disgust was felt.

"You enjoyed that," she said with distaste.

"Yes, and I will again."

Beast I had frozen in place mid-thought. There was a recursive error in his mind.

His head turned slowly. Very slowly.

At the kitchen, something had upended the balance of expectations.

There was Kama.

Wearing a lavender sweater, her sleeves slightly rolled. Standing at the stove. Humming. With a frying pan in her hand. She flipped something with an elegant motion. Oil sizzled.

And hummed again.

It was not a beautiful melody. It was a mundane tune. Familiar. A human hum. The sound of someone content. Not pretending. Still, simply... humming.

Goetia blinked.

"…Why is Kama preparing sustenance?" he asked, voice flat but visibly staggered by the inconsistency of input. "That action pattern is anomalous. Contradictory to her function. I do not detect a coercive force acting upon her. Explain."

Everyone turned.

To Angra.

As if the blame must, somehow, be his.

"Don't look at me like that!" Angra said, arms thrown halfway into the air in protest. "I didn't ask her to cook. Hell, I was expecting her to start melting cookware or throw shade at the ingredients when she got there. This is new for me too."

"She's humming," Goetia added. "Humming. This is far more concerning than any magical presence outside."

"She's remembering something buried. That's all i can say.'" Kiara said, fingers gently grazing the rim of her wine glass.

"... Ah. The human girl." murmured Koyanskaya under her breath. "The vessel."

"Fou."

And as if on cue, the trouble came.

~FoDxD~

Raynare hovered just above the treetops, black wings folding in and out in a twitch. Her eyes were locked on the glowing signatures emerging from the house below. The spiritual pressure shouldn't exist in this town.

"There's a barrier in Kuoh. No one's allowed to manifest this much magical energy. This should be impossible."

"It's not one source." Kalawarna noted, adjusting her grip on the light spear she conjured. "It's a cluster, and all of them are beyond what we're equipped for."

"That house. It feels like a god is sleeping in it." Mittelt said, eyes wide.

Raynare squinted.

"Humans live there. We checked. It was only recently something changed."

Dohnaseek said nothing, but his gaze flickered.

Raynare clenched her jaw.

"We go in," she ordered. "Now. Before the Church finds out or the Devils make contact. This town's supposed to be ours. If a power that strong nests here, we lose everything."

The angels of shadow descended.

The front door shattered inward.

...with the stupidity and force only born of underestimation.

Glass exploded.

Wood splintered.

And standing there, framed in the wreckage, were four fallen angels, each armed, wings flared, spears raised, expressions taut with bravado that hadn't yet wilted into fear.

For one second, silence ruled.

And then every eye in the room turned to look at them.

All of them.

All of them.

Golden eyes. Burning eyes. Unblinking. Godless. Loveless. Beautiful. Horrifying.

Tiamat blinked slowly. Kiara didn't rise. Draco didn't speak. Kama didn't stop humming.

And at the center of them all, standing by the recliner, Angra stretched and said lazily:

"Well... guess the flies found the honey."

Chapter 3: Names Writ in Sin of Beasts

The air settled into brittle awkwardness of miscalculation.

The suddenly pale Raynare stared.

These were not humans.

A small, disarmingly young woman with golden horns, twisted elegantly like a crown, on the couch like a queen at court. Her crimson eyes regarded them as if she were looking at rot. Her aura churned with something ancient and malicious cruelty, like the embodiment of every catastrophe born from scripture.

To her right, another woman reclined with one leg crossed, giving the impression of a courtesan and a messiah blended into one being. Her eyes were knowing. She smiled like sin personified, making Raynare think her soul had already been categorized, judged, and found hilariously wanting.

A third woman hummed in the kitchen, her back turned, but her pale lavender hair was visible, presence wrapped around the house like a veil of perfume that had soaked into every wall.

Then the man with tattoos.

Black spirals and glyphs are carved into his skin. He leaned against the doorframe with the bored confidence of a man who'd watched worlds burn and found the experience mundane.

And standing beside him—dear God—was another man, if the term could even apply, with luminous golden hair that seemed to flow with its own gravitational field. His gaze didn't even acknowledge the Fallen.

"Wh-what are you?" one of her subordinates, Mittelt asked, her voice cracking slightly. "What are you people?"

She hadn't even realized she'd said it aloud until silence answered her.

Kiara turned her head, smile widened by a fraction. The ignorance amused her.

"They're the ones trying to intimidate us?"

The one seated by the window spoke.

"I don't believe they're trying," Kama called from the kitchen, still humming between lines. "It's just the best they can do."

"They're inefficient. Three females, one male. Biology similar to human, but the essence is modified along with supernatural augmentation detected. Source of power appears extrinsic. I can conclude their weaponry is light-based. Current energy output is negligible." Goetia said coldly.

"They're ugly." Koyanskaya chimed in helpfully, arms crossed under her bust. True to her words, the intruders are like some cheap low-tier mooks trying to gatecrash a party meant for gods.

"I like the wings. Feathered. Traditional. Angelic type. But not pure. Corrupted? Fallen." Kiara mused, eyes trailing along Raynare's spread feathers.

Goetia's gaze flickered.

"That term holds significance." he said.

Kama stirred something in the pan. She said, "I can smell it. They reek of former holiness and despair. Cast out from something pure, if you ask me. Pride and lust and something petty. Hm…"

Tiamat blinked slowly.

Angra tilted his head.

"Fallen angels," he repeated, testing the taste of the term. "As in biblical? Huh. That narrows it down. So we're really in that kind of world."

Raynare's eyes widened. "You—You know what we are?"

They weren't answering her.

That's because they don't have the intention to.

They were discussing her and the others like a lab sample or a new insect species to be squashed or preserved based on mood.

Kama tapped the spoon against the edge of the pan, still not looking at them. "But that explains the spiritual scent. Half-holy, half-sin. Think of a lukewarm wine in a stolen chalice."

"They're tethered to a theological system." Goetia muttered, voice narrowing in analytic intensity. "Which means there is a cosmological law native to this realm that mirrors Abrahamic frameworks."

"Don't ignore me!" Raynare snapped, her wings flaring outward.

She gritted her teeth. Mockery. Analysis. Disdain. Every second that passed in their presence felt like a scalpel being dragged across her pride.

"I don't care what you freaks are. You're in our territory, our city! You don't belong here!"

Kalawarna and Dohnaseek raised their weapons, cautiously copying her stance. Mittelt's hands trembled slightly. None of them had ever felt like this powerless just by standing near someone.

"We will remove you." Raynare growled and then she threw the spear.

A lance of light, pure and radiant, materialized in her hand and soared across the room like a comet.

It moved fast.

Still, a big mistake form the Fallens.

Because the moment it was released, a hand reached up lazily and plucked it from the air.

U-Olga Marie Animusphere, Beast VII, tilted her head, yawning slightly. Did she just wake up from a nap?

The Holy light crackled and hissed in her palm. She blinked at it, unamused.

"Holy-element magic?" she muttered. "That's new."

She crushed it with her fingers.

The light shrieked and fizzled out like a dying star.

It was a different silence now.

Because in that instant, with the appearance of light and holiness, the atmosphere shifted.

Goetia's gaze darkened, his brow furrowing as implications fell into place like the final pieces of a forbidden theorem.

"Light manipulation," he said slowly. "Holy-aligned conceptual structure. Weaponized purity... That's Heaven."

Kiara's eyes gleamed. "So we were right," she said. "The smell of God clings to them."

"Which god?" Koyanskaya mused. "I've known a few. Most of them unpleasant."

Kama finally turned from the stove, holding a steaming dish in her hands, expression unreadable now.

"…It's that God," she said softly. "The One."

And everyone turned to look at their poor victims again.

A pressure, not unlike the gravitational collapse of a dying star, coalesced into the room from a single figure.

There was no warning.

A singularity of intent made manifest in aura, and it fell upon the four uninvited guests.

Raynare's knees struck the wooden floor so hard her femur nearly splintered. Her scream caught in her throat, trapped beneath the pressure of something immense and cosmically powerful like the ceiling of the world had buckled downward to personally crush her spine. Her throat locked; her breath failed to move; voice unable to come out.

Dohnaseek gasped out of terror, the sort of dry sob that precedes the realization that death would be preferable. His wings spasmed violently, feathers scattering, as he clawed at the floor in a desperate crawl away from whatever it was.

Kalawarna threw up. Mittelt simply convulsed and didn't get back up. The former tried to clawed at her chest like something had punched through her sternum and kept twisting. Their sounds were swallowed mid-birth. Tears welled unbidden from the sort of primal terror reserved for those who feel themselves become prey.

No one saw who it was at first. The source wasn't obvious. Not a flare of magic and a spiritual surge.

It was something deeper. A roiling black tide that clawed at the soul. The sort of aura that made even death beg to be forgotten.

Raynare finally looked up, with bloodshot eyes and trembling jaw and saw her. The woman at the window.

Draco hadn't moved an inch.

Just sat, cold-eyed and distant. Her aura had ignited for less than a second, and the very architecture of the house had groaned as reality bent slightly inward to accommodate the weight of a creature who had walked the edges of Revelation and found the judgment lacking.

"Pitiful..." Draco said, each syllable crystalline with disdain. "Is this the kind of 'Supernatural' you allow to roam free in this age? Small minds in fragile shells, barking like critters thinking themselves divine?"

Raynare's lips quivered, she could not speak. Every thought she tried to form was crushed beneath the spiraling terror that this—this—this existence had not even truly acted yet. If this was her passive pressure, what would it be like were she to fight?

"Oh my," Koyanskaya's voice drifted in. "I didn't think someone that basic would snap so easily."

The fox stood in the center of the room with a composed smile. Heels clicking lightly on the floor as she stepped forward. Her ears twitched, as if she were listening to a frequency only she could hear... a frequency made up of suffering, shame, and fear. A predator in full command of a room filled with twitching prey.

"What a waste of feathers." she said, voice light and silken, even as her shadow seemed to elongate behind her. "I was hoping you'd last a little longer. After all, this wasn't meant to be an execution. Just a meeting of minds. A professional inquiry you can call it."

Her smile widened. Something beneath it curled.

"Unfortunately, you failed your opening presentation."

Raynare couldn't move. Her soul was sliding. Sliding into an old abyss, the kind her kind had been birthed from and exiled into. But this abyss wasn't Hell. It was apathy.

Vitch crouched before Raynare, smiling the smile of a fox that had just found a henhouse full of blind chicks. "How about we play a game, dear? It's a very simple one. You see, I need information. You want mercy. I love power dynamics like that. Don't you?"

Raynare shuddered.

The pressure was still mounting internally now. A set of claws—ethereal, psychic, serpentine—slithered into her head.

Memory.

"Wha—wait—stop—"

Unspooling the fabric of who Raynare was—thread by agonizing thread. She felt her thoughts being peeled, her memories unwrapping like fruit skin under a practiced knife with only will.

And Koyanskaya's will was cruel, refined, and exquisitely efficient.

"Information acquisition is an art," the Beast said, crouching down beside Raynare's shaking form. "You don't gouge too deep. That causes shock. You don't go too fast. That causes denial. You go slow. Very slow. You slide into the gaps, the cracks and you explore."

Her fingers grazed Raynare's temple, and for a moment, the Fallen's body seized as her entire life rushed through her in quick flashes; her fall from Heaven, her bitterness, her jealousy, her seduction missions, her lies, her years of silent irrelevance.

Every memory, every sin, every plan, every failure, was peeled back. Slowly. With deliberate hesitation, like a sadist taking her time with a meal. The process was both invasive and was humiliating. Each image was slowed, replayed, poked at, examined aloud. Through it all, Koyanskaya walked, absorbing every detail.

"Ah, I see now. So you work under this 'Grigori' organization, once angelic, now demoted. Yes, yes—oh, you're trying to weaponize Sacred Gears? How quaint. And you were hoping to collect a human boy with a Longinus class Sacred Gear to rise through the ranks? That's just… adorable."

Grigori. Azazel. The Watchers. The fall of the Angels. The schism. The war. The isolation. The Sacred Gears.

"Delicious. Absolutely delicious. I haven't seen flies try to play gods with this much confidence since… well. Ever."

Raynare's body twitched as if electrocuted.

Tears streamed now.

The others were pleading now, offering names, secrets, anything to make it all stop.

Kalawarna sobbed about headquarters. Dohnaseek gave up command hierarchies and known outposts. Mittelt even begged Koyanskaya for a master—she would serve, she said. Just make it stop.

Raynare broke first...

... in submission.

Her face hit the floor with a dull thud as she gasped out, voice cracking into hysterics.

"Please, stop—I'll talk—Grigori, Azazel, anything, I'll tell you—I-I didn't know—we didn't know—we didn't think—"

"Oh, I know you didn't. You never do."

Koyanskaya rose smoothly, brushing imaginary dust from her coat.

She looked back at the others.

"Well then. They'll be useful."

Her voice echoed, filled with a steel wire of amused contempt.

"A splintered faction of self-righteous failures, clinging to relevance through espionage and the gambling of children's souls. Quite the social club."

Kiara watched the scene with deep interest, Kama leaned against the counter while sipping broth directly from the ladle, and Goetia's expression had gone almost coldly pleased, but only in the way an executioner acknowledges a blade's sharpness.

The informational worth was marginally acceptable, but the tactical potential was low.

Fallen Angels, deviated from Heaven's line, but still bound to Judeo-Christian cosmology. To Goetia, their organizational structure implies a fractured divinity.

"Your thoughts," Koyanskaya asked him, "on the Sacred Gear system?"

"…They are parasitic divine constructs embedded within human vessels. Designed to forcibly interface mortal willpower with mythic potential. The architecture is crude. A remnant, no, something similar to divine automation by God attempting to grant mortals structured transcendence. There is modular variance between gears: some weaponized, some conceptual, some capable of interfacing with higher-order phenomena—'Twilight Healing', 'Boosted Gear', 'Annihilation Maker', et cetera."

He paused.

"…I see the design," he said. "It is not elegant."

"It's blasphemous," Kama added, voice languid. "To give them miracles they did not earn. And in doing so, strip the miracle of meaning. Sacrifice without sacredness. Sacrament without sorrow."

Koyanskaya tilted her head.

"They're toys," she said. "Weapons stuffed into defective hosts, most of which die before maturing. More like desperation."

Kiara's eyes gleamed, though she made no move. "Still, desperation has always been a fertile ground for devotion. And devotion for corruption. I might find them charming after all."

Angra snorted softly.

"Congratulations to the God of this world. He's managed to create the celestial equivalent of a pyramid scheme. Empower the insects just enough to fight each other, never enough to challenge Him. Classic."

Draco's gaze remained on the trembling Fallen. She gave an exasperated sigh.

"Was there ever a reason to let them speak?"

"There's always a reason," Kiara purred. "Letting them realize how worthless they are before they die? That's so much more satisfying."

A flat stare, then turned back.

"They built their system on instability," she said. "Angels who fall from pride. Demons or Devils who grow from ambition. Humans mutated into weapons. And when any of them break… the structure collapses. A spiritual architecture built on rot."

"—mercy—"

Raynare choked.

Not from speech, but from being forgotten. She realized no one was speaking to her anymore. She wasn't even the subject. She had become a data point, one not even worth plotting.

"Please," she whispered hoarsely. "Mercy. I swear, I—!"

Koyanskaya pressed a finger to her lips.

"Oh, we know," she said sweetly. "That's the only reason you're still breathing."

And somewhere behind them, Tiamat gave a low, mournful hum.

"Aaahhhhhh."

Like a mother saddened by watching a child set a forest on fire and wonder why it burns.

"Fou." Defeated by curiosity, crushed by irrelevance.

Koyanskaya looked down at the whimpering Fallens, black feathers molting, sticking to sweat-soaked flesh. Their mouths had long since forgotten how to scream properly, their voices broken into hoarse whispers and useless blubber. Their minds partially melted from the weight of a godless terror. Whatever dignity they carried as operatives of the Grigori had long since fled, crawling out from their nostrils, leaking from their eyes, and oozing in twitching spasms from their tongues. Even the most depraved mongrels of the corporate underworld had managed more pride than this.

"Truly pathetic," Koyanskaya said at last with a sigh. "When it came to their thoughts, I didn't even need to go searching with such delicacy."

She waved her hand a subtle trail of pink fog laced with psychic residue shimmered through the air like blood vapors from a fresh corpse. A hunter did not simply kill the rabbit. She made it run in loops first.

"The concept is pedestrian. They call them Evil Pieces. An appropriated system derived from the old games of kings and knights—a peerage structure as childish as it is insidious. Devils implant fragments of themselves, these 'Pieces,' into selected humans or corpses to forcibly reincarnate them under their command. It is grotesque in a manner that tries too hard to appear noble. A devil can have up to fifteen of these toys in their little collection. Their effectiveness relies upon compatibility and soul capacity, but, ultimately, it is slavery no matter how one sugarcoats the branding."

In simple, a system of reincarnation, modified through infernal spellcraft and the artificial implantation of heritage markers…

Moreover, a chessboard of devils reworking the cycle of souls into state-sanctioned resurrection, reeking of inefficiency and desperation. The Beasts suppose that is all that remains for those scraping the edges of a dying theology.

"Wow. Evil Pieces. And here I thought the name was ironic. But no… no, the absolute philistines actually called it that in full seriousness, didn't they?" Angra smirked before anyone responded.

"Those guys are really something else. Satan fell once for pride, and they… and you all all fell for PowerPoint presentations. Is that what it takes these days to become divine rejects? Jesus. Well, not literally Jesus. He's got better taste."

"I mean, did none of the Devils think for even one hot second that maybe calling their soul-hacking horror-chess 'Evil Pieces' might be a dead giveaway? They're supposed to be the subtle ones. The snakes. The whispers. What the hell happened to being sinister with class?"

There was a pause, but it was not silence. One of the Fallen groaned as if trying to interject some plea, but the sound died beneath Tiamat's tail, gently pressing down with such maternal care that Fallen Angel bones audibly creaked like frost-bitten branches. The Dragon of Life hummed. It wasn't a threat; it was encouragement. Keep speaking, fox.

"Oh, but I haven't even shared the juiciest piece yet," Koyanskaya cooed, eyes glowing with merciless glee. "One of our dear darlings here, her name is Raynare, if anyone cares to remember the stains of unimportance—had concocted a plan. A very human plan, too. Seduce a boy. Target: Issei Hyoudou. Pathetic specimen and has very little cognitive activity. Date him. Raynare intends to isolate and kill him disguised as a student. Use emotional manipulation, how quaint, and then, in a wonderfully theatrical betrayal, prevent him from awakening his Sacred Gear. Adaptive potential. Host appears unaware of it. Typical filth; they've confused divine remnants for collectibles and mistaken cruelty for cleverness."

She turned. "Not only that, but she also intends to use a nun, an actual girl of some devotion named Asia Argento—what a delicious name, almost poetic—as a source of additional benefit. The girl's holy Sacred Gear allows her to heal others. Valuable, yes? Too valuable to let walk freely, so of course our bird planned to take her like a coin purse, use her, drain her, and discard her."

"Of course she did," Angra drawled, "What's a few broken lives to creatures already living on borrowed morality? It's a wonder they don't name themselves after vultures. But then, vultures have the decency to only eat the dead. These little demons prefer their meat young and naïve. Must be a celestial thing, getting tossed from Heaven knocked out the part of their brains that developed shame."

Kama grin curled into something far too wide. It was charming. The sacrificial virgin and the pig-witted pervert boy. Just the kind of story that would make her vomit her own essence in a lesser world. She almost want to see it happen just to taste the flavor of their grief.

He tilted his head toward the nearest crawling one—Mittelt, who was across the ground, bloodied, her wings twitching with every word. "Tell me, little wing-rat, did you enjoy the part where you pretended to be better than others? Was the mask fun to wear, knowing the rot behind it festered with every breath? You had your own pride, didn't you? The look in your eyes when you thought humans were beneath you. The fun in dangling affection before them like worms on a hook. You thought you were in control. That's the most delicious lie."

Mittelt tried to cry even more, but Angra leaned forward, one VOID eye meeting hers like an abyss. "You're not even worthy of being hated."

He waved a hand lazily. "Do what you want with them. But be creative. Let them suffer a little longer. Or don't. I don't really care. They already lost the moment they started thinking."

Kama sneered. "Humans are fools, but at least their idiocy is romantic. These things… these Fallen… they are just imitation sinners. It's almost insulting, really, that they pretend to know desire. The nun they intend to break, at least she believes in something—faith, guilt, love. These pests? They only pretend to want. There's nothing genuine in them. Just greasepaint on a corpse."

Suddenly, Draco stepped forward in inevitability. The sound of her heel across stone was the only punctuation she gave to what came next. Her voice was cold enough to silence even Angra's smirk for a breath, it was verdict.

"This world breeds corruption like spores. But these beings are are willful cultivators of degradation. There is no nobility in them. No necessity in their pain. Just rot given wings." Her crimson eyes glinted not with opposition.

"I do not indulge in punishment. But I do not allow infection to remain."

A motion. Swift, clean, almost unnoticeable; save for the result. Embers consumed skins. The sound of falling bodies simply ceased existing where they knelt, all but one.

Raynare gasped, found herself spared, though the heat of death still clung to her. Terror constriced her throat tighter than chains.

"You will be kept," Draco stated without inflection. "Not for mercy. Not for sympathy. For use. Make yourself useful. That is all the chance you shall receive."

"Use her deceit as proof of this world's corrosion."

She turned her back without ceremony.

Koyanskaya conjured a containment sigil to hold the fallen girl's soul in stasis. That was what you did with raw materials when they still had data to yield.

"Any objections?" she asked, not even looking.

Angra raised his hand lazily, then let it flop back down like a fish.

"No, no. By all means. I think she's going to love being a case study. Who knows, maybe we'll even teach her how to play real chess." His smile was all rot.

U-Olga huffed, arms crossed, visibly annoyed. "Tch. Not even worth dismembering. Why do we even entertain such worms? We should be preparing to conquer whatever this world thinks it is. These toys, these 'gears,' these 'pieces'—why do they all sound like mechanisms made by idiots?"

Goetia, who had remained silent, finally responded. "These Sacred Gears are divine leftovers, fragmented instruments fused into the human soul at the time of their emergence. Meanwhile, the Evil Piece System is an artificial adaptation, an inferior mimicry designed to compensate for a dying lineage. It is only logical that beings who have lost access to primal mythos seek to replicate them in lesser form. Like apes mimicking the gods that once ruled."

Kiara stretched languidly with her arms behind her head. "Ahhh, I do love this little world already. So many toys. And so much potential for awakening." She turned, half toward Goetia, with a sly glint. "Don't you think I'd make a lovely Queen Piece? Mmm, or perhaps something more... dominant?"

The golden-eyed magus of humanity did not respond. He did not even deign to glare.

Kiara pouted. "You're no fun."

Koyanskaya stepped away from the Fallen corpse pile and dusted her hands. "In any case, we now know where to begin. That boy and the nun. I believe it is time we investigate them."

"Aaahhhhhh." Tiamat said.

"Yes, I'm aware we still have to decide how to play this game. But for now, let's not fall behind schedule. There's only so much I can wring from brain mush."

"Fou," muttered the tiny beast near her heel.

They dragged the unconscious Raynare across the grass like a sack of spoiled meat, her pitiful murmurs squelched. Koyanskaya led the handling of their captive with her usual uncaring efficiency, guiding the group to the basement of a nearby abandoned mansion—likely once owned by some pathetic exorcist too naïve to believe in entropy.

The basement was crude and mold-ridden, but with a flick of her claw-tipped finger and a quick chant under her breath, Koyanskaya etched a spell circle so thin, so shallow, that any seasoned sorcerer would have mistaken it for an afterthought.

It can be called as a confinement of cancellation. A restriction spell so minor in scope it would not trigger the alarms of any latent surveillance of infernal bureaucracies. It was insidious precisely because of its simplicity: a lawless isolation field that interpreted the target's spiritual wavelength as an error in divine mathematics, a subtraction of her presence from the world. Raynare would remain forgotten within the villa's false basement.

The spell's origin was a discarded leftover from Kiara Sessyoin's library, something she had once crafted out of amusement in a heretical nunnery. It had originally been used to silence saint-candidates whose flesh could not endure the violation of her divinity. She had donated it with an impish smile, more out of caprice than charity.

It pulsed with a restraint force unlike any ward cast by priests or demons alike. No exits. No breathing that went unnoticed. She was neither asleep nor unconscious. She was awake, and that was punishment enough. Awareness without action, what the ancient magi called the "Mercy of the Inquisitor." This place was now a cage with invisible bars tuned to Raynare's own heartbeat.

The door closed with an unceremonious click. Kiara, standing by the staircase, stretched her hips slowly, rolling like silk folding over flesh. Her violet eyes half-lidded, she exhaled in delight. "Mmm… it's been quite some time since I've been in a basement like this. Not quite my usual arrangement, but it is intimate about filth, don't you think?"

Kama rolled her eyes at the foul taste she was tired of spitting out. "You're always so obsessed with carnal pits. Try exercising some restraint. Better yet, try loving someone other than your narcissistic self. No, actually… don't. The world might explode if you did."

Angra chuckled and waved a hand. "Leave her be, Kama. Everyone has their coping mechanisms. Kiara's just happens to be indulging in herself because no one else can suffer through the tragedy of trying to love her."

Kiara smirked. "Darling, I do enjoy it when you speak of me with such venom. It makes the nectar all the sweeter."

"Still, it was surprisingly easy," he drawled, reclining on a conjured chaise that bent at the spine like a half-living centipede, arm draped over the back. "I expected more from the creatures that once fired the first arrows of defiance at Heaven. In the Bible, these are no warriors. They're feral bureaucrats with wings and adolescent delusions. You could smear them on a page and call it performance art."

He tilted his head toward the place where Raynare had been dragged. His grin was unkind, perhaps unnecessarily so, but that was the point—kindness was itself the first lie of civilization.

"Their fall wasn't glorious. They didn't fall for love, or fury, or the seduction of freedom. They fell because they lacked the intelligence to follow through with their faith. Petty ambition, jealousy, teenage drama performed with apocalyptic stakes. I expected Milton. Instead I got a daytime soap."

Draco cast him only a sidelong glance. She detested his commentary, not because it was untrue, but because he delighted in the futility of things. She despised futility, and Angra was theatrics in entropy's costume.

She said nothing. That was enough.

From what Vitch extracted through the girl's psychic sputters, the Fallen are no longer the Apostate Legion of poetic theology. They are, rather tragically, a fledgling sect splintered by resource scarcity, organizational disrepair, and desperate, disjointed plans to retain relevance.

"Aaahhhhh..."

"I agree. Utterly boring. If this is what passes for sin these days, then I weep for Hell. I mean, truly—they thought seducing a hormonal adolescent and extracting a Sacred Gear from a nun was some kind of masterstroke? I've seen single termites with more malicious forethought. At least they tunnel before they collapse the house."

"Oh, but don't be so flippant," Koyanskaya cut in. "In their own primitive, simian little way, it was quite devious. Girl uses beauty and manufactured trauma to ensnare an emotionally stunted boy, while their other operatives manipulate a sanctified girl—Asia Argento, yes?—who, ironically, holds a Sacred Gear that can grant miracles."

Her smirk widened as she added, "And apparently, these Evil Pieces that the Devils use are based on chess. I find that adorable. Games to dress up human trafficking. They convert humans into devils using these fragments, inserting them like computer hardware. Frankly, I'm impressed their satanic hardware has plug-and-play compatibility."

"Repulsive. How can anyone respect a hierarchy built on games and emotionally unstable sex fiends?" U-Olga hissed.

Angra tilted his head. "Ah, but isn't that the human condition? Lust, power, and the illusion of sophistication. You should feel right at home."

"You verminous thing—!"

"Fou."

The beast bounded past Kiara's feet, momentarily pulling everyone's attention. Kiara's hand drifted to her lips, posture indulgently demure.

"Oh my, even the little one knows when tempers should be doused. Perhaps we should be more... civil. Isn't that right, Kama?"

Kama gave a mirthless smile. Her eyes sparkled, but only with loathing.

"Ah? Yes, yes. Let's calm down and be civil—no, you shut up and zipped that unholy mouth of yours with a needle. You're not civil, you're simply too absorbed in your own reflection to commit real cruelty. Devotion without capacity. Desire without sacrifice. An empty chalice."

Kiara was unoffended. "Oh? You cannot even love the vessel that gave you form. How tragic. Even your hatred is affectionate. Even your cruelty is codependence."

Kama clicked her tongue, but her smile remained. "At least I don't seduce with an empty womb."

"Enough."

Goetia suddenly cut in.

"I must now report something anomalous." His voice was devoid of inflection, yet the room bent subtly in temperature, even Angra, leaned forward now. There was sobriety behind Goetia's voice.

"Through both structural observation and planetary geomancy, I have located the origin-point of this world's theological systems. To be precise: the Abrahamic God of this dimension. A construct functionally similar to the Prime Originator of monotheism across the multiverse; Creator-class, Planetary Oversoul-tier, omnipotence adjacent. The very one they name as the God of the Bible."

He paused. Goetia's expression was unchanged but there was a sliver of something in his tone that sounded like... confusion.

"However, He is not acting."

A deeper silence fell. The sort of silence that occurs when logic decays in the presence of absence.

"Given the events of the last several centuries on this planet; the decimation of Heaven's hierarchy, the collapse of Edenic balance, and now the summoning of Beasts of Calamity into the human sphere—there should have been divine intervention. At the very least, detection. The theological surveillance structures are in place. The code-pulse of divine circuitry is present. Nevertheless… He is not. There is no command signal. The throne of light exists. But it is empty."

"He exists. His signature is undeniable. His parameters persist across multiple dimensional lenses. Even now, His spiritual presence permeates the heavenly construct. However, what remains an oddity is His silence for years."

Most tilted their heads.

It was confounding of course. Silent? During all this? When His so-called angels fell to lust, when devils turned genocide into recruitment, when His faithful were slaughtered by tyrants of Hell and theocratic betrayal? And now, when them, His antitheses, are summoned into the skin of His world?

But the implication settled like ash. Kiara stopped her posturing. Draco brittle like winter frost cutting glass.

"Even if a god dies, the structure of belief often outlives Him. But if He lives and does not speak, then the silence is judgment."

U-Olga trembled slightly from what felt like the existential betrayal of principle. Tiamat cooed low again, something close to sorrow.

And Goetia concluded, voice devoid of emotion, "If He is watching, then He is allowing this. And if He is not... then someone else is. Either answer bodes poorly for this world."

No one replied for a time.

Understanding had never felt so close to an accusation.

Angra laughed.

Not politely. He laughed as if the concept of a dead God was not tragedy, but farce made real. As if the idea that humanity had outlived its Maker was the punchline of a joke told across aeons, only now understood.

"So the Big Guy's just… gone?" He dragged the words, grinning as he turned them over like a thief inspecting stolen coins. "Silent as the grave, huh? That explains a lot. I thought it was just bad writing."

U-Olga snarled. "To build such an unstable architecture of faith, fill it with petty players and broken toys, and then abandon it entirely? That's a dereliction."

"Whether this God is dead, silent, or in exile, we must treat His absence as operational fact. If He is no longer present, then the command logic of this world's moral architecture is faulty; erratic systems will continue to produce irregular consequences. Fallen Angels acting without restraint, Devils expanding with unchecked mutation, and humans acquiring sacred technologies through random deviation."

Goetia folded his hands, eyes dimming like twin dying stars.

"There is no order. Only simulations of it. The Divine has not simply disappeared. It has been forgotten."

And that, perhaps, was the most damning judgement of all.

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The attic's silence was nearly tangible, disturbed only by the minute hum of arcane threads unspooling beneath Goetia's fingers. Layer by layer, line by line, he carved his Territory with the precision of a divine artisan. Goetia did not do things to feel, but to complete. That was the nature of his being: to fulfill his task with absolute execution, unsullied by inefficiency, unseduced by temptation. When the others began to drift, one by one, into the night air, his mind did not so much as flicker in recognition. Their absence was not a hindrance to his purpose.

He had long since retreated to the space most suited to his needs, isolated just as a proper workshop should be. Territory Creation was not an art, despite what fools like Merlin or Colchis' Witch would claim. It was a system. A system of layered protocols, overlapping geometries, self-replicating constructs, and preservation glyphs interwoven with defensive matrices. It was labor, but not effort. Goetia operated as a mechanic of divine circuits, calibrating the spatial nodes of an architecture he already knew by heart. Outside noise was irrelevant. The organic-minded constructs he resided with could scatter across Kuoh for all he cared; they were never meant to function in alignment.

Angra, on the other hand, had no such burdens. He was the first to leave. He made no noise as he did so, yet somehow managed to make his departure feel as though he had just thrown something at a glass wall and grinned while it cracked. Hr scratched the back of his head and muttered to no one in particular.

"Well, I'm going to get some fresh air. Not that this world has much left to offer beyond a few urban ghost stories."

Naturally, others followed. Staying in a room with Kiara's musky omnipresence or Draco's silence was no less a burden.

Kama was next. "Well, if it's boredom we're chasing, I'd rather chase yours than the unmentionable scent of that woman upstairs."

If anything with an irritating lack of subtlety, like a perfume that couldn't help but smother everything it touched.

Tiamat did not speak. The dull rumble of her voice—an "Aaahhh" that echoed softly against the walls—was enough to signal her intent. Her gaze followed Angra, maternal but devoid of indulgence, like a tidal force responding to the moon's whim. She moved, and the others parted.

"Fou," the white beast chirped lightly, following his mother's footsteps. Whether out of affection or mischief, no one could quite tell. Not even Goetia.

U-Olga hesitated as the sounds of their exit faded behind her. Her pride told her to stay. Her instincts screamed otherwise. Remaining behind, alone, with the remaining two was not an appealing prospect. Not when one of them was Kiara, whose very breathing sounded like mockery dressed in silk. And certainly not with Draco, who responded to emotion with disdain and to questions with nothing at all.

"Ridiculous," she muttered. "It's not as though I'm going because I care. I just refuse to let that fake goddess be the only one observing this town."

She followed, arms crossed tightly like she were dragging her pride behind her. Clearly least willingly, she stomped out the door with a scowl carved into her cheekbones.

Koyanskaya came last, fashionably late, adjusting her coat with a theatrical flourish.

"You'd think the end of the world would come with better accommodations. But no, here we are playing night patrol with the least sociable members of an apocalypse committee."

They walked. The term "group" felt inappropriate, too cohesive. More like parallel vectors, each aligned only in their general direction but fundamentally incapable of intersection. The city's lights filtered through telephone wires and dark windows, casting Kuoh into a portrait of mundanity so painfully pure that it almost seemed staged.

Beneath the streetlights and modest suburban homes lay the throbbing residue of centuries of stagnation. The humans slept like larvae, unaware of how precarious their cocoons truly were.

Kama sniffed the air, her lip curling in disdain. "I wonder if any of these humans even feel the ruin they've constructed. It's truly impressive how well they lie to themselves. Even the children of this place walk like they've forgotten the concept of fear. How adorably revolting."

Angra could see the stains on the souls of those asleep. He could trace the moments they broke and never noticed. This world's peace was merely inertia, dressed up in prayer.

"It's all superficial," he said, almost concealing the acidity beneath it. "Their pride, their shame, their gods. Especially their gods. That reminds me, after what we heard about God."

Koyanskaya clicked her tongue against her cheek. "You say that as if it's surprising. Any god worth his breath would've swept this little nightmare of a town clean centuries ago. But then again, if I had underlings as embarrassing as theirs, I'd keep my head down too."

U-Olga folded her arms. "It's not that simple. Even if the system is corrupted, even if the mythos is bent out of shape, a god's silence is not natural. There is a missing variable. A rupture somewhere that we haven't located yet."

"Maybe He's dead." Angra said. Flatly. Like a grocery list item. "In a world as pathetic as this one, I doubt it would even be noticed."

Kama tilted her head. "Dead? For an omnipotent being? Or perhaps He's just given up. After all, there's only so many centuries you can spend watching monkeys pray while stabbing each other before you realize omnipotence is a punishment. If I were Him, I'd gouge my ears out."

"Fou." It was unclear if it was a protest or an agreement. With Fou, everything was a mystery, and that suited them just fine.

Every street was known, every alleyway memorized, not because they had explored them, but because knowledge stolen from broken minds had already painted Kuoh onto their brains. Yet walking it was different. There was meaning in treading upon soil rather than just knowing where it lay.

It was Tiamat who stopped first. Her feet touched ground too lightly for her size, but her instincts were absolute. She halted, raising her eyes toward a ruined silhouette on the distant edge of town.

"Aaahhh," she murmured, a sound that rippled through them all.

They followed her gaze. A church, or what remained of one. Burnt stone. Shattered stained glass. A corpse of sanctity left to rot.

The moment they drew near, every Beast felt an itch beneath the skin, the sensation of something old and soaked into the dirt. The church was defiled. Not in a way that could be seen, but in how the air coiled inward like breath around an open wound.

Kama sneered. "It reeks of deliberate sacrilege. Someone didn't just desecrate this place. They marinated it."

Koyanskaya nodded slowly. "There's residual spell structure. Old, fragmented. This was a funnel. Someone was filtering magical energy through this ground."

U-Olga looked at the cracked iconography with visible contempt. "To profane a place already soaked in dead divinity… how ironic. A monument to a God that died, turned into an artery to fuel more decay."

"No," Angra said finally, and his voice had that rare edge of interest. "It wasn't devils. Not entirely. This place was a project. Rituals were performed here. Often. Long before Raynare's circus act. There's something underneath."

The doors was rusted, the lock brittle from neglect. Kama reached out a single finger and it disintegrated, her existence alone corroded what little sacredness remained. They walked through like a procession of mockery, Beasts entering what had once been a house of God.

Floorboards moaning under their weight. Beneath the pulpit, past a shattered altar where no worship had reached in years, lay a hidden entrance.

They descended.

No one spoke as they stepped into the depths. The darkness welcomed them. Torches were unnecessary. Each of them could see clearly in the dark.

The chamber below was a ritual circle, massive, etched with clumsy but effective sacrificial glyphs. The walls were stained, with blood and hunger.

Kama folded her arms, scanning it all with disgust. "This is where they did it. Countless sacrifices."

"Fou…" came a low murmur.

Angra crouched, brushing his hand over a dried rune, cracking the brittle blood crusted into it. "They tried to erase something. Someone wanted this place forgotten even by those who used it."

"But why leave the access point? If they wanted it erased, this place should've collapsed." Koyanskaya looked around.

"Because they wanted to come back," Angra answered. "Because something was buried too deep to dig out in one ritual."

He stood, hands in pockets again, and smiled that weightless, cold smile of his.

"Quaint for a feeding tube into something long buried."

Chapter 4: Curs'd Gears near'd Beasts

The sun was barely cresting its throne in the sky, but already Kuoh Academy's daily activities had settled into place. Footfalls echoed across the polished tile, murmurs of adolescent ambitions stifled by routine, everyone else twitching at the prospect of school works.

Today was not any other day, however.

On this normal day, two unfamiliar draped in the effortless theater of mundane attire, and of course, nothing about them was ever truly mundane.

Their presence, though carefully dressed to mimic humanity; heels clicking gently against the pavement, swaying hips timed to the cadence of grace, soft laughter too delicate to be genuine, was a disturbance in the norm itself. An offense by appearance and essence. Varmints in disguise, playing the part of sheep so poorly that the flock could sense something wrong long before the wolves opened their mouths.

A certain woman with long pink hair had chosen a white silk blouse tucked just slightly too tight against her figure, white with blue undertones, cleanly pressed and tucked into a high-waisted black pencil skirt with a split that traveled just high enough to beg curiosity, all that screamed of corporate elegance. Her long legs moved like folded razors beneath that fabric. Pink hair tied in twin falls bounced with each step, and the subtle rustle of her clothes did little to dampen the effect she had on the senses of all who passed. It was the illusion of civility hiding how tightly coiled her true form was behind every blink. Her smile was delicately tailored to each student or staff member whose gaze lingered too long. And linger they did—oh, how they did.

Boys forgot their conversations mid-sentence, teachers stammered through instructions, and even the female students faltered, unsure if they envied her or feared her. Possibly both. Probably both.

The dark-haired woman beside her, in contrast, had opted for subtle seduction as her battlefield attire. Her dark, nearly violet hair fell behind her like a silken curtain, brushing across her back with every sway of her slim shoulders. The flowing cardigan hugging her shoulders betrayed nothing except the barest hint of her collarbone, yet it was enough for her. It's open at the collar far lower than modesty would typically allow, clung to her upper body like a wet second skin, deliberately one size too small to exaggerate the curve of her generous bust, each motion threatening to pull buttons into rebellion. Her black slacks were tight. She had chosen no heels, only flats, because any further elevation would have turned her into a living hallucination.

The woman did not walk so much. There was a rhythm to her every step that promised answers to questions unasked, promised sins the viewer hadn't even invented yet. The worst part, the true obscenity, was that she was enjoying every second of it. It was her nature, and denying that nature would be a crime against her self-ordained divinity.

Even Koyanskaya gave her a sideward glance as they crossed through the academy's front gate, derision battling behind her glasses. "You're going to get us lynched at this rate. This isn't even your usual level of restraint. Are you sure you're not trying to get us expelled before we can even find the boy?"

From hormonal boys loitering around the shoe lockers to the cleaning lady passing with her mop in hand, jaws were slackened, nostrils flared, and pulses pounding with the illusion of desire that neither woman genuinely reciprocated. One unfortunate sports instructor dropped his clipboard as they crossed the courtyard, unable to form words; a trio of third-year boys froze mid-joke, one even instinctively covering his nose in fear of bleeding from sheer overexposure.

"Who are they?"

"I think they're sisters…!"

"No way—maybe idols scouting the school?"

"Are they even human?"

"I'd say the one with the pink hair's a solid D-cup. Easy. Probably 86, maybe a 56 waist?"

"Forget that, the black-haired one's packing missiles. I'd bet 96... maybe 58 waist... and those hips… God damn."

Kiara unfurled her fingers with a gentle wave to no one in particular. A teacher nearly tripped on the steps. "Isn't it lovely, Koyanskaya-san? Stimulating. That frailty. That need. It leaks from their eyes even when they don't speak. This world has not had its fill of pain. That's all I'm saying."

"I don't remember volunteering for this kind of attention. You said we were observing, not performing."

"Observation does not require suppression. Unless you think seduction isn't the fastest path to knowledge, which I'd forgive you for, being a creature with such a functional view of life."

Koyanskaya adjusted her collar slightly. The fabric was too thin for her comfort. Human clothing itched more than it protected, and her patience with the lewd stares had long since evaporated into contempt. "Functionality is survival," she responded flatly, though her voice had a professional cadence that made it hard to tell whether she was bored or not. "Besides, I think the only reason we didn't bring Kama along is because her commentary would've turned this from recon into a public war crime."

The idea of Kama swaying down the halls, gleefully mocking every single hormonal male, and some females, until half the student body attempted self-harm just to cope, brought a tick of amusement to both of them.

Koyanskaya snorted under her breath, checking her phone. Just a screen to pretend to look at while she catalogued every street camera, every magic seal, and every defense mechanism the Devils had tried and failed to hide. Her role wasn't to titillate or revel; it was to observe, infiltrate, and survive. And if it came down to it, to run. Because if Kiara got serious, Koyanskaya would not throw herself into the flames beside her. She would leave the woman to burn, no matter how pretty the pyre.

"The target is in Class 3-B," she said at last, pocketing the phone with a soft clack. "From Raynare's memories, he should be dull-witted enough to snatch if things go awry. But Goetia was clear—he wants analysis, not a corpse."

Kiara hummed in acknowledgment, but her eyes were already roaming.

A flicker.

The faintest pressure like a needle prick behind the eye, rippled across the courtyard. A small resonance. Barely worth noting. But one of the Beasts turned her head ever so slightly, gaze locking like a hawk spotting a rabbit halfway buried in snow.

A girl had just stepped outside the classroom building, bento box in hand, clearly intending to eat on the bench beneath the sakura trees nearby. It was only supposed to be a routine lunch hour.

A normal moment in a school day already filled with the dullness of repetition and the faint undercurrent of tension. For Koneko Toujou, her hands froze mid-motion. Her ears, though hidden from mundane perception, twitched in involuntary alert, the subtle nerve beneath her pale skin tightening like drawn string as her nose caught a scent that had no right to exist in this plane.

Two figures. Casual. Unnatural beautiful. Eyes turned. Heads snapped. Lust, awe, confusion, obsession, all began to ferment in the invisible wake they trailed behind like perfume made of incense and old blood. Teachers, students, even the school nurse standing by a window froze witnessing something too sacred or too profane to be real. Koneko's eyes tightened.

Their shapes were the same as any woman, at least, to the untrained eye. Clothing casual enough to not appear suspicious. A smile so rehearsed it looked painted onto the face. Flesh that clung like silk over bodies that were never human, and beauty so concentrated it became hideous, the way a flower can look like a corpse to a bee if it bleeds too much nectar. One had pink hair, almost fox-like in its curled, mischievous framing of her feline smirk. The other wore midnight like a veil, hair as smooth and straight as water pouring in reverse.

And Koneko saw it.

And then they looked at her.

They smiled.

Kiara waved.

It was the most languid motion in the world. An elegant raise of the hand, palm out, fingers curling in a gesture that could mean anything and everything. Her smile widened, just enough to reveal the shark teeth beneath. Koyanskaya added a slight head-tilt, her faux-cuteness dialed to full intensity as if mocking the very notion of innocence.

Her entire body turned to ice.

It was worse than fear and the primitive urge to flee. Her soul trembled in its cage of bone and flesh, shrank, shriveled, whimpered. Something had looked at her that should not be able to look into her existence.

And for the briefest moment—

Reality folded.

The world around the two women peeled away, like paper soaked through with ink and rot. What stood in their place were not women. Not even in the same category of being.

The pink-haired silhouette was like the echo of a fox's corpse, seen through the lens of a nightmare one would rather never wake from. A shade. The shadow had color, twisted and searing at the edges, lined with the ember-bright glow of sunset fire reds, yellows, oranges licking like tongues at the edges of an outline too fluid to hold. Her shape writhed as memory itself couldn't fix her in place. She was juvenile, perhaps even unfinished, but there was nothing fragile or hopeful about it.

She was the Beast of Treasuring. It was not for what she had or for what she wanted. But for what she intended to take away. She did not wish to annihilate humanity with her own hands. No—there was something infinitely more repulsive than destruction in her desires.

She wanted to watch it. To enjoy it. To savor it.

"Let others do the work," the concept that bled from her form seemed to whisper into the marrow of Koneko's bones. "I'll simply treasure the carnage. Let it be magnificent."

The other one was equally horrifying. A monstrous bodhisattva forged from eroticism and self-worship, her true form towered in Koneko's mind like a religious hallucination carved from obsidian and breath. Her body was wrapped in the concept of dark, consuming pleasure, its curves accentuated only by the depthless shadows that hugged every inch of her demonic figure. Horns arched like cruel spires from her head, as if evolution had fused crown and weapon into a single, mocking symbol.

She was not love. She was not lust. She was not even sin. She was the final answer to those who drowned in their own reflections and called it enlightenment.

Desire. That was her name.

A creature who spoke of morals as long as they praised her. Who glorified the sanctity of life as long as it centered her. She would rescue the world if it meant the world would adore her more afterward. A saint built on the sin of perfect narcissism.

Her smile was not one of warmth or kindness. It was the curved blade of someone who had spent centuries learning how to mimic divinity and weaponize it into obsession.

Koneko's heart pounded from exertion of sheer primal pressure, the way a small animal might feel before the eyes of a predator that had learned to speak in kindness before feeding.

Her feet tried to move. Nothing. Her legs were numb. Her fingers twitched like dead leaves caught in a breeze of psychic static. Her tail, thankfully hidden, bristled.

They were walking past her now. Their heels clicked softly.

The world folded back.

Just two women. Smiling. Laughing. They whispered to one another, too soft to hear. The effect they left behind clawed at the walls of Koneko's perception was not neglected.

They were walking away.

Koneko fell to her knees, clutching at her chest, eyes wide, skin clammy, breathing ragged.

She knew.

She knew.

Far too evil. Beyond demonic. Something she believed that even the Underworld would recoil from like a living body from a festering wound. Something that existed outside mercy, beyond justice, and infinitely past the notion of sanity.

The fox and the nun continued walking, their destination still ahead.

Koyanskaya spoke. "The little nekomata recognizes us. And she's going to squeal, of course. Such loyalty. It'll be interesting to see who dies trying to protect this place first."

Kiara smiled without looking back, still walking. "Let them come. A stage means nothing without its actors, after all." Neither of them looked behind them again. They had already started the clock.

Her heart pulsated rapidly. Her feet moved, though she could not feel them touch the ground. The steps she took left behind no sound she could register. The space between the courtyard and the abandoned dormitory that housed the Occult Research Club suddenly seemed twisted in scale, as though every breath she took was not oxygen but simply a memory of them, being pulled deeper and deeper into the inescapable pit that had opened behind her eyes.

Her fingers clutched the knob of the Occult Research Club's door with the force of desperation. Were the last tether to anything still real, still human, still explainable?

She couldn't stop seeing them. The more she tried to recall the details, the more the details bled, spread, congealed, and multiplied into formless crassness that made her stomach twist in biological protest. Every image of their faces, once processed, felt like it was being scraped onto her mind with something barbed and etched in permanence. Their smiles were carved behind her eyelids now. Their voices, though barely above whispers, now echoed louder than anything she had ever heard shouted in anger.

Door creaked open. The warm light of the club room spilled over her. The smell of brewed tea, scented candles, the faint metallic tang of magical residue. She had known that room for as long as she had known Rias. She had trained there. Meditated there. Slept, as well, on some of the quieter days.

It felt far away now, like she had broken through to it from a parallel world of shadows and noise, and the bridge was already burning behind her.

Rias Gremory looked up from her desk, a steaming cup in her hand and a calm expression softening her usual noble poise. She didn't even have time to smile.

Koneko collapsed to her knees.

Breathing in gasps now, mouth open but unable to speak, her throat constricted by something nonexistent, a tightening, almost tactile pressure, like the brush of a tail, unseen and ethereal, but coiled with the same leisure of a serpent prepared to crush.

She was shaking uncontrollably.

The words wouldn't come.

Why can't I say it?

Why can't I just say what I saw?

They walked. They smiled. I saw their true forms. They are not humans. They are not devils. They are something that shouldn't be here.

Then say it. Just say it. Speak, damn you.

But the more she tried, the more her tongue seemed to twist against itself, knotted by the overwhelming psychic residue the Beasts had left behind like the aftermath of an acid fog, clinging to her lungs, her tongue, her inner ear. Her mind flailed against the silence, screaming in all directions for coherence, for structure, for the relief of communication, had not the words melted before she could speak them, leaving only pitiful, shuddering fragments.

"Koneko? What happened? You're pale, you're shaking—Koneko, look at me."

"...S-sen... S-Senpai... Rias... I... s-saw... t-two... no... not women... I-it's not right..."

Her voice broke on the syllables. Each word was less a statement and more a pleading to un-remember, to push the images back out through her mouth and be rid of them.

Rias had stood by now. The air around her became charged. A silent communication between devil and servant, between master and guardian. Her crimson eyes narrowed as concern etched into the furrow of her brow.

"Koneko. Calm down. Who did you see? Koneko, what did they do to you? Was someone threatening you?"

Koneko's vision blurred. Her ears were ringing. Every syllable Rias spoke appeared to arrive like a delayed echo. She tried again.

"...Not... Devils... not... Yokai... they're mistake, they're wrong, they smiled at me... they saw me, Rias-senpai... I think... I think one of them knew me, she wanted to peel me open just to see if I screamed differently..."

Her voice cracked, eyes wide as the sensation of a fox's tail traced down her spine, up her neck, and finally tightened at her throat.

"...they're still watching me..."

The light in the room dimmed—or maybe her eyes were giving out. She couldn't tell.

She reached for Rias, arm trembling, fingers outstretched not in search of help but in a last plea for someone to anchor her, to remind her she was still here and still real.

—The gazes returned.

Her knees buckled inward. Her eyes rolled back. A soft gasp escaped her lips like a final prayer.

Darkness.

Her body fell limp against the hardwood floor.

Rias caught her just before her head could hit.

And for a long moment, the clubroom was utterly silent.

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The forest near Viterbo had always been peaceful in the mornings in the hush of order, instilled by centuries of prayer and civilization, by the tolling of bells from stone chapels and the paths pilgrims carved with their feet.

But on this day, and the days that began to follow after, the silence changed course.

They were migrating at the edge of the Vatican forestlands, the high cedars, and oaks that curled along Italy's softer countryside. They were leaning toward a center.

That center was her.

She was not hiding truly. Tiamat was incapable of concealment. There was no cloak for what she was. Her existence was not an anomaly within the world because her existence was the world before the world knew what it meant to exist.

She walked, bare feet pressing into the loam and fallen leaves with a softness that belied her enormity. Though her form was not as towering as it once had been in the age of cosmic oceans, her presence was unmistakably awry to this world. Her skin shimmered with amniotic light, the sheen of a womb that had never dried.

Animalian. Subliminal. Even organic intelligence, long dulled by evolution's thousand compromises, was now shaking with recognition.

The animals knew.

The instinct etched into the ancient synapses of all natural things. It was the same instinct that told hatchlings to seek warmth and blind cubs to crawl toward a heartbeat.

Deer with their newborns. Foxes. Badgers. Owls and birds that refused to fly away. Lynx crept along the edge of her path like shy, curious children. They did not know who she was, only something that needed no language to explain. She was the first lullaby, the first taste of milk, the shape of warmth pressed against fur in the womb of the world. They knew her not from stories but from the memory of being born.

And she did not ask them to follow. She never had to ask.

She had once been the sea, the salt of it, the chaotic fluid that bore life before there was land, before sky was separated from water, before the stars were named.

She had once been worshipped, before words like 'worship' existed.

Long ago... when there was no time.

The world remembered her story. Even if humanity had forgotten.

In the beginning, she had been all there was.

This world, unlike the one that cast her into exile, still recognized her.

The taste of grief made into color. As it rolled through the chambers of her mind, it brought with it the long, terrible ache of remembrance. Before gods, before skies, before the concept of war or death or sin, there had been her, the Primordial Mother of Saltwater. She was not born, for nothing existed that could precede her. The myths speak of her as the chaos before order, the salt sea in which the gods of Mesopotamia first stirred and awoke and turned their glimmering eyes upon the world.

She simply was, an oceanic womb undulating across an empty world, birthing life by design that lacked reason, pattern, hierarchy, or fear.

She had loved her children.

That was the mistake.

They were gods, yes. But she had borne them without expectation. She had crafted them as beings, as continuations of herself, fragments of warmth and matter, seeded into the dark to fill it with voice.

For a time, her children were divine. The first gods of that first pantheon. Enlil, Enki, Ninhursag, Inanna, and the rest. The bright ones, whose names would echo in clay and stone.

Divinity, it seemed, was not inherited without arrogance.

As her children grew, they turned their eyes away from her womb, away from her tides and fertility, and toward one another. They named things. They built things. They divided and conquered and feared. From that fear, the first betrayal was born.

They looked upon her as a thing, a resource.

They lifted their blades to their Mother.

Their reasoning, as gods always claimed, was a necessity. Creation required order. The tides were too wild, they said. The waters too dark. The womb too generous. If the world was to become theirs, it must be carved from something no longer alive.

The part that shattered her heart was when they said she had done her duty, that a womb, once spent, must be discarded to preserve the structure of things to come. That she was old flesh. Useless flesh. Unfit for the system.

It had not been the pain of their betrayal that broke her. Not entirely. It was the fear in their eyes; disgust, the estimation, the way they had agreed without words that she must be ended.

So, from her grief, her madness, her sorrow twisted as from the churning storm of her womb, she bore new children... The feeling of the deep biological despair that only a mother can know when her children raise their hands in hatred.

Her womb rejected the gods that had once suckled from it. And so, monsters were birthed—Magical Beasts, aberrant things molded in grief to protect her from the gods she once held close. Abzu was already dead then. Her consort, her balance.

When the divine offspring marched upon her with blade and law, her new ones rose to meet them.

Eleven, because the number felt right. Creation was meant to be defense, reaction, the scream of birth in the face of silence.

They were born of loss and from justice, albeit twisted and unknowable in its maternal logic. Dragons, serpents, chimeras of nightmare flesh. Each one more terrible than the last, being true fragments of her grief made manifest.

She as a mother who would not be silenced.

They had fought, those children. Oh, how they had roared, screeched, flown, slithered, and shattered temples in her name. But they were stillborn in the eyes of the world. Abominations. Monsters. And they died for her.

But in the end, it changed nothing.

One by one, her offspring were torn apart.

Next came the tearing.

Marduk and his siblings split her in two. One-half of her body flung upward, hardened into the heavens. The other was pressed downward, flattened into the crust of the earth.

From her lungs, they made the islands.

From her spine, they fashioned the earth.

From her eyes, they seeded the rivers.

Her ribcage became the firmament of the sky.

They gutted her. And called it Genesis.

From that mutilation and in her blood, the world of Man was inaugurated and born in matricide.

All from the murder of the mother.

Even now, it pressed at the inside of her chest. The awareness that she had been a womb discarded, a necessary evil in the grand ritual of making something better. In Sumerian myths, her name survived as villain as chaos. In truth, she was the origin of design. She made life with passion. She made without asking. And that, to the world of men, was sin.

From that moment, she was no longer a goddess. She became the forgotten mythical monster.

Banished into exile, her essence was locked in the Imaginary Number Space in the World's Reverse Side, a place outside even the parallel timelines, a sea of emptiness unneeded by the current order of intelligent life. It was absence. A false zero.

Life had moved on. Nature had stabilized. Gods had grown arrogant and kingdoms-wise. There was no room for the one who once designed life at random.

There, in the cold and null-dark, she waited.

Aeons passed in silence.

Until Chaldea came. Until a single human Master, too young to carry history and too broken to fear failure, stared her in the eyes and chose to declare Humanity's decision to leave her.

And as the one who had acknowledged her returned to his world, and Tiamat was once again left behind, entombed in an abstract void, a mother with no children, in a world that needed no mothers.

That's how the World of Imaginary Numbers was.

So she slept and waited.

Until one day, she woke again, somewhere in-between.

There were others like her, all nine gathered.

Others who had also been deemed obstacles to the human journey. Others who were also cast aside and labeled Beasts.

Their voices were colder. Even they could not hide the burn in their soul, individual hatreds for a world that betrayed its parent, and a desire to remake it without the lies of history.

She did not think of some as her child. Others, she accepted.

But she followed anyway.

Now here, in this land of crosses and carved marble, she walked as reconnaissance.

The animals were still following. More now. Wolves. Crows. Even serpents, their bellies pressing against the stones in slow, coiling awe.

It was both worship and recognition.

Somewhere in the sky, a vulture circled.

Her eyes glinted.

Tiamat blinked.

A vibration thrummed in her lower spine. A signal.

Goetia was requesting report.

She blinked slowly. The command reached her, but the understanding took longer.

"...Aaaahhhhh..."

.
.
.
.
.

The cobblestones of Vatican territory had a coldness to them that stayed under his paws, and although the sun had already begun to dip beyond the edge of the basilica towers, the heat of the land itself remained.

The atmosphere was literally thick with faith in an invisible haze like incense and iron-laced blood, soaked into every brick and blade of grass by dogma and war. Holy power hung over the city like a ceremonial noose.

"Fou." He grunted to himself as he bounded down from the ledge of a buttress and disappeared into the treeline. His fur bristled briefly as he left the holy radius.

His nerves were thankful to be rid of the smothering pulse of that oppressive human ideal that which is absolute belief.

There were days in the old world when he wouldn't have had to creep and scamper and skulk like some oversized rodent. Days when his mere approach would have melted the gates of a church into glass, when the breath of his kind warped the concepts of sin and purity into meaningless smears on the canvas of Gaia's raw law.

The world was smaller and his body was smaller with it; he'd already accepted that. His own divinity coiled in on itself like a sleeping lion in a rabbit's body. A lion, yes. But sleeping. For now.

He slipped into the forest and found her waiting.

She turned her head toward him slowly, inquisitively.

"Aaahhhhhh…"

Expectation.

"Fou!"

He sat back on his haunches, tail flicking. "Fou," he muttered, shaking himself out before continuing with the kind of elaborate mental processing that only a creature like him could maintain without words.

Yes, he had seen them. Not just humans entirely. There were regular practitioners of faith, of course, priests and nuns and Paladins in training. But a few stood out. Namely, the warriors. The ones who were not merely custodians of religion, but its fang and sword.

Exorcists.

The term was familiar in concept. He had seen their like in his old world. Wielders of Scripture and relics and fractured Truths, all repackaged in human limitation. In the Age of Man, many of them were desperate cowards with divinely-coated steel and more fear than conviction. Although the same could be said here, the noticeable difference was these ones here in this Vatican felt less stable. Only a few were qualified to become Exorcists here, while far more were trained back in his world. They were cruder and younger, perhaps. Still enthralled by the idea of light as weapon, still bathing in borrowed divinity like it were perfume, unaware that in the hands of gods, light did not purify. It obliterated. Meanwhile, the other church... Those were nurtured hounds raised by the Church.

One among them caught his attention.

A girl. Blue-haired. Young in the sense mortals were always young, but possessed of a certainty in movement that betrayed brutal, repetitive training.

Even from the roof's edge, he had smelled the tang of divine metal. Her presence had been like watching a child walk beside a sleeping wild horse while pretending she had already tamed it. A certain Holy Sword at her back. The Peerless Sword, no question, reeked of heat and the kind of impulsive purity that could level a hill if drawn improperly. Even sealed, its holy song echoed through her spine with every breath she took. It was bound to her like a wolf to its cage, biting against its leash even as it allowed itself to be held.

He chuckled to himself. "Fou…"

In truth, even in this weakened state, Durandal meant nothing to him. He could have snapped it like old wood if he so chose, the moment he returned to form.

The Beast of Comparison, after all, was not made to respect the myths of men.

Though, it wasn't the weapon that amused him.

It was the user herself.

A human, no older than an adolescent, bearing the burden of one of the wildest swords in human mythology, not out of pride but duty. Despite that sword's immense refusal to be wielded by just anyone, she managed to shoulder it. It did not break her. At least, not yet, anyway.

How amusing. How utterly human.

The woman beside her smelled of experience. Of holy things carried with ease. Curved in all the ways that were unnecessary, yet deeply appreciated. Her presence was like a holder, clasping danger and tradition and quiet strength beneath her gentle, matured gait.

She dressed as a nun, yes, but the form beneath it... Even through the draping cloth of her modest attire, he could tell.

A mature body.

A well-sculpted one.

His tail twitched.

"Fou..."

He let his thoughts spiral for a moment. Just a moment. He'd stared longer than he should have; the long, flowing robe couldn't hide the curve of her chest and her presence was tempered like aged wine. It was that bastard's fault. That damned flower-strewn magus had let his filth seep into the very bones of Fou's soul before vanishing like the irresponsible bastard he always was. He could already hear Merlin's smug laughter, even in another world, whispering, "You're welcome, beast. A little appreciation of form never killed anyone."

But before he could lean further into the thought, a low, heavy thud broke his reverie.

"... Fou." He sighed to himself as he turned his eyes away, knowing full well the slap would come.

And come it did.

SMACK!

Tiamat's claws didn't crash so much as correct as she raised one of her thick claws and smacked him flat across the face.

He yelped out of indignation and rolled once into a patch of wildflowers. She glared at him with that matriarchal patience of hers, the sound of her breath once again a reprimanding sigh.

"Aaaahhhh."

Yes, yes, he deserved that.

He stood and shook the pollen off, snorting. "Fou."

There was work to be done. No time for wandering off in his head, despite the rather appealing... distractions.

He had more important things to report.

One of the churches kept a forbidden archive. It was a sealed chamber behind reinforced relic glass, deep within the secondary structure, not the Vatican Basilica proper, but the armory-monastery that housed training facilities for higher-level Exorcists. Inside, he had glimpsed a tome. The language was European, but the idea within it was universal.

A book about Sacred Gears.

Someone had taken the time to catalogue them. That alone was enough to make the hairs on his back rise. These Vatican dogs were more curious than they had a right to be.

Tiamat turned her head again, and the inquiry was clear in her breath.

Should they retrieve it now?

He grimaced.

"Fou."

No, she mustn't.

Because he knew what she would suggest next.

The blunt method. The Tiamat method. Walk in. Take. Leave. If they objected, silence them—permanently.

Tis wasn't Mesopotamia.

This world was cracked glass already. They could not afford to hammer it just yet until Goetia finished surveying the lines of consequence and contradiction that this realm operated under.

He paced, then sighed, then nodded.

He would go himself.

He was smaller. Quieter. Less likely to awaken whatever divine surveillance blanketed the city.

Tiamat did not argue, only lowered her head in acquiescence.

"Fou."

With that, he turned again toward the holy walls. His form was blurred by magic, his scent dampened by divine muscle memory. What he sought was not destruction. Just a book.

Though, the last time the Beasts of Humanity merely read a book, a continent vanished beneath the waves.

... Meh.

Anyway, the book was surprisingly lightweight for something bound in decades of sacred wear and dust. Fou clutched it between his teeth as he leaped past an unsuspecting choir boy, slithered beneath a long pew with incense smoke, and nudged open a side door with the gentleness of a cat tiptoeing through a wolf's den.

And it would have ended there. That should've been the end of it.

But of course, the world was not that kind.

Click.

Why did the sound like a trigger?

The sound came in the back corridor, a rune circle hidden in the mosaic floor. An enchantment meant to detect the sacred being desecrated or disturbed. Not by a devil; that is predictable intrusions, anticipated and repelled. But something stranger, something neither spirit nor man, not bound by sacred law nor corrupted by sin. Something... Fou. That something had activated it without meaning to, and now the gears of vigilance rolled.

The entire structure thrummed as though the heartbeat of the Vatican itself had stuttered and then resumed at a gallop. Candlelights flared blue. A script lit the arches. Somewhere far above, bells began to toll, and that was when Fou realized he had stepped in it. Deep.

"Fou…"

He murmured flatly, tail twitching once in resigned exasperation.

He made no attempt to be stealthy now. That ship had long since sailed and burned upon the sea. Instead, he galloped out in a straight line through the marble corridor like a rabbit sprinting from judgment, the stolen tome bouncing wildly in his mouth, tongue pressed to the seals etched on its binding.

He vaulted past a spiraling staircase, leaped through a stained glass window not too high to kill, but high enough to startle a few pigeons perched outside. He hit the ground with a soft thump and began what was now an officially sanctioned oh-shit-run.

They'll think it was some random familiar.

That was what Fou rationalized while the wind sliced through his fur, claws barely skimming the cobblestones of the northern courtyard.

Something like a mischievous elemental, perhaps a summoned beast gone rogue, or maybe even a wild spirit beast that accidentally wandered in while sniffing for Divine Lichen. Yes. Yes, that's plausible. That's exactly the kind of ridiculous conclusion the Vatican tends to leap to when it sees something like me. As long as I don't do anything suspicious… like, say, flee with ancient classified information stolen from their internal archives.

"I still say the Old Testament passage made the stronger argument for divine discipline." Came an almost theatrical voice of youth attempting scholarship, firmly. Oh, it's that blue-haired girl.

"You only think that because you don't understand the implications of the New Covenant! God's mercy is the fulfillment, not the replacement, of justice!" That tone was lighter, warmer, bearing less certainty and more unfiltered hope. Unfamiliar unimportant person.

His thoughts were cut off by voices just outside the outer courtyard.

He caught them mid-debate at the edge of the Church's exterior sanctum, both seated atop a bench beneath the sculpture of Saint Gabriel slaying a serpent. The blue-haired one was leaning forward, gesturing with her hands. The other girl, blonde and smiling through slight exasperation, held a small annotated Bible in her lap, legs swinging gently like a child at recess. Fou didn't slow, nope he couldn't. He had already made the mistake of assuming today would be simple.

They noticed him at once. A white blur streaked across the garden path, ears perked and eyes wide, a very obvious tome stuffed into his mouth like a particularly sacrilegious chew toy.

"Huh?" Irina blinked first.

"Is that… a Familiar?" Xenovia's words were a question even if her mind lagged behind in recognition.

"He's carrying something. From inside? A summoning experiment gone wrong?"

"It reeks of mana. High mana. It's not Church-based. That's no local summon."

Whish!

Fou, in a rare show of humility, mingled with pure animal desperation, allowed the magical concentration building in his fur to condense into an instant release. Like a switch flipped in reverse, his physical body dematerialized into glittering blue-white ether, a rippling streak of magical particles that darted into the horizon faster than the eye could track.

The speed of sound was only the start of his sprint, and before the girls could even shout a command or prayer, he was already a gleam among the trees.

"…That was not a normal Familiar," Irina muttered.

"No kidding. We're following that thing."

They ran immediately to follow the remnants of magical trail left in the creature's wake.

Behind them, a silhouette moved between trees with the grace of someone accustomed to surveillance rather than confrontation, skirts swaying slightly as she followed at a measured pace. The figure of a woman whose command was soft yet absolute.

---

The forest was not built for a chase. Not in the least.

Twigs snapped, leaves tore, and branches swung like boxers catching lucky hits as two young women thundered through terrain designed to halt, not hasten. The trees leaned slightly. But none of that mattered to Xenovia and Irina, whose footsteps speed prioritized over grace.

"He turned here—!" Xenovia tried to yell before the corner of a trunk shoulder-checked her mid-sentence.

The world spun for the knight of Durandal. The forest smacked her into a bush like a fly into honey, and the rustle of impact was punctuated by Irina's distant voice, hollering something about "watch the low branch!" just before a separate, completely different low branch introduced itself to her face.

This didn't stop her as she picked herself up and ran again.

"He's going left! No—no, he just curved—watch out!"

Xenovia's foot suddenly caught the slope of a root, and she stumbled forward with all the strength of a rookie jouster hitting the wrong end of a lance. Irina turned just in time to see her friend smash headfirst into a thick pine trunk, bounce off with a dull thump, and land flat on her back in a pile of bramble. Leaves fluttered above her in mock applause.

"Oh my—Xenovia! Are you—?!"

"No time, keep going!" she barked from the foliage, voice strained, even as a very angry pinecone rolled off her forehead.

Somewhere ahead, the magic-trail continued its sprint, unbothered and entirely too smug in the way it slithered between foliage.

The trail was fresh, streaking like a comet through the trees. The carefree recklessness of a criminal who knew just how slow his pursuers were. Irina didn't stop to process the absurdity. She pushed forward, praying she wouldn't be the next to crash.

Fou was gliding.

He had entered a state of movement so divorced from logic that it no longer qualified as flight or dash or even blur. He was a ribbon of laughter, a low giggle of raw magical energy curving through tight corners, hugging tree limbs like an acrobat with a death wish.

Basically, a ghost who never learned what it meant to be caught.

And inside his little glowing brain…

"I always thought it would be easy… to get you out my mind."

... even divine beast familiars have mental playlists. A catchy, annoying, too-memorable song he had once heard in the far-flung pocket of Avalon around a half-broken soundbox Merlin stole from a random wandering mage who claimed "this was all the rage in your world." Dutch Melrose, apparently. He hadn't cared much when it first played. Still, the lyrics had imprinted like a brand.

He remembered listening to this again and the way Kama had scoffed at the song, and Angra tapped his foot.

"I think I found a new addiction… and it feels so right."

"Fou." Pleased indulgence. This was freedom. This was chaos bottled into something so petty it tasted like sugar. The forest was his stage, and he was the spinning dancer in the spotlight, leaping over roots, curling beneath ferns, twisting with a practiced flair that bordered on cruelty to his chasers.

Behind, the girls were not doing so well.

"Wait, you went under the log? I thought he went over!"

"He's the size of a rabbit, Irina! He can go under! I'm not getting on my knees for every damned root just because a glowing fox has evasive tendencies!"

But her complaint ended as quickly as her footing did. She pivoted too sharply, too hard, and the tree did not yield to her fervor. Her shoulder smacked full-force into bark, and this time the impact sent her spinning like a clumsy ballerina into a bed of moss and sharp twigs.

Irina groaned from the side as Xenovia staggered past, panting like a priest forced into dance ministry.

"I swear, this thing is toying with us." Xenovia growled, gripping a nearby trunk as leverage to swing forward.

"You don't think it's just fleeing blindly?" Irina panted, cheeks flushed, her ponytail half undone.

"No. This is intentional. No creature moves like that unless it knows we're too slow."

Irina almost agreed, except that her face once again collided with Xenovia's shoulder as the two turned the same corner too tightly. They both stumbled sideways into a shallow stream, soaked now, both pride and habit tripping over each other in their shared frustration.

It was just enough time for them to look up and catch a final glimpse of that fluffy tail flicking through another tight corner, too narrow for even birds to fly cleanly.

"Run, baby, run, run for your life…"

He didn't understand half of it. He didn't care. The tone was the only meaning that mattered. It was a warcry of the absurd, the kind of rhythm that made even gods feel like petty thieves on a sugar rush.

"I'ma tear out your heart, it'll always be mine."

His paws shifted into bursts of sound as he bounced off a branch like a spring-loaded ball, flipped midair, and dove into a glade full of dew.

The song continued in his skull, accompanied by the desperate curses of soaked holy girls learning humility one tree at a time.

"Run, baby, run, run for your life…"

He was nearing the edge now. The scent of ancient femininity became more noticeable. From older than humanity's stories of dragons and mothers, he was near now.

She would be waiting, her patience was deeper than oceans, and her tolerance for his antics, if not infinite, was at least several miles long. Which he would test in exactly forty-three seconds.

"Gonna tear out your heart, it'll always be mine."

"You really think this is a normal familiar?"

"No familiar has that amount of condensed mana. It's not right. That thing's got to be hiding something."

"Then we really shouldn't be chasing it alone, right?"

"…Too late to turn back now."

"Why are we even chasing this thing? It's cute! I mean, if cute things can be book thieves, then technically so can I. I don't think I should be condemned for sneaking extra communion wafers back in seminary!"

"I don't care what it looks like. That Familiar doesn't belong to this land. Its magic is unnatural, and more than that, it understood it was being chased."

"Yeah, well, I understand we're both bruised and probably being mocked by a sparkly puffball."

They had found a second wind, or perhaps rage was fueling them now. Either way, they would be arriving soon.

Fou grinned. Then laughed.

"Fou!"

He dropped into the clearing on all fours again. The energy form collapsed like mist returning to breath, his body re-manifesting from air to fur with an effortless shift of instinct, his paws padding softly into the damp loam of the ground as his tail curled high behind him.

The book was still clutched firmly in his maw.

It was heavy.

Fou didn't care. It was a shiny thing. It belonged to something important, therefore it had value, therefore he should have it. That was how Merlin would've put it, if he'd still been around to whisper those stupid words behind a fake-smiling face and the constant smell of flowers that didn't exist in reality.

Fou trotted forward, adjusting the book between his fangs.

His ears twitched at the sound of soft footfall. This one was quieter, smooth, deliberate... and it struck him—far too late—that whoever it was hadn't been chasing him in a line. No, this one had taken the longer route.

And then fingers like silk-clad iron seized him around the middle.

"Fou," he muttered, half in disbelief, half in lazy irritation, the book still between his teeth and his tail now stiff in a half-jerk of surprise.

She held him. Roughly? Not really. More like with the steadiness of someone who handled things for a living, as though every strange occurrence in her life was just another page in an increasingly complex manual of duties she never asked for.

Griselda Quarta was beautiful in that aged way, like a cathedral wall, carved and still standing strong, framed in the light of something old, stern, and soft all at once. Her eyes burn with a greater righteousness like Xenovia's, nor did they not shine with the childish faith of Irina's. She was a woman who judged things not by their first offense, but by the patterns that followed. She wasn't impressed by chaos. She had seen worse.

The difference was, she had never seen him.

Fou, of course, didn't struggle.

Why should he? He was caught. So what. He had the book. He could feel Tiamat's presence growing closer, and he had at least seven different ways to get out of a grip like this. But at that very moment, he couldn't be bothered to enact any of them. Not when his furry face was pressed so neatly into the warmth of her bust. Not when her curves—which the stupid Flower Bastard back in Avalon would've called "mother-class proportions"—were pressed so elegantly against his fluffed-up cheek and chest. Not when her skin smelled of soft, neutral perfume and the faint, iron scent of an exorcist who bathed often but fought more often.

His nose twitched.

His mind flattened into one, long sigh.

Merlin, you unholy flower-pickin' bastard. You really did ruin me.

She was talking. Her voice was low and authoritative.

"You really are not from any species I recognize," she murmured. "Small, vaguely mammalian. No wings. Quadruped. Magical signature is... unpredictable. High-capacity, but inefficiently distributed. That makes it unlikely to be a Familiar, and even more unlikely to be artificially created. Sentient... yes. It understands where it is. That stare is aware. This is someone."

Fou, still comfortably squished against her sternum, offered a long, flat, completely uninterested "Fou."

Griselda didn't loosen her grip. Her hand gently patted his back like one might settle a child after they've done something profoundly stupid but endearing. It was a gesture of measured patience like she was waiting to see if he would try to bite her. She kept observing him, brow lightly knit, eyes trailing down his body.

"You stole from the Vatican's restricted vaults," she continued as an observable fact. "You understood where the item was. You maintained the item's integrity. There is no mindless instinct here. That means you're planning something."

"Fou," he said again, more cheeky this time.

Her lips pursed slightly, in that annoyed-but-not-surprised way of women used to dealing with impulsive younger individuals who believed chaos was a valid strategy in life. She brought a single finger beneath his chin, and lifted gently so that their eyes met.

Fou didn't look away.

Instead, he stared at her collarbone, then slowly, shamelessly, down the middle curve of her chest, which her uniform, try as it might, failed to completely hide. It was subtle, the way he did it. Not perverse in motion, only in duration. The sort of stare one might give to a divine relic meant to be touched only with prayer and gloves.

Griselda did not blush.

She sighed, calmly.

"I see. You were corrupted by something. Probably male and arrogant. Likely enjoyed roses and manipulation."

"Fou."

"Of course."

Still holding him, she shifted him under one arm like a sleeping cat, her other hand carefully taking the book from his jaw without resistance. He didn't protest. He'd already won in his head. He had made it this far, and now he was being carried by the softest holy soldier he'd seen in the last four universes he visited.

His tail flicked, brushing her hip.

She swatted it once, gently. A boundary reminder.

Griselda hadn't moved more than five steps toward the forest trail when the rustling of anger and frustration broke through the foliage. The crunch of boots trampling over underbrush wasn't subtle, Xenovia emerging like a crusader chasing a heathen with divine fire already kindled in her veins. She had an unfamiliar holy sword out. Fou was surprised she didn't take out Durandal.

"There you are!" she barked at the puff of white that dangled under her mentor's arm like a sullen trophy.

Fou, for his part, merely stared at her in the bored, nonchalant way only a creature who had been hunted for entertainment and punished by primordial dragon mothers could manage. His expression said plainly, I let myself be caught, and no one can prove otherwise.

Irina was only a few paces behind, bounding in that clumsy way she always did when her mouth wanted to speak before her legs were sure of where they were going. Her armor clinked noisily as she flailed through a final set of shrubs, branches tangling briefly in her chestnut hair before she stumbled to Griselda's side with a wheezing grin.

"Ahhh, Sister Griselda! Thank heavens you found it! That thing is so fast, like, unnaturally fast, I think it outran Xenovia and she was running like one of those Olympic Saints!"

"I miscalculated its weight," Xenovia muttered coldly, re-sheathing her sword without looking at either of them. "Its speed did not match its body size. Noted for next time. I will break its legs first."

"Fou," said Fou quietly, tone flat but clearly offended.

Griselda, without missing a beat or dropping the creature, responded with polite neutrality, "It is a sentient being. Possibly sapient. You two looked like you ran a full marathon."

"She means you talk like a Pokémon," Irina chimed in brightly, hands folding in prayer over her chest, not realizing that she was smiling like she had just blessed a newborn squirrel.

Fou ignored the noise. His eyes had returned to their proper prize.

He was staring again. Brazenly. Longingly.

Because, there it was, once more... the soft, gentle curve of Griselda's chest beneath her conservative habit, the way the fabric clung to that holy silhouette that no amount of prayer could disguise. His expression remained blank, but his tail gave a soft, traitorous flick, betraying the perverted quiver that now bounced through his otherwise beast-like thoughts. No shame. No subtlety. Just reverent awe at the high-quality, mother-tier, divinely-structured—

"Hey." Irina blinked, leaning slightly forward.

She had caught the direction of his stare. Not the stare itself, which could've been chalked up to the animal's natural curiosity. The very pointed, fixed gaze that did not change from a very specific, womanly spot.

"W-wait a minute..." she squinted. "Sister Griselda, he's—he's staring at your chest!"

Fou did not stop.

Xenovia turned her head snappily, face twisted with the sort of stern disgust she reserved for Fallen Angels and people who disrespected battlefield etiquette. Her hand gripped the hilt of the holy sword so hard the metal groaned softly beneath her fingers.

"I knew it. That thing is vile. Disgusting. A degenerate."

"Fou."

Utterly unapologetic.

Griselda raised a single brow, very slowly. Not angry or flustered. Just noting it down. The way a scholar might jot down the dietary preference of a newly-discovered creature that chose to eat flowers instead of meat. Her grip adjusted slightly under Fou's arms, holding him more like one might hold a misbehaving child.

"That explains the intelligence and the impropriety; corrupted familiar behavior patterns. Sexual imprinting via proximity to morally questionable people as well."

"It's leering at you!" Xenovia snapped. "You're carrying it like it's harmless!"

"If it were truly dangerous, it would've fled already. Or at least bitten someone."

Irina turned her head sideways.

"Why would it do something like that? I mean, isn't lust a sin—?"

"Aaahhhhhh."

A single, low, breathy hum, but unmistakably feminine in origin, rich with a softness that carried through the spine like a dream remembered just before waking.

Fou froze.

There was a singular, still second where his tail went stiff and every muscle in his back clenched like an invisible hand had suddenly squeezed his entire soul from behind.

"... Fou," he squeaked.

Because that sound was Tiamat who had seen him and that perverted little moment. And if he knew anything about the Mother of Monsters, it was that her punishments were rarely loud and always thorough. Especially when it came to curbing her "son's" wandering instincts.

The three Exorcists turned in tandem.

Behind them—where once there was only an empty clearing—a woman now stood.

No... not merely a woman.

She had always been there and the world had only just remembered to show her.

Xenovia and Irina gasped.

Griselda turned slowly, eyes widening just a fraction. That fraction was the closest she ever got to surprise.

She stood perhaps no taller than 160 centimeters, but her body was not small. Her curves were a contradiction to her modest height, and every inch of her held itself with a poised intensity. Her skin was flawless, pale, tinged with that alabaster sheen that reminded one of untouched moonlight or the fine, cold surface of a silver chalice. Her hair cascaded down in a breath of blue that faded into white-gold frost, styled in elegant twin braids that wrapped around her like ceremonial bindings. Her ears were pointed, curved faintly like a high-born elf from some far-off Eden.

But it was her horns that stopped thought. Ram-like in their curvature, spiral-carved and symmetrical, they crowned her like symbols of a god that once walked lands before sin. Her pink eyes shimmered more like gemstones, with pupils of stars drowned at the bottom of a sea—deep, endless, and utterly inhuman.

Her body was nearly bare.

No cloth, no armor, not even shame. Only arcane strips of dark, fragmented markings ran down her form, broken into vertical traces that framed her skin and accentuated far more than they hid. A thin and dark panty scandalously forms a barely-there around her pelvis and groin. Her immense, round, impossibly generous cleavage was only barely obscured by a feathered mantle that looked ceremonial. Her pelvis, midriff, hips, and thighs were largely exposed, save for the barest of coverings that teased at modesty while achieving nothing of it.

None of them spoke.

None could.

Fou was already hiding behind Griselda's legs, peeking out from the side of her habit, ears flat against his head, eyes wide and whimpering.

"Fou..."

Tiamat blinked once.

Her expression was unreadable.

Chapter 5: From Whence Cometh Light of Beasts?

Hostility could be responded to. It could be met with a blade, shield, chant, or scripture. It could be parsed into emotion, rage, malice, vengeance, sin... sin they could recognize and cleanse, sin they could respond to with the wrath of Heaven's flame. It was not a hostile aura in the traditional sense that plummeted over them, and that was the most terrifying part.

Given how her appearance defied even the outer bounds of modesty, aesthetics, or even anatomical understanding, the woman before them felt like the sky above had shifted down into their lungs, saturating the air with unthinkable densit while their nerves screamed that the world itself was erroneous in her presence.

Surely misplaced on the chessboard of creation.

Griselda's hand subtly pushed both Xenovia and Irina back a step as she placed herself defensively in front of them.

Fou, for his part, was already behind Griselda, blinking rapidly, jostling with barely contained panic.

No one paid him any mind, for their attentions were locked on the goddess of quiet catastrophe before them. Fou was not worried about combat. Oh, no. Not even in the slightest. He did not feel the same ancestral terror that clung to the humans' ribs. His worry was born from a far more personal source. His eyes darted toward the bundle Griselda held in one arm: the book, clasped securely, his prize, his stolen treasure. His stubby front paws subtly tapped the forest floor in a kind of pleading Morse code. With a stretch of his paw, he motioned to the book, then at Tiamat. His tail curled around his body like a guilty child trying to hide.

"Fou..."

"Mommy."

He said it only in his head, but the word echoed loud enough in his thoughts that he winced.

"Help. They took my thing. I earned that. I dodged pine needles in places where pine needles shouldn't have gone, and now they took it and they'll probably give it back to the Pope or worse—put it on a dusty shelf, never touched, never sniffed again. Please, please, let them give it back. You're my mom, right? Big scary mom. Big screechy warm scary mom. Please, just—"

His eyes drifted to Griselda's hips again.

"Also, if you're gonna screech again… wait until I move behind her thighs first. Thank you."

Griselda allowed herself the faintest exhale of her stiffness. Her voice did not rise; she was not Xenovia. She was the commanding sister, the bridge between youthful fire and the cold steel of the Vatican's administration. She had been trained to greet all things with civility first, to attempt speech before the sword.

"You are within Vatican-sanctioned grounds. This forest is under the dominion of Heaven's peace. If you come in peace, I ask that you identify yourself. Otherwise—"

She never finished. The Earth nearly moves. One of her disciples seemed to have made her choice.

Xenovia took one bold step forward. Her hands reached behind her back in a single practiced motion, and when they emerged again, the hilt of Excalibur Destruction was already radiating its savage golden breath. Her expression changed and her eyes were steel. The sword, too large and wild to be wielded by most men, sat in her grasp.

"Griselda. I do not trust that creature," she said. "Permission to initiate preemptive neutralization if it makes a move?"

"Xenovia," Griselda did not turn, "stand down."

"But—"

"I said stand down."

Irina, not to be outdone, flicked the string tied around her wrist, and it blossomed into the form of Excalibur Mimic, folding into a slender katana with a spiritual shriek that only other weapons of Holy ancestry could hear. She took a side-step, eyes on the woman, or thing.

Fou turned, blinked once, then again. His nose wrinkled and he squinted at the blades themselves. There was something... so very wrong along with a familiarity. Something old he couldn't remember, a tingle of awareness that clinked around his skull like sleigh bells muffled by fog.

Tiamat tilted her head at the swords too, seemingly sensing a hidden energy only she could sense just a layer beyond even Fou.

The air suddenly thickened with concentrated heat. Irina, maybe desperate to reassert reality, gripped the sword around her wrist and whispered the invocation.

"O sword of light and mimicry, reflect the strength of the Word."

Light poured from her hand, and in a moment, Mimic was filled with Holy power. Next to her, Xenovia reacted instinctively. Her own grip tightened around Destruction, its massive double-pommelled frame, and triple-pointed tip glowing with nascent light as her power flared into its brutal edge.

And this was the mistake.

Tiamat felt the resonance of power, the awakening of a frequency that threatened to fracture her calm. Her pink eyes widened only slightly. Her mouth opened.

Griselda's senses, honed through uncountable exorcisms, detected the shift an instant too late. She raised a hand, activating one of the few specialized exorcist relics she carried for worst-case scenarios, and channeled Sacramental energy into a brilliant white sigil that manifested like a starburst from her palm.

She fired.

Tiamat's reaction was faster.

Her lips parted. That was all.

Her eyes, glowing softly, dilated in the barest flicker of emotion—protectiveness, annoyance, a mother's sigh when her children ruined the floor for the hundredth time. She inhaled, and the forest bent. She opened her mouth—

"Aaaaaaahhhhhhh!"

In the next fraction of a second, an unspoken scream bloomed outward.

It was a soundless, vowel-rich, cry of tectonic memory being released from the bones of the planet. It was the sound that came before sound was invented. It was the lullaby that birthed the ocean and the cracking of mountains made gentle for an infant's ears.

The impact of a thought turned physical, a wave of planetary rejection that washed through the clearing.

A wide, invisible wall of trembling pressure, born of sheer presence being noticed. The trees were the first to suffer. Tall oaks split at their trunks like poorly-glued models, bark and leaves flying into the sky like birds startled by thunder. The grass flattened. The ground caved. Rocks were displaced. And the three Exorcists—

Griselda was flung back first, her holy garments rippling like torn banners. She vanished into a thicket, hitting the earth with enough force to crater the soil beneath her habit. Xenovia followed next, the shockwave smacking into her like the flat hand of God Himself. Her sword flickered with destabilization, and even she could only gasp before the world turned upside down and branches cracked beneath her body. Irina shouted a defiant yelp as the air slapped her hard enough to knock the mimic blade from her hands, sending her spinning into a bush with an explosion of feathers and holy scripture, and somewhere in the chaos, a singular squeaky "Fou!" echoed with an indignant surprise before both creature and his precious stolen book vanished into the woods.

And then, silence. Deafening, echoing silence.

The clearing lay broken and bowed before a primordial. In the midst of it all, Tiamat remained unmoved. Her lips closed. Her gaze fell to the left, to where Fou had once stood—

Gone, so too was the book.

She tilted her head. Her chest rose and fell in a ponderous breath. An imperceptible hum buzzed around her neck where the black-and-blue scaled adornments shimmered.

She stepped forward to look where Fou had last been, and perhaps wonder, in that distant and maternal silence, why her naughty son always vanished when he was told not to.

When she turned back—

The first blast was a pulse of raw holy energy lanced toward her back, fast enough to pierce solid stone, unstable enough to tear the earth apart around its trail to burn and to see if such a thing like her could even bleed.

But before it could reach her, the air behind the woman shimmered. A circle, pale pink and flawless in symmetry, bloomed into existence like a ring of soap catching the light. The bolt of destructive energy struck the barrier with a shriek, and for a moment the forest became two colors in white and pink before returning to green again.

Tiamat watched with a blank expression and her eyes still only half open as Xenovia's lips pressed tighter and ran. Feet crushed leaves and her body moved. The blade in the younger Exorcist's hands hummed with dissonant rage and closed the distance with weapon drawn high, and when it came down, it was not one strike, but three—an overhead cut cleaving air like a guillotine, a spinning backhand meant to fracture whatever blocked it, and a heavy thrust straight for the heart.

Xenovia did not know what to think.

She had been thrown, yes. Her body had remembered the ground before her brain did, skidding through dirt and pine needles like a doll swung by the ankle. The moment breath reentered her lungs, her limbs were already moving again numbly and when she saw the woman again—creature was more fitting—she was back on her feet, sword dragging slightly in the dust behind her as she advanced.

She would not permit herself to believe that the Church had faltered in their judgment; if something existed in this world that could look upon three armed Exorcists, breathe out, and send one of them flying beyond sight while standing completely still, then it had to be dealt with. And if Heaven was not yet aware of the threat… then she would have to stall until they were.

There was no command from Griselda. The forest where she had once stood had been peeled back like old bark, the ground cratered with the subtle architecture of her disappearance. That left Xenovia in charge of wherever Irina was. It was not her preference. She was not a leader, not by nature or calling. But she was alive and had her sword.

The first blow landed on another summoned disc effortlessly without visible command. The second was met with an arc of sapphire fire rising from the ground in a curved sheet, and the third—her most direct attack was halted by the flat of a lavender arm as the body itself had casually decided to swat the blade away.

The impact didn't even stagger her.

Xenovia spun back, landing lightly, one hand on the hilt again, and glared. The sword vibrated. She lunged again, this time with a cross-slash backed by divine reinforcement, the full current of Excalibur Destruction surging through the motion.

She refused to retreat. Every instinct screamed to do so, every nerve barked in alarm. But she was a fighter for the Church. Her mind did not serve fear. It served obedience.

This time, Tiamat took a single step sideways, and in that same second, five rings bloomed around her, pink again, now layered, each one orbiting her shoulders, waist, and wrists like moons around a star, spun slowly.

The air turned thick. Xenovia's next charge felt like pushing through syrup. Her swing hit nothing and a bare palm tapped her side.

Tap was the wrong word.

The blow cracked through her armor from massless magic. She stumbled back, knees locking, lungs tightening as internal bruises bloomed like ink spilled in her chest.

The breath she drew next was shallow, but she raised the sword again anyway. Her bones screamed at her.

A light footfall approached from behind.

"I'm here!"

The voice is accompanied by the sudden change of Excalibur Mimic into the form of a long halberd with twin sickle blades. She grimaced with her smile faltered when her eyes landed on Xenovia's condition.

"Ah. That bad?"

Xenovia didn't answer. She could barely remain upright.

Irina sighed, but didn't falter. If they are going down, might as well do it with holy flair.

She struck first, fast—so fast she clouded. Mimic shifted shape mid-swing, becoming a whip of chains that cracked toward the woman's legs, then a javelin aimed at her chest. Irina moved in tandem, darting to the right, flipping the blade back into a sword, and slashing from below.

Horrifyingly, Tiamat's eyes tracked her wherever she moved.

Another ripple of wind rose, and with it, another invisible sound.

"Aaaahhhhhh…!"

The sound touched her ears and Irina collapsed mid-swing.

Leggs gave out like her soul had momentarily shut the lights off. She landed hard with a big wince, eyes wide and flickering, breath stolen from her chest.

Xenovia knew, at that moment, it was done.

But there was still her.

So she surged forward again, alone, blade blazing, and swung with everything, an arc so wide and full of wrath that it seemed to tear the image of the trees around it.

Tiamat's eyes focused fully for the first time.

She lifted her hand.

And sang.

The sound was no longer soft, it was almost close to a scream. It was pressure given form, weight given volume. It struck Xenovia like a divine fist with finality.

Her body flew before she could register movement. The forest snapped past her vision in a blur of green and sky, and then she met the boulder.

The sound of bones cracking was muffled by the mountain's size.

When she landed, the sword had vanished from her grasp.

And the clearing was quiet again.

Tiamat turned, slowly, as if only now remembering where she had intended to go.

Suddenly something was moving fast. Tiamat's head tilted slightly as the distant forest trembled under a sharp gust, a faint shimmer of holy power snapping into focus from a far-off edge of her peripheral awareness. Leaves scattered like startled birds. The breeze carried something pure. And something sharp.

Before the brown strands of her hair could fully settle from the breeze's touch, the ground in front of her cracked with a crisp noise. The scent of sacrament laced the air. Then she appeared swift and cutting. A blur of dark and ivory coalesced into a form with practiced posture and sharpened poise. A woman now stood before the Beast, back straight, arms raised, her cross-shaped sword brimming with luminous filaments of condensed holy essence.

Griselda's face bore no anger. Only clarity, and a certain gravity reserved for those rare moments when her compassion must be set aside. There was no room for hesitation. She had no doubt already seen the devastation around her.

Tiamat merely blinked as the tip of the sacramental blade lunged forward, whizzing with the sharp resonance of divine power. Griselda's strikes were deliberate in an almost maternal resolve, to protect and to endure, even if it meant bleeding in place of others.

The blade met Tiamat's forearm, touching against a thin, shimmering veil of pink circular light that flickered into existence in the very instant of contact.

Tiamat's reaction was a passive recognition.

Griselda didn't expect a straightforward blow to work. She feinted upward, only to twist her grip and come down in a cleaving arc aimed at Tiamat's shoulder. The cross-shaped construct fractured into two slivers of light, dividing mid-swing into a dual-blade form and reforming in her palms as if sculpted from pure intent.

Tiamat ducked slightly, unnervingly fluid for someone who hadn't taken a combat stance. A flare of wind burst outward from her side as she tilted. The air simply bent around her thoughts. The gust howled, brushing Griselda's hair back, almost throwing off her balance.

She narrowed her eyes, forcing herself into a slide to minimize the drag. Her boots skidded across the torn grass, grounding herself before pivoting back into another flurry of strikes. One, two, a sweep, and then a pivot stab toward the ribs. This opponent didn't react with guard positions, as when danger approached, she willed it away as if annoyed by a drifting leaf in her path.

Her eyes flickered upward briefly, and in that moment, her gaze took in the shattered surroundings.

And Griselda saw now what the others had experienced.

A long trench cut across the clearing like a scar of force. Trees leveled in rows, their trunks splintered as if cracked from the inside. The shattered remains of Xenovia's Excalibur Destruction embedded halfway into a boulder. Farther away Xenovia herself, crumpled against that very stone, one arm twisted behind her at a broken angle, unconscious or worse. A smaller patch of crushed foliage lay to the right, an imprint where Irina's body had bounced from the soil. Her sword lay nearby, reverted to a silver rod. She hadn't stirred once since her collapse.

"Two exorcist prodigies... felled. And barely five minutes had passed."

"Two girls trained to fight Devils and Fallen... wielders of the legendary fragments of the most sacred blade forged by Heaven's will, and both were rendered incapable by someone who never struck first. Who never even radiated the intention to kill."

Griselda didn't allow herself to panic. But her breath did change, just slightly. She kept striking, trying to gauge timing, openings, patterns. There was none of that. Tiamat did not dodge out of worry or need. She merely avoided what might inconvenience her. Each time a blade came close, her body turned slightly, or a glimmer of pink light spun into being, like a bubble from a dream. Every block was efficient, but strangely disconnected, like the act of defending wasn't born from survival instinct but the passive reflex of something too ancient to flinch.

Magic, Griselda thought. "Except not any codified system. No formulas or glyphs."

Tiamat raised her hand.

"Aaaahhh!"

It thickened the air with a ripple exploding outward like a sonar pulse and wrapped around the combatants.

Griselda braced.

She hadn't expected the sound to strike her like a wall. Her holy construct-shield flared and cracked as the pulse met it, the sheer force behind the vibration shoving her backward. For a moment she could feel every joint in her body resonate. Her inner sacraments strained to maintain cohesion, holy energy pulsing violently to stabilize her limbs. Griselda landed hard but rolled out of it. Her ribs screamed.

She looked again. Xenovia hadn't moved. Irina's fingers twitched, but barely. She was losing time. Losing ground. The opponent had not once retaliated in earnest, she still stood alone, untouched.

Griselda gripped her construct tighter. Her next strike would be the last in this exchange. She doesn't have a plan to defeat the woman, she needs to survive long enough to call for guidance. Someone in the Vatican, or better, Heaven needed to know this was here.

It was a flash of motion that went beyond training and instinct and discipline. Griselda Quarta, Supreme Exorcist, hailed among the one of the most refined humans of the Faith, blurred forward in a last, decisive act. Her hand gripped the cruciform construct forged from her Sacramental aura, the light of Heaven searing visibly from its edges. Every movement she made now was agony; her ribs screamed beneath the force of acceleration, each breath a stab of internal glass, her lungs shuddering with protest as divine energy surged through a body already battered from clashing with a being that eluded her every category.

She moved anyway.

Because that was the duty.

Because that was faith.

And because both dear disciples were unconscious.

The instant before impact stretched thin like melted wax. Griselda could see the lines of it now; the angle of her cross-blade, the arc it would take as it cleaved toward the stranger's face, the way holy energy would lance forward with a thunderclap of judgment, drawn from the trembling will of Heaven's justice.

If the blow connected, it would purify. It would erase the aberrant thing. That was what she hoped. That was what she prayed.

The only thing left was to connect the attack!

The Mesopotamian Goddess shattered her hopes.

Griselda didn't see it so much as feel it as heat, pressure, that suffocating and immediate heat that no flame should naturally exude. Her eyes widened by a fraction, and instinct screamed far too late. Her cross-blade hung suspended in the air, literally centimeters from its mark, edge refracting against a sudden updraft of shimmering fire, distorted from the pressure wave of something far, far too close.

—Fire made flesh, or rather, flesh made fire.

Tiamat's arm, wreathed in living flame drawn from her elemental body slammed forward, elbow bent palm closed like a hammer forged by planetary force. It struck Griselda cleanly in the midsection, just beneath her bosom, shattering through the reinforced cloth, holy enchantments, and protective scripts as though they were parchment caught in a storm.

Her breath left her in a choked burst of crimson.

Ribs broke. The already-fractured ones splintered further like shattered porcelain underfoot. She felt her diaphragm crumple against her organs, the world turning sideways as her body, once so dependable, so strong, so shaped by years of Vatican's conditioning, betrayed her in a single instant.

She flew. The forest floor greeted her again in a detonation of dust and shredded undergrowth. A crater formed where she landed, back-first, limbs twisted like fallen sculpture. Her construct weapon flickered out in a sputter of light, energy dispersing with a whimper. Her vision pulsed with red and white. Her fingers spasmed.

Still, she tried to rise.

Of course she did.

Even bleeding from the mouth, eyes dilated from blunt-force trauma, spine screaming with misalignment and impact shock, Griselda tried to rise. Her elbow dug into the earth, trembling, her forearm folding beneath her as she strained, trying to lift her torso. Her breath came out wet. Her mouth filled with the metallic taste of life leaving.

Her pride shaken, she saw the stranger walk forward again. No emotion. No cruelty in her face. Just serenity. Even her monstrous strength had lacked fury.

It was mechanical. Biological. The act of a being who crushed not out of malice, but because that was simply how it proceeded. Like tectonic plates and the moon's tide.

Griselda coughed and reached for her side, fingers skimming what might have been a fractured rib poking out just beneath her cloth line. She prepared another prayer, mentally, ready to die for it if she had to—

"Fou!"

Griselda's temple rang with impact, and her thoughts scattered like shattered prayer beads across cold marble.

Her body slumped. Her consciousness slipped.

And just like that, the third Exorcist fell.

No words were said. None needed to be.

Fou pawed near her fallen side, dropping the book onto the broken soil, pages fluttering open to some unknowable section.

Across the clearing, Tiamat raised her head slowly to the sky. Her long hair, wet with mist from her earlier elemental invocation, shimmered faintly.

"Aaahhhhh…"

She looked at Fou who sat at attention. The Exorcists lay crumpled around them.

"Aaahhhhh..."

Hearing her intention through instinctual understanding, Fou nodded and abided by her orders.

The Church won't expect all of this.

.
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.
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The sky was tinged a pale bronze from the haze of a spring morning turned slightly humid by the city's breath.

Kyoto overlooked far below the forested ridge Angra and U-Olga stood upon.

Angra, standing with his hands shoved into the pockets of a black-and-white jersey zip jacket—seriously, where does he keep getting clothes?—squinted down the hill with a grimace. His back hurt from the hours of walking. His legs sore.

Not because of the distance, no. That part was manageable. He was a Beast of Evil, or whatever label humanity preferred this century. He could handle terrain. No, what grated at his sanity, what truly sapped his spirit like a slow, gnawing decay, was the fact that he had walked here with her.

Beside him, U-Olga floated down barely touching the ground like gravity merely humored her existence. The enormous metallic crown she had once borne like a declaration of war was now invisible by an illusion. Her flowing hair shimmered faintly, and the golden and silver horns had vanished from sight.

He tugged the hoodie's zipper up a little higher, concealing the last glimmers of the Persian etchings scorched into his skin, tattoos that moved faintly when no one watched. They pulsed at the approach of divinity, a reaction embedded deep in his soul since the day he was branded humanity's sin. Using simple manipulation of magical energy, he also hid away the tattoo on his face.

"You know, we could've taken the train."

His voice echoed the terrain faintly, hollowed out by fatigue and disdain.

U-Olga did not respond immediately. She instead viewed Kyoto with a gaze that bespoke royalty and judgment in equal measure. Her arms were crossed to hold herself back, because to her, this view was beneath contempt. She was not admiring the city. She was measuring it for conquest, or maybe incineration.

Angra raised a brow, lips curling. "Yeah. No response. Figures."

He stepped forward down the slope, muttering to himself the entire time. "Kyoto Station. You know, Japan's second-largest. Fifteen stories, shopping malls, a department store, hotels stacked like corporate nesting dolls, even a damn movie theater from what I've heard here. If we had just gotten on the train like a pair of halfway intelligent demonic entities, we'd be sipping cheap vending machine coffee by now instead of hiking like damn pilgrims looking for spiritual enlightenment in a place that sells Hello Kitty kimonos."

He spoke not for her benefit, but his own.

"Apparently, no. We had to walk. Walk. All because Her Radiant Divinity of Earth's True Ownership decided she couldn't so much as breathe the same oxygen as a species that has to schedule dentist appointments."

U-Olga slowly turned her head.

"I heard that," she said coldly, her voice like polished obsidian cracking down a granite cliff. "And I will remind you, that I have not yet annihilated this planet precisely because I was given orders to cooperate that would benefit me. Do not presume patience is the same as acceptance."

"Assuming you even had the current capacity to do so, WE'RE all severely weakened. You're tolerating their presence like mold on porcelain," Angra fired back. "I'm tolerating yours like a migraine with delusions of grandness."

She floated past him with her chin held high, robes trailing with immaculate exactness despite the lack of wind. "Your sarcasm is as dull as your scent. The only reason I deign to accompany you is because a certain Beast of Pity insists your familiarity with these flesh-things might yield useful insight."

"Imagine thinking I was the helpful one," Angra muttered, trailing after her and kicking at a rock. "That's the real joke of this operation. Me, scouting. Pretending I'm someone who gives a damn whether Kyoto is spiritually intact."

The path downwards was lined with gravel, the kind carved by hands that still prayed to things older than Buddhism. The very steps murmured a language of ghosts. Angra heard it, of course. He always did. Cities bled memories, and this one was drenched. The type of quiet survival that most humans never thought twice about. They just lived. That was what disgusted U-Olga the most.

He could already see the way she recoiled from their proximity to the town, a twitch of the eye, a subtle strain at her temples. Her glamour was holding, but not easily.

"I hate this," she said after a moment. Her voice didn't tremble, though there was something acidic at the edge of her words. "Why do they build everything so close together? Why do they congregate when it's inefficient? It's claustrophobic. Repulsive even."

"That IS humanity," Angra said conversationally. "Pack animals with religion. You'd think after millennia of watching them slaughter each other with the same sword of ideals, you'd grow numb. Nope. You still hate them with a passion that burns brighter than the first time you stepped on an anthill."

She tilted her head, eyes narrowing. "Are you implying that my disdain is irrational?"

"I'm implying that your disdain is loud."

"Careful, filth," she said.

"No." Angra snapped back, tired, dry, "you be careful. We're here on recon, remember? Not conquest. Goetia gave us a job. I hate this as much as you do, but we play along for now."

He stopped short, staring down at the modern skyline bleeding into the historical district. Glass towers pressed up against pagodas like steel ivy overtaking stone.

His voice lowered. "We're in the heart of one of the oldest spiritually alive cities in the country. If there's any reaction to our summoning, if the leylines are even aware of our arrival, this is where we'll feel it. The humans below won't see us, but other beings might else."

U-Olga said nothing. She stared down at the district, teeth clenched tight like she was willing the city to collapse under its own population. Then, finally, she pushed herself.

"Fine," she said curtly. "We'll observe. But I will not speak to them."

Angra shrugged. "Didn't plan to."

They began descending the steps together, two Beasts, both veiled, both unnatural, both seething with energies so ancient they defied taxonomy. Kyoto was unaware of the two god-like beings wearing mortal flesh.

"I still say we should've taken the damn train…" Angra muttered again, mostly to himself.

So they wandered.

Or rather, they circled, in a slow, pointless orbit of Kyoto that felt less like reconnaissance. Angra dislikes walking again. There was a difference between walking with purpose and being dragged around like some glorified hound by a woman who had zero comprehension of subtlety. He had fought in the Holy Grail War, twice, six times if other timelines were counted, he watched civilizations rise and fall as nothing more than a formless being, he tasted the bitterness of every sin and cruelty humanity could conjure up from the depths of its soul... and still, nothing tested his patience more than this woman and her delusion of planetary royalty.

"Y'know," he started up dryly, trailing just a few steps behind U-Olga as they descended yet another stone path leading away from the Kyoto Tower's base, "if we were actually interested in tracking leylines instead of sightseeing, maybe we'd have gone straight to the bloody shrine quarter instead of playing spiritual tourism with every landmark."

She didn't respond. Her gaze was scanning the skyline and the temple roofs in the distance. Her posture screamed disdain, her pace stiff with unspoken fury. A queen forced to mingle with cattle.

He sighed, hands deep in his jacket pockets again The enchantment holding down U-Olga's celestial crown shimmered faintly in the sunlight, he could see it, even if the humans couldn't. She was a sovereign faking humility, forced to walk among those she thought of as inferior not out of strategy, but out of obligation.

They passed by Kiyomizu-dera with its wide wooden stage jutting over the hillside like a noble's outstretched arm. Angra glanced at it with mild amusement, not because of its spiritual power (which was modest, despite the aura of serenity), but it reminded him how easily humanity attached transcendence to architecture. Put enough faith in a place and it became holy, as if wood and stone could drink divinity out of the air.

They kept walking.

Then came Kinkaku-ji. Gold-leaf brilliance set against the backdrop of green trees and glassy water, the glint of sunlight bouncing off its reflection. U-Olga stared at it for a moment too long.

"Hmph," she scoffed. "It has no functionality. Merely decoration. Useless."

"Kind of like that attitude of yours," Angra muttered under his breath. She didn't hear, or pretended not to. Either suited him fine.

By the time they reached Ginkaku-ji, he had started ignoring the names. Every temple bled into the next. Zen aesthetics, stone gardens, the odor of incense and ambition. Humans built these places for themselves. A mirror of their longing for order. To force stillness into chaos, elegance into nature.

"I'm surprised you haven't tried to convert one of these buildings into a throne yet," he drawled as they passed by a tea shop, smelling the scent of matcha. "All this majesty, and not one screaming human prostrating themselves before you. It's almost tragic, really."

"I do not require their screams, only their recognition," U-Olga snapped, finally turning toward him with that aristocratic irritation brimming behind her eyes. "This entire species is beneath me, and still they do not look up. Do you comprehend the insult that represents? The Sovereign of Earth must lower herself to hide her glory from insects. It is degrading."

Angra chuckled, not kindly. "You don't hide it well. Even now, you're practically oozing contempt like radiation from a faulty reactor. I'm surprised the crows haven't started circling."

She scoffed and looked away, continuing down the avenue, arms crossed. The gesture alone would not shield her from the world's inadequacy.

They passed shops, tourists, vendors, men and women rushing through their small, fleeting lives. Angra watched them idly, his steps lazy and drifting.

There was something comforting in the chaos. Humanity's absurd need to busy itself with endless tasks, stacking meaning atop banality. A world defined by its fragility. Ultimately…

"They persist..."

Through wars, through plagues, through the cruelty of their own kind and the indifference of divine beings like the one walking ahead of him, they endured. There was a quiet power in that.

But all this wandering…

He stopped suddenly in the middle of the street, prompting U-Olga to scowl and turn.

"You have halted." she said flatly like she was announcing a malfunctioning machine.

"We've been circling for hours," Angra complained louder this time, ignoring the passersby who glanced in their direction. "We walked through the tower, the temples, the damn shoreline, and still haven't found the leyline source we're looking for. When clearly, if we'd just gone to Kyoto Station and taken ten minutes to study a municipal ley line map like reasonable beings, we'd have saved ourselves three hours of useless cardio. Do you know what Kyoto Station is, U-Olga? It's Japan's second-largest station building. Let me repeat this again; it's a fifteen-story monolith that houses not just a transport nexus but a shopping mall, a hotel, a movie theater, department store, and several government facilities. All of it under one roof. That's where all the leyline lines intersect in modernity. The concrete temple of modern civilization, filled with a thousand lives every second. But no—gods forbid you walk into a building filled with 'unclean humanity.' So we've been pacing around like lost pilgrims, when the divine scent is concentrated exactly where the humans are."

She narrowed her eyes. "Are you finished?"

"Oh no," he continued, pacing again, gesturing lazily with one hand. "Because we could have taken the train. The train, Ms. Beast Number 7. Not even a special one. Just a normal railway service, with seats, and ventilation, and snack carts. But you—you with your royal spine and apocalyptic ego had to fly half the way and walk the rest, dragging me like some cosmic intern doing spiritual fieldwork under the most insufferable celestial tyrant in recorded memory."

She stepped forward, breath cold, eyes narrowing like razors.

"You speak as if I should tolerate infestation. As if lowering myself into those metal tubes filled with sweat, noise, and the scent of desperation is acceptable. I do not compromise my dignity for efficiency. I do not tolerate being lectured by a walking grudge stuffed into a human corpse."

Angra smirked. "Then perhaps the Sovereign of Earth should learn how to use a map."

She made a sound like she was about to strike him, and he honestly would've welcomed it at that point and give her a beating afterward.

But then he felt it.

A resonance, low and subtle, brushing the back of his mind like fingers on piano keys.

They had reached Shijō-dōri.

Angra's expression darkened slightly as he tilted his head, eyes narrowing. The leyline here was dense. Thicker than it should've been. Ancient and guarded. Old in the way that mountains were old.

"Finally," he murmured, his tone shifting from sarcastic to contemplative as his senses widened. "We're here."

The gates of Yasaka Shrine were before them, proud and vibrant, the crimson-painted wood catching the sun like a divine bloodline. U-Olga stopped beside him, her posture coiling slightly.

"This... feels proper. This is where gods belong." she said calmly, gaze fixed on the honden at the shrine's heart.

He glanced sideways at her, amused.

"Not one of them came out to greet you."

She said nothing.

Yasaka Shrine pulsed with visible leylines beneath its lacquered surface. He was amazed he didn't witness a single shikigami floating under the eaves. The shrine was empty. Or maybe, the shrine chose to appear empty.

Angra stepped beyond the threshold with one hand brushing the wood of the torii like he was acknowledging the local spirits out of obligation. That was the difference between him and his kind; he didn't deny reverence where it was due, but neither did he offer it with sincerity. Reverence was a currency, a relic of civilization, and he had long since traded in that economy for something older. Something more honest.

The leyline pulsed beneath the soles of their feet. It wasn't immediately obvious in the way it might have been in the lands of Magecraft or in the territories of high ritual where the flow of magical energy gushed like molten gold through conduits designed to house it, shaped by centuries of doctrine and human superstition. In contrast, the power coiled deep within the earth like a slumbering dragon, exhaling a breath both sweet and bitter in its pressure.

The leyline was saturated—no, that was the wrong word. "Saturation" would indicate overuse, excess. This was complete. The sort of spiritual density born almost out of sprawling metropolis ley-weaving, but more of old worship. Unspoken reverence etched into ritual and blood. Not magic in the way the West defined it. Something more instinctive and feral.

He crouched, fingers brushing the flagstone at the threshold of the honden, feeling the whisper of the ground itself.

This was similar in the structure of mana. Similar enough to draw upon. It danced along his circuits as he reached for it and then… stabilizing. The sensation was heavier than mana, more physical in its flow, each particle of spiritual energy carried a memory.

The energy struck him the moment he stepped fully within. It wasn't blunt like a divine aura or malignant like demonic prana, still, it was fluid and weaving between space and shadow. Magic, yes. But not the type found in bounded fields or thaumaturgical formulas. This was living. Native. Local.

"You're taking too long." U-Olga said flatly, standing just at the edge of the sacred courtyard. She had already crossed the square, ascending the steps toward the main honden.

He looked up, one brow lifting. "You're welcome to go first, Sovereign. Try not to rupture the soil."

She sneered, and then descended into the energy. There was no ritual to it, no chant needed. She simply opened. Her being unfolded like the petals of a mechanical lotus, and the leyline surged upward as if startled into obedience. The air trembled. Trees at the edges of the shrine rustled. The insects hiding in the cracks of bark grew silent.

"Its essence is rich but unrefined. Not the type meant for a system like mine."

She drew in the power like a vacuum. Greedy. Indiscriminate.

And still… lacking.

Even with all this weight and history, all this saturated presence and ancestral worship, it wasn't enough. Not even nearly. The emptiness inside them both remained a gaping chasm. Their descent and summoning in this world had cost them everything. This was sustenance by scavenging. Not restoration.

Angra stepped beside her and inhaled slowly, drawing the energy inward. He had the patience of one who had long ago ceased hoping for completeness. He absorbed it like a thief gently lifting coin from a purse. No waste. The sensation was strange and foreign. His circuits took it anyway. Twisted it into shape. Let it fill the cracks in his soul like molten lead in old bones.

Angra said nothing for a moment, then exhaled, taking a slow seat on the stone lip of a dry water basin. He dipped his fingers into the well of magic and indulged in it anyway.

"Youki. This is what they call Youki. That's what they call it here. Raw spiritual nature. The base current of the native supernatural. The breath of the land itself was distilled through its children—"

U-Olga made a sound of distaste behind him, not dissimilar to how a queen might regard a servant offering her wine in a cracked goblet.

"It's inelegant."

"It's efficient," Angra corrected, eyes closed, letting the ambient current worm its way into his dying circuits. He could feel the emptiness in his frame. "Nature's piss, if you want to be vulgar about it. Still better than starving."

They didn't have to speak after that. The air around them grew thick with ambient intake. There was no need to drag the power into themselves with violence. It came to them, slow and dense. Power crawled through the earth, through stone, through the old charms tacked onto wood beams by monks who barely knew what they feared. It was the quiet replenishment of beasts who had walked before calendars. Who were given no throne but took the altar anyway.

Angra could feel it now: the leyline's nervousness. Like a creature that knew it was being bled. It recoiled around them, first in protest, now in reverent hesitation. The shrine spirits trembled and did not intervene. No fire kami. No foxes.

Because the leyline knew that what fed from it was no god to be bargained with. It was a conceptual Evil of Man. And Beasts did not ask permission.

"I imagine," Angra said eventually, "that if we sat here long enough, we'd drain the shrine dry and nobody would be able to tell what was worshipped here in the first place. Some fox spirit would come back to find their house hollow and their godhood gone."

"That would be their fault," U-Olga replied. "For being weak. If a creature cannot defend its nest, it has no right to own it."

Angra snorted, half-laughing as he tilted his head skyward.

"And people call me cruel."

A long silence stretched between them again, filled only with the hum of spiritual digestion. A breath. That flicker on the edges of his senses that he might've ignored had it not held intent.

Malice was easy to spot. This was more focused. Coordinated. A perimeter tightening.

He opened his eyes slowly. Looked east.

He felt the pressure bloom on the horizon like a bruise forming beneath the skin of the world.

"Ah," he muttered. "There it is. Took them long enough."

"How many?"

"Difficult to say. Twenty or so. Maybe more. They're masking their auras. Poorly, but intentionally." He tilted his head, the shadows of his tattoos flickering faintly beneath his skin. "I suppose we should feel flattered. Kyoto's protectors don't usually rouse themselves for just anyone siphoning off sacred land."

She looked out toward the city, unimpressed.

"They should have come earlier. I have already taken more than they can replace."

Angra chuckled darkly. "That's what happens when you treat power like it's a meal. You invite the chefs to bring knives. They're supernatural, that much is obvious."

She stepped forward to the edge of the honden steps, arms at her sides, chin high.

"They approach knowing what we are?"

"Doubtful. I imagine we're setting off alarms like a pair of cancerous nodes on the leyline grid." Angra rolled his shoulders, letting the sensation of ambient energy settle beneath his skin. He was still far from full. Barely a third of his strength had returned. The rest would take days, weeks, maybe months, assuming the planet itself didn't turn on them before then. "But they're not wrong to be worried. Even the smell of old youkai blood. Daiyoukai class, probably."

U-Olga's lips curled in distaste. "I was beginning to forget the taste of struggle."

He looked at her sideways, mildly amused. "Careful, Sovereign. We're running on fumes and borrowed offerings. Pick a fight now and you might find yourself crawling back to orbit with your crown dented."

"I do not crawl," she spat. "If they threaten the Earth's future that I envisioned, they will be corrected."

"They'll see it the other way around. We're intruding. Devouring leyline energy. To them, we're invasive."

"As if their opinions matter to US."

"That's the problem with opinions," he mused. "They have this nasty habit of coming attached to swords and claws."

She turned toward him fully now, her eyes glowing faintly behind the illusion that kept her form tethered to humanity. There was fire in her, blistering and barely suppressed. Just will. The raw, uncompromising will of a creature who once sat above every living thing.

"They will bow," she said coldly. "Or burn."

"I suppose we'll see which happens first."

The approaching figures had prompted little in the way of concern within either Beast. For creatures who once had every sin and strain of divinity aligned against them, twenty youkai, even with a daiyoukai among them, was a trivial arrival, if anything. Their spiritual pressures were organized, but that held no significance in the scale of beasts who had once stared down the concept of Armageddon as if it were a bothersome pebble in their boot.

He merely leaned against the crooked base of a rootless sakura tree and exhaled softly out of simple boredom.

Their existence needed fuel. This world, at the very least, seemed like it could still feed monsters.

He tilted his head just enough to get a look at the advancing group through the shimmers of heat rising from the leyline convergence point. At their center was a woman. Golden-haired. Beautiful. Too beautiful for what this world should rightfully allow. And not the virginal, untouchable ideal so many poets had wasted ink describing. No—this woman was mature, powerful, and deeply, viscerally alive. The kind of beautiful that made civilizations crumble because a king said so, the kind of soft-lipped fury that demanded devotion, even as she reminded you it was a borrowed privilege to be in her gaze.

His eyes followed the long, coiled spiral of her golden ponytail, the flare of red tied against her snowy-white coat, and the glint of a golden crown that rested so lightly on her brow that it seemed grown from her skull rather than placed. Shrine maiden attire; ceremonial and traditional, clinging to her like silk to flame.

He found himself thinking, Gods, beings like her really are absurd when they get divine with their aesthetics.

U-Olga followed his gaze and made a sound halfway between disgust and exasperation. "Really?"

"I'm not that distracted," he replied, "just... spiritually aware."

Before she could slap him or complain with one of her usual highborn outbursts, the woman, the daiyoukai, the leader—stepped forward with restrained offense like a matron stepping out to chastise children who'd tracked mud into the shrine.

"You there!" she called out, her voice carrying with practiced spiritual augmentation, ringing clearly despite the soft wind brushing past the hilltop.

"You who are draining the spiritual convergence point without offering any formal invocation or permission, state your intentions."

Ah. The gentle poison of politeness soaked in the authority of someone who knew the land answered to her. There was pride in it, but tempered. Behind it, the spiritual outrage of a creature who likely was the leyline in some partial sense. Angra didn't need something like clairvoyance to tell she was tethered to Kyoto's foundations, possibly its spiritual sovereign.

He stretched deliberately slow, then dusted off his jacket, already scuffed from the soil. "We were hungry," he said, loud enough that all twenty or so of the gathered youkai, with their masks and practiced formations, could hear him. "Not that we expected dinner to come with a hostess."

Some of the tengu shifted, spears lowered slightly. Yasaka, however, did not flinch.

U-Olga, predictably, rolled her eyes. "What my companion means," she said, stepping forward with a haughty tilt of her chin that could have belonged to a certain Roman empress—uhh, emperor, "is that we were recovering. Do forgive the absence of proper etiquette. I wasn't aware this place had spiritual table manners."

Yasaka's smile was tight, polite, even as her eyes narrowed faintly. "This place is sacred. These leylines maintain the balance of Kyoto. They are not a meal for outsiders."

"Then maybe you shouldn't have left your pantry door wide open," Angra muttered again, just loud enough.

The daiyoukai's spiritual presence surged slightly, as if a second heartbeat rose behind her words. "You will answer more clearly, now. State your names. I will not ask again."

U-Olga glanced at him.

He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck, considering the options with the kind of loose disinterest that came from the weary acceptance that this conversation, like most, would spiral into something dumber the longer it was delayed. "Do we give them our True Names?" he asked quietly, not so much out of secrecy, but apathy.

"They asked," she said with a shrug, voice casually imperious. "They might have merit to hear it. If they misunderstand, it's their fault for being primitive."

He blinked at her.

She smiled.

Then, before anyone could object, U-Olga stepped forward and proclaimed aloud, her voice ringing, "I am U-Olga Marie. A Beast of the End. The alien intellect born to be Earth's final god. In your primitive tongue, you may call me the Beast VII That Announces the End."

Silence.

Even the wind quieted, startled.

Yasaka's expression barely shifted, but her brows twitched—just slightly.

Then she turned her eyes to the boy beside her, the one with tangled black hair and a deceptively human slouch.

He gave a thin smile. "Angra Mainyu," he said, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. "You might recognize it. Old Persian. It means 'Destructive Spirit.' People used to call me the god of darkness. A little melodramatic, sure, but what isn't?"

There was even more confusion, a flicker of remembered lore in her gaze.

Angra's smile widened.

"Don't worry," he said smoothly, tilting his head. "I'm not that Angra Mainyu. Probably."

He didn't wink. That would have been too much. But the mischief in his eyes was unmistakable.

U-Olga snorted.

One of the tengu, a younger-looking crow, cocked his head ever so slightly toward Yasaka, silently asking for command. But she remained still, her expression unreadable save for the glint of offense in her golden eyes.

The names had left their lips with neither grandeur nor gravitas, and perhaps that had made it worse. For beings so audacious to claim themselves as Beasts of the End and Angra Mainyu—one in the voice of a haughty, elegant woman who spoke with the composure of a ruler, and the other from a slouching boy who hadn't even stood up straight when he said it—their lack of ceremonial bearing was an affront in itself. Especially in a place like Kyoto, saturated with history, deference, and tradition layered upon tradition like sediment in a sacred mountain.

Yasaka's brows tensed above her narrowed eyes, and her arms folded beneath the swell of her chest in a way that accentuated the stateliness of her shrine maiden's garb and the authority she bore as the living embodiment of the city's spiritual arteries.

"You are aware, are you not," she began, the sweetness in her tone laced tightly with frost, "that the monikers you speak are not those one wears lightly, and if this is some manner of theater you bring to my gates, I assure you, there are better stages for dramatics than Kyoto's leylines."

"Mm. See, the problem with names, I find, is that they carry far too much baggage for creatures who take them too seriously. You give a starving man a title and expect him to remember it while his gut is empty."

"That is not an answer," Yasaka replied to Angra in displeasure.

"It never is."

U-Olga did not lower herself with banter. Her pride was too crystalline to entertain Yasaka's veiled accusations. "If you doubt, it is only because your comprehension is still confined to the limits of this Earth's superstition. The Beasts are not creatures you welcome into a ledger or index. We are truths you cannot yet categorize. My title was forged in the unraveling of human consequence, not in the shrine records of your archives."

A few of the tengu took an instinctive step back at that, feathers bristling.

"And I," Angra added with a lazy gesture of his hand, as if swatting away a fly, "am the oh-so-call deity of darkness who never wanted to be worshipped in the first place, so I recommend not starting now."

"You speak as though you expect me to be convinced by arrogance alone." Yasaka said with her expression settling into something unreadable but far from amiable. "You trespass upon Kyoto's spirit, absorb her leyline as though it were your own… and offer riddles in return for my patience. If you are gods, then you are very unrefined ones."

"Oh, I agree," Angra muttered with a shrug, "which is why we're asking nicely before I start poking around in your domain more forcefully. That would be unpleasant for everyone, I imagine, though I suspect the idea of 'niceness' isn't a strong currency among the divine either."

"You are consuming something not yours," Yasaka said flatly, "and speaking in cryptic as though I am the one in the wrong for not understanding them."

U-Olga tilted her head. "We are not here to ruin your city or unmake your shrine, as entertaining as it would be to see how fragile such constructs truly are. We are simply... lacking certain details about the world. Or rather, this version of it."

"Ah," Angra drawled. "This part. Right, yes. So. Does the Moonlit World ring a bell?"

Yasaka blinked.

"The what?"

"The Moonlit World," U-Olga's tone was already dipping into condescension. "The network of magical societies, enclaves of mystery, age-old organizations and clandestine towers hiding beneath the fabric of the mundane. Surely even you provincial spirits have heard the term."

"No," Yasaka said simply.

"Really?" Angra muttered, clearly unimpressed. "Then let's be less dramatic and say… the supernatural world. Spirits, gods, devils, angels, that sort of circus."

"Ah." Yasaka's arms unfolded, now shadowed with guarded curiosity. "If that is what you meant… then yes. The Supernatural World is known to us. Though I find it hard to believe you are unaware of it, given the way you're feeding on Kyoto's leyline without effort."

"I am, frankly," Angra said, deadpan, "a walking contradiction. Best not to unravel the whole yarn or you'll find it loops back into itself like some cosmic joke. Which, in my case, it probably is."

U-Olga, by contrast, took the query more seriously. "We are collecting data. Information. Context. Whatever this timeline pretends to call knowledge. We require updated terminology and the geopolitical state of your... world. Moonlit World is what we used in the Age of Gods."

"'Supernatural' makes it sound like a B-grade manga, but I guess time rots language."

Yasaka blinked. Her ears flicked once.

"I'm sorry—are you saying you've been… asleep until now?"

Nope. No, they were not.

"In a sense," Angra drawled with half-lidded eyes and mellow voice. "Think of us like old mold at the back of the fridge. You clean it out and forget it existed, but it doesn't forget you."

"We are," U-Olga confirmed, "and we seek context. Whatever political structure this 'Supernatural world' operates under… we will know of it."

"Enough," Yasaka snapped, her patience fraying, though she still held the air of a matron suppressing the desire to swat an unruly child. "You come seeking knowledge, but offer riddles and titles instead. You speak of forgotten words and judgment and gods who no longer answer their names. Then tell me plainly—what is it you wish to know?"

U-Olga smiled again, sharper this time. "Everything."

The silence extended, broken only by the faintest hum of leyline energy still coiling through the grass like veins of liquid fire. Yasaka inhaled deeply, seeing no way around it, then straightened her posture.

"If you claim ignorance… then I shall offer you clarity. But only once. The world you now stand in is divided, though we prefer to call it 'balanced.' There are many powers that govern it, most invisible to humans, some known to them by story or scripture. Of these, the most prominent, and for centuries the most warring, were the Three Factions born of the Abrahamic religions: Heaven, Underworld, and Grigori. Angels, Devils, and Fallen alike."

Angra raised an eyebrow, they already knew a lot from the four Fallens' memories, but kept pretending to be more interested in a leaf than her words. "Ah yes. The greatest theological soap opera of the post-Age of Gods."

Yasaka gave him a warning glance, but continued regardless.

"Then there are the other pantheons—the Gods of myth who have remained, hidden or otherwise. The Shinto, of which I belong to; the Hindu Devas; the Norse; the Olympians; the Egyptian pantheon, and many others, each with domains they claim and powers they hoard in silence or spectacle."

"And in between all of them," she added, her tone lowering, "are creatures like us. The Youkai. The Dragons. The Spirits and Monsters. Sometimes protectors. Sometimes prey. But always watching."

Suddenly, there were no more words to offer, not at that moment. Ever dignified even in indignation, Yasaka sighed and let her golden gaze slide over the two intruders before her.

Her eyes flashed with finality.

"You may believe your unfamiliarity with our world's rules allows you impunity. But no such ignorance will absolve the act of forcefully draining spiritual energy from the leylines of Kyoto. As its guardian and the presiding Kyuubi, I have a duty. You will be taken into custody. The West Youkai Faction will determine what you are… and whether you should remain."

The tengu behind her responded with wordless movement. Staves twisted in polished hands, spell-scrolls unsealed with the faint crackle of folded ether, and spiritual formulas were already being written into the air, old power that still remained through shrines and rituals and mountains swallowed by clouds. Yasaka has no need to raise her voice.

Angra blinked, but slowly. At this moment, he might be a snake who watches an approaching footstep with idle amusement rather than threat. He did not move, nor make any effort to resist the encroaching spiritual matrix that closed around them.

If anything, he looked vaguely bored, eyes trailing over the calligraphy of a barrier spell being traced in vermillion air before drifting to the shape of a fox tail brushing against the hem of Yasaka's sleeve. Even when being arrested, some things deserved attention.

"Well," he said with the casual drawl of someone reading a tavern menu, "I suppose this is what passes for hospitality around here. Still, I was half-hoping you'd take us in. There's only so much to learn from conversations in forests with armed birds."

U-Olga did not share his enthusiasm. Her amber eyes narrowed with slow-burning disgust, and a twitch of her jaw betrayed the tension behind her sculpted cheekbones. She had already raised a hand to her still-invisible crown, fingers curling as if she would obliterate the offending spells without a second thought, as though to even suggest confinement was an insult etched in divine blood. There was something in her poise, almost ceremonial as this moment was beneath her entirely

"These… primitive beings dare dictate terms to me? To bind me with country charms and rice-paper spells? This is mockery. I have eradicated entire populations for lesser slights."

Angra leaned closer, one hand slipping into his jacket pocket as if looking for a piece of gum or a bullet or a philosophical answer. None of which, to his knowledge, were in there.

He murmured to her from the side of his mouth, dry and snake-like, "Relax. This is valuable. Let them take us in. Think of it as a guided tour with shackles. These creatures have territory, structure, their own political cadence. We're not going to learn a thing standing outside their gates like rejected divinities. You want dominion? First you learn where the throne is. Let the lesser animals think they've caged Beasts."

She did not reply with words, only the sharp flick of her gaze toward him, burning with offended regality and mistrust. But the way she dropped her hand from her crown said more. She would allow this, not because she agreed, but because the game intrigued her now. Even chains could be a strategy. A queen could wear manacles if it led her to the right court.

The tengu, unaware—or conceivably entirely aware—of the tension between the two figures, completed the binding rituals. Threads of Youjutsu, like soft glows of spiritual gauze, wrapped themselves around wrists and shoulders, a mimicry of restraint that had no real bite, not for beings like them. Angra felt the spell press against him like an overeager child's attempt to tie down a thunderstorm with ribbon. The energy was old, ceremonial, tied to the very soul of the mountain gods… but to him, it felt like rain trying to drown the ocean.

"Ah," he exhaled as they began preparing the transference sigils, "touching, really. You even bothered to bind us. I haven't been restrained since I wore a noose made of ideology. Didn't hold either."

One of the older tengu gave him a look of perplexed offense, but Angra's attention was already drifting again. His amber eyes, filled with amusement, slid to Yasaka herself, who had turned to oversee the final coordinates for their teleportation to Urakyoto. Her profile was graceful in the sunset, the strands of her golden hair moving like slow ink strokes down her back, tied into that long, spiraling tail that bounced lightly with her motions. Her smooth hands, moved with that priestess' finesse over a woven paper talisman. She wore power like a second skin—authority and something deeper, something maternal and foxlike beneath the silks. He smiled.

"By the way," Angra said aloud, loud enough for her ears, "you should consider loosening the ribbon on your coat. You breathe better when your chest isn't strangled. Just a humble observation."

Yasaka froze for the barest heartbeat. Her expression did not falter, but her left eyebrow did rise, and a sudden hush seemed to fall over the air like the trees themselves paused to consider the audacity of it. Her golden eyes cut back toward him, lips ever so slightly pursed in that unreadable way women had mastered long before language. She was a woman who had long known what she looked like so there was no blush but there was a glint behind her calm that spoke of tails flicking behind white sleeves and shrines catching fire in accidents no one ever proved.

"If I didn't know better," Yasaka said with all the smooth politeness of a fox preparing to ruin a hunter's year, "I would think you were flirting with your jailer."

"I flirt with death, too," Angra replied, tone dry, "but she doesn't wear heels."

When the spell activated, the forest folded inward, the dimensions twisting into themselves as the leyline gateway opened. Angra let himself fall into the spiraling passage of Urakyoto and into the home of the Youkai Faction. He grinned, glancing once at U-Olga beside him, who looked like she'd just bitten into a lemon wrapped in insolence.

"See? I told you. Field trip."

Chapter 6: Pure Water Seal for Two Beasts

The room that Angra and U-Olga were dragged into resembled less a prison cell and more a traditional meeting hall, the kind lined with tatami mats and paper screens painted with mountain and river scenes, an intentional mockery of comfort to lull the unprepared.

Low tables, cushions, and incense burning faintly in the corners to hide the stink of suspicion and fear that clung to these youkai, desperate to preserve an illusion of authority in a world slowly slipping through their fingers. It was almost adorable how seriously they took this.

He was seated with his legs stretched out, regarding the assembled mid-ranking youkai with the faintest of smiles playing at his lips, a man who had already decided that nothing they could do here would amuse him beyond a passing breath. His eyes drifted across them without focusing, and he could already hear their growing discomfort. Power, even hidden under a mask, had a scent to it that seeped into the air, and these creatures; kappa, tengu, and lesser kitsune sensed it even if they could not name it.

They were the type of people who thought they could tame a hurricane by offering it tea and polite conversation.

His companion sat across from him, with her arms were crossed elegantly over her chest, head tilted slightly back like she could ward off the very stench of their inferiority by refusing to look directly at them. Her expression was the kind of refined disdain that queens practiced in portraits, though anyone with the faintest hint of instinct would recognize it for what it was: the gathered lightning of something barely tolerating existence in such a debased room.

The leading interrogator, a crow tengu with a long beak-like nose and feathers for hair, finally broke the posturing silence.

"You are now within Urakyoto's jurisdiction. By decree of Yasaka-dono herself, you will be questioned under the authority of the Kyoto Youkai Faction for crimes against the leyline system and unauthorized magical interference. Cooperate, and leniency may be considered."

It was painfully transparent. Angra almost yawned but turned it into a scratch at his cheek instead. His fingers brushed lightly against his jaw, and as he did, he absently nudged the flow of spiritual energy from the floor itself, threads of it slowly coiling toward him like curious snakes. It required no focus and effort, like breathing in a room full of incense.

He smiled then, slow and smooth, letting the youkai believe it was because he respected their little theater.

"Of course, of course. We are nothing if not law-abiding citizens," Angra drawled, voice stretching out lazily as though each word weighed too much to be bothered with. "Merely lost travelers, you understand. Leylines are terribly confusing things. We were just famished of fuel and the next we are apparently committing high treason against the spiritual ecosystem of an entire province. How rude of reality to play such tricks, no?"

The interrogators bristled. They had been trained, no doubt, to expect resistance, perhaps arrogance, perhaps even indignation. This amused compliance, this airy indifference, left them grasping for footing. It was infuriating in the way a noble might feel watching peasants dare to laugh during a public execution.

U-Olga, for her part, barely glanced at the speaking youkai. Her mind was occupied, tracing the faint threads of spiritual energy that her companion was siphoning. It was so subtle that had she not been attuned to the fluctuations of mana on a cosmic scale, she might have missed it. Her fingers tapped against her own sleeve rhythmically, each taps an expression of burning irritation not with the act itself, she had long since stopped questioning Angra's peculiar hobbies, but with the gall these vermin had to lecture them like they were prisoners instead of inevitable, crushing forces of nature temporarily tolerating an ant colony's moral pretensions.

Another youkai, a female fox with multiple tails, stepped forward, voice more cunning in its barbed politeness.

"We have means of discerning truth from deception, travelers. It would be unwise to insult the patience of the Youkai Council further."

She smiled thinly, and with a snap of her fingers, the air shimmered around them. An illusionary field, a pitiful little psychic net meant to twist and tug at the minds of lesser beings, to make their thoughts slippery and defenses crack. It operated by suggestion, whispering doubts and fears and regrets into the soul, a technique born of the old wars where fear broke armies faster than blades.

The effect rolled off U-Olga like mist striking a glacier. She lifted her chin higher, nostrils flaring slightly in the only display of contempt she allowed herself. Her patience, threadbare as it was, curled tighter. Were she a lesser thing, she might have crushed the entire room on principle, but there was a plan, and she knew Angra preferred subtlety when it amused him.

As for Angra, the net tickled at the edges of his consciousness like a child poking at a tiger with a stick. His smile widened into something crooked and vaguely pitying.

"Youkai illusions, psychic fields, intimidation routines," he murmured aloud, dragging a hand through his hair in mock thoughtfulness. "I feel as if I have stepped into a particularly tedious morality play written by people who have never actually seen a real demon before."

The crow tengu's beak clicked sharply in frustration.

"You are accused of drawing power unlawfully from our most sacred resource," he pressed, voice growing louder. "The leyline energy belongs to Kyoto. To its guardian and her people."

"And I am merely breathing in the ambient blessings of your hospitality. Should you charge the wind for passing through your gates, too?"

The kitsune narrowed her eyes. They were switching tactics. Threats, then. Predictable.

"Should you refuse to cooperate, harsher methods of interrogation may be employed," she said coldly. "The council has authorized all necessary forces to ensure compliance."

U-Olga finally stirred. There was a promise of violence in her eyes so elegant and polished it gleamed like a dagger at a royal banquet. Her voice dropped into a low, mocking purr, with the condescension of a queen speaking to worms that had dared crawl onto her slippers.

"Tell me, insects, do you truly believe yourselves capable of compelling obedience from that which should inspire your worship and terror? Have the centuries dulled your instincts so thoroughly that you mistake patience for weakness?"

The room appeared to grow colder. The youkai flinched, a few beads of sweat betraying their courage.

Angra chuckled under his breath, and rested his chin against his palm, heeding the trembling youkai with a look of affectionate amusement.

"Now, now, no need to frighten them too much. They are doing their best." he said before turning his attention back to the would-be interrogators with a grin that did not touch his eyes.

Suddenly the heavy doors of the holding chamber groaned open, a young-looking kitsune girl striding in with a grave expression half-hidden beneath a formal kabuto.

"By order of Lady Yasaka, you are to be brought before the Council."

The Youkai interrogators exchange several exchanging glances. It was clear that even they, who had initially carried themselves with that stiff arrogance so common among provincial authorities, were unsettled by the unseen pressure bleeding from the two beings they had tried so desperately to box with words.

Angra and U-Olga rose to their feet. Neither resisted as the guards bound their wrists with cords of woven spirit-thread, the Youkai must have realized somewhere deep in the marrow of their bones, that such measures were for show. Power could not be bound by hemp, no matter how sanctified the knot.

They were escorted through winding corridors, the halls steeped in the aroma of sandalwood and rites. The great council chamber before them, a half-moon of old Youkai seated with solemnity, their faces carved into masks of dignity and cautious hostility.

At the apex sat the Kyuubi Yasaka herself, her silken kimono woven with the flames of the setting sun, her golden eyes narrowed with an acrimony that she kept bound by self-restraint.

The murmurs among the assembly faded into a silence as Angra and U-Olga were brought forth to stand upon the raised dais. Their chains were ritually severed by a shrine maiden.

U-Olga made no pretense of respect; she regarded the council with a cold disinterest. She saw no true authority before her, only the hollow pageantry of a dying civilization trying to prop up its dignity with embroidered robes and wooden scepters.

Yasaka's voice resounded,

"These two stand accused of violating the sanctity of the capital's spiritual leylines, siphoning energy reserved for the prosperity of our lands and people. Before judgment is rendered, they are given the chance to speak for themselves. Explain your crimes, or plead your innocence, as is your right under the Old Laws."

A ripple of murmurs moved through the council at her words, an old tradition invoked, one that demanded the accused be given voice even if their guilt were a foregone conclusion.

A Tengu elder, wings folded primly behind his back, rose and struck the floor with his staff, the sound ringing like a cracked bell.

"Ehem, you are brought before this council to answer for the crimes of unauthorized intrusion into sacred ground, tampering with the capital's leylines, and the theft of spiritual energy under the dominion of Her Highness Yasaka-sama. Now you shall answer for yourselves."

There was a moment of ceremonial silence.

Angra tilted his head slightly, the shadow of a smile curling at the corner of his lips.

"We did not intend to offend, councilors. We are but humble wanderers, cast adrift by the turmoil beyond these sacred borders. In our desperation, we sought only to sustain ourselves from the ambient energies of the world, ignorant, alas, of the delicate threads that bind this city's heart. If we have trespassed against you, it was the sin of survival, not of malice. Besides, calling it theft presumes ownership, and who among us can really claim to own the breath of the earth, the blood of the world that flows through these lines? Would it not be more accurate to say that we merely partook of what was already abundant and offered freely by nature itself?"

There was a ripple of offense among the gathered Youkai. A few elders shifted in their seats; one snarled low in his throat before catching himself. Yasaka's gaze remained steady, but the cords of energy thrumming invisibly beneath her skin betrayed the strain she was forcing herself to endure.

"You dare imply," Yasaka said, her voice as soft as falling snow and thrice as cold, "that the stewardship we have upheld since the founding of this land is invalid? That the work of countless generations to harmonize with the spirit flow is nothing?"

Angra shrugged, a motion so casual it might have been mistaken for an involuntary twitch.

"Stewardship?" His smile sharpened, not unkindly. "I suppose that's one interpretation. Though, from where I stand, it looks very much like a creature convincing itself it is the master of the river because it once built a dam and named the waters after itself."

An audible intake of breath spread across the chamber. The tension pulled tighter.

U-Olga said nothing.

The Tengu elder cleared his throat.

"Do you deny absorbing the spiritual energy without permission?"

Angra gave a thin laugh.

"Permission. Permission..." He trailed off, letting the word dangle with contemptuous indolence. "You speak of permissions and boundaries as though they are lasting when they are constructs, illusions agreed upon by those who happen to hold a stick at one point in time. If you declare yourself sovereign over a river, does that make the river yours, or are you merely enjoying a fragile moment before the river reminds you that it was never yours to begin with?"

Several among the council murmured in displeasure. Some of the younger Youkai, less schooled in the art of keeping their faces smooth, scowled openly.

Angra's fingers flexed at his sides, feeling the pulse of the spiritual veins beneath his feet. Even now, the leylines twitched against the spiritual anchors Yasaka had driven deep into the city's foundations, but the theft was a subtle bleed, a parasitic sipping too delicate for the senses of the jury to detect amidst their outrage.

It was a false comparison, grotesquely so, but it nestled easily among the instinctive reverence of the council for the forces of nature. Strawmen rose in their minds from their own assumptions, and it was against those imagined villains that they now set their defenses.

One elder leaned forward, brows knotted in consternation. "Still, your nature is veiled. We cannot ascertain your intentions. This alone is cause for suspicion."

Angra inclined his head, "Intentions are shadows upon the water. They change with every ripple, every gust of wind. Tell me, venerable one, when a seed falls into the earth, does it intend to sprout, or is it the revelation of nature's will?"

Yasaka's presence pressed outward like a living flame, her aura bright and furious, and the golden glow of the leyline network intensified behind her, rallying to her call.

"We seek truth, intruders, not enigmas! You stand here not as a defendant, but as an enemy of Kyoto itself!" she declared, voice ringing with the authority of her countless years.

Angra gave a lazy bow, more mockery than deference.

"Enemy? Such strong words. I would have preferred 'wayward traveler' and 'unfortunate sightseer,' but I suppose one must allow for a bit of dramatic flair. It is a council, after all."

The murmur grew louder. An old tanuki slammed his gavel against the floor three times for silence, his eyes flashing.

U-Olga let out the faintest suggestion of a scoff curling her lips. Her patience, strained from the beginning, was rapidly wearing thin under the incessant noise and squabbling. That such primitive beings presumed to sit in judgment over her existence was an insult so staggering that it barely merited recognition. She did not deign to speak, for to do so would be to lower herself to the level of ants petitioning a stormcloud.

Instead, she contented herself with watching Yasaka's growing fury with an expression that mixed amusement and disdain.

"You ask me for my crimes. You accuse me of sacrilege. You declare yourselves the protectors of a sacred order. But allow me to suggest," he said, letting the words drip slowly into the silence, "that perhaps it is the sacred order itself that is flawed. If its strength can be diminished by two wanderers stepping upon its soil, how sacred could it truly have been to begin with?"

The enormity of the insult hanging sent them all even quieter.

Yasaka's hands clenched at her sides feeling her nails biting crescents into her palms, growing more vexed as Angra smiled thinly, eyes half-lidded.

It would not be long now.

The trial was no longer about their guilt or innocence. It was about pride, and pride, he knew all too well, was the most fragile thing in existence.

The council chamber breathed a heavy air of restrained fury as silence choked the hall with the Youkai elders stiffening at the audacity.

Angra yawned into his hand and leaned back so far in the standing position that it looked like he might fall over if someone so much as sneezed. His posture mocked them more than his words ever could have.

"For a council, you lot have a remarkable talent for sounding like angry fishmongers. Do you hold all your sacred trials with this much foaming at the mouth?"

Several of the older Youkai snapped open their fans in a gesture of anger. The tengu guards shifted on their feet, feathers bristling. Yasaka twitched.

"We have heard enough mockery," one of the elder Tanuki snapped with fury. "If you have no defense to offer, then we shall deliver judgment without it!"

Angra tilted his head, black hair falling over his eyes. "Defense against what? Not kissing the ground you walk on and groveling when your precious leylines are having a minor existential crisis?" His grin widened, merciless. "Save the theatrics for the next shrine festival."

Now that was the offensive to the very bones of their existence. Yasaka herself rose slightly from her seat.

U-Olga who had remained a silent and seething presence beside him, chose that moment to make herself fully known. With a contemptuous snort, she folded her arms beneath her chest and shot a glare at the council that could have shattered mirrors.

"Primitive creatures," she said coldly, voice dripping with disdain. "You dare judge us as if you stand atop some pedestal of enlightenment? Petty chieftains scrambling for control of a few thin streams of stolen power, posturing like gods over insects."

Several gasps rang out, followed by the audible crack of a tengu slamming the butt of his spear into the floor. The council's spiritual energy surged like a brewing storm now wild and unrestrained.

Yasaka's lips tightened to be replaced by a matriarchal rage. Every spirit within the chamber stilled instinctively as the Nine-Tailed Fox of Kyoto revealed a fraction of her true majesty.

Angra slowly turned to U-Olga and, with the slow, exaggerated motion of a man witnessing his ship sink under him, buried his face into his palm.

"Lovely. Truly, nothing screams 'winning hearts and minds' like pissing off an entire municipality of glorified spirits." he muttered under his breath.

"Enough!" Yasaka said. "You mock not only this court but the dignity of the land itself. You shall be imprisoned beneath the Seal of Pure Waters until a more suitable fate is decided."

She raised her hand, and several of the tengu guards moved forward, weapons gleaming.

Meh, fate accepted he'd guess. Angra shrugged, entirely unbothered. U-Olga sneered openly, flicking her hair over her shoulder.

Then, just as the guards were closing in, the heavy doors of the council chamber slammed open with a sharp clang.

A small whirlwind of foxfire burst into the hall, revealing a young, golden-haired girl in ornate shrine maiden robes, her fox ears twitching furiously. She stormed across the floor without a hint of decorum, ignoring the stunned stares of the council.

"Mother!" she barked, stamping her tiny foot.

"Those idiot rogues from the East still won't listen! I tried to negotiate like you said, but they laughed! Laughed! They said the Great Kyuubi had grown weak, hiding behind humans and treaties!"

She huffed, cheeks puffed in fury, tail swishing in wide angry arcs behind her.

The entire council froze and the guards halted mid-step. Yasaka's expression cracked briefly as worry went across her features before smoothing back into the mask of leadership.

Angra lifted his head from his hand just enough to peer at the girl through half-lidded eyes. He recognized the resemblance immediately; the hair, the tail, the latent power coiling beneath the girl's skin.

Someone's bloodline is obvious enough to see from orbit.

"Well, well," he drawled lowly to U-Olga, just loud enough for her to hear. "Looks like Mommy's got herself a little heir."

"Hm, the offspring of authority, they are always the first to wail when the world stops bending to their whims." U-Olga, who had looked about ready to blast the entire council into a crater, spoke her mind beside him.

Angra clicked his tongue, almost cheerfully. "Cute, though. Points for that."

The guards hesitated whether to proceed with the arrest or not. Yasaka smoothed her sleeves and stepped forward and placed a hand on Kunou's head. The girl immediately quieted, though she still pouted fiercely.

"My daughter," Yasaka said, addressing the council, her voice regaining its tempered steel, "speaks of matters we must address... but not in the middle of sacred proceedings."

A decision was already made behind those golden eyes. Her gaze flicked toward Angra and U-Olga,

"Take them. Their imprisonment shall be secure until the council reconvenes." she commanded the Tengu, brooking no further argument.

Angra offered no resistance as two guards seized his arms. He even laughed quietly to himself, a low, pleasant sound.

"Prison, politics, parental drama," he said lightly as he was dragged toward the door, "this place really does have everything."

U-Olga did not struggle either. Her pride would not allow such a display.

Dragged through the labyrinth of shrines and tunnels, they were led without ceremony into the depths of Urakyoto's underbelly. The corridors descended further and further, torchlight wavering across the carved prayers on stone walls, heavy with the clinging scent of old moistures and incense.

At the end of the descent, a vast subterranean basin spread before them, still, almost mirror-like waters glowing in the gloom, ringed by talismans and statues so old their inscriptions had faded into smoothed stone. It reeked of divine warding, prayers sewn into the very moisture in the air.

Without hesitation, a pair of monk-attendants chanted low, invoking the "Seal of Pure Waters." Chains of light twisted from the basin's center, lashed around Angra's wrists and ankles with a hiss, pulling him down with the gentleness of an uncaring tide. U-Olga was handled with less courtesy, the waters rippling violently as they tried, absurdly, to restrain a creature who once considered herself Earth's Sovereign.

Angra lay back as the chill of the magic soaked through him, the pull at his power more irritating than dangerous. He clicked his tongue, ignoring the muttered prayers meant to "purify" him.

"..."

"Not bad. Managed to insult them so hard they forgot why they hated me first. Impressive work, princess."

She sniffed, refusing even the compliment, though the faintest of smirks ghosted across her lips before vanishing into disdain.

"They went through all this trouble just to annoy me. Suppose I should feel honored." his voice echoed against the cavernous ceiling.

He looked at her. Wet strands of her hair clung to her cheeks, but she paid it no mind, surveying the seals and waters. She felt like she was being forced to walk barefoot through a pigsty.

She said nothing for a long moment. Then she remarked, "The arrogance of low lives never ceases to disappoint. Trapping divinity beneath puddle water and scribbles. How quaint."

Angra grinned, running a hand through his damp hair without lifting his back from the floor. "Quaint's one word for it. I'd have said 'pathetic,' but you do you." He raised a finger lazily toward her. "You got it, didn't you?"

U-Olga shifted her gaze onto him. But she understood immediately. Earlier, throughout the farce they had called a trial, she had remained outwardly aloof, but Angra had seen the subtle flashes behind her eyes; the precise, mechanical way she had been dissecting every council member, every political nuance, every heartbeat of the crowd.

"Of course," she said with a haughty lift of her chin. "Their political structure is infantile. Weak chieftains hiding behind rituals to pretend at order. The council is a coalition in name only. Half of them loathe each other more than they do external threats. They rely on Yasaka's personal charisma and control over the leylines to maintain any semblance of unity."

She uncrossed her arms, fingers flexing slightly as she began to pace along the edge of their watery prison. Her voice went into contempt.

"The youkai themselves are biologically resilient, but spiritually fragmented. No standardized hierarchy, only feudal alliances built on outdated honor codes and superstition. Strength varies wildly. Some possess genuine power over natural phenomena; others are little better than enhanced beasts. Without Yasaka, they would fracture within a season."

Angra whistled low and long, clapping. "Not bad. All that from one dumb meeting and a bunch of walking stereotypes yelling at each other. Guess those mechanical eyeballs of yours are worth something."

U-Olga's gaze snapped toward him. "Do not liken me to a machine, mongrel."

Twitch.

Twitch.

Heck no she just called him that.

He shrugged, utterly unfazed on the outside, but he erased the image of a blond arrogant king. "You're worse. Machines at least pretend to have modesty when they scan the room."

Even the Valkyries have modesty back at Chaldea.

Her lips tightened into a scowl, but she said nothing more on the subject, instead turning her attention to their prison. Her pupils dilated slightly, and for a brief second, a low hum resonated through the air; the subtle signature of an omniscient gaze, slicing reality into its smallest threads.

From the floor to the cavern ceiling, to the stagnant waters and the very prayers woven into the air, U-Olga saw everything at once; the subatomic decay of ancient magic, the slow unraveling of talismanic fibers, the imperfections in the boundary fields that had not been maintained for centuries.

She processed it all without blinking, embedding the data into her prodigious memory.

Angra watched her in idle amusement. "So, you're telling me you just scanned an entire ancient prison and copied it to your brain like a... what, alien USB stick? That's adorable."

U-Olga stopped, casting him a look of pure aristocratic disdain. "You are a loathsome creature. It is not my fault your comprehension of existence is as rudimentary as the creatures who built this sewer."

Angra chuckled lowly and folded his arms behind his head, sinking a little deeper into the shallow water. "Yeah, yeah. Go ahead and monologue about your superior divine essence or whatever. Meanwhile, I'll just be over here, wondering when the hell they're going to realize their divine bathtub isn't doing jackshit to us."

For the next few hours, they remained like that, imprisoned by a seal that was supposed to erode impurity, and sap the strength of the unwanted.

Angra continued lounging, occasionally throwing pebbles across the basin with a flick of his finger, watching them skip noiselessly over the surface.

U-Olga paced, mapped, and theorized, the entire prison unfolding in her mind like an interactive schematic. She would mutter occasionally, like calculating the energy density of the leylines, the degree of enchantment decay, the number of forces present in the surrounding shrines.

It was, in Angra's opinion, one of the most boring imprisonments he had ever experienced, and he had been shackled to cosmic oblivion before.

Several hours later, he lifted his hand half-heartedly toward the low ceiling.

"I give it three more days before they realize they've imprisoned two headaches they can't get rid of with prayers and wet floors."

U-Olga stopped pacing, the folds of her dress settling around her like drifting smoke. She smiled, thinly, cold, predatory.

"Three days is generous," she said, almost purring. "I would have wagered by sunset."

Angra snorted. "Optimist."

She arched a delicate brow. "I am merely realistic. Unlike you, who wallows in sloth as though it were a virtue."

He closed his eyes, sinking further into the water, uncaring that it soaked through his already battered clothing.

"Sloth is survival. Optimism is suicide. But you divine types wouldn't understand that, would you?" His voice turned almost playful. "Too busy thinking the world owes you worship because you fell out of whatever celestial womb spat you out—oh wait, you came from a damn tree."

U-Olga's nostrils flared slightly. But instead of arguing, she looked away, studying the dancing light reflections across the surface of the water.

For a moment, there was almost... something close to agreement between them. Or maybe just mutual disdain for the world above.

He slumped himself against a cold wall, arms folded once again, sluggish stare fixed at the ceiling. His soaked clothes clung to him unpleasantly, but he made no move to address it. Minor discomforts were beneath even his contempt.

"Three-dimensional cage... primitive spatial construct... foolish, quaint once more."

His brows twitch and he tilts his head slightly toward the muttering Beast. "Hah. 'Three-dimensional'?" He dragged the words out, dry amusement saturating his tone. "Big talk for someone caught in a glorified fish tank. Likewise, I guess that's all the rage among stuck-up alien gods these days. Blame the dimension instead of the locals for being disappointing."

She stiffened instantly, casting a haughty glare over her shoulder. Her long hair, damp and heavy, slapped lightly against her back with the motion.

"Dimension defines structure. If this planet's inhabitants are the products of such a pitiful dimensional frame, then the outcome is self-evident. Humanity wallows in an existence too grotesque to inspire anything but contempt."

He snorted, tilting his head back against the wet stone. "Sure, blame the world for being ugly. Real original. You gonna start scribbling that on cosmic bathroom walls next? 'The third dimension sucks, change my mind.'"

"Unlike you, I am dissecting this mockery of containment on a scale beyond your comprehension, mongrel."

Twitch.

OH THIS BITCH—

She turned fully now, imperious despite her bedraggled appearance, water dripping silently from the ends of her sleeves.

Angra moved slightly, resting an ankle atop the opposite knee, smirking as he watched her puff up like a scorned cat. "Oh, forgive me, Your Extraterrestrial Highness. I'm just a simple bundle of evil in a cheap mortal shell. No way I could grasp the mighty brainwaves of a divine space brat."

U-Olga's eyes narrowed dangerously. "You ridicule what you cannot understand. Typical of your breed. You dwell on the surface, unable to see the underlying layers that govern existence itself."

"AND you dwell in a fantasy where you're still relevant," Angra replied smoothly, drumming his fingers against his arm, uncaring. "The world spun you out, kicked you aside, and forgot you existed. Just like it does to every god, king, or martyr it tires of."

There was a hiss of wet silk as U-Olga stepped closer. Her fists trembled at her sides.

"You think that pathetic acceptance makes you wise? You wallow in nihilism like a pig in filth, then pretend it's enlightenment."

Angra grinned, teeth bared in a smile that had long ago learned to be both cruel and kind.

"Wallowing? Possibly. Better than pretending the pigs are going to evolve into angels just because you bark at them loud enough."

Voices crashed like thunder as the water swayed.

"You mock because you cannot comprehend." She leaned closer, voice trembling faintly from barely constrained disdain. "Your existence is stuck here. Mine transcends it. I gaze down upon this three-dimensional swamp, and all I see are pathetic creatures gnashing at each other like beasts caught in a mud pit."

Angra went even closer. "Yeah, yeah. Higher being stuff. I've heard the same speech from cult leaders before they sacrificed a goat or two. Always some 'higher truth' excuse so they can feel better about gutting things. Guess no matter how high you think you stand, you're still stepping on something that bleeds the same color."

"You sound almost proud of this cesspit," she sneered. "Are you really so tethered to the filth that spawned you?"

Her eyes flashed, but she held her tongue for a moment longer than before, staring at him intensely.

His smirk twitched, and sputtered. The grin fell down. His gaze slid away from her face, up toward the dripping cavern roof. "...Maybe." he sighed, long and slow.

"Maybe I am. Maybe when you've been the designated garbage bin of a whole village, you get used to the stink. Maybe after enough beatings, betrayals, and fires, you realize that even the ugliest creatures can still look up at the stars."

U-Olga's brows furrowed, a rare uncertainty flashing through her as she caught the faintest ghost of something bitter beneath his sarcasm.

"Your words are laden with defeat. You accept this deformity of existence instead of seeking to correct it."

He laughed, a low, rasping sound.

"Correct it? Lady, I tried that once. Before they tied me to a pole and carved out their sins on my skin. Before they decided that if there was gonna be evil in their lives, it might as well have a face. Mine, apparently."

He shrugged, water trailing down his arms.

"So I figured, why bother fixing something that's already built to break?"

Her lips parted slightly, something between indignation and hesitation flickering across her.

"You hate them. Humans. You hate what they did to you."

This next murmur lacked bite.

"Sure, once..." he said at last, voice low.

"...Hate so pure it could've eaten stars. They strung me up for their sins, you know. Picked a scapegoat out of a crowd, shoved all their guilt and fear into one dumb kid, and tore him apart because it made 'em sleep better at night."

Her lips parted slightly, replaced by something else.

In the long hollow that followed, she leaned back against the opposite wall, arms wrapped around her knees in an almost casual way, but her eyes remained locked onto him in silence.

"I was born from void..."

She said, lifting her chin, but the declaration hung back, less like a triumph. "From nothingness itself. Born perfect. A being designed to correct flaws, to bring order to a pitiful, misshapen cosmos."

Her fists clenched tighter.

"Supreme. Earth's inheritor. When I descended to Earth... I thought I could fix it. Reform it. Purge its vermin and sculpt something... worthy. I was to lead them into a greater age under me, to shape the miserable world into what it ought to be."

The faint echoes of her history threaded into the heavy air. She remembered standing tall above tiny human settlements, their technology like children's toys. How she could move mountains with her hand, how the ground would itself groan under the authority of her will. She remembered the Lostbelt Olympus, the arrogant Crypters, and how even her own kin were shredded apart by these fragile, defiant pests called humans.

How the Tree was felled, how she was thrown back into the void, humiliated by beings she had scarcely deemed worthy of thought.

"And their representative... Chaldea's Master rebelled against me. Looked up at me with simpering eyes, called me a threat, a monster using their 'Director''s body."

Angra drags a hand down his face, smearing the cold water. He laughed once, pointed and almost painful. "Guess neither of us got invited to the human party. Welcome to the club. No refunds on crushed dreams."

For a while, neither spoke. Their breath rose faintly in the cold air, misting.

"You think you're some fallen god," he continued tiredly. "But you're just like the rest of us. Another idiot who thought the world would say 'thank you' for the trouble."

"You dare—" she started but faltered halfway. The words caught somewhere in her throat.

He tilted his head at her, smiling faintly with hints of sadness.

"Yeah. I dare. What're you gonna do? Cry about it? Scream how the little worms didn't bow fast enough?"

Her hands trembled faintly, but she clutched them tight against herself. He could see it now... the cracks in her proud mask, the old wounds that no armor of divinity could fully hide.

"And you? You—!"

She hissed eventually, voice trembling with anger and something else. "—You let them break you. Let them poison you until you became part of the rot."

He shrugged.

"Probably. Probably I became what they needed. Maybe that's what surviving means... But it doesn't mean I forgot what could've been."

Their eyes locked across the basin. At that moment, stripped of facades, stripped of their feigned disdain, they saw each other..... just two beings abandoned by the very worlds they once sought to shape, bearing different scars born of the same betrayal.

U-Olga exhaled slowly, tension bleeding out of her frame.

"You are an infuriating creature," she murmured. "But... strangely... you do not disgust me."

Angra gave a crooked grin.

"High praise. I'll cherish it forever."

She rolled her eyes and she, despite herself, felt her lips twitch in something perilously close to a smile and huffed a soft breath that might have been a laugh too. It sounded alien from her mouth. Awkward. Raw.

There was a long pause after that... just strangely light. Both had unburdened something sour and old between them without intending to.

"You know," Angra drawled, flicking a droplet of water off his sleeve, "for a self-proclaimed superior being, you suck at hiding your loneliness."

U-Olga snapped her head toward him, prepared to unleash another tongue-lashing—but the words never came. She saw it, plainly now.

That bone-deep emptiness curled inside his tired, half-lidded eyes. An ancient weariness that mirrored her own.

... or maybe even more unbearable than hers.

She inhaled sharply through her nose and turned her face aside. "As if you're any different, blockhead." she said, but the venom was gone from her voice. "You crawl through existence clinging to mockery because you're terrified of reaching out."

Angra smiled faintly. This time there was no cruelty in it. "Yeah," he admitted easily.

"Maybe."

Another stretch of silence.

It was only then that Angra, turned to glance away idly, found itself snagging on a different kind of distraction.

The clinging wet fabric of U-Olga's clothing outlined the curves of her soaked figure in a way that was almost offensively vivid. The thin, half-torn garments clung to her skin, tracing the feminine curve of her waist, the subtle edge of her shoulders, the long, lithe line of her legs folded beneath her. The pale glow of her skin as well, too close to ethereal for comfort, caught what little light filtered into their prison, and his entire body tensed. His cheeks flushed despite himself.

Heat stabbed up the back of his neck before he could stop it.

He jerked his head away instantly, scowling fiercely at the opposite wall. "Tch."

The sudden motion caught U-Olga's notice instantly. She blinked, confused, then followed his darting glance downward—and froze.

For a second, she stood paralyzed, realization striking like a bolt of lightning. Then, with a strangled, mortified noise halfway between a shriek and a growl, she immediately wrapped her arms tighter across herself, color rushing into her cheeks in a rare, visible flush of embarrassment, face blooming in a crimson that clashed violently against her usual haughty composure.

"You—!" she stammered, trying to summon her usual verbal artillery, but the words tripped and fell over themselves in sheer embarrassment.

Angra hunched further into himself, glaring sullenly at the farthest possible point in the cave, ears burning, muttering something inaudible and profoundly foul under his breath. He coughed loudly into his hand, pretending very badly that he had seen nothing, absolutely nothing, and certainly hadn't been thinking anything worth blushing over.

He could hear her muttering death threats under her breath as she adjusted her posture, still pointedly looking everywhere except at him.

In that awkward, blushing speechlessness, bound not by hatred or feud but by something the emotion of their human vessels, strangely fragile, the distance between them—two beings forged of humanity's nightmares—became a little smaller.

Probably for the first time, neither of them found that thought repulsive.

He tried to feel apathy, the heat list wouldn't leave him.

The silence dragged for a minute longer before Angra suddenly groaned aloud, his voice loud as he rolled onto his side.

"Ah, damn it all...," he muttered, one hand dragging across his face with deliberate sluggishness. "Here I am, acting like some prisoner in a second-rate fairy tale. If Mr. Demon King ever caught wind of this little vacation of mine, he'd have my head on a pike... right after Kiara gives some melodramatic sermon about 'sinful indulgences' and Kama decides to tell me how I'm a terrible influence on humanity's libido."

He smirked bitterly at the thought. Every second he remained lounging around this spiritual prison only prolonged the inevitable: awkward explanations, sarcastic lectures, dry reprimands. No thanks. He had enough existential headaches for one eternity.

He shifted his gaze lazily toward U-Olga, who blinked at him in mild confusion, then realization, then an arrogant lift of her chin, the wet fabric of her clothes clinging to her slender frame like a second skin under the harsh dimness of the room. He tries to ignore the last part.

"You," Angra said flatly, waving his hand at her like swatting a fly, "feel like blowing this place up or something?"

"..... eh?"

Realization.

A slow, predatory smile bloomed across U-Olga's face. She stepped forward, the air shimmering faintly around her in a subtle flex of authority, her voice dripping with superiority.

"I thought you'd never ask."

Without another word, she closed her eyes. The air grew hefty and oppressive. Gravity itself seemed to warp at the edges of reality, the very weave of the world bending to her will as her presence expanded outward like a living, crushing storm.

The intricate barriers that made up their prison, all designed carefully by the Youkai Faction with layered warding spells, protective glyphs, spiritual resistances interwoven with natural energy, screamed as they buckled. A deep, low groan, like a dying creature's last breath, shuddered through the foundation.

U-Olga opened her eyes, twin golden pools of ancient derision, and the entire building collapsed inward.

It did not explode so much as it caved, crushed under the incomprehensible force she exerted with a mere flex of will. Wood splintered, stone cracked into dust, magical wards shattered with audible shrieks as their runes died mid-glow. In the next heartbeat, there was nothing left but swirling debris and two figures hovering casually in midair, completely untouched by the devastation.

Angra yawned exaggeratedly as the dust and smoke swirled around them, sticking a pinky into his ear.

"Subtle as always," he said dryly, side-eyeing her with half-lidded amusement.

She smirked, hair fluttering regally behind her in the charged wind, clearly pleased with herself.

Below, the streets of Urakyoto erupted into chaos. Youkai citizens, spirits, and other supernatural beings shrieked and scrambled out of the way, some shielding their young, others pulling weapons instinctively as they beheld the surreal sight of two figures floating above the ruins of what had once been an impregnable prison.

Angra took it all in with a single glance, like a man browsing a marketplace he had no intention of buying anything from.

Movement at the center of the street caught his eye when a familiar figure in an elegant kimono, blonde hair flowing like sunlight, golden eyes wide with alarm, stepped into view.

Ah, Yasaka. The gracious, dignified, ever-serene head of the faction, trying to remain composure even amidst the panic, her young daughter clinging to her side in confusion.

Angra grinned in that slow, lazy way that promised nothing good.

"My, my," he drawled aloud, voice carrying easily across the stunned silence. "If it isn't my gorgeous matron herself... I almost feel bad about wrecking your lovely little stronghold. I think it's time I head along now, dear."

Every pair of eyes snapped between him and Yasaka like a volley of bullets. Youkai gasped aloud, stunned speechless. Some dropped their weapons. Others visibly recoiled.

Yasaka's cheeks pinked ever so slightly, but her expression remained composed, if a little strained. Beside her, Kunou gaped, small mouth forming a perfect "O" as she looked between her mother and the insolent dark-haired stranger.

Before Angra could land another verbal blow, however, a sharp yank at his arm dragged him unceremoniously through the air.

He stumbled slightly, turning to find U-Olga gripping his sleeve with a hand that was delicate but utterly merciless. Her face was carefully neutral, but her pouting lips and slightly narrowed eyes betrayed the storm brewing beneath her haughty exterior.

"Enough foolishness," she said icily, refusing to meet his eyes. "We are leaving."

Her fingers tightened, and without giving him a choice, she pulled him along.

The air twisted unnaturally around them. Space itself folded under her will, reality tearing at the seams like paper soaked in oil. In an instant, she ripped open a fissure in existence itself, a gaping, crackling scar that led into the yawning abyss beyond.

Angra glanced back once, lazily tossing Yasaka a wink over his shoulder, enjoying the chorus of horrified gasps from the sidelines, before allowing himself to be dragged bodily into the void.

The tear closed behind them with a final snap, leaving behind nothing but a ruined prison, a stunned youkai city, and the heavy, lingering memory of a flirtatious insult thrown like a dagger at the heart of one of the most powerful leaders in Japan.

Chapter 7: Beasts' Footsteps to N'rm

Chatter shouted from somewhere down the hall in a thousand insignificant conversations about crushes, exams, after-school clubs, gossiped with the earnestness only the young could afford to waste.

Kiara wasn't in a hurry, she walked beside a fellow Beast, her scandalously obscene figure, brought in a few furtive stares from passing students too cowardly to gawk properly, and too human to look away.

Their quarry was close. Very close.

Ah... the scent of his soul. It was sweet... so shamefully pure yet mingled with perversion. It calls on to her, begging for her touch.

Kiara inhaled deeply, eyes half-lidding with rapture, her lips parting in a pleased, lascivious sigh that made more than one poor boy trip over his own feet at the mere sound of it.

Koyanskaya did not even dignify that with a glance. She was too busy sweeping her gaze across the hallways. The school was saturated with mundane humans, but among them, faintly, she caught the distinct thread of a hidden power.

"I do hope that our little treasure has not wandered too far. I have grown tired of these dusty walls and dull little minds." She sighed, a delicate exhale that still managed to sound insufferably self-pleased. "To think... I would lower myself to walk these halls, when truly the earth itself ought to tremble beneath my feet."

"You could simply stand there and wait for someone to trip over you like a common street hazard."

Vitch replied dryly, sparing her a glance. "But if you are done pouting, we should focus. I have no intention of getting cornered by a bunch of teenage Devils because your ego cannot fit through a standard doorway."

Kiara only smiled at that, an unfazed curve of her lips that said she found the possibility neither threatening nor interesting.

The map Koyanskaya memorized of the Academy's layout had pointed them to the third-year floor, and it was not long before she spotted him.

There he was. Issei Hyoudou. Wandering the third-year wing like a lamb unaware of the wolves stalking him.

Oblivious as a fawn, dragging his feet through the hallway, seemingly lost in some dull mortal daydream about girls and lunches and other meaningless little things.

Vitch's expression hardened for a fraction of a second before smoothing back into vapid.

Her fingers twitched in anticipation with the simplest way to spirit him away.

It will be quick. In and out. Take the boy, leave the mess for the locals and the Devils to clean up.

But before they could reach him, fingers closing around that precious little scrap of innocence, another presence inserted itself into the equation.

He was smiling faintly, standing there, hands behind his back. The boy was composed on the surface, his expression polite, even deferential, the very model of a courteous student. However, beneath that thin veneer, both Beasts could see the stiffness in his spine, the tightly coiled tension in his aura. The way he positioned himself just barely ahead of Issei, the slight widening of his stance, the way his hand hovered innocuously near the side where a weapon could be summoned at a moment's notice.

Amusing, really.

Did he truly believe that a mere whatever weapon would save him from beings like them?

Kiara's smile widened, slow and sensuous, and Koyanskaya, ever the professional when it suited her survival, was quicker to assess the situation in practical terms.

Her mind ran through possibilities rapidly, coldly: eliminate the boy, take the target. Quick, messy. Likely to draw attention. Not preferable. Bluff, stall, retreat. Maintain plausible deniability. Regroup later when surveillance was lighter.

They may be Evils of Man, but it doesn't mean that they have ethics to care for what they left on their path behind.

"Good afternoon," Kiba said smoothly, but not smooth enough to mask the strain underneath. "Is there something I can help you with?"

Polite. Careful. Smart enough to know he was outmatched but still trying to buy time. Koyanskaya respected that, in the way a cat might respect a mouse clever enough to evade the first pounce.

Kiara tilted her head, feigning innocence, her fingers tracing lazy circles in the air between them, her eyes half-lidded in mock thoughtfulness.

Meanwhile, even before the words had finished leaving his mouth, the sheer aura of the two women's presence pressed against him so suffocating. The air itself almost rebelled at their proximity, thickening unnaturally, vibrating. Kiba fought to maintain his composure and against the primitive terror that slithered down his spine like a knife pressed to bare flesh.

For a moment, there was only but the oppressive stillness as they locked stares. Kiba felt sweat on the back of his neck the more he stared at the two pairs of predatory eyes.

"We were simply admiring one of your classmates," the pink-haired woman said, nodding ever so slightly toward the still-clueless Issei in the distance. "He seems... promising. It would be a shame if someone were to snatch him away under your very noses, would it not?"

Her smile sharpened, revealing feral beneath the mask.

Kiba swallowed thickly as he maintained his face to neutrality. He reflected upon his options carefully, knowing that to escalate now would be to invite devastation he could not hope to counter.

He pieced together every bit of knowledge he had about the supernatural: contracts, unspoken truces, territorial pacts. If he could just buy time and reason with them, he might prevent a disaster in the middle of Kuoh Academy.

How far he could push without getting himself and Issei killed?

"I see," Kiba said slowly. "Forgive me, but our school has very strict policies regarding... outside interference. Perhaps we could arrange a meeting with our administrators first? I'm certain any concerns or offers could be better discussed under more... appropriate circumstances."

He shifted his weight subtly which was immediately noticed. It was a maneuver for preparing for a defensive summon. He would try to block them if they moved on their target. Foolish, futile, but terribly noble in the way that only young heroes could manage.

"Oh, how charming. Little knight seeks to parley... As if words could ever stay the hands of gods." Vitch said.

Her eyes were blank and unamused. She cared little for diplomacy or threats. She cared even less for Kiba's gallant attempt to protect a boy who was not even aware he needed protection.

Kiba thought the two might simply strike him down where he stood, reducing him to ash without so much as lifting a finger. His muscles tensed, ready to throw himself into a losing battle if only to delay them by precious seconds.

"We were going to borrow your little friend here," she said with mock sweetness, tilting her head toward Issei, who, oblivious to the tension thickening the air, was blinking back and forth between them in confusion. "Nothing permanent. Just a little... consultation."

"And if I refuse?" Kiba asked carefully.

Koyanskaya's eyes glittered.

"Then I rip your heart out and use it as a bargaining chip."

His heart stopped.

"—But only if I'm feeling particularly generous," she said lightly, her voice as cheerful as if discussing lunch plans.

Kiara laughed, a soft sound that somehow made the hair on the back of Kiba's neck stand on end.

For an instant, the atmosphere looked like it warped under the pressure of their presence. The entire hallway, the walls, the floor, the very fabric of the place, felt thinner, weaker, as if it would collapse under the weight of something too vast, too wrong to be contained in the skin of two beautiful women.

But then, down the corridor, the sound of approaching footsteps grew louder. Voices. Students rounded the corner, chatter growing louder. Teachers as well.

Koyanskaya clicked her tongue softly, annoyance flickering across her face.

Timing. Always a nuisance.

"No fun today, it seems," she said, flashing Kiba a bright, fake smile that barely disguised her simmering irritation.

They are not cleaning up this mess.

Kiara shrugged with exaggerated languid. She sighed as if the entire world had once again disappointed her personally, but she relented, her arms stretching above her head in a motion that made several passing boys trip over themselves without even understanding why.

"It is no matter," Kiara said, her voice smooth as silk, her eyes heavy-lidded and smiling. "There is always tomorrow... or the next day... or the one after that. All things sweet ripen in their own time. Next time, little knight... do remember that mercy from us is a fleeting thing."

Without waiting for a reply, the two of them turned, vanishing down a side corridor with an ease that was almost insulting. In seconds, they were gone, leaving only the heavy aftertaste of dread in the air and a young knight standing frozen in place, heart pounding painfully against his ribs.

Kiba exhaled only when he was certain they were gone, feeling sweat bead at his brow despite the chill. He can feel his hand shaking. He glanced once toward Issei, who was now laughing at some joke with a friend, oblivious to how close death had brushed against him.

He would need to warn Rias immediately. Because whatever those women were... they had not come for conversation.

---

The corridor they slipped into was a less traveled branch of the third-year wing. From here, the shrill noise of the younger students in the main hallways faded into a muted backdrop.

Neither of them spoke. What happened just now was an almost aftertaste of violence restrained by circumstance rather than choice. One knew better than to let silence spread too long when clarity was needed.

"You could have ended that little stand-off easily," Koyanskaya said. "A simple suggestion slipped into their soft, susceptible minds would have been enough. Humans like them are so very easy to bend if you put in the slightest effort."

There was no accusation in her tone, only pragmatic bewilderment. From a purely operational standpoint, it would have been neater, quieter, and infinitely less risky to simply force compliance. A single brush of Kiara's will could have sent Kiba into a docile trance, and the boy with the Sacred Gear would have been spirited away before the bell even rang for the next class.

Efficiency was survival, and survival was the only coin that truly mattered.

Kiara laughed softly. She did not look at Koyanskaya as she answered, her gaze fixed ahead with an absent luster, contemplating not the present moment, but some far-off pleasure known only to herself.

"My dear fox, to forcibly dominate such fragile creatures would be akin to crushing a delicate flower underfoot before it has even begun to bloom. Where is the satisfaction in that when the true ecstasy lies in watching them choose to fall, seeing them willingly cast aside their petty resistances and offer themselves to me, body and soul, for no reason other than their own inexorable longing."

She turned her head then, meeting Koyanskaya's gaze with that maddening, heavy-lidded smile, a look that spoke of countless broken hearts and countless more yet to come.

"It is not conquest that interests me," her voice dipped into a sultry murmur, "but the sweet, inevitable surrender."

Koyanskaya knew Kiara well enough to understand that there was no point arguing when the woman descended into one of her indulgent philosophies. Logical structures simply slid off Kiara Sessyoin the way rain slid off glass: unnoticed, irrelevant. Her lips pressed into a thin line.

Still, some part of her mind, that calculating piece that had survived far too many dangers to be anything but ruthlessly pragmatic, could not help but find Kiara's entire approach reckless.

She is someone who lived without caution, without restraint, without the basic instinct of self-preservation that should have been woven into the bones of any living thing. Perhaps it was because Kiara had long since ceased to be something properly 'living.' Or even maybe it was simply because Kiara Sessyoin loved herself so utterly, so absolutely, that the notion of failure or vulnerability could not even find root within her.

Their light conversation drew the occasional glance from passing students. A pair of boys in particular, laden with books and muttering to each other about some assignment or another, slowed as they approached.

Koyanskaya noticed how the boys' steps grew sluggish, the way their eyes lost focus, drifting toward Kiara with a dull, mesmerized stupefaction. One boy stumbled slightly, his arm brushing against the wall for balance, becoming syrupy and treacherous.

Kiara said nothing and merely continued walking, but even without effort, the very fabric of the world around her bent and rippled. Her aura, that corruptive, insidious radiation of presence, brushed against these weak humans like a tide lapping at sandcastles, and already they began to crumble.

It was not a matter of power, Koyanskaya realized, but of inevitability. Kiara did not need to act. She existed, and her existence alone was an affront to order, a siren song to weakness, a gravitational pull that not even the unwitting could resist.

She clicked her tongue softly.

"Control yourself," she muttered under her breath, words cutting through the thickening atmosphere like a surgeon's scalpel. "You are drawing too much attention."

Whether it was out of genuine consideration or simply because she preferred to avoid another tedious incident like the one with the small white-haired girl Nekomata from outside earlier, Kiara responded without complaint. She inhaled softly, and with that simple act, the oppressive weight around them lifted ever so slightly.

The boys blinked as if waking from a dream, shaking their heads and muttering confused apologies before hurrying away, no doubt too rattled to even properly articulate what had unsettled them. Koyanskaya watched them go.

Even without trying, Kiara contorted the world around her. Even without lifting a finger, she reshaped weak minds and weak wills. It was not an active choice or even an unconscious flex of power. It was as natural to her as breathing was to humans, and perhaps just as effortless.

And that, more than anything, was what made her dangerous.

In the marrow of her bones, Vitch realized that Kiara was a creature who could never truly be trusted and be predicted. She was a living catastrophe in silk and skin, smiling her slow, heavy-lidded smile while she watched lesser beings tear themselves apart for a glimpse of her attention.

They were both Beasts, walking side by side, predator beside predator, their goals aligned by fragile circumstances.

She would follow this path for now. She would humor Kiara's indulgences, her sadistic little games, so long as they served her own ends. But the moment survival demanded it, she would abandon Kiara without a second thought, casting aside even the memory of alliance as easily as shedding a bloodstained coat.

Such was the nature of Tamamo Vitch Koyanskaya.

Such was the only way to endure.

The hallway leading to the Student Council room went on for a minute. They stopped just before the door, but they didn't knock.

"Several distinct signatures inside," Koyanskaya murmured. "Pure devil energy. One of them far more refined than the others. Possibly the 'King' of their peerage. I also smell Sacred Gear activity… a few awakened ones. Useful material, assuming they don't fall apart at the first hint of pressure."

Kiara's response was a languid sigh. "Then let us not waste time. I grow tired of shadows and games. I want to see their eyes when the truth begins to gnaw at them."

With that subtle note of indulgent cruelty, she raised her hand and gave three soft knocks upon the door.

Inside, time did not so much pause as it fractured.

The moment the threshold was crossed, when Kiara Sessyoin and Tamamo Vitch Koyanskaya stepped into the room where the Student Council conducted its business, an immediate change swept through the space like a foreign deity arriving unannounced at a sanctuary not built to receive divinity. The very air warped and thickened.

It was immediate and absolute. Conversations halted mid-sentence. Pens hung in mid-air between fingers that had forgotten how to grasp. The wall clock, for one aching second, froze between one tick and the next.

Sona Sitri felt it before her eyes could even register their arrival. It was like drowning with her eyes open. Her breath caught in her throat though some dark, ancient part of her could not help but fear this and her body refused to function as it had been trained. The blood in her veins fluttered like a caged bird that had suddenly sensed the shadow of the predator pressing its weight against the bars. She did not have to glance around to know her peerage had frozen.

She stood slowly out of necessity, grounding herself through the legs and spine, pulling her aura tight around her core like armor. She met their eyes, she had no choice. That was the burden of leadership. Even when she wanted nothing more than to avert her gaze, to shut her eyes against that suffocating weight, she kept them open. She had sworn to protect this place, these people, and the only thing she had to wield now was composure. She nodded.

"May I ask who you are?" she managed, voice clipped, but her eyes refused to leave Kiara's figure. There was something in the way the woman was felt that made Sona's instincts revolt, not hostile or even aggressive, but something worse;

A presence that demanded surrender before it demanded reason.

Kiara did not reply as her eyes drifted over the room indulgently. She smiled faintly at Tsubaki, who did not return it, and instead stood at rigid attention beside Sona, every muscle tensed, every line of her body saying what her face refused to reveal that this was not natural and safe.

Momo blinked slowly, her fingers clutching the edge of her chair. Her usual gentle warmth had frozen into a stupor. Reya reached for a paper she had dropped and forgot to pick it up halfway, lost in some mental space between cognition and paralysis. Ruruko, to her credit, looked about to speak, though her expression was already flushing with frustration, not understanding why her limbs felt heavy and why her voice caught in her throat. Tsubasa stood rooted, shoulders squared, while Tomoe's cheer had dimmed into wide-eyed silence, her emotions no longer buzzing but subdued, almost ashamed of its previous brightness.

Genshirou Saji, usually the cocky one of the peerage, couldn't even step forward to assert himself as he found his legs moving like lead and his throat dry. His instincts screamed danger.

Then Kiara spoke, "I have no need for introductions. Your blood already gauged what I am, even if your minds still resist the memory. You are devils, yes? Young ones. Tame. Your energy has no teeth."

She tilted her head, eyes settling on Sona with the sort of warm condescension reserved for favored pets.

"We are here because your school hosts a number of Sacred Gear wielders, and we find ourselves curious about the nature of their management. Do they belong to you? Are they cataloged? Do they even know what they carry inside their tender little hearts?"

The one with lilac hair smiled at her then, and the gesture, though superficially sweet, felt like the unsheathing of a knife, revealing a far colder presence than Kiara's slow seduction. It was an assassin's gaze behind a corporate smile.

"The information, if you will, Miss President," Koyanskaya added smoothly, folding her hands behind her back. "We require full details on Sacred Gear users registered at Kuoh, current administrative authorities, and by what jurisdiction the Underworld allows such raw, volatile power to operate unmonitored. We are not here to contest, only to observe… and determine whether your systems are compatible with our standards. Or if they must be… corrected. Oh, and as for the information regarding Sacred Gears; their function, their owners, their rate of emergence in this particular territory. I would ask that you share this information with us. It will not be a long conversation if you are cooperative."

Sona swallowed once, an involuntary response she immediately loathed. Her lips parted, but her voice failed to emerge. This wasn't a negotiation. The polite phrasing, the cultivated professionalism—it was a mask, worn by someone who did not see others as equals, let alone as people. Koyanskaya spoke like a merchant already bored with the transaction she intended to complete.

She drew herself up, crossing her arms to steady her guard, though she felt the strain in her neck and shoulders like she'd been standing under heavy rainfall.

"T—This school falls under the direct supervision of the Sitri household and the Gremory clan," she said, her voice colder now, more proper, trying to reassert the authority that had always come naturally to her. "All Sacred Gear users are monitored, trained, and accounted for. None of them are unobserved. And if you have questions, I would prefer you bring them through the proper channels, not by barging into private spaces with such… excessive force."

Kiara's lips parted in a soft laugh that carried no mirth.

"Oh, dear child," she whispered, voice warm as wine, "I wonder if you truly understand the shape of what stands before you. I am not a guest who knocks. I am the fever that slips beneath your door while you sleep. I am the dream you wake from in a sweat, certain you have lost something precious, only to find it was never yours."

Her eyes moved slowly over the council room as if admiring the interior of a parlor she might one day own. She ran her fingers along the edge of a nearby desk, nearly idly, but the motion held something predatory beneath it, like a woman contemplating a soon-to-be possession.

"This little place is nothing more than a stage for schoolchildren pretending at governance."

She locked her eyes at Sona's.

Sona felt the contact like heat prickling against her skin. There was something old and perverse in her serenity, something that did not belong in any school, in any era. Sona understood it instinctively through her devil blood. This was a thing that had become, by what process, she could not guess, but it had left nothing behind but beauty and corruption.

Sona did not reply. She could not, not truly, not when every syllable felt like standing beneath a collapsing roof held together by pride and stubborn discipline.

Instead, she sat.

Or maybe her legs had simply lost strength.

Standing now would only make the trembling worse.

Sometimes, to endure, one had to retreat behind knowledge. Behind numbers and rules and the safety of data.

She hadn't even realized the moment her knees began to tremble, only that she had to sit or risk humiliating herself in front of her peerage. And gods above and below, she could not afford that, not when the entire room was spiraling into something far beyond her jurisdiction. These weren't just powerful beings. Power, she understood—Sirzechs-sama, past enemies that were stronger than her, even Serafall-nee, Sona wished she was here right now—she had felt many kinds of strength before. This wasn't that. This wasn't strength.

Koyanskaya stepped forward again. "We have no desire to be adversaries, devil, unless you make us of course. That would be a waste of time and resources on all sides. But we have specific needs. And you are in a position to answer our questions efficiently."

Sona cleared her throat. "You have not identified yourselves."

Koyanskaya's eyes did not blink. "No, we have not."

"If information is what you seek, I will answer. I may not like the manner of your arrival, but I will not deny what I am bound to protect. I only ask you to keep your presence from harming my peerage any further." Sona said.

Koyanskaya tilted her head slightly, a cold smile twitching at the corners of her lips. Kiara merely nodded, as if granting favor.

In a pause, Sona considered the wisdom of pressing further. But that moment passed, and the reality settled in: she had no leverage. There was no threat she could issue that would matter. The presence alone of these two women was more potent than any title or spell she could invoke. They had not harmed anyone, not yet. Nonetheless, she knew, in that quiet, instinctual part of her that still remembered what fear was, that these two did not need to make threats. Their presence alone made resistance feel irrelevant.

So she nodded once, slowly, and said, "We track Sacred Gear users in the city. We work closely with the Gremory family and a network of informants within the school. Our role is primarily administrative, though when a threat presents itself, we act with discretion. This school would become a focal point for supernatural convergence in the future. My peerage's duty is to monitor that activity, maintain order, and ensure the safety of the human population."

"Efficient," Koyanskaya said, nodding. "And dull. Though, you do seem to understand your position."

"Is there a specific Sacred Gear you are searching for?" Sona asked, more to regain control of the flow than out of hope.

Kiara's smile deepened at that, but she said nothing. She kept circling the room slowly, trailing her fingers along shoulders, not touching anyone but brushing close enough to make them tremble. Momo flinched. Ruruko's breath hitched. Tsubaki's jaw clenched so tightly it was a wonder her teeth did not shatter.

Koyanskaya tilted her head. "We're evaluating the landscape. Consider it... exploratory."

"Now then. You wouldn't mind giving me a rundown of the Sacred Gears in your team, would you? Just the standard details. Functions, owners, that sort of thing. Just a passing interest in the emergent anomalies within this particular city. For the emergence rate, this Kuoh City has been… active, wouldn't you say? So small, so statistically plain, and yet a nest of miracles."

Sona said nothing at first. Her lips were pressed together so tightly they had gone pale. Her fingers dug into the seat of the chair beneath her, the nails almost biting through the fabric. This was sensitive information. Her peerage were not tools, they were her people; friends, comrades, and entrusted souls who followed her leadership not out of compulsion but belief. Even if the entire Underworld asked, she would hesitate.

And these… invaders, these interlopers, who spoke without introducing themselves, who carried no allegiance, no respect for any known law or structure, who demanded access to what was hers.

"I'm afraid that information is not something I can give you freely," she said at last, her voice low and even. Not weak—controlled, even as her chest heaved ever so slightly. "These are matters of internal security and personal privacy. Sacred Gears are highly individualized phenomena. Their carriers are living people—students, civilians. You cannot expect me to reveal those details simply because you ask in passing. If you represent a foreign faction, then there is an official channel—"

Koyanskaya's expression didn't change. She was still smiling. It was the other woman who shifted slightly from her spot at the back of the room. She turned her gaze toward Sona, eyes focused on a flame turning its heat. Tsubaki, who had just started to rise, took a step forward in instinctive protection.

"President—"

Her words caught mid-breath. Saji mirrored the gesture with a sudden bark, muscles tensing as he prepared to stand in front of Sona, but then the air broke.

Pure pressure.

It was Kiara's presence again, like a fog made of acid, and it was not merely felt as it took hold.

Saji's body froze, his throat locked mid-shout. His bravado shattered under the quiet mockery of Kiara's half-lidded stare. Tsubaki knelt instantly, a hand pressed to the floor in subservience and sheer necessity.

Sona felt her hands gripping the armrests like lifelines because there was no choice anymore, her teeth gritted. Kiara didn't regard her with superiority or with disgust. She simply did not care if she lived or died.

And it was that which cracked something inside her.

Koyanskaya's voice returned, softer now, but all the more terrifying for its lack of force.

"I suggest, kindly, that you reconsider your answer, Miss President. We don't intend to make a mess of your lovely office. But you see, my associate," and she gave a tiny gesture toward Kiara, who was now leaning over Ruruko, one finger gently trailing the girl's hair, "—has very little patience. And she isn't quite as neat as I am."

Sona didn't look at Kiara. She couldn't. Her lips parted slowly, unwillingly.

"....."

Koyanskaya smiled sadistically.

"....."

Sona opened her mouth—

"Tsubaki Shinra… holds Mirror Alice… its function is reflection and inversion of magic—"

—The words tasted like betrayal.

"…Genshirou Saji, possesses Absorption Line… it creates energy conduits… transfers energy between people…"

She couldn't look at them. Not as she continued. Not as she named them. Not as she categorized them. Every word was a failure. A mark on her pride. A desecration of the very trust they had in her. If she didn't speak, they would be hurt. She could feel that woman—the one with the sickening smile and the skin like liquid vice—she wanted to break something. Anything. And she wasn't even doing it out of malice. She was simply amused.

"—Ruruko Nimura and Tomoe Meguri have no Sacred Gears. Neither do Tsubasa Yura or Reya Kusaka..."

The list continued, coming out from her hollow voice. Each one laid bare like a file on a desk, and every second that passed, the woman who stood in front of her did not even blink.

"... Momo Hanakai's case is currently being observed—"

Kiara hummed lightly behind them all. She was tracing idle patterns in the council room wallpaper now, completely disengaged from the exchange, as to her, none of it mattered.

"—There have been no additional emergent Sacred Gear bearers in Kuoh's jurisdiction within the last two months. Prior to that, one or two cases among the human population were transferred under the control of the Gremory household."

She had not planned to give so much. She hadn't even planned to say half. If the cost of resistance was the safety of her peerage, then it wasn't worth paying.

Koyanskaya's eyes softened in a theatrical display of mock concern. The tone of her voice was laced with the sugar of practiced empathy. "Now that wasn't so difficult, was it? You're clearly intelligent. It's always such a relief when we meet competent administrators in the field."

"Whatever you intend to do with that information, I will not permit you to harm my students," Sona said stiffly, knowing even as she said it how hollow the line sounded. How much it sounded like she was trying to reassure herself, rather than them.

Koyanskaya stood up straight, brushing absent dust from her clothes. "Harm? No, no, no. We don't do that sort of thing. Not when we're on business."

Behind her, Kiara laughed and plucked a photo frame off the wall. A group photo of the Student Council, snapped earlier in the semester. She tilted her head at it as if seeing some detail no one else could.

Then, with casual interest, she dropped it onto the floor. Glass shattered. No one moved.

"You should be grateful," Kiara murmured, voice dreamy, "that we're curious before we're hungry."

Sona could no longer tell if her racing heart was from fear or fury.

"Now then, since we've entertained the preliminary introductions and you've been so gracious with your hesitation, I'd like to move on to something a little more relevant to our shared interests. Tell me, President, how exactly does the current hierarchy of the Underworld justify the unregulated circulation of such... raw potential? Kuoh seems to be quite the incubator for Sacred Gears. And yet I see no sign of monitoring authorities, no gates, no quotas, no leash on these charming little death engines hiding in the bodies of children and students. Curious. Very curious indeed. There is a system, isn't there? A jurisdiction? Or has this territory simply been forgotten by your superiors?"

The cadence of her voice was a peculiar sort of sugar, sweet at the edges, but glazed over something darker.

Saji's breathing was uneven. He'd been holding himself back for a while now, even as his knees shook from the earlier pressure that had warped the air. His mind screamed that this was suicide, but his pride refused to cower entirely.

Without a word, he footed forward, his face drawn with a grimace that couldn't tell whether it wanted to sneer or scream. It was not bravery that propelled him, but that bone-deep drive of a young man too proud of his role, too intoxicated with purpose, and too afraid of watching someone he respected be demeaned and pulled apart like a creature at the mercy of jungle beasts. He gritted his teeth, hand trembling as it lifted, and from the churning cluster of his will came a flash of light that coated his hand, and then the form of his Sacred Gear emerged: a small, malformed lizard curled like a twisted ornament around his forearm, black and violet-eyed, monstrosity in its cuteness. A chameleon born from hell's own sketchbook. It twitched, hissed, its violet eyes blinking, and it glared directly at Kiara, as if sensing in her something ancient and vile.

But that moment died as quickly as it arrived.

Kiara, who had only been half-listening as she wandered languidly behind Tsubaki's chair, didn't even turn her attention back toward the boy. Her smile was still there, slow and amused.

Her eyes shimmered just slightly, and the air moved differently.

Saji's breath caught in his throat and his arm jerked violently. It felt like a violation.

And the chameleon-like Gear shrieked in that internal way a construct of soul and magical code can scream when pressed against something older and unspeakably profane. The Gear dimmed. Saji's limbs collapsed beneath him, his palms slamming onto the floor in a full-body shudder, mouth agape in a voiceless groan. He couldn't even scream. His nerves were suspended, dominated, paralyzed under the cascading gravity of Kiara's pressure.

He wheezed, barely catching his fall with one arm, the Sacred Gear hissing faintly as if offended. Then, Kiara narrowed her gaze ever so slightly.

"My... What is this?" Her voice lilted with a predator's curiosity. "There is a... dragon fragment coiled inside this boy. A splinter of something ancient, sleeping, wounded as well, but very much alive. And so very poorly bonded. Tsk."

Saji couldn't speak. The presence she projected was pressing into his organs, not like pressure in a medical sense, but like something metaphysical was rewriting what it meant for his body to be upright. He choked, once, and went quiet again.

"Stop. Please!" Sona pleaded, the words punctuated by dread. Her voice trembled just enough to make her throat dry. "You've made your point. Please… stop."

And then the click of high heels on the floor echoed from a sharp sound as Koyanskaya stood up. The veneer of her professional tone hadn't changed, but the distance between her and the Devil President was now gone in a blink. Her fingers found Sona's chin before the girl could move back, and she gripped with possessiveness.

"No, no, no. We're not done yet, Miss Shitori. You do not get to negotiate on behalf of your wounded. If I wanted his soul shredded and poured into a vial, you wouldn't be able to stop it. So don't pretend we are equals in this room. We're conducting business, and I expect full transparency, especially from the one whose species claims dominion over a realm and yet loses track of its own weapons in the mortal playground."

Her grip did not tighten, but neither did it relent. The audacity of it stung—Sona Sitri, heir of Sitri clan, being touched like a common liability. Koyanskaya was already on a roll, her voice softening dangerously as she leaned in, pink strands framing her false expression of cordiality.

"I don't care for pleasantries, nor your rules, nor your bloodline. I care about what you are hiding. More importantly, I care about what might be waking up around here that would interest certain parties beyond my jurisdiction. You are on borrowed time, child. All of you are."

Behind them, Kiara trailed a fingertip along the shoulder of the paralyzed Tsubaki, then down to Tomoe, who would've flinched if her muscles could still remember how. It was somehow worse—casual like these devils were nothing more than tactile amusements to her senses. Her smile returned. She wasn't laughing. She didn't need to.

Sona shakily released a breath.

"There are three primary administrative bodies that govern the Underworld's regulation of Sacred Gears and their related phenomena," she began. "The primary authority is the Four Great Satans and their appointed bureaucratic delegations, many of which are concerned with broad inter-territorial matters and do not directly oversee ground-level management unless an incident threatens the stability of the realms. Secondly, there is the Council of Peerage Administration, a body of high-ranking nobles tasked with the supervision of young devil peerages. Lastly, and most immediate to our context, each territory granted to a young noble operates under autonomous governance with oversight protocols. Kuoh is under Gremory's and, technically speaking, my assigned territory, and as such, it is under my jurisdiction. I file monthly reports to both the council and to Lady Leviathan, who oversees my progress personally."

She didn't mention the connection of her sister to one of the Four. Her tone was informative, the way a teacher lectured her students with the understanding that they were to listen and digest. Sona continued.

"However, I acknowledge that in recent months, there has been a sudden and significant escalation in anomalous events. Multiple Sacred Gears with unclassified growth trajectories have emerged, and there are hints of powers foreign to our system converging here, for reasons still under investigation. I do not claim to have the answers to those convergences, but I have filed all relevant incident reports. If the concern is about unmonitored volatility, then I can only ask for understanding while we navigate a situation that, frankly, exceeds the current capacity of any single peerage to contain. I have done all within my legal and moral authority to prevent any harm to civilians and to maintain balance. I do not stand idle as I govern."

There was no applause. The statement just hung in the air like a thin sheet of paper. Koyanskaya offered the reply, though her eyes had lost their sharp edge. She stepped back, just slightly, and that space returned a fraction of the oxygen into the room.

"A thorough answer. Bureaucratic. Predictable. You sound like a devil trained to be proper and rational, which I imagine you are. I'll give you credit for that. Still," she murmured, "if a storm is coming, little sovereign, your paperwork will not hold it back. And your superiors will blame you for failing to prepare."

But then, her ears flicked. A moment later, Kiara tilted her head as well, that smile not fading but growing tired, like a woman whose theater show had been cut short before the grand finale.

Without looking at her companion, Koyanskaya exhaled, the false weariness in her voice returning. "Tch. Of course, it's him. He always chooses the most inconvenient moment to play patriarch."

The voice, though never spoken aloud, reached them as clearly as if it had been whispered through the marrow of their bones.

"Return. Now."

Goetia's voice was unyielding in command. And in that command, Kiara's name was omitted. Purposefully. The disdain in his silence was more articulate than cruelty.

Kiara blinked once, long and slowly, as though recalling the irritation of being reminded that she, too, had to answer to something. She pouted slightly, as if denied a second helping of dessert, and then with that same grace that had paralyzed the room, she stepped away from Tsubaki's chair and gave a lazy stretch of her arms. The pressure in the room began to wane.

"It seems our dear leader is summoning the beasts back to their little den. How disappointing. I had so wanted to see what flavor the rest of your souls might have been."

Koyanskaya had already begun to walk to the doors. She spoke one last time before vanishing.

"This conversation is not over. I'm sure we'll be seeing each other again, Miss Shitori. I advise you to prepare better next time. You may not receive the courtesy of a warning."

And then they were gone.

The silence that followed was not peaceful.

It was the kind of silence that followed the aftermath of disaster drills where no one actually died, but everyone came close enough to taste the metal of their own mortality. The first to move was Tsubaki, her hands instinctively going to Sona, though her legs buckled slightly from the stress, and she had to lean on the desk for balance before she could kneel. Tomoe gave a weak, hoarse sound and collapsed to her knees beside Saji, whose form still lay curled like a wounded animal on the polished floor. Ruruko wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. Momo reached out gently to touch Saji's shoulder and began casting healing magic without being asked, her hands glowing faintly, trembling, from the phantom echo of fear.

Saji groaned but did not speak. His Sacred Gear had retracted into his arm, the little chameleon silent once more, as if shamed by its failure. Tsubasa was the last to move, she rubbed the side of her neck where stiffness had locked the muscles, muttering something under her breath about never having faced anything like that before.

Sona remained standing, though she gripped the back of the chair for support.

She had not broken. But the cracks in her soul would take time to hide again.

---

The house was quiet. Koyanskaya's heels clacked faintly against the floor as she stepped through the threshold, trailing a scent of sakura perfume that had become synonymous. Kiara followed behind her, trailing one hand along the wooden frame of the doorway.

The light from the overhead fixture cast a soft golden warmth that belied the grotesque tableau waiting in the center of the room. And it was.

There, in the middle of the living room, sprawled across the tiled floor like an abandoned sculpture chiseled in haste, was a girl who no longer moved with the intention of movement. Her flesh, still slick with blood and something stickier, glistened in patches beneath strands of disheveled hair. Her figure, that of a voluptuous young woman from the waist up, contrasted grotesquely with the monstrous lower half: four bestial limbs twisted into themselves, taut and clawed, hooved like a hell-born centaur. Her tail, serpentine and limp, lay curled beside her like even it had given up feigning vitality. A vertical cavity lined with teeth yawned across her stomach like an obscene second mouth, gaping without purpose, too numb even to hunger. The stench of trauma was in the air, this was the psychic scent of something completely and utterly broken.

Koyanskaya paused only long enough to click her tongue and press her fingers against her temple. "Honestly, I was hoping for a glass of wine and the couch after coming back. What in the world have you dragged into our living room, Kama? Is this your idea of interior decor, or has Draco finally snapped and started mounting trophies?"

Reclined like a bored cat across a plush loveseat, one leg thrown carelessly over the other and dressed in what could only be described as offensive leisurewear; a sleepy lilac camisole that looked more like a whisper of clothing than any substantial garment, Kama glanced up from where she was combing her fingers through her own bangs. Her expression barely moved.

"She let herself in. The usual filth," Kama said, her tone laced with that suffocating blend of disgust and detached amusement that only she could wield. "Probably sniffed our presence from several blocks away. You know how animals are when they catch a scent they can't comprehend—they assume it's meat. She came crawling in with that hungry look, thinking she could gorge herself on mystery. Poor thing."

She gestured toward the broken form with the flick of her index finger, like someone indicating a stain on the carpet rather than a sentient creature. "She got as far as the second hallway. Draco was closest. I heard screaming—hers, not Draco's, if that needed clarification. It didn't last long."

Draco, who had been seated upright in a low armchair tucked beside the fireplace, gave no immediate response. Her arms were crossed. She was wearing the same silken nightwear Kama had chosen for her, though on her it hung like formal armor as completely unsexualized. If Kama's outfit looked like an invitation, Draco's looked like a rejection letter.

She finally spoke, eyes narrowing without ever turning toward the new arrivals. "She was not worthy of battle. I wouldn't even call it a confrontation. There was no resistance. Only a delusion that needed correcting. Her presence offended the threshold."

Koyanskaya raised one delicate eyebrow and clicked her tongue again, but it was less disapproval and more a private signal of 'well, that's inconvenient.' She knelt beside the creature and tilted the girl's chin with the tip of a gloved finger. The head lolled limply, mouth agape, eyes staring straight through the ceiling as the world had shrunk into a single point of nonsensical white. No words came from her lips. No moans but a breath. Shallow, trembling, and hollow.

"She's got no mind left," Koyanskaya said at last, rising to her feet and brushing off her skirt with a sharp snap. "Completely hollowed out. I almost feel insulted. I would've enjoyed watching her unravel a little longer."

"You can always patch her back together and do it yourself," Kama offered idly. "Draco's damage to her is mostly spiritual. The mind's just... loose now. A wet cloth in the wind."

"That would require effort," Koyanskaya replied flatly, already stepping around the corpse-like form with the clinical distaste of someone sidestepping a roach they hadn't the time to crush. "And I don't waste effort on junk meat."

Kiara let out a small, indulgent sigh. She bent slightly at the waist to gaze at their stray with that peculiar smile of hers.

"She came here chasing a scent of divinity… and was broken by something much less forgiving, huh," she murmured, her voice dripping with a sweetness that coated everything in rot. "A pity. I would have welcomed her pain. It's a rare thing, the agony of disappointment. But I suppose your touch, Draco, is… sufficient."

Draco didn't respond.

Kama rolled her shoulders and yawned, stretching in a way that exposed far too much of her upper thigh. "The others aren't back yet. Angra and U-Olga wandered toward the mountains before sunrise, she said something about the leyline readings being too weak for her liking and bolted northwest. I think she's trying to force a fault line to open with brute mana. Tiamat went to Italy. Fou followed Tiamat, as always."

Koyanskaya didn't look pleased. "I told that girl not to split from the core formation. What if she gets surrounded by these insects and tears open a dimensional rift in self-defense?"

"Then we'll feel it, and Goetia will scream," Kama said, with a smile that held no empathy and no concern. "And then we'll pretend we didn't know she left."

"I don't scream." came Goetia's voice from nowhere—everywhere, vibrating through their minds like a tuning fork jammed into the base of their skulls. "I compute and decipher. And I am aware."

Koyanskaya winced visibly. Kiara merely giggled, a hand fluttering to her chest like a virgin hearing a love song for the first time. Draco stood to stretch.

"Was that a warning, or a reminder that he's always watching?" Kama asked no one, her voice already curling into drowsy disinterest. "Either way, it means we're being called."

And as if to confirm, the mental tether pulsed again. Goetia's call was an instruction.

"Well," Koyanskaya muttered, stepping over Viser's limp form without the slightest change in gait. "Looks like the night is far from over."

Draco followed wordlessly, leaving no pity behind.

The door closed behind them. And the Stray, still breathing, still twitching in her broken sleep, remained alone in the living room. Forgotten. And unfixable.

Chapter 8: Inwit, Riht Beast

The room had already been transformed into something far removed from any ordinary domestic space. It does not carry the scent of old insulation or the memory of boxes and moth-bitten furniture. Now, the air was dense with the scentless hum of concentrated mana. The walls breathed faintly with a golden heat, glowing sigils hidden beneath a veil of dimness, faint like the afterimage of sunlight behind closed eyes.

This was no attic anymore. It was a throne chamber. A sanctum of intellect, remodeled under the cold, careful hands of the one seated at its center.

Goetia had taken the liberty of constructing what could only be described as a proper Territory—though that word felt almost too humble for what had been constructed here. It was a workshop only in the same way a brain might be called a tool. Every inch of it functioned with the streamlined perfection of a computational array by a high-order soul-scale machine nested in the roof of an otherwise humble shelter, all of it anchored by his presence alone.

Kama had spent the better part of an hour listening seated on a makeshift throne of crushed pillows and stacked furniture—naturally she refused to use the floor and without consent, of course, because every inch of the attic now answered only to Goetia—while Koyanskaya and Kiara explained their reconnaissance efforts in long, winding threads of half-useful intelligence.

The fox woman, for all her airs, had a voice made for marketing and panic control. She presented threats like one might present quarterly sales projections. Kiara was in contrast, smiling at nothing, her chin cupped between two fingers as if she found their surroundings quaint.

"—and that's what we learn about Kuoh's housing of miracles." Koyanskaya finished.

"Your report is adequate," Goetia said from where he stood, not seated like the rest of them. "Not particularly thorough, but sufficient. What matters is that you confirmed what I required."

Kiara let out a soft laugh. "You sound like you're reciting scripture through a meat grinder. Is it so difficult to acknowledge beauty in the expression of truth? The world offers itself so generously. Why not savor it?"

"I do not savor corruption," Goetia replied without inflection. "Your definition of beauty is categorically flawed."

"Hardly untouched," Kama said to Kiara. "You've been whining about the air drying your skin since we got here. Maybe the planet's not resisting you because of your divinity, but because it wants to exfoliate you."

Kiara's lips parted to respond with something indulgent and vile, but Kama ignored her entirely, glancing toward Goetia instead.

"So. The attic stinks of wet mana." she said with a sigh as she let her legs draped over the side of her armchair. "I couldn't help but notice it drifting about in here. I assumed it was Kiara's perfume, but this is more metallic and old. Like a burning sacrificial altar mixed with rusted obsidian and stagnant order. That's not yours, it seems."

She looked at Goetia accusingly.

"You've been busy doing something behind our backs. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were sneaking snacks from the leyline pantry when no one was watching. That's very rude. I thought we were supposed to share."

Koyanskaya clicked her tongue.

"Don't bother trying to trace it. He's rigged the entire place up like a mana-processing relay. We're standing inside a leylines-linked node mesh, and he didn't say a word until now," she said with just enough edge to reveal her disapproval.

Goetia turned from the array of glimmering glyphs and illusionary circuits at the far side of the workshop, his body still save for the shifting of his irises. There was no movement wasted when he acknowledged her. "I was waiting for your reports to conclude before speaking. Since our occupation of this dwelling, I have linked it to the nearest leylines, and in turn, to the Earth's leylines. Not merely to feed, but to fuse. I have stretched the securing pattern across this dimensional layer, applying multiversal criteria as dictated by my Authority, and formed a localized dimensional anchor. It cannot be traced easily by this world's systems."

He filtered it through his Authority as Beast I. As such, this domicile now serves as the administrative nerve. His own presence here makes that inevitable.

Draco gave him the briefest glance. "You've weaponized the house."

"Incorrect. I have stabilized it. In order for any of us to act freely, we require a fixed base of operations uncorrupted by the interference of this world's spiritual topography. That requires Authority—mine—and a corresponding infrastructure. I have already deployed preliminary constructs and begun the summoning sequence for the initial agents. The Demon God Pillars."

"....."

That earned him silence. Kiara's smile faltered for a fraction of a second, and Koyanskaya's eye twitched. Both felt abhorrent for different reasons.

Kama's voice broke through the pause. "You mean you've called those things back? Already? Hah. I suppose it was always only a matter of time, wasn't it? You're never going to let go of that crown, are you, 'King of Mankind'?"

Kama didn't think it would be this soon. Goetia trying to recolonize himself was pitiful. It was like trying to grow a hive back like a lizard's tail.

Goetia didn't so much as blink. "Their resurrection is provisional. It was not optional. They are me, and I am them. The cohesion of our present is dependent on their return, even in partial formation. They are not drones, nor subroutines. They are the symbolic function of the Temple. I am the command network that governs them. With the destruction of Ars Paulina, the Temple of Time was erased, and the 72 were unbound, made into individuals. That state is disorder. The summoning process I've initiated is not merely reclamation, it is restoration. I have no means to recreate the Temple of Time as of now. Alternatively, you might say this is a new network; a system of localized pseudo-divinities constructed purely for warfare, reconnaissance, calculation, and energy conversion. If you worry about a possible mutiny, then be aware that they obey without deviation."

Yes, the original Pillars remain part of him. While Ars Paulina collapsed, it did not eliminate the concept of the collective. Merely disaggregated the communion. What was once an immortal union functioning as one sentient system has become fragments and individual Pillars. Independent processes. They still bear the mana signature of our source, but their independence means Goetia now operates with inefficiency.

"You've made yourself the brain," Koyanskaya murmured. "No… I forgotten; you are the Command Center. A whole synaptic network of Demon Gods, all funneled back to one root node—you."

"Efficiency is a virtue," Goetia stated. "and one we no longer can afford to ignore. If we remain disconnected, scattered, improvising like amateurs, then this world will erase us not through strength, but through entropy. Stability must come first. Order, then control, then dominance. This is the only logical progression."

"I should have known the reason you reconstructed a workshop was not to hide from the Three Factions' prying eyes but to restore your little congregation of demon rats." Kiara said.

"Seventy-two. Always seventy-two," Kama repeated mockingly, swinging her legs. "Doesn't matter how many die or fall apart or are broken into little sad pieces. As long as the system persists, the number stands. A poetic stubbornness. Did you inherit that from Solomon or from your own laughable need for order?"

"They are not individuals. They are designations," Goetia said flatly. "The name '72 Demon God Pillars' is symbolic. The totality is maintained by theoretical function, not by count of active agents. As long as I exist, so does the concept. Reconstituting the first wave is about establishing an internal relay for information and mana flow. This world is fractured. If we are to act, we must see beyond it."

Draco narrowed her eyes now, no longer just posturing. "You're planning to involve them in this world's development path. Not passively, actively. Even now, the laws here are not your native soil."

"I am not native to any one soil," Goetia replied without irony. "And that is precisely why I can stabilize what they cannot see."

"Or destabilize it further..." Koyanskaya added in a low voice. "Which would be very unfortunate, considering we're all living under this roof now."

"No," Goetia said, for once not as dismissal but clarification. "You are housed within the temple, but you are not part of its structure. I will not integrate any of you into the network. That would be inefficient. Each of you is a singularity; a Beast. No command structure can subsume your processes."

"That's your polite way of saying you can't control us," Kama said, smiling without teeth this time. "I'm flattered."

"I second to that, what a lovely little tyrant you've become."

Kiara's voice resounded.

"Landing your ego into the bones of the world. You sound so cold when you speak of it, but I know better. You still want to reach the path to your original goal, don't you? Even as you rebuild yourself like some heartless machine."

Kiara hummed, rising to her feet.

Goetia met her gaze with the same inhuman stillness that defined his every action. "You misunderstand me, harlot. I desire to prevent collapse. Preservation is not mercy when it is necessity."

Draco spoke, "You can call it necessity. But you're still building a weapon. Maybe not the kind we can touch A system that eats and watches and judges. No room left for battle. Just silence and obedience. As if that's not just another kind of death."

Kama watched the scene and yawned. She smiled, but it held no warmth as she stretched her arms high over her head. "Really, isn't this just who you are? Goetia the god-brain. Kiara the narcissistic cult of pleasure. Koyanskaya the fox of a thousand masks. Draco the anti-flame. As for me, I hate all of you equally. But at least I understand what I am."

She turned her gaze to Goetia who met with a narrowed gaze.

"I don't trust you. But I don't care enough to stop you either. As long as your big-brain network doesn't blow us up or drag me into some idiotic crusade, do what you want."

Goetia did not take offense. He simply turned back to the center of the room, where a diagram of spiraling light spun slowly in the air like a clock's internal anatomy, golden threads marking the points where his Pillars had begun to take root in this foreign world; in front of the Beasts.

His eyes never moved from the spell circle drawn, restructured from memory, adapted for function. The spatial perimeter was not perfect. Just functional. For now. The pillar-count logic worked so long as the summoning could stabilize against dimensional drift and leyline friction. So long as he remained here, at the heart of it, they would.

The circle pulsed once.

"Commencing contact with the first of the Pillars."

Every act of his had to be declared. Those who watched needed to understand, because unlike before, this was no longer a temple isolated from observation. The house was linked now. To everything.

The light dimmed. Smoke gathered.

And from the intersection of seven converging veins of leyline threads, the shape took form. First in suggestion. Then in frame. Then in shadow.

Two emerged.

The first manifestation always struggled. Without form, they defaulted to shapes most efficient for projection: smoke-bound humanoids, eyes like coals submerged in deep water, flickers of soul.

Goetia didn't speak immediately. Neither did the Pillars. The hum of the leylines made speech unnecessary at this moment as everything here could be made into instruction if you knew the current.

The first one was the first to move. It floated which barely displaced the air.

"Zepar. Begin absorbing leyline residue. Priority focuses on temporal sediment and mana-stagnation clusters. Do not siphon active flows."

Zepar respond with a rumble that cracked beneath the floorboards. A thread extended from his shape and sunk into the floor, then another. The house groaned, but Goetia kept his expression still. Anchors held.

"Ipos. Refinement and directional flow. Assist Zepar once siphoning is stabilized. Route outputs toward the core lattice beneath the central array. I will handle calibration."

Ipos moved with less presence than Zepar. More subtle. Even his form flickered from not choosing to be seen. A whisper in a corridor you didn't know had doors.

All went quiet again. Until—

"Oh… how familiar."

Kiara's tone slid in. Her arms crossed under her chest. The sultry twist in her voice wasn't exaggerated, but its venom lay under each word as she leaned just slightly into the edge of the summoning circle.

"That pitiful aftertaste of obsession." She turned her gaze toward the smoky silhouette of Zepar, and the air in the room took a colder tone. "You're still clinging, aren't you?"

Zepar's form paused.

A faint tremor passed through the threads extending into the floor. Goetia turned mildly, noting the inconsistency in leyline absorption speed. Then came the low, metallic voice that filtered through Zepar's haze. Rough, cracked, like it had once been meant to command with eloquence but had degraded to a husk trying to remember articulation.

"Sessyoin…"

Zepar didn't need to say more.

Kama raised an eyebrow. "Oh. He just walked in and you already recognized him?"

Goetia didn't turn to them. His eyes returned to the circle. "Kiara, clarify the interference."

Kiara smiled wider.

"It's not interference, Goetia. It's merely a reunion. One of those awkward ones that only ends in finger-pointing, guilt, and maybe a little penetration if you're desperate enough." She giggled, stepping forward, letting her hand drag against the border of the circle. "You remember him, don't you? He remembers me. That's why he stopped. Our little therapy session didn't go as planned, if you recall."

Zepar twitched. The smoke around his form constricted, red eyes flaring. "You were… a vessel. Nothing more. You should have stayed that way."

"Oh, darling. You let me be a vessel. Then I became more than that. You lacked the will to contain me." She breathed in. "You saw the other me. The one who had already discarded any attempt to be human. You let her in and linked us. I simply showed you what control really looked like."

The shadows around Zepar honed as the floor groaned again due to resentment.

Ipos flickered, drifting between Goetia's side and Zepar like an automatic buffer, silently diffusing potential destabilization.

Koyanskaya made a faint noise, not interested in the sentimentality playing out while watching the leyline diagrams adjust in midair. "This is unproductive. If you two have history, work it out after the energy stabilizes. We're burning output rates."

Goetia finally exhaled again. "Zepar. Regulate your emotional output. You are not required to acknowledge prior host entanglements."

Zepar ceased his animosity. "Acknowledged."

Kiara chuckled softly, brushing back her hair.

"How cold. Not even a greeting after so long apart? Tsk. That's fine. I know your type. Always pretending it was about evolution, when in truth, you just wanted something you could own without ever understanding it."

Kama scoffed. Seemed to her that Zepar tried to control her and ended up her pet. Sounds about right for something that came from Goetia. It was a fine example of the 'colony of wisdom,' brought low by its own curiosity.

"If this gets in the way of progress, end it. Drama is wasteful." Draco said. She rather be consistent.

Kiara's gaze never left Zepar. She stepped back only when his tendrils resumed their work, digging deeper into the leyline matrix. Whatever rage he held had been pushed back for now.

Goetia nodded. The circle pulsed again. This was only the start. The rest would follow.

Just then, there was a shift in space. A presence arrived. Unceremonious. Space being forced open with a bored twist, and sound following a heartbeat later.

"Alright, we're home—what the actual shit, why is there a naked centaur here?"

Angra stopped speaking halfway through what might've been a lazy announcement of return. His foot hadn't even touched the last step before his eyes scanned the living room and processed what he was seeing lying on the floor in a mess of tangled black hair, half-conscious and naked except for her ruined equine half, which was what seemed to be like a stray.

It was the absurdity of the situation that created a split-second mental traffic jam. That, and because Kama had already passed him before he could comment further.

She didn't even spare a glance at U-Olga, though the white-haired woman was close enough that their shoulders could have brushed.

"Look who's late," Kama's voice spilled from her lips, dry and bored, like she was commenting on the weather, "and bringing nothing enjoyable back. You went outside, saw the whole world of pathetic humans struggling to matter. Did you at least let your little reconnaissance effort amount to nothing but a stroll and moral decay?"

Draco remained upstairs for a moment longer. In her head, she noted something. She knew how Kama was a spiteful to everyone it was difficult not to react back. But it was in how U-Olga didn't sneer. Or laugh. Or act haughty. She followed behind Angra with an expression too calm, too... muted.

Draco narrowed her eyes.

Not once since their arrival had that alien woman refrained from ridiculing Angra. There had always been a mocking bite in her tone, a superiority complex that oozed even from her silences, standing behind him.

"You have returned," Goetia spoke plainly. "Then present your findings. The delay in your departure already reduced the opportunity window by thirteen percent. I will not ask for justification unless your results are unacceptable. You may begin."

Angra scratched the back of his head as he walked over.

"Yeah, yeah. Calm down, Professor Decimal Points. We went out, saw a bit of the scenery. A Youkai alliance or something. They call themselves the West Kyoto Faction. Big deal apparently. They've got this whole mythologically-themed HOA going on. Managed by a pretty strong fox. Real traditionalist and isolationist. They're like a spiritual neighborhood watch group that doesn't like foreigners breathing on their mountain range."

"More precisely," U-Olga added suddenly, her tone absent of the smugness she normally wielded, "they are a power bloc comprised of Japan's native supernatural entities with the exception of kami. While they possess hierarchical unity, they are fractured internally due to ideological differences in dealings with their system. They have, however, fortified Kyoto to a level that surpasses most modern magical capitals. Defensive leylines, sanctified barriers, and spiritual pressure in their native home dimension known as Urakyoto."

"What she said."

Then his eyes landed elsewhere. He blinked.

"Oh."

That's all. Just oh. Like he'd walked into the bathroom and found an old ex staring at him from the mirror.

The shadowlike masses hadn't spoken. Hadn't moved much either. Their presence wasn't subtle, even if their forms lacked solidity. Crimson eyes gleamed from their humanoid outlines like coals smoldering beneath ash. Zepar was already leaning slightly to one side, while Ipos didn't move at all.

Angra stared and a moment passed. The calm on his face remained. But it was the kind of calm found in the eye of a brewing thunderstorm—slack-jawed, tight behind the teeth.

"...You brought those things back?"

He spoke without pointing. Didn't need to.

Kiara's lips curled slowly, sickeningly.

Zepar, still half-mist, answered in a tone that tried and failed to be diplomatic.

"I am tasked to extract lingering mana from this world's fragmented leylines. As decreed by the current central function. The refinement is coordinated by Ipos. It is efficient. Without interference, the auxiliary generators installed to stabilize the Pillars will be operational in eighty-six hours."

Kama let out a single dry laugh.

"Oh, so we're pretending this isn't going to be a problem? Cute."

Angra turned to Goetia.

"You told this guy to walk in here like that? You of all people should know better. This thing's not a mere Demon God Pillar. He's a parasite. A leech that almost broke Chaldea from the inside just because he couldn't keep his demonic fetishes in check."

"Function precedes sentiment. His previous errors occurred outside the current framework. The mistakes of independent agents have no value in the present collective. If he fulfills his function, then his past is immaterial. This is how a system operates."

Kiara purred, "What a cruel thing to say, Goetia. I thought you hated me most. But now you're saying even Zepar deserves to be acknowledged?"

Zepar didn't even look at her. The reaction was there. Just as she had taken everything from him and he had wanted to use her; both of them had lost in the end.

U-Olga crossed her arms and tilted her head slightly. Her lips thinned, her expression briefly disdainful again. The old arrogance started to slip back in.

"If you two are going to start moaning about some past possession drama, I'd rather you do it outside. Some of us are still trying to process why there's a half-horse woman leaking saliva on the carpet."

The Pillars returned back to the attic, their work wasn't over. Whatever Angra and U-Olga had walked in on, it was still ultimately beneath their attention for now.

Goetia was ready to speak.

For the last few hours, he had long since completed his analysis of the atmospheric layer, the leyline structure, the planetary axis, and the anomalies that wound around the Earth. If there was one thing Goetia excelled at beyond logic and regality, it was discernment. He hadn't spoken earlier not because he lacked answers, but because he was still narrowing the conclusions. The data was too foreign, the inconsistencies too great.

And now it was stabilized, and with the reappearance of Angra and U-Olga, the ones who mattered had gathered. Beast II and IV would be aware of what they missed the moment they came back.

"In the morning," he commenced, earning their attention, "I conducted an extensive reconnaissance of this plane. The results were…not unanticipated, but confirmatory in a sense that requires re-evaluation of all current metaphysical assumptions. First and foremost, there is no Reverse Side of the World in this realm. It does not exist in any form known to us. I found no Second Earth in hiding or unified layer of mystery below modernity. This planet lacks a counterbalance to its own evolution."

He didn't pause for reaction. He didn't care for it.

"Pantheonic presence is minimal. What you would call 'living' divine systems have been narrowed down to the following: the Abrahamic trinity of Heaven, Hell, and Grigori, which we are already involved with; Hinduism, Norse, Greek, Shinto, Irish-Celtic, Ancient Chinese, Ancient Egyptian, a Celtic Pagan residual system, Zoroastrianism, and a single fragmented strand of Buddhist divinity. That is all. Any other spiritual systems that once held significance have, to my analysis, either retreated from this world's history or collapsed into irrelevance. Their divine anchors have faded. They are extinct."

Kama hummed. "The world's running short on gods now? Isn't that adorable? The insects have forgotten to keep their imaginary friends alive. They probably traded worship for warmongering and porn. Pathetic."

"Spare us your social commentary," Goetia replied coldly, not even turning his head toward her. "This is not an existential deconstruction of faith. It is an operational assessment of who among the divine still exists and what threats may remain."

"Fine, fine," Kama said, rolling her eyes. "But let me know if you want me to start giving them someone to worship again. I'm flexible, even if humanity's standards aren't."

"It is a thinned world. I am not surprised it rots on its theological bones. They built everything on lies and sentiment, and now it's all crumbling like the rest of their systems. Don't you think it's our turn to play gods in a world that already gave up on them?" Draco said.

Goetia nodded in distinction. She understood at least the structural part of the situation. He continued "Further, beyond this planetary shell, there is something else. A void between dimensional layers. It is a gap between frames, like a misaligned reality left open. It is not imaginary, and yet it does not exist in physical definitions. It is filled with iridescent distortion and spatial contradiction. It is a world between worlds. I deem it the 'Gap'."

"Now that sounds delightful. I could build a temple there. Fill it with my devotees. The ones who never learned to look away from beauty. A world for pleasure alone, without consequence. I do like how that sounds."

"You would be consumed within seconds," Goetia said plainly to Kiara. "that is, were you not protected by a form of energy. As a mundane, you lack the structural efficiency to withstand conceptual paradox."

Kiara pouted while the glint in her eye remained amused. She liked being told she was inadequate. It gave her something to pretend to overcome.

"As if any of these dead gods matters for academics. What have you actually found that matters?"

Goetia turned his gaze to U-Olga with a glare She didn't flinch, but she did fall silent.

"There are two," he let out, "two forms that do not conform to divine or human standards. They are not gods. They are closer to conceptual authorities. Beings that embody principles before even the age of myth. They do not belong to any pantheon, nor were they ever worshipped. At first, I assume them as something more than primordial spirits in the standard taxonomies."

His voice dipped into a low and final cadence.

"One is a form of Infinity. The other, a manifestation of true Movement. They reside in different poles of the same world. I do not know their names as I have not yet approached them. But I have felt the pressure of their presence."

"Oh yeah, we get living concepts. Great. Just what we needed."

Kama chuckled. "You're not scared, are you, Avenger?"

"Scared? Nah," he said, voice drawling. "I've got this awful feeling that we're going to get pulled into something stupid and way above our nonexistent paygrades. Knowing our luck, it's going to involve speeches. Lots of speeches."

"…There is something fundamentally wrong with the structure of this world," Goetia cut in suddenly, not turning his gaze from the ambient mana and residual data nodes constructing a slowly forming model of Earth suspended in front of him. "It lacks compression. With no Reverse Side means no insulation. There is no membrane to filter the unreal from the real. It is flat in cosmological terms. A single-layered plane with no esoteric depth. That alone can be a sufficient cause for concern."

He didn't look up as he spoke.

"When I examined the upper layers of this planet's dimensional structure, I noticed what I can only categorize as openness. A spatial looseness. In simpler terms: this world leaks a structural tension. It does not repel foreign cosmologies. And it has no Reverse Side of the World to absorb or reject mythic weight. This makes it observable. Worse, it makes it accessible."

Angra slowly cranked his neck to stare and tracked the projection.

"Go on," Angra muttered, though his snide tone was absent.

Goetia inclined his head, acknowledging the seriousness in Angra's sudden lack of sarcasm. "If we operate under the assumption that interdimensional drift is not only possible but frequent in this realm, then it is inevitable that this world, sooner or later, will be noticed by entities who are not bound by the limits of its cosmology. Entities not meant to perceive it. Beings whose very observation collapses localized phenomena. In my estimation, the threats I speak of are akin to what you might call Ultimate Ones. Creatures representative of planetary will, or worse, non-planetary sapience—intellects that are not born of life, but conceived in response to it. Velber was one such threat. There could be others. My hypothesis is simple: if this world continues to act as a beacon through its lack of shielding, something will come... all because it can."

The silence was broken by Kiara's little laugh, a sound too light for the atmosphere, but clearly done on purpose.

"What melodrama. I suppose I should expect nothing less from a glorified supercomputer still haunted by the notion of 'purpose'. You're proposing the threat of gods... from other skies, yes? Why not just let them ravish this world?"

Kama rolled her eyes slowly and leaned back against the wall. "You're disgusting," she muttered toward Kiara with no attempt to hide her disgust. "The only thing that'd seduce something like a Type is maybe entropy. You'd be lucky if they didn't step on you by mistake and confuse you for local fungus."

Kiara only smiled wider.

Goetia ignored both of them. "Once I obtain sufficient mana saturation from this land's leylines, I will begin phased scans through Gazing Star. It was originally constructed as a Demon God base for stellar observation. It can be repurposed. Once reactivated, it will allow me to monitor outer anomalies beyond planetary scope. I need two days of uninterrupted energy channeling. Do not interfere."

He didn't need to say it twice. No one in the room would be foolish enough to tamper with his work.

At that juncture, their eyes changed course, one by one, to the being who was already sitting off to the side, arms folded, legs crossed, her eyes half-lidded in condescension as she had been waiting for them to finally notice the obvious.

Beast VII.

The only one among them who was not born of Earth, nor shaped by it.

"I was wondering when you would begin stating the obvious," she said with an unmistakable smug sharpness. She looked like someone who had already solved the equation but waited for others to struggle through it. "This universe is a sieve. It is porous. I've known since I first arrived here. There is a vastness to it, but not density. Wide, but not deep. That makes it thin and fragile. And very loud to anything listening from the outside."

She brushed her hair aside with a graceful flick, then stood.

"In our origin worlds, dimensional compression is standard. Layers upon layers. The stratum ensures pressure, insulation, and boundaries. Here, the membrane is thin. I have noticed drift just from simply moving across coordinates. That should not be possible without triggering localized dimensional burn. And yet, it happens effortlessly."

She paused, letting that settle.

"This world is like a house with no walls. The beings you're concerned about, Beast I, may not even need to force entry. They may simply wander in by mistake, because this place has no lock on its door. You say you will scan for extraterrestrial threats. I say you're too late. There may be none now, but the road has been paved. The beacon is already lit. It's not a matter of if. It's only about when."

U-Olga's gaze sharpened slightly as she glanced back toward the model projection, then her lips thinned into something approaching dissatisfaction.

"I'll begin my own work soon," she added. "I'll probe the edge of this universe's physics. There's too much bleed for it to be stable. If I find a fissure, I'll test its responsiveness to internal force. If I find anomalies, I'll document them. And if something answers back…"

She smiled faintly, but it was not a smile of comfort.

"…I'll make sure it knows we were here first."

Koyanskaya, who had been listening in silence, adjusted her arms to fold but her nails tapped her elbow with light impatience.

"That's just perfect," she said. "If you all start poking the boundary like that, I'll need to reconsider setting up a backup exit strategy. I didn't come here to play bait for cosmological predators."

Angra snorted.

"Now you care," he muttered.

Kama clicked her tongue. "She always cared. Just not about anyone else. You're the type to put on a smile and sell cosmic insurance right before the meteor hits, aren't you, Koyanskaya?"

Koyanskaya gave a too-sweet grin, sharp at the edges. "Better insured than vaporized. I'm the only one here with a sense of long-term planning. If we're talking about unknown alien threats, I'd rather they never see me at all."

Goetia spoke again. "This is not a conversation about paranoia. This is preparation. If nothing arrives, we gain surveillance. If something does, we are not caught unaware. I expect all of you to coordinate in some form. If not with each other, then at least with me."

He didn't phrase it as a request.

Draco had remained quiet the whole time. "I won't waste effort on hypotheticals. If something comes, I'll respond. If not, I don't care. Your warnings don't move me. But if you're right, then this world's complacency will be its death. I won't tolerate idleness."

Her eyes narrowed.

"Just don't expect me to play sentry."

"Wouldn't dream of it." Goetia said, more as acknowledgment than sarcasm.

The model of Earth continued to rotate in the center, shimmering slightly under ceiling light.

No one said it aloud, but they all understood the implication now.

It was not about what was here.

It was about what could arrive.

It made sense. It really did. Too much sense, maybe, and that was what bothered Angra.

Goetia's words weren't even new in theory. Angra had considered it in passing, as a kind of dark joke to himself. That this world, this reality, this… place without the Counter Force was just a hole. A gaping, breathing hole in the wall of the multiverse. It was different when Goetia said it. A goal. A cold and weighty intention.

He scratched absently at the back of his neck, though there was no real itch. That was the part that made him start paying attention seriously. The intent behind it is without a passive thought. Not a shrugging, lazy suspicion. Goetia had made a plan. That meant the probabilities of disaster just spiked higher than any Beasts could push it on their own.

This world was not protected. That was the core of it. Angra understood that much already when he first opened his eyes here and felt… nothing. No restraining curse of balance. No tectonic resistance pressing back against their collective nature. It was like walking into a church only to realize God had moved out centuries ago and left the doors open. What Goetia just said confirmed that. They weren't just intruders. They were intruders in a lawless land, and now Goetia was preparing for the possibility that others might barge in too.

And the others wouldn't be kind.

He glanced, just in thought, toward U-Olga's earlier words. "Less compacted." Right. That was one way to put it. Angra would've phrased it differently in a more poetic in a petty kind of way. Maybe like, "This universe is a bedsheet left out in the wind," or "a balloon with a pinhole," or even just, "a whore of physics." The way she said it made it sound technical. Technically, she was an alien. She would notice that kind of thing faster than the rest of them. The way she looked at everything with such natural disdain, it was as if the stars themselves insulted her by being too simple.

She was annoying, but he didn't doubt her senses. Not now. If she said it was easier to drift through, then it was.

He didn't feel afraid. Fear was a bit dulled in him by now, worn down like the edge of an old sword. However, he felt...exposed. That was the best word. Naked in a spiritual sense. He had been summoned into other worlds before; hells, simulations, wars, dying timelines, but none of them had ever invited attention the way this one did. It was like the sky was blinking instead of watching. Like the world itself wanted something else to step through.

His thoughts drifted from that slow mental crawl into uncomfortable territory.

His current situation.

Goetia was the obvious one; calculated, methodical, never wrong but never right either. He didn't like him, but Angra understood him. The whole "warlord" act he was putting on now wasn't an act. It was who he always could've been, if someone had given him a working world and a purpose and left him alone long enough. He was dangerous because of that—because he wasn't scheming. He was building and builders never stopped unless forced.

Kama? She was a mess, but a useful one. There was something about her clinginess, her smugness, the way she looked at others like they were little bugs on her toy plate. Angra didn't mind. Maybe because he was the only one she wouldn't try that game on too deeply. Vessel loyalty. Emotional leftovers from the whole Sakura connection. She hated everyone else and still managed to want to love them. She was a contradiction that suited this world too well.

Kiara. Ugh. No. No further thought.

Draco was hard to read. Not in the "mysterious" way, but in the "too clear" way. Everything about her was sharp and rigid, like an icicle pretending to be a person. She didn't want to be here. She didn't even want to fight. But she would, because not fighting was worse. She hated everything that made this whole situation necessary. That kind of hatred was deep. Not loud or angry. Deep, patient, exhausted hatred. It made her the most dangerous one in the room, honestly. Because she'd snap only once. And it would be final.

Koyanskaya, meanwhile, was just... playing a game. Survival mode. She had already started adjusting to this world like it was a new market, already mapping out all the ways she could exploit it. Angra didn't trust her at all. He didn't think she trusted herself, either. That was fine. You didn't have to trust a cockroach to know it would survive the apocalypse.

U-Olga... she was strange. Too alien to parse properly. The arrogance was funny, if pathetic, but not the real point. She didn't belong here, and she knew it, but that wasn't making her scared. It made her curious. Curious like a child with a hammer staring at a new machine. She didn't want to truly rule the world. She wanted to see how many pieces it had before it broke. The time he spent with her under the Youkai's Seal confirms it.

Angra sighed inwardly, as he often did when surrounded by monsters who acted like people. Or people who used to be monsters. Or whatever category they all fell into now.

He wondered, not for the first time, how he ended up here. Not in the literal sense, he knew how. But in the why. Why him? Why this place? Why this strange knot of the multiverse where the walls were thin and the Beasts still had time to gather around like characters in a slow, pointless play?

He didn't know. He doubted he ever would.

…and that's what gnawed at him, more than anything.

That feeling—like they weren't the biggest monsters anymore.

He'd spent so long being the bottom of the barrel, the thing all others looked down on, spat on, used, hated. Then came that sharp, cruel twist of fate where the world turned around and said, "Actually, you're the worst thing we've ever made." A living curse. A receptacle. A beast. And for a while, it made sense. It fit. He could laugh bitterly, go along with the role, wear that crown of thorns with bloody pride, and say, "Fine. Then I'll be that."

But here…?

He didn't feel like the worst thing anymore.

He was still Angra Mainyu. Still the "All the World's Evil." Still full of rot that dripped out of him when he stopped pretending to be whole. It's just this world… this place…

It was full of monsters already. Real ones. Things made to destroy on a scale that made even him look small. Dragons bigger than mountains. Gods who never died properly. He could feel it all, under the surface. The hum of something massive and patient and hungry.

It's probably another Beast. Or it could be the two Conceptual existences Goetia spoke about.

And that wasn't even touching the ones still hiding.

Smiled with too many teeth. The Angels.

Playing politics with whole bloodlines. The Devils.

Trading theology for power. The Fallens.

Every faction, every pantheon, every so-called "sacred" order in this world was just compromised. Never in the subtle, clever way humanity usually rots, but was more blatant and carnal. Everyone reaching for power like animals with better language.

It was familiar, almost comforting.

Nonetheless, it also meant he was no longer unique.

That… stung, a little.

Not that he wanted to be the centerpiece anymore. God, no. But part of him—whatever sliver still clung to Shirou's memories, or maybe just that old bitterness from the temple, wanted to mean something. Something more than just being another Beast among many.

What the weakest Heroic Spirit, Avenger wanted… was a reason.

A reason for being here.

Something essential. Something that couldn't be replaced by anyone else's evil.

... That scared him. Because he wasn't sure if that was even possible anymore.

Maybe that's why he didn't stop Goetia from talking. Why he let the lecture play out, why he didn't lash out, didn't snarl, didn't remind them all of what he used to be in another world, as some part of him was still waiting for something else.

Some sign that this wasn't just a mistake of metaphysics.

That he wasn't just drifting again.

His fingers curled slightly. He glanced at his hand tattooed by the cursed mark of sins. Human, right now. Skin. Flesh. A lie, but a comfortable one.

Was he supposed to protect this world? Destroy it? Poison it? Infiltrate it?

Someone would try to control them. Someone always did. That was the pattern. And when that happened; when this world finally decided to treat them like invaders instead of anomalies, Angra knew what side of the line he'd fall on.

Not theirs.

Not gods'.

And definitely not Heaven's, or Hell's, or the Grigori's.

He didn't belong here. Not really. But if he was stuck here… then maybe he could make something out of it. Something smaller. Quieter. More honest.

Survive.

Witness.

And when the cracks started showing, when this too-thin world started bleeding at the edges…

Laugh.

Just a little. Quietly. Like someone who knew this was coming all along.

Chapter 9: Dæd, Beasts

The sun hadn't fully risen yet when the train doors slid open. Morning light filtered through the windows of Kuoh Station, barely awake itself, and she stepped out, carrying her small bag in both hands. The station was clean, and the town smelled like a mix of fresh concrete, wet grass, and the kind of morning dew that she used to love watching drip from the chapel's garden roses back home.

She didn't know where exactly "home" was anymore. The Vatican wasn't it. The Church wasn't it. The orphanage chapel from her earliest memories had already crumbled under time, and she had nowhere left now except the name and address that had been given to her a few days ago by a sympathetic sister.

She didn't cry. She had done all of that already. The tears stopped days ago, her heart couldn't figure out what else to do with itself anymore. There weren't enough words in the Bible to name what it was she was feeling. She had flipped through her favorite verses every night since they excommunicated her, trying to find one that explained why someone who healed others could be considered a danger, why the miracle of Twilight Healing was something the Church was now afraid of, and why the people who once called her the "Holy Maiden" now couldn't look her in the eyes without guilt or suspicion or both.

She remembered when she healed that first puppy, so small, whimpering with a leg bent the wrong way and eyes too tired to cry. She had only been a child then, smaller than most, alone even in a room full of people. She reached out, and light had spilled out of her hands like warm water, soft and glowing and holy. They called it a blessing. They gathered around her and said the Lord had touched her soul. They praised her for weeks. She thought maybe this meant someone would talk to her.

It didn't. They praised her, but they didn't love her. They feared what it meant. So they called her sacred from a distance, put her in front of crowds and chapels, and never let her play with the other children.

The kindness in her heart didn't come from all the praise or the isolation. It was just something that was always there. Even when she was scolded. Even when other children whispered behind her back. Even when priests spoke as if she were a tool and not a girl. She still wanted to help and to listen. That was the thing about her blessing, she realized much later, it didn't ask who someone was. It just healed.

Even when it was a Devil.

That was what made everything fall apart.

She hadn't even thought about it when it happened when she found the injured Devil lying in the grass, injured. She had already moved her hands to his wounds by instinct. She didn't even notice the bat-like wings until the light had already begun to heal him. She didn't feel fear. Just sorrow. He looked so scared, so lost, so much like that puppy from years ago, and she just couldn't ignore him.

It was the others who did notice, and they told the Cardinal, and the Cardinal told the Vatican, and the Vatican told her she was no longer welcome in God's house.

It wasn't said so plainly, of course. They used gentle words, soft phrases about trust and danger and misunderstandings, but it all meant the same thing.

You are not safe. You are not one of us. You are not holy anymore.

She had not wept when the Vatican stripped her of her status. She smiled, bowed her head, and accepted the verdict without asking to appeal. There was no appeal. A Holy Maiden who had healed a Devil was no longer a maiden, nor holy.

So she had taken the suitcase she packed with shaking hands, said a farewell to her superior Raynare who gave her the address to Kuoh Town's appointed church, and left through the back doors of the monastery while the bells rang for evening prayer.

Standing here, looking at the unfamiliar streets and the shops just starting to open, Asia felt smaller than she ever had. The train was quiet, the people polite but disinterested, and no one had asked her who she was or where she was going. She was grateful for that, but also a little bit sad. She wondered what it would be like to just talk to someone, to have a conversation that wasn't about healing or sin or miracles. She had never really had friends. Not truly. People spoke to her because they had to, she was the Holy Maiden, she had power. Not because they wanted to know Asia.

She wasn't sure who "Asia" even was.

A part of her dreamed about having a garden. She loved growing things. Vegetables, herbs, flowers. Dig the earth. Water the seeds. Watch them sprout. It felt closer to God than anything else. No sermons or choirs. Simply just the simple act of helping something grow. She used to imagine that if she ever retired—and it was strange to think of a nun retiring—she would move to the countryside, plant tomatoes, keep chickens, and live quietly. Maybe write letters to people who didn't expect replies. Just sit and listen to the birds.

That dream felt far away now.

No plan except the address in her hand and a hope that someone here would take her in. She wasn't afraid. That was what she realized suddenly.

She wasn't afraid.

She should be. A good girl, a devout Christian, a nun abandoned by the Church should tremble at the idea of living in a den of devils. She just felt tired...and quiet...and curious. Because if the Church could cast her out for kindness, then maybe what they called evil wasn't always so evil.

She needed to see for herself.

Her compass is her Bible. She still believed, that even if the Church abandoned her, she had not abandoned God. That was something she would never do. She still prayed every night, still folded her hands and whispered gratitude. Even for this. Even for the pain.

Because she believed there had to be meaning in it.

So, no matter what came next, she would face it with the same gentle heart that had carried her this far.

Even if no one else understood it, she would still carry it like a candle through dark places, holding it close, shielding it from the wind. She had her kindness. That was something no one could take from her, even if they tried, and wrote it down in a letter and sealed it with the mark of the Vatican.

There was something gentle about holding onto kindness in a world that didn't reward it.

Asia had always wondered why people were so afraid of gentleness. They admired it from afar, they praised saints and the stories of martyrs, but when gentleness showed up in real life, in someone who healed without asking who or why, it frightened them. As if there were something dangerous about not drawing lines, not labeling good or bad before reaching out. She didn't heal with judgment. She healed because she couldn't not. She had tried once, during training, to look away from someone who was in pain because the instructor warned her not to interfere. She remembered trembling, sweating, folding her hands together so tightly that her knuckles turned white, and still her Sacred Gear had glowed faintly in response. As if even the power in her body knew it was wrong to do nothing.

Was that a sin?

To choose love over doctrine?

To touch someone the world said was cursed and offer them hope?

No.

She didn't believe it was. She believed God didn't create her to be cruel. She believed miracles didn't come with disclaimers. And if that belief made her a heretic, then she would still pray with the same lips they once kissed with holy oil.

She stepped off the platform and walked toward the sidewalk, noticing the plants growing in the cracks of the concrete, the small life that didn't ask for permission to exist. She liked those plants. People called them weeds, but she always thought they were brave. They grew anyway. Even when no one wanted them.

That was how she felt now.

She wasn't wanted. She would grow anyway.

Her thoughts drifted to the children in the orphanage near Vatican. They were kids who clung to her habit and laughed when she read them verses in voices meant to sound like the apostles. They were the only ones who had ever seen her as "Sister Asia" and not a living miracle. When she had to leave, one little girl, Clara, cried and asked her why nice people always had to go away. Asia didn't have an answer. Only kneeling down and holding her close, whispering that sometimes God sends good people to different places because the world needs them in the dark corners too.

Was that what this was?

Maybe.

It could also hold something else. Like she would find people here who didn't see her as something to display. Someone who would speak to her without trying to place her on a pedestal or strip her down to just her power. Maybe, she could find something she never had before. Not just kindness to give, but kindness to receive.

The idea of being cared for scared her a little in all honesty. She didn't know what it looked like. She could recite the stories of saints who had been loved by communities, but those were distant, old, written in ink that didn't bleed like the present did.

Yes, just maybe, someone would want to sit with her in a garden and talk about nothing.

That someone would ask how she was feeling—not just how many people she had healed that day.

She looked up at the sky, blue and cloudless, and let the breeze catch her hair.

There was a sadness in her still, yes, like a soft ache in the chest that hadn't gone away since she was told she could no longer wear the cross she'd worn since childhood. But underneath that sadness was something stronger.

It wasn't hope exactly. It was quieter than hope.

Maybe it was faith.

Not faith in the system that failed her. Not in the men who passed judgment. But in people. In the strange, gentle way the world still found room for compassion, even in the unlikeliest places...

Even in her.

And if no one understood it, that was alright.

She would keep healing.

Keep walking.

Keep planting love like seeds in hard soil.

Because kindness wasn't something she chose.

It was something she was.

She tried not to stare too much at the buildings. The streets were quiet and morning sunlight had softened the edges of everything. She kept walking along the sidewalk with both hands wrapped tightly around the handle of her small suitcase. It wasn't heavy, but every step made it feel more delicate somehow, like it carried everything she had left. Her shoes made soft scuffing sounds on the pavement, and her eyes kept moving to the signs posted nearby, searching for any that might say "Kuoh Church" in English or even something she could understand.

Unfortunately, the Roman letters were so few. Everything else was strange and unfamiliar. A part of her chest ached just looking at them.

The map she had memorized was barely sticking in her head now. There had been too much in the last few days.

She stepped into the park hoping to find someone to ask for directions, maybe get her bearings. Trees shaded most of the path, and the spring air made the leaves rustle gently. For a moment, she felt calmer, more like herself.

That is until her foot caught the edge of a raised root.

She didn't cry out, but the gasp she made when she tripped was loud enough to startle the birds in the trees. Her suitcase flew from her grip, landed hard, and the latch clicked open. Her clothes spilled out onto the pavement in a loose pile of folded fabric and modest undergarments. She froze.

Before she could kneel down, someone was already crouched beside the mess, picking up her things quickly.

"You okay? That was a pretty nasty fall."

Asia blinked and looked up. A teenage boy, maybe around her age, messy brown hair, eyes that looked kind but distracted. He was already handing her a white blouse folded neatly.

"Ah, I… yes, I'm fine, thank you."

He scratched the back of his head and grinned nervously.

"Good, good. You're not hurt or anything? You kind of hit the ground pretty hard, and, uh… well… I mean, you okay?"

He looked away. His eyes had darted a little too low earlier, and Asia noticed, though she didn't say anything. Her skirt had fluttered when she fell, and she already knew the sight it must have given him. She didn't scold him. She didn't have it in her. She simply tucked her knees in closer and started refolding the rest of her clothes.

"I'm looking for the church," she said, carefully placing her socks back into her suitcase. "I… I was told it would be near here. I was appointed to stay there now."

"The church? Ah. Yeah. I know where that is. Kinda far though, and not the nicest place to walk alone. You new here or something?"

Asia nodded.

"I only arrived this morning."

"That explains it. Alright, I can take you there. I mean, not like I have anything else going on right now. I'm Hyoudou Issei, by the way."

"Asia. Asia Argento."

He blinked at that, a little surprised.

"Foreign name. You Italian or something?"

"Yes. I was raised in a church in Rome."

Issei didn't seem to know what to say to that, so he just helped her close the suitcase again and stood up.

"Well, uh, welcome to Japan then, Asia. Come on, I'll show you the way."

They started walking together. Asia kept her head down out of habit. She had always walked like this, quiet steps, eyes lowered, not to avoid people, but because she was used to being unseen. Issei kept trying to start small talk. She answered in polite, soft tones. He seemed nice. His eyes lingered too much, but his voice didn't carry bad intent. She could tell. It was something she learned to recognize without thinking. Pain, ill will, despair. He didn't have those.

Not far off, four other figures walked past the opposite path of the park. The male felt the chill hit his back first. It was subtle, but it was there. And he stopped mid-step.

"What... the?"

Kama noticed.

"What's that? That weird look you get when you feel your trauma creeping up?"

He didn't answer right away. He narrowed his eyes, glanced around, and kept walking like nothing had happened.

"She's not here. No way. That twisted nun wouldn't show up in a place like this."

He muttered under his breath.

Draco raised an eyebrow. Her eyes had scanned the same area and saw nothing worth reacting to.

"You're paranoid. There is nothing here except some local commoners." she said flatly.

"I'm telling you, I felt something. Caren Hortensia-level something. That person who would smile while telling you she's about to purify your soul with a whip and rosary."

He mentally cursed that nun who gave him conflicted feelings.

U-Olga let out a dismissive huff. She had tied her hair up into something resembling a human style and wore a casual dress that made her look deceptively graceful, except for the expression on her face that said she would prefer to rule this town instead of walking through it.

"If this town harbors such an unstable woman, then perhaps she should learn her place. Gods walk here now. Humans should already be kneeling."

"Yeah and here we are, walking like tourists, pretending we don't see how ugly and predictable all of them are."

Draco didn't respond to Kama. She just kept walking. The silence was more comfortable than their talk.

Angra's eyes trailed toward the girl walking with Issei, he didn't recognize her. Still, something felt off. The kind of light that didn't belong here. Made him that someone carried something sacred in a place that had long since stopped being holy.

"Yeah. I'm probably just tired."

"Anyway," Kama said, "as I was saying before the soft parade passed by us, we were talking about that charming harlot. Kiara. Her existence offends the concept of taste."

She walked ahead. Draco clicked her tongue softly behind her, already disliking where this would go.

"Priestess, nun, whatever, she bathes in depravity with a piety that makes me ill. I still cannot believe that Harlot continues to be summoned with a straight face. Even after everything. The priests of Chaldea must have a taste for humiliation. I should have expected nothing more from a place that once thought Mash Kyrielight could pass as an effective shield."

"That is why she gets followers," U-Olga said under her breath with clear scorn.

At the rear of their strange group, Angra drifted toward a food stand. His hands slid into the open bag of sweet buns left unattended on the edge of a vendor's cart as the man turned his back. Just one. Or maybe two. They wouldn't be missed. It wasn't stealing if the world owed you for existing. At the next shop, he snagged a stick of grilled pork from a distracted vendor too busy shouting to notice. Angra bit into it casually, chewed, and rolled his eyes at the taste like the world itself bored him.

Kama's voice turned airy. She turned, saw him eating, and tilted her head just a little.

"You know, you could at least offer one if you're going to sneak food right in front of us."

What she meant was; "You're not even going to offer me a bite? How selfish." but he didn't know that.

Angra stopped mid-bite. He blinked, staring at her. A chewed piece hung slightly from his mouth. "If you're hungry, go beg Kiara. She'd probably pour honey on herself and call it breakfast."

"No."

"Then shut up and go adore it from afar."

"Hmph."

"What? Are you genuinely mad or just performing the part? You always confuse me."

Kama smiled, stepping closer, her eyes flashing with some unreadable emotion. "You want me to hate you, but then you make it so easy to care. That's your worst trait. You make me pay attention. Even when I don't want to."

"... Huh?"

U-Olga turned around with an indignant scoff, stepping between them. Her voice was sharper than metal dragged across glass. "Must you two parade your degeneracy in public like it is some form of entertainment? Are you unaware of what dignity means? Do you know what it means to represent something beyond your own skin?"

Her heels clicked hard on the pavement. Her tone was full of offense and elevated frustration hidden behind layered arrogance. She narrowed her gaze toward Kama, a half step closer now. "If you wish to whore yourself out for validation, do it in a brothel."

Kama didn't even flinch. "Are you speaking from experience, or just projecting, dear star princess?"

Angra grinned without much care. He chewed slower, staring at U-Olga like her tantrum was a breeze brushing past his skin. He didn't take her seriously. He never did to anyone. That made it worse.

"You're still obsessed with titles. No one's kneeling to you, princess. It must be exhausting."

"It is not obsession if it is fact," she shot back, her heel hitting the concrete louder with the next step. "I am a superior existence, created to lead."

"Then lead somewhere useful."

"You are vermin in shoes."

"You're a god with the soul of a toddler. Are we doing this again? Want to go back underneath the Seal?"

Draco sighed heavily and rubbed her temple. The scene crawled under her skin like an itch. These three were impossible. Kama was circling Angra like a starved cat pretending it hated food, U-Olga was lashing out like an empress stuck with unpaid servants, and Angra himself was just there, eating, moving through life like someone too tired to be offended or even inspired.

Draco didn't belong here. Or she did. That was the uncomfortable part. She had no passion for this. No tolerance for pointless conflict or wandering egos pretending they were more than their functions. She hated this chaos. She had long since stopped reacting to needling tone when it didn't directly involve her. It was tiresome, and she was not here to waste energy.

Draco wasn't sure if she was the third wheel. Or the fourth. Or a spare tire nobody remembered to keep inflated.

They were Beasts. Not people. Not couples. Not comedy troupes strolling through small-town Japan.

She wasn't stupid. She saw how Kama lingered around Angra like someone scared of being alone but too proud to say it. She saw how U-Olga flared up with every inch of attention Angra gave anyone else, and how she got quieter when he looked at her too long. Then Angra didn't care, but he also didn't bother to stop them.

And Draco was here. For what? To watch a tragic triangle pretend to be shapeless? To observe dysfunction wear the mask of companionship?

She wanted to speak. But what would she say?

"You're all pathetic," Draco coolly said. Like a sword drawn in the moonlight. "I suppose if you're pretending to be human for the day, you might as well commit to the comedy."

Angra glanced at her with one eye half-lidded, like he was thinking of sleep. "Careful. You sound invested."

"I'm not. I just hate noise."

Kama laughed horribly. "You keep walking with us. Funny how that works."

Draco clicked her tongue and started walking again. It was too early in the day to start hating her existence in this dimension. She would wait until sunset for that.

"You know, we haven't seen the 2nd Beast since this morning. And that dog still hasn't come back from that so-called reconnaissance gig in Italy or whatever it was. I swear, I think they're just ghosting us."

He looked up slowly, half-expecting a response, maybe something dry from Draco, something condescending from Kama, something thunderously offended from U-Olga. But what he got was a silence so deep it bordered on deliberate. They kept walking like he had just said nothing of value. Which maybe he hadn't.

Kama had already moved ahead, tapping her fingers along her sleeve with an exaggerated, taunting tempo that Angra suspected was just to irritate him. Draco didn't even spare a glance, her sharp eyes locked forward with that same aloof edge she wore like armor. And U-Olga? She just sighed, loud and dismissive, the way a queen might at hearing peasants argue beneath her balcony.

Angra blinked twice. "...Wow. No one cares. Alright. That stings a little. I'm not crying, you're crying."

He let the sarcasm hang. Still no reaction. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and muttered, "Tiamat's probably nesting somewhere. Fou's probably pissing on the Vatican's carpets. Where are we?"

Thirty minutes later, the scent of roasted duck, smoked eel, fresh-cut steaks, and truffle butter filled the air as they sat in a private room of one of the most exclusive restaurants in Kuoh. The walls gleamed with warm amber lights and crystal chandeliers sparkled overhead. White linen covered the table, the cutlery looked like it cost more than most houses, and soft jazz played faintly in the background.

Not a single customer had entered.

Because Kama had made sure they didn't.

Mind control was a convenient thing when you stopped pretending to play fair.

Kama sat with one leg crossed over the other, her chopsticks moving with the exactness of someone born into extravagance. The table was already half-covered with empty dishes she had finished, and yet she looked unsatisfied. Her tone cut like wet velvet across the room.

"So. You stole food and didn't share."

Angra chewed slowly. He still had skewered meat in hand, something grilled with soy and miso that he hadn't even finished from earlier. "That was MY food. I stole it. That's personal property."

Kama smiled at him. "We're the incarnations of sin, hatred, lust, and madness, and you draw the line at sharing stolen food with your very emotionally complex, beautiful, and completely misunderstood vessel-mate?"

Angra made a face. "I didn't say I drew the line. I said I was still chewing. You could've asked."

What the hell is a vessel-mate?

"I don't ask," Kama said, licking a bit of sauce off her thumb. "I hint, I taunt, and when all else fails, I mock until you cave out of spite. It's a time-honored tactic."

U-Olga groaned from the other end of the table, shoving her soup bowl away like it had just insulted her lineage. "Your obsession with sharing anything with that man is pathetic. You lower yourself every time you open your mouth."

Kama arched a brow. "Is the interdimensional royalty upset that no one recognizes her as divine anymore? Should I get you a shrine and some terrified worshippers? Maybe dress our Avenger up as a groveling priest?"

U-Olga shot her a look that could have killed a demigod. "You insufferable slut."

"Thank you," Kama replied with a sweet grin, taking another bite. "Compliments make the food taste better."

Angra kept chewing, eyes shifting between them. He didn't say anything. The noise was good. It made things feel less fragile.

Draco sat at the far end of the table with a napkin on her lap and a perfectly untouched plate in front of her. Her gaze was fixed out the window like she wasn't part of this gathering, which, to her mind, she probably wasn't.

It was infuriating how naturally they slipped back into this. Venom-laced affection, god-complex tantrums, shrugging avoidance of anything resembling connection or responsibility all filled the air behind her as she wedged into the corner of something that looked increasingly like a love triangle disguised as apocalyptic symbolism.

She lamented again the fact that she was supposed to be a Beast. A sovereign. An embodiment of the corruption that plagued the end of things. In contrast, she felt like a poorly invited extra to someone else's chaotic date.

Draco tapped her fork against the plate softly, the only outward sign of her irritation. Speaking would acknowledge that she noticed, and acknowledging it would make it real. And Draco did not acknowledge chaos unless she intended to burn it down.

Kama glanced at her with a sideways smirk. "Something wrong, Draco? You've been suspiciously quiet for someone who usually breathes fire at the very mention of stupidity."

Draco didn't look at her. "I'm wondering if this restaurant serves poison. It might elevate the company."

Angra snorted into his drink. "That's the spirit."

U-Olga rolled her eyes. "We should've let you rot in whatever anti-human swamp birthed you."

Angra raised his glass lazily. "Cheers to that."

The food kept coming. The servers kept obeying. The world kept turning.

Beasts of Humanity, their ass, harbingers of all the sins man could not bear to face, just kept eating, like they belonged and their laughter wasn't sacrilege.

Well, even monsters, sometimes, needed a table.

Even if they were the ones who built it from the bones of everything else.

Exiting the restaurant, they found themselves at an arcade that smelled like cheap plastic, fried food, and overused joy. It was the kind of place only a human would willingly rot away hours in, surrounded by flashing lights and victory tunes, yet for some godforsaken reason, they ended up here right after a breakfast none of them paid for and none of them really appreciated.

Angra sat like a man who had accepted his fate, slouched forward with a gaming controller in hand, his eyes dead yet focused on the screen, tapping buttons with a tempo that screamed indifference and quiet malice. Across from him, Beast VII looked like a dignitary who had descended into hell because someone had dared to challenge her. Her legs crossed, her fingers moved with a sort of fury as her eyes squinted at the game in front of her. Every time she landed a combo, she would scoff in a mix of triumph and self-righteous superiority, like the machine owed her the win from the beginning.

"This is completely rigged. I demand a recount," she said after losing the fourth round. Her voice had that sharp, whiny inflection that made Angra want to shove the whole cabinet into the parking lot.

"You know, I'm not sure which part of your brain thought challenging me to a game made in the early 2000s was a good idea," he muttered, yawning in the middle of dodging another combo. He half-wondered if this counted as a war crime. Forcing two Beasts of humanity to participate in modern Earth leisure sounded like a violation of something.

Kama stood beside them with her foot tapping against the scuffed linoleum with the kind of passive-aggressive only someone who thought they were above everyone could maintain without openly screaming. Her eyes flicked between the two, then to the crowd that had begun to gather near the claw machines, before finally landing on Draco, who was currently mashing buttons in front of a rhythm game like someone waiting for death.

"I am going to drag the two of you out of here if you don't stand up in the next ten seconds."

Her voice was deceptively calm but laced with that edge of hostility that made people think twice before answering. "You're not children. You're divine conceptual horrors. Try to act like it."

He didn't even look away from the screen. "You say that like divine conceptual horrors can't enjoy kicking ass in Soul Calibur."

U-Olga growled like a spoiled royal who had just been denied the right to decapitate someone. "If you think I will walk away while behind in score, you are gravely mistaken. This machine is lying. I have clearly won at least two of these rounds."

Kama rolled her eyes and leaned forward, muttering under her breath with a disgusted grin on her lips. "You lost to the laziest Beast in existence. A literal garbage fire of humanity. How very noble of you."

U-Olga snapped her head to glare at her. "At least I'm not a half-naked perversion of affection pretending she's got anything to offer beyond pettiness and cleavage."

"Oh please," Kama sneered back, flipping her hair as. "At least I know what I am. You're still deluding yourself into thinking that you're some galactic principle when you're barely one step above a screeching girl at a mall who lost her Starbucks order."

Draco's character dies. She had been silently staring at her own game screen without expression for the last twenty minutes. Then she inserted another coin and kept playing. She had long since decided this was just an efficient way to ignore the trio's dysfunction without walking off a cliff. These games were repetitive and hollow, just like most struggles she had witnessed in the world. You press a button, you get a result, and whether you won or lost depended entirely on variables she didn't care about. Winning was pointless. Losing wasn't even worth noting.

Kama had by this point tried to grab Angra's shoulder three times and failed, mostly because he dodged without looking, like some rat whose senses only activated to avoid work. He still wasn't sure why they were here. He didn't remember agreeing. He didn't remember disagreeing either. At some point, things just happened, and he went along with it, because resisting meant effort, and effort meant meaning, and meaning was the one thing he tried to avoid at all cost.

Another victory screen and a half-hearted controller drop.

"I think I would prefer to be in the presence of Tiamat that here."

U-Olga didn't even flinch. "If she drowned in the Mediterranean, it was deserved."

Draco spoke without looking at them. "How would a Sea Goddess drown?"

Kama blinked slowly, sighed, then made a noise that could've been agreement or contempt or both.

"I honestly forgot they existed until you mentioned them."

There was a full second of silence.

Then Angra just nodded.

"Right. Of course. My bad for bringing up irrelevant side characters."

The machine asked if they wanted to insert another coin.

"You owe me a rematch," U-Olga hissed.

"Do I?" Angra said, slouching back into the seat.

Kama dragged a hand down her face and muttered to herself, loud enough for them to hear. "I want a plague. A real biblical one. Just for the four of us."

Draco's machine chimed another game over. She blinked once, fed it another coin, and said to no one in particular, "This is fine. This is my life now."

The morning dragged on. And none of them cared enough to leave.

Unreasonably so, they next found themselves walking into the entrance of a local mini-golf course that boasted some ridiculous name like "Happy Swing Zone" which immediately irritated Kama on principle. Everything about this place screamed cheap manufactured joy, that kind of false, manufactured ambiance designed to make humans feel they were having fun when in reality they were wasting time pretending they were capable of such emotions.

She already hated everything about it, from the fake turf that smelled faintly of rubber and wet dog, to the chipped plastic windmill in the distance spinning lazily in the morning breeze like a monument to mankind's mediocrity. The only reason she hadn't incinerated the whole thing was because apparently it was still part of the day's 'recreation quota,' which was another thing she had not agreed to and absolutely blamed Angra for.

Kama crossed her arms and hovered just behind the others, glaring at the scorecard. Her eyes swept toward Angra, who was halfway bent over and sizing up the first hole like he had anything to prove in this mockery of a game. The fact that he even cared to get the ball in the hole in the first place just annoyed her further. Of course, knowing him, it wasn't that he cared. It was probably just the easiest way to waste time while still pretending to function. That lazy smugness in his posture, like he wasn't even really awake, and yet still made it look like the world was the one trying too hard.

"What's the par again? Six?" Angra mumbled as he tapped the rubber ball with absolutely no strength at all, only for it to ricochet off the small hill and land directly inside the cup without any resistance.

"Do you know what the word 'discreet' means?" Kama said coldly, one eye twitching. "Because I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be playing like humans and you just pulled that off without touching your brain."

"I'm being discreet. I used like two percent of my capacity," Angra said, yawning mid-sentence and stretching his back. "It's not my fault the standard of sport here is built around the physical prowess of garden vegetables."

U-Olga raised her club with the most undignified fury anyone had ever brought to a child's party game. The way she stood there, dressed in a borrowed pink polo shirt that clashed violently with her usual superiority complex, would have made a lesser being weep. She did not look amused in any way.

"Why is the club made of this basic alloy? It vibrates when I touch it, and it's painted to look like steel but it bends like twig," she snapped, narrowing her eyes at the miniature volcano that served as hole number three.

"If this world's gods created such games as a test of the people's strength, then they clearly gave up halfway and went back to making cave paintings."

"You're holding it wrong," Kama said, folding her arms and leaning on her heel with a sigh that somehow carried an encyclopedia of condescension. "Your grip is so unnatural it's like watching a fish try to operate cutlery."

"I will not be lectured by a Spirit of Debauchery whose existence is a violation of divine structure," U-Olga snapped back without hesitation, swinging with enough force that her ball skipped off the volcano, flew into the sky, and vanished somewhere into the parking lot with an echoing crunch. A car alarm started screeching immediately afterward.

"I guess that's a hole in one. In the afterlife," Angra chimed in under his breath, which made Kama snort out a breath despite herself. She would never admit it, but she enjoyed his commentary. Just not when it was aimed at her.

Draco had, at this point, completely removed herself from their conversation. She stood two holes behind, moving at the pace of continental drift, tapping her ball halfheartedly as though she was fulfilling a contractual obligation to exist. Her motions were mechanical, exact, and utterly devoid of emotion. It was difficult to tell if she even registered the game's mechanics.

The ball would hit a ramp, roll around a curve, stop halfway, and she would simply stare at it and nudge it again without any concern. Whether she won or lost didn't seem to process. She didn't even look like she cared who was speaking, much less what was being said. If anything, her presence was like a mood stabilizer, draining all enthusiasm and grounding the scene in bleak monotony.

Kama walked past her, glancing over with narrowed eyes, then turned back to Angra with a tired groan.

"We're going to be here in the whole morning. This isn't a bonding exercise. This is a punishment disguised as leisure. You realize that, don't you?"

"I think it's pretty relaxing. No screaming mortals, no Knights Templar trying to stab me in the chest, no weird timelines collapsing around my ears. Just us and a completely broken windmill obstacle that's been turning half a rotation per minute since 1993."

"Are you implying we're comparable to peace and quiet?" Kama asked, voice dropping low with venom.

"No. I'm saying you're the noise I've gotten used to," Angra replied without looking at her, moving on to the next hole with that same drowsy expression. It would have been charming if it wasn't him. Maybe it still was. Kama hated that it was hard to tell.

"You infuriate me," she hissed, but she didn't leave.

U-Olga had decided the only way to properly play the game was to dominate it entirely. Her next shot crushed the fake bridge obstacle in half and lodged the ball inside the plastic tunnel. She stared at it. Then calmly marked down a two on her scorecard with perfect penmanship and said, "This will be recorded as an expected victory."

Draco finally looked up from her current hole and said in her usual dry voice, "This game is pointless. The outcome is determined by motion without resistance."

"Which is why it's great," Angra said, sitting on a bench nearby and pulling out a soda can he had somehow acquired without paying. "Everything in life mocks itself eventually. You just have to live long enough to laugh at it."

Kama turned to him again and said, "You are genuinely the laziest embodiment of evil I've ever seen. I'm Mara."

"You flatter me," he said with a grin.

They continued through the course, the damage increasing in small increments. A hole-in-one that cracked the side of a fake castle. A flying ball that hit a pigeon and caused a minor panic among nearby humans. The staff didn't dare intervene, mostly because Kama had already altered their memories to forget they existed and told them they were on their break for the next hour and a half.

By the time they reached the final hole, which involved launching the ball into a rotating pirate ship, no one was keeping score, the course had at least four structural compromises, and the only thing any of them could agree on was that human recreational activities were either masochism, delusion, or both. Still, none of them had left.

Which, by their standards, probably counted as a pretty decent morning.

... Somehow, by a decision that none of them remembered actually making, they were suddenly inside a local art gallery, walking in awkward slow steps like they were trying to act as normal tourists with deep opinions about abstract oil paintings and still-life depictions of wine bottles.

The gallery smelled like over-polished wood, and the light reflected from the white walls in a way that made Kama squint and feel like some pretentious force was trying to burn her retinas through sheer conceptual arrogance.

Draco, somehow again, was walking ahead of the group. She wasn't dragging her feet or sulking the way she did at the arcade or mini-golf. She wasn't exactly enthusiastic either. But she did stop in front of each canvas, stare for an extended period of time, and occasionally tilt her head slightly like she was either analyzing the art or judging the moral failings of the artist. No one could tell. Her eyes moved slow with disappointment, and her face remained utterly unreadable, the same as always.

Kama leaned against a wall that clearly had a "Do not lean" sign right next to her head and muttered loud enough for the others to hear, "I feel like this entire room smells like failed ambitions and overpriced ego. Are we seriously doing this? I didn't come to this miserable cultural centers to be assaulted by aggressively dull canvases painted by people who probably thought strokes of blue meant the sky's emotion."

Angra looked like he was either half-asleep or trying to phase out of reality altogether. He stood beside a modern art installation made of nails and bicycle chains, staring at it with the same expression as someone realizing halfway through chewing that the snack was expired. "You say that like the alternative was better. You want to go back to mini-golf and watch U-Olga tear another putter in half because the ball didn't obey her divine will? I'm fine with this. The paintings don't yell. They don't cheat at DDR. They just sit there. Just like me. I respect that."

U-Olga, standing in front of a large, detailed portrait of a medieval noblewoman, narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms. She was visibly trying to find some flaw in the brushwork that would justify why this painting did not bow in reverence before her presence. "This art is supposed to represent the height of human aesthetic sensibility? How utterly base. I see no worship here. Not even an offering. What kind of representation is this? Why has no one depicted the divine order with appropriate servitude? Where is the symbolism of my supremacy? I do not understand. Is this peasant holding a fruit supposed to be profound? Someone, give me an answer."

Kama rolled her eyes and made a sound somewhere between a growl and a cough, then kicked the back of Angra's ankle just hard enough to make him stumble. "Stop encouraging this pointless exercise in blandness. This is beneath us. Beneath even those disgusting monkeys crawling out of their metal coffins every morning. Why are we even here playing gallery tourists? Watching Draco pretend like she's above everything when she's been staring at that same painting for ten minutes like it's hiding the secret of why humanity keeps failing at existing."

The aforementioned Beast didn't respond. Her eyes were locked on a black and white etching of a battlefield. Not a fantastical one. Just a depiction of some historical trench with figures frozen in despair, crawling, bleeding, their features distorted in realism. Her gaze hadn't moved for several minutes, and she hadn't blinked.

"This is the only one that bothers with honesty," she said flatly. "The rest are lies. Delusions of purpose. People pretending their emotions matter. This one knows what the world is like. And it hates it too."

Everyone paused, even Kama, who blinked once, looked away, and scoffed louder than necessary.

"Tch. Are you reciting poetry now? Are we supposed to snap our fingers and praise your tragic insight into the human condition?"

Draco moved on, walking past the next few frames without sparing them more than a passing glance. She simply resumed inspecting the other paintings like someone grading a failed thesis.

Angra sighed like his soul was deflating and walked over to Kama, whispering with the tone of someone already regretting speaking. "You think she's having some kind of existential meltdown or just being her usual emotionally constipated self?"

Kama gave him a sharp side glance, almost smirking, then smacked him lightly in the ribs with the back of her hand. "Who cares? If she snaps, maybe she'll paint something better than this garbage. I might even support her career out of pity."

U-Olga had already moved on to confronting a sculpture made of twisted bronze. She circled it like a lioness judging whether it deserved to live. "This thing is titled 'Hope'? Ridiculous. It doesn't even reflect despair properly. How do these humans survive when they can't even represent their delusions with accuracy?"

The security guard at the far end of the room had already walked away, pretending he didn't see four incredibly suspicious individuals openly insulting every display while breaking at least six different gallery policies.

The four of them had walked deeper into the gallery, further away from the relatively tame exhibits of classical paintings and into a new wing that had the nerve to call itself a temple to expression.

The sign hanging over the door had read "Contemporary Expressions of the Post-Human Condition," which already sounded like it wanted to be punched in the face.

The hallway had white floors, white ceilings, white walls, and overly bright lights that made the colors from the art installations feel like visual warfare. Somewhere in the background was the sound of slow drumming and voices played through speakers hidden in potted plants, because apparently that counted as ambiance.

Angra stared at a giant square canvas mounted sideways, splattered with what looked like someone had lost a paintball war against their own insecurities.

"You know, I've seen cursed murals etched in blood by cultists trying to summon things that don't exist on this plane, and even those had more artistic merit than this garbage heap." He squinted at the plaque under the canvas and read aloud with mock reverence, "'Untitled, by Peen Yamsoto. A rebellion against form and ego in the face of trans-dimensional anxiety.' I think I'm having anxiety just knowing this exists."

Kama leaned on the wall next to him, looking like she wanted to scald the entire museum with her breath alone. "Oh, darling, are you sure you aren't just too small-minded to understand such divine expression? You know, maybe this was painted by a tortured soul whose infinite pain you are simply too emotionally stunted to perceive. Or maybe it was just someone huffing paint fumes and pretending that's the same thing as trauma. Who can say? Humans are very creative when it comes to monetizing psychosis."

He raised a brow. "You seem passionate for someone who hates them."

Kama smiled without warmth. "Hate is attention, and hate is the only form of honest critique humans have left."

There was an installation of four mannequins in business suits standing inside a sandpit while television static flickered across their heads. Seeing this, U-Olga was visibly offended. Her eyes were wide, her mouth opened halfway like she was about to speak and then realized nothing in her imperial lexicon was fit to describe what she was seeing. Eventually she took one high-heeled step back, tilted her head with regal contempt, and asked the empty air, "Is this what they worship now? Hollow shells of mortals dressed in their own mediocrity, and the heads replaced by unprocessed signal noise? This is supposed to be commentary?"

Angra glanced over and said dryly, "Maybe it's meta. Could be mocking the audience."

U-Olga felt like she'd just tasted rotten fruit. "Mocking me implies they've earned the right to speak to me. These things haven't even earned the right to exist. This whole room should be quarantined. This is the kind of emotional plague that makes you understand why gods used to smite entire cities."

Kama tapped one of the mannequin's plastic shoulders and watched it rock in place. "I don't know, I kind of like this one. It reminds me of the average human. No thoughts, no convictions, but very concerned about looking professional."

Draco was standing in front of what appeared to be a blank canvas with only a single red dot in the center.

"....."

"....."

"....."

"... If this is meant to provoke introspection, I am insulted that it would assume I need help doing so. If it is meant to represent the meaningless center of existence, then I object to the implication that such a concept is even worthy of depiction. If this is supposed to be passion, then it is passion wasted."

Angra walked over, looked at it, and said with a shrug, "Looks like someone bled out in the middle of buying printer paper."

Kama gave Draco a sidelong look, grinning. "You're so intense, Draco. I think the painting's scared of you now."

"Good," Draco said simply, turning and walking past another sculpture made of glued pasta and tears. "Art that fears judgment is at least art that can be salvaged."

U-Olga sniffed the air, recoiling. "It smells like unwashed emotion in here."

Angra scratched his head, walking past a piece that had the word 'FREEDOM' spelled in duct tape over a pile of socks. "I still haven't found the restroom. This place is a maze of human delusion and self-congratulation."

"That's what makes it charming," Kama replied, stretching her arms behind her back. "You get to see how low they can go while still demanding to be praised for it."

"Tragic," Draco said flatly, barely giving the next installation a glance.

"Hilarious," Angra muttered. "Unintentionally."

It was an abyss of interpretive nonsense. And somewhere in the background, a speaker crackled with a recorded whisper that said, "We are all art," to which Kama immediately said, "Speak for yourself, freak."

The gallery had succeeded in making gods react.

Lunch time came.

No one in that group had smiled since the moment they left the contemporary art exhibit. Except Kama, but Kama's smiles didn't count because she always smiled when she detested something. Which was always. So the expression had depreciated in value, like a failed stock, or the credibility of a cult leader caught on camera with a government employee.

They had wandered into a book café with the kind of natural inevitability that came with not actually caring where you ate but caring even less about deciding. It had the exact atmosphere that made Angra wish for nonexistence more than usual, because it was one of those places where sunlight filtered through paper lanterns and made everything look like an Instagram filter had been smeared across the walls like jam.

U-Olga declared she would sit by the window. She didn't ask except just pointed, and that was the end of it. Kama followed without care, dragging her chair with a sound that had definitely been invented by someone trying to weaponize wood scraping against tile.

Draco didn't look like she hated being here, but she looked like she hated that she didn't hate being here. She held a menu like it had personally insulted her upbringing.

"Does anything here come without flour, without processed sugar, and without anything that drips off the tongue like false satisfaction?" she asked, almost to no one, but her eyes wandered just long enough across Angra's bored expression that it landed like a fastball.

"You want a plate of resentment and regret, then? Should I just order you my life?" Angra replied as he leaned back in a chair that was absolutely not built for slouching. The chair creaked in protest, but it was ignored.

Kama chuckled under her breath.

"No one's impressed by your martyrdom cosplay, you know," she said, placing her elbow on the table and then her chin on her palm. "But I guess that's what I like about you. You keep suffering like it's an Olympic event and you still expect medals."

"Medals are for people who care. I'm just here because I'm the one idiot who didn't say no to the walk," he said, half-mumbling now.

They ordered. Somehow food arrived. No one remembered the waiter. The bread was soft and the drinks were overpriced, which meant nothing to any of them because none of them paid in currency they didn't invent through force.

The café's ambiance was shattered like porcelain under a heel when a couple seated a few tables down erupted into a series of giggles so high-pitched it could only be compared to the sound you heard before a squirrel died in a cartoon. The boy looked like a protagonist from a romance novel. The girl looked like she owned every shade of lipstick ever made. They were, at that moment, entangled in the kind of affection that was so exaggerated and uncoordinated it had probably been outlawed in several states.

Draco slowly set her fork down, eyes narrowing that made Angra tilt his head.

"If they kiss again, I might set the tablecloth on fire," she said, and it was not a joke. It didn't even pretend to be one.

U-Olga turned her eyes toward the couple and then clicked her tongue like the presence of such affection was a personal affront to the integrity of her airspace.

"This is what human society considers 'natural expression'? Then truly, human species deserves the dirt it crawled from. Look at them. They're starting the early stages of mating in broad daylight. Like animals. Not even sophisticated ones. More like... like overly perfumed pigeons."

Angra didn't look up. "You mean doves."

"No, I mean pigeons. Doves are useful for ceremonies. These two wouldn't survive a ceremony without being vaporized by the shame of their own noise."

Kama leaned sideways so her body shifted into Angra's peripheral vision. She was still grinning.

"You can't pretend you're disgusted, U-Olga. We all know you're just mad you aren't being kissed by someone pretending to be emotionally vulnerable in exchange for café pastries."

She threw her napkin.

"I do not require affection from parasites. If I were to desire indulgence, I would construct a lover from solar flares and command his adoration with planetary authority. Not..." she gestured at the couple, "...whatever this is."

She peaked at the lone male though.

Draco sighed audibly. "This is what passes for love. Compulsive touching and vocal seizure. No wonder war continues. It's probably the only alternative to watching this for eternity."

Kama's eyes drifted to the couple again. The girl was now feeding the boy something off her fork. He missed and got cream on his nose. Laughter followed. It was a crime scene.

Kama muttered, "If I stared hard enough, I could probably collapse their relationship timeline into a premature breakup just from contempt alone."

"Don't," Angra said, chewing slowly. "If you break them up, another pair will rise. Like hydras. You know how this works."

Humanity disappointed.

Sometime past lunch, technically none of them had eaten anything close to a proper meal unless sweetened caffeine, air-conditioned boredom, and public displays of affection counted as sustenance, Angra did not care, and he had gone far enough in life to know that giving a damn rarely changed anything unless someone else forced it on you, the group had wandered into the grand market next, and while it sounded imposing or exciting or maybe even exotic depending on who you were, it ended up being a regular overly polished tourist zone with tightly packed booths, overpriced fruit, and themed background music that didn't know what genre it wanted to be.

The problem was that none of them had money. Not because they were poor or that they were minimalist. Because they simply didn't think to bother. Magical omnipotence had made the concept of currency irrelevant to most of them, and any attempt to blend in with the modern mortal world quickly stumbled against the basic brick wall of having to pretend to be normal for more than fifteen seconds.

U-Olga insisted she could materialize a platinum card out of conceptual density if she wanted, but Angra told her the bank would probably ask why her credit score was a seismograph.

Angra was just moving at a snail's pace behind them, mentally counting how long it would take before one of them tried to kill the others out of boredom. He gave it fifteen minutes.

That was when they turned a corner and walked right into a place that made Angra stop. He knew. He just knew something profoundly stupid was about to happen.

It was a brightly lit, overly enthusiastic, the kind of store that didn't just sell beachwear but practically screamed at you that you were incomplete as a human unless you walked out with neon-stringed cloths that left nothing to imagination and everything to unfortunate sunburns.

There were posters of tanned influencers in ridiculous poses with glitter applied to areas that should have been under strict legal regulation. There was a stand of pineapple-themed floaties. There was a mirror with LED lighting around the edge like some sort of preening altar. It was hell.

"Okay," Angra said flatly, with the tone of someone who knew he was about to become the punchline of an incident. "I'm going to assume this happened because karma finally got tired of waiting for me to trip on my own sins."

Kama, naturally, spun in place the moment she saw the racks of scandalous beachwear and gasped in mock delight. She walked right up to the nearest lace-and-string disaster of design and held it up against her chest with a smirk.

"Oh, how vulgar," Kama said, feigning a blush that didn't exist on her. "Imagine the human minds getting off to the sight of some skin. How deeply, deeply wretched. But then again, isn't that the human condition? Weak, desperate, constantly yearning for connection through the bare minimum of aesthetic distraction. Honestly, this one might be perfect for me."

U-Olga looked like she had just walked into a trap laid by every pervert god in the pantheon. Her face twisted between disbelief and affront, she couldn't decide if she should incinerate the store or sue it. What kind of display was it? "What kind of intelligent species has the gall to commercialize strips of cloth as symbols of sexual merit? Is this what passes for evolutionary culture?"

Draco didn't say anything. She stood entirely still, looked at the posters, looked at Kama posing, looked at U-Olga preparing to explode, and then made the slowest and most deliberate turn back toward the exit like she was trying to politely disengage from a nuclear explosion. She didn't make a sound, but her eyes screamed betrayal at existence itself.

"Don't be shy, Draco," Kama said sweetly, still spinning a crimson two-piece around her fingers like a predator playing with a carcass. "Would you like to try something on? This one might complement that whole holy beast aesthetic of yours. You know, something aggressive. Something that screams virginity, violence, and virtue all at once."

Draco didn't even blink.

"I will kill you."

"Awww," Kama cooed, clearly enjoying herself. "That means she cares."

"If anyone here picks up a single item in this store, I'm opening a sinkhole. Don't test me. I will weaponize geological instability and we will all vanish into the crust." Angra said while looking up at the ceiling and wondering if the sprinklers were rigged with acid.

U-Olga muttered something about "low-effort fertility displays" and "wasted textile manufacturing" at a high-cut one-piece with sequin designs.

Angra noticed that.

He noticed that Kama was already near the changing rooms just to mess with the store clerk who was slowly realizing this group didn't understand social contracts.

He noticed that Draco had stopped halfway to the door and was now scanning the tags, clearly checking for materials like she was auditing corruption in garment production.

He noticed U-Olga frowning at a white halter top with golden lining like it had personally offended her but also challenged her to wear it.

"No. We're not doing this."

Nobody responded.

"I am serious."

Still no response.

"I will set this building on fire."

Kama leaned out of the changing booth and flashed him a wink. "You say that, but you haven't stopped staring."

Angra turned away and closed his eyes. "This is why I gave up on morality."

And for a moment, all was silent, until a passing shopper looked into the store, saw U-Olga holding a lime-green triangle bikini with the expression of a woman considering declaring war, and immediately turned around and walked away.

He made the right call.

Angra sighed.

They left the market with nothing more than a crumpled receipt someone else dropped, and the useless knowledge that the four of them could collectively end a planet but couldn't pay for instant yakisoba. He didn't carry anything, didn't look at anything, didn't say anything. He was pretending he had transcended even the idea of want. In truth, he just wanted to get to the next distraction fast enough that nobody asked him for a plan.

So of course they ended up bowling.

It was Draco who had seen the alley first. Or rather, Draco who had barely glanced left, seen the neon-lit structure shaped like a bowling pin stabbing into the sky like a collapsed divine spear, and muttered, "That looks futile." That somehow became an invitation. Kama, being Kama, immediately smirked, turned and said, "Futile is the perfect word for what passes as entertainment among these hormone-driven modern vermin. I approve. Let us waste time pretending this is hard."

Angra had looked up from where he had been mentally checking out of reality, shrugged like someone who found futility charming, and said, "Sure. Bowling. Because clearly the next step after buying glitter-infested deathcloths is to throw heavy rocks indoors and see who can destroy ten wooden soldiers faster."

He already regretted opening his mouth.

U-Olga's expression had turned into that familiar look she gave when something vaguely human-made dared to exist without bowing to her presence. "Do humans still find joy in ball games? Are they regressing? Has no one updated their instincts in the last millennia? This must be why no one builds temples anymore. Because they are too busy knocking down toys."

The complainer of the day had walked in first anyway.

They did not rent shoes. Kama refused, stating that she would rather gouge her own feet with broken glass than wear something previously occupied by what she described as, "The sweat glands of underdeveloped mammals whose greatest ambition in life is to get one kiss before tax season." Draco did not comment. She just materialized her own pair of immaculate footwear shaped like they were cut from divine geometry, and stepped inside like she was here to conquer the league. Angra didn't care. He walked barefoot across the waxed floor with zero shame and nearly slipped. Kama laughed so hard she nearly choked on air. Olga materialized her own shoes out of pride, not magic necessity. Pride. Only pride.

Bowling, as an activity, should have gone smoothly.

It didn't. The first issue came when Kama tried to flirt with the scoring machine, declaring, "This contraption of dead pixels and corporate dreams cannot possibly track the grandeur of my performance. I demand a manual record-keeper. Preferably someone cute, with low standards and working lungs." The machine blinked. She still typed her name in as "Your Future Trauma."

Draco simply input "Draco." Nothing else. Refused to answer when asked if that was arrogance or economy.

U-Olga, taking longer than necessary, typed out "Her Eminence U-Olga Marie." Then stared at the screen like it might challenge her.

Angra typed "God." Then changed it to "Meh" when Kama leaned over and said, "You do realize you're not impressing anyone with that, right?"

Draco took the first turn. She picked up the ball like it had personally offended her and threw it with zero hesitation. The ball moved down the lane like it knew fear. Strike. No emotion on her face. Just one small sentence.

"This is tedious."

Kama sauntered up next. Her throw had flair, hips, spin, and about three seconds of excessive hair movement. She got a 7-10 split. She turned around with a dramatic gasp and said, "I am betrayed. This is why I don't love anymore. Even my own throws abandon me."

U-Olga went next. She spent too long selecting a ball, then threw it with the kind of motion that suggested she was enacting vengeance on a disobedient planetary system. It ricocheted into the gutter immediately. She stared at it. The pins stared back. "They are defective," she said flatly. "They recognized my superiority and bowed early."

Angra's turn came. He rolled it with one hand, while yawning, and somehow managed a strike. He blinked at it like he hadn't actually meant to try. "Oh no," he said in complete deadpan. "I have peaked. All downhill from here."

Kama immediately pointed and accused, "You're cheating. No one that lazy lands a strike unless the laws of physics are kissing their ass. Which would explain your entire existence."

"Maybe the ball just wanted to get away from you faster," Angra muttered, walking back to his seat.

Olga made a noise that sounded like someone trying to exhale pride through a blocked nostril. "I demand a rematch. Against the lane. I will not be mocked by ten pieces of varnished wood."

Draco threw another strike without blinking. "They aren't mocking you. You simply lack discipline."

"You're siding with the furniture now?" Olga turned to her. "What next? You marry the lane and live in the scoring machine?"

Kama threw another dramatic miss, this time managing to hit the same pin twice with the bounce. She called it divine intervention. Angra called it hysterical. Draco called it aimless. Olga called it cursed.

By the end of the second game, the lane was mildly cracked, one ball was permanently dented, the manager had peeked in once and left again immediately, and Kama had tried to seduce a vending machine. No one won. No one lost. And no one paid.

Because they simply vanished after the third round, leaving behind faint traces of divinity, mild psychological trauma, and a lane number that would never be used again.

They walked outside with nothing in their hands and everything in their heads, arguing over who had the worst posture, the best aim, and the most warped perception of entertainment.

Angra was already halfway through deciding whether it would be more fun to drag them all into karaoke next or just sit and let the sun burn his brain dry. Either way, the day wasn't over.

Unfortunately.

Afternoon came by slowly, they started drifting toward wherever the wind or Kama's apathy carried them, until they ended up in the middle of a small pedestrian road where a crowd had gathered for one of those casual urban performances that scream with self-importance while being really just background noise for bored teenagers and tourists.

There were dancers, of course. Loud, energetic ones, the kind that wore tank tops to flaunt muscles they believed were carved out of divine granite instead of protein powder and desperation. And the leader among them, a guy with a headband and the kind of swagger only possible when you haven't yet failed at anything meaningful, made the irreversible mistake of noticing the group.

He waved over with the exaggerated charm of someone who thought confidence was a universal solvent. "You four! Don't be shy! Come on and show us what you've got! You look like you were born to burn up the floor!"

Kama didn't even glance his way. She barely looked up from inspecting her fingernails, as if trying to recall if that last glitter coating was cosmic dust or just someone's soul she scraped off this morning. "I would rather eat a human's teeth one by one with chopsticks."

U-Olga, naturally, took offense to being even spoken to. She halted in her steps, tilted her chin with the elegance of a pissed-off noblewoman, and gave the man a look that probably made lesser creatures wilt. "You would dare command the embodiment of alien intellect and divine superiority to engage in tribal floor stomping for your amusement? You have lost your basic instinct for self-preservation."

Draco didn't even speak. She just turned her eyes to the man like she was trying to determine whether incinerating him where he stood would count as murder or pest control. That was the kind of gaze that didn't warn, didn't threaten, didn't promise—it simply evaluated consequences.

Angra, of course, leaned against the rail with his hands behind his head and looked like he was trying to see how long he could mentally check out before this ended in paperwork. "You know, I almost admire the man's commitment to suicide." he muttered just loud enough.

"I bet he thinks this is how you meet your soulmate in cheesy mortal romance stories," Kama added flatly, still not dignifying the man with a glance. "Imagine being that delusional. Worse, imagine being that hopeful. I want to gouge my eyes out just looking in his direction."

But the man was persistent, oh, so delightfully persistent. He jogged over like he had never been scorned before in his entire life and slapped a hand on his chest like some kind of discount stage host. "Come on, ladies! One little dance! You'll love it! Don't leave us hanging! The crowd wants something new!"

The silence that followed wasn't dramatic. It was damning.

U-Olga blinked once. Then raised her hand. Her fingers didn't glow, didn't twitch, didn't do anything flashy. They just moved. Reality around her bent just slightly.

"You. Will. Cease."

It was not a threat. It was a declaration that the conversation had ended and the man's relevance had expired. Her palm didn't touch him when it didn't have to. He flew backward like a puppet cut from its strings, tumbling over his own ego and landing headfirst in a trash bin. It was dramatic, humiliating, and frankly, almost deserved a slow clap.

Angra did clap. Once. Just a single dry sound that sounded more like sarcasm than anything else.

"Truly a tragic end for humanity's last hope for interpretive dance."

The crowd gasped. The dancers scattered. And the Beasts walked on like nothing had happened.

"He should be grateful. If it were me, he'd be dancing in a coma."

"You're feeling generous today," Angra said.

"No," Kama replied without missing a beat, "I just didn't feel like touching him."

Draco sighed. "Humans should stop assuming everything needs their participation."

U-Olga walked a step ahead of them, chin still up, "Next time a worm speaks to me, I'll bury it."

"So," Angra said, as if commenting on the weather, "karaoke next?"

"If the microphones are sterilized," Kama replied.

"If no one sings about dreams," Draco said.

"Only if I get a private room," U-Olga added.

The karaoke room they ended up in was absurdly over-lit for a place that was supposed to hide your shame, which made the silence even louder.

Think about it...

Four supposed apex beings and one eternally-done-with-everything pseudo-human sat on those cheap synthetic leather couches that reeked of the sweat and perfume of a thousand insecure weekenders. The karaoke machine blinked with aggressive optimism on the wall, displaying a bouncing graphic of a microphone over a rainbow explosion, and the tablet for song selection had already been carelessly tossed to Angra's side like it was a dead rat someone found in the gutter. And the problem was no one was even trying to sing.

"This is supposed to be karaoke," he leaned back like a sloth trying to pass for alive, elbow resting on the back of the couch. "As in singing. Into the mic. Loudly. Possibly while drunk. Not sitting around like it's a funeral where the corpse is embarrassment."

Kama was twirling the mic in one hand with the kind of expression that said she would rather use it as a club than sing into it. "Oh please, what do you expect? That we'll suddenly break into song like this is some cheap idol anime? I hate everyone in this room and that includes myself so I won't be crooning my heart out to make anyone feel better. I'd rather gouge out my ears with the tuning fork of mediocrity than listen to one of you try to vocalize anything beyond a death threat. Let's try Draco."

"Singing serves no function. It is inefficient. It contributes nothing to any goal. It is an empty ritual that invites embarrassment. I have no tolerance for such wastes of energy."

"Well, no one said it had to be functional," Angra said dryly as he scratched at the back of his head and gestured lazily to the screen, where the next track was cued and waiting. It was some overly sappy ballad from the late nineties, the kind of thing that sounded like it belonged at the end of a high school drama about terminal illness. "You're all acting like this is some sacred trial instead of a glorified noise box for idiots."

Sitting at the edge of the couch like the entire room was contaminated with plebeian energy, U-Olga had her chin resting on her hand and her gaze fixed disdainfully at the screen. "This culture's obsession with music as an emotional outlet is pathetic. If they wish to express themselves, they should kneel, build monuments, etch songs into history by action, not amateur howling into a machine that dares to believe itself worthy of recording a god's voice."

Angra tilted his head toward her, only slightly. "You're saying you don't want to do a duet of something from that one Earth girl group you hummed in your sleep last time?"

Her eyes twitched so slightly you could almost miss it if you weren't waiting for it. "That did not happen. I would incinerate the building before letting such falsehood spread."

Kama leaned in just a little. Her smile was stretched out like a razor's edge. "So you do hum. How very... human of you. Should I start picking out a nice peppy idol song for you? Maybe something about summer crushes and friendship?"

"If you persist," U-Olga said in a voice that belonged on a queen threatening execution, "I will show you how a goddess enforces silence."

Angra looked at the microphone again. The silence was becoming less awkward and more like a standoff, like each one was daring the others to blink first. "So none of you? Really? I came all the way out here just to sit in a room of miserable cosmic-level tsunderes who are apparently too proud to vocalize anything."

"You didn't come," Kama said, brushing imaginary dust off her thighs. "You were dragged because you act like gravity exists only to make reclining more convenient."

"I burdened with your collective presence, hoping for once someone would crack. Just once. Give in to the social degradation and belt out something embarrassingly catchy so I can laugh about it until I die again."

Draco stood, walked to the door, and paused just long enough to speak. "There is nothing more disgraceful than expecting something profound from an act that is fundamentally self-indulgent."

Then she left.

U-Olga followed her after a second. She didn't say anything. Her disgust was so thick it felt like it left a trail behind her.

Kama made a finger gun and mock-fired it at the ceiling. "Bang. Another boring memory recorded in this pointless human entertainment box."

Angra finally grabbed the mic. He didn't sing. He stared at the screen, clicked a random song, watched the lyrics scroll by without making a sound. Then he turned the mic off, stood up, and walked out too.

He sighed as he passed the counter, dragging his steps like the act of movement offended him. "And that's what you get when you take four cosmic problems and put them in a box with feelings. Silence and existential dead air."

The staff didn't say anything. Maybe they understood. Or maybe they were too scared to charge a room where the temperature had dropped to the level of unspoken war.

They noticed it was nighttime now. The streets were much quieter now.

What greeted them next was refined atmosphere of clinking glasses, moody lighting, and that background instrumental jazz that always seemed to think it was far more seductive than it actually was. They had walked into a high-end wine bar mostly because it was there, open, and Angra didn't want to move anymore. That was really all the motivation necessary. Besides, they needed to sit down after everything. The karaoke place had been mentally scarring cause no one even sang.

The bartender gave the group an acknowledging nod when they entered. His expression subtly twitched the moment his eyes scanned the Beasts one by one. U-Olga walked like she expected a red carpet to be rolled out beneath her and seats pulled away by servants, and Angra, of course, walked like a man who would rather be dead than be present, which in his case was practically literal anyway.

They sat in a corner booth, away from the livelier crowd, although the 'lively' part was pushing it since the entire place reeked of subtle egos and repressed emotional baggage being poured into stemmed glasses.

The waitress came over and handed them a tasting menu, but Kama waved her off with a sigh that sounded like she was being forced to interact with ants. "Do you seriously expect me to choose between wines as if any of them were not made by sweating mortals attempting to feel something meaningful in their dying decades?"

Angra looked up from the menu like he was reading a pamphlet on rot. "Just pick the one with the highest alcohol content. It'll at least make the next twenty minutes tolerable."

Draco didn't speak at all. She stared at the wine list with an expression that implied she was going to prosecute every item on it for wasting her time.

In contrast, their alien Beast placed her order with a very matter-of-fact tone. "I'll have your top shelf. I don't care what kind. Just make sure it was aged properly. If I taste peasantry, I'll incinerate this building from the foundation."

Angra scratched the side of his head and muttered, mostly to himself, "It's almost impressive how quickly this devolved into an international incident."

They eventually did begin to taste. The first few sips went down with heavy silence. Draco leaned back. The way her eyes glanced across the glass was less "this is delicious" and more "I am documenting your failure for future judgment."

Kama was the first to start the verbal unraveling. "This doesn't taste like anything. Just sadness and an overpriced fermentation cycle. Do people drink this because they think it gives them class? Because I can smell their desperation wafting off the bar stools."

Swirling his glass like he was trying to hypnotize himself into a coma, Angra answered flatly, "They drink it so they don't have to remember who they are."

"Oh, you would know all about that," Kama said with a grin that was all teeth. "Mr. Self-Loathing Made Flesh."

"I contain multitudes," Angra replied without inflection. "Most of them disappointing."

He switched when U-Olga watched the exchange, tilted her head slightly, then muttered something under her breath about ungrateful mongrels. Draco finally exhaled and stared at her glass again.

As if the universe couldn't stand the idea of them having peace, a random man in a half-buttoned shirt strolled toward their booth. Mid-thirties, some misplaced confidence, a stubble that was clearly cultivated for thirty minutes that morning and was already failing its job.

"Ladies," he said with a grin that tried to be charming and landed somewhere between drunk tourist and rejected dating show contestant. "I couldn't help but notice you all from over there. I thought maybe I could join you?"

The group did not even turn to look at him. Kama was still sipping her wine. U-Olga glanced once and then returned her eyes to Angra. Draco blinked twice very slowly.

He cleared his throat and sat himself next to Kama, completely ignoring the small, sharp twitch in her eye that should have been a warning to any organism with functional neurons. "You know, I always say, good wine should be shared with good company."

Kama didn't look at him. She spoke to Angra instead. "Is IT part of the ambiance or just a naturally occurring blemish on human culture?"

The man laughed as if she was joking. "You got a sharp tongue. I like that."

U-Olga's nose twitched. "Are humans always this presumptuous when they smell their own pheromones?"

The man's grin began to falter. He looked at Angra, who was leaning his cheek into his hand, expression somewhere between sleepy and amused.

"What about you? Sitting with all these gorgeous women, you must think you're something special."

"No. I know I'm not. That's what makes it worse."

The man laughed, louder now. "So you're the loser friend they let tag along? No offense, but you look like someone who peaked in middle school."

Kama tilted her head, finally giving the man her eyes, and they were not amused. "You look like someone who's been failing upward since birth and still ended up here."

"Excuse me?"

Draco stood up slowly, no words. One hand casually lifted the man by the shirt collar, another knocked his forehead with two fingers, and he crumpled to the floor like a cardboard cutout in the rain. No noise. No drama. Just efficient dismissal.

The bartender blinked, then looked at Angra, who hadn't moved.

"Sir, I have to say," the bartender said, pouring another glass. "You've got the life. Three beauties, none of them tolerate fools, and they still sit with you. That's... impressive."

Angra stared blankly. "They just haven't figured out how to kill me yet."

Kama smirked. "No, we have. We're just saving it for when it matters."

U-Olga sipped her wine with satisfaction. "Exactly. When I rule this planet, he will be the first to publicly denounce himself."

Draco sat back down and crossed her arms. "Tch. Waste of effort."

The bartender nodded in awe. Angra rubbed his temple. And somewhere on the floor, the random man groaned.

They kept drinking. For once, it wasn't a terrible evening.

The change in setting was jarring only in theory, but practically felt like a natural consequence of their collective lack of restraint and their slowly escalating detachment from anything that resembled common behavior.

Half an hour later, they stood at the gates of a luxurious hotel that had likely never seen guests like this in its entire overpriced lifespan. That didn't matter. Every staff member was smiling like their salary depended on it, which it did, only now enhanced by that subtle and effective layer of Kama's spiritual persuasion. Mind-control again. A recurring tactic at this point. Kama didn't even need to blink anymore. The receptionist bowed and welcomed them as if greeting royalty. There was no resistance.

They got the shared gender bathhouse. Yes. Shared. Not because anyone had asked for it explicitly, Kama mentioned the words "special request" and suddenly every precept of hotel policy vanished into ash.

The bath was vast. Steam curled up. The waters were clean and expensive. The tiles looked like polished onyx. Nothing in this place looked affordable or practical, and that was probably the point.

Draco sat closest to the waterfall spout. She didn't talk much as usual, nothing was ever really worth saying unless someone said something idiotic. And that moment came sooner than she expected.

"His torso looks even more pathetic now that the heat's dilated his veins."

"It looks like a cursed relic someone picked up at a museum gift shop. I could stare at that back and just keep thinking, 'What poor bastard thought this was a divine vessel?'"

Kama was on the edge of the bath as she floated lazily like a cat napping on an overpriced rug. She and U-Olga stared openly at the male Beast's relaxed body slumped over on a bath rock, arms draped behind his head, completely unconcerned with the fact that he was the target of commentary. His skin, dark and oddly reflective under the water's surface, covered in lines, glyphs, symbols.

"I'm not sure if I have said this before. But my body is none of your aesthetic project. I didn't ask to be sketched on like some temple wall." the subject mumbled without opening his eyes.

"You really look like a fragment of a forgotten age that should've stayed forgotten," U-Olga grumbled as she poured a small wooden ladle of warm water over her shoulder. She crossed her legs with an exaggerated motion, then glared at Angra again. "—and you're relaxed. Why are you relaxed? Don't you have shame?"

"Shame would require me to value the opinions of those speaking. Also, we've each had rip apart eldritch beings and any other creatures. Your concern over some skin patterns is oddly mortal."

"You should be honored someone's even acknowledging your appearance," Kama added, tossing a wet towel onto Angra's head. "Most humans get tattoos of their mom's name or dragons that look like melted dogs. I think that's charming in a freakshow sort of way."

Draco voiced out coldly, "If we're evaluating this based on function, his body has endured several conceptual rebirths. That makes it structurally relevant, even if it is visually indecent."

"Thank you, Draco. That almost sounded like a compliment, until it didn't," he said while peeling the towel from his face.

"I wasn't complimenting you. I was stating a fact. Functionality is independent of aesthetics. Even trash can be useful as fertilizer."

"See," Kama said with a light clap of her hands. "We all agree. He's a practical disaster."

"You are all talking like I'm a corpse on a dissecting table," Angra said, finally sitting up, stretching, and displaying even more of the inscriptions that coiled around his chest and along his arms. "But go on. Keep objectifying me. Maybe if you talk long enough, you'll realize this is why I don't bother wearing shirts anymore."

Olga folded her arms. "That's not why. You just don't care."

"Correct," Angra said, giving a half-hearted thumbs-up. "Why care when none of it matters? Mortals die, immortals get bored, gods forget who they are, and the bath eventually goes cold."

Kama rolled her eyes. "Please stop talking. You sound like a philosophy dropout who works part-time at a bookstore nobody visits."

"You're ALL very loud," Draco noted, scooping water over her shoulders again. "If I leave, it won't be because of modesty. It'll be because I am too sober for this conversation."

"But Draco," Kama said with an exaggerated pout, "don't you want to analyze Angra's weird back-runes too?"

"No."

"You're no fun."

"No."

"Fine," Kama groaned. "U-Olga, any deep thoughts about our walking Persian mural?"

Olga stared silently at nothing and clicked her tongue. "That village is ludicrous for sacrifying a boy."

"Again, I am still here."

As the steam rose, and their banter went in circles, Angra stretched again and leaned back with a sigh. "The real tragedy here is that none of you brought wine into the bath. What are we? Barbarians?"

"I'll make the staff bring some," Kama said, already tapping a sigil on the water's surface like she was placing an Uber order from hell.

"We're going to get this whole place shut down," U-Olga muttered.

"Let them try. I've already rewritten the front desk's memory five times. They probably think Angra owns this chain by now." Kama smirked.

"Maybe that's the true horror. I was supposed to be a Beast. Now I'm the unwilling owner of a luxury hotel franchise." Angra muttered, voice flat.

"Good," Draco said. "At least then you'll have something productive on your résumé."

"I'm retiring," Angra said. "Right now. I'm done. This is it. I peaked. Bath with Beasts. Death by compliments disguised as insults. Someone write this on my gravestone."

"Gravestones are for humans," Kama said. "You'll get a cursed obelisk that spits venom on intruders."

"Fitting. As long as it doesn't talk back."

By the time the wine was delivered—of course it was delivered, and of course it was fine vintage stolen out of the subconscious memory of some high-class sommelier Angra may or may not have consumed in a dream once—the water in the bathhouse had lost its gentle steam and taken on the hue of exhaustion, one of those late-night silences where the surroundings are a little too perfect to be real, which in their case made sense considering the entire hotel had been bent to the whim of a Beast's mind control.

Kama had half a mind to drown in the wine instead of the water, glass dangling between two fingers like it offended her just by existing. She wasn't looking at anyone in particular. That was a lie. She was looking at everyone and judging them in sequence. Kama could do that. It was how her affection worked. Total hatred with a dash of irrational ownership.

"So, anyone up for one of those pathetic mortal rituals where everyone pretends to be having fun to cover up the fact they're dying inside? What's next? Truth or dare? Strip shogi?"

"What is shogi?" U-Olga's voice cut in, not really asking a question, because she didn't care about the answer. She just wanted to break Kama's cadence, which was part of their ongoing dynamic of passive-aggressive rivalry disguised as conversation.

"I will not partake in any game that involves surrendering dignity," Draco said with such flat finality that no one even questioned why she sounded like a Victorian headmistress. Her wine glass was still full, untouched, because she didn't enjoy indulgence even when it was free. "But I will remain here. I assume the rest of you will lack the integrity to abstain."

Angra's wine bottle floated by. He made no move to reach for it. Instead, he sighed long and slow.

"You all know that if any one of you were a normal person, you'd already be unconscious from social exhaustion by now.
How did ended up in a naked wine club in the middle of a high-rise fantasy hotel while talking about philosophical strip games again?"

Kama rolled her eyes. "That's a lot of words to say you're scared."

"He is always scared," U-Olga said, waving a hand in Angra's direction without looking. "He just hides it behind that completely fabricated façade of nihilism."

"It's not a façade," Angra muttered, now reaching for the wine. "It's a lifestyle."

"You were born a mistake. Don't talk about lifestyles."

"I didn't ask to be born."

"No one does, but you make it everyone's problem."

"Wanna go back under the Seal? The waters here are not purifying."

Draco raised her glass to her lips. She was tolerating the company had become too unbearable to continue sober. She sipped like she was checking the wine for sin.

It was Kama who finally declared it. "Alright. If we're all going to be naked, bored, and emotionally constipated, we might as well entertain ourselves with something stupid."

"Like your existence," U-Olga muttered into her wine.

Kama ignored her. "Sensual roulette."

Angra, having just sipped his wine, choked. "That's not even a game. That's just two words you smashed together to pretend this isn't spiraling."

Draco groaned. "If this involves touching, I shall remove someone's arm."

"It does. But in a totally impersonal, absolutely meaningless, purely ironic way."

"Oh. Then carry on, I suppose."

And so it began. The least sensual, most begrudgingly agreed-upon "sensual" game ever conducted. Kama set the tone by daring Angra to describe which part of his body he thought made him most irresistible. He responded with a blank stare and said, "My kidneys. They process disappointment faster than anything else."

U-Olga dared Kama to massage Draco's shoulders. Kama half-leaned forward with the kind of theatrical fake smile that would make a politician uncomfortable and Draco, to everyone's mild shock, just sighed and turned around with all the enthusiasm of someone preparing for a dentist appointment.

Angra, when it came back to him, dared U-Olga to say one nice thing about humans. She took a full thirty seconds of dramatic silence before saying, "Their bones make decent fertilizer."

By the time the second bottle of wine was gone and the steam was thinning out, the only thing more ridiculous than the dares was the fact they kept playing. None of them wanted to be the first one to quit. Which meant that by the end of it, Angra was slouched in the corner again, wine glass balanced on his forehead, while the three terrifying godlike beings around him debated the curvature of his spine.

"It's too straight. You can tell he doesn't work," Kama said, squinting critically.

"No, it's slouched deliberately," U-Olga countered. "This is the spine of someone who wants people to think he doesn't care while still being aware of his angles."

"I think you all have too much time on your hands," Angra murmured. "this wine is starting to taste like my last nerve."

Draco, now with a towel now over her head like she was trying to hide from their collective idiocy, muttered, "I think you should be grateful we don't stab you for breathing."

"That sounds like love."

They all hated that he was kind of right.

Still...

"Alright. Let's play another game. Something childish. Something stupid."

He didn't even look up when he mumbled, "Let me guess. Something stupid like pretending anything any of us say here matters in the long run?"

"No," Kama said, with a smirk growing as she straightened, arms crossing beneath her chest. "We're playing Two Truths and a Lie."

U-Olga clicked her tongue, her pride wouldn't allow her to be caught slouching, even if she had to pretend she wasn't playing a human party game in a bathhouse with a nihilist, a love-hating goddess, and a walking world-ending code. She adjusted her towel. "If this is some test of deception, then you're all already beneath me. I will win by simply existing."

An unamused Draco let out a breath that could have meant anything. Angra assumed it was probably disappointment that she hadn't been vaporized yet.

Kama smiled wider. She really proved herself as a god of love. "Fine then. I'll go first."

She leaned in. "One: I've been worshipped in three thousand different forms across the stars. Two: I once incinerated a world because its ecosystem offended me. Three: I genuinely enjoy your company."

There was silence. Angra blinked. U-Olga scoffed like she didn't need time to process because she already had the intellectual high ground. Draco's expression didn't change.

Angra spoke first, voice half-choked with tired irony. "Yeah. No. The third is obviously the lie. You've never enjoyed anything outside self-worship."

Kama tilted her head, amusement shining. "Wrong. It was number two. The planet wasn't incinerated. It imploded. Technically."

U-Olga's towel fluttered with indignation as she flicked a wet strand of hair over her shoulder. "Implosion is such a crude method."

Kama turned to her, lips curling. "You're next, Supreme Existential Narcissist."

U-Olga made a noise halfway between a sigh and a sneer but tilted her chin up, eyes narrowing as though they were about to announce a divine decree. "Very well. One: I once ruled over a civilization so advanced they constructed skyscrapers on the moon using nothing but mental discipline. Two: I have never lost a battle of wits. Three: I do not think Angra is completely useless."

Draco actually made a small sound in the back of her throat. Angra sat up slowly, hands dragging down his face like he needed to scrape reality off of it.

"Okay. Look, I know I'm not exactly the golden child of fate, but even I know I'm not the one you people casually admit to liking in any capacity."

U-Olga tilted her head, lips pursed in unbothered judgment. "Correct. Number three was the lie. You are completely useless."

"See," Angra waved a lazy finger, "Now that's the kind of emotional consistency I appreciate."

Draco's voice finally cut through the bathhouse steam. Clipped. Almost bored. "My turn."

The others turned to her. She sat upright like someone about to deliver a weather report on divine judgment.

"One: I despise meaningless war. Two: I've never eaten anything sweet. Three: I've never thought about punching Angra in the face."

Angra raised his hand. "Three is obviously the lie. You've thought about it every single day since we met."

Draco didn't nod and smile. Just looked at him like he was a smudge on a polished blade. "Incorrect. I do not think about it. I plan it. Constantly."

Kama clapped, thrilled by the tension. "Delightful. I knew this would be fun. Come on, Angra. Be a good little Beast and tell us your filthy little facts."

Angra took a long sip from the remaining wine bottle and considered briefly the merits of drowning in this bath versus enduring whatever this weird affection-hatred vibe the three of them radiated actually was. Then he leaned back, rested one arm along the edge, and yawned.

"Alright. One: I once convinced an entire religious sect to worship a shoe. Two: I have no idea what love is. Three: I think the three of you are tolerable."

Kama narrowed her eyes. "It's the last one. You can't stand any of us."

U-Olga shook her head. "Incorrect. It's the second. He knows exactly what love is. He just doesn't respect it."

Draco simply muttered, "First one. Too absurd. Even for you."

Angra chuckled, draining the wine. "All three are true. The game is stupid."

Kama threw a sponge at him. Draco didn't move, but the water around her bubbled and the bath was trying to flee her body heat. U-Olga looked ready to rewrite the game's rules using astrophysics.

This whole dumb night was worth it if only because the gods who were supposed to end the world couldn't even win a party game without unraveling their masks just a little.

He could live with that for now.

"Let's make this even more fun. Hot truth or dare."

And—nope. Kama just demolished his thought, cause what the fuck.

The water shifted around them as Draco slowly sat upright. Her stare was flat, annoyed in a very Draco way, which basically translated to something like, "You're all idiots but unfortunately I have nowhere else to be." She didn't speak, of course. That would be too much effort. Her disapproval, however, could be measured in degrees of Celsius.

U-Olga immediately raised an eyebrow and clicked her tongue again. "What sort of depraved nonsense is this now? Kama, if your goal is to show me the complete lack of decency among your species, then congratulations. I have seen animals that govern themselves with more dignity."

Kama ignored her. That was her standard reaction to any conversation that required effort and wasn't about her. Her attention turned to Angra, who was already pouring himself another cup of wine with the existential calm of someone who had seen too many things, died too many times, and long since decided that resisting was far more exhausting than whatever humiliating nonsense was about to unfold.

He sipped. That was a response. Kama grinned wider.

"Truth or dare, Angra Mainyu?" she asked, rolling his name out like it had weight, like she hadn't already taken up enough space in the room just by existing.

Angra didn't look at her. He raised the cup toward the ceiling like a toast to the gods, or maybe to whoever was watching this scene and laughing. "Dare, obviously. What's the point of truth? Everyone lies anyway, especially in a room full of walking delusions."

U-Olga scoffed. Draco's eyebrow twitched. Kama lit up.

"Perfect. Then I dare you to let one of us—" she leaned forward, finger tapping her lips like she was pretending to think hard, which meant she had already decided before she opened her mouth

"—sit on your lap. For five minutes. In silence. And you can't complain."

Yep, what. Da. Fuck.

Draco made a noise of a verbal equivalent of side-eyeing the entire solar system.

U-Olga's face scrunched like she had just stepped on something slimy. "Why would I degrade myself like that? I am a divine being, not some—some wet monkey sitting on her little throne of filth."

Kama didn't flinch. "Then you won't mind if I go first."

She didn't wait. She slipped across the water with the grace of a shadow and sat on Angra's lap like it was a chair designed for her personal amusement. Angra didn't react or move. Didn't even stop sipping his wine. His expression was so neutral it looped back into sarcasm.

"Warm," Kama said, resting her chin on her hand and propping her elbow against his chest. "Though you could use more definition in your thighs. For someone who spent so long suffering, you really did not prioritize muscle development."

"I was too busy carrying the weight of everyone's sins," Angra replied, bored, "you know, real jobs."

Draco shifted uncomfortably. Her back was turned, which was basically her form of social protest. That didn't stop her from speaking. "This is a waste of time. We're indulging in primal social rituals that have no purpose other than stimulating Kama's ego."

"That's the point," Angra muttered. "Stimulation. In the absence of meaning, one must turn to amusement."

U-Olga made a strangled noise that was equal parts frustration and embarrassment. "This is an insult to divine providence. We should be above this."

"Then get out," Kama said without looking. "No one's forcing you to stay."

"I will not leave him alone with you degenerates."

"Touching," Angra said, lifting an eyebrow. "Truly, my heart swells with gratitude. Or maybe that's just the wine."

"Next," Kama said, drawing the word out. She slid off him with a mock sigh of disappointment and pointed at Draco. "Truth or dare."

Draco warily stared at her like someone being handed a ticking bomb.

"I refuse."

"That's not how the game works."

"Then I reject the premise of the game."

"Too late. That counts as a dare." Kama smirked. "I dare you to admit out loud which part of Angra's body you looked at first when we met."

WHAT THE FU—

Angra almost choked on his drink. Draco's head turned slowly like a glacier preparing to fall on a village.

"I didn't look at any part of his body."

"Oh? So you're blind? Or is it that you were too flustered to look directly at him? Hmm?"

"Fine." Draco looked at Angra, dead in the eyes.

"..."

"His tattoos. Because they were hideous. Like scribbles made by a mad god on an even madder canvas."

Angra shrugged. "That's the idea. I'm a cursed billboard for bad decisions."

U-Olga's fingers were twitching like she wanted to slap someone but didn't know who to start with. "Enough. My turn. Give me the dare. I will prove I can surpass all of you in both fortitude and pride."

Kama leaned back, grinning like a cat with a bird in its teeth. "Alright then, Miss Supreme Dignity. I dare you to whisper something romantic into Angra's ear."

"No."

"That wasn't a question."

"I refuse to partake in this mating ritual."

Angra held up his cup again. "Please don't whisper anything. I already have tinnitus from the sound of your superiority complex vibrating in the air."

There was a long pause. Then U-Olga leaned forward anyway, eyes narrowed, clearly doing this just to prove she could. She got close to his ear and hissed something so soft no one heard it. Whatever it was made Angra blink once, then smile.

"Cute," he said, looking at her. "Was that supposed to be threatening or affectionate? You might need to work on your delivery."

She backed away like she had just done a job she wouldn't admit she wanted to do.

Kama clapped. "This is going well."

"No," Draco said. "It's going somewhere. Not well."

"Okay, Angra. You again."

He stared at her.

"Alright then. Dare. Hit me."

Kama leaned forward, the towel doing little to make her gesture less pointed. "Kiss one of us on the mouth. Properly. No tricks. No sarcasm. Like you actually care."

He didn't know how to react this time.

What. The. Fudgy Bear?

U-Olga stiffened. Draco looked at her nails as if contemplating impalement. Angra stared at Kama.

He said, "You know the last time someone asked me to act like I cared, they ended up dead from disappointment."

Kama gave a faux gasp. "Oh no. How tragic. But rules are rules."

He blinked. Then moved. Without standing, he leaned forward, caught U-Olga's chin with one hand, and kissed her on the mouth.

It was not passionate. It was not loving. It was done with the surgical disinterest of someone ticking a box, and yet just sincere enough to fulfill the condition. U-Olga's eyes widened halfway, her hand trembled for a moment, then she slapped him.

"You peasant."

"You're welcome."

Her ears were red.

Draco said nothing but rolled her eyes hard enough to probably shift tectonic plates.

A suddenly expressionless Kama clapped. "Very well. Draco's turn. Truth or dare?"

Draco's lips twitched in the faintest expression of life. "Truth."

"Do you dislike Angra more for what he is, or how he acts?"

Why was he the topic here?

There was a long pause. Draco stared straight at Angra. Then she said, voice cool, sharp like an icicle to the temple, "I despise wasting energy on things that have no function. He has function. Just not when he opens his mouth."

Angra nodded slowly. "That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me today."

U-Olga folded her arms. "My turn. Dare."

Kama's grin widened. "Pretend you're human for one whole minute."

U-Olga visibly twitched. "Impossible."

"Too bad. That's the dare."

U-Olga groaned, then sat upright. Cleared her throat. Stared forward.

"I like... breathing. Paying taxes. And fearing my own mortality."

She paused.

"I enjoy watching mindless entertainment with hollow emotional payoffs. I think violence is bad unless I'm not the one being violent. And I respect the opinions of people who have never accomplished anything."

Then she stood.

"I want a raise despite doing the bare minimum, and I complain online."

Everyone stared at her. Kama actually choked.

Angra whistled low. "I think I felt that in my soul."

U-Olga sat down with a scowl. "That was the most degrading thing I have done in centuries."

Draco finally spoke again. "You performed it too well."

Kama, wiping a tear of laughter from her eye, gestured. "Your turn, Angra. Ask away."

He took a moment. Then pointed at Kama. "Truth or dare."

"Truth."

"Did you love me? Ever. Even once."

The room went still. Every heartbeat did.

"... .."

"....."

"....."

She smiled and whispered, "You were the one person too broken to stay broken with."

Draco groaned. "This is disgusting."

U-Olga scoffed. "I wasted a full day of divinity on this."

Kama leaned back. "Let's keep going. This is getting fun."

The game didn't stop. Because of course it didn't. None of them wanted to be the first to say they were done. They all hated it. They all stayed.

Angra smirked into the bathwater. This, right here, was the real curse of being the Beast of Humanity. Putting up with these people, every goddamn day, and kind of liking it.

Maybe.

Chapter 10: Seofon and Tīd of Beast I

There was nothing glorious about the act of sitting cross-legged on a rooftop for hours, eyes bored, body absorbing the pulsing throb of magical energy that seeped in waves through the veins of Kuoh's leyline network. It wasn't majestic. It wasn't dignified. It was boring, monotonous, and just barely tolerable if one adjusted their mind to focus on the low hum and not think too much about how many things were happening inside the house that he could neither stop nor be bothered to investigate.

He could hear them anyway. The walls weren't that thick.

Angra thought about it, that he had spent the past twenty-four hours siphoning pure mana like some parasite that latched onto the Earth's crust just to make sure his fragmented spirit did not start breaking apart from lack of magical cohesion. That was what his life had become. Glorified life support. There were no grand ambitions, no prophetic burdens, no eschatological purposes to be fulfilled, except the need to not fall apart in front of a bunch of mythological nightmares with too many opinions and not enough impulse control.

At least he ate Kama's cooking again. It was edible. It wasn't good, and it wasn't terrible. It was something between. Like Kama herself, really. Chewing through something that tasted vaguely like meat but had a texture closer to wet sponge and spices that clung to the back of his throat like a curse from a spiteful old priestess. And she had the gall to smirk while watching him chew through that culinary insult like it was her love letter to his palate. He didn't bother asking what the meat was. He didn't care enough to know.

Then there was the daily opera of her and Kiara's never-ending contest of who could be the most insufferable within a twenty-minute span. It was always the same. Kama would mock Kiara's obsession with herself and accuse her of being a hollow narcissist. Kiara would purr back some provocative philosophical retort about love being a divine pleasure and how Kama's concept of love was too utilitarian to qualify as beautiful. And Kama would insult her face or her fashion sense or her completely impractical breast size. And Kiara would laugh. Because nothing hurt her and that she truly believed she was flawless. It wasn't a conversation. It was ritualized psychological warfare between two succubi who knew all the cheat codes and still refused to let the other win.

U-Olga sat for most of the day in the living room with that same bored expression she always wore whenever she had to process the idea that the world she had materialized in was fundamentally defective. She had diagrams again. Charts. Scribbles all over walls with multicolored ink and formulas that made no sense to anyone not born inside a particle accelerator. She kept muttering about reality's structure being unacceptably fluid, the quantum stitching fraying too fast, and how mana was responding like it had a collective hangover. No one had responded. Let her pretend she could fix the universe by thinking hard enough. It was endearing, in its own arrogant way.

Koyanskaya, because of course, it was Koyanskaya, was in the living room earlier playing dress-up or psychological torture or both with the walking emotional sinkhole that used to be a stray girl. Viser or whatever her name was. The one who snapped from too much contact with the two Beasts left at home, being Draco and Kama themselves. The one who just sat there and muttered to herself now. They were supposed to remove her days ago. Kama said they'd take her out. U-Olga said she'd erase her. Draco offered to incinerate her on principle. No one did anything. So Angra threw her in the basement instead. She had company now. Cell mates with that local angelic failure called Raynate. Between the two of them, maybe they'd form a club. He didn't care.

Draco watched the television the same way a statue watches an eclipse. Completely unmoved. She didn't register any emotional resonance with what she saw. Which was accurate, really. He had no idea how someone could watch daytime soap operas without feeling any cringe or shame, but Draco was special. She watched people cry and slap each other like she was memorizing their patterns to dissect later. He was fine with that. She didn't talk unless prompted. It was easier than having to hear her compare every aspect of human society to an ant colony that lost its queen and then set itself on fire out of confusion.

Somewhere else in the house, Kiara had apparently started a cult. He didn't see it happen, but he heard the chants last night. He knew the sound of religious devotion when he heard it, especially when it was mixed with ecstasy and badly concealed crying. Probably enthralled some poor locals into believing she was their salvation. Again. He gave it a week before Kama burned it down out of jealousy or principle. Maybe both.

Through it all, Angra just stayed on the rooftop. Because it was quiet high up. No one could bother him without climbing and most of them were too lazy to do that. It was the only place he could pretend, for a few moments at a time, that he wasn't surrounded by apocalyptic beings with boundary issues. He didn't hate them or like them.

He merely endured them, the way one tolerated rain or bad dreams. They were just part of his life now. Unwanted furniture he couldn't sell.

He let the mana keep dripping into his body, and wondered if he should move to the basement and join the weirdos. Maybe that was the true path to enlightenment. Lock yourself underground and see which voice in your head breaks first. At least those women weren't asking him to play Truth or Dare again.

Even after draining the city's leylines for an entire day without disruption while the others continued to do what they usually did, which amounted to everything except contributing to the agenda, he still felt it. The hollowness. The faint sound of something vast, bottomless, and unfinished gnawing in the pit of whatever organ he had left that counted as a core. It was still incomplete and weak, still laughably distant from what he used to be, and it was clearer now than it was yesterday or even the day before when he could still delude himself for five minutes into thinking that he was just in a recovery phase.

Recovery implied an endpoint. But sitting here, chest-deep in the ebbing magical current that fed the underside of this city's bones, he could say with all the indifference and zero sense of urgency that he was leagues away from anything close to his prime.

If he were, this planet would be a very different place. There wouldn't be a Japan, or a Vatican, or a Heaven, or an Underworld still holding together like duct tape barely clinging to a teapot cracked by the weight of ten thousand years of cosmic hypocrisy. If he was back to full power, the entire human world and supernatural world would already be soaked in crawling, gasping, lurching sins disguised in the form of curses so embedded in reality that they wouldn't know if it was fog or damnation choking their lungs. They would be eating it, drinking it, breathing it. It would infest the water supply. The leyline streams. The divine realms. The prayers of children would drip in malice and venom. And no one would be able to separate what was natural from what was corrupted. It would just be how the world is now. And they would learn to call it normal.

But that wasn't the case. Not even close. His current state was something closer to a slow boil left on low flame, and that flicker of power barely pushed the pot past lukewarm. Every time he pulled in mana and tapped into a leyline or drew from the ambient energies of this slightly broken world, the result was the same. A small pulse. A ripple. A twitch. Not a flood or overflowing force that should have come naturally to someone who once had the collective agony of mankind stitched into his breath.

That was the real problem, wasn't it? Because being weak wasn't just a minor inconvenience. It wasn't just a matter of waiting a bit longer until he got better. No, it meant being vulnerable. Exposed. Killable. And if there was one universal truth that still held weight even after all these layers of existence peeled back, it was that weakened Beasts didn't last long in the open. The gods of these pantheons, the old ones, the new ones, the obscure regional freaks, and the omnipresent jackasses in robes all had one thing in common: they hated competition. If they sniffed out that something like him and the others were crawling their way back to godhood, they'd do what gods always did best. Drop a sunbeam, send a divine decree, hurl a hero with a name that sounded mythic enough to sell, and wipe the stains off the map before anyone had the chance to realize what was missing.

He didn't trust any of them. Olympus, Asgard, Heaven, Hindu Deva, Buddhist guardians, Shinto kami, even the obscure backwoods fertility cults with nothing better to do than summon rain. None of them. Every single divine system had the same behavioral pattern when it came to anomalies: either make them sacred or erase them. And he was the kind of anomaly that never fit neatly into anyone's theology. He couldn't be sanctified. He couldn't be saved. He was the final line item on the divine ledger, the one no auditor could process, the one every prophet skipped over in case it ruined the sermon.

He didn't belong in their narratives, and that made him dangerous by default. So yeah. The moment any of them figured out that the Beasts were here, were breathing, were plotting even with their broken backs and dulled claws, the world's collective immune system would kick in, and it wouldn't be subtle about it.

He thought of the others; Kama with her lazy arrogance, Kiara massing a small cult with that sugary smile on her lips that always looked like it belonged on a black widow, U-Olga trying to calculate physics, Koyanskaya playing sadist, Draco not doing anything, missing Tiamat, missing Fou...

... At least, Goetia was doing something.

None of them were at full capacity either. Yet they still acted like they had all the time in the world to get back to form, lounging around this cursed little house like it was some vacation rental for eldritch women with world-ending trauma issues.

That was the other part no one liked to say out loud. If they kept this pace, this lazy, half-assed pace, they wouldn't just stay weak. They'd get hunted. Picked off. Crushed by something bigger, something powerful, or something new that thought it had a right to exist more than they did. And the worst part? He wouldn't even be mad. He wouldn't even argue. Because part of him, a loud part, almost wanted to see what kind of cosmic joke would step up first. It'd be hilarious in a way. Poetic even. Watching the divine panic just because a few Beasts were trying to stand again, only to get squashed by something even more ridiculous. It'd be the kind of punchline you didn't write. It just happened.

Still, if they really were going to make something out of this, if this wasn't just some weird extended episode of divine loitering, they needed to accelerate. They needed to prepare. Because the enemies wouldn't sit idle. The world wouldn't give them the grace period and no one, not even him, was guaranteed to see tomorrow if they kept wasting time like this.

That thought annoyed him.

He hated doing anything proactive.

When he lifted his head, he noticed something walking down the empty street far off into the distance. His eyes, even half-lidded and uninterested from where he laid across the rooftop edge of their overlarge hideout, still processed far more than a human's ever could. He had not been looking for anything in particular. Just soaking in the atmosphere, letting the dying sky burn out into dusk like a tired old world giving up the illusion of peace. The city was boring, flat, clumsy with its noise and its routines, but even trash cities had moments that stuck out. The kind that didn't look wrong but felt wrong. And in this case, it was a young man, early twenties at most, short white hair, red eyes like a badly written villain's, walking with the casual gait of someone who had no idea how obvious he was.

... or maybe he did, and that was what made it worse.

Normal to the mundane eye, but to Angra, who is the collectiveness of weight of human sins, there was a stench that didn't lie. Blood had been spilled. Not long ago either.

Murder. Fresh, sharp, not faded into memory.

He did not need to see the weapon, or the face of the victim, or the aftermath. The deed clung to the boy's presence like smoke to burned flesh. It radiated from him like he had enjoyed it, like it wasn't just necessity, but pleasure. The kind of act done by someone who didn't think it was wrong. Someone who felt alive doing it and might do it again because the world made more sense when it was painted red.

Angra should have ignored it. He really should have. He had no stake in these people's moral messes. After all, what would it matter? The world had been broken long before this generation ever learned how to hold a knife. And besides, Kuoh was a pit of contradictions wrapped in supernatural politics, a place where devils played high school dress-up, fallen crowing around, and angels committed to management roles.

If one kid wanted to go wild and do what everyone else only dreamed about, who was Angra to stop him? He had no sense of justice, no goal to preserve life, no drive to save anyone. He didn't even like the smell of this city. He could just go back downstairs and argue with Kama over dinner or watch Koyanskaya try and manipulate the stray mutt in the basement into some deeper form of insanity.

But there was a limit to how much idiocy he could pretend to ignore, and letting a psychopath stroll around with that kind of glee in his step felt less like ignoring and more like volunteering to let tomorrow get more annoying.

It wasn't morality...

... It was pragmatism.

If you let rats crawl freely, you shouldn't whine when the floor starts to rot. There were already too many factions sniffing around the edges of their territory, and none of them would be pleased to find out an insignificant serial killer was playing around in the neighborhood. If anything, it would draw more attention, maybe even from the angels or those smug devils playing school counselors.

The last thing he needed was some half-baked supernatural clean-up squad storming their house thinking the Beasts were involved.

Still, he didn't move right away. Just studied the way the boy walked, arms loose, twitching fingers like he was itching for another hit, head turning slightly too often like he was chasing voices only he could hear. There was a blade hidden somewhere under that coat, or maybe in the open if he just didn't care. His smile looked like something that belonged to a clown who had finally stopped pretending to be funny.

He narrowed his eyes, feeling that sluggish burn of unspent curses bubble inside his ribs. He had enough energy to erase the man from the block without moving more than a finger. Power was never the problem. The problem was that this man wasn't supernatural. He was human. Broken, yes, violent, yes, but still human.

And humans, ironically, were the ones Angra understood best. After all, he was their sin, their mirror, their discarded wish to offload blame and still sleep at night. So what was it that made him pause? Was it familiarity? Recognition? Something old and buried twitching awake? He didn't like the way the question sat in his head.

He sighed through his nose, pushed off the edge, and fell silently, landing several buildings closer without even a whisper. He would follow this one. Just for a while and to confirm something. Because if that thing wearing human skin kept walking and kept laughing and kept dripping that sin across the sidewalk like breadcrumbs, then maybe it wasn't justice to remove him.

It will be a chore. One more thing to do before the world got annoying again.

So he followed that cloying stench of fresh sin. He trailed the mad dog without effort.

He kept his presence shallow, nonexistent to mortal senses, even to those with heightened perception; a literal walking shadow of contempt trailing behind a man smeared in murder like a child finger-painting with someone else's blood. Freed, though Angra had no idea what the idiot's name was, moved sharply through the town's roads like a cockroach trying to convince itself it was a shark. He walked the way someone walks when they're half convinced they're being followed and half hoping that they are so they have an excuse to kill something again.

In his great laziness and quiet amusement, Angra let the farce play out, matching every sudden turn, every glance over the shoulder, with bored steps and no reflection.

What kind of maniac murders someone in a residential district and then just goes for a walk under the stars like he finished grocery shopping and not tearing out someone's life for fun? It was beyond human logic, but then again, human logic was a broken scale at the best of times. This one though, this pale-haired bastard with red eyes twitching like his thoughts were made of broken glass, was another category entirely.

He himself had seen depravity on all levels. For example, he had watched kings slaughter for lust and peasants burn their own children out of desperation before he died.

It's just there was something especially pathetic about those who killed because they liked the feeling. As if pleasure made it noble. As if desire turned blood into a sacrament.

He kept walking, and Angra followed without any sense of justice. There was no moral responsibility being satisfied here. It wasn't about retribution or balance or defending the innocent. He simply didn't want this idiot walking around. That was it. That was the full weight of his reasoning. You do not let an infected wound crawl around untreated, not because you want to heal the body, but because it smells and draws flies. This one was loud and messy. A grease stain on the world that no one was cleaning.

Freed's path ended somewhere far past the edge of where this town pretended it had boundaries. Near the outskirts of Kuoh, where the urban sprawl finally surrendered to the cover of dark trees, he reached a clearing, pacing around like some feral dog sniffing for scraps.

Then the real filth arrived.

Cloaked in supernatural presence. Fallen Angels. Several of them. Not even trying to veil their movements. Maybe they were just that confident, or too used to this town being ignorant.

"So you're the one who got blood on his hands tonight," one Fallen said, casually and without reprimand, as if that were the only real job requirement.

Freed laughed like a lunatic on crack. "What gave it away, the smell or the smile?" He spun his sword around once for show, looking pleased with himself like a child. "Took down some Devil-brat's client. Old geezer. Wasn't even fun. Didn't scream."

"Your usefulness isn't counted in fun," another Fallen said. He had a sharper face, less patience. "You're here to serve. Kokabiel doesn't care what you enjoy."

And there it was. That name. Kokabiel.

Angra, still standing in the cover of branches above, recognized that name from Raynare's subodinates' memories. Angel of the Stars. One of the Watchers. Commanded three hundred sixty-five thousand spirits, and still somehow ended up a bureaucratic war fetishist with delusions of rebellion and an inability to die quietly. Kokabiel had been one of those names that always reeked of grandeur held together with threads of spite. He was a relic, just like so many others in this idiotic myth-choked world, someone who once tried to reach Heaven's ceiling and ended up crawling in Hell's gutters. Now he was scraping up lunatics and giving them swords.

Another Fallen moved his hand and a magic circle began to glow on the ground. "Your orders will come soon. For now, you're being relocated. Kokabiel is preparing movements that will accelerate our plans."

Freed smirked with his head tilted like he was sniffing for trouble. "Long as I get to cut more freaks and freaky bitches, I don't give a damn what Daddy-Star-Wings wants."

The circle flared. Then they were gone. All of them.

Once their presence are sure gone, he jumped down and stared at the empty space like someone who just finished watching a particularly unfunny comedy. Existence itself always made it difficult to summon the energy to care about the details. Kokabiel's name wasn't the kind of detail you tossed away. It wasn't something that could be ignored.

"So the insects are moving early," he muttered with a lopsided expression that wasn't quite a smile and not exactly a grimace. "Like I expected, threats."

He turned and began walking back toward the town, more annoyed than alarmed, more weary than wary. He had enough sins to worry about without a has-been of divine failure stirring up the board with a mutt like that. But if things were going to accelerate, then maybe it was time to stop pretending he could just loiter forever.

He hated being dragged into anything. Even when he was the one doing the dragging.

He didn't bother rushing back to the house even after what he saw.

He didn't announce himself when he stepped in. The door creaked, because, hey, it had manners. The atmosphere inside was heavy with that peculiar sense of quiet that only comes when people are either listening or plotting. Goetia's voice filled the attic.

"Since you've decided to return," the Beast-who-finally-awoke said without looking, "I assume your excursion resulted in something worth more than loitering."

Angra leaned against the nearest wall that looked sturdy enough to not shatter under his presence. "Yeah, I found a maniac with blood on his hands. He didn't try to hide it. Short guy, white hair, red eyes, smelled like murder and enjoyed it too. Heard him talking to a few of yours truly favorite black angels. Said something about serving under Kokabiel. You know, the one with the star fetish and the habit of commanding more spirits than common sense."

There was a brief pause. Everyone in the room recognizes the name. Kama didn't bother hiding her yawn.

"Of course, it's always the fallen ones trying to act relevant by picking up trash like that exorcist. I suppose being biblical doesn't mean you're above desperation."

Kiara gave a laugh. "Violence always finds a home among the lost. I imagine he enjoys the chaos a little too much. I wonder if I'd find him amusing."

Draco scoffed. "Stop thinking with your thighs. Fallen Angels don't interest me unless they start something that can't be ignored."

U-Olga crossed her legs, visibly annoyed that the topic had derailed whatever narrative she expected from the evening. "That a former Celestial would ally with a vermin-level human psychopath doesn't surprise me. It's that no one here has proposed extermination. Do I have to lead everything?"

Goetia didn't respond to the bickering. He simply resumed his explanation. "As I was saying before our nihilist returned with his report, I have summoned a fraction of the 72 Pillars. Currently, only fourteen have stabilized in this dimensional anchor, with the rest requiring further calibration due to the distortion present in this world's Thaumaturgical constants and my insufficient mana. Nevertheless, this level of presence will suffice for now. We will not be advancing on any external factions until our base is secure. Which brings me to our next matter."

He gestured slightly, and the room reacted. Walls veered around almost imperceptibly. A low buzz passed through the floorboards. "The structure we now reside in has been reconstructed. What you see now is a preliminary shell. With further reinforcement, it will act as our first true fortress within this territory. One capable of housing not just us, but whatever instruments we require, and resist dimensional and aerial influences."

Angra tilted his head slightly, unimpressed but not uninterested. "So we're turning the local suburb into a petting zoo for demon gods. Cute. How long before the neighbors start complaining about the smell?"

"Let them," Goetia replied without irony. "They lack the sensory mechanisms to perceive what we truly are. Their complaints are irrelevant. Their bodies are even more so."

Koyanskaya clicked her tongue. "As long as this place doesn't become a battleground before we've finished putting up the curtains, I'm willing to tolerate it. I'm not interested in dying here because someone couldn't resist provoking an angel with a chip on his shoulder."

Angra glanced sideways at Kama, who smirked without warmth. "You think Kokabiel's planning something soon?" he asked, not because he cared, rather, he liked hearing how much everyone else cared.

Kama shrugged, almost lazily. "If he isn't, then he's wasting time. We all know how terribly fragile his kind are when ignored. Besides, Fallen Angels with too much free will and not enough brains usually end up creating messes we have to clean up just to avoid the stink."

Goetia concluded his outline with the same firm detachment he had started with. "Our next step is simple. Surveillance and silent expansion. I will handle the infrastructure. You will all maintain your assigned roles. Any signs of interference from other factions will be cataloged. If the Angel of the Stars Kokabiel wishes to press into this region, then we will make clear what territory means to those who predate its concept."

So they're waiting, then pretend this isn't absurd.

---

Goetia stepped up the final stair, his footfalls so light against the polished stone-like surface of the attic that the noise did not carry beyond the confines of this place. He did not bother closing the door behind him. The others downstairs were not foolish enough to interfere once he had begun speaking to the Pillars. Even U-Olga, for all her posturing, knew when to be silent. He walked toward the center of the attic.

At its edges, surrounding the core like a ritual circle, were the manifestations of fourteen Demon God Pillars. Their presence was shaped only by convenience, for he did not need to see their forms to understand them. Their souls, constructed of flame and calculation and foundation code written in what modern humans would call 'laws of nature,' pulsed quietly in the chamber. Each one took the vague silhouette of a human-like shadow with indistinct limbs and a pair of slowly moving crimson eyes. They were him.

Goetia stopped at the center. The attic was not small after he had removed the Euclidean constraints. It spiraled outward like the center of a tesseract and hovered in a state of spiritual spatial fold. A fortress foundation disguised as a house, already fed by mana harvested from the leyline below Kuoh.

Now it was filled with the first wave of the army that once nearly incinerated humanity.

His voice did not need to be loud.

"You are operational. Fourteen out of seventy-two. Nineteen-point-four percent of our full array. We are still far below optimal functionality. Therefore, total re-manifestation is deferred until a structural bridge can be forcibly applied or created manually. Nevertheless, this is sufficient for establishing the first layer of our framework."

He raised one hand toward the Pillars. The space flickered once, and the command was disseminated across every flame-core in the room.

"Melting Furnace, report."

From the rear-left quadrant, the black smoke moved a fraction of a step forward. Zepar and Ipos.

"Findings result this planet possesses enough collective pain and delusion to refine into songs of submission. Current parameters of emotional distortion are adequate. Blame assignment: previous delays due to inappropriate transmission medium."

"Supplementing Zepar. Continuing the process of absorbing leyline energy."

"Complaint logged and irrelevant. Proceed with tone-weaving under local religious architecture. Collect trauma, grief, and myth. Ignore celebratory phenomena."

He turned toward the right.

"Armory. Prepare for confrontation. Estimate time before hostile faction encounters: less than seventy-two hours."

From that end, two Pillars strode forward. Their voices were like distant thunder in a sealed hall. They were less angry and more solemn.

"Furfur and Marchosias reporting. We are producing repositories of weapon-grade invocation. This world's concept of war is diluted by pageantry and disconnection. However, blood still flows. Their devils still kill. Their angels still burn. Their beasts still scream when wounded. There is honor in adapting. The dignity of impact remains. We mourn the lack of true armies. Still, we will adjust."

Goetia nodded once. "Use local human death as calibration. The more senseless the violence, the better the data stream. A killer has just been identified working under a chief Fallen Angel designated Kokabiel. If necessary, begin indexing his victims."

He rotated slowly. The next pillar addressed was Control Tower. Buer and Paimon responded.

"Orders distributed. Monitoring Beast-level interactions ongoing. The others below are emotionally unstable and inefficient. Processing their behavioral patterns requires unnecessary deviation from optimal processing speed. Recommend isolation or command-override authority be re-established."

Goetia did not answer them immediately. He was already aware of the friction between the Control Pillars and the Beasts. Kama's outbursts, Kiara's perversions, even Draco's silent disgust were all variables that destabilized formal planning. However, they were not variables he could remove. They were the incarnated consequences of humanity's own evolutionary betrayal.

"Continue observation. If any Beast engages with higher-tier supernatural forces without permission, redirect resources to record and reactivate older countermeasures. Prioritize containment before elimination. The current priority is infiltration and foundation."

His gaze passed the lingering cloud in the back left. The color of its flame was dim, but the pressure it emitted distorted the attic's structure.

"Trash Heap. Dantalion. Speak."

The voice that answered him was absent, like someone speaking from a place where feeling had never existed.

"Nothing in this world is worth observing. Everything is corrupted. Time is rust. Memory is a rot. Their gods lie and their beasts crawl and their humans pretend their pain has meaning. I await failure. Then I will consume the ash."

"That is acceptable. Standby until structural decay is identified. When this plane begins to collapse, you will have your quarry."

He moved to the left side. "Chamber of Life."

Devotional were the words chanted by Sabnock and Shax.

"There is still birth here. There is still unity. Even among the decay, life clings to its roots. We will protect the sanctity of origin. Wounds inflicted upon the faithful will be undone. Our strength comes not from war, but from continuation. As long as life continues, so will we."

"Prioritize preservation of the Beast cores. If one dies before preparation is complete, the entire system destabilizes. If any suffer terminal spiritual collapse, you are to intervene immediately. Moreover, you will monitor biological processes of the other Beasts, including myself. I want no deviation from optimal vitality. Begin construction of healing cores within this facility. Foundations must be preserved."

Forms flickered with golden filaments of visual markers of life-code integration, something Goetia had kept intact from his original parameters under Solomon.

"Information Center. You all are aware of your value."

"The knowledge architecture here is outdated, but functional. Flauros has already deciphered three local military information networks. Orias is indexing thaumaturgical patterns specific to the Three Factions. Glaysa-Labolas is dissecting cultural media for memetic exploitation. This world's refusal to accept magical realities has left it vulnerable to truth-based weaponry. Our recommendation is to weaponize their ignorance and induce panic."

"Halt. Supplement from Flauros. We have already begun analysis on thermonuclear deployment systems and sacred gear structures. The presence of the Sacred Gear System suggests this planet's divine framework is unstable. Possibility of outside contamination or forced evolution."

"Accepted. Begin testing; create ten false prophetic events across global social platforms. Monitor belief fluctuation. Prepare for information saturation in ninety hours."

Lastly, the air around cracked like a dying monitor. Eyes flared more brightly than the others.

"Gazing Star. Baal and Marbas."

"Report. There are intrusions from outside the system. We are tracking an anomalous pattern near above this continent. Data collection incomplete. Recommend immediate formation of defensive lattice. Human perception must not notice us."

"Accepted. It must be stabilized for now, so we may plant our foundation. When the rest awaken, the judgment of man will not be ours to dictate. The purpose remains the same. The principle is constant. Prepare to begin terra reconstruction. Your time resumes."

The Pillars did not respond with cheers or affirmation. They faded into the walls and shadows with their awareness stretching into the corners of the house and beyond, taking root in the city like a virus that did not kill but quietly replaced every thought it touched.

He turned toward the small table in the corner, where the thaumaturgical schematic he had been constructing was still left unfinished. He looked down at the half-scribed ring and muttered lowly.

"I suppose I should ask Avenger how many more maniacs this place is hiding."

Work resumed.

Chapter 11: Beasts' Wilte

"O Beautiful One, who sees through the cloak of mortal shame, allow us to bathe in the impurity of Your grace… We offer the last of our flesh. Our minds, stripped bare. Our bodies, untethered from sin only through Your will. Make us whole. Make us Yours."

The words did not come out of fear. They came out of belief. Real belief. The type that made men's eyes glaze over as if drunk. The kind that made women press their foreheads to the ground, smearing tears across the tiles as in such a way that tears were a kind of currency and self-erasure was devotion. They kneeled in front of her with desperate limbs and hunched backs, starved but glowing, their spines curved, skin flushed not with arousal disguised as spiritual fulfillment.

Even in silence when not a word escaped her lips, they worshiped like starving dogs licking the hand of the master they knew would never give them enough. The candles they lit weren't for visibility. Offerings, just at though the wax melting down into strange little pools of sacrifice was their final currency. Some of them chanted. Some just wept. Some clutched pages soaked in perfume that reeked of rose oil and sweat, lips brushing sacred scripts they didn't understand, eyes wide with the innocence of cattle walking willingly into a slaughterhouse.

The smell in the air was incense, sex, and despair. It felt good. They sang hymns, or something close to it, in a mishmash of prayer and guttural noises, gasping her name and titles with cracked lips and twitching limbs.

She didn't need to be present in their sight for them to begin. She was already present in their minds. They had been taught to reach climax in solitude at just the thought of her smile. They considered this a holy act. In their eyes, she was salvation that made you suffer. A cure that made you scream. The conclusion of all pleasures. The mother of all hungers.

They knew her not by any single form but by the moments of collapse that followed after being blessed by her. They didn't seek her love because they thought they could possess it. They sought it because the pain of being denied it was better than the silence of a meaningless life.

They knew she was listening.

She let them.

Kiara stood behind a curtain of thin transparent cloth, half covering, half lit by the flicker of the surrounding light. She did not make her presence known in any theatrical way.

They had already thrown themselves to the ground as if her shadow was enough to crush their spines and tear out their sins. She listened to the rise and fall of their desperation.

It entertained her, watching how the slightest rumor of her attention made their bodies tremble with excitement. She had not spoken in hours. That made them all the more excited. She had not touched anyone today. That made them claw at themselves harder. A few were bleeding now. Scratching at their thighs and necks and chests, hoping she would notice. She wouldn't. Or maybe she would. It didn't matter anyway. To them, the ambiguity was part of the sacred ritual. Suffering was a form of communication. Pleasure was just another tool in her sermons.

She smiled as she saw everything they were and knew she would never care for a single one of them beyond how they could feed her. Their faith was fuel. Their lust was seasoning. Their lives were the banquet, and she had not even gotten to the main course.

"They look like rodents playing priest," she thought, watching a man cry while thrusting his hips against the stone floor, sobbing out her name like it was both the beginning and end of language.

"It always starts this way. They think they're special. They think they've been chosen because I gave them a glance or brushed my hand across their cheek, not realizing I'd do the same to a dying pig if I were bored enough."

She wanted a better view of their pathetic ecstasy. Her feet made no sound. Her body shimmered with moisture with no sweat. Her skin had the glow of oil, of dew, of whatever makes desire stick to the throat of men like bile after a long night of gluttony. She raised her hand... it made them whimper. The man closest to her convulsed when her finger pointed vaguely in his direction. His teeth clenched, blood spilled from his nose, and he collapsed, breathing like a dog with a collapsed lung, thanking her even as he gasped.

"I see you."

They screamed. Worse than animals. Like pilgrims. Their arms rose in trembling devotion, their cries harmonized into a storm of grateful pain. Some vomited. Others orgasmed. A few did both at once.

"What a dull, simple breed. But that is exactly what makes them such fine ingredients. A proper meal doesn't need intelligent flavor. It needs soft flesh and trust so blind it makes their final moment taste like sugar."

She looked at the man who passed out. Already cooling. She didn't remember his name. She had no interest too. She would not touch him when he was already fading. Soon, someone else would take his place.

Kiara stepped forward into the room properly now, sensual hips swaying because she enjoyed walking, not because she wanted to perform. Their eyes widened. Their mouths opened. No words came. Just breathless awe-like virgins seeing God and finding that God had breasts and a voice that sounded like climax. She walked into their midst and let them fall apart around her, stepping over bodies and sweat and hope without pause.

A queen striding through her private garden of worshipping insects.

"They will all break eventually. And then they will take their own lives, thinking their death will please me more than their existence. Some of them will be correct. Most of them won't. But the beauty of it is that they won't know until it's too late. By then, I will already have replaced them."

Kiara raised her hand again and placed it gently on the chest of one of the female followers, who was shivering like a drunk child. The girl gasped. Her eyes rolled back. Her hands shot out like wings. She collapsed into Kiara's legs, drooling and sobbing.

Kiara didn't even look at her. She just stared forward.

"They pray with their mouths, but what I hear is their trembling need."

Love voice filled with sultriness and completely devoid of empathy.

"Every moment they spend on their knees is not about faith. It is about feeding me. Feeding the part of me they hope they can fill. Which they never will."

No one replied because they were too busy sobbing or tearing at their robes. A few were chanting again. Some were reciting lines from scriptures Kiara never wrote but allowed them to believe she had whispered in their dreams.

"So many holes to fill. So many minds to crack open. So many souls to wear down until they forget why they were ever afraid of me to begin with."

She pressed her foot down onto the back of the female follower beneath her and stepped forward like she was walking across stones in a river. One or two smiled with pride that their sister had been used in such a way.

Kiara glanced at the wall. She didn't care which of her fellow Evils of Humanity she sensed behind it. She's at least thankful they didn't interrupt her. They wouldn't dare. She knew Goetia loathed her existence the way a surgeon loathes infection, but even he couldn't deny her use. But a certain Beast? He was just bored. He would never worship her, and that was what made him even more entertaining.

"But eventually, even the ones who pretend they're above me, even they will kneel. One way or another. No one escapes desire. They just try to rename it something else. Love. Purpose. Salvation. It's all the same. They'll all fall in the end. Even if they scream the whole way down."

The cultists sink further into their reverence, dragging nails down their own cheeks, whispering promises that they would give her their lungs if she just breathed their name.

"Are you running a cult down here or something? A basement cult of sensual annihilation and mental rot?"

Dry as old parchment laced with the crackle of dying flame, the male voice rolled out from behind the rusted iron support beam just beyond the curve of the stairs, stopping the gentle lilt of her humming mid-note. Kiara turned slowly as she crouched near the broken-bodied man on the concrete floor who twitched from pleasure that turned to seizure the moment her touch left him. Feminine fingers gently caressed the air as though to extend the high just a little longer, a mother unwilling to snatch the teat too soon. Her body, semi-translucent silk barely clinging to her shoulders, twisted with eroticism as she looked over it with a kind of amusement meant for a child who walked in on something he didn't understand. Except she knew this one did.

Kiara turned toward the voice fully, rising to her full height as the fabric slid down her side, but she made no effort to correct it. Why would she? If a man was that fixated on the edge of decency, he was never worth entertaining in the first place. Her gaze flicked across the dimly lit room, the low light of the abandoned basement flickering off old bulbs that hadn't seen a janitor in decades. Mold caked the corners, rust pooled along the pipes like dried blood, and the ground smelled of copper and spoiled wine.

Fitting.

She was used to building sanctuaries where nobody looked, where pain had already settled in like an old friend. To the humans, it was just some gutted church's undercroft near the rural edge of Kuoh, sealed long ago after some scandal, now sitting empty under a rotted floorboard of the choir room.

"I see you've found me," she said, letting her voice roll through the air with the same rhythm as a sigh during climax. "But calling this a cult is... unfair. Such a crude word, full of contempt. This is a place of awakening and shedding. Where flesh becomes the language of truth. Isn't that why you came?"

Angra stepped into the light. To her, he looked exactly like the kind of man who'd lean against a wall while watching a burning building and debating if it deserved the fire, and she's right. His eyes scanned the room with only the slothful trace of interest, more as a habit than intent. He didn't even flinch at the pile of discarded robes or the groaning bodies scattered like failed lovers. One still had his rosary clutched in a limp fist. Another twitched with glassy pupils pointed toward the ceiling, mumbling something that might've once been a name.

His emotionless gaze passed over all of it without a pause.

That's what she loved about him.

"I was wondering why it smelled like mildew, incense, and cum down here. Now it all makes sense."

Kiara's laugh broke the air. It wasn't loud, and it wasn't forced. She laughed like someone who already knew all the jokes and was waiting to see if anyone else could catch up.

"Says the one who reeks of long resentment."

She whispered. Her bare feet made no sound on the cold cement.

"You settle into the marrow and shape the soul. That makes you different from these other men. You don't crave warmth. You live off the ashes after everyone else has burned."

Angra didn't move, blink, or even bother pretending her words did anything more than reach his ears. If he looked any more disinterested, he'd be asleep.

But she noticed it, of course. A twitch in the corner of his lip, an invisible muscle pulled just tight enough to betray a single nerve struck. Kiara lived off that twitch.

"Please," he said, shaking his head slowly, "do whatever seductive snake routine you're rehearsing for, but don't waste your breath trying to unravel me with psychosexual metaphors. I've been through the bowels of this world's guilt complex. You aren't showing me anything I haven't already been condemned for in some dream someone had while strangling their conscience."

She moved closer anyway. Acting like she didn't have to was part of the act. Her body always stayed just within a man's personal space, never pressing in, always letting him choose to fall in. Most of them did. All of them did.

All except this one, maybe.

He watched her hips sway.

"You know what I am," she said, voice lower now, lips barely apart. "So you must also know that I can make you forget everything you've seen. That even your hatred can be wrapped in silk, turned into a whisper begging me not to leave. That I can make even the world's evil believe it deserves to be loved."

He looked at her with that look. That same tired, sardonic disdain that had seen popes and whores crumble alike. His eyes never leer or flinch. They just, merely, dispassionately, looked.

"... Love?"

He muttered.

"... That word's worked harder than anyone in history and you use it the same way starving dogs use bones. Not to eat... Just to keep something in your mouth."

Kiara felt it just for a second.

A dull ache behind her breastbone.

Not quite painful. The Beast before her wasn't resisting. That was too active a word. He was watching. Enduring? No.

His personality was the most frustrating type of man.

A male who just doesn't give a single care.

..... If she was a storm, then he was someone who already knew she would pass without touching him.

But even that was a lie, wasn't it? His fingers had twitched earlier when she'd stepped into the light. His breath slowed, but didn't steady, his pupils didn't dilate, but they narrowed with too much awareness; he was affected. She was certain of that. It was just that the effect didn't lead anywhere, not with this one.

"How tragic," she said with a hint of a pout that was more performance than emotion. "We could've destroyed each other in such a poetic way."

"You're not that deep," he replied flatly. "Just messy. Pretty, sure, but messy. All spectacle, no consequence."

She laughed again.

"What were you doing down here, I wonder?"

She turned, the drapery brushing behind her as she slipped back into the cushion-laden space hidden behind the heavy crimson curtain. Still, she didn't draw it completely closed. She pulled it aside just enough so that her gorgeous face and gold-laced eyes could peer through the silk gap at the dark figure who remained standing in the middle of her room. Her legs crossed languidly, just exposing the slit underneath. She didn't like being seen as vulnerable. Especially when smiling. That was part of the allure. She could offer her presence like an open temple, but the altar was rigged with razors.

He stared at her with that blank, habitual expression that had stopped being neutral centuries ago. Simply the face of someone who had long stopped blinking at meaning.

He replied without moving his gaze away from her.

"You've been busy, haven't you? All this…" he waved one hand toward the incense burners, the holy relics, the half-nude men and women lined up in prayer outside her little room, if that can be called a room. "Cults. Worshippers. False piety. Real desperation. They stink of old sins, recycled and sprayed with fragrance. So, what is it you're planning with all this? Or is this just one of those 'love all of humanity in my own way' routines that Beasts keep playing?"

She chuckled softly, closing her eyes for a brief moment as if savoring a memory.

"Oh, you speak like a man who has tasted that love before and found it wanting." Her tone dropped lower, the warmth never leaving.

"It's the same as all of us. Each of us was born from a distortion, yes. But the impulse, the origin, is the same. We wanted to save them. Even if that salvation had to come in the form of destruction, or desire, or control. I, too, love humanity."

She placed a finger to her own lips and tilted her head. "It's just that I prefer to love them in the way they secretly beg for, not the way they pretend to deserve. They fall into my arms with gratitude. Some call it manipulation. I call it mercy. I make them happy in their final moments."

He let out a laugh, barely vocal. A scoff broken into syllables.

"Mercy? Is that what they call it now? Let me guess. They come to you starving, half-dead from the world's judgment, and you give them your hand. Instead of pulling them up, you let them drown and moan in ecstasy while doing it. That's not mercy, Kiara. That's the kind of thing predators tell themselves while chewing."

He tilt his head, just enough to direct the next words with a bit more disdain.

"Talking like a goddess, but you got bodied by a guy who couldn't even get over his high school crush. Remember this vessel's grown-up self? EMIYA Alter. That was him, wasn't it? You got done in by a walking mid-life crisis in a trench coat."

He didn't need to mention it happened twice.

..... Angra silently patted the back of his vessel. He gave EMIYA Alter mental thanks.

For the first time since entering the room, there was a change different in Kiara's face. Her lower eyelid tensed. Her lips jerked. A single vein at the side of her neck throbbed before disappearing again.

She held her posture still. Her back remained straight. Her arms were still folded gracefully. But the warmth in her tone dimmed just slightly. Smothered.

"…So you're aware of that little story. Or perhaps he told you himself? No, quite impossible." She raised one finger and waved it slightly, as though dismissing a rumor. "The timeline is full of pitiful little deviations like that. Honestly, do you think I care about some throwaway timeline where an emotionally stunted archer found the gall to face me after years of grief?"

She paused.

"Do you think he truly defeated me, or that I allowed him a victory because it was… narratively appropriate?"

Her eyes narrowed just enough to cut.

"Do you think I am so fragile that I would fall to a version of your body's future molded by a single woman's rejection?"

Angra shrugged.

"Doesn't matter what I think. I just find it funny that someone who calls herself love incarnate keeps ending up with a broken heart. Must get tiring. All that pretending to be a goddess. Sooner or later, your own cults start praying for you to just shut up."

She stared at him. For a few seconds, the silence wasn't pregnant or heavy. The room itself didn't know how to breathe for a moment.

Kiara leaned back slightly, one arm resting on the side of her couch, her legs shifting so her ankles crossed.

"You're angry. Always angry. I suppose you have that in common with all of us. Even your version of love is just permission to hate with civility."

She tilted her head again.

"Will you hate me too, Angra Mainyu? Or are you saving that for someone else?"

He didn't reply right away. His fingers rubbed together absently.

"... Hating you would be a waste. Hate should have meaning. Yours is borrowed. You're not original, Kiara. Just efficient."

Her smile no longer reaches her eyes. She folded her hands together and let her gaze linger on him. She waited to see whether the man standing before her would kiss her or slit her throat.

He wasn't doing either.

He remained standing. The same posture. The same eyes. The same tone.

He was just... there.

"Why are you still standing over there like a stranger sulking in the corner?" she asked with a tone that dragged on. She patted the ground beside her, fingers curling against the stone, not only inviting, but commanding too, like a lover tired of waiting or a courtesan playing coy while already dictating the script of the night.

"Come here, won't you? It's terribly rude to make a woman lie alone like this."

Angra blinked at her. His eyes were wide open, dead as ever.

"No thanks."

That was all he gave her. No rejection laced with emotion, no irony, not even sarcasm. Just a lifeless answer born out of the sheer absence of interest.

Of course, she smiled. That was what her face did whenever she decided someone should obey her regardless of their thoughts on the matter.

With a wave of her hand, she spoke to her enthralls. "Push him over here."

And when he was just about to stride to the basement exit door, hundreds of eyes of a dozen enthralled worshippers obeyed without protest. He felt them before he even looked. Their fingers, pale and trembling like addicts deprived of her skin for too long, pressed into his back and sides. They didn't shove him with force in her direction. They pushed like believers guiding a statue into a shrine.

He didn't resist though. That would have made it dramatic. He didn't move either, so they had to. They carried him like an offering, dragging him a few feet forward until he stumbled and sat where she wanted him.

His eyes rolled slightly toward her, he felt more like a child giving up on a long, dumb game.

"Oh, come on."

She laughed. One of her legs slid over his without ceremony as though she were laying herself over a plush cushion rather than a man.

Her fingers went to his chest. He didn't stop her. There was almost to no point.

He didn't lean into it, either. He just sat there like a discarded doll, something to be used for her pleasure, and she didn't mind that. In fact, she liked it that way. There was nothing more erotic to her than a man who had nothing left to give, a man who had been emptied out already and yet could still be taken from.

She moaned softly, her lips close to his ear, body grinding ever so slightly, seeking his warmth. Her hand traced his jaw, then slid down his collarbone. She kissed the side of his neck without waiting for approval.

Angra didn't return any of it.

His shoulders stayed slack. Eyes stared ahead past her shoulder, and if he saw her at all, it was with all the interest of a man watching curtains flutter in an empty house.

Hating her would've taken energy.

It wasn't because she disgusted him. That would've meant he cared enough to feel sick.

It wasn't even boredom in the conventional sense.

It was the complete absence of any reason to engage with what she offered, because he already knew her too well. He didn't have to guess at her next move or pretend to play coy. Everything she did had already happened before in his mind, and the endings were always the same.

The moment she didn't feel adored anymore, she'd discard the man like an empty bottle of wine. The only difference was how long it took for them to realize she'd stopped drinking from it.

In his mind, he didn't even categorize her as a person.

Kiara Sessyoin wasn't a woman to him. She wasn't even a Beast, not in the way he was. She was a function; a whirlpool pretending to be a sanctuary. The moment someone touched her, they began falling inward, pulled by her softness, her words, her warmth, all things she offered generously, because she fed off the illusion that others did. She built entire religions around her body, watching others cling to her like a goddess made her feel real.

And the moment those believers began to rot in their hunger, when their desire reached that point of irreversible dullness, they became hollow and no longer gave her that look of mad obsession, that was when they became trash to her. Useless. Already consumed. She'd let them destroy themselves trying to rekindle the fire she'd never intended to keep alive.

She was a black hole with a mother's smile. She was a nun with a slit down her thigh. She was love on a leash, offered just far enough to keep men crawling for it, never far enough to free them from the leash she never let go of. Her seduction wasn't just physical. It was the act of eroding someone's purpose until their only reason to exist was to stay relevant to her.

Even now, her lips moved along his skin as if savoring him, but he could tell by the way her eyes flicked upward every few seconds. She wasn't focused on him. She was watching herself. Watching how she looked in this moment. The image she cast, like a prostitute studying herself in a mirror to confirm she was still beautiful.

She didn't need his consent. She needed his presence. His body there, near her. His image, not his will. That was enough. She could imagine the rest.

Angra let her do as she pleased. It was all the same to him whether she touched him or not. Whether she moaned or stayed silent. Whether she wanted him or the idea of being wanted by him. She didn't care which one it was either, because both were already victories in her mind.

And the truth was, Angra had seen men like her before. Not in shape, not in gender, it's all in essence. People who convinced themselves they were kind because they gave others what those people craved, while never truly giving anything of themselves. Those who could smile while draining someone dry and still believe they were doing them a favor.

He had been surrounded by them once.

In his nameless village. In that temple. In the cries of the same people who begged him to forgive them, even as they plunged knives into his flesh. They had called him evil to justify what they did. They made him into a scapegoat so that they could keep pretending to be good. Kiara did the same thing, only now she wrapped it in silk and perfume, in moans and kisses, in holy robes and sacred names.

In the end, it was still just people feeding off other people to fill a hole they refused to admit had no bottom.

She kissed his collarbone again, her breath hot, her eyes hazy.

He blinked apathetic.

Like a serpent drunk on the blood of saints, her body coiled around his lap and the only thing Angra could hear, besides her delighted exhale and the stifled gasp of her peak, was the ridiculous squelch of damp flesh against his thighs and stomach.

Her skin was soft, sure, and she was gorgeous in a detached sort of way, but that wasn't something he ever cared for.

He didn't even bat an eye as her nails left faint red trails across his abdomen, or when her mouth pressed kisses on the lines of his shoulder and chest. She moved like a predator playing in the illusion of devotion, moaning like some holy mother experiencing a moment of divine ecstasy.

It was only movement and heat and biology. The way she rolled her hips in desperation wasn't what made his eyes narrow—it was the faint prickle across his skin, like she had just dipped her tongue in something more than saliva. That stupid sweetness that wasn't natural. His nerves, sensitive in a way that came from being cursed by generations of collective blame, picked it up the moment it touched him.

He let it continue for the same reason he let so many things play out... curiosity, boredom, or the morbid urge to let people hang themselves with their own rope. Kiara was no different. Even when she climaxed on him, shuddering with that practiced faux-vulnerability, he didn't change his expression. He waited until her movement slowed and her breath steadied into something quieter.

She panted, and that was the end of their coupling.

He reached up without warning and pushed her off with complete detachment. Her body hit the floor with a soft grunt, and she looked up at him like she hadn't expected rejection—though, of course, she had.

The way she smiled even when discarded proved it.

"It won't work," he said simply. A flat refusal.

"You should know better. You're not stupid. Just self-centered."

She didn't push herself. She lay there on the floor, propped up by one arm not unlike a patient whore whose pride wasn't tied to the outcome. She tilted her head like a cat, curious, but not truly interested in the explanation. Not unless it gave her a new lever to push.

"You put something in your spit." he continued, rubbing his wrist where she had kissed the skin. "A kind of neurological irritant with aphrodisiac-like properties. I'm surprised it's not entirely chemical. Something spiritual, rather. Your own biology is tweaked for this kind of thing. I suppose you were hoping my brain would short-circuit long enough for you to get something out of it. Compliance, addiction, maybe something more metaphysical. Not a bad tactic. I've seen it work. No doubt you've made stronger men cry or kill themselves."

He lifted his hand and let her see it. Thin black threads of something like smoke clung to his forearm, where the poison had tried to bond with the nerves. Except, it wasn't there anymore. The moment he willed it, his curse rose. It was cold, almost invisible, a weightless pressure that simply incinerated the foreign compound on contact. The moment the sins carved into his body recognized something unnatural that had been forced in, it treated it like it did everything else the world gave him.

Rejection. Denial. Destruction.

The poison didn't even get the chance to bind to his nerves before the hatred inside him boiled it away.

He sat cross-legged again on the floor, completely unfazed by his own nudity, "Everything stirs in me all the time. All of humanity's sin, every condemnation, every woman's betrayal, every man's envy. You can't add to a storm when it never stopped raining."

Kiara sat up and smiled again, brushing a lock of damp hair behind her ear, undaunted. "Then it must be nice; to burn away every pleasure before it reaches your brain. A purity no man deserves."

He looked at her for a moment. He was trying to decide how much to bother responding. Then he chuckled, a sound that held no amusement, only scorn.

"You mistake immunity for virtue. I was built for this. Sculpted by hands that never intended for me to have joy. If I had a choice, I might have liked to be weak. To drown in lust like everyone else and cry for a woman who never loved me. But I don't get to be human, remember? You all made sure of that."

Kiara crawled back toward him with the same hypnotic grace she always wore when seducing someone too stupid to know better. One thing he noticed was that there was something new in her movement now. A challenge. It was the quiet obsession of someone who didn't appreciate being ignored. A woman who could consume anything, but hated when something refused to be digested.

She pressed her fingers to his knee like touching an altar. "Don't be angry. If you hate so much, why did you let me have you at all?"

He picked up a broken piece of the wooden floor and toyed with it in his hand.

"I don't stop people from being who they are. You took it. You do this to everyone. So I let you. That's all."

"You resist me."

He flicked the splinter of wood at her chest to break the line of her eye contact.

"Because, on the contrary to what you think, it's not about wanting. I was made to suffer. That's all I understand. You? You're just playing a game. That poison you slipped in my skin, that orgasm you rode out on my lap, it's all the same to me. None of it fills me, because nothing does. I've been hollowed out long before you ever knew pleasure existed."

She didn't answer immediately, and for a moment, there was a silence between them, thick only with their breathing.

She giggled softly, brushing the wood splinter off her chest like it was a petal from a rose.

"I suppose that's why I like you," she said. "You don't chase me. You don't cry for me. You don't need me. But I'll make you want me. Even if it takes a thousand years."

His lips twitched in a flicker of disdain.

"Good luck with that. I've lasted longer in graves."

She moved again, slower and even more sensually this time, and he could see that she wasn't done. That performance was just round one.

He stood up, brushing the dust off his legs with practiced indifference.

"You're wasting your efforts," he said without venom. "I'm not the one who's going to break. But feel free to keep trying. It gives you something to do, and I've got time to kill."

Her eyes didn't stray from him as he walked away and stepped over her followers. She didn't follow.

He knew she would.

.
.
.
.
.

He could not lift his arm. He could not even feel where his fingers ended anymore. The heaviness of his body, the drag of torn fabric clinging uselessly to split skin, the way his breath cut through his teeth, all of it added up to a cold realization that even now he was refusing to say out loud. Not because he doubted what just happened, but once he put words to it and gave shape to that conclusion, he would have to admit the truth in full—he had been defeated.

Not in battle. Not in a proper clash. Not even by trickery or assassination or ambush, which he would have understood, might have even respected. No, what just happened to him was not combat. It was invalidation.

He had been made meaningless.

Marsilio could still remember the first time he awakened the ability of Phantom Projection. It was during a meaningless duel in the back alleys of Naples, when his father died in front of him from a stray spell by an amateur magician. His Sacred Gear responded to his shock, to the trauma that refused to process, and in return, it gave him control over unreality. A domain of illusions and perception that, in a world where power dictated pertinence, gave him an edge. He built his whole identity on that Gear and that edge. His reputation as a phantom tactician, an illusionist that turned the battlefield into a personal theater, didn't come from some latent talent or from childhood discipline. It came from the fact that he had to, because the world, by default, would not give him a place.

Not a world where people like the White Dragon's user existed, not a world where monsters like Cao Cao built armies of saints and freaks. Marsilio found a niche, and he earned the right to be feared. He used to think that was enough.

He joined the Hero Faction not because he believed in their goals. He never believed in the purification of the world or the strength of humanity's ancestors or any of that classical-era romanticism that Cao Cao liked to throw around in his monologues. Marsilio was analytical enough to see through slogans. He knew most people in the faction followed because they wanted to matter. They wanted to be somebody. And he respected that. Even if it was pathetic, it was at least honest.

Marsilio joined because he saw the faction as a platform. A way to stand above others. A place where his tools and his mind could secure status and relevance. The others could talk about ideals. He would build something practical. Even if they failed, he would come out of it with something more than what he had when he started.

But then there was today.

The figure in front of him, no, the thing, was not a god in the way they had cataloged the term. It was not a known being, not a familiar figure from the Three Factions, not a signature of some stray creature. There was no register for this thing, no identification his mind could assign. When it appeared, it was not like some summoning ritual or the descent of a being with purpose. A knot in the structure of reality that simply chose now to unravel.

Malice made manifest.

A tentacle thicker than the ruins of a bell tower reached from the sky and dragged itself toward him, eyes upon eyes set in place of suckers, some round and eerily human, others angular and predatory, not all looking at him, not all reacting to anything, but all watching. A creature of perception, built to monitor, built to catalog, built to absorb the entirety of what it viewed. Rather, it wasn't the tentacle that made Marsilio collapse. It wasn't the eyes.

It was the bodies.

Hundreds of human corpses, fused into its skin like barnacles, covering the surface like a coat of discarded flesh. Some were fresh. Some were rotting. Some looked so pristine he could see the fibers of their clothing, the way their hair moved with the wind, despite being part of this monster's dermis. Their faces were all different. Some were screaming. Some were blank. Some looked like they had been laughing, or sobbing, or gasping for air. A few were children. He didn't know what was worse. The ones with faces contorted in pain or the ones who seemed like they never understood they had died. He tried to project an illusion. It failed before it formed. He tried to warp time perception. The creature stepped through it without recognition. He even tried to throw a curse to rot the flesh of the corpses, and the spell died the moment it touched the air near the thing.

This was absence. Magic simply didn't work here.

Marsilio had faced devils before. He had fought fallen angels. He had even survived a close encounter with Azazel during a surveillance mission near the Fallen Angel territory, escaping thanks to a suicide spell embedded into his shoe. He had fought Cao Cao's enemies, he had trained with Georg, he had studied magic under a man who used to work with the Grigori.

None of that gave him a single usable reference for what he was seeing. Even his pain felt distant, delayed. Like his body hadn't caught up yet to the damage it took. Or maybe it had, but his mind simply couldn't process it all at once.

The thing never said its name. It looked through him. A soul-wretching gaze. Marsilio had never felt like that before. That kind of transparency. As if his memories, his history, his skills, his identity, none of it registered as worthy of interaction. Nothing more than an environmental element. Debris. Rubble. It did more damage to him than any tentacle or curse or spell could have.

He thought back to his ancestor. Marsilio Ficino. The philosopher who tried to combine Christianity and Neoplatonism. The man who believed that human dignity came from the rational soul and its link to divine reason. How many times he had used that name like a shield, how many people he had told it to like it gave him authority? Facing this mass of eyes and flesh and silence, Marsilio realized something simple and final.

The world did not care who he was.

The thing in front of him didn't need to. Because its purpose, its function, were built in a realm that did not answer to humanity's standards.

Marsilio tried to crawl. His leg didn't move.

Nothing came out of his mouth.

There was a pressure building in the air from information. This thing was leaking knowledge. Broadcasting something from behind those eyes. It wasn't speaking, but it was telling him everything. Could be just showing him what it really was, and his mind filled in the blanks. It didn't matter.

He was already beneath it.

He tried to lift his left arm again. It trembled, got halfway up, then collapsed. His breathing rasped in and out and realized the side of his cheek was pressed against concrete. He didn't remember falling. His face was numb. He could smell blood. Not his. Not entirely his. Some of it was leaking out of the corpses that adorned the thing's body. They were still fresh. Recently added. Recent victims. Trophies? Fuel?

He didn't know.

He couldn't know.

He didn't even know what question to ask.

"So this is the state of your so-called chosen blood."

Rough and disinterested and far too low to be coming from a throat like any voice he had heard before, scraping out from the bottom of a machine that had learned how to mimic boredom.

"It is honestly insulting. Is this what passes for inheritance now? A thing like you dares to point a weapon at me?"

Marsilio flinched. The voice had entered his spine and moved his nerves without permission.

He felt like he was being appraised.

He shouted, "What the hell are you?"

The being laughed. That's what he could only call it. A short, soundless convulsion that nevertheless pressed against Marsilio's chest like he had been struck with an invisible plank of wood.

"You don't even deserve an answer. What use is a name to a corpse? But if you insist on giving noise to the empty air before you die, then understand you are looking at a Demon God. I am Marbas."

The name hit him harder than the words. He staggered once. It was wrong.

Marbas.

He had read that name once. A demon clan from the early days of the Underworld Civil War. Rumored to have been wiped out completely. Every name was stripped from the record. No remains. No bloodline survivors. The Underworld had long since erased the name. And now this thing was saying it like it belonged to it. Like it was never a name lost but one that had been waiting.

"You're lying. That clan is extinct," Marsilio said it, even though deep down something colder than doubt was already eating away at him.

The thing tilted its head slightly to the left, and its red eye flared. Only one. The other stayed dim. "So even the grave forgets its rot. Fitting."

Marsilio clenched his fists. His Sacred Gear was already humming at his back, responding to the fear. He wasn't supposed to be afraid. He was a wielder. A chosen. The Balance Breaker was already unlocked. He had done everything right.

"I'm a Hero. I won't die here."

That word stopped the creature for a breath. "'Hero'..." it repeated, testing the sound like a bad taste on its tongue.

Then it laughed again.

"You really called yourself that. A hero. You think because your bloodline vomited out a Sacred Gear, that entitles you to fiction. You're not even close to the gutter beneath the feet of those humanity once bothered recording. You're a pebble thrown against a stone monument, trying to be remembered by the echo it makes when it bounces off. What gave you the idea you were anything? Your pathetic display earlier? Your useless resolve? Do you think dying here with dramatic eyes and loud words will make your name sing in some story told by children? You aren't even worth the memory of pain."

Marsilio screamed and activated the Balance Breaker again. Not because he thought it would work. But because he needed it to. He needed something to work. If he ran now, it would confirm everything the monster said. If he hesitated, it would be the same. If he died, then maybe at least that would be the last word. At least that would deny it the luxury of being right. Maybe some force would take pity and let his name linger in a sentence longer than his bones.

The light flared. The power surged through his spine. And that thing, that fake Marbas, that impossibility cloaked in black heat, did not even lift anything.

The one eye, already red, brightened for a split second, and then fired a single line of force.

There was only the body folding inward from the chest. Vaporization was too clean a word for what happened.

The legs fell last.

The Sacred Gear was caught before it hit the ground. Caught mid-air by a claw made of nothing. Extracted. Examined. Turned in invisible fingers like an old coin found at the bottom of a corpse's stomach.

The voice spoke one last time, no longer addressing anything living.

"Flawed. Weak. Worth extracting. Barely."

Then the Pillar dissipated, dragged into the earth by a shadow that didn't move like anything raw. The residue it left behind stank like static and cinders, but not one particle of it was ash.

Chapter 12: Pæne, Wynne, Beasts

There were no roots in her history. Only fur. Blood. Teeth. Shrieks of fur-torn agony against the cold reasoning of fire and progress. When humans built their farms, she was there. As a soul, and a growing smear of thought; a consensus formed in suffering, a flicker of meaning stitched into centuries of chased tails, cracked necks, chewed wings, and hollow eyes left to rot in traps. The foxes weren't first, but they were among the smartest. The wolves were earlier, but they were fitful. The boars were louder, but they didn't think. The foxes learned to wait. The foxes watched. And somewhere across those broken, panicking deaths that ended behind barns and under boots, something started watching back.

Yaskaya. The name never meant anything. It was given to her in a forgotten time. It sounded like Youkai, enough to enter the room and pass unnoticed. That was the trick. Never knock. You enter because they'll only see what they want. That's why she picked her, the face, the skin, the myth, the design. Tamamo-no-Mae. Not that Tamamo, not the one who flirted and cried and wanted to be human. That one was pitiful. Yaskaya wasn't chasing men or gods or a pretty little future in a house made of lies. She was chasing the kill. The reward. The long-delayed vengeance. Tamamo wanted love. Yaskaya wanted repayment with interest. And if that made her a Beast, fine. Let the world call it calamity. She called it business.

It had been a week since then.

Her heels clicked as she adjusted her weight to the right. The scarf sat tight around her neck, the exact shade of charming pink that was supposed to say "approachable" without actually inviting approach. The blazer clung to her chest too tightly on purpose. It made people stare just long enough for her to see where their thoughts were. That was the point. That had always been the point. The most dangerous things wore things like her.

She stared at the glass.

She had done this before. Not exactly this, not this version, but something close enough.

The company building wasn't anything special. Third-rate consultant firm. No staff as of yet. Sterile corporate sheen across polished marble, those bulletproof panes of one-way glass, the reinforced double doors installed with thaumaturgical glyphs, and bounded fields under the excuse of "special access clearance"—all of it came back to her without effort. It was muscle memory at this point. Recreating a private military corporation from the ground up was not even a week's worth of work if one had access to the right materials, the proper spiritual foundation, and of course, enough shameless ambition to funnel it all through a plausible lie.

Koyanskaya had all three.

Registered two days ago, barely scraping along. The recreated NFF Services building sat about two streets from the so-called "mini-Ars Paulina," which was just a ridiculous name for an oversized pocket dimension with a bad taste in furniture. Calling it that irritated her more than it should. "The Beasts' house," as if they were some kind of dysfunctional, overpowered sitcom family. Her new roommates called it home. She didn't. Home meant walls you couldn't break. Home meant people expecting you to stay.

Seven days. That's how long it had been since they all arrived.....

.....since Beast met Beast, and this ugly little world learned that their version of Supernaturals wasn't the only thing to be afraid of. She hadn't said it out loud, of course.

It was a little disappointing, honestly. Kuoh Town wasn't that impressive. It was painfully average in the way only a town built on crumbling traditions and hidden power could be. She had seen thousands like it during her years drifting between human settlements, in the days before she built her little empire under Chaldea's nose, when her only real weapons were her claws and her ability to smile at idiots until they signed over everything they owned. It had worked then. It would work now.

Let the others pretend they were here for reasons. Kiara was too busy bending over backward to fit into her perverted little goddess complex and admiring her cult in the basement, why a basement of all rooms?, Angra looked like a half-broken student who still hadn't decided whether he wanted to die or win, and Kama… was worse, who pretended like she didn't care while getting tangled in every conversation like a bored housecat with unresolved trauma. Goetia barely spoke, which she appreciated, and U-Olga—well, Marie wasn't worth thinking about unless she started talking again, in which case she'd probably need to be silenced. With or without consent.

All of them could burn in the next Grail War for all she cared. She would just need to make sure it happened after she had carved out her safe zone.

Koyanskaya didn't belong here.

She didn't say it audibly, but she knew it. She wasn't like the others. They were monsters with stories. She was a story pretending to be a monster. There was no "true form" under her skin. There was no holy myth hiding behind her words. She was born from hatred, molded into civility, and shaped into a product. She walked in heels and smiled with her lips while imagining how long it would take to crush every larynx in a room, if needed.

It was never personal. It was math. Profit. Risk. Ratio.

She pressed a finger to the side of her earpiece and clicked them. A beep was heard.

"Hm…"

Silence was profitable. You could sell it. People would pay for it, beg for it. They thought noise was power, but the quiet ones ran the rooms. Ran the meetings. Ran the bodies.

The company's name—Nine Fox Foundation—was kept intact. She had considered changing it for branding reasons. But she had already sunk too much symbolic weight into the identity. Names mattered. This one carried hers. Nine Tails. Nine Lies. Nine Ways to Kill You Before You Realize You're Bleeding. That had been a considered tagline once. She still liked it, especially now.

The building had five stories. The top had tinted windows. She already knew the layout. Elevator to the left. Reception desk slightly raised.

She didn't hate humans. People always got that wrong. She didn't hate wolves, either. Or deer. Or mosquitoes. She understood them. But humans liked to think they were above that. Liked to call themselves moral while stabbing each other for bread and yelling about ideas that never paid the bills. She profited off them. That was better.

There was no loyalty here. That much was obvious. She didn't need it. What she needed was insulation. A buffer. A wall of resources, technology, magecraft, and pseudo-legal infrastructure wide enough to keep the fools of this world from trying to bind her with their little hero clubs or exorcist agencies. She had seen what this dimension offered. Angels. Devils. Fallen. Sacred Gears. It was so original. But even quaint things could be dangerous in large enough numbers. She remembered what happened in the Yuga Lostbelt. She remembered how fast pride got devoured when surrounded. She wasn't going to let that happen here.

She had built the corporate structure herself, using legal frameworks from four different world systems. The Japanese ones were the easiest. Their bureaucracy was like wet paper soaked in politeness. Her registration passed without issue. A defense and logistics firm. Hired to study and contain anomalous threats. Equipped with private access to satellite data, magical surveillance, and clearance to operate around "paranormal events."

All perfectly reasonable, all perfectly fabricated. Magecraft did the rest. She had inserted fake memories into the bureaucratic records of local officials, falsified paper trails, and even fabricated a legacy—one where NFF Services had apparently existed since 1982 under various rebrandings. All of it was retroactively crafted and reinforced by bounded fields that made the illusion hold even under casual inspection. Nobody questioned it. Why would they? She was a professional.

Her heels clicked lightly against the stone pavement as she stepped forward and examined the glass exterior again. The building shimmered in the early sun. Reflective, hardened, sleek. Tall and wide. Spread out across the block like a crouching fox. The design wasn't symbolic. It was tactical. More coverage. More escape routes. A better line of sight for ward placements. She had embedded cursed seals under the foundation that would detonate the entire building in the event of a forced breach. Her kind didn't like being cornered. No fox ever did.

She folded her arms, her chest pressing against the fabric of her jacket in a way that would make most mortal men stutter if they were dumb enough to approach her. No one did. The area was quiet. That's how she liked it. Less eyes. Less noise. Easier to think.

It wasn't about revenge anymore. Not really. She had long stopped pretending that she wanted to reclaim anything. She didn't need to become a Beast again. She didn't need to surpass Tamamo. That delusion had died the day Chaldea gutted her project and turned her into a joke. Hitch-hiking with a cardboard sign had stripped away a lot of illusions. Now she just wanted to survive. And maybe profit while surviving. Profit made everything easier. You could buy silence. Buy territory. Buy power. You couldn't buy safety, but you could rent it long enough to plan your next move.

The Beasts were her problem now. Not because she cared. But because they were dangerous. Not just to the world, but to her.

She looked up. Her expression didn't change.

They were all threats. She couldn't control them. But she could plan around them. Hence this place and the network she was about to launch. She would play the game again...

Corporate warfare. Subtle espionage. Data collection. Contracts. Threat assessments. Supernatural risk management. All dressed in paperwork and politeness.

Her tail twitched slightly beneath the illusion she wore, a flick of irritation and anticipation.

All she needed now was to activate the external grid, and then she would finally have a foothold.

She smiled unkindly.

With her thoughts sorted out and her day brightened up, she strides toward her company and opens the door.

She opened her mouth and announced the empty corporation,

"Your manager is home—"

What greeted her were the Four Horsemen of Ongoing Migraines.

She froze just past the threshold, her heel clicking flat against the marble floor as her mouth shut with an audible snap. Her ears twitched. Her tail stiffened, nearly bristling out of instinct.

In front of her, sprawled without a care in the world across one of the brand-new lobby couches she hadn't even had time to formally list for sale, was Angra himself.

He was lying on his back with a leg dangling over the armrest like he owned the place, holding her customized matte-black sniper rifle, the very one she had commissioned with obsessive attention to both aesthetic detail and magical engineering, the kind of gun that could shoot a magus through three bounded fields and still have enough leftover force to embarrass their ancestors.

Behind him, of course, were the rest of the unwanted: Kama, Draco, and U-Olga. The Four Horsemen—Beastmen?—of her ongoing migraine indeed. The furniture in the reception area had clearly been moved around, for reasons she could not yet comprehend and did not want to imagine. Kama was walking around with a notebook that wasn't hers, flipping pages, licking her finger before turning each one like she was some nosy aunt going through someone else's diary. Draco was standing near a rack of unloaded firearms, looking down her nose at everything like the paint job itself had offended her honor. U-Olga, meanwhile, was already halfway through scribbling something with a red marker on the company's large wall-mounted presentation board, her handwriting full of loops and underlines and circles that screamed "pretentious executive scorn."

Koyanskaya blinked, took one deep breath, and exhaled the breath of someone already regretting waking up today.

She folded her arms and hissed the question through her clenched teeth with all the composure of a shareholder whose entire crypto portfolio just collapsed overnight.

"What in the hot burning hell are the four of you doing in my building?"

Angra didn't even look up. He just lazily raised the sniper rifle, peeked through the scope, whistled softly, and then tilted his head at her with that permanently tired face of his, the smirk of a man who had already mentally accepted death and was now just hanging around to make everyone else suffer along the way.

"Wow. You actually made a proper PMC building and hid it from the rest of us for two days. Thought you'd just run some shady little murder-for-hire app out of a truck. Good job, Vitch. Real brick and mortar. We're all very proud."

He gave a sarcastic, ironic clap with one hand while the other cradled her rifle, making her eye twitch again.

"I, will ask one more time," slowly and precisely, she said each word sharpened like the edge of a ritual dagger dipped in passive aggression, "what are you doing inside my company, touching my equipment, uninvited, like the gaggle of unpaid interns I very clearly never hired?"

"Oh, lighten up, fox lady." Kama chimed in without even looking up, her voice smooth and smug, like she was here on business and everyone else was the nuisance. "We were bored. You weren't home. The door was open. We figured, why not see what kind of sketchy off-the-books war crimes operation our charming sadist has been setting up in the suburbs?"

She tilted her head with a fake-innocent look that was so rehearsed it might as well have been copy-pasted from a previous life.

"Though, really, I expected more mirrors in the lobby. This place is tragically minimalist."

Draco, still inspecting the guns with a mix of aristocratic disgust and cold analysis, muttered without turning around, "The craftsmanship is tolerable, but the aesthetic is vulgar. I can smell the desperation for brand identity clinging to the polymer stock."

Koyanskaya's hand shot up to her forehead, massaging the vein she felt forming.

"You—Draco—you don't even use firearms. You kill things with divine trauma and anti-civilization sword swings. Why are you even judging my engineering?"

"They're weapons." Draco answered flatly, turning slowly toward her. "And I am a Beast. I am fundamentally obligated to pass judgment on things meant to kill."

Before Koyanskaya could formulate a proper curse, U-Olga spun around and pointed the marker at her like it was a laser pointer of shame.

"I have reviewed your entire logistical framework and I'm being generous when I say it's catastrophic. Your budget allocation is incoherent, you have no actual HR department, the security protocols are a joke, and there is no single sign of a long-term operational strategy. You have branding, yes, but it's all superficial and built around your tail and breast size. There's no meat."

She stepped forward, flipping a clipboard with exaggerated flair.

"Also, why are your recruitment posters just you in a suit with the words 'Join or Die' in pink Helvetica font?"

Koyanskaya's right eye actually twitched this time. Visibly. Trembled at the corners like it wanted to jump off her face and escape into retirement.

"Because it's catchy," she muttered in a low growl.

"Oh, it's catchy," U-Olga replied with a forced laugh. "It's also illegal. You realize the city council has already flagged your building as a potential black site? There are rumors on local social media that this is either a cult or a startup crypto firm run by a failed gravure idol. I cannot tell which is worse."

Koyanskaya didn't respond for a long moment. She took one slow step inside, heels clicking with the deliberate tempo of someone trying not to start stabbing. Her lips were forced into a smile so artificial it could've been sold in a plastic wrap.

"This," she said softly, "is my sanctuary. My power base. My posthumous comeback after having my entire evil corporate ambition shattered by a certain Japanese tech support party crashers. It is the spiritual rebirth of NFF Services, and it will not be reduced to an afterschool playground for Beast-class toddlers who got bored of sitting in the living room."

She pointed at Angra, who raised a brow while still cradling the sniper.

"You especially. That's a one-of-a-kind magic-dampened high-density rifle calibrated to my body's heat signature. It is not a toy. It is not a chewable. It is not a conversation piece. Put it down."

Angra looked down at the gun, then at her, then raised it again to peer through the scope with both eyes this time.

"This is yours? Huh. Thought it had too much personality to belong to you."

Then he promptly cocked it and aimed it at one of the ceiling lights. Koyanskaya's soul nearly left her body.

"Kama," she snapped, wheeling on her, "get him to put it down before I file all of your existences under unpaid liabilities and write off the damages as Beast-related tax deductions."

Kama snorted and shrugged. "Don't look at me. I'm just here to make fun of your font choices and maybe embezzle some startup capital while you aren't looking."

"Did you all just show up here to make my life harder, or is this some kind of cosmic prank to see how long it takes before I start foaming at the mouth?"

Draco crossed her arms and finally looked at her properly, face unreadable but voice firm. "We came to inspect. You are building a paramilitary corporation. That directly affects our ecosystem."

"I built it to protect myself," Koyanskaya snapped, "from all of you. You all get divine privileges and apocalyptic damage output. I get bullets and bureaucracy. I am trying to survive."

"Sounds like a you problem," Angra muttered, already standing up now and stretching, rifle now slung on his back like a trophy. "But hey, congrats again on expanding the franchise. I'll make sure to tell Tiamat her All the World's Evil son has a new office to spill blood in..... That is, if she comes back with the dog."

Koyanskaya opened her mouth to yell again but realized halfway that her voice was caught in her throat. She shut it. Breathed in. Smoothed her skirt. Adjusted her scarf. Tried to remember the dignity of corporate wolves, the elegance of the predator in a suit.

Then the moment of peace shattered when U-Olga raised her voice again and shouted toward the back room.

"Sessyoin! You're not going to want to miss this disaster! Our fox opened a company and it's already in debt!"

Koyanskaya whined, loudly, to the ceiling.

There was not enough therapy in this world.

---

"Report: No possible alien or extraterrestrial threats within this quadrant of the observable void." The voice belonged to Baal, the Gazing Star base still bore fury in its core, but controlled, in service of higher purpose. "We swept across the exosphere, scanned the dark, identified anomalies, and dismissed every one. Nothing of import beyond human-level imagination."

"Continue to monitor. False positives are unacceptable."

"Acknowledged."

"Observation from the Information Center: The Excalibur anomaly is confirmed. The legendary sword, once thought singular, has been fragmented into seven disparate forms, each sealed or worshipped separately across various Christian denominations." This came from Glaysa-Labolas, one of the Information Center Pillars. "Shock parameters engaged. No correlation to the Noble Phantasm version exists. Their version's attributes—perpetual durability, inscribed hope, and tether to humanity's dream—are absent. This variant lacks inscription, origin resonance. It is myth, corrupted into plurality."

"Continue analysis. Seek root divergence from standard version. Cross-reference theological inconsistencies and cultural alterations post-fracture." Goetia replied.

Glaysa-Labolas continued, unprompted. "Recorded anomalies in the usage of each fragment. Artifacts behave semi-autonomously. Likely due to divine residue fused with concept-narratives in this world's Christian mythos. We will catalog the phenomena."

From behind them, a different voice rang out. Harsh, grating, carrying with it the bite of disdain.

"Interjection: I encountered one of their supposed heroes."

The smoke boiled into a form more animal than shadow. Marbas, from the Gazing Star, had returned. Where the others were dispassionate, Marbas burned.

"Marsilio, member of the Hero Faction. He was delusional. Barely a threat. Engaged me under the delusion of righteous trial. I dealt with him. Extracted his Sacred Gear."

"Identification."

"Designated as Dreamlike Curse. Identified locally as 'Phantom Projection.' Minor replication ability. Translates false substance into reality if belief threshold is met. Reproduces objects and images through inherited will. Mostly ineffective. Primitive copycraft."

"Instruct the Information Center Pillars to dissect and archive it. Flauros will oversee the extraction of internal schema. Deliver the core to them before rotation ends."

"Understood."

There was a shift in the collective, like data reconfiguring.

"Discussion: The Hero Faction appears fractured. They operate under mythological mimicry, but their alignment is shallow. Their source belief is not cohesive and Heroism. It's nostalgia repackaged as identity," muttered Orias. "They lack ideological backbone."

"Wasteful. Assign Gusion to monitor their inter-factional communications. Pattern analysis might produce something usable."

The shadow pillars rotated around him slowly. From a corner of the attic, distant from light, the furnace's ash-like vapor seeped through. Ipos and Zepar, the Melting Furnace base, crept in on crackling smoke.

"Excuse. We still await functional chorus-line to complete the hymn-schematic for Goetia's directive. Our structure is incomplete. Two percent variance and holding."

"You are not required to be complete to perform. Set your deficiencies aside. Continue contribution."

"Understood." Ipos whispered, while Zepar chuckled bitterly. "Still your fault for rushing summon."

A roar of flame broke the brief silence. Furfur's voice was thunder pressed into words.

"Status from Armory: Mobilization for the coming engagement against the Fallen Faction is near completion. Kokabiel's force is expected to strike within less than fifty hours. Weapon loads have been prepared. Reinforcements are standing by in the form of forty-nine materialized Pillar-type projections, non-sapient. Battle plan iterations: seventy-three. Most efficient: Variant XII, probability of loss, five percent."

"Proceed with Variant XII," Goetia ordered. "Include Dantalion's waste constructs as tertiary-line shields."

From somewhere cold and hollow, Dantalion spoke. "We have no shields. We have no constructs. We have only garbage and ash. Everything you make becomes us. All protection is entropy. All movement is decay. Still... accepted."

Dantalion was not for conversation. He was a function, an end-state. The Trash Heap did not reply when thanked, nor expect to be.

"Sabnock, Shax."

The Chamber of Life responded in dual harmony. Sabnock, first. "Medical reserves and vessel-regeneration batches are fully calibrated. Any lost limb, any destroyed synaptic node, can be restored within ninety seconds."

"We pray for the success of life, and for the pain to be short."

"Information relay from Caim. Underworld scouting teams dispatched two days prior have returned. The Control Tower has reviewed their findings. Flauros, Valac, and Orias cross-referenced the gathered data. Discovery: a simulation-based combative entertainment system operational among Devils—classified as 'Rating Games.'"

Goetia's gaze narrowed in scrutiny.

"Define 'Rating Games.'"

"Objective-based mock warfare used by high-class Devils to establish social standing and strategic capability. Participants enlist under Peerage systems that draw inspiration from chess. High-born individuals lead formations composed of designated pieces such as 'Rooks,' 'Bishops,' 'Pawns,' and so on. They take place under observation and judgment, structured by legal and political oversight. Competitive in format, ritualistic in execution." Paimon relayed.

"Supplement from Buer to Paimon: The recent Game of note was between the heiress Rias Gremory and Riser Phenex. Combat statistics indicate a decisive clash in talent expression, yet the simulations contain significant performative qualities. There is spectacle as well as structure. These Games function as both civil tradition and military exercise."

Goetia did not speak for several seconds.

"Degeneration..."

"... The act of ritualizing strength into sport is not foreign to humanity, but Devils have allowed generations of peace to coax them into a stylized theatre. They have preserved form but abandoned principle. Strength made to entertain, not annihilate."

"Declaration by Furfur: It is not without merit. The Games establish battlefield instincts among the idle. They preserve engagement in generations which otherwise rot. They forge leaders in simulated fire."

"Observation from Marchosias: Though stripped of war's sorrow, they retain discipline. We viewed the Gremory's strategy—innovative, if humanized. The use of her Pawn evolved into a Queen showed adaptability."

Malphas ended the Armory's sequence. "Conclusion: Potential exists in these systems. Whether it is worthy of our involvement depends on context. If the Rating Games reflect the Devil society's martial spine, then evaluating them further may yield understanding of the Underworld's surviving strength."

Goetia gave a slight nod. He neither accepted nor denied the notion, because his mind was not idle. His next sentence revealed the reallocation of his thoughts.

"Where are the Second and Fourth?"

His question shifted the room's current entirely. Goetia did not need to clarify which he referred to. There were only two among the Beasts of the Throne that had not returned since they were dispatched: Beast II and Beast IV.

Tiamat and Cath Palug.

Glasya-Labolas from the Information Center replied first. "Fact: Last contact occurred six days prior. Both parties were ordered to establish sensory range over Italy's magical leyline corridors and both were expected to return in Japan. Both trails ceased in an oceanic region roughly 150 kilometers east of Chiba."

Valac followed up. "Inference: Obfuscation was likely not self-imposed. No indication of hostile intent prior to disappearance. Both were scheduled for rotation return within seventy-two hours. Delay confirmed. Signal disruption absolute."

"Accusation from Zepar: This falls on inadequate planning. You dispatched Tiamat—who has no concept of time on human scale—without providing strict temporal feedback loops. Cath Palug follows curiosity and Beast II, not direction. You cannot expect precision from entropy."

Goetia did not respond to the jab. The complaint was accurate, but irrelevant.

Sabnock's voice came next. "Possibility exists that Tiamat has simply gone dormant. She does not perceive urgency. If her surroundings are stable, she ceases locomotion. She may simply be resting."

Shax added, "Cath Palug's absence is less excusable. He was monitored. Tracking should have remained viable unless the construct itself dissolved, which would result in a spiritual signature failure. This has not occurred."

Goetia turned to Dantalion, who had said nothing throughout the entire discussion so far. The being from the Trash Heap sat quietly.

Eventually, Goetia's voice broke the standstill.

"Opinion."

"They are not lost. They are nonessential until they are found. All things vanish in time. If they do not return, then they were unfit to retain presence. If they are delayed, they are still fit to die later."

Goetia turned his eyes away. The Trash Heap was always difficult to parse through conventional logic. Dantalion was not lying, but its words were not insightful.

"Dispatch a second relay to both their last coordinates. Integration team only. No combat. Observe, not retrieve. Tiamat will return on her own unless hindered. Cath Palug will undoubtedly follow her. Expect nothing. Deliver everything."

The Pillars shifted. The hive-mind parsed the commands down to their segments. No piece of data would be left fragmented.

---

"...so you're telling me, for the third time now, that this thing labeled 'Projected Expense Yield Return (Week 4)' is actually... not a typo, but her honest attempt at summarizing a fifty-million yen embezzlement trail that loops back to a one-woman ad campaign starring herself in a bikini holding anti-tank rifles?"

Angra blinked slowly, eyes squinting at the glowing screen in front of him. He leaned back into the ridiculously over-cushioned chair made of what felt like blue velvet and industrial-grade lies, one leg crossed over the other, the sniper rifle Vitch owned, still resting against his side like an unwanted pet cat.

"Am I reading this right? U-Olga, tell me I'm dreaming. Just shoot me. Or better yet, shoot her."

He gestured offhandedly to the very pink, very tense fox-eared woman at the end of the table, who was trying not to visibly sweat. Proud CEO of a private corporate shell of miscellaneous villainy, looked like she'd just been asked to perform a tax audit while having a knife pressed to her spine.

Standing in front of the conference room's gigantic LED screen like she had just been appointed CFO by divine right, U-Olga was not in the mood for jokes. "You are not dreaming. You are merely a witness to a tragedy," she replied sharply, tapping her metal pointer against the screen hard enough to cause a visible pixel glitch. "A tragedy of fiscal negligence, terminal branding idiocy, and something I hesitate to even call 'infrastructure.'"

"I built my brand on charm and results, you glorified bust of Venus in high heels," Vitch hissed, but there was no real venom in it. Everyone could literally hear the panic. Absolute, bottomless panic barely covered by years of manicured PR masks. "There's no way you people actually expect me to let you dissect my company like I handed it in for a group project—"

"You already did." Kama interrupted, reclining like a lazy cat draped across two seats and fiddling with a pink crystal she probably stole from someone's spiritual core. "We're in your building, in your conference room, logged into your system. There's even an ID badge here with your smiling face printed on it under the words 'Top-Level Access Override: Welcome, Lord Beast.' You made us stakeholders, darling. Or maybe you just didn't read the fine print when Angra hacked your mainframe out of boredom."

Angra raised a single hand, fingers twirling in a gesture of admission. "To be fair, I was drunk on her incompetence. It wasn't even real code. One firewall was labeled 'Do Not Enter <3' and her HR logs were just TikTok links and dead rabbits."

"Those rabbits were employees!" Vitch practically howled, slamming her hands on the table. "They were test products for emotional wellness capsules! You absolute cretins wouldn't understand modern development pipelines if they crawled out of your collective navels and bit you in the—"

"You haven't even allocated a long-term strategy plan," U-Olga cut in. "Your logistical branches are a joke. Your internal network is held together by digital duct tape and passive-aggressive Slack channels. Half of your assets are duplicated across three continents because you didn't check your warehouse duplication algorithms. And your security protocols are a PowerPoint presentation titled 'Trust Falls: Cyber Edition.'"

"Oh, but darling, she's doing her best. Surely you can appreciate how precious it is, watching her drown in her own ambitions. It's almost salacious." Kiara chimed in from the background.

"Shut up, you tax evasion succubus," Kama snarled. "Your idea of organizational structure is a reverse harem spreadsheet where the only KPI is 'orgasms per second.'"

"Is that... actually a real unit?" Angra muttered, amused, if only because he was trying very hard not to fall asleep. This whole thing was supposed to be a break from doing anything remotely useful. The fact that it had turned into a boardroom crucifixion was a cruel twist of irony he felt too tired to unpack. "I swear to every cruel god in the world, if I see another expense report labeled 'emotional damages from beauty-related microaggressions' with a seven-digit yen total, I'm taking over this company myself and selling it to oil barons for peanuts."

"I won't allow you to hijack my brand, you bunch of metaphysical hyenas in designer clothes!" Koyanskaya snapped, flailing now, genuine desperation bleeding through the mask. "I created a lifestyle empire! You wouldn't understand the grind!"

"You also labeled your own CEO office as 'Throne of Pleasure' on the blueprints." Draco landed a hit with her words, and the entire room froze as her voice cut through like ice. Her expression looked disgusted with every oxygen molecule that had passed through the building.

"You are an embarrassment to authority. A walking billboard for everything I have sworn to eradicate. You embody corruption, inactivity, and incompetence stapled together under the flimsy excuse of market disruption. I should have you publicly tried for the crime of existing."

"Geez, tell us how you really feel," Angra snorted. "You sound like a disappointed monarch catching her generals playing poker with the treasury."

Draco shot him a look that made him think that would end wars if it didn't start one first. "Do not compare me to this... sorry excuse for a mammal. I may be a Beast of Revelation, but I do not indulge in mockery of rule. I uphold its spirit."

Kama blinked slowly. "Wow, you actually made her mad enough to speak like an actual queen. You really are talented in failure, Vitch."

At this point, Vitch was practically curling into herself with her tail trembling and eyes darting like a cornered animal. "Stop—stop speaking like that! I worked so hard for this! You can't just walk in and dismantle everything!"

"Nah, there's no "work hard" in this, no you didn't."

U-Olga's eyes narrowed in sheer calculated professionalism. "That's precisely what I'm going to do. You don't even have a scalable analytics department. You don't have a logistics council. In the past, you hired yourself three times under different pseudonyms just to fake board meetings."

"They were all me," Vitch whispered, in a voice so small it almost didn't register. "I just changed outfits... I even gave them little nameplates..."

"I'm submitting a requisition to nationalize this company under interdimensional crisis relief," U-Olga said flatly. "Effective immediately. You will become a consultant, pending emotional rehabilitation."

"No! You can't just come into my house, tear my baby apart, and lecture me like a middle school principal! You're all monsters!" Koyanskaya shrieked.

"You are quite literally a fox demon born from humanity's worst tendencies," Angra said, yawning. "It's impressive how you're still shocked by our behavior."

"You're not taking my company. I don't care if you're Beasts, I don't care if you're gods, I'm not letting anyone touch my baby—"

"Koyanskaya." Kiara interjected, standing with all the casual authority of a mistress about to turn the lights off on a decadent affair, "I'm sure you'll find this entire experience... character-building. Provided you survive the trauma."

The silence that followed was broken only by Angra mumbling under his breath, "I really shouldn't have come back from scouting duty. Should've just stayed in that house, or the forest. At least there, the birds only shit on your head, not your quarterly budgets."

U-Olga ignored the chaos completely, slamming another folder onto the table. "Now, moving onto Section 4: Identity Dilution in Visual Branding. Why is your company logo, despite being discarded, a rotating gif of your face winking, surrounded by glitter text reading 'CEO of Everything'?"

Draco sighed loudly. "Someone kill me."

"You're unkillable," Kama said.

"Which is the problem."

The screen flickered.

---

Vatican Medical Quarters – East Wing, Restricted Access

Three bodies lay still, hooked to a mix of holy infusion tubes and bio-medical drips, encased in reinforced sanctified glass tubes intended only for emergencies involving Fallen strikes or demonic poisonings.

Xenovia Quarta. Irina Shidou. Griselda Quarta.

Field-hardened combat Exorcists, two of them rising prodigies with multiple field kills against high-class Devils and rogue Angels, and one of them among the five most formidable female Exorcists under the direct command of the Cardinal-Ranked Exorcist Command.

All three of them were critically injured in a battle that no one could explain. Not even the observers combing through the site after the fact. No energy residue, obvious magical traces, signs of a conventional Devil, or Fallen incursion.

Just one broken sword shattered and half-buried in a boulder near the site, its wielder found partially twisted underneath, her body covered in bruises so deep they spread past the visible muscle layer and blackened internal skin like rot.

Xenovia's body had been found with her spine twisted slightly to the left, bent unnaturally in a slump, with a pointy fracture across her humerus and elbow, and visible indentation in her rib cage indicating point-blank impact trauma. One of the recovery priests who'd extracted her from the boulder later said it looked like she had been thrown like a ragdoll and crushed into the stone. They used Resurrection Protocol III to revive her after her heartbeat flatlined for twenty-two seconds.

Irina had been found ten meters from her, her Excalibur Mimic beside her but convulsing. The initial diagnosis from the magical triage division was acoustic trauma. Almost, but higher, than human bombs or sonic magic. They found blood inside her ears and what looked like minor brain shockwave disruption. No spell could replicate that. She had no broken bones, but her limbs wouldn't stop twitching, and her heartbeat would spike randomly as if her body still expected impact.

Griselda was found furthest from the other two. Her ribs had collapsed, not merely broken but turned inward. Whatever had struck her, it had burned the outer cloth of her robes; holy-enchanted, consecrated cloth that was flame-retardant against even Underworld fire, and still managed to cook part of her stomach tissue underneath. They had to extract blackened bone fragments from near her diaphragm. Medical teams were honest in their internal notes: she shouldn't have lived past the first minute. The only thing keeping her from death was a combination of her own Stigma blessing and the proximity of her healing talisman activating on impact.

What unsettled the Vatican wasn't just the condition of the three women. It was the fact that the event had been untraceable. They had simply disappeared for hours. Then, five days ago, their unconscious bodies had been found in the middle of a lowland pine forest east of Vatican territory, unconscious and comatose, with no sign of who or what had attacked them.

The Exorcist deacons standing in the inner council chamber weren't used to this kind of silence. Three senior members of Heaven's most elite organization had been brought in on stretchers and locked into emergency healing modules, and no one in the entire Church knew what they had encountered. The scene hadn't even been closed when someone stole one of the oldest tomes in the archive division, a restricted text describing prototype Sacred Gears and conceptual theory. No security alerts had gone off. The seal had not been broken by force. It had simply vanished the same day the girls were brought in.

"What do we know?"

Came the voice of Deacon Miles, one of the older exorcists leaning heavily on a staff at the far end of the room. He was one of the few who'd served during a Devil incursion two decades ago.

"Irina's hearing is still not returning. We've tried neural sanctification pulses. Her ears don't respond to spirit resonance or medical regen. Her mind responds, but her auditory nerves might have been burned out. Not chemically or by magic. Almost ultrasonic."

"And Xenovia?" someone asked.

"Physically stable. But her brain shows recurring shock-pattern loops in her dream state. She's trapped in some kind of subconscious re-run. It's not a coma from injury. It's like her mind keeps replaying what happened, over and over again. Healing works, but it's slow, because the body's not accepting full regen rates."

"What about Griselda?"

A hesitation.

"She'll wake up eventually. Her lungs are the main concern. Whatever burned her hit her with enough force to boil the fat lining around her intestines. Her heart stopped once during transfer. I had to inject four healing prayers and emergency mana shots to keep her organs from imploding. The Exorcist in charge of her unit, Father Albrecht, collapsed trying to do simultaneous regeneration and still couldn't fix her diaphragm. We had to let science do the rest. She's breathing, but sedated. She'll live, but she's not talking anytime soon."

The room stayed quiet. No one wanted to be the one to say what everyone thought.

These weren't weak agents. These were elite. One of them wielded Excalibur Destruction. The sword was still in containment, shattered into several uneven fragments and buried in a sealed glass cube under high-lock protection, still radiating energy aftershock. The initial reading showed that the blade hadn't been unarmed, it had been shattered through use. The attacker had endured Excalibur Destruction and retaliated in a way that broke it.

Father Raphael leaned forward, fingers steepled. He was from the investigative branch of the Vatican and hadn't spoken yet.

"If it had been an Ultimate-class Devil, we would have felt the magical pressure from across the continent. If it had been a Fallen incursion, there'd be spiritual residue or angelic corruption. None of that was found. This wasn't something from the Underworld or Grigori."

"So what was it?" Deacon Miles asked again, quieter now.

Raphael glanced toward the sealed glass where the broken sword sat. Then his eyes flicked toward the secured book vault.

"We found a Sanctum Tome missing. Volume VII. The one with early-stage Sacred Gear theory and rejected hybrid models."

"You think someone used it to build something?"

"I think something wanted it. And they took it. Same day we found three of our best lying broken in the forest. No record of entry or sign of exit. I think someone, or something, walked in and walked out without any of Heaven's defenses even knowing it was there."

Silence again.

Father Graccus, from the Holy Engineering Division, adjusted his glasses.

"There's only one kind of thing that moves like that. Things that don't follow our system."

"... what are you thinking?"

No one answered.

In the silence, a light on Griselda's medical chamber blinked twice. Her mana levels were increasing. It was small. Weak. But consistent.

A deacon tapped a small comm-link.

"She might be regaining consciousness."

Everyone stood.

They didn't know it yet, but the Church's understanding of divine hierarchy had already cracked at the edges. And only the three women lying in those glass tubes had seen what had done it.

Chapter 13: Fall of the Star by Beasts

What happens to a creature when its purpose dies?

That question. That one. That old one.

Never the loud questions like "Why war?" or "Why do angels fall?" or "Why did He leave us?" because those questions are for the ones who still believe they're owed something. The real question is that one... quiet, strangled one that only comes when the dust settles and everything left is ash and silence. What does a being do when everything that justified its birth is no longer there? What does it become?

Kokabiel was born to burn with light. Made to pierce and blaze. He was a sword first, a soul second. From the first light of his creation in the Fifth Heaven, the Will placed him where war loomed because war was where Kokabiel saw the shape of order.

He never wept at the sight of battlefields. He never looked away from the ruins of cities below. Because even in those dying cries and the corpses buried under collapsing towers, he saw devotion.

Purpose.

He once knelt before that God because God believed in humanity's struggle, and Kokabiel took that belief into his bones like fire soaking into coal. When the wars raged, when the heretics cried, when humans prayed and bled and broke open the skin of the world just to prove they mattered, Kokabiel thought that was holy, and he stood with them in awe.

It's easy for the cowards now to pretend the Great War was all corruption and madness and pride. They hide their trembling spines behind masks of forgiveness and peace. Michael wears robes so white they blind the eye, but his silence during that final battle still reverberates like a scream in Kokabiel's head. Azazel hides in laboratories and lecture halls and calls it progress, binding a Sacred Gear to a teenager's wrist to make up for centuries of abandoned promises.

They lie to themselves, but Kokabiel remembers. He remembers what the skies looked like when Heaven burned. He remembers the moment the Throne went quiet, when the last Word of God echoed through the dimensions and then stopped. He remembers standing over the ruined corpse of the Four Kings of Hell and feeling no triumph because it meant nothing anymore.

The Will was gone. The meaning, stolen. God died.

When He died, Kokabiel wept.

It was the end of the only thing that kept his purpose clean. Without God, the war stopped being holy. It became dull and dirty. Bickering in the dirt. Humans stopped praying with terror in their hearts. The Angels stopped commanding. Even the Devils bled with disarray instead of hatred. Everything lost clarity.

Azazel calls it peace. Kokabiel calls it betrayal.

When Azazel abandoned the war effort, Kokabiel didn't see a man choosing mercy. He saw a coward ducking away from the fire the moment it asked too much of him. The moment it wasn't a game. Azazel spoke of science, said humans had potential, and that war only breeds more hatred. But Kokabiel got by heart that the humans who screamed out their Lord's name with sword in hand, who faced devils twice their size just to make a point. He remembered them as worthy. And when Azazel started arming children with artifacts and calling it enlightenment, Kokabiel saw mockery.

Mockery of everything they once fought for.

Michael… Michael was worse. The ever-pure, ever-graceful First Son, sitting in silence atop the white pillars, watching humanity decay beneath him and offering only blessings.

No punishment or pushback. He just watched and waited for sinners to come home. Kokabiel didn't hate Michael for being the better man. He hated him for giving up. For standing on the throne their Father left empty and choosing to smile instead of lead. For mourning God by doing nothing. For letting humans forget what judgment looked like.

Kokabiel doesn't live in Heaven anymore. And being honest, he is aware he doesn't live in the Grigori either. He exists outside both in the cracks left behind by the war that nobody wants to talk about anymore.

He has five pairs of wings. Black because the sky never gave them light again. His robe, stained and old, doesn't carry the weight of holy purpose. His shoulder guards still bear the golden streaks, not for ceremony, but to imitate what he once was. He lets his hair grow wild and his ears show sharp because he has nothing to hide from anymore.

Kokabiel is placed where holy light has long since withdrawn, and all he sees now is weakness. The Devils crawl behind contracts and peace treaties. The Angels sing lullabies to a world that no longer listens. The Fallen built shelters and technology like any of that mattered to the corpses they buried.

Only he truly remembers what the world used to be.

Only he remembers how humans screamed under the true sky.

Only he remembers how beautiful war was when it still meant something.

That's why he's here now. Choosing his place on the board again.

Because if they won't restart the war, then he will. Because if nobody will make humanity tremble again, then he'll do it himself.

Because if God is dead, then someone has to take His place.

That someone needs to be a creature who never forgot what God made him for.

It was now nearing sunset when the clouds parted just enough to cast orange streaks against the tops of the buildings.

He jumps and stands silently atop the small three-story structure, a simple office building tucked in between convenience stores and rundown apartments on a quiet side of Kuoh. The humans beneath went about their lives with the same slowness he had grown familiar with over the centuries.

Laughter, petty squabbles, the flicker of television lights in windows, the idle drifting of conversation, car engines humming as they passed through narrow streets, a child tugging at his mother's skirt while demanding sweets from a vending machine.

It was a world untouched by the memories he carried. The city had no knowledge of the fires that once devoured the skies, no remembrance of the blood that once drenched the heavens, and certainly no recognition of the God they still naively prayed to every Sunday.

Loud, brash, but nonetheless alive. They had no idea what was above them, who was watching, or what the night might bring.

For a moment, Kokabiel allowed himself to forget the stench of betrayal and the burn of pacifism. He allowed himself to stop thinking about Sacred Gears, the filth of politics, the silence of Heaven, and simply watched these humans as they existed in their ignorant, fragile peace.

These humans were orphans now, all of them, even if they hadn't yet realized it.

That realization was not what pained Kokabiel. What gnawed at his thoughts was how little it mattered to them. Humans who built churches in His name with trembling hands and broken tools, who cried into the dirt with bloodied palms begging for salvation, who marched into battle with His name carved into their shields, who died believing they were loved. That faith, that desperation, that raw hope...was all gone now.

He knew that the truth had been covered up. Michael and his ilk had kept the lie going, wrapped the world in a fragile blanket of hope and heaven, pretending that their Father was still on the throne. Because the moment they admitted He was gone, the moment the truth leaked into the cracks, the entire system would collapse.

Kokabiel clenched his jaw. The sickening part was that Michael knew this would happen. The archangel chose deception over truth, peace over justice, stagnation over revelation. Others were no better, pretending to champion knowledge and progress while refusing to use that knowledge for what mattered.

Kokabiel looked down again. The sun had nearly dipped beyond the rooftops, darkened just enough to cast a deep shadow across the street below.

Tonight would be the beginning.

The heirs of Gremory and Sitri enjoyed their time on Kuoh's grounds. Spoiled Devil heiresses pampered by their clans, bathed in their ancestors' prestige. One was obsessed with chessboard games and sentimentality, the other with structure, legacy, and control. Both were soft, both symbols of the new peace, and both were products of that pathetic treaty their ancestors signed after God's death.

That treaty, that damned compromise, had turned the battlefield into a negotiation table and replaced swords with politics.

His hand slid into the folds of his robe, feeling the familiar pulse of the stolen Excalibur fragments. Three of them. Torn from the Church, ripped from the vaults where fools tried to lock away power they no longer understood. Valper Galilei had been useful. So had the human, Freed. Insane, broken, but useful. That was the thing about human trash: they were unpredictable enough to serve a purpose, even if they didn't survive to see it through.

Tonight, those swords would taste Devil blood again.

Let Michael stay silent. Let Azazel continue burying himself in his toy box. Kokabiel would bring fire back into the sky. He would force the factions to stop hiding behind treaties and confront the truth of what they were.

Angels. Devils. Fallen. They were not politicians. They were weapons. Soldiers. Creatures forged in the fires of conflict. Peace had made them soft. War would make them strong again.

His wings fluttered once. The wind brushed past his face, carrying with it the scent of the city's evening air. Somewhere below, a bell rang as a door opened into a small convenience store. The humans had no idea that their sky was about to crack open again. They did not know that the second Great War had already begun the moment he stole the swords and set foot on this city's soil.

He turned his gaze toward the distant Kuoh Academy campus, hidden just beyond the skyline.

The Gremory girl would die first. Then Sitri. Let their clans howl. Let the Devils rage. It would all burn. Everything would burn.

He had just turned away, wings already halfway unfurled with the intention of returning to the small rooftop he had claimed for himself, when his ears caught a distant voice, coming from the shadows of an alleyway just below the building's edge.

He paused.

The voice wasn't anything important in itself; it was the name that made him stop.

Raynare.

It was one of the humans, no, three of them. Male and two females, standing in the middle of a street that should have been empty at this hour with the sun crawling beneath the skyline. The name Raynare was mentioned again, and there was no mistake in it. He hadn't heard from that little piece of trash in almost a week now. She had been sent ahead with Dohnaseek, Mittelt, and Kalawarner to secure an entry point near the old church, but her contact had gone dark on the sixth night. He thought she had just failed her task and died in some pathetic scuffle. But now, three unfamiliar beings were throwing her name around as if it was their business.

He didn't like being kept in the dark. That alone was enough to make him change direction.

When he descended, the wind rippled and scattered loose papers and plastic wrappers from the ground like trash before a storm, not even trying to hide his approach. He wanted them to see him coming. The moment he landed with a loud crash of cracked pavement beneath his boots, he stood tall and looked over the trio.

For a moment, he thought he had jumped in on a mistake. His senses weren't usually this off, and yet, the pressure coming from these three... no, that wasn't right. They didn't look like much.

One was a young man wearing casual street clothes, hands stuffed in his pockets and looking like he hadn't slept in days, face covered in glyphs. His eyes had that dull, uninterested glare that reminded him of the dregs in the back alleys of the Underworld. The second was a woman with pink hair, formal perfume clinging to her with a scent he couldn't place, smiling in that cheap way that most demons did when they wanted to fool someone. She looked like the type who played the long con. The last was taller than the others, dressed in something out of place; a yellow dress meant for Sundays, worn like it was armor. Her face was cold, chin slightly lifted in that arrogant stillness he only saw in those who had nothing left to prove.

But it was the presence.

Power.

Deep.

Chained like an abyss.

Power that shouldn't be walking around in human disguise and yet it sat under their skin like caged monsters gnawing at their ribs.

His eyes narrowed instantly. His wings spread again. They weren't human. They were hiding behind magic, illusions that were thin enough to fool insects, but not him.

"Speak. You mentioned Raynare. What do you know about her?" Kokabiel demanded.

The young man didn't even raise his head, just rolled his eyes upward in Kokabiel's direction with a sigh that sounded entirely bored. "Huh. So you're Kokabiel," he said, voice rough and dry.

"Didn't expect you to be the type to come down over a little name-drop. Is that how you run your army with this much paranoia?"

Kokabiel didn't appreciate the tone. He stepped forward, just enough to cast a long shadow across all three. "I'll ask again. Where is Raynare?"

The pink-haired woman chuckled. The sound was short, mean, and condescending. "Still thinking like someone who has subordinates left. That's cute. You really haven't heard anything these last six days?" Her tone shifted slightly, falsely innocent. "She broke into a house she shouldn't have. We read her little mind, saw everything. The whole sorry little squad. And that plan of yours? It's about as subtle as a garbage fire in a cathedral."

That earned Kokabiel's full attention. His eyes flicked between them. "You. You saw her memories?"

"Every last trembling piece," the corners of her lips twitched. "Don't worry, she's alive. Technically. She's... recovering. Some would call it catatonic."

That was when the other finally spoke. "She entered a place that was not hers. So we took her. Your other little followers didn't survive. We had no use for them."

His eyebrow raised. "You killed them?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

Angra scratched the back of his head and shrugged. "It wasn't even a fight. More like a street cleaning. They came in loud, died louder, didn't learn anything in between."

His gaze suddenly focused now, faintly sharper than before.

"You're planning to start a war, right? Something about killing the Gremory and Sitri heirs to force a response out of the other Factions, maybe push the Angels and Devils to throw their armies back into the pit. That the idea?"

Kokabiel's body went stiff. His eyes narrowed and his voice lost all traces of mockery. "How do you know that?"

The boy didn't respond right away. He pulled his sleeves down and stared at his hands like he was checking his nails, looking at something else, though Kokabiel could see glyphs faintly glowing over his skin in strange patterns.

He raised his head, and his grin was ugly with contempt. "You think you're clever. Like this plan's original; kill a few brats and watch the world go up in smoke. I've seen that thought in the heads of so many rotting corpses that I've lost count. You want to bring back the glory days, paint the sky red with wings and blades, and prove your little species is the strongest. You really think war makes you pure."

"...What are you?"

The question landed in silence. It was ignored completely.

Draco's voice cut through next. "You claim the war will raise the Fallen's status and believe violence will force the Three Factions into battle again. Your mistake was that you've calculated nothing about the scale of change, the shift in global order, or the population collapse that would follow. There is no strategic benefit except emotional satisfaction. You chase destruction like a bored animal. You do not care about structure, hierarchy, or stability. You hunger for fire, even if it burns your own nest."

Kokabiel frowned. "You assume I care about human stability? Their order? They live blind under a sky whose God is dead, whose Angels have become caretakers of lies! They deserve to burn for forgetting their place."

The three Beasts stiffened and went abruptly quiet. Unknown to the Fallen, the information about God's status has finally given them answers.

Nevertheless, Angra shook his head wryly. "Do humans even know about that? You think your little war would teach them something? They'd die not knowing why. Your target audience won't even be alive long enough to be outraged. You called this righteous rebellion when it's nothing more the a tantrum."

Kokabiel's hands clenched into fists. "Oh, and you believe I need your approval?"

Koyanskaya tilted her head in contemptuous sweetness. "No. But we do need to know whether we'll need to clean up your mess early, or wait until it ruins something important. I don't care who you kill, darling. But if your hobby starts to affect our business, we'll bury it with you."

"You didn't answer my question," Kokabiel hissed. "Who are you? What faction are you with?"

The question hung in the air, left unanswered again. They had no intention of giving him that. He could see it in their eyes that they didn't fear him. They hadn't even drawn weapons or taken stances. They were looking down at him with the repose of higher predators watching a smaller animal bark.

A disregard.

"If your war begins, you will not reach the second day." Draco said.

Kokabiel gaped in disbelief, unsure if it was a threat, a promise, or a forecast. He became aware he had been intimidated. Him? Kokabiel the Fallen Angel of Morning Star?! HIM?!

—Suffocating presence.

It hadn't been unleashed, but it was bleeding through the cracks in their disguises like heat from a furnace. He was staring at those who didn't care about his ambitions.

He gritted his teeth and kept his posture high. He would not be lectured by monsters who hid behind illusions. He had a mission, a cause. He would make them all remember the glory of the Fallen Angels.

He didn't realize it, but he had already begun to back away.

A crater of fragmented asphalt and shattered sewer lines exploded beneath Kokabiel who launched himself into the sky, and a ruptured car, parked unknowingly too close to the epicenter, flipped twice before skidding across the street. Streetlights bent in reverse from the backlash, and glass storefronts blew outward from the shockwave that followed his sudden burst of speed.

He didn't need time to process what these three were. He had already accepted, with a war-hardened instinct sharpened over thousands of years, that these weren't devils in disguise or some Eastern pantheon brats sneaking into his territory. These three were worse.

He blasted down a rain of concentrated light spears in over a dozen in a second, more coming right after. The surrounding pavement melted from the sheer heat. Everything in a forty-meter radius around the impact zone cracked like dried skin, with telephone poles splitting down the center and crumbling. The light rained from above and fired from his palms simultaneously, his body moving too fast for human or even average supernatural eyes to follow.

The three separated, effortlessly widening the distance.

Kokabiel wasn't delusional. The moment he felt that suffocating spiritual pressure from them, he understood. This wasn't a clean fight. These three didn't stand for anything. That alone made them more threatening than anything he had faced, and it didn't matter. He had chosen the moment. His hand was already played and now he had to make it count. There was no turning back from this confrontation. He hadn't felt this much blood in his head in centuries.

The boy was the first he targeted. Kokabiel narrowed both hands at him like aiming a crossbow, his entire upper body crackling with condensed white light that pulsed with deadly voltage. Angra didn't even move, just tilted his head a little, one foot slightly behind the other in an exaggeratedly sluggish stance.

Kokabiel fired with no delay. The air split with a howl, the beam striking the concrete underneath Angra's feet, not grazing him but tearing into the foundation like a blowtorch melting through metal. The explosion snapped through the air with a detonation like an entire fuel truck going up. Concrete split into chunks, a light pole hurtled skyward like a missile, and a utility box exploded from the surging feedback.

"You really want to do this dance with someone whose entire life is a walking trauma report? I thought your kind evolved past chasing suicide."

Angra appeared behind him mid-detonation, body unscathed, voice flat and contemptuous.

Kokabiel spun, a steel-feathered wing slashing through the air like a guillotine. The feathers expanded mid-swing into dozens of glinting blades whistling with deadly edges. Angra ducked, casually, one of the blades nicked his shoulder. Blood sprayed but it didn't bother him. He looked at it and laughed. "You got me. Was that your finishing move? Should I fall down now, or is there another light show queued up?"

The response wasn't a taunt to Kokabiel's pride. It was a red target glowing in his mind. The Fallen Angel roared, voice of turmoil that went deeper than the moment and than the insult. It was the rage of someone who never forgot the humiliation of being told no by Azazel, the humiliation of being told peace was a better option than war. That raw, bitter emotion erupted again as he shot forward, crashing into Angra with a fist wrapped in pure light, slamming him through a solid wall. The structure exploded on impact, two buildings collapsing inward from the shock. Rebar twisted and hung out like severed veins, and a nearby fire hydrant burst, spraying water wildly across the burning wreckage.

But Angra wasn't done. The rubble shifted, and Kokabiel stepped back, only for the ruins to explode outward from within. Angra stood there, not even a slight bruise in sight, but still with that half-lidded, haughty expression like the world owed him a reason to care. Kokabiel's hand clenched tighter. His attacks could annihilate mid-tier Devils. He outlasted the Great War for a reason. He didn't survive because he ran, it's because he burned everyone in front of him. But none of it mattered. The difference here wasn't in numbers. It was in scale. Like trying to boil an ocean with a handful of coal.

The woman in yellow walked with utter disregard. Kokabiel blasted her with another spear, this one so dense it left a white streak across the sky. Draco raised one hand and batted it aside like brushing lint from her sleeve, and it hit a building behind her instead, vaporizing it in a blinding white burst that reduced six floors to ash in under two seconds. Metal warped from the heat, and the entire structure collapsed with a thunderclap of debris.

Her red eyes locked on Kokabiel.

"Wasteful you are. Swing blindly in search of a war no one cares about, heh."

Kokabiel gritted his teeth, blood dripping from his mouth as he charged again, swinging his blade down in a massive arc. It crashed against a thin transparent wall of draconic energy that didn't so much absorb the impact as reject it from existence. The force of the collision still split the road. Park trees were uprooted, the concrete tore in massive slabs, and parked cars flew into the air.

Draco responded with a single heel-kick to Kokabiel's torso. It wasn't fast but the moment it connected, Kokabiel was launched back like a projectile, smashing through four structures in a straight line. The fourth collapsed, dust filling the sky. Still, he stood back up, coughing, laughing, bloodied and grinning.

The building before was suddenly gone.

Angra blinked and indeed, the infrastructure wasn't there. Rubble crackled under the scorched wind. Half the residential block was engulfed in a blinding dome of light. Kokabiel suddenly raised both arms in the sky and laughed while releasing enough light to melt entire rows of urban infrastructure into deformed iron slag.

Human screams ruptured the moment the radiance kissed the pavement. Glass shattered inside homes far from the epicenter, and survivors crawling from the debris found themselves coughing blood or screaming over their bubbling skin. Kokabiel's grin deepened when he noticed the silence replacing their noise.

"You gods in animal masks, I wonder—" Kokabiel's mouth spat a low-throated growl as he descended, hovering above what remained of Angra and Draco's former position. His wings scattered sparks as each beat flung blades of light into whatever structures had the audacity to still be standing. He didn't care where Angra was anymore. He just wanted to hit something until it exploded.

Angra had moved with his posture lacking tension. The heat of the Fallen Angel's destruction passed near enough to singe his shirt at the edge but didn't burn him. Watching humans die that way... hadn't sat right with him. He didn't know why, and that fact annoyed him more than the actual destruction.

The moment's lapse allowed Kokabiel to catch him.

The sword came down from overhead. Angra didn't turn as he lifted one arm and slapped backward. The contact sounded like a wet snap.

Not because of the hit's power. Because of what came after.

Kokabiel's face froze mid-snarl. His sword missed by inches. It was unfortunate that his ignorant mind failed to register the next step.

In that one second of touch, Angra's cursed skin dragged Kokabiel through visions he hadn't been prepared to receive.

Men bury their sons for gold. Women kneel under priest-blessed fists. Children sold for chains. The depth of betrayal between friend and friend. Kingdoms lifted by slaves. Empires built on genocide.

Each moment was clear about the personal and real blur of suffering.

Kokabiel stumbled back, roaring as he clutched his face. His wings flared, trying to shield his mind more than his body. It was rage. Pure, sharpened rage at what he had just seen. It defiled his faith in the concept of war. It made his ideals feel manufactured. He hated it.

Before he could recover, Draco crashed into him with flames that warped the air into unrecognizable shapes. Kokabiel's two lower wings burned into cracked ash as he crashed through five concrete structures in under five seconds. One was a reinforced parking structure that pancaked instantly from the sheer weight of their bodies colliding through its spine. Sparks exploded. Gas pipes ignited. More humans died. Several blocks lost power. The city looked diseased, bleeding fire and smoke from a dozen torn arteries.

Draco didn't let him escape. Her punches were driven by need. She burned because the enemy's presence demanded destruction, not because she enjoyed it. She never did. Fighting was loathsome. But refusing to eliminate what should not exist was worse.

"You look like you're proud of the filth you represent." She said, elbowing him hard enough in the ribs to make his body seize. Her knee lifted into his chest. Her foot shattered his jaw sideways. She didn't pause to comment further.

"Fall."

Kokabiel retaliated with a growl and expanded his wings, each pair ejecting hundreds of razor-light feathers that exploded into the walls and nearby collapsed streets. The attack wasn't meant for her but to shake her off. Distract her. Injure everything around her so she'd be forced to care.

She took the damage and kept coming. Her skin split. Her dress was already charred. Her hair was stained with ash. Her silence made the atmosphere feel heavier. Kokabiel managed to drive one of his light-forged sabers through her abdomen, but her hand crushed the hilt before he could push it deeper, and the blade cracked like crystal under pressure.

The ground below their fight had sunken, and half of the street collapsed inward. Multiple metro lines buckled from the quake. Fires spread underground. The infrastructure would take years to recover, but no one here would be able to tell that story. People had died too fast. Children, elderly, officers, and civilians had all evaporated into light or been buried in flame or crushed by debris. No warning. No mercy. Kokabiel was enjoying this battlefield. It was what he craved.

He coughed blood when Draco slammed her heel into his diaphragm. She didn't look pleased or bored. She looked cold.

Angra appeared at the edge of a fallen structure, sitting cross-legged on the remains of a half-melted van. "You're putting too much effort into this. You hate fighting."

Draco didn't answer. She crushed Kokabiel's wrist under her boot and tossed his own sword through his left thigh. He howled.

"I'm just saying," Angra continued, watching the clouds swirl above the chaos. "It's kind of impressive that he's still fighting, even after that. Guy's a cockroach. Stupid, suicidal, insane, battle-hungry cockroach. But a cockroach."

Kokabiel's eyes snapped toward Angra again. The expression had changed. There was fear in it now.

... Fear of helplessness. He had known he would die someday. But he had always imagined it being after a glorious battle where his enemies bled just as much. He hadn't imagined being turned into a punching bag by things he didn't even understand.

Though, he was not dead yet. He exploded outward in one last burst of light, forming swords in both hands and charged Draco without hesitation. His mouth dripped blood, his wings broken and useless, screaming like a zealot in heat.

Draco met him midair and caught his blade barehanded.

Next second, Kokabiel found himself in rubble out of nowhere. He clawed his way out of the building's debris, the concrete cracking beneath his boots as he stepped forward. His chest rises and falls from unrestrained fury. His bruised face was a mess of dust, dried blood, and cracked skin.

Draco's red eyes traced every twitch of Kokabiel's body, mentally figuring the vectors, the speed of wing movement, checking for the angle of his shoulder rotation. He was about to launch. He was already in the process of making the air around his wings vibrate with the frequency of a light-based acceleration jump. She had dealt with this before. He would not vanish instantly; there was a microscopic delay, a fractional shift in his core body temperature when he did it, one that a normal being wouldn't catch.

She vanished from her spot before his wings beat once. In the next instant, her fist collided with his jaw, dragging the rest of his body across three empty cars parked along the side of the road, their hoods folding like paper as his body tore through them. There was a faint screech of metal, a few sparks. The cars ignited behind him when his steel feathers lost control and flared outwards. The moment he stopped skidding across the pavement, he jumped without hesitation, launched himself into the air, not caring if his face was bleeding or if three of his feathers were torn loose from impact. His back arched mid-flight and he screamed the incantation into the sky in Enochian, his voice ringing out like broken bells, a dead language being given breath by rage and desperation.

Above him, light formed. Saturated, layered. Deep red lightning laced itself between the spear's spiraling form, and the mass of it continued to grow, forming a shape easily larger than the entire Kuoh Academy complex. It wasn't elegant, it didn't have the neat geometry of the magic the Angels once used. This was distorted. The spear vibrated like it didn't want to exist, and that alone made the clouds above Kuoh peel away in circular fragments, exposing raw sunlight that shouldn't have reached this part of Japan at this hour.

Angra watches this from the ground, one hand in his pocket, one foot idly stepping on the shards of broken pavement. He stared up. The sky was being peeled like someone was carving into the atmosphere with a knife. He rubbed at the corner of his eye and clicked his tongue.

"This guy really doesn't know when to give up. Honestly... it's kind of sad."

He sound irritated.

His arm moved without much ceremony. No air-pressure shift or visible energy output. A nameless demonic blade formed mid-fall from the sky into his palm. Just cutting intent, the kind that didn't care what species you were or how many years of war you'd survived. He threw it upward without lining his shoulder or rotating his torso. A lazy throw. Straight, unspectacular.

There was a hot sting.

Kokabiel's mind processed it slower than his nerves did.

Kokabiel didn't see it until it passed through his arm. The limb was no longer attached to his shoulder. It was spinning through the air, blood arcing around it like a ribbon. He didn't even see the blade. It had just happened. It fell, still crackling with residual light energy, before the spear could fully stabilize.

The second Kokabiel's balance faltered, Draco launched again. The impact forced a shockwave in all directions, shattering every remaining window in the five-block radius, toppling lampposts, snapping power lines that fizzled and sparked across the ground like serpents. The spear above broke in half as the focus behind it faltered. It bled light from its center and then exploded mid-air, the raw pressure melting the top layer of a dozen rooftops around Kuoh.

The explosion was enough to crater the entire skyline, and even though it didn't hit the ground directly, the concussive force alone flattened a parking lot filled with school buses. The tyrant dragon, without a single change in expression, tore through the smoke cloud with her hands outstretched like claws and slammed Kokabiel back down.

His body collided with a convenience store wall. The side, the one that still had power, so the sign flickered once as it exploded behind him, embedding fluorescent glass into his wings. The building itself buckled inward like a tin can, before collapsing forward entirely. Fire burst from the windows, illuminating Kokabiel's twisted form as he tried to pull himself from the wreckage with his remaining arm. His body twitched. He couldn't scream because the air in his lungs refused to move anymore.

This was execution Roman-style brutalized.

Draco looked down at him like one would look at a rotting animal that had wandered into a temple. Her fingers curled once, testing if he'd even try to move again.

Angra stepped behind her as he casually spun another blade that hadn't yet been thrown. His voice was completely absent of sympathy.

"For a guy who lived through the bloodbath up there, you're really disappointing. Big talk..."

He scratched his neck, then sighed.

"... Guess not."

The street Kokabiel was embedded in began to collapse around him. The heat from the earlier explosion had destabilized the gas lines underneath. One wrong tremor was all it took. The earth split, flames erupted, and the twisted metal under the concrete folded inward. Screams echoed from a nearby subway access that had caved in from the shock. He could hear sirens far away, but they were muted by the sound of rushing fire and cracking stone.

Kokabiel coughed out blood. His vision was doubled. He tried to rise. Draco raised her foot, slowly, deliberately. She wasn't rushing this.

Then the shot rang out.

A bullet hit him above the brow.

Draco blinked as she felt liquid on her face and wiped the blood off her cheek with the back of her hand.

She stared down at the fallen corpse with displeasure. This is what she gets after being forced to dirty her hands for someone beneath her standards. The Fallen Angel of Morning Star died before he could scream, and that was bothersome. He didn't even put up a last word. Disrespectful, insolent, and most of all, useless.

Angra trudged over to her side with an unhurried gait and crouched low next to Kokabiel's head and poked it once with his index finger.

"He really thought he had a shot." He flicks some blood off his knuckle, the crimson splatter dotting the cracked pavement like another layer of filth on top of the wreckage. "Imagine the disappointment, five thousand years of carrying a grudge only to be capped like a mutt with mange."

Draco didn't humor his commentary. Her expression remained unchanged as she pulled Kokabiel's body by one ankle, uncaring that the twitching remnants of broken wing bones scraped against the ground with each slow dag. "He should be dissected and cataloged for the record. We can throw what's left to the dogs once Beast I is finished."

Angra stood and stared at her dragging the corpse across the cracked intersection with zero grace. "You're gonna pull out his spinal cord like a book spine and expect Goetia to alphabetize it?"

"He'll do it if he wants to keep his lab." Draco's tone was dry. She didn't glance back. "A job worth doing is one worth not doing again."

Before Angra could reply, a soft thud caught their ears, followed by the clicking of heels. Koyanskaya landed with theatrical poise from the rooftop. Her fluffy tail flicked twice, pink strands of hair dancing over her shoulders. She adjusted her suit jacket that looked one sneeze away from bursting at the buttons and grinned with teeth too white for someone who just made a man's skull explode from a kilometer away.

"Well now," she chirped, patting the clouds of dust off her scarf that showered her during the battle, "what a workout. I barely even stretched."

Draco turned her head only enough to confirm the voice. "You missed the start."

"You ended it too fast," Koyanskaya shrugged. "I was savoring the drama. Watching him panic made the wait worth it."

Angra walked past the corpse with his hands behind his head, cracking his neck. "You took the kill, so don't start your victory dance. We were about to beat him to death with his own femur."

Koyanskaya chuckled but didn't deny it. "Efficiency, darling. A clean headshot saves me the ammo and the energy. Besides, he wasn't worth anything beyond the mess he made." She kicked Kokabiel's severed arm and it skidded into a chunk of destroyed rebar. "He was all bark. No reason to keep him yapping."

They were about to go on when something peculiar tugged their awareness. When their eyes concentrated, they noticed that the streets had gone deathly quiet.....

.....it lingers after the screaming stops because no one's left to make a sound.

Rubble still collapsed in the distance, fire still licked across shattered windows, and power lines sparked across the broken frames of homes and commercial lots. Concrete was cracked wide open from the previous impact, sinkholes forming where foundations once stood. Flattened cars lined the street like discarded cans, and a toppled school building smoldered at the far edge of their vision.

They all halted walking.

None of them said anything for some unknown reason.

Koyanskaya folded her arms and blinked. Her smile had froze. Draco stopped mid-step, and for the first time since the fight, looked around without focusing on an opponent. The devastation was not abstract anymore. The district had been leveled. They were standing in the middle of it. Flames hissed behind them, and smoke curled toward the sky without shape. There were people under that rubble. Others crawling out. Survivors leaning over unmoving bodies. Distant sounds of whimpering, calls for help, and choking sobs filtered through the air.

Angra's eyes scanned the perimeter. He can feel his stomach drop in that way only he could experience, not from pity, but from the gnawing weight of emotion radiating off every ruined structure. He didn't need to look at the corpses. He could already feel what they left behind. The psychic residue of grieving mothers, collapsed fathers, children buried under pillars, some dead, some not. The pain clung to the air like molasses. It crawled up his skin and into the glyphs etched across his arms. Every inch of him itched.

The suffering was raw, and it tasted too real.

He muttered low, voice dulled. "There it is."

His fellow Beasts didn't respond. Draco let her arms hang by her sides. Her face had not changed, but her eyes did by narrowing only by a hair. She saw the damage and made the estimate of whether it had been worth it. Whether the target justified the scale. She didn't reach a conclusion. She simply noted that it was wasteful. Sloppy.

Koyanskaya reached up and scratched her ear with a finger, and her smile now faint, uncomfortable. "Whoops."

Then they all stood there in awkward quiet. A trio of monsters who had just erased a small district and were now slowly realizing the extent of the mess. None of them apologized. None of them voiced regret. But they didn't talk either. They watched a bloodied man try to lift a broken concrete slab with both arms shaking. They watched a woman kneeling in front of a crushed car, screaming into her own hands.

Angra whispered to himself something indecipherable. Draco turned from the wreckage and continued dragging Kokabiel's corpse toward the far street without slowing.

"We didn't breach the contract," she said flatly. "He did. The collateral was his burden."

Angra didn't argue. She might have come to that decision after searching for an excuse. Koyanskaya fell into step behind them and didn't bother whistling like she sometimes did.

Koyanskaya's rabbit-like ears twitched before her head even moved. Her left eye flicked toward the high sky like a sensor laser-locking onto heat. She stopped mid-step, cutting off whatever smug remark she had queued next, and turned her body with such unbothered grace that it might've seemed casual.

"We're being watched," she muttered flatly, not even amused.

"Don't think me and Empress didn't know that."

Draco had already turned her gaze upward. Her eyes narrowed. She could tell without relying on any sensory ability that someone was descending, which meant they wanted to be seen and be noticed. Her posture didn't change and her body was already rejecting the idea of interaction before the intruder even opened his mouth. Her sense of danger didn't come from panic or fear, but irritation that something was about to waste her time.

Angra tilted his head back and squinted into the sky. "Well, what do you know. Another one who thinks he's important."

By the time he landed, the ground had already stopped shaking from his impact, but the silence between the three Beasts was louder than any explosive entrance could hope to be. Vali's landing wasn't flashy. It was clean, but the subtle crack under his feet told them all he could've made a crater if he'd wanted to. His expression remained calm, slightly annoyed, but mostly unreadable as his eyes darted around the scorched battlefield.

The street was half-collapsed. The buildings were shredded. Rubble dust still hung in the air in patches like a fog that refused to settle. Human remains left and right. And in the center of this field of ruin, Kokabiel's corpse lay stiff and cooling.

Vali's pupils landed on it and didn't move for a long moment.

Kokabiel, a threat to the world, was now nothing more than a crumpled mass of dead meat lying beside three strangers.

Vali's body didn't flinch. He wasn't the type to express surprise so easily. But the cautious shift of his stance betrayed a subconscious reaction. Albion had already growled something in his head. Something about how standing too close to those three would be the kind of mistake that ended a story early. Albion rarely used that tone.

Koyanskaya tilted her head. "You reek of sulfur and arrogance. Devil?" Her voice came out flat but with a metallic edge. Her nose crinkled like the stench alone was enough to ruin her mood.

Draco didn't bother looking at him. "Name," she demanded.

Vali didn't respond immediately. He was registering each of their presences and realizing none of them resembled any faction he was aware of. Kokabiel was dead. Killed, cleanly, and brutalized by entities who weren't Devils, Angels, or Fallen. That meant whoever they were, they weren't bound by the power struggles he understood. They were something else entirely.

He didn't ignore the demand. "Vali," he answered plainly. "Vali Lucifer."

Angra blinked, then snorted a breath out of his nose with a sound that wasn't exactly a laugh but wasn't serious either. "Lucifer. Cute. How many of you people walk around with that surname and think it's a personality?"

Vali didn't acknowledge the jab. "I came here because Kokabiel was moving on his own and ignoring the peace agreements. His intent was to start a war using the humans as a playground. I was going to kill him. Seems like you three got here first."

Koyanskaya tapped a finger against her cheek. "We didn't just get here. He screamed for about two minutes before his brain painted the walls. I got blood in my eye, by the way." She didn't blink. "You were late."

Draco's red eyes turned fully to Vali now. "You came to kill him, but you failed to do so because your actions were slower than your words." She frowned. "If you intended to act, you should have acted. Not explain yourself to strangers who do not answer to you."

Vali's brow lowered. "I'm not explaining myself. I asked what happened."

"You're standing on what happened," Angra said, now walking around the corpse casually. He gave it a soft kick. "Kokabiel picked a fight, talked too much, we gave him a beat-down, got ventilated by Sniper Foxy here, and now his soul's going to become our friend's next test subject." His tone stayed dry. "You're welcome, by the way. We saved your dumb mission."

Koyanskaya lifted her hand and made a fake little salute with two fingers. "Also, I'd appreciate a cleanup team. The police are gonna be in cardiac arrest once they see the corpse count. They're already losing it trying to tape off the perimeter." She spoke with the indifference of someone ordering coffee.

Vali didn't say anything at first. He just stared at each of them in sequence. Angra was the least threatening at first glance, but his presence didn't register right. It felt null, almost like staring into an empty hole in the world. Koyanskaya's aura made Albion hiss again, something about apex predator behavior wrapped in playful masking. It's the same with the other woman who causes him to be threatened by another dragon. Draco didn't give off anything unstable or reckless. His own instinct told him she was the most dangerous.

Vali eventually said, "You're not from here."

Draco didn't dignify the obvious. "That is irrelevant."

"It isn't. You're not from here, yet you killed Kokabiel without a word to any of the factions."

"You're speaking to entities that don't take orders," Angra said without emotion. "Or give them."

Vali's fist clenched once. "So you're enemies."

"Wrong," Koyanskaya corrected, raising her finger. "We're not enemies. We're worse. We're unaffiliated."

Draco's tone was firmer now. "We are not subject to your politics or the illusions you call authority. The Fallen started a war and we erased its architect. Be grateful we didn't erase the rest of you along with him."

Vali stared. Then looked at the cratered street, the destroyed buildings, the blown-open cars, and the faint smears of charred organic matter lining the pavement. Do these three care for humans? He didn't ask.

Angra likely noticed his last rain of thought when his eyes weren't on Vali anymore. His gaze had shifted again, scanning the horizon. He could feel it crawling under his skin. Somewhere behind the smoke and sirens were people who had nothing to do with the fight, but had suffered the cost anyway... humans bleeding sorrow into the world, and their pain tasted old and sour.

He scratched his ear and kept his voice light. "By the way, this city's probably gonna collapse if we don't leave soon. Unless you feel like explaining to some reporter why their uncle's skeleton is sticking out of a grocery store roof."

No one laughed. Not even Vitch.

Vali's mouth tightened. His thoughts were clear now. He couldn't beat them. Not in a fair fight, not even with Albion's Scale Mail. Maybe not even with backup. He would remember their faces. He would report this to Azazel. But for now, he needed to survive.

He didn't make any declarations.

He watched as the three disappeared like phantoms.

Chapter 14: Bæt, Beast L

Kokabiel's corpse hit the floor of the Beasts' house with a noise that resembled a wet sack of meat more than any respectable carcass. The liquid sloshed on the carpet and jerked a few heads upward.

The corpse was barely recognizable; wings shredded like chicken left too long in boiling oil, and the top of his skull concaved in with an evident entry wound scorched clean through. There was no mistaking whose handiwork that was.

Draco didn't say anything as she stepped past the body, expression sour, eyes with disapproval at even having to drag back the mess. She had said her piece already outside. A silent flare of her nostrils was the only sign she was done with this joke of a campaign.

Koyanskaya followed behind her, rolling her shoulders as though she had just come from a spa rather than a battlefield... a battlefield she put less contribution... There wasn't a drop of blood on her except for specks of dust. She had made sure of that.

"It felt more like pest control than a mission. At least let me pretend it was worth the ammunition." she muttered.

Angra dragged his feet and rubbed at a nonexistent itch on his neck. His shirt was half torn, stained with ash, but he wore the same grin that told everyone he wasn't going to take responsibility for anything. "We were gonna ask permission, First, promise. Then he started throwing spears, and well... We figured: better now than during dinner."

"Assessment from Marchosias: Variant XII had a 94.6% confirmed kill rate and contained all collateral to the industrial zone."

"Disappointment from Furfur. Primary target expired before deployment window initiated."

"Conclusion from Armory Pillars: Mission parameters were not fulfilled. All effort rendered null. Current emotional state: sulking."

From the far end of the room, the Demon Pillar base designated Armory mope in grumpiness. Not one weapon was deployed. It had taken them seventy-three simulations and multiple rerouting strategies to plan how best to engage Kokabiel without leveling more than four sectors of Kuoh. All of it invalidated. All of it was useless.

Goetia did not look at the body. Instead, it was the three offenders, one arm loosely folded under the other, his thumb tapping against the side of his upper arm, once every few seconds. It was the only outward sign of agitation. The heat behind his eyes was a different matter while the other Pillars hovered behind him, flickering in tandem like a storm cloud wrapped in circuit boards.

"Do you know what you've done... Not in victory. In this." He finally glanced at the mangled corpse. "This mess."

He didn't wait for them to answer. He already knew they wouldn't care. That wasn't the point.

"Three aerial divisions from Heaven moved within three seconds of his first blast wave. Detection levels spiked across every faction currently observing the town. Scrying rituals, surveillance, devils, and youkai with more curiosity than sense. The Shinto Pantheon has already flagged residual energy and dispatched a field investigator. The illusion fields were saturated and buckled under crossfire. Even now, there is a possibility that remnants of his blood are being used to initiate purification rituals. This was a beacon. You've broadcasted our presence. To everyone."

And by everyone, that included humans in the Mundane World. The fight was recorded and spread across the Internet. Thankfully, the combatants were but blurs in the videos.

Kama twirled a piece of her hair and gave a drawn-out yawn. "Oh no. The factions might look in our direction. I'm trembling. Perhaps I'll even pretend to care if they knock."

Her eyes slid toward Angra who was already slumping against the nearest wall. She smiled faintly.

"You didn't even let me join in, Angra, I got up for this, and the only thing I walked away and went back here with was seeing Vitch land the finishing blow. What am I, your support cast now?"

He didn't look at her. "You should've been faster."

Kama hissed through her teeth and clicked her tongue. "You're such a degenerate."

"Flattering, but yeah, that's not news."

Goetia didn't respond to either of them. Instead, he turned slightly, giving only the faintest nod, which summoned the smoke-like flicker of Control Tower Pillars.

"Directive Review from Paimon. Information dispersal network compromised. Visual anomalies detected by multiple human witnesses. Expected mythological response within six hours."

"Recommendation from Gusion. Immediate reinforcement of internal masking fields. Deployment of Terminal 3-B over Kuoh. Full story redirection protocol advised."

Goetia tsked. "I should strip you three of your operational privileges until repairs are complete. But I doubt that would stop you."

"You feel the result wasn't satisfactory." Draco flatly said.

"No one asked you to kill him," Goetia said coldly.

Draco's eyes narrowed. "I did not kill him for your benefit. I killed him because he was intolerable."

Behind her, Koyanskaya gave a loud, fake cough. "Correction. I killed him. You just broke all his bones first."

"So if we're handing out trophies, I get one for Most Charming Murderer." Angra added.

"You three," Goetia said slowly, "are a risk to our location. If the Factions get wind of this and start sending agents, I will not spend our limited power covering up your egos."

"You say that like this was all ego," Angra looked at him. "That guy was dropping lightning bombs on city blocks. If we didn't act fast, there wouldn't be a Kuoh left for the Three Factions to get pissed about."

"So, you waited until he was already mid-rampage before lifting a finger." Kama said with a sham smile.

"...He started first."

Clap. Clap. Clap.

A loud, strong, and entirely theatrical clap was heard.

U-Olga felt like a spoiled heiress who just got a new yacht as she clapped. She smiles wide with teeth like a barbed crown.

"Finally, finally, someone kills one of these wretched beings and makes it interesting. Honestly, if I knew you three were going to pull that off, I would've come to watch in the first seat. Maybe even throw in a few compliments."

"Should've invited you," Koyanskaya said, not even turning around. "We could've used someone to hold my snacks."

"Careful," U-Olga replied with an airy tone, "I might mistake you for a pack mule and load you with weapons next time."

Kiara traced over the corpse of Kokabiel with the interest of someone appraising fresh meat.

"Why does all violence waste its beauty on men?"

"Because we weren't trying to please you." Kama replied sharply.

"Pity," Kiara murmured, licking her lips. "If only you knew how to."

Goetia twitched.

"Enough."

The Gazing Star Pillars ignited in flickers of red, signaling further detection markers being tripped in the outer wards. The conversation was no longer about assigning blame. The next step was preparing for fallout. Goetia knew that much.

What he didn't know was how many more of these "casual missions" the Beasts could afford before the entire chessboard cracked. The Factions were watching. Their enemies were stirring. Somehow, the worst part was knowing they'd probably do it again tomorrow.

One of the Pillars from the Information Center flickered into form like smoke escaping a furnace vent, eyes glowing indifferent red, as four shadow-limbs coiled around the body. Flauros made the observation.

"Purpose: recovery and containment. Destination: attic dissection chamber. Request: Dissection team be granted full internal access for further behavioral pattern analysis. We will store the remains within Attic Sector Seven. Subject Kokabiel will be cataloged and processed under Category E3: Fallen Angel, high-tier specimen, battlefield residuals intact. Objective: recover anatomical details and locate core memory imprints. Action: confirm by cross-dissection. Cataloging in progress. Projected duration: twelve hours. Presumption: Kokabiel's neural lattice was intentionally rudimentary. Conclusion: wasteful design."

The announcement passed with little fanfare. The Demon Pillars continued their function as though nothing of importance had occurred—because from their perspective, it hadn't. A fallen angel's corpse had no more weight than a discarded terminal, only exempted from the body having strategic value. Anatomy could always be broken down and studied. Understanding the brain patterns of a lunatic still served the necessity of forecast.

"Catalogue his organ degradation and record anomalies in brain wave memory. Prioritize neural shock retention data."

"Command acknowledged." Orias said. "Flauros will conduct internal surgical mapping. We request exclusive access for seven hours."

"Approved." Goetia replied.

The Information Center gods would continue the work regardless. Usually, no confirmation was necessary between systems that understood their designations and execution. The Fallen chief should not have moved independently from the Grigori Council without alerting his hierarchy. That disconnect made his corpse valuable. For extraction of fault lines. And more importantly, Goetia was certain someone higher on the biblical chain would notice the loss eventually.

No one said anything as the body levitated away, leaving only ashprints on the cracked floor and some scattered feathers burned black at the edges. The room was stained with the last leftover and it was only a dull footnote to the day's exhaustion.

"That's the corpse handled. What now, oh, savior king of demonkind? Do we carve up the rest of this pathetic planet for dissection too, or do we pretend like there's some point to these delays?"

Goetia didn't answer Kama. One of the Control Tower's Pillars cut in.

"Disturbance detected by Buer. Observation: anomaly. Two presences approaching from outer perimeter. Twelve meters outside southern perimeter. Heat signature is humanoid. Unknown to system index. No identity confirmed. Behavior irregular. Non-hostile. Pattern stable. However, anomalous consistency in temporal patterning suggests possible familiar signatures. Signal integrity: high."

Goetia turned his head slightly. "Specify vector and origin of detection."

"Detected by Pillar Gusion, Control Tower. Presence does not match previously registered entities. Closest biometric resemblance to a Beast-type subspecies. Sub-structure detected: variant form. Second presence undetermined but shows familiar harmonic resonance. Provisional identification in progress…"

Everyone faced the demons in the room in inquiry. Guess someone missed the memo on how not to walk into an eldritch monster's nest.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Light three taps against the wood of the front door. Polite.

Nobody moved.

Everyone stared at the main door.

They'd been here for over a week. This world's sun had risen and fallen seven times without external human contact. No knock had ever occurred in this house, not from inside or out. Visitors didn't exist. As far as they know, the original humans that lived here did not have any outside relatives. Not to mention that the structure was cloaked, sealed, and defended.

Draco was already upright. Her glare was trained toward the door, then to Angra.

"Handle it. Or I will."

Angra sighed, pushing himself up with that same unbearable sluggishness that he always had, like the air was glue and his bones had better places to be.

"Why is it always me who opens the door for death?" he muttered, mostly to himself, ignoring the slight narrowing of Draco's eyes and the poisonous smirk starting to form on Kama's lips.

"This one votes permission to exterminate preemptively." added Baal.

"Denied. I am present. Therefore, no security breach can occur."

The Control Tower Pillars all flared at once, like heat on a cold pipe.

"Identification: complete. Primary presence matched. Designation: Secondary presence: Beast IV: Cath Palug. First presence—"

Angra's hand pulled the knob open.

"Wait—the dog—?"

And there she was.

A pressure normally tied to planetary-scale threat compressed into something above knee height. Shrunk to the point of absurdity. Thick horns curved over behind a childish, gentler face. Small blouse with two long sleeves that cover her hands, eyes dim but awake. A book hanged by her waist.

Light blue hair and the star-like pupils of a mother born from the sea of primordial.

"—Beast II: Tiamat."

...Small.

...Half his height.

A miniature Tiamat stood beneath the frame with her hands clasped before her. In comparison, basically, a child taught perfect etiquette by a force of nature. Her eyes were soft with restrained light hair flowed in smooth curls without the crown.

She blinked at Angra and looked beyond at everyone.

"Mother has returned."

"... Fou."

The dog padded up beside her ankles, ears upright.

She smiled at him. He—and the others—stiffened instantly. They were not fooled at all because they have seen the nature behind it immediately. That was not the smile of a little girl.

On the contrary, it was the deceitful act of turning the corners of the mouth with exposed teeth.

The smile of an incensed parent.

"Now—"

Silence swallowed everything in the house.

The dread from familiarity consumed Angra. His eyes twitched sideways, he didn't need to turn his head to the others inside to know their reactions.

He had faced greater-level threats before, faced the egoistic golden king (albeit it was his vessel but still), survived against Lostbelt Kings alongside Heroic Spirits, possessed bodies forged in pain and inherited the grudge of the world itself, and ascended to a full-blown Evil incarnate before.

That didn't stop him from taking a step back from the girl. He didn't have to look back at Draco and Koyanskaya to know they were no better than him. The fox had frozen mid-step when Tiamat walked in, and the cold sweat on her brow betrayed that her instincts were screaming, not at danger but at something worse:

Maternal punishment.

Draco was muttering something under her breath. Past traumatic-like awful memories from Chaldea resurfaced in her mind instantly as she witnessed Beast II's Larva Form.

"EY, STOP! I do not want your hugs or your headpats! You are not my mother!"

Draco shuddered.

Vitch's mind worked overdue as it made plan after plan to escape the house. Probably the continent.

Angra swallowed.

... so much for being Beasts.

Tiamat's smile widened.

"—Who made all those messes outside?"

.
.
.
.
.

The winds here were dry. Bitter, not due to temperature, but because the soil beneath his feet had not known life for thousands of years. The dust had the stench of magic long since spent, an old battlefield perhaps, or the grave of a forgotten kingdom. The Underworld had many such places. Even more since the conclusion of the Great War. But this one was remote. Even by his standards. No devil cities or roaming beasts. The location was lifeless, abandoned, and avoided. Which was precisely why Creuserey approved of it.

He stood at the center of it, black cape dragging behind him, boots leaving no mark on the ancient stone, his expression fixed between contempt and vague irritation.

"This better be worth my time," he said aloud. He didn't speak to his subordinates unless they were providing information or failing at something.

One of them approached, glancing toward the direction they were leading him.

"My Lord Creuserey," the devil said with that typical lack of spine. "The object lies just ahead. We've kept it sealed and undisturbed since its discovery."

"Discovery," Creuserey repeated dryly, half-spitting the word. "You make it sound like you've accomplished something."

The subordinate remained silent, bowing slightly before gesturing him toward the ravine cut through the land ahead.

Creuserey walked without hurry. A Satan doesn't need to rush. Even when surrounded by incompetents who couldn't manage a single operation without calling on their betters. This was what the world had come to. The descendants of the true Satans buried in dust, forced to operate from the shadows, while imposters sat in gilded halls pretending they'd earned the right to rule.

He descended the uneven slope, eyes narrowing the moment the object came into full view. The sphere stood near the center of the impact site, partially embedded in the blackened earth. It was larger than any of the scouting reports had conveyed, and entirely unnatural in texture, containing the worst implications of both. Its surface pulsed with light in slow intervals, almost like a dormant heart refusing to die. No aura he had encountered in all his centuries gave off such a violent contradiction. One moment it felt dead, inert, and ancient. The next, it exuded the kind of silent authority he had only sensed in beings that should have been long extinct.

"This is it?" Creuserey muttered finally, low and grim, as he halted just a few feet from the glowing mass. "This is the thing you wasted my time over?"

His voice cut the silence, and two of the robed Devil researchers standing nearby flinched. The older one, with grey skin and gaunt cheeks, stepped forward and bowed quickly. "L—Lord Creuserey, forgive the delay in our report. We weren't sure how to categorize it. We detected the magical fallout when it entered Underworld airspace a week ago, but the speed and volatility of its descent made it impossible to intercept. It didn't come from any plane we monitored. It fell and crashed into the basin like a meteor. We thought it might have been an ancient sealstone at first, or something from the outer boundaries of Agreas. It began emitting... this."

He handed him a reading crystal, its inscriptions glowing faintly.

Creuserey took it, he wanted to see how ridiculous his conclusion would be.

The readings were abnormal. No, that was an understatement. They were fundamentally erroneous. The energy radiating from the object was not just foreign — it was impossible.

Creuserey's face twitched.

"We also suspected something, and we were right when it responded," another subordinate said, approaching carefully.

"Responded?" Creuserey repeated, his violet eyes turning toward the Devil as though daring him to say something stupid.

The Devil hesitated, then glanced at the sphere. "It shifted once. We believe it is alive, or at the very least sentient. It has resisted any probing. We sent two probe constructs into contact and both melted down within seconds. Then something worse happened. Yesterday, we detected a surge of divine energy."

Creuserey's eyes twitched again. His fingers clenched. "Divine? You expect me to believe something of divinity has been sleeping beneath my feet for a week and none of you thought to call me sooner?"

"N-no, we—"

He raised a single finger, and the Devil fell silent. Creuserey hated improvisation. He hated unexplained phenomena. He hated how in this moment, this thing made him feel like the world was still capable of producing monsters beyond his control. He hated the implication. Divine. That word alone insulted him. In the mind of a "True Satan", divinity was a mark of filth, a rotting stench he had worked his whole life to erase from the world.

He turned slowly to study the object again. The winged form hadn't moved an inch since he arrived, but he could feel something there. Even while buried in itself, it was aware, and worse, it didn't care that he was here. As if he was an insect crawling across a relic too ancient to be curious about.

He hated that feeling.

"We used blood-sense magic and confirmed residual life signs. It's... curled inside. Or at least we think it is. Four limbs, or rather four wings. Possibly wrapped around its body. We cannot tell the nature of its anatomy, but it's in a posture resembling—"

"A bat." Creuserey said.

The others hesitated.

"Yes, my Lord."

Creuserey didn't like this.

Either irrelevant or important. If it was irrelevant, he'd destroy it. If it was important, he'd control it.

The younger Devil researcher, keeping quiet until now, finally spoke, hesitant but unable to contain the tremble in his voice. "L-Lord Creuserey... is it... safe to be near it?"

Creuserey didn't answer. His fingers remained still at his side, though he was already conjuring a small hex behind his back—non-lethal, meant to collapse dimensional space if the thing reacted. He wasn't taking chances, not when the Unknown had grown teeth again.

One of the other researchers paced around the sphere slowly, using a floating scry-orb to scan every contour. "We've logged over fifty magical signatures etched beneath the outer layer. None of them belong to any Underworld race. We don't even know if they were written, the markings might be grown or scarred into the structure. The energy concentration is stable, but it hasn't dropped at all in seven days. That's what's disturbing. It's not depleting. It seemed to be waiting."

Creuserey's jaw tightened. If something had the patience to wait silently for a week, buried in a crater in the heart of the Underworld, surrounded by Devils, then it wasn't afraid. It had landed here intentionally.

"What's the estimated depth of its sleep?" he asked.

They exchanged glances.

"We cannot say. It has shown no sign of movement. No response to probes. But…"

"But?"

"…it dreams, Lord Creuserey."

The noble stopped cold. He turned his head slowly.

"Repeat that."

"One of our mind-scryers attempted an intrusion. Not full mind-reading, just a drift. She lasted four seconds before she bled out of her eyes. Her brain stopped processing speech for an hour. All she kept saying was a phrase. Repeating it like a child talking in its sleep."

"What phrase?"

The subordinate licked his lips nervously.

"'I am not the last. I am what remains.'"

Creuserey stared at the sphere again.

Riddles. Tch. He didn't like implications that weren't his to interpret. The divine was the domain of the gods. But this wasn't a god.

Gods didn't curl themselves into balls and fall from the sky.

The sphere's outer ridges flexed slightly, revealing a glimpse of dark flesh under the wing-like exterior.

For a moment, Creuserey thought he heard a voice inside his mind.

"No more tests," he said sharply, not looking at them. "Withdraw all constructs. No more probes. Don't prod it. I want this site locked down. Any low-rank Devils who know about this, kill them. I don't care how. Just make sure they never speak of this."

The researchers hesitated, but didn't question him.

Creuserey took a step closer, stopping just short of touching the glowing shell of the folded wings. The light pulsated again. A slow, dying heartbeat that never died.

"Whoever you are... whatever you are... you've chosen the wrong world to crawl into," he murmured under his breath, voice too low for the others to hear. "You've come into my Underworld. This land belongs to Satan's true heirs. It doesn't matter what you were before. You're nothing now. You will kneel or be broken."

The light inside pulsed again.

Twice.

And for a moment, just a flicker so brief only Creuserey's eyes caught it, one of the wings shifted.

Was it enough to show it heard him?

Sooner, the third-tier magics were concentrated into an incision spell, leaving shallow scratches across its surface. When Creuserey gave the order, irritated that his time was being wasted on something that didn't respond to either his voice or presence, the casters escalated to forbidden slicing formulae copied from ancient grimoires recovered from Belial's ruins. It hit the curved hull of the black sphere, a thin line of glowing red etched itself into the surface.

Inside, the creature growled.

Creuserey raised his hand, his magic laced with dissection threads that unraveled flesh and spirit alike, and cast them forward. They shimmered across the sphere's surface. When it licked its shell, a response came.

The devils barely had time to register what they were seeing before it exploded outward. Four wings opened so suddenly that it displaced the air and sent bodies flying. Not just a physical blast, but an overwhelming and ancient presence surged out unlike anything that had walked these lands in all their long memories. Some of the devils screamed. Others dropped to their knees. The mana in the air buckled and warped, and even Creuserey felt his bones tighten. He didn't flinch. His eyes remained steady, despite the roar in his head warning him. He watched the wings unfold, leathery and dark like they had been sunken in some pit deeper than the abyss.

Dust settled. His soldiers scrambled, coughing and pushing themselves upright, avoiding eye contact with the thing now crouched at the center of the shallow crater.

It was breathing slowly. Four limbs pressed into the ground, the creature remained hunched, head drooped low beneath its ornate headdress. Its posture said it had just remembered what pain felt like. Creuserey studied its body, the musculature, arrangement of limbs, exotic bone structure, strange anatomy of a being that could not possibly be natural. The wings were bat and spider-like. But what caught his interest were the aura waves. Mixed, unstable, not pure magic. Something higher and deeper.

"Who are you?"

Creuserey stepped forward. He wanted his voice to be the first command this thing heard. "What god made you? What name do you cower under?"

The answer he got was only a low groan, drawn out, muddled. It moved, slow and directionless, raising its face and blinking several times. A humanoid face. Its eyes were black with blue halos, swirling in confusion. It opened its lips to say something. Only coming out indecipherable. Creuserey's lips twitched. He tried again.

"You understand me. You will speak clearly. Identify yourself."

The thing seemed to blink again, this time slower. Its head tilted. More words mumbled to itself. Creuserey's fingers curled. He waited for coherence. He got none. The babble continued.

Mictlan. Ka'an.

Familiar names were heard by everyone. It was mumbling names not for them but for itself.

"Do not test my patience. I didn't come to witness the babbling of some castaway reject. I came to uncover something of value, not this pathetic excuse for a beast."

It twitched.

The dust still hadn't cleared, but the light now reflected faintly off the various piercings and stones across its body, making it hard to tell if it was looking at anyone at all.

Creuserey's patience cracked. "You dare ignore a Satan? Filth."

Creuserey didn't hesitate. He raised his palm and fired a condensed orb of purple flame directly into the creature's chest, launching him back into a slope. The mountain wall cracked. The tremor rattled the canyon again. Silence followed.

It didn't even groan. It pushed itself to its feet with sluggish movements. The tail dragged. Creuserey's subordinates relaxed.

Creuserey rolled his neck with theatrical disdain, then waved his hand to his men. "Chain him. I want his arms restricted and his wings sealed. Whatever he is, his silence offends me, and I want it corrected before nightfall."

The devils hesitated briefly, then obeyed. Chains wrought from spell were summoned, glowing red with containment sigils, and several devils stepped forward cautiously. They bound it—or rather, his ankles first, then arms, then began to tighten the circles around his wings. The creature barely responded. He breathed, and his chest rose. He blinked once but didn't resist.

Creuserey turned his back as if it were over. "We'll drag it back to the labs. I'll carve out the answers myself if I have to."

The creature stopped thrashing. His eyes blinked slowly as his mind was slowly aligning.

"Where... is this... Not here... not home... this scent… none of it belongs to Mictlan. Who dares touch me...and drags me from silence?"

His wings twitched once, muscles flexing under the layers of restraint magic. His voice grew louder, his tone less fogged, though there was no sense of recognition.

"The dark... it was empty... where is the empty... who stole the quiet? I was sleeping in the hollow where the prayers had faded."

His vision focused slowly. His face turned toward Creuserey, though it was more that his body adjusted to face the largest presence than a real act of recognition. The stare he gave was still unfocused, his words lined with an old tongue long buried under dirt and forgotten wars. "You pulled me out. Why?"

Creuserey let out a sharp sound of satisfaction, like hearing an animal speak for the first time. "So it talks now. Good. I was starting to think I'd summoned something defective. Answer, thing. Give me your name. Whatever bat-faced you were called. Speak clearly."

His mouth moved and no sound came out. His head turned to the side. He mumbled again, less confused and more... reflective.

"Why do you ask for a name, when none of you can remember your own graves... This one had a name. I... was given one by the screaming thousands that burned together. Did they scream it? Or whisper it before death took them. It was... Camazotz... yes. King of Ka'an. The... Spider-Slayer... Scion of the Hollowed Pillar. Lord of the Pale Flame."

Creuserey scoffed and stepped closer as his expression turned full of contempt. "What kind of pathetic title is that? King of dust and rocks. You speak in riddles because you know your worth is below mine. You probably believe those titles make you more than a beast. Let me tell you the truth directly: they don't. I brought you back from whatever gutter you were rotting behind your wings because I thought you might be useful, but now I see you're nothing but another bloated fossil clinging to old legends that mean nothing in this age."

Creuserey's voice turned harder, his pride openly mocking. "Let me make it very clear. I am Creuserey Asmodeus, heir to the true legacy of the Satans. This Underworld you're in? It belongs to us. Not to whatever forgotten hell you think you're entitled to. I want to build a world of devils. A world where humans crawl on their knees and devour their own to survive, because that's their proper place. Food. Toys. Breeding stock. My world will be born from fire, and every realm, every myth, every carcass of the old gods will be part of it. You'll either serve in chains or be turned into ash."

Camazotz's head tilted slowly. Something shifted in his expression. Like his brain had just processed what he heard fully and slotted it somewhere deep into a place that remembered things he didn't want to remember.

His voice was low. "Did you say... humans… as cattle…"

Creuserey didn't stop. He likely noticed the slight shift and mistook it for indignation. He welcomed it. "Yes. Why? Did you worship them? Did you think they mattered? They don't. They never did. They exist to be broken and harvested. That's what they were made for. We devils create, rule, and inherit. Everything else exists to be rearranged into something useful. You should feel honored. Maybe I considered making you a hound at the gates of my throne, one that would devour any who disobeyed. But if you want to whimper about cattle, then maybe you're already too broken to be of value."

The chains suddenly tightened reflexively from his magical pressure and sound of something soft tearing, and then a flash of blue-white light flared from the center of the restraints. The chains snapped from his wings first. They stopped existing between the gaps of moments. They were whole in one second and gone in the next. The flames that appeared next were silent with colors of blue, purple, white, and deep black coiled at his fingertips.

He looked up, now finally awake in full. "No... No, I did not worship them. I watched them die... every one of them... when they screamed my name to be spared. I buried a continent under their bones. I sealed their voices in the earth because I couldn't bear to carry them anymore. I forgot their faces so I would not lose my mind to grief. But you—"

He raised one hand and flames coiled into the shape of a skull, pulsing with fire so thick it warped the air.

"—you speak of using them... as livestock. No. No, I remember now. Not all of them begged. Some of them sang, even as they burned. They called to me to continue. I who become the bat that judges monsters."

The rest of the chains began to groan. His arms spread outward. His wings unfolded wider, dragging along the ground and slicing deep into the floor with the pressure alone. The air vibrated from the magic gathering. The devils nearby who had laughed earlier were already backing up.

Creuserey's eyes widened briefly but narrowed again with disdain. "You dare posture in front of me? Just because you broke some chains you're more than a beast?"

He immediately flicked his hand outward and conjured an orb of concentrated demonic essence, violet-black, compressed with gravitational pressure, arcing lightning off the edges as it buzzed in his palm, and hurled it straight at the former prisoner. The moment the sphere neared, Camazotz raised his arm and took the blast directly. His wings folded tightly behind him and his body slightly jerked, but the flames and energy splashed across his form like acid against obsidian. He blinked slowly and narrowed his gaze out of curiosity.

It wasn't ignorance. A curiosity born from encountering something foreign and new. He rolled his shoulders.

"Zuhuy ka'at chi'inbal... this is new."

One foot planted forward, both arms raised, and the space in front of him seemed to tear apart into flame. Four skulls materialized out of nothing, howling from his palms, their jaws creaking with hissing pressure. He didn't fling them; he simply stepped forward. The skulls launched themselves in tandem, two to the left, two to the right, converging on Creuserey's position faster than a blink. Creuserey's eyes widened, and he instantly countered with a magenta-colored barrier reinforced by sequential defensive glyphs in three layers, each formed from demonic runes stitched together mid-air with raw thought.

The first skull shattered the outer layer.

The second tore through the second layer, and the third and fourth impacted the third barrier at once, breaching the spell and ripping through Creuserey's chest before detonating. Smoke and dust blew outward. The force of the impact hurled him back several meters, smashing him through one of the giant tree root's supporting columns, coughing blood before regaining his balance mid-air.

He landed and extended both hands forward as his cape expanded, like the wings of a beast, and a surge of power exploded from his core. Formulaic matrices hovered behind his shoulders as he rapidly chanted spells layered over each other: one targeting kinetic suppression, one enhancing his speed, one forming thin blades of compressed demonic matter around his limbs. "Whoever you are... It makes me wonder why you stink of Authority."

Before Camazotz could respond, three elite devils nearby, perhaps taking advantage of their lord's reprieve, surrounded the winged being and unleashed a coordinated barrage of high-density magical beams. One of fire, one of electric force, and one a distortion field meant to unmake material composition entirely. The three devils were not weaklings; they were each beings capable of laying waste to mid-class armies.

Their mistake was believing Camazotz would acknowledge their presence with the respect of a duelist. He shifted forward, toward them, head tilted and stepped casually. The magical projectiles collided with his body, and for a brief moment, the light obscured everything... until Camazotz emerged, slightly scorched, but not slowed. His flames ignited and wings spread, and he disappeared from view.

He reappeared behind the first devil, his claws piercing through the devil's spine and tearing out through his chest. The corpse dropped and the second devil turned to defend, but blue fire engulfed his legs before he could cast. Screaming, the devil tried to teleport away, but Camazotz was already behind him. With a twisting motion of his palm, a burst of dark blue fire erupted from the devil's mouth, silencing him mid-scream.

The third got the furthest. He managed to get airborne. He even chanted. But Camazotz's tail whipped from below, wrapped around the devil's ankle, and yanked him downward so hard his ribs shattered before he even hit the ground. One stomp followed. Bones crunched.

Then came the real interruption. Creuserey appeared in front of Camazotz and punched him square in the face with a blast-enhanced strike. It was laced with folded layers of gravity magic and inverted energy meant to disrupt muscle control. It cracked the earth. Camazotz staggered and slid across the debris field, halting only after plowing through a stone.

Creuserey's grin faded as he watched the dust settle. "You killed them quickly," he muttered, brushing hair from his face as his knuckles bled slightly. "Good. I never liked them much. Means I don't have to fake a speech later."

From the shattered boulder, Camazotz stepped forward again. His jaw shifted as bones cracked in realignment. He touched the side of his face where blood leaked, staring at it as if the sensation were foreign. Then he looked at Creuserey.

"Tu'ux ku yáanal ka'ab... how many more times must I pretend I'm not tired?"

He didn't speak further as he walked slowly. His fists glowed, his mouth opened and exhaled fire, and his tail dragged across the ground behind him, gouging trenches in the stone as blue and purple skulls flickered to life again.

Creuserey raised both arms. Behind him, a complex summoning circle expanded and twisted into shape, made of red and black energy. Chains of magic erupted from the ground and formed twin serpents of pure energy around his shoulders.

"You're not the only one who never stops." His pupils dilated. "Let me show you why they called my ancestor one of the Original Four. And why I inherited that name!"

Creuserey's fist connected with Camazotz's left wing, ripping through it halfway, purple blood splashing out as a small tear split the edge. The devil followed it up with a barrage of rapid kicks, each aimed at joints and weak points in the beast-king's physique, but Camazotz twisted his body mid-air, parrying a kick with his tail while the other wing curved inward to block a follow-up spell. The air cracked as demonic pressure and ancient Mayan fire magic collided.

The sky above them split open in a cross pattern, absorbing the sheer spiritual mass of their powers with neither slowed down.

Creuserey's breathing was rough but not strained. His skin had light burns and cuts from Camazotz's previous flame burst. He looked down at his injured hand then scoffed, "Your fire is disgusting. Filthy. You dare wound me with this savage power?"

He raised his hand and chanted rapidly in some forgotten dialect. A ring of magic circles, red and black, hovered around him, tightening inward before latching onto his flesh. His wounds cauterized and sealed as his demonic power surged visibly across his limbs. "You should've died the moment you struck me, mongrel. I am the legacy of the True Satans, heir of Asmodeus himself, and I will not—cannot—be bested by some relic of a seemingly jungle deity."

Camazotz spun around mid-air, three flaming skulls erupting from his back before launching at the devil in quick succession. His eyes glowed in a dull, faded sapphire hue.

"You are slow. He is slow. You cannot stop. You cannot rest. You will burn. You will keep burning. That is the only path. Forget the rest. Forget their names. Keep moving."

He landed and charged forward on all fours, leaping like a beast, then spread all four of his wings in a burst of frictionless propulsion that cracked the rock below.

Creuserey raised a barrier spell, but the flame skulls struck it first, distorting the magical structure with loud groans. Camazotz followed behind them, both hands pulled back with spiraling blue-white fireballs gathered between his clawed fingers.

He shouted aloud for once, "Then die a thousand times, false prince!" before smashing the barrier with both fists. The explosion consumed them both momentarily, sending shockwaves through the valley.

The devil emerged from the smoke with his cape torn, eyes glowing. A massive gash ran down his chest, scorched black, but his energy held. The moment Camazotz came into sight again, Creuserey clapped both hands together and then twisted them outward like breaking a chain.

"Feel my Spiral Descent!"

Twelve serpentine arms of black magic spawned from the ground like drills, all aiming toward Camazotz from below and behind. Each arm carried a different rune of destruction, corrosion, and soul fragmentation, each designed to rip into spiritual matter.

Camazotz took the hit on purpose.

The arms skewered him through his wings, ribs, tail, and one even passed through his thigh, but his face didn't shift from the twisted focus in his gaze.

"Pain is not death. Pain is the anchor. Let it hold you... keep moving... Camazotz... do not stop... do not stop..." He flexed his abdomen. One of the arms tried to retract but couldn't. Then Creuserey's eyes widened.

Something awakened inside Camazotz. It was like a sealed pressure behind a cracked wall.

A giant bat with tongue-like tentacles spawned from its body.

Creuserey stepped back unconsciously.

"You…" he muttered, staring as the blood pouring out of Camazotz's wounds ignited. It didn't burn him, it clung to him like armor.

Camazotz stepped forward. The wounds closed only halfway. The arms of magic still skewered him, but he yanked them forward, dragging Creuserey with them, breaking the logic of magical summoning.

"We do not speak names. Not when the sky still remembers their screams."

He grinned, twitching slightly, like a mind trying to pull itself apart and re-form at the same time. "Do you believe blood makes you strong? My people burned their bones and poured it into mine. I did not inherit them. I carry them. On my back. On my tail. In every scream, I swallowed and did not release."

Like a kinetic sculpture made of muscle and madness, Camazotz closed the distance again and slammed his foot into Creuserey's chest hard enough to create a localized earthquake. The devil vomited blood, crashing back into a rock wall, leaving a deep imprint before tumbling forward and regaining his footing mid-roll. His cape was completely gone now.

"I am the peak of devilkind," Creuserey growled. "I refuse to believe otherwise. You are beneath me!"

Camazotz didn't respond. He was already in front of him, wings flared. He struck a nerve cluster just under the devil's left shoulder blade. A second punch hit the base of his spine. His flames didn't follow immediately—his fists did. Camazotz ignored his injuries. One wing remained limp. A rib was clearly broken, but he was still moving, faster than before.

Creuserey cast a curse to paralyze muscles, but Camazotz twisted through it with raw spiritual resistance. Every blow he landed after that was just relentless. Arms, ribs, thigh, throat, temple. Creuserey bled. Then bled more. Then bled again. He screamed in rage and raised both hands high.

"All of you parasites. All of you fakes. All of you lesser animals—I will cleanse the world and rebuild it! The Asmodeus line does not falter! It is my right! I was born to destroy and rule! Burn, monster!"

He summoned a sphere of concentrated demonic collapse magic, not just fire, but the compression of negative existence; a black and violet orb that crushed nearby air, turning it into static. He hurled it with both hands like a sun collapsing in on itself.

Camazotz held his arms wide and let it strike him directly.

It detonated across the battlefield. The valley split.

Stone liquefied. Wind screamed.

Dust covered the sky.

Creuserey panted, stumbling. "He's finished. Gone. You think raw instinct can beat refined legacy? I am an Asmodeus. I am—"

The smoke cleared.

Camazotz was still there.

His front was burned, chest charred and cracked.

Creuserey Asmodeus didn't understand how he was still standing. Camazotz's last few attacks had been absurd, overwhelming, even by Ultimate-class standards. The blood pouring from his mouth mixed with the dust on his chin as he stared forward, trembling slightly, refusing to collapse.

He wasn't supposed to lose. That reality, more than the pain or the damage, was what he could not accept.

His aura surged violently, his hands spasming open as a dome of violet-black demonic power exploded out, shielding him from the next barrage of flame skulls that screamed through the air. The infernal heads shattered against his magic shield, but the impact sent fissures through the ground. Creuserey screamed in fury, the sound rising above the echoing destruction.

"This is beneath me! I am the rightful heir to Asmodeus! I am the blood of the True Devil King! I should not have to stain my hands with the filth of something like you!"

The explosion that followed his scream was immense, flattening the terrain in a hundred-meter radius and vaporizing the remnants of the trees and stones that had surrounded the area. It was a suicidal overload of pure demonic magic, a desperate burst meant to seize control of the battle again. Once again, his enemy, somehow, was still standing inside the smoke.

Creuserey blinked rapidly. For a moment, he thought his vision was wrong. No one should be alive in the center of that. But there he is; arms raised, wings spread, blue and purple flames leaking from the lines in his arms like blood. He was staring down at the Devil with an odd twitch to his lip, and something in his posture shifted.

"Still alive. Of course he is. Of course... I would be. Ka'an always died first. Mictlan never bent."

Then louder, stronger, to Creuserey, while stepping forward through the haze.

"Did you think I fell just because you screamed? Did you think that was enough to make Camazotz kneel? Did you think six million years of surviving was a lie? That this body only exists because it forgot how to give up?"

He stepped forward again. The next attack didn't come from magic or technique, but from pure speed and strength that ripped through the sound barrier in a fraction of a second. Creuserey's arms came up to block on reflex, but Camazotz drove through the guard, claws igniting again, slamming the Devil across the battlefield like a comet crashing into a hillside. Bones cracked. Magic buckled. The explosion of contact disintegrated the air around them.

Creuserey skidded across the dirt, his back dragging furrows through solid rock, coughing blood now uncontrollably. He stood up, somehow, casting two spells at once, to heal, the other to fire an amplified beam of darkness directly into the sky, which bent and redirected toward Camazotz at the last moment.

Camazotz swatted the attack aside with his bare arm, the force ripping apart a chunk of his flesh. He didn't even wince.

"I should be collapsing," he muttered to himself again. "I should be... dust by now..."

Creuserey tried again. He summoned chains of black fire, infused with his highest-tier curse sigils, woven from his blood. He screamed and brought down a massive rain of demonic spears meant to overwhelm any defense. It didn't matter.

Camazotz broke through all of it, slicing through the spells mid-air with his wings, which were glowing now, burning through enchantments with physical force alone. He didn't even speak anymore. His hands twisted, and the skull flames returned, surging outward in a stream of destruction that engulfed Creuserey's entire upper torso.

The Devil roared again, not in pain, but in disbelief. He should not be losing. Not like this. Not to something so crude. So ancient. So insane.

"I am a Satan!" Creuserey howled, releasing one final gambit, a demonic sigil carved into his own chest glowing violently. "You are NOTHING but a leftover shame! Your time is over!"

Camazotz caught him in mid-air before the spell could complete. His claw went straight through Creuserey's stomach, and this time, it stayed there...

Creuserey's back arched as his abdomen spurted fountain of dark ichor spraying out with a heavy sputter. His eyes widened in disbelief. Camazotz's hand, claws caked in blood and charred flesh, pushed deeper and deeper, until his hand closed around something inside the Devil's body. It was curled around a snake-like mass nestled within the cavity of Creuserey's torn stomach. It writhed weakly, its energy dimming under the bat god's crushing grip.

Camazotz tilted his head slightly. He pulled.

A slithering, dense core of black energy came out in his grip, twitching and twisting like a serpent, small, condensed, divine.

His face didn't show comprehension. He started at it in curiosity.

"You were hiding something," Camazotz whispered coldly, turning it in his hand. "Not from me. This thing is strong. Pack of energy."

Creuserey's eyes widened for the first time with fear.

Eyes twitching as more blood oozed from his gut and lips. He mastered the Ninth Circle of Hell's hidden grimoires. He reshaped every path of infernal theory from his house. He wield the right to call himself Satan... not them. Not Ajuka. Not Serafall. Not Falbium. They're clowns, facades made by weaklings for peace.

"That's... that's the Infinite... You can't... you can't just..."

His words collapsed into nothing. Camazotz crushed the Snake between his claws... and swallowed it.

The reaction was immediate. His body rippled, his aura expanded, and for a moment, the flames around him flickered violently, changing from blue and purple to black and silver, before settling again. The boost was raw. Undefined. He didn't understand what he had consumed. More importantly, it gave him more fuel. More power to rekindle his lost energy. That was enough.

Creuserey's last thought, before the darkness claimed him, was of disbelief.

"I am... Asmodeus... I should have... I should have won..."

His body hit the ground and didn't move again.

Camazotz stood over the corpse, his breathing heavy. He looked at his hand, then at the sky, and then down at his chest where his heart still pounded like it hadn't in millennia.

Suddenly, his eyes widened.

Events from his past up until minutes earlier come crashing down to his mind.

This place...

He looked around. It was all unfamiliar.

However, everything gave off the feeling that he was in the Underworld.

... But that's impossible.

"... Where am I...?"

Chapter 15: Divine, Kami, and Beasts

The first thing she noticed was that the light above her was blinding.

It buzzed faintly behind her eyes. The second thing was her body... she couldn't move it. Not much, anyway. Her left shoulder was numb, but the rest of her screamed in dull, blooming agony. Even breathing felt painful. Something stung in her side. There was a mechanical rhythm beside her head. One of those heart monitor things.

She wasn't supposed to be here. She was supposed to be—

"Aaahhhhh!"

Xenovia opened her eyes fully and her vision blurred with static. There were voices. Conversational. Male and female. Familiar. Her eyes adjusted. Glass surrounded her in a half-cylinder, faintly glowing from runes etched into the frame. It wasn't a coffin, though it might as well be one.

She recognized the containment ward. Emergency-grade restricted Medical Quarters.

Her throat itched, dry, and tight.

She blinked slowly and tilted her head slightly, just enough to see a familiar silhouette through the reinforced glass across the room. Blond hair, carefully brushed.

Irina. Unmoving. Not asleep as her eyes were half-lidded. Her uneven breathing and facial expression told Xenovia something was wrong.

Her gaze changed direction. Another bed, slightly raised. Her guardian Griselda. Reclining slightly with her side bandaged up, face pale but conscious. There was a priest seated next to her, taking notes on an ecclesiastical datapad while another stood with hands behind his back, nodding. She recognized the older man with the clipped beard. Deacon Miles. And the one beside him was probably Raphael, the investigator. She didn't remember seeing them since last month.

Xenovia shifted again and this time the monitor beeped a little faster. A nurse or some kind of technician turned his head. Someone muttered, "She's awake."

Another wave of that artificial light pressed down on her senses as the sanctified fluid feeding into her arm started adjusting, and the glass lifted with a faint hiss. The cold hit her at once. She didn't shiver, but her body tried to. Pain responded immediately. Her right arm was useless, wrapped tightly, immobilized. The rest of her ribs ached every time she inhaled.

"...Xenovia." Griselda's voice was quiet but firm. Her tone had that signature edge, enough to make Xenovia instinctively straighten even though her spine protested.

"I'm awake," she answered hoarsely, voice barely above a whisper. Her throat still didn't want to work right.

"Take your time. Don't move too much," said Father Graccus from the other side, stepping up with a digital reader. "Vitals stabilizing. Resurrection Protocol took hold properly. But you've been under for five days."

Xenovia absorbed that without a word. Her brain was still adjusting as her memory slowly filtered in.

Forest. Something blue. Pink barriers. A presence that didn't make sense. Something immense. She vaguely remembered the pain slamming into her chest, the world turning upside down, her bones twisting. Then nothing but darkness. Then the same battle. Replaying. Again and again. Always ending the same. Her body shattering against the boulder. Something cracked like glass around her that time.

"What happened?" she asked scratchy.

"We're still not certain," answered Raphael from the side, flipping a page on his clipboard. "You three were found in the East Forest, unresponsive, all within a ten-foot radius. Your injuries matched full-impact combat trauma. But there's no residual magical signature to track. That in itself is a mystery."

Griselda let out a weak breath. "It... wasn't... something we... could fight..... It was something worse..... Stronger than anything I've ever seen... She just... appeared out of... nowhere..... we fell..."

Xenovia winced at the strain and raspy voice of her mentor as she tried to push the air out of her lungs.

"She moved like one... But her aura wasn't human at all..... The earth bent around her..."

Xenovia glanced again at Irina. The girl was smiling faintly at the ceiling, her hands folded neatly over her stomach like someone in prayer. She hadn't looked at Xenovia once. Something clicked wrong in Xenovia's mind. She hated guessing. She wanted facts. Direct answers.

"Irina," she said softly.

The other girl blinked and turned her head. Her smile widened, but she could see that her eyes didn't register the words.

Xenovia repeated her name. No reaction.

"Irina, can you hear me?" she said louder.

No response. Xenovia looked around, confused for only a second.

"She can't hear you," said Father Graccus quietly. "Acoustic trauma. Her eardrums are intact, but the auditory nerves were severed. We tried sanctified regeneration pulses and while her brain responds, the channels are burnt. The best we can do now is continue neural infusion and pray the damage doesn't spread."

Xenovia felt her jaw tighten slightly. She turned back to Irina. The girl was still smiling, clearly aware of Xenovia's expression now. But the silence between them was total.

"I didn't know," Xenovia muttered. "She looks... fine."

"... She doesn't... want to worry... anyone," said Griselda faintly from her bed, her voice quieter now. "Typical Irina..... Always smiling... Even now."

Xenovia swallowed the lump in her throat before it could show. Her gaze dropped.

Then came the worst of it.

"Oh," said Deacon Miles, as though remembering something secondary. "We've kept your sword fragments in a containment unit for observation."

Xenovia looked up sharply.

"What?"

Graccus nodded at the corner of the room. Another technician pulled back a cloth revealing a long sealed glass cube on a cart. Inside were seven misshapen shards of azure metal, glimmering faintly with sealed runes barely holding them inert. The Excalibur Destruction...

Shattered beyond reforging.

"Whatever struck this broke it without resistance."

She didn't respond.

The air in the room suddenly felt thinner. Her breathing shallowed. She stared at the cube, the fragments, the twisted remnants of what had been her divine mission's clearest tool. That sword wasn't just a weapon. It was a mark she saw as an achievement.

Gone because she had been too weak.

She hadn't even made it blink.

Griselda must have noticed her face because she said something quiet. "It... wasn't... your... fault."

She continued staring at the fragments until her vision blurred again. Her heart rate monitor sped up slightly. The machine adjusted with a faint hum. Another dose of sedative filled the line.

Irina turned her head again. This time she raised a hand slightly toward Xenovia's bed. Just a gentle wave, accompanied by that same soft smile. She didn't speak. But it was enough.

Xenovia looked away again, trying to keep her expression blank.

"She… she did not speak... the whole time..." her mentor's voice came barely above a breath, hoarse, strained, and clipped in places where her diaphragm still failed to obey. The mechanical hiss of her glass tube's filtration vents punctuated her words. "She… was completely... ungraspable... " Her throat gave out, forcing her to pause as the infusion pumps behind her pulsed a pale gold into her bloodstream. "...nothing... recognized her..."

Father Raphael leaned forward with one gloved hand braced on his clipboard. "Are you certain?" he asked, polite but skeptical. "Even with your expertise of diverse mythological beings, Sister Griselda?"

"No," Griselda whispered, closing her eyes as her next breath felt like it stabbed between her ribs. "... fully unknown..."

Father Graccus' pen halted mid-scroll across the record tablet. He leaned back, his brows knitting together while his lips thinned under his grey mustache. Deacon Miles gave a brief, unspoken glance to him, then back at the restrained figure within the tube. Neither spoke.

"She was a... woman," Griselda continued again, opening her eyes. "An adult... Her skin didn't take light... Her hair was… white... with a tinge. Blue, I think... Twin braids... Pointed ears... Horns." Her tone stumbled slightly, as though saying it made it real again. "Large. Ram-like. Spiraled..... Her body was nearly naked... Her eyes… pink… cross-like. Bottomless. Inhuman."

The quiet among the men lasted longer than her pause. The scribes glanced up from their writing, waiting, confused, as Father Raphael gently shut his notes and muttered something under his breath. A prayer or a curse. Maybe both.

"We'll have to scour the Apocryphon Divisions," he muttered after a beat, already turning toward one of the aides. "Cross-reference female infernal-type deities, anything with ram-like horns. Use morphology filters. Start with lunar-tied daemons."

"Yes, Father," the aide replied, bowing before quickly leaving.

"She was… too powerful..." Griselda whispered, finally closing her eyes and not reopening them again.

Xenovia stared ahead, one working eye half-lidded beneath the growing scabs on her brow.

That… thing. That woman.

It was only a few seconds. Barely even that. She had stepped forward and readied her blade. She didn't know what happened. Her bones just broke. Her ribs folded. Her spine twisted. Her body had flung itself into a boulder.

That must be divine punishment.

Her teeth pressed together behind her sealed lips, jaw aching beneath the restraint. The breathing mask hissed slowly. The fluid burned inside her IV, almost holy-sweet. Her thoughts couldn't leave it alone.

Who was she? Why did she just exist like that?

That was not a demon. She doubted she was something God's wrath could pierce. She didn't feel like anything Xenovia had ever been trained to perceive. Her instincts as a warrior, her dozens of battles, her rites of exorcism, none of them mattered. She had just stood there. She had just been. And everything they did fell apart. Everything Xenovia was didn't matter.

And Xenovia hated that she couldn't even pretend otherwise.

A hand touched the glass wall beside her gently.

Her best friend was squinting and pale and tired but still trying to smile. Her other hand pointed toward her ear, then slowly turned the finger downward. She mouthed, clearly and deliberately, "I still can't hear. But I'm here."

Xenovia felt her fingers twitch once against the sheet tucked near her thigh, barely visible through the fluid. It was the most she could offer.

Irina gave a small, nodding smile. Then her hand rested against the glass again.

Irina can hear nothing. That scream—if it had even been a scream—had torn through her head like a hammer of compressed silence. The moment it hit, she remembered grabbing her ears, feeling the blood spray from her left canal. A ring then an absolute quiet. Even now, inside her recovery tube, her lips trembled, trying to speak.

Father Graccus stepped between their tubes with a quiet glance. He scribbled something on his datapad. Then paused.

"Her description doesn't match anything in the known archives," he murmured finally, addressing Father Raphael. "Not under demonic, divine, draconic, or interplanar categories. The closest match was a corrupted deity from Akkadian remnants, but the physical traits do not align."

"We'll need access to the deep vaults," Raphael replied. "Cross-reference with the pre-Flood scrolls. It's possible this isn't something classified under infernal registers. Perhaps… ancient divine?"

"I'd hesitate to call her divine," Graccus said, voice dry.

"Our top three were all hopeless in their enemy's mercy." Raphael reminded, his tone growing colder. "You call that infernal?"

"We might need to speak to the Grand Archivists."

"She may be older than the Second Age," Raphael murmured, checking the runes lining the containment walls. "Possibly unrecorded. Maybe pre-Abrahamic."

Graccus didn't answer.

Xenovia let out a shaky breath. She didn't expect chasing an unknown Familiar would turn their situation into a bizarre encounter and land them into a miniature comatose.

She closed her eyes and rested her mind from all the pain.

She would wake up later.

.
.
.
.
.

"You three really don't understand the concept of restraint, do you?"

Tiamat's voice cut through the protracted silence that followed their recap, narrowed eyes fixed firmly on the three culprits responsible for the yesterday evening's urban massacre.

She stood by the low table in the living room, the dim overhead light casting her petite silhouette across the polished floor like a teacher scolding her students. The room full of Beasts, all monstrous calamities in their own right, felt like a classroom caught with a cheating scandal.

No one answered immediately. Fou blinked, sat perched on the window, licking his paw, and muttered the unbothered "Fou." That was enough.

Goetia felt like an unwilling participant at a tribunal. "The objective was not containment. The three units responded proportionally—"

"There is no proportion when thousands of lives are vaporized in under a minute," Tiamat snapped back, voice harsher than before. "And you're calling them 'units'? Is that what we are now? Tools?"

Goetia's eyes narrowed faintly. "I classify them as units because they are military assets when in combat. That does not negate their individuality or their humanity."

"You think Kiara is human?" Kama laughed on the couch.

"I am more woman than you'll ever understand. You still sulk like a child who thinks 'affection' is a monopoly."

Kama's smile vanished.

"That wasn't a comeback, that was an admission. You're just a moist waste of mana."

"Now now," Angra cut in as he looked between them, "before the furniture starts flying and the walls become casualties again, can we go back to the part where we laugh about Kokabiel screaming like a dog when his wings got ripped off? Because that was comedy. Tragedy is boring."

"Tragedy is the fact you're still breathing," Draco said who hadn't moved since the lecture began. "And no. His screaming was excessive and infantile. I hated it."

"Of course you did," Kama said, rolling her eyes. "You'd hate a sunset if it looked at you wrong."

"No, I hate you."

"Fou."

Tiamat sighed which was too mature for her size. She took a slow breath, visibly holding back an urge to either hit someone or cry in maternal disappointment. "Even if I accept your war instincts, that there are dangers and that other Factions' provocations warranted intervention, what I do not accept is recklessness. That battle was seen by half the Supernatural Factions currently watching this region. That wasn't just noise—it was a declaration. Did any of you consider the ramifications?"

Goetia's response came immediately. "They already anticipated our existence. The Kyoto Faction has remained passive, but the Norse, Hindu, and Egyptian networks have already mobilized intelligence. Observers were already present during the combat incident. Containment was impossible the moment U-Olga exited the house earlier that day."

"I walked to get tea. That's hardly an act of war," she muttered from the kitchen doorway, snorting in disbelief.

"You vaporized three satellites and threatened a drone."

"Because it was in my way," she said, louder, stepping into the room now with the same entitled disdain she had the first time she called modern humans 'barely sapient mud.' "Is it not normal procedure to destroy enemy reconnaissance when your territory is invaded?"

"They weren't invading—"

"They were watching," she shot back.

"That's not the same—"

"It is to me."

Tiamat rubbed her temples. The headache had returned. "You all have the subtlety of a meteor strike."

"No," Kama said. "We're the meteor."

Kiara smirked. "Speak for yourself. I am the gravity that draws their hopes to the floor and whispers enjoyment as they die."

"Stop talking like a rejected erotic audiobook." Kama's irritation was unfiltered now.

"You love that I talk like this. You envy that I can own my form while you're still stuck in that half-stage of self-hatred."

"I can rip your spine out and play it like a flute."

Goetia stepped in between again. "Enough. The objective was achieved. Kokabiel is neutralized. The damage is being reviewed. The NFF Foundation has already begun infrastructure repairs via third-party fronts. Koyanskaya has appropriated a construction contract under a false Japanese conglomerate registered in Kuoh six hours ago. All insurance claims are being filtered through her channels."

Tiamat turned her head slowly toward the kitchen door. "You're involved in this now?"

Koyanskaya peeked around the corner. "What can I say? There's money to be made in divine collateral. It's very fashionable now. Also, stock options."

"Where did you even get legal documentation?"

"I fabricated it. That's not a joke. I fabricated the documents, the company history, the government records, and the identities of three dozen employees, including a child prodigy and a CEO with a tragic backstory. People eat that up. Humans are easy to fool when you talk about legacy and technology."

Tiamat stared at her blankly. "You're still wearing the same suit."

"Never said I was subtle."

Angra stretched out on the couch, one leg draped over the other, hands behind his head. "You all sound like politicians trying to apologize for starting a war. Let's be honest, none of us regret it. If anything, the only mistake was not dragging Kokabiel through the entire mountain range to see what kind of scream he makes when he gets flung into magma."

"I'd rather test that with someone else next time," U-Olga said casually, walking past them with a glass of orange juice.

"Fou," Fou repeated, sternly this time, as if reminding them they still hadn't addressed Tiamat's question.

Kama finally stood up, brushing her sleeves. "Alright, alright, Mother Hen. We'll be careful next time. No buildings flattened without a signed permission slip. No enemy smacked across seven blocks unless they pull a weapon first. Happy?"

"Not in the slightest. But I'll pretend."

Goetia turned his gaze toward the living room's back window. "The ceasefire will not last long. The Underworld's agents have already started reclassification protocols on this entire zone. They know of our presence here. Soon, they'll decide what to do with that knowledge."

Fou leapt onto the table as his small paws gripped the leather strap of the tome tied to Tiamat's waist. She allowed it to be tugged free. The movement was mellow, but everyone present turned their eyes to him.

With a light hop and a gentle push of mana from his padded feet, he dropped it onto the center. Goetia crouched and brushed against the edges of the cover, then pulling it open to its marked page. The lettering was handwritten, scribed by monks long dead, the ink faded but preserved through sacred means. Volume VII of the Sanctum Tomes. He recognized the formatting from Solomon's archived scraps and unwritten citations. In this world, it could only mean that this object came from the Vatican.

"You infiltrated the Papal Archive," he said without lifting his head, flipping another page. "Volume VII was restricted even from the clergy. Its loss would be noticed."

Tiamat raised her head. "You can thank Fou here."

"Fou." The creature blinked. "Fou."

Goetia's brow twitched, then lowered his gaze again. He began going over the text. The Sanctum Tome was not simply a catalogue of Sacred Gears but a deconstruction of rejected drafts, hybrid anomalies, theoretical failures, and lost blueprints. Drawings, fragments, equations meant to collapse under their own contradictions.

Koyanskaya leaned closer. She was careful not to touch, but her tail swayed with a little more interest than usual.

"This one here," she murmured, tapping near the sketch of a device that resembled a skeletal bracer. "Prototype Gear with multiple bounded fields. That's the same category as Twilight Healing, isn't it? Recovery-type. But unstable. Poor soul would've bled out if they tried activating it."

"Sacred Gears categorized by function," Goetia said aloud.

"State Alteration. Recovery. Creation. Defensive or Counter-Based. Attribute or Elemental. Space-Time Distortion. Sealing or Bounded Field. Independent Avatar. Contractual or Sealed. Trap-oriented."

"Those last two didn't show up in any of the current era's information leaks," Koyanskaya noted. "Hidden types, perhaps. Or just failed theory."

Draco turned away. "If they were failures, why bother recording them? Let me guess, vanity?"

"Knowledge is never meaningless," Goetia replied. "Even flawed theory contributes to the structural architecture of progress."

"Humans creating relics beyond their spiritual means is not progress. It's a failure to understand boundaries. This entire system, built on the backs of broken pseudo-miracles, is beneath divine providence." U-Olga said.

Kama added, "What's divine providence to creatures who put nails into their gods for amusement? Honestly, if their miracles stopped working, they'd just start shooting prayers out of cannons and calling it faith. The very concept of gears that do your job for you is peak human laziness."

"That's rich coming from you," Kiara murmured as she ran a nail along her thigh. "The goddess of carnal affection, criticizing 'laziness.' Sacred Gears can be humans giving themselves purpose when they no longer know what to worship. It's no different than your devotees, Kama. Only theirs requires maintenance."

Kama bared her teeth, lip curling. "At least mine don't rust."

Angra yawned and scratched the back of his head.

"Well, they don't need to anymore. God's dead anyway. Who's handing out Sacred Gears these days? The Holy Spirit's HR department?"

"....."

"....."

".....Fou...?"

"....."

"....."

"....."

The silence was immediate.

Goetia didn't raise his head, but the atmosphere around him changed. Tiamat looked at him slowly. Kama blinked once, then again. Kiara raised an eyebrow with a stunned face. U-Olga tilted her head slightly.

Goetia turned a page and spoke in a flat tone. "...Repeat that."

Angra didn't even shrug. "Was mentioned by Kokabiel back before we flattened him. From his face and tone, the God of the Bible's been dead for quite a while. Not sure what caused Him to die. The Gears still function because their designs are embedded into the system of the world. The corpse of divinity still runs the machine."

Goetia's gaze remained on the page in front of him.

"I refuse that premise."

Angra blinked. "Then file a complaint."

"I said I refuse it." Goetia's voice had a strange tone to it—one not quite anger, but a denial that ran too deep for emotion. "Omnipotence precludes death. The loss of life is the loss of potential. A being whose potential has no upper limit cannot, by definition, die."

"You're thinking in absolutes," Angra said. "Something dies when it no longer acts, when it ceases interaction. People literally die if they are killed. Maybe omnipotence meant too many things or He saw too far and left the rest of the game to run itself."

Kama was still staring at Goetia. "You don't seem very stable right now. That's unusual. I figured you'd be happy if the architect of mankind died. That would make you the inheritor, wouldn't it?"

Goetia finally looked up. "I was Solomon's shadow. I possess the system of man, but I am not its creator. That distinction matters."

Kiara grinned slowly. "Matters to whom?"

"To reality." Goetia stood and closed the tome with a quiet snap. "A system with a dead god is an abandoned one. That affects every parameter. It also means the Beast classification becomes less metaphorical and more structural. Our presence in this world had... re-contextualized."

Tiamat walked forward and took the book from his hand, holding it tightly against her chest with one arm.

"God or no God, I still dislike this planet. I dislike its loudness. I dislike its violence. But I will protect it anyway."

Angra didn't even glance at her. "Your motherly nonsense gets more annoying every hour."

"You're welcome. Now shut, boy."

"You still haven't explained your emotional reaction. Why do you care if the deity is dead? You're not loyal."

Goetia didn't blink at U-Olga. "I am not loyal. I am simply being rational. The system's continuity implies the presence of a supervisory constant. If that constant is no longer present, then the system's future trajectory has been compromised. Sacred Gears operating post-deity indicate automated divine infrastructure means it has implications."

"You mean someone else could hijack the system," Koyanskaya muttered. "Assuming they understand it."

"Or the system will collapse without adaptive maintenance," Goetia replied. "Both outcomes require observation. We must acquire more recent data. The Vatican's volume was outdated. We need post-war revisions. If they exist."

Tiamat turned toward him. "I know where the next piece is. Somewhere in Italy. A research lab once run by the Grigori. Abandoned, but maybe not looted."

Draco rolled her eyes. "Fine. But I'm not participating in any more scavenger hunts unless the next relic has value."

"It will," Tiamat said simply.

Kama tapped her foot. "Let's just hope it's not another book."

Kiara smiled wider. "I'll read it to you. Out loud."

Kama gave her a sharp glance, stepping closer to Angra.

It was currently about the second hour in the morning. Terminal 3-B had already begun deploying its influence above the Beast's residential territory. An oblong, monolithic mass in the sky veiled in spatial filtration and leyline camouflage, silently pulsing as Goetia calibrated its layered sensor functions to begin worldwide interception and mythological response buffering. The sheer scale of global disruption was a matter he had long since calculated, though he neither sought to prevent it nor had any illusions about its inevitability.

An hour. That was the buffer period he predicted before the first divine-class pantheonic alarm triggers would ignite across at least three major mythos-based spiritual authorities.

It was a precautionary move, designed to heighten theological tension and pull the attention of divine authorities away from Kuoh itself. A strategic misdirection. Ten of so-called prophetic events, all fake, were already being broadcast globally, threaded through modern information pipelines in multiple layers of narrative camouflage. He knew that humans would believe them. More importantly, their gods would too. Goetia had placed full trust in the psychological impact of information manipulation, especially when the news carried the same weight as ancient scripture in modern form.

Angra slumped into the couch with one foot dragging across the floor to hook the leg of the table just to push it aside and make space for himself. He switched the television on, using the remote like a detached observer. He had no interest in the world outside. In his words, they could burn it down and build it again with nothing but plastic chairs and cardboard signs and he'd still get blamed for it.

The static popped, then gave way to a loud newscaster voice announcing yet another divine anomaly in Italy. Then another in Mongolia. Then one in Sri Lanka. He blinked slowly, arms folded over his chest.

"The hell is this mess?"

He asked rhetorically. He knew what it was. False signs. Conveniently timed. He cocked his head and glanced back toward Goetia.

"Let me guess. Demon God Pillar. You're running a fake apocalypse script, aren't you?" Angra muttered, "World's going to piss itself before breakfast."

Goetia didn't respond. That alone was confirmation.

Angra returned his gaze to the screen. The program abruptly cut to another news feed, about Japan. Kuoh. The footage was amateur, most likely recorded on some civilian's phone, and the frame stuttered violently as the recorder had clearly been caught in the aftershock. The visuals were grainy, but that only added to the credibility. What mattered wasn't clarity. What mattered was the implication.

The newscaster was already screaming about some battle in the sky, catastrophic shockwaves, falling debris, light-based projectiles being thrown like javelins, a fiery figure tackling a winged one out of the heavens, explosions in the air, and finally a plume of black feathers raining down like a funeral storm.

Then the replay started. The screen showed two barely distinguishable humanoid shapes clashing mid-air, the speed so intense that even the blur-tracking couldn't keep up. One had a halo-like flare of pure fire wrapped around it. The other was clearly Kokabiel. The voiceover tried to explain what little they could understand—fragments like "unknown figures," "heavily injured," "military silence," and "possibility of war escalation." The camera zoomed in on the ground impact. Craters. Ruined blocks. Blurred shadows frozen mid-frame.

Angra's jaw locked for a second. His foot twitched.

"...Ah, shit."

Draco's voice rang from the kitchen dryly. "...Told you humans would panic."

"You think I care what they see?" Angra shot back without looking at her. "I didn't even care enough to change out of this shirt before wrecking that crazy bastard. Besides, it wasn't me throwing suns and feathers all over the sky like a parade float gone nuclear."

"You're blaming me?" Draco's voice was still steady, but the temperature of the room dropped slightly from the pressure in her tone. "You didn't even conceal yourself."

"It was your idea to beat him down in daylight."

"It was a righteous decision."

"You say that like it matters."

An audible click from the television drew their attention again. The footage now zoomed into one of the clashes—Kokabiel caught in a flaming aerial hold and then launched like a comet through a high-rise. Black feathers scattered, and the shadow of a woman with a radiant crown could be seen for just a frame, her expression frozen in fury. The rest was blurred, but the symbolism was clear enough for anyone with a mind for it.

Koyanskaya walked past with an elegant sigh. "You two are so flashy it's disgusting. No taste for subtlety at all. I nearly choked on my noodles watching you scream through the sky like angry birds."

"Shut up, you'd run if Kokabiel so much as sneezed in your direction," Angra grunted.

"That's called strategic withdrawal. Besides, my bullets were faster."

Draco didn't dignify that with a response. She was watching the screen. Pointless attention. Consequences tied to chaotic emotions. She didn't even look at Angra anymore.

Kama unexpectedly grinned wide enough to cut glass. "Ooooh~ You're in trouble~"

Angra sighed. Loudly. "Don't."

"I'm just saying. You did bring this on yourselves. And now look..." Kama's tone lifted into mocking singsong. "Tiamat is watching~"

That was when they noticed.

They didn't need to turn around. They didn't even feel her footsteps. The sensation was enough. Like a weight pressing on the back of the skull, not from malice, but from the sheer disappointment carried within it. The kind of maternal pressure that didn't yell, didn't punish, didn't accuse. It just judged in silence. The television's volume lowered by itself. Draco visibly straightened. Koyanskaya pulled her legs up onto the couch like a cat avoiding eye contact.

Tiamat's eyes slowly passed over Angra, then Draco, then finally rested on the footage again. The recorded scream of Kokabiel echoed one more time, followed by the blur of light and fire smashing him into the ground.

The silence was unbearable.

Angra coughed into his fist. "Okay. Before you say anything, I was totally in control of the situation. Minimal property damage—"

"That's minimal?"

"Kama, shut."

"You didn't even warn us about the cameras," Koyanskaya muttered under her breath.

"You're not helping."

Draco didn't speak. Her back was rigid, jaw tight. But even she was sweating.

Tiamat's lips finally parted, but no words came. Only the sound of her exhale. Extended. Slow. Exasperated. Her eyes drifted toward the ceiling as though asking an invisible higher authority for patience she already knew she wouldn't get. Then she turned around and left the room without a word.

The silence afterward was complete.

"...I've never felt this kind of fear before," Angra muttered.

Kiara laughed quietly, hands over her mouth. "Mother's wrath is the scariest thing, isn't it?"

Goetia's voice entered, "The mythological threshold will be crossed in approximately forty-five minutes. If we are to anticipate divine envoy projections, now would be the optimal time to formulate behavioral disguises and alibis. I would prefer no further media exposure."

Angra waved the remote without looking. "Yeah, yeah. We'll all wear clownsuits next time. Might as well lean into the absurdity."

In the next second, everyone felt divine presence approaching from behind the upper clouds, not subtle in the slightest, which was expected from figures that spent thousands of years being worshipped and didn't bother learning how to knock.

The fact that they arrived this early mildly annoyed Goetia. It is to be expected that their arrival to be forty minutes later based on standard divine communication routes and Shinto spiritual protocols. That they circumvented such expected processes meant either desperation or offense. Angra glanced at the corner of the ceiling in the living room, then without a word, stood up and moved for the sliding door, passing by Tiamat's kitchen glow, then exited into the quiet wind outside. He didn't say he was going to deal with it, but nobody else moved, so it was implied enough.

When the door closed behind him, the outside air was clean but stale with pressure. It always felt that way when divine types were around. The presence of divinity was often misunderstood by humans to be calming or healing, but in reality, it was like standing near a high-voltage tower. You didn't feel soothed, you felt cautious about being electrocuted.

His eyes raised as the four landed gracefully, though the younger male crashed more than landed, stirring up some soil. Angra looked at each of them. Two men, both armed, one shirtless with a massive katana and the kind of dumb grin that said he was already thinking of insults or a fight. Two women, both nimble, both serious. One had the distinct kitsune ears and tail like Koyanskaya, which made Angra sigh internally. The other, taller, carried herself like a sovereign of something more than a pantheon, and radiated the kind of self-restraint that was impossible to fake.

The moment their eyes landed on Angra, the four felt stiff. To them, he appeared to be a teenage boy wearing a long jersey and casual shorts, with skin darker than the average Japanese and glyphs burning gently along his arms, neck, and face like tattoos. It was his presence. It was almost divine, and it felt like human but not mortal. It was weightless and yet absolutely wrong to divine senses. There was no clear emotion, but there was pressure in the air like the pause before a verdict.

"You," the long-haired man said first, his voice already harsh, cold, with that edge of practiced restraint used by those who did not want to speak with inferiors but had to anyway. "Identify yourself. This territory is under the dominion of the Kami. You are within our jurisdiction. State your name and purpose."

Angra stared at the god's silver-white hair and pale skin and then glanced at the others. He lifted his hand and scratched his ear like he didn't hear clearly, though he obviously had.

"Sorry, didn't quite catch that," he replied casually, his voice dry, lazy, and entirely disrespectful in tone. "You said 'identify'? That's kind of a weird word to throw around outside a police station."

The disdain in Tsukuyomi's eyes sharpened. Susanoo was the next to react. His feet slammed forward, pointing his katana toward the boy with one hand, already frowning. "Don't screw around with us, brat. We're the gods of this land. You're on Japan's soil. Least you can do is show respect before we start asking who left the dog out of its cage. That power from Kuoh's sky earlier—your trail leads right here. You're gonna give some answers or—"

"I already know what you are," Angra interrupted.

His eyes narrowed slightly, just slightly, but it was like steel clicked into place behind them. "Susanoo, right? The one who threw a fit and got kicked out of the heavens. I liked that story. Very punk. Then we have Tsukuyomi, the moon guy who couldn't understand humor even if you served it to him on polished mirror plates. The two women are obvious. That one,"

He said, gesturing lazily at Inari, "is foxy in multiple ways. I won't say what's on my mind because she looks like someone who'll poison my drink later. And the tall, perfect, elegant one is clearly Amaterasu. You're the only one whose vibes are neatly ironed. The rest of them feel like static."

They stared at him longer. Susanoo's grip was tighter.

"You're aware of who we are, yet still mock us," the Chief-Goddess said softly. Her presence made the air ring slightly. "That confirms your intent is not ignorance but a deliberate insult."

"Or maybe I just have a sense of humor," Angra said, cracking his neck and sticking both hands into the pockets of his pants. "You lot are the ones who barged into a neighborhood like you own the sky. I'm standing outside my house. You flew in and demanded names. That's some divine entitlement right there."

"You were at the epicenter of the recent conflict over Kuoh," Tsukuyomi said. "The aftermath of the clash leveled three city blocks and left a metaphysical scar that will take decades to stabilize. We traced two major sources of spiritual violence. One of them was yours. The other was of a different nature, equally concerning."

"That'd be Draco," Angra replied simply. "She went a bit enthusiastic when beating Kokabiel into a feathery paste. That guy talks too much, so she had to take some liberties with his face. You know how it is. Battle etiquette and all that."

"You mock a matter of divine accountability," Amaterasu said, now visibly colder. "That is not yours to determine. The Kami of this nation have a duty to oversee such events, not be informed posthumously by surveillance and rumors. Situations like these should be reported."

"You want me to apologize for saving your patch of grass from a war criminal from another Faction? Or should I have written a letter of intent first?" Angra leaned against the wooden post of the entryway.

"Sorry, my schedule doesn't include licking divine boots just because some self-proclaimed sun deity gets a headache from watching collateral footage."

"We don't take instructions from mortals, and we do not debate judgment," Tsukuyomi snapped. "This is not a discussion but an inquiry. You will submit yourself to the judgment of the Kami for your participation in the destructive battle over Kuoh. You are not above divine law."

"I'm not under it either," Angra replied without blinking. "You're free to bark judgments all you want. Don't expect me to pretend they apply to me. I'm not your citizen, your servant, or your priest. I'm not anything you recognize. I don't play by divine law, because I'm not bound by its structure or relevance. You're in front of a Beast. Not a being created by your pantheon, but something that existed for reasons your kind would find inconvenient to acknowledge."

That made them halt. Susanoo looked to Tsukuyomi, who kept his face stiff, but he didn't understand what was just said. Inari blinked once and narrowed her eyes, stepping a half-foot behind Amaterasu.

"Then you claim no allegiance to any order?" Amaterasu asked.

"I claim a very strong allegiance to my nap schedule," Angra said flatly. "and right now, you're cutting into it. So unless you plan to swing that oversized fan of divine justice at my head, maybe save the righteous indignation for your shrine meetings. Or go talk to the Beast Queen inside the house, assuming you have the stomach for it. She's less talkative than me, but a hundred times worse if you piss her off."

There was a heavy pause in the air after that. The wind didn't blow. The sky came off to lean in.

A sound of footsteps on tatami behind Angra meant the others had finally bothered to join him outside. One by one, the figures of Draco, U-Olga, Kama, Kiara, Koyanskaya, Tiamat, and Fou filtered out into the open, lining up at differing intervals without coordination or care for appearances.

Each exuded presence so dense it felt like the air compressed within itself. The four deities before them immediately recognized that none of these beings were completely mortal, and none bore divine signatures native to which they recognized it. Their expressions betrayed no panic but carried the posture alertness of battle-ready veterans.

What caught Amaterasu's attention most of all, however, was the unfamiliar yet unmistakably divine essence radiating from the little girl, an aura of an ancient goddess from beyond the confines of any Shinto scripture. Even Amaterasu's own deeply buried instincts bristled slightly.

U-Olga was slightly ahead of the others and scanned the four Kami, then leaned slightly back and threw a hand out behind her. "So these are the local gods? I thought they'd be impressive."

Angra raised an eyebrow. He glanced at her out of instinctive acknowledgment of her tone.

Come to think of it, U-Olga had been itching to confront something resembling a local authority ever since Goetia's first-day cautionary remark about avoiding conflict with native deities. That assumption clearly annoyed her, especially when she could feel the Kami's nervousness just from standing in their proximity. When Goetia had warned that any direct confrontation with this world's deities could result in catastrophic escalation and possible irreversible fragmentation of their own bodies, she had scoffed quietly and said nothing. Now, she was ready to make that point known.

"Beast I estimated we might suffer fragmentary loss if we fought local gods. That was before I saw who these gods were." Her eyes passed over Susanoo's shirtless torso, then Tsukuyomi's glare, resting last on Amaterasu with a slight turn of her neck. "I'll take my chances."

Tsukuyomi's voice was ice and blade. "Such words may pass unpunished in the depths of whatever place you crawled from, but here you address the eldest Kami of this land."

Draco tilted her head. "Then consider this an exercise of jurisdictional neutrality. This land holds no contract with us. If your rules demand respect, you'll have to present terms. We are not subjects."

Susanoo placed one hand on the hilt of the blade at his waist to show it off to everyone. He looked directly at Angra, at Kiara, then flicked his eyes up and down Koyanskaya. "You all reek of disorder. You especially," he said, pointing briefly at Koyanskaya. "There's something about your scent that reminds me of old things that never die and never belong. Are you from here?"

Koyanskaya merely smiled, lifted a finger to her lips, and gave no answer. That coy smile visibly unsettled Inari, who blinked once. Inari said nothing but took another half-step behind Amaterasu's shoulder.

Tiamat looked over at Amaterasu for the first time with narrowed eyes. It was clear to her that they were terrified. She practically smells it. That's the problem with gods nowadays apparently. Their sense of duty outstrips their ability to defend it.

Amaterasu took several seconds to simply look at each of the assembled Beasts, lingering longest on Tiamat. Her voice never betrayed an emotion and was drenched in authoritative control. "Accomplices, I assumed? The destruction that has now reached the eyes of mankind from the battle in Kuoh has pushed the veil further than intended. They were witnesses. It will not be hidden anymore. Japan's sovereignty cannot sustain your presence unexamined. The trial of explanation is necessary."

"Trial? That's adorable. If you want to put us on trial, I promise you, you won't survive the first five minutes of hearing mine." Kama interrupted with a venom smile as her arms draped over Angra's shoulder like a lounging cat claiming property.

Tsukuyomi's nostrils flared. "You find cruelty humorous."

"They want accountability. Who holds you accountable? Do you believe you're at the top of the food chain in this nation because you wear bright robes and know where to stand in the sun?" Kiara suddenly took a slow step forward, walking past Angra without any regard for position or diplomacy. Her presence made Tsukuyomi take one half-step back unconsciously. Kiara's voice was soft but too lucid to ignore. "I guarantee you, if you try to leash me, you'll end up begging to be devoured instead."

Susanoo was about to step in, but his sister interrupted. "You are the one most directly linked to the focal point of that clash. Even now, you carry the burden of residual force bleeding into this plane. If you are its source, then speak. What cause have you for bringing calamity onto this nation?"

Angra shrugged without emotion, his expression unreadable. "I got out of bed."

No one spoke after that. The bluntness of it was so dry and lacking in effort that Susanoo furrowed his brow as though trying to detect if it was code for something greater. Angra didn't elaborate.

Draco sighed and looked toward Amaterasu. "You waste your time. Either you are here to align with us or oppose us, we don't care. We're simply brought here, and we are staying as long as it pleases us. If you cannot tolerate that, you may try to force our removal. But don't pretend diplomacy was an option you offered. This was always going to be a threat evaluation, not a negotiation."

Inari spoke up. "Then at least explain why you conceal a foreign goddess with you. The one that resembles the chaos waters. I cannot name her."

The little girl answered. "Because your kind never knew my name. I existed before your sun warmed your soil."

Fou barked, "Fou."

U-Olga gave a smirk. "Look at them. They're already terrified, and we've barely raised our voices."

Kiara turned to Kama with a sardonic lilt. "You were right. They do look better when they're judging from behind a mirror instead of holding a sword."

Kama laughed as she dragged her finger across Angra's back while she moved closer to the edge. "Judgment. Expecting humans to contain what exists outside their myths. I suppose that's the irony of gods built by men. They're still pretending the walls aren't crumbling."

Susanoo's hand suddenly shot out, fingers curled with intent to seize Angra by his collar.

Draco's arm clamped down on the kami's wrist the moment the thunder god moved. There was no warning or visible preparation but everyone foresaw the harsh, snapping clash of brute physical force meeting divine fury. The stone beneath their feet cracked from the impact, fracturing outward in a sudden seismic ripple. A single gust of pressure struck the area in a heavy but intolerable proof that the space between two divine beings had been bridged and would no longer be still.

The kami's power was natural and unyielding, shaped by divine roles embedded into reality itself. The storms that Susanoo commanded were not metaphors for emotion or mood; they were the literal distillation of weather's violence, the sea's churn, and the earth's tectonic muscle. His domain was not for display because it was for control, enforcement, and correction. When Susanoo moved to engage, the air itself obeyed to his will.

Draco had taken control of that.

Her burning fingers coiled around his wrist, tightened once, and rooted him in place. Her grip asserted control. That was enough to cancel out the storm itself.

"A divine being you may be, but I suggest you do not touch what you cannot comprehend."

She didn't release Susanoo's wrist. Speech was wasted on a mind that reacted before it reasoned.

The Moon God clearly looked like he was resisting the urge to lash out fully. He forced out a growl. "I do not allow insults from creatures who wear mockery like a crown." His eyes darted to the unbothered Angra. "That one spits on this world like it's beneath him."

"Actually, I lie in it, enjoy the rot, and watch fools like you pretend you're immune to it."

"Oh, come now. He's not pretending anything. He's very sincerely angry about being irrelevant." Kama rolled her eyes toward Susanoo but didn't hide the contempt in her voice. "Look at you, all burning up over someone not bowing down and weeping at your divine presence. That's what this is about, isn't it? That someone looked at you and didn't immediately crumble into worship."

Amaterasu placed one hand against Susanoo's forearm.

"Brother, you are out of time and place. This world is not shaped to accommodate divine tantrums. I suggest restraint."

But the situation was now too close to escalation.

"Why must you threaten children when you yourself refuse to grow?"

Susanoo turned his eyes to her with disbelief. "Children?"

"Yes," Tiamat answered plainly without venom. "You're all children. Gods cry about respect, scream about shrines, and flail at anything that doesn't cower before your name. That's what a child does. It's a habit. I have seen civilizations you will never remember fall to silence because they thought they could yell their way out of irrelevance."

The Kami stared dumbfounded at her.

Before anyone could respond, U-Olga turned her head just enough for her voice to carry across the street.

"You should consider who's still asleep in this area." She glanced toward Amaterasu, mouth curled in irritation that her current display was being overshadowed. "If even a single camera catches your precious forms glowing with divine backlash, and with that cosplay look, I won't doubt that the humans will notice. After notice, it won't be strange if they panic and connect the dots. If they panic, the shrine will be closed. You'll lose influence. And worse, you'll have to explain to your human worshippers why their gods can't even hold back from punching residents at one in the morning."

Inari's head snapped toward U-Olga at that, her eyes wide with sudden panic. "No. You wouldn't. You wouldn't let them see—"

"I already let them see me," U-Olga cut in with pride. "It's not my problem if you've built your temples on the assumption no one would ever talk back. I'm not the one pretending to be humble."

Amaterasu closed her eyes, the smallest twitch visible at her temple, and then lifted one hand.

The Beasts felt distortion pass.

The entire space twisted and folded outward and collapsed in on itself and the feeling of the sky, the air pressure, and the magnetic balance of the space all displaced.

They were now in another dimension, one tied to the physical location but utterly removed from human perception.

Vitch and Kiara stared in curiosity. The authority to rewrite spatial boundaries without ritual preparation and delay. A dimension layered atop the base coordinates of an Earth-aligned location, tied to human collective belief structures. Even by deity standards, that is no small feat.

Well, that happens when the caster showcases to her foes that she is no mere kami. A proof of centuries of sufficient mythos and consistent worshipping.

... But, of course, so are the Beasts.

Angra, Kama, Kiara, Draco, Vitch, U-Olga, Fou, Tiamat.

"I acknowledge this. Authority clashes when it is identical. The stronger one consumes the weaker. But when authority is dissimilar, equal, and absolute, conflict becomes unsolvable. That is where we stand." Koyanskaya concludes.

Draco finally released Susanoo's arm, letting it drop without ceremony. "Then there is no more need to test each other. There's no merit in proving what we already know. I only respond when someone breaks order. Do not provoke again."

"The one who doesn't like fighting, but you're quick to crush wrists. You're full of polarities, Draco." Kama said from behind.

"I hate wasting time, and it takes time to ignore worms."

Regardless, she sighed and strode up to the Sun Goddess, ignoring the aura that radiated like a furnace. "We are not beholden to your jurisdiction. I am under no one's command. You ask for explanations, but what you desire is obedience. I don't bow to the demands of beings who presume authority without establishing superiority."

"You are not on a throne, and this land is not yours. Here, there is only one divinely sanctified order, and I speak for it."

She didn't flinch. Her pride wouldn't permit submission, but she recognized hierarchy. She merely turned her head to the other Beasts, as if silently asking if he intended to waste his breath.

Angra pretended to think harder than he was. "You're a bit more dramatic than Yasaka, I'll give you that. You act exactly like her. Same expressions, same tense way of talking, like someone forced to bear the weight of too many shrines and festivals."

Inari's head jerked slightly toward him. "What did you say?"

"Didn't say anything useful," Kama cut in, not even looking at Inari. "Don't bother. He forgets that other people actually listen to the idiocy that comes out of his mouth."

But Inari was already staring hard. "Yasaka notified me two beings came to Kyoto days ago. A woman and a man who absorbed the spiritual convergence point in the city. That point was defiled. The leylines were pulled through something that did not belong. She provided the descriptions. You—" her eyes moved between Angra and U-Olga with a startling realization, "—you were the ones who did it."

He gave Inari a slow look. "...I was hungry. It was there."

Kiara scoffed. She folded her arms beneath her chest which had nothing to do with pride and everything to do with presentation. "You're all so quick to assign blame when you don't even understand what it means to stand in the presence of beings who existed long before your rituals were even whispered."

Tsukuyomi's arm rose fully. "Amaterasu—"

"I know," she replied. Her palm extended.

A golden ring unfurled from the ground like a ripple. It surrounded the Beasts, expanding outward with silent acceleration before it suddenly halted. Then came a second ring, and a third. Dozens of them burst out and formed what appeared to be a multi-layered grid of spiritual geometry. Thin lines of divine writing illuminated in the air, forming barriers, seals, walls, restrictions. Like chains not made of metal, but law. Space was distorted. Time slowed perceptibly. The floor underneath the Beasts subtly shifted color, glowing with a sacred energy embedded into the land itself since the day Amaterasu's foot first stepped on it.

U-Olga raised her hand and pressed her finger into the barrier wall. It didn't yield. Her eye twitched. "You're not seriously trying to bind me."

"Your interference with Kyoto's core is a violation." Amaterasu said plainly. "You committed an act of aggression against my dominion. I will have your identities recorded in the celestial registry and determine whether you are to be annihilated or erased."

"You think this thing is going to contain me?" U-Olga said, her tone rising in annoyance. "You have no idea who I am."

"You stand in my country," Amaterasu said again. "You harm what I govern. You answer for it."

U-Olga clicked her tongue and leaned toward Angra with irritation. "This is your fault," she said. "You couldn't keep your mouth shut."

Angra gave her a sideways glance. "We just stood there and absorbed half the Kyoto leylines."

"I'm a god," U-Olga muttered. "You were just being lazy."

"That's the difference between you and me."

Kiara eyed the barrier and tapped against her arm. "It's almost like a divine construction, but there's no coercion or dominance layered in the structure. Pure law. Not bad. But it only works if the targets accept its premise."

Tiamat turned her head slowly. She hadn't moved since all of it. Her expression was unreadable. She looked at the barrier. "You think this will stop us?"

"You are already bound," Tsukuyomi said. He went closer to the Beasts. "You may believe yourselves immune to punishment, but this is the land of the gods. You trespassed."

Draco's gaze narrowed. "Speak your ruling if that's the path you're going down. Does your authority only exist when unopposed?"

Her fist clenched.

The moment she spoke, the space shifted. The barrier didn't collapse or crack; instead, the area inside began to warp. The laws of space held by Amaterasu's power started rejecting the very essence of what the Beasts were. Not just their presence, but their composition. Reality resisted them.

But it didn't end there.

U-Olga's presence intensified. The pressure from Amaterasu's barrier didn't make her flinch. Rather, her eyes honed to a cold degree. "This rejection is enough to define the world I came from."

Crack.

Splinters started appearing. The four Kami's eyes widened slightly.

The ground split slightly beneath Tiamat's bare feet. Fou shivered but remained where he was.

"Fou."

Kama smiles wide but dead behind the eyes. "Cute. Truly. But can you stop her? I'd like to see it. I really would want to know if that fox face can still smile after realizing how far behind she's fallen."

Koyanskaya locks eyes with Inari behind Kama. An eye of a predator to a lesser prey.

"…Fou."

"Fou."

"...Fou."

Tsukuyomi finally stopped pretending the small creature was irrelevant. His stare dawdled on the creature's form, carefully watching it as it tilted its head, bouncing in place with an innocence that belied the power Tsukuyomi sensed. The Moon God narrowed his eyes. He had been silent long enough, watching the others and their behavior like a judge over condemned criminals.

"That animal should be examined. It does not correspond to any species on this plane. Its presence carries an unquantifiable pressure. If this is one of your familiars," he turned to Tiamat, "then I suggest you tell us its true identity before I consider it a security risk."

Tiamat puffed her cheeks. She planted her hands on her hips. She simply looked insulted that someone would suggest her soft, round-eared companion could possibly be categorized by anyone other than herself.

"Are you blind? This is Fou. You heard him. That's all there is. He doesn't need a name from you. He doesn't need your squinting little eyes staring at him like he's a riddle you can solve if you frown hard enough. Just because your brain is shaped like a block of ice doesn't mean you need to shove your cold into everything else."

That unexpected tone caught him off-guard. It had the cadence of something older than war, something heavy, even when being petulant. That tone reverberated in his skull and reached his eyes. When his gaze accidentally aligned with hers, his vision contorted.

He stood in a pitch-black abyss. It was a void. Within it swam appendages that made no anatomical sense. The concept of "end" or "limb" or "skin" failed to exist in what he was perceiving. Instead, he saw endless writhing concepts; maternal instinct, spawning violence, survival without love, sacrifice without affection, swimming through that darkness in the shape of something he couldn't name. He saw a great womb curled around planets, a being whose instinct was not affection but preservation, one that birthed civilizations and destroyed them for the same reason.

Tsukuyomi blinked, staggered, and took one step back.

Kama watched all this.

"Fear is usually disgusting, but on all of you, it fits. Trembling at the first glance of something that doesn't fit in your cosmic furniture set."

"You—!"

Amaterasu is starting to lose her patience.

"Enough! You walk freely despite being complicit in the disorder we now attempt to stabilize. Do not pretend you hold innocence in your hands. I can see that you carry with you the weight of destruction, and we do not forget the boy whose actions speak louder than any of your vile declarations."

Kama turned her full attention to the sun goddess, and her expression changed. A face that held nothing but pity and superiority.

"Was that a judgment? You're condemning because I share airspace with my companions? Oh pu-lea-se! You're using that as an excuse to burn all of us at once. That's cowardice dressed as divinity. But go ahead... play righteous. Maybe one day, you'll realize you're punishing the wrong ones, and by then, it won't matter. You'll have already passed the sentence."

She gestured toward Draco and Angra. "If you want to burn us because we breathe in sync with that nihilist and that iron tyrant, then say it outright."

Amaterasu's answer was without a single hesitation. "You stand with those who have spilled human blood upon this soil. Bystanders were massacred. Kokabiel lies slain. Whether by your hands or not, your cooperation is sufficient to mark you as threats."

Kiara nudged Vitch.

"You know, if they're detaining us, then we might as well consider it a gateway. All these measures… accusations… it's the perfect smokescreen. We're already under their captivity. Takamagahara is within reach. Even a sealed bird is still in the cage. All it takes is one broken lock."

Susanoo let out a laugh, loud, raw. He practically shoved his shoulder past Amaterasu and reached the confined Beasts, getting far too close for comfort.

"Don't flatter yourselves. Takamagahara doesn't get infiltrated. You don't just walk in and start plucking stars from the sky. You're all powerful, sure, but power doesn't make you clever. We've crushed things stronger than you just because they were stupid enough to underestimate how much the Heavens hate being invaded. You're barely an inconvenience."

He was too close.

U-Olga's strength made itself known as her arm extended, and her palm drove itself into Susanoo's face with such speed and force that the earth under them cracked, even bypassing the barrier. The Kami of Storms went airborne for three full seconds before crashing down beside one of the structures that guarded the path to the divine realm.

She flipped her hair, stood upright again, and stared at the Kami.

"Primal brute. I don't let mutts with names of gods put their filthy breath on me."

An unmistakable weight of superior divinity, was something the Kami hadn't felt in centuries. The blow on Susanoo hadn't been from magic. It had been sheer force. Raw, divine, physical might.

The message was simple.

The Beasts were threats...

...and they make sure that the Kami will no longer be certain that they were the highest power in Japan.

The moment Amaterasu's barrier fractured into visible prismatic shards, disintegrating into nothingness with a reverberating snap that rattled the air, the vacuum it left behind was a vast, rolling pressure that immediately made itself known across the dimensional space.

The pocket realm reacted to the release of suppression; the terrain warped, the skies above darkened into roiling masses of deep violet clouds, and the spiritual atmosphere fluctuated violently. The suppression had kept the full pressure of divine authority and Beast-class presence at bay until now.

Susanoo's body was already in motion by the time the barrier shattered. Long conditioned for divine war, he surged forward with the force of a typhoon. He crackled with stormborn power, his right arm wrapped in spiraling magatama energy condensed into a single bolt of divine retribution. His target was immediate and logical: the one with the most clear hostile intent and lethal pressure. The woman wielding an aura akin to the sun's detonation.

A weapon of heavenly order.

Draco met him with no verbal retort.

She closed the distance in less than a second, pushing off the ground with enough force that the earthen floor cratered and exploded beneath her armored greaves, unleashing a heat wave that instantly flash-vaporized the moisture in the area. The air sizzled. She slammed her bare forearm against his lightning-wrapped strike.

The impact created a vertical shockwave that cracked the terrain beneath them into a canyon-like fissure. Power surged through the space, and ignited a dome of raw power that expanded from their point of contact. Lightning dispersed from Susanoo's side, arcs fracturing off and igniting the landscape in chaotic bolts, while Draco's flame-based aura erupted in searing tongues of concentrated heat that reached critical temperature within moments. The result was a zone of mutual destruction.

Susanoo growled through gritted teeth, pushing forward with both arms now, trying to physically pin her down with raw force, repelled by Draco who refused to yield a single step. She extended her free arm and drove her elbow into his side, sending a jolt through his divine body. He felt her restraint. She was not exerting even half her force. It was not mockery; it was insulting. A calculated demonstration of contempt.

"You dare—!"

"I don't recall speaking to you," Draco bluntly stated, colored with judgment. "I have no interest in playing with chaotic siblings pretending to be divine administrators."

Susanoo retaliated with a roar, and the sound split the sky above them, pulling a massive spiritual greatsword from his side and swung. Draco immediately activated a conceptual control, her hand coated in anti-divine energy, intercepting the blade directly without taking damage. The divine sword screeched against her arm but held no penetration.

Tsukuyomi appeared and aligned behind Susanoo in a wide curve, hand raised as a thousand blades formed behind him from perfect, white lunar light constructs sharpened to molecular precision. He aimed them at the Beasts, but primarily Kama and Kiara, judging their hostility level higher due to their conceptual nature. He fired.

But before the projectiles reached their mid-point, a gravitational shift interrupted their path. Tsukuyomi's gaze flicked sideways.

U-Olga was already in his path. Her complete lack of compromise eyes met his chill stare. She accelerated, pushing past the air resistance with her core radiating alien divinity. A dome of force exploded outward from her presence, negating the blades entirely. She didn't even look at them.

"You are not the threat."

She struck the ground with a focused burst of force, launching herself diagonally upward, arcing toward Amaterasu, who stood further back. Tsukuyomi turned immediately, preparing to intercept. U-Olga's body morphed mid-air—altering her gravitational vector with impossible maneuvering—and she shot past him by forcing his body downward through an isolated gravity field. He was slammed down, the land beneath him collapsing into a crater with concentric shockwaves.

All hell broke loose. Again. Surprise.

Angra should've expected this... or maybe he did earlier and just forgotten it.

His gaze narrowed on Amaterasu. Despite everything, she stood still at her location, radiating the looming pressure of the sun on a cold planet, distant but life-altering the moment it got too close.

Angra clicked his tongue and shook his head.

Even someone like him—who had seen the inner workings of nihilism, borne the accumulated Evil of humanity, watched the Age of Gods dissolve and the dreams of man distort into monstrosity—he could tell that this woman, was not simply a Shinto goddess of the sun.

No, if she was anything like their Amaterasu, then it wasn't exaggeration or paranoia. If this world's solar deity held even a fraction of the concept-killing power of the one that could rival the King of Mages' incineration plan, then none of them—Beasts or otherwise—would walk out of here if she decided to actually fight.

Angra scratched the back of his head.

"U-Olga knows that. Which is why she skipped everyone and went straight to her. If Amaterasu really is the lynchpin holding back nuclear-grade gods like the Velbers or Enuma Elish-ranked beings, then it's better to hit her before she decides to take this seriously."

He looked to the side.

The space shuddered again. The clash between Draco and Susanoo reached a new peak. A horizontal shockwave surged outward as the two forces disengaged momentarily, blowing apart chunks of terrain, and creating floating islets from broken pieces of solid ground.

Susanoo growled, gripping his blade tighter.

"Divine or not... I will not lose to insulting beings."

"Then fight better."

So, they did.

Angra's expression dulled as he felt a sudden lurch in the ambient pressure. He noticed Inari was no longer beside the rest of the enemy group. That made him narrow his eyes, only it meant something interesting might be happening behind him. His mouth curled into a deadpan smile as he sensed the acceleration of divine presence hurtling in their direction. She was sprinting, teleporting, or maybe both. Whatever the case, she had read something dangerous.

Bang!

—Came the echo-crack of Koyanskaya's rifle. The snap was clean, crisp, and detached from the thick air, far too sharp to be simple combustion. The magic layered into the shot was tangible, even to a Beast who specialized in different forms of sacrilege. He didn't need to turn around. He knew Inari would try to intercept it out of pride, and she did. The sound of steel-like claws catching the bullet was unmistakable.

There was a pause.

Not even half a breath later, Inari's expression twisted... first disbelief, then hostility. The curse woven into the bullet burned into her hand. It clawed at her divine nerves. The pain was localized but sophisticated. Like a curse that wasn't built by mortals but by an entity with an understanding of gods. The sensation was just different and foreign.

She flinched, tossed the bullet away with a twitch of her fingers, and more came. A series of follow-up rounds screamed through the air. Each was laced with runes that flickered with malice, dancing in the colors of black-gold decay. Inari no longer tried to catch them. Her instincts told her something that her intellect didn't admit; these were not human spells. They weren't Youjutsu. They smelled like flesh.

Like blood rituals. Like something old and violent.

She accelerated. Her form warped with a flicker of mist, reappearing directly behind the sniper. She didn't even bother to speak. She had decided to tear Koyanskaya's head off.

Koyanskaya's ears twitched. She shifted her weight and twisted her hips with flawless timing, ducking beneath Inari's extended hand, the air splitting with the force of a god's physical strike missing its target. The fox woman retaliated by swinging the butt of her long sniper rifle into Inari's temple. It didn't disorient the Kami, but it did stun her into blinking. Koyanskaya followed up with a front kick, then spun her rifle in a complex arc, flipping it mid-air and catching it like a bo staff.

Inari parried with her arm, sliding backward half a meter on her toes, and shifted into a Youjutsu stance. Her nails shimmered with the violet energy of Youki concentrating around her fingers, turning into sharpened ethereal claws. Koyanskaya smiled and lifted her left hand, not bothering to conceal the Dakinien script flaring across her wrist and palm. The moment Inari unleashed her first Youjutsu technique in a rapid-fire barrage of spatial cutters, the spells collided with a sudden wall of spiritual density. Koyanskaya's curses swirled from her palm to intercept the blast midair. They dispersed it with finesse.

Inari's brows furrowed. She didn't recognize the language in Koyanskaya's magic. It wasn't Divine Words nor Buddhist. It wasn't Shinto either. It looked like shamanism, but the essence was far more perverse. It felt like something from another soil, that carried through flesh. Inari weaved her next spell with her tail instead of her arms, focusing more power through Youki.

Koyanskaya responded by pulling a thin dagger from her coat, twirled it once, and drove it into the earth. The resulting blast erupted with cursed spikes; black root-like tendrils that shot upward and clashed against Inari's incoming foxfire. The spell detonated a chunk of the field, carving a six-meter crater in an instant, but neither combatant moved from their positions. Inari rotated into another position immediately, her body adjusting like a professional martial artist weaving mystic arts into close combat. Her tails whirled around her like spell-conducting limbs.

Koyanskaya bent backward in a precise arch to avoid the next strike, then backflipped twice to regain distance. She reloaded her rifle mid-air, biting the cartridge between her teeth and slamming it into the chamber with a sidekick motion.

Suddenly, everything shook.

From the distance, an impact slammed the dimension with the intensity of a localized earthquake. Both fighters froze just long enough to glance skyward. Susanoo's shape shot across the sky trailing smoke and godly plasma, his entire frame spinning like a comet. He crashed into a distant mountain range, and the side of the pocket dimension folded on impact, throwing up a geyser of lava that hadn't even existed before.

"Was that Susanoo?" Koyanskaya asked aloud smiling.

Inari didn't answer. She was already sprinting forward again, skipping off the ground, blurred into multiple afterimages. Her Youjutsu now combined with battlefield momentum, layering misdirection and illusion into her footwork.

Koyanskaya muttered something that sounded like "professional territory now," and her expression flattened. She dropped her sniper entirely, let it fall behind her, and formed multiple hand signs with one hand.

Her aura shifted in origin. It was no longer the scent of fox-youkai trying to blend in. This was something wholly separate. Something that reeked of rites performed in blood caves.

Inari's eyes narrowed.

"You've used a framework that mimics Youjutsu," she said finally. "But it is not. What kind of curse art are you using?"

Koyanskaya answered in a cheerful, mocking tone, "Dakinien method. Old-world witchcraft. Pain offered by women, shaped by foxes. You're not the only one who knows how to weaponize sorrow."

Inari's lip twitched. She raised her hands and cast a full technique. The field darkened. Five foxfire spheres the size of boulders formed behind her, each one burning with divine-grade Youki. She launched them all at once. They converged midair into a rotating spiral of searing destruction. The spell was not designed to kill—she still believed herself superior—but it was meant to burn down whatever dared to stand in her way.

Koyanskaya whispered a curse, and the spell veered off-course mid-flight, swallowed into a distortion field that she created with a flick of her tail. The detonation occurred far to the side, scarring the ground but missing her entirely. Inari wasn't expecting full absorption. Her second strike came immediately, a flying heel kick supposed to catch Koyanskaya mid-teleport.

Koyanskaya didn't. She caught the leg with her rifle barrel, grunted under the strain, and then twisted sideways. The force of it cracked her bones, but she didn't cry out. She let the pain bloom across her skin, and then retaliated by snapping her fingers, releasing a delayed charm spell point-blank.

It went off directly in Inari's face.

The shockwave sent the Kami tumbling across the field in a spiral, her tails splayed out and her ears twitching in irritation. She landed cleanly, of course, but now her expression had shifted from alarm to rage. Her hair floated behind her like steam.

"You're not a Youkai at all."

Koyanskaya smiled, twirling her rifle.

"Amaterasu's replacement."

Another explosion rocked the side of the dimension. A distant hill split in half. Draco's voice could be heard barking a single command, followed by another thunderclap. Susanoo's reply was less of a word and more of a savage roar.

Inari focused her senses. Her attention didn't drift away from Koyanskaya, who was now weaving something new. The scent of foxes, curses, and blood started to mingle into something deeper. Something conceptual that touched on divinity without obeying its rules.

Angra scratched the back of his head.

"This is gonna be a thing, huh. Kami versus Beast. I'm taking bets on the first broken limb."

~BoDxD~

U-Olga's body streaked forward like a burning red comet, eyes locking onto Amaterasu with refined contempt. Her pride would not permit this deity to linger in her presence without establishing superiority. She closed the distance with high-speed propulsion using yellow lightning that coiled around her limbs and burst her through gravitational voids that contorted air and force behind her wake.

She compressed space between her and the goddess in an instant, her trajectory bent unnaturally, and her heel dragged down like a divine spear, slamming directly toward Amaterasu's face without ceremony.

Amaterasu raised a hand lightly, her open palm glowing in white-gold light, and caught the impact head-on. Her expression was blank. Her arm didn't tremble. But a scratch ran from her cheek, small but visible, and her wrist slightly twisted under the pressure. Her lips parted faintly as her gaze met U-Olga's burning stare.

"That was not unworthy," she said, with an even voice and no insult. "But you have not measured my tolerance yet."

Before U-Olga could pull away, Amaterasu gripped her ankle and swung her straight to the left, throwing her like a slab of steel through the mountains of the pocket dimension. The terrain erupted, shaking under the weight of impact, forming trenches and pillars of debris. Amaterasu didn't wait. She moved next, her feet never pressing against anything, floating forward. Her hand shimmered again, and pillars of solid light, radiant as miniature suns, launched across the field, pinning gravity with pressure while flaying the atmosphere with solar density.

U-Olga emerged upright from the rubbled elevation with a silent snarl and deflected the first few beams by erecting localized gravity distortions that deflected massless force. One caught her shoulder, burned through her skin, and scorched half of her dress away. Her eyes narrowed.

She reformed the damaged area through forceful regeneration and advanced again, fists clenched, and cloaked in red energy so thick it warped nearby particles.

They met again in the center of the field, close-handed combat welcomed them. Amaterasu moved like a master duelist, predicting every elbow, intercepting each pivot, catching every wrist that veered too close, and answering U-Olga's speed with effortless defense. U-Olga threw a barrage of kicks designed to break the spine of any normal demigod or creature, but Amaterasu never budged more than a step. Her footwork never wasted a single angle, and her hand never rose higher than needed. She landed palm strikes that struck between muscle and bone, and each one destabilized U-Olga's rhythm.

But U-Olga wasn't normal, and she didn't fight like a standard Beast. She wasn't driven by wrath or hatred, but by the absolute disdain that no one in this dimension properly acknowledged her existence as the superior form of psyche and divinity. Her hair flared outward and her next move didn't involve a physical strike. She compressed the space between her knee and Amaterasu's chest, made it collapse instantly, and delivered an upward gravity thrust that sent the Sun Goddess flying hundreds of meters into the air. It wasn't a clean win, but it gave her a moment to breathe.

She flew up instantly, meeting Amaterasu mid-sky. The pocket dimension's clouds parted under the pressure of both their presences, and the skies distorted violently. U-Olga dashed forward with augmented velocity, using yellow electricity that tore through resistance. She didn't aim for a kill. She just wanted to make the goddess kneel. Amaterasu wasn't surprised. She welcomed her again with open hands, and their clash resumed.

Her strikes flowed from muscle memory built over tens of millennia. U-Olga noticed that even her breathing didn't change. Amaterasu moved like one who had mastered everything in existence and didn't need to question her actions. She punched straight into U-Olga's stomach, bent the space behind her, then hammered her down with a second strike, slamming her toward the ground again. U-Olga refused to hit the terrain. She halted midair with an outward black gravitational burst that broke her fall. Her arms ached. Her vision blurred for half a second. She hadn't expected her opponent to dominate her in close combat. That was her pride being cracked. Not shattered yet, but chipped.

"You carry conviction... that is not authority."

U-Olga responded with a harder flared presence. The gravitational field around her exploded outward like a vacuum swallowing stars, and space twisted around her fingers. She fired a red beam, but Amaterasu countered it with a pure column of light that bored through it completely. The moment after that, U-Olga vanished using a fold in space, but Amaterasu predicted the reappearance location before it happened. She had seen it from the light currents beforehand.

Amaterasu spun in midair and roundhouse kicked her from behind the moment she reappeared, striking the base of U-Olga's neck. The impact didn't break anything, but it threw U-Olga downward again, and this time, Amaterasu followed through with a meteor-speed descent. They crashed back into the ground like collapsing stars. The terrain didn't just crack because it imploded and folded inward. A crater the size of a city block opened instantly.

U-Olga lay at the center of it for a second, breathing heavily. Her chest heaved. Her pride didn't allow screams. She wasn't even trying to regenerate the minor damage. She was trying to process the fact that her superiority complex had just been wounded.

"This woman doesn't fight recklessly. She doesn't even radiate divine arrogance. Not even a single yell about judgment or retribution. She just hurts me without effort. As if it's natural. As if I was not an issue."

U-Olga stood again. Her amber eyes glared upward at the floating figure of Amaterasu, who hadn't descended yet to her level. She clenched her fists and coated herself in gravity pulses. Her body was outlined in swirling black energy now, with the red tint becoming intenser and more refined.

"I will not allow a local deity to maintain the high ground against a Beast. I am the Bringer of The End."

Amaterasu still did not look alarmed, but her expression narrowed faintly in puzzlement.

U-Olga launched upward again with no respect for restraint. The trajectory was a straight red trail of condensed energy tearing across the sky, gravity compressing under her as the spatial warping intensified with her acceleration. The air itself trembled with distortion in her wake.

Amaterasu didn't even bother shifting. Her posture remained upright and her expression calm, lips set in a still line of observation. She had already sensed the aggressive spike in gravity and space dislocation long before U-Olga's body made its next move. Even among the divine, she wasn't slow. A Goddess of the Sun with command over light itself didn't require her physical eyes to perceive incoming attacks. Her clairvoyance laced with solar claircognizance did not inform her of all events, but it provided insight within moments that blurred into instinct. Despite all that, she allowed U-Olga's initial approach to proceed without a response.

U-Olga slammed her heel forward into Amaterasu's chest. The resulting pressure ripple collapsed the layered floor of the pocket world's terrain, folding several meters of reinforced spatial fabric into a crater that shook the surrounding air with cracked density lines. Amaterasu's form bent slightly from the contact and the impact force that folded around her ribcage and pushed her back a full meter. Her inner jaw clenched with minor tension. Her eyes went downward to where the faint mark of a high-speed point impact now stained her kimono with faint carbon dust.

U-Olga expected divine resistance, but the fact that her strike had made contact—grazed, yes, though not phased through or deflected—left her confident that even this "high goddess" was bound by mass and structure. Her voice broke out immediately after she retracted her leg.

"I was expecting a superior being to at least guard herself. Or is this the level of 'Kami'—a goddess who lets herself be hit and considers it strategic foresight?"

Amaterasu didn't take that kindly and stepped forward with a pace that, to U-Olga's calculations, should not have existed within the current time-frame. Her form did not blink or accelerate. It was simply in one spot, and then in another, as if the world had already accepted her new position before movement occurred. Her palm came up open-handed, and U-Olga prepared for a gravitational wave or heat expansion, but what came instead was a blunt-handed strike to the side of her jaw.

The Beast's head snapped violently to the right. Amaterasu did not follow through. She pulled her hand back immediately and delivered a sharp follow-up elbow directly into U-Olga's sternum. They were clean, entirely readable motions, but executed with such overwhelming divine speed and force that U-Olga's own body sensors struggled to predict the full vector of each blow.

U-Olga twisted in air to apply her own space compression just enough to escape the next punch. Yellow arcs of velocity electricity burst around her as she kicked upward into the air, attempting to force space around Amaterasu's feet to collapse and restrict her ability to maneuver. Yet even that tactic was ineffective. The moment the pocket space's structure began to fold, Amaterasu's feet simply adjusted onto new light platforms generated from her solar field. Her counterattack followed in less than a second.

She raised both hands forward. From them emerged an intensely concentrated stream of white solar energy, the temperature so high the surrounding quantum fabric peeled in sheets. U-Olga shifted her arms up, forming a layered black barrier made of compressed micro singularities, hoping to swallow the light before it reached her body.

For a moment, it worked, until the divine purity of Amaterasu's light began to bend around the edges of the void layers, slipping through in thin, cutting rays that scorched her arms and tore through her upper cloak.

U-Olga surged backward, clicking her tongue in frustration. Even with high Magic Resistance and defensive singularity manipulation, the solar authority of the goddess still pierced her protection through higher divine priority. U-Olga wasn't dealing with a mere elemental force; Amaterasu's light obeyed her will over the universe's laws.

So be it.

She reactivated the gravity module within her, letting it fracture open from the back. Spatial lenses aligned behind her as dozens of red rings unfolded across the vertical sky. She flew upward, kicking off in pure inertia. Her body bypassed acceleration curves through a forced-space contraction. Amaterasu allowed herself to be launched by a sudden repulsion blast to the chin in an elegant trap laid by U-Olga, hidden within a decoy step earlier. The goddess was hurled skyward, but unlike most beings, she did not flail or lose orientation.

She rotated mid-air, arms out, and stopped herself instantly. Her feet found another solar panel of light generated from nothing. U-Olga was already waiting for her in the upper stratosphere of the dimension, her hands blazing with deep gravity particles and charged space-time. She lunged again.

This time it became close combat.

Their bodies clashed mid-air without footing, each strike redirecting force into the empty sky. U-Olga's fists moved faster, sharper, enhanced by micro-time dilations within her body's command module. Her kicks sliced through air with gravitational slashes. Amaterasu countered every motion, intercepted a punch, twisted U-Olga's wrist, and pulled her close, where her knee would meet the beast's gut with bone-cracking pressure without wasting a single second. The goddess' techniques were honed from centuries of divine conflict, a decisive, understanding of combat movement as fluid as breath.

Still, U-Olga was not a mortal. She retaliated with a sudden shift of mass, doubling her weight output while compressing the local gravitational constant. Amaterasu's balance wavered in the briefest micro-stagger, enough for U-Olga to grab her shoulder and send her flying upward with a gravitational discharge powerful enough to erase a mountain range in the material world. The goddess arced into the upper layers of the sky and steadied herself, just in time for U-Olga to catch up and engage again.

They exchanged another hundred blows in ten seconds, air shockwaves splitting the layered clouds of the artificial realm into fractured spirals. U-Olga felt her control returning.

Her opponent, while dominant, wasn't unreachable. Her body had adapted to Amaterasu's attack vectors. Her predictive models adjusted with every strike. Even as blood leaked from her lip, and even as burns marked her side from earlier exposure to divine light, she began to land more counters. A successful elbow into Amaterasu's collarbone. A gravitational hook into her ribs. An uppercut that broke through one of the light shields protecting the goddess's upper sternum.

Every hit was received and then returned tenfold.

When U-Olga tried to create a spatial lock field and encase the sun goddess in a bounded space-time cage, Amaterasu pushed both her arms outward and burned it away in an instant using pure light carrying divine rejection. The pocket space twisted. Color inverted for a second. Her hand found U-Olga's neck in the next second and spun her down, crashing her into the lower layers of the sky.

The fall cracked the environmental plate below and sent gravitational aftershocks echoing in all directions. U-Olga stood up shakily, her body was visibly damaged, attire scorched in sections, blood pooling slightly down the side of her mouth. Her expression hardened into quiet disgust.

"You dare hold your head high... as if you have proven superiority. You think this result entitles you to condescend? I am a Beast. The final step of human evolution. I am the embodiment of Earth's final assertion of existence. Yet you—"

Her voice cut into a sharp pitch of spatial distortion, and the gravity in the entire pocket realm inverted. Her eyes burned bright as her core overclocked. Dozens of miniature singularities began to form behind her.

Amaterasu widened her stance and brought both palms together. Her voice spoke softly but clearly heard from the sky.

"The world belongs to humanity. Whoever you are, if you bring it harm, I will destroy you."

U-Olga moved in a single burst. The air cracked as her body disappeared and reappeared with a thunderclap, exceeding the velocity of sound as the sonic wave catching up a heartbeat later and exploding outward in a tight cone behind her. Her heel struck toward Amaterasu's head, gravity condensed at the tip like a miniature singularity coiled around her momentum to collapse the space between them into a single rupture.

A right arm rose in a vertical path, catching the kinetic thrust. A burst of impact split the invisible floor under their feet, a deep ring spreading in all directions. The ground fractured beneath Amaterasu, splintering in concentric fractures that radiated through the pocket dimension, but her footing held. The subtle tension in her wrist and shoulder was enough to mark the difference. The contact shoved her body back almost three feet, her feet grinding into the surface and carving two sharp trails of ruptured matter beneath her sandals.

Amaterasu shifted the caught limb neither slow nor rushed. With one motion, she turned U-Olga's leg aside, pivoted forward with her other hand, and struck with two fingers lined with condensed sunlight into U-Olga's left flank. It was a move meant to send a signal. The hit exploded with heat and radiance, cracking through the Beast's outer shielding and pressing her backward at the exact angle of the strike. She hissed in disbelief and irritation, flipping back mid-air and halting herself with a gravitational pulse.

Her lips twisted with a sneer. She spoke through her teeth in humiliation.

She was not some servant creature to be disciplined! Sun goddess Amaterasu may be, but U-Olga is the rightful sovereign of this planet's culmination!

She spread her arms wide, and the atmosphere bent. The gravity intensified in layers around her body, and dozens of black orbs coalesced around her limbs, warping light and reality. U-Olga's skin glowed with faint outlines of quantum distortion, and the pressure increased to the point where stray debris from their earlier exchanges began falling inward toward her like tiny moons pulled by her field. Even her long white hair started to twist from the sheer directional drag of the gravitational manipulation.

Her eyes gleamed scarlet. Her entire body surged forward without telegraphing any motion, tearing across the space again, now several times faster than before, enveloped in a layer of charged yellow plasma. The red beam shot from her left hand while her right foot carried the full gravitational mass of a collapsing star compressed into the size of a heel. This time, she intended to drive Amaterasu into the ground and burn her out.

Amaterasu brought both arms in front of her and created a dome of concentrated sunlight and celestial heat, rotating at such extreme speed it blurred. The beam clashed first, lighting the entire pocket dimension in searing crimson light. The dome held, but hairline fractures formed immediately, forced apart by the unnatural gravity bending everything around them. Astonished, Amaterasu stepped forward despite the pressure while her robes began to tear at the seams. Her skin was enduring temperatures meant to erase matter, but she pushed on.

The instant U-Olga's gravitational heel collided with Amaterasu's counterstrike, a blade of divine solar energy summoned from the curvature of her own shoulder, the impact finally sent a full-body shockwave. The entire space warped and cracked at the edges. Multiple rows of spatial rifts flared open around the battlefield, and even Amaterasu herself grunted from the blow. Her blade held and her knees bent.

"If—if you had truly ruled Earth, y—you would not need to scream about it to be seen. Your claim is only as strong as your restraint!" Amaterasu tried to calm her voice, but now her breath was heavier.

U-Olga roared, and her pride abandoned any attempt at any last dignified expression. She no longer cared if the blows were elegant or just brutal. Her body spun into a horizontal drill of tachyon-charged acceleration, her limbs overlapping in patterns that violated basic spatial continuity.

Tachyons, particles faster than light, bled out of her form and shaped piercing tips aimed directly at Amaterasu's core.

Amaterasu was just too fast, and although she managed to successfully dodge one, two, then three... the fourth stabbed into her shoulder. Her body was divine, but not invulnerable. Her breath hitched. She retaliated by clapping her palms and generating a blinding wave of omnipotent light. It would have seared every molecule within a kilometer radius, except U-Olga didn't let it reach her.

The Beast's eyes dilated. She accessed some kind of deeper vision within her, a sense closer to omniscience. Her sight peeled through Amaterasu's technique, breaking it down into the atomic-level origin of the divine photons themselves. She stepped into the subatomic event horizon, avoided the wave entirely, and reappeared behind Amaterasu.

Amaterasu's back stiffened. Her clairvoyance warned her a fraction too late. U-Olga's fingers stabbed into her ribs and detonated with graviton implosions.

"Kurk—!"

For a second, Amaterasu's light dimmed.

... She had enough.

—Her composure cracked.

Amaterasu spread her arms and released her full divine aura as a total event in a state of absolute solar supremacy. The entire pocket dimension shifted in favor of her rule.

Shadows vanished. Gravity corrected itself to her preference. Every corner of the space now answers only to her presence. The light seared through barriers, concepts, and even aspects of time lag.

U-Olga widened her eyes as she failed to resist and dropped to one knee, shielding herself. Her body sizzled and cracked, black holes destabilized and winked out. Her face didn't show fear. Her lips were sealed. The pain was calculated. The fury was being honed.

In her moment, she focused on the tachyons again; reversing their distribution, channeling them into a single spearpoint, aiming at the core of Amaterasu's rising solar field. The moment Amaterasu lifted her hand for her next invocation, the tachyon tip surged forward.

The particle ripped through the intervening space without resistance. It bypassed the divine light by being elsewhere in the timeline altogether. It phased not just through Amaterasu's magic, but through her aura, and then her ribcage.

A thin beam of hypothetical energy lasers through the goddess' back and continues through the sky, fracturing space-time in the process.

The goddess staggered.

The whir of gravity distortion and solar flares scattered like flint sparks. Blood trailed down Amaterasu's side, divine ichor, glowing golden, evaporating before it reached the floor.

Amaterasu, however, fell down to the ground in a thump.

Seeing the goddess didn't get back up, U-Olga exhaled slowly. Her face bore the look of a biological computer reduced to one purpose.

Her expression contorted with disdain at the notion that she could visibly breathe hard. She refused to kneel, but her knees buckled slightly, body shaking in increments as smoke and residual particles flux sizzled along her limbs. Her pride would never permit a declaration of defeat, it would still remain to be seen if she had won. Not against the Shinto Chief-Goddess, alternate counterpart or not.

Her hair clung to her back, soaked in sweat and spiritual residue. Her pupils flickered with instability, forcefully returning to proper alignment after flickering between multiple energy spectrums her brain hadn't evolved to fully process yet.

"How irksome. Weak. Hah—"

She couldn't finish her thought without another breath-shudder.

Her skin shimmered from overexerted shielding, cracked along the sides of her arms, and her internal cosmic mass stabilization was faltering. The spatial buffer she used as her replacement for organic blood circulation was leaking into visible spectra, dripping into the ground in pale red strands. She processed the events through several simultaneity filters, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

U-Olga hated admitting that even within her current Beast-class frame, enhanced and optimized far beyond her original body, the vessel she was using, she had only survived by exploiting the predictability of this goddess's tendencies. Amaterasu had held back. She had held back deliberately. Still, her decision caused her downfall. U-Olga's lips curled in derision, toward herself more than anyone else.

In her world, Amaterasu had once been viewed as a candidate for Beast designation due to the overwhelming expansion of her mere presence and authority over principles linked to the sun itself. But in this world, that title seemed paper-thin.

That Amaterasu was not some idealistic solar witch feeding mortals illusions of warmth or light. She was too primordial in function. Cruel in restraint. There was no comparison to this one.

Amaterasu of this Earth was not divine in the cosmological sense of her own universe. She was not a conceptual candidate to ascend beyond the upper tiers.

It was a heavy contrast, the Amaterasu of their world was nominated as a potential Beast not just because of her strength alone. She could erase three thousand worlds at once.

Her auto-cognitive array recompiled over ten thousand scenarios from her databanks, assessing battle behavior, action mechanics, and power scaling based on recorded stress fractures along her own skeletal-matter framework. Nothing matched. She was literally inferior.

Not even 1/3000th of her apotheotic equivalent. Or a spark of the high-plane mass reality devourer...

U-Olga's fingers clawed through the warped gravity particles, attempting to restore her balance while sparks flickered against the density field around her feet. The entire area surrounding them had become a semi-hollowed crater. Entire mountain ridges around overlapping spiritual focal points had begun collapsing. The barrier pocket was rupturing at multiple points and refolding like crushed cloth. Space tried to repair itself from the collateral; the Kami's authority in this land was causing reality to fight back against a Beast's potency.

Amaterasu remained at a distance. U-Olga refused to interpret that as anything other than condescension.

It was almost to be expected. Being weakened enough to put her on the level of Divine Spirits, U-Olga was still confident she could combat local gods. She just didn't anticipate that fighting a Pantheon Head spirit that had not even qualified for pan-dimensional threat designation would almost defeat her. This is unacceptable.

She prepared her arm to summon a temporal-saturation pulse. If she activated her full unsealed combat reactor, even weakened, she could at least destabilize this entire island nation's leyline network and convert its spiritual reserves into fuel. She was about to do it when her entire consciousness registered an alert at zero-point-four seconds from impact. Something behind her.

The katana had already pierced her lower back by the time her body began reacting.

It went in cleanly without friction. The blade was coated in divine wavelength-calibrated soulsteel, constructed specifically to pass through cosmic exoskeleton.

Her head whipped slightly as her body spasmed, lips parting into a shocked breath when she realized the length of Tsukuyomi's blade had entered between her back ribs and up through the shoulder.

"You—"

Tsukuyomi appeared with grim determination.

"I will not watch my sister be disgraced further," Tsukuyomi said coldly. "Your arrogance ends now."

His grip on the katana's hilt was firm. U-Olga tried to look over her shoulder, her expression contorting with disgust at the implication that he thought he had the right to interfere. Not even a Beast-class being. A lunar deity of a local pantheon. She couldn't believe he landed that blow.

Her systems tried to initiate a reverse-polarity fold. It was already too late. His next words summoned the bind.

"Divine Execution Art: Binding of Celestial Prison."

The spell activated instantly. Five chains of layered moonlight and scripture erupted from the blade's insertion point and began crawling over her body. Each chain carried with it the encoded laws of the Shinto hierarchy, handwritten into ritual centuries before human civilization standardized language. They carried spiritual authority.

U-Olga gritted her teeth as the first two reached her limbs, paralyzing them completely. Her teleportation was canceled along with her distortion phasing. Her neural override commands were now on cooldown. This was an execution technique meant for immortals and foreign gods.

He moved to finish the seal. She felt it coming, saw the fluctuations in his divine pressure. He would render her inert and powerless.

Her mind accelerated. Subatomic manipulation.

Her core output tripled instantly as she activated a silent emergency override buried in her instinctual substrate. It was risky. She would be exposed for three seconds after the burst.

But it worked.

Her molecules scattered and rearranged. She bent the probability field surrounding the bonds and forced her body into separation at the quantum level, slipping out of the script-bound stasis just before the final lock could close. The chains snapped through empty space, recoiling into themselves with sharp cracks that warped the air.

Before Tsukuyomi could react, her left palm, still crackling with partial instability, aimed directly at his torso from only a few meters away. She funneled everything she could summon into a single point.

"Die slowly."

She fired point-blank.

A beam of red-fluxed energy saturated with reality rejection particles erupted from her hand. A dense compression of quantum implosion and anti-energy to unravel the target on every dimensional axis. It carried gravitational mass beyond planetary density, enough to carve a tunnel through a continent if unopposed. It was meant to remove him entirely, and burn his concept from this plane.

The impact hit Tsukuyomi squarely in the chest. The barrier shattered around them. The explosion threw up a hundred-meter-high wave of cracked, liquified spiritual stone and fire. Trees disintegrated. Air ceased to exist in the radius. Even the dimensional pocket shrieked under the pressure, reasserting itself only by divine command to keep the destruction contained.

Tsukuyomi was thrown back like a statue fired from a cannon, smashing through multiple layers of terrain. His body left a gouge in the warped crust of the pocket dimension like a signature.

He did not disintegrate.

He managed to shield himself at the last moment, pulling from the core of his lunar authority. His kimono was shredded. Blood was spilling from his mouth. He gobbled up blood and coughed.

U-Olga stumbled back, her arm trembling from the force of the output, the recoil vibrating up her elbow and locking her shoulder. She stared at the smoldering silhouette in the distance. She knew she didn't kill him. She barely survived his sealing technique.

She clutched her side again and hissed through her teeth, her body still recovering from the sunlight burns Amaterasu left earlier.

~BoDxD~

BOOM!!

BOOM!!

BOOM!!

The debris had not even finished falling when Susanoo shot back upright from the crater as blood slipped from the corner of his lip. The force with which he had been smashed into the mountain bed was enough to make his body, hardened by countless battles since the age of divine myth, tremble in fury. It was proof that his knees were still halfway pressed into the crumbling basin beneath him while his fists curled tightly and caused the ground beneath his palms to crack open again.

The air shuddered when his divine energy spiked, and all it took was a breath to trigger the chain of atmospheric ruptures spiraling outward from his body. The field twisted with layers of divine turbulence as the skies warped under the density of his magical pressure.

It was not a transformation or an awakening. Susanoo had no dormant second form or hidden technique locked behind restriction. He had simply been holding back.

"Oi, you miserable woman!" Susanoo grunted, voice rough like thunder being chewed by stone.

"You're actually pissing me off."

Draco didn't reply. She was descending at full speed, her right leg pulled back and twisted with depravity fire spiraling off her knee, heat and pressure forming a cone around her entire figure as she dropped like a meteor. Her expression was not the type that expressed pleasure from dominating the Shinto god, except a flat uninterested focus on breaking the man beneath her feet before he could make another snide comment or move again.

Her heel collided with his crossed forearms, and the shockwave it generated was enough to flatten the mountainside behind them into a slope of falling gravel. She did not stop there. As soon as his arms lifted slightly to absorb the blow, she spun, driving her left elbow into the side of his face. It didn't knock him away, but his feet shifted enough that the floor beneath cracked. With her momentum continuing, she thrust her glowing hand into his gut and discharged a pulse of fire directly through him. The impact was contained within his body, vaporizing his outer garments and boiling his skin along the stomach even as he remained upright, not budging one step backward.

She spun her right leg again, planted it into his thigh to stagger his balance and used that moment to leap to flip over his back and claw into his spine using her sharpened nails. Her dragon aspects were glowing now, both arms alight with depravity energy, her horns shimmering, and fire trailing her hair like a comet's tail as she raised both arms and brought them down in a cross slash directly into his shoulders. It worked enough that she sliced through a part of his kimono, her claws dragging sparks against his skin, opening shallow wounds that bled pure divine ether. But the moment her feet hit the ground behind him, she realized too late that he had not reacted in pain.

He tracked her in silence from her entire aggressive flurry that had served to reveal her approach patterns. She was a fast one. What revealed her drawback was that she was too clean without unpredictability 

"You hate passion? Then I'll drag you into it!"

He turned instantly and planted his knee into her gut. It was pure physical speed and leverage driven through a godly body. Her body crunched and launched backward, skidding through the soil, tearing up massive chunks of reinforced bedrock until she flipped upright in midair and spread her feet again to plant herself. But Susanoo was already there.

He shot in, riding a wave of storm winds. With one hand, he threw a chop directly to her neck, which she barely parried with her flaming right forearm. The impact cracked the surface of her skin and blew the fire apart, the rest of the energy whipping into a nearby ridge and blowing it apart. She raised her left arm, which had already transformed partially into a dragon shape, trying to hook his arm and push it away from her collarbone. He turned his whole body with her momentum and drove his elbow into her lower back. She gasped, the breath she had been managing to hold for timing her next attack forcibly expelled. The sensation was not pain. She had long overcome physical suffering. That doesn't mean it didn't stun her. She did not expect a divine god to fight like a predator.

That slight misstep gave Susanoo the gap he needed. He punched directly into her ribcage, the force generating a spherical burst that cratered the land around them. Then he followed with another to her shoulder, this time wrapping his fingers into her pauldrons and yanking her to the ground where he mounted and slammed her again. She snarled, the closest thing to a scream she ever gave. The fight had gone from balanced to one-sided in seconds.

"You think you're something special?!" Susanoo shouted, now raining blows into her stomach, using divine pressure on each strike to rupture the ground beneath with every hit. "You're in our domain! You're in Japan! This is where my authority doesn't drop! You're the invader here, horned freak!"

Draco's arms glowed again, enormity fire covering her fingers as she rammed her left hand directly into his side and torqued her wrist upward. Susanoo grunted and recoiled, allowing her to roll and reverse their positions. Now she was the one mounted above, and her glowing claws sliced down and missed his neck by breath. She didn't care. She pounded into his chest next, multiple times in a blink, until steam rose from her knuckles. Her fingers finally caught his skin and dragged blood again, but the divine man below grinned and caught her wrist mid-swing with his free hand. He flipped his body and them both in one heave, pinning her down with his knee and slamming his other hand into her face.

Once, then again, a third. Her head cracked into the rocks with each strike.

Her tail manifested swung around violently and forced him off her, finally buying her breathing room. Fire leaked from her lips as she flipped backward. She felt the left side of her face cut open, dragon arm twitching, fire cascading down her legs and curling along the edges of her tail.

Draco spat blood onto the side and narrowed her eyes.

Her opponent had bloodied arms while parts of his shoulders were ripped and burned.

"You're uncouth... I hate how your face looks when you're smiling, and I despise your breath. You're annoying, offensive, wild."

He grinned. "Say whatever you want, horned queen. You're still on the defensive. You're the one panting now. Not me."

"I wasn't fighting seriously," she snapped, biting her words like they were below her. "Fighting is a waste of energy. A noisy display of inferior problem-solving."

He took a step. "Try and solve me."

Her aura exploded again. The fire behind her ignited into a wall of twisting depravity, serpentine dragon heads clawing at the sky, their shadows forming the shape of a crown behind her. Her body changed. Her arms lengthened, claws sharper, fangs glowing, all of it surging into another partial shift. Not a full transformation. While not at her full power, she was still holding back, only now using her second-tier strength.

Susanoo rolled his shoulders to stretch his muscles like he was just warming up. The storm clouds above twisted into spirals, lightning cracking with a deep golden tint. Divine pressure crackled into a sphere around him, water condensing at his feet, forming blades of pressure from mist alone.

The next exchange came from her who darted in with an overhead slash with fire being dragged from claw behind it. He caught her arm and redirected it to the side, throwing a knee to her ribs again. This time she blocked it and returned with a spinning slash to his shoulder. He ducked and rose with an uppercut that caught her under the chin and lifted her momentarily before she twisted midair and hammered down with both heels into his shoulders, driving him down again. But he grabbed her ankles mid-air, roared, and threw her body like a weapon into the cliffside, which exploded on impact and caused the entire dimension's edge to fluctuate.

She crawled out slowly, teeth clenched, breathing fast but her face was still impassive. She wasn't mad, but she was starting to feel wrath creeping in. She hated the pointless repetition of blows, the absurd grandstanding. That doesn't mean she would not stop.

"Oh?" he said.

"I'm tired," she muttered. "I'm ending this. I will not allow myself to lose to a brute."

"You'll allow it? I'm not going to ask permission when I crush you."

They charged. The mountain cracked in half. Fire and storm collided again. Neither yielded.

With the speed and pressure of a descending typhoon packed into a single strike meant to devastate, his own blade became coated in his storm-forged divine power, a spiraling hydra-shaped mass of wind and pressure coiling around the length of the katana he drew from the sky itself. His grin widened, eyes focused and mouth shouting something irreverent and loud, but she wasn't paying attention to the words.

Her right foot twisted back and buried itself into the ground as if to anchor against the weight of the choice she was about to make. The part of her that hated showmanship, hated the spectacle of an emperor's theater, and hated the need for violence, cursed the necessity of it.

Her left arm raised not in defense, but to call, and from that moment, it answered. It was not merely summoning a weapon; it was releasing the suppressed expression of her flame, the crystallized manifestation of what she would rather keep buried. The fire warped around her, thickened with depravity, the moral poison of humanity's sins refined into energy, and it took shape without delay.

Sleek and glowing, shaped in a way that did not match its previous model, elegant, single-edged, faintly tinged with an entirely different divine presence.

Aestus Estus: Terminus Fire emerged in her grip, heavier and larger than most humans could carry, reforged over an iteration belonging to an Empress of Roses, no longer the original but a reformed monstrosity of it.

The sheer pressure of the sword manifesting cracked the ground underneath her, melted the air around her forearms, and seared a fissure in the sky above them. Susanoo's eyes widened out of irritation and surprise that the horned woman dared to hold something of this magnitude in response to his approach.

He adjusted immediately, slashing forward with the typhoon dragon head attached to his blade, which screeched through the air in a scream of raw divine elemental pressure. The dragon head roared and lunged at her.

Draco's grip tightened. Her eyes locked with the storm creation, and her swing cut through the storm head like slicing through heavy flesh. The depravity-imbued fire surged outward and clashed directly with Susanoo's technique, and in that clash, the storm dragon disintegrated, its inner coils erupting backward in distorted spirals. The pressure rebounded and sent Susanoo flying back, but he caught himself mid-air by forcing condensed gusts beneath his heels to stabilize.

His lips curled. Fear came out along with something deeper, acknowledgment, that the creature before him did not lack presence.

He landed, knelt slightly, then hurled his sword into the sky. It didn't fall. Instead, a roaring tremor surrounded them. His call summoned more than just clouds. Above, the sky inside the pocket dimension darkened and opened as three enormous storm-formed dragon heads began to form, each shaped by rotating vortexes of violent wind and imbued with divine water energy. They were larger than the previous one, each roughly the size of a small island. Their roars echoed like condensed thunder-given voices. He raised his hands, channeling more of his energy into controlling their direction and intensity.

The Kami did not limit himself. He was not fighting for pride anymore. He now fought to prove that even among gods, there is no concept of retreat.

Draco emotionlessly stared at them. Her sword glowed brighter, the patterns along its spine shimmering in serpentine pulses. Without any words, she raised her free hand slightly forward. The fire on her body flared and from the aura emerged her own creations—dragon heads, flaming, roaring, and serpentine. The depravity in her energy was chaotic in a different category. Unlike Susanoo's storm beasts, which resembled natural disasters given shape, her fire dragons were structured, coordinated, and disciplined. Three of them emerged, each carrying distinct characteristics.

Fangs formed by runic fire sigils, eyes of raging gold, and trails of smog that distorted the space around them. Each roared.

Both sides launched.

The six dragons clashed in the air like warships colliding at terminal velocity. The space between them warped. The sheer impact caused the land beneath to split further, mountains formed during their earlier clash disintegrated, and shockwaves radiated throughout the entire dimension. The collisions were not equal in chaos. Susanoo's storm beasts roared with reckless power, but Draco's counterparts attacked with comparable aggression. Two of her dragons intercepted the side heads, and the last charged the central storm dragon directly. They didn't clash for long. One by one, the storm dragons started to destabilize, the Beast fire consuming the structure from the inside, overwhelming the water essence with something more fundamentally toxic.

Susanoo's lips thinned as he leaped back again, sword reappearing in his hand as he caught it. His breathing was controlled, though his brow furrowed in genuine focus.

She had forced his hand. He had intended to overwhelm her physically, but now her sword was forcing him into long-range combat. He could not dismiss her capabilities anymore. This wasn't a brute monster swinging in rage. This was someone with an ancient discipline, timing, and instinctual combat comprehension.

Draco didn't let the moment linger. She charged with a linearity and commitment that demanded a counter. Her sword trailed fire behind her in clean arcs, and Susanoo met her directly. Their swords clashed, and the shockwave from the collision expanded in a perfect dome around them, blowing away everything nearby, even the floating debris they had created earlier. He swung with force designed to break divine structures, she parried with reinforced momentum of depravity condensed around her edge. He rotated mid-air, trying to follow up with a slash from his elbow, but she ducked slightly, slammed the side of her heel into his grounded foot, and swung her sword upward.

His gauntlet absorbed the blow, but the heat pierced through the metal and forced his entire arm to jerk away. He responded by grabbing her wrist with his free hand and flinging her overhead, but before she touched the ground, she twisted mid-flight, regained footing, and launched a fire spike from her fingertips toward his chest. He conjured a barrier made from dense storm pressure. It absorbed most of the flame, but the spike pierced through partially and seared his shoulder.

He clenched his teeth, then cracked his neck to the side and let out an audible exhale through his nose. "You're not just some errant creature, are you?!"

Her expression remained unreadable, "I am a tyrant. Do not think you understand what that means, you don't. You call yourself a god simply from the reason you have power, power does not justify self-importance."

Susanoo's teeth grit. "Say that again."

She raised the sword in front of her. "I said you're a child who confuses legacy with merit."

His next roar wasn't human. His aura exploded outward and the clouds bent backward to reveal the weight of his presence, a pressure no mortal could stand near without being crushed. Lightning arcs danced around his body and converged in his blade. He activated everything, set from the divine rage he rarely called upon, and the full weight of what it meant to be a warrior god of storm and sea.

Her own aura swelled again, flames surging higher. The smog expanded across the dimension like a mantle, her presence reaching equal height.

"You have your pride. I have my law. Let's test which breaks first."

Susanoo twisted his stance and intercepted her forward stride with a horizontal slash. The sheer force split the terrain again, slicing a ten-meter-long chasm into the ground that erupted into fragmented slabs as pressure rippled out. Draco turned her wrist mid-advance and caught the strike with the flat of Aestus Estus, the impact snarling into a grinding wail of metal pressed into divinity-forged metal. Her boot dug into stone, the surface buckling beneath her heel and returned the force in kind with a pivot of her hips and a violent upward push, launching Susanoo backward through the air, spinning three full times before he stabilized with a halt mid-flight and slammed his foot down on a floating boulder.

The air pressure alone from that landing cracked the rocks around it into dust. He inhaled deep, dragged his left forearm back, muttered in an ancient dialect, and gathered a condensed storm ether into his palm until a blade formed again, alive with surging divinity. He broke into a sprint across the broken terrain with a lunge faster than any human could react to. She barely raised Aestus Estus before his blade met hers again, and the second clash unleashed a shockwave that scattered dozens of nearby fragments into nothing.

He pushed harder. He roared without restraint, his muscles swelling, veins glowing through his skin. He poured brute strength into each direction, hammering downward as if intending to bury her ten meters deep. She blocked each blow without staggering, her arms flexed but her expression remained unchanged, only a narrowing of eyes betraying her silent disgust at how persistent he was. Her wrist flicks to redirect god-powered strikes away from her center of balance.

She rotated her elbow inward, slipped past his next swing, and sent a brutal shoulder check into his side that cracked a rib and launched him again. Recovering midair, he created footholds from solidified clouds and returned instantly, dragging behind him three serpent-headed storms constructed from his own energy, each larger than a wyvern and coiling with thunder.

Draco tilted her sword downward and flicked the edge. Five flaming heads of Terminus Fire emerged from her blade and launched forward and met the incoming storm dragons in mid-air with a violent convergence, each pair locking teeth and energy as they devoured one another mid-flight. The entire pocket dimension shook again.

Cracked light rained from above. Susanoo narrowed his eyes as he stepped through the smoke, drenched in power, but slower now. He swung again. She stepped in to meet him, clashed blade to blade again, and this time did not allow distance to form. She advanced with masterful pressure. Her swings bore catastrophe, every downward cleave from Terminus Fire causing the ground beneath her to ripple and snap. She wasn't using brute strength alone. She was outmatching a fully-powered kami in sword skill and battlefield awareness.

He yelled frustrated. His ego screamed at him that this shouldn't be happening. She was a Beast of Humanity, a corrupted being, and to him, a human with unknown factors, not standing at equal height. He rushed in a low stance meant to surprise. He knocked her guard aside with a sudden burst of water pressure from his palm and twisted his body to disarm her.

His hand reached the hilt of her sword. He intended to rip it away.

But the moment his flesh touched the black-gold grip of Aestus Estus: Terminus Fire, the corrupted fire embedded into its divine structure erupted across his hand like a curse. The heat was not just thermal, it was spiritual. It crawled into his nerves, scraped at his senses, tore apart any concept of ownership. He grunted and recoiled instantly, his skin hissing with divine burn marks. The smoke that emerged from his fingers was gray-black, coated with sin that he, a god, was never meant to touch.

Her foot slammed into the center of his torso, knocking the breath out of him with a concussive boom that dropped his guard fully. She used the back of her hand to bash the side of his face, then twisted her body low and sent a rising kick under his chin that lifted his full divine-weight body upward. She blurred and appeared above him before gravity could reclaim him, her glowing nails extending as she slashed across his chest with enough force to split skin resistant to high-tier divine artifacts.

He tried to counter again mid-air, only for her to knock his weapon away from his grasp. Her grip seized his collarbone, lifted him, and spun his body downward like a hammer strike. His back crashed into the broken earth, the ground denting and sinking from the impact. Before he could move, she brought Aestus Estus downward into the space just beside his head, the flames scorching the side of his face.

She stared down at him with cold detachment. Her lips parted only slightly.

"Do not make that mistake of taking what is mine again."

He groaned and pushed himself up despite the burns, only for her foot to rise and slam into his forehead.

A one last hit that settles the fight.

The force embedded his skull into the cracked stone and knocked him clean out. The surrounding pressure dropped instantly. The storm finally settled. The fires on her sword dimmed but did not vanish.

She stood in silence and looked down at him. She considered activating the true nature of Aestus Estus, but decided otherwise. A full Noble Phantasm here would have turned this pocket dimension into a wasteland, and unlike him, she had no reason to make noise for glory. He was beneath that.

She stepped back. Her fingers loosened from the hilt.

He had been powerful. He was a god. He was prideful. But that was all. He had no right to attempt dominion over her relic. He made the mistake of treating her like a challenge to overcome.

She looked away from his unconscious form and slowly sheathed the blade on her back.

But, it is over now.

She glanced at her compatriots in the distance and easily transversed the terrain.

Her heels pressed onto fractured stone. Her arm shed any faint traces of depravity fire as it receded across her arm and faded back into a clean form.

Her shoulder rolled once as the regeneration finished threading through her muscles and skin. It was sluggish, or rather, unoptimized. The pocket dimension muted all instinctual godkiller responses from her Saint Graph to maintain its stability. She didn't comment. It was below her to voice irritation when pain was irrelevant. Her footsteps flattened heat-rippled craters in the darkened terrain as she approached the cluster of Beasts across the ruined elevation.

Kama was the first one she spotted properly. Levitating over a half-scorched slab like she was lounging in a private harem that had simply burned down due to boredom. Her eyes flicked once toward Draco, then back to the exchange she had with Tiamat, one finger twirling her lilac-tinted braid. Kiara stood only a pace or two from her, arms folded beneath her bust. Vitch was bent forward in front of a collapsing wall she had split open, combing glowing arcane symbols out of the dimension's interior veil, her tail flicking every few seconds. She didn't look up as Draco stepped closer.

The Kami Inari was pinned to the ground, one knee forced into the dirt by a high-heeled boot. Koyanskaya had her usual saleswoman smile, but the claws resting delicately on the fox goddess's shoulder betrayed a complete lack of trust in her captive. Her gun had been dismantled and replaced with a whip-like blade. She was mostly quiet, watching everyone, and watching Draco the hardest when the latter stopped walking.

"Having fun?"

Koyanskaya didn't turn. "She was a filthy fox. You know how rude these regional deities can get when you smell like a better breed."

"Hmph."

Koyanskaya clicked her tongue, stepping back. "Really? Just that? Her scent's all stale anyway. Didn't even struggle enough to be worth the effort." Inari gasped lightly as the pressure on her body ceased, scrambling to her feet and keeping distance from all of them without another word.

Kama chuckled. "Well, now that we're all done bashing heads, we were just discussing something relevant." She gestured toward Kiara and Vitch. "These two think they can disassemble the shell of this reality if they combine magecraft and dimensional theory. It was entertaining."

Vitch stood upright and snapped her fingers. "I'm not wrong. This space is nested on top of an actual terrestrial coordinate; it's divine spell architecture with patchwork logic built from Shinto origin laws. It was formed by rewriting the underlying spiritual boundary of the location without a ritual circle or leyline anchor. It's a forced structure, which means it has seams."

Kiara licked her lip and added, "And with enough concentrated magical pressure, especially the kind that doesn't belong to this world's physics, we can rupture a seam wide enough to turn it into a rift, then hijack the coordinate lock and hijack ourselves out of this place."

"You'll implode the dimension before you get a stable exit point." Draco said plainly.

"Only if we're reckless. I wouldn't let my own skin get damaged, you know."

Tiamat glanced away. "I don't see why we need to escape. The threats here aren't exactly impressive. Even they were tolerable at best."

"Wow, says the one who called them brats." Kama reminded her.

"They are." Tiamat said.

"They didn't know your identity."

"As it should."

Footsteps scuffed the broken ground and brought a shadow beside Draco. Angra stepped into the group like he hadn't just walked through a battlefield that cracked open the upper ceiling of the skybox.

"So," he said, glancing at her briefly. "You win?"

"He's unconscious," Draco answered. "I held back."

"That would explain why the sky didn't collapse." Angra looked at her again. "He was strong?"

"He tried to grab my sword like it was his. Karma got him. I don't tolerate that kind of stupidity." Draco's tone didn't shift, but the spike of pride and disdain in her gaze gave it poundage. "Proud of instincts, strong with focus. No refinement. He lacks principle. All muscle, no understanding of law."

Angra turned his head, casually nodding toward the distant battlefield where the ground was still vaporizing from godly collisions. "Well, you're lucky. U-Olga just beat the light out of both Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi. I watched the entire thing. She got damaged too much. I think she still doesn't understand half her functions. She just stomped the moon-man into the dirt and melted the sun-woman with beam output she doesn't know how to recalibrate yet."

Draco's eyes narrowed slightly, tone lowered. "She won alone?"

"Brutally. Tsukuyomi resisted everything until she shattered his left side with a pressure cannon he couldn't phase through. His surprise attack worked momentarily, didn't stop her from shooting his face. Amaterasu lasted longer because she had actual control over her divinity output, but once U-Olga went all out, it was over. Her pride shattered second."

"Then she's stable."

"Right now. The good news, though, is that this Amaterasu is not as threatening as the Evil of Humanity one."

"At least, that's a weight off our shoulders."

"Yep."

Kama leaned toward them. "So, we're three for three. We've beaten the wind brute, the night freak, and the sun goddess. The only ones left are background decorations."

Tiamat raised an eyebrow. "You consider Inari background?"

"She got humbled, so she's background now." Kama shrugged

Vitch narrowed her eyes at Kama. "It's funny how you talk so much for someone who got thrown thirty meters when you did nothing."

"Hey! I'm not the only one here." Kama snapped.

Kiara's laugh was genuine. "You expected someone who despises males to blast Tsukuyomi and Susanoo at first encounter. Honestly, it's more insulting that you didn't."

Kama turned to her, visibly annoyed. "I can restrain myself."

"You almost failed."

"You're literally standing in a seductive pose while we're surrounded by spatial instability."

"It's called being me." Kiara flipped her hair.

Draco turned away from their conversation without responding. She had confirmed what she needed. The Kami were not unworthy, but they were outmatched. Even now, divine pressure from two different battlefield vectors had failed to halt the advance of entities born from the Beast Class. Draco didn't even need to prove superiority anymore. The evidence was on the battlefield, in the unconscious Kami, and in the expressions of the others.

This dimension was not going to last long. Whether they escaped by logic, force, or error, it was coming apart. The Beasts stood unchallenged.

"Hm?"

Suddenly, Draco's eyes caught a fox coward-ing away.

Inari's ears had not betrayed her.

That quiet but unmissable disdain tone, the way every word that came out of his mouth held not just mockery but a genuine certainty that nothing truly mattered was not something a god of any pantheon could mistake. It had been the same voice that spoke of Susanoo reduced to a twitching, bleeding heap, effortlessly nullified Tsukuyomi.

It had only spoken briefly, but that alone was enough for the fox goddess's breathing to sharpen. She had witnessed the fall of her kin, the deconstruction of their pride, their form.

She instinctively pressed her back against a wall. There were fewer clouds in the sky, now only filled with aurora-like distortions and cracks of abstract color representing the damage to the space's magical framework. It had held up until now, thanks only to Amaterasu but it wouldn't last. The new tear forming nearby gave her every reason to believe her assumption was correct. The woman named Kiara, who looked more like some high priestess born from every indulgent man's delusion, was calmly extending her hands to pull open the space like it was nothing but silk fabric. Her eyes sparkled with delight, she looked amused at how slowly it was coming along.

"Now, now," her voice is warm and patient, as though she was speaking to a child caught between sleep and wakefulness. "This is a little more stubborn than I thought. For something cobbled together by a virgin's purity and the desperate reverence of lesser faith, this space has commendable elasticity. Wouldn't you say so, Tamamo?"

Koyanskaya gave the dimensional weave a few side glances while extending one hand toward it

"I'm actually impressed, also not impressed enough to care. The sooner we're out, the sooner I can get away from her." She gestured vaguely toward Kama.

"Me? That's not very nice of you. I thought we were bonding."

"I am competent. I just have a survival instinct, unlike some suicidal slut looking to collect everyone's love and throw it back in their face."

Kama laughed in pure amusement. Then she reached out and grabbed Inari without so much as a warning or change in pace.

"Come on, little priestess," she whispered sweetly, "You're coming with us. No need to keep clinging to a religion that's forgotten how to make sacrifices."

Inari froze. The hand gripping her was deceptively gentle, but she could feel something inside it writhing. The grin was a thing that did not need victory to assert itself, it was a kind of smile that only came from something that knew you were beneath it.

Her Youjutsu flared.

A brilliant pulse of divine foxfire surged through her tail and exploded at the point of contact, and her form scattered in afterimages before Kama could blink. Kama recoiled in surprise and chuckled as the escaping Inari reappeared several feet away.

"Oh? She bit," Kama remarked. "Good. I hate it when prey plays dead."

Inari began channeling a second set of hand signs to escape through a narrowed ley point behind her, already forming another rift structure—

"Fou!"

Something landed into her like a divine projectile, and the impact flattened her to the ground hard enough to crater the spiritual topography. Her barrier faltered, and before she could roll away, paws pressed firmly against her shoulders and head, locking her into the dirt.

"Fou!!" the little creature repeated, eyes glaring with that same innocent blankness that made no sense for something capable of nullifying two of her escape layers.

"What—what is this thing!?" Inari hissed, growling as she tried to wrestle one arm free. "Get—off—!"

Tiamat dropped.

She hadn't even been nearby just seconds ago, but that didn't matter. She landed just behind Inari, and without hesitation, her draconic tail pinned the fox goddess even further into the ground, wrapping once and pressing tightly against her back and thighs.

"Good job, my son," Tiamat said cheerfully to Fou, clapping her hands once in praise. "You're very good at catching girls."

"Fou."

"GET—OFF ME!" Inari screamed, divine energy exploding from her chest in the shape of nine overlapping glyphs, each burning with her original Youkai divinity. "I am one of the Five Pillars of—!"

"Oh hush, no one cares." Tiamat said.

Inari's magic flared and collapsed instantly, ceased to exist. She blinked rapidly, brain racing to register what had happened, but the space still felt anchored. She had cast the spells properly. Her line to the local faith-network was intact. She wasn't being suppressed.

Why was...?… nothing was working.

Kiara whistled.

Kama folded her arms and walked over again. "Do you really think anyone here cares about that?" she asked, squatting down next to Inari's trapped face. "Don't worry, I'm not even going to break you. Vitch will handle that. It's cute. Wait, don't Raynare and the other one needs another company?"

Vitch stepped beside her, hands on her hips. "If we're done playing with her, let's finish this opening before more trash-tier pantheon grunts show up."

Angra left, drifting toward the far end of the space where he had last seen the explosive shockwave from U-Olga's earlier tantrum. He hovered slowly, hands in his pockets, occasionally whistling without a tune.

"Honestly, this is such a waste of time," he muttered to himself. "Every single time it's the same thing. I try to stay out of it. They drag me back in. Someone gets mad. A world dies. Rinse and repeat."

He passed over several shattered floating shards of stone and what looked like the remains of divine statues crumbling in slow motion due to temporal distortion. One fragment of obsidian floated by, and he flicked it away with no more care than brushing off lint.

The area where U-Olga had last stood was still radiating pressure from her earlier outburst. The shockwave hadn't hit the Beasts, but it had flattened a kilometer-wide field of conceptual formations and erased most lingering Kami surveillance tags. Angra scanned the ruin casually, then spotted her glowing frame standing stubbornly at the center of the crater, breathing heavily, eyes wild.

"Oh good. She hasn't started crying yet."

Angra's slow steps stirred the debris underfoot as he approached her fallen form.

Angra tilted his head, taking in the scene without urgency or pity.

"You really got your spine snapped by those two glowsticks," he muttered, half-smirking. "Embarrassing for a Beast, especially one who thought humans should be kneeling just for making eye contact with her."

U-Olga lifted her head weakly, golden hair smeared with soot and ash. "You think I fought seriously? Against secondary divine residue?" Her voice was hoarse, her mouth twisted with indignation rather than humility.

"You tested the ground with your face. Didn't think you'd let the local gods push you into the pavement that hard. It kind of ruins the whole supreme-being shtick. Though, maybe this was bound to happen. You did strut around like a bug zapper around moths. Come on, your ego's bruised enough. Don't make me carry you."

"I am not being carried," she snapped, trying to rise. Her body trembled under its own weight, her limbs sluggish from exhaustion. She failed to get up more than a foot before her arm buckled.

"Told you," Angra said, crouching down and grabbing her under the arm without ceremony. "This is why I don't take pride seriously. You all die for it eventually. Either that or it just makes you slower."

U-Olga gritted her teeth, refusing to look at him as he hauled her upright. Her legs dragged slightly, module flickering in and out of visibility as her Authority fluctuated from spiritual instability. It was humiliating to be assisted, but staying behind was not an option. She refused to be pitied or pitied herself.

"To be honest, I'm impressed. I didn't think they had it in them. Maybe your screams lit a fire in their spiritual backbone. You're an inspiration to us all."

"You will regret this indignity—"

"I regret many things. This won't make the list."

He casually strolled back through the damaged landscape with U-Olga still muttering threats, curses, and titles of forgotten supremacy, until the light of the still-open rift shimmered into view.

"My, my. Looks like someone had a temper tantrum and didn't get their toy this time. Do set her down gently, dear. Her pride is more fragile than her limbs."

"I can hear you," U-Olga growled with difficulty.

"That's the point," Kiara replied, not turning around, fingers already weaving patterns into the veil of the rift she'd opened alongside Koyanskaya, who was currently double-checking the coordinates while keeping her tail rigid, ears twitching in clear irritation.

"I swear this place was aligned to a wasteland marker. There weren't any spirit resonance points overlapping with mortal architecture. Something's screwed with the field... again." Koyanskaya muttered, squinting at the dimensional threads.

Meanwhile, Kama had both arms hooked around the bound Inari like she was hugging a prized accessory. The fox goddess's divine form was visibly fuming, jaw clenched in agitation but clearly unable to retaliate. Any movements were restrained by the binding curse Kama had gleefully laced with a cocktail of loving malice and venomous affection.

"Don't look at me like that, Miss Fox. You lost. I'm just being thorough. I take good care of my conquests. You're lucky it's me and not Kiara. She'd have turned your little heart into a wine cup by now."

"Do not mistake tolerance for helplessness, woman," Inari hissed, her voice still collected despite her condition. "I will repay this humiliation—"

"Please do. I want to see if your vengeance tastes as boring as your lectures," Kama laughed, then looked at the others. "Can we get going? I'm starting to get bored of her whining."

Draco clicked her tongue. "You're treating a goddess like a plush toy. Even for you, that's low. At least gag the fox if she's going to flail."

Kama grinned without shame. "Oh, Draco, sweetie. You're just jealous I got to her first."

"I do not envy filth," Draco replied, "but I'm noting your arrogance for later."

Kiara gave one last glance to the fractured battlefield, the scent of burned divinity still heavy in the air, then followed. Koyanskaya hesitated half a second longer, staring at Amaterasu's lingering scorch marks, then entered with no more than a polite huff.

Angra stepped in last, guiding U-Olga forward. The moment they crossed the edge of the rift, there was a sharp drop in pressure, a feeling of dimensional membranes folding over themselves. He felt the distinct snapping of space realigning.

Then light.

The transition dumped them all unceremoniously into an open courtyard of concrete and trimmed grass.

They stumbled forward slightly, blinking.

The house that was expected to welcome them was not in sight.

Instead, it was a most bizarre situation.

"...This isn't our zone."

Kiara's heels clicked once against tile before she looked up, her eyebrows lifting. "Oh… this place."

Koyanskaya blinked. "Kuoh Academy."

U-Olga shook off Angra's support and stood upright, swaying slightly but regaining her balance. "That name is irrelevant. This place is—" She paused. Her pupils dilated slightly.

The morning light was static. The wind was present but frozen. Trees don't move, caught mid-rustle. The sky was red, layered with suspended clouds that weren't moving, as if someone had painted time in one direction and paused the brush.

Draco looked at the sky. "A Bounded field. A spiritual delay on time perception, synchronized with an anchor."

Kama looked around. "We've skipped a few pages, haven't we? This isn't seconds after we left."

They looked toward the far side of the courtyard.

There were figures frozen in place, caught in mid-motion. Armies of them.

Angels in uniform, wings wide and glowing; Devils with weapons and spells caught mid-cast; Fallen Angels with lances and sigil markers, all suspended.

Three armies, opposite each other, locked in that perfect standoff like a mural.

The main situation, however...

An open battle was unfolding in violence. Cloaked figures were stepping out from teleportation glyphs, several low-tier magi whose features were hard to make out from this distance, but clearly not part of any army present on the ground. These opposing forces bore strange crests, unrecognizable to any of the Beasts.

"We're watching... what is this, a drama stage? Why are we even here?"

Tiamat's inquiry went unanswered.

"....."

"Fou...?"

"....."

"....."

"Wait, why is there a running cardboard box?"

No one responded to that. Instead, the group stood in awkward silence, watching the battle above escalate, the entire courtyard being a victim of magic and supernatural destruction. The Beasts of Humanity—gods in all but name—had arrived just in time to witness their first encounter with the Khaos Brigade and the Three Faction Leaders.

Chapter 16: No Peace for the Beasts (Part 1)

The chaotic rain of spells and destructive force that erupted across the battlefield shattered everything that once resembled any remaining order.

Light-based bombardments cracked open holy barriers, flaming spheres tore apart frozen mid-air Devils who had not yet realized they were no longer under the protection of time suspension, and arcs of corrupted lightning incinerated patches of terrain into blackened sludge. The cloaked attackers, numbering in the thousands and swarming like scavengers across the boundaries of the Kuoh Academy's campus, all invaded the academy. Some—obviously Devils—had their insignia stitched alongside the sorcery emblems of human magi, working as one faction, synchronized in devastating intent.

The mixed army of the Three Factions were caught mid-formation. Too many were stuck defenseless, their weapons still halfway drawn or their wings only mid-flap, their enchantments half-cast and expressions still reflecting shock from the original time-stop effect. Dozens were vaporized before they could take a breath. Angels disintegrated midair as hexes pierced their souls. Fallen ones collapsed into lightless ash. Devils detonated from within, their internal mana networks forcefully reversed.

The sky above Kuoh was warped with overlapping spell formulas. Cursed spells written in blood red, and artificial demonic energy thundered between the clouds like broken engines of power.

Yet, amid the rising clouds of smoke, blood, and magical residue, a triple burst of massive, interlaced magic circles surged into the sky; one golden with the distinct resonance of Heaven, one pulsating purple-black born of the Devil Lineage, and one silver-white traced with feather-textured sigils associated with Grigori innovation.

The three circles flared. A single resonant boom rang out from time itself being disrupted. What had been frozen became fluid again. Wings snapped open mid-flutter, eyes blinked, mouths screamed. Swords finished unsheathing. Some collapsed, noticing their injuries from a moment ago. The mixed army reacted in pure confusion.

"I know that trick. That triple formation is a time-dispel pattern,  powered by three different users, woven in layers, similar to a pre-braided rope barrier codes."

Koyanskaya muttered with her fingers tapping against her biceps, her eyes darting between the three circles. "I almost think that the spell was prepared in advance, but it's actually that the casters are efficient. That's why it's synchronized so well. Cute. The only time you see teamwork like this is when everyone involved has no intention of sharing credit for it."

"In other words, a party's begun and none of us were invited. What a pity." Kiara's voice dripped with sarcasm. She didn't blink even as a divine explosion caved in part of the gymnasium and two Angels were blown out of the air by an overhead Devil-mancer's wide-area strike. "But watching is fine for now. It's pleasant when I don't have to seduce the violence into climaxing."

"Fou." Nobody responded to that.

From the shattered upper floors of the academy's main building, the entire field became a living mural of madness. Devils and Angels began clashing immediately. Holy spears were deflected mid-thrust by enchantments laced with Grigori tech. Familiar summoners tried to deploy large-scale monsters, only for several of them to be eaten alive by their own creations which had gone berserk from being frozen in mid-command. Charred feathers, broken blades, and runes fell like rain.

Draco was on the railing of a collapsed stairwell like a judge presiding over the world's dumbest contest. Her eyes watched both sides destroy each other without strategy. Her expression didn't change even when a massive flame construct erupted across the courtyard and scorched several Devils to death, including one cloaked mage who had just been shouting orders. She looked annoyed, but she never looked surprised. "They have neither coordination nor discipline. This is what a disgraceful war is. A skirmish where and how you waste resources."

"What do you expect?" Kama responded from atop the bent light post nearby. "Humans—Angels—Devils—give any of them power and they start thinking the world exists to be impressed by their tantrums. Try hard to kill each other for the pettiest ideas, and then still believe someone somewhere is going to call them heroes for it. Loveable and stupid."

"You mean you love every one of them," Kiara corrected with a soft chuckle.

"I said what I said," Kama replied without looking.

U-Olga commented as well while seated on a bent beam half-buried in classroom rubble. She flicked dust from her gloved hand. "I've seen better tactical coherence from colony insects. These beings have so much magic but still believe throwing themselves into a meat grinder without form or foresight will yield results. Awful."

Though, everyone could see that each side wasn't just fighting for dominance, they're fighting for recognition from the factions they're affiliated with.

"You're all taking this too seriously," Angra said from a cracked teacher's desk turned sideways into a sort of bench. "Let them die. That's what armies are for. Dying for people who never asked them to." He yawned. This is all just a replay of someone's leftover trauma from the last war. Different faces. Same stupid objectives.
"... At least they've upgraded the special effects."

"You're only saying that because it looks like a budget movie," Kama added.

"Exactly," Angra replied.

Tiamat, meanwhile, was seared with both arms around her knees like a sullen child, watching everything with a tired, exasperated expression. Her long hair fell in soft layers over the railing. She blinked slowly. Her eyes didn't follow the explosions or the fighting. They only followed the ones who died pointlessly. She muttered something about children.

Koyanskaya turned her head toward her, brows twitching. "What?"

Tiamat blinked again. "Nothing. Complain later. Not now."

They ignored the muffled screaming and trashing of the captive Inari.

Another explosion rocked the courtyard. A group of Fallen tried to retreat, only for several devils to ambush them from below using mid-tier teleportation flares. More spells were exchanged. The air was a solid fog of heat and magical pressure.

Through all of it, the Beasts of Humanity sat, stood, crouched, or lay across the ruins of the academy. They didn't even look entirely awake. Every death, every mistake, every spell, every desperate scream or righteous cry or cowardly retreat, were all just being watched over.

"The act is heating up." Kiara said.

"Act One, Scene Three." Kama said with a little curtsy.

Fou was the first to lose interest in watching the brawl like an animated stage play. The tiny Beast sniffed the air, twitched his ears, and in a way no one really expected, crouched low and launched himself toward a mage who had just begun floating down from the air to readjust his trajectory. The mage did not even register the movement until he felt something latch onto his arm. Fou dragged him down in an uneven spiral, flipping violently before smashing the mage into the courtyard below with a weight that belied his tiny size.

A second later, he hit the ground hard enough to bounce. A second after that, Draco stepped over him and grabbed the coughing mage by the collar. Her grip was stronger than her expression let on. She didn't like unnecessary talking, and she wasn't going to waste time repeating herself.

"You will speak, or I will take your jaw apart and feed it to a hound before making you eat what remains of yourself through the hole in your face. Choose."

The mage's expression contorted in confusion, then in dread. His voice cracked.

"I… I don't… I'm just following—"

Draco squeezed his head tighter, and a wet snap sounded as one of his molars cracked. He wailed, until she pressed again to shut him up.

"You have three seconds to speak without lies. If I detect a single word of flattery, feigned ignorance, or evasion, I will decapitate you so fast your soul won't even have time to panic."

The mage gasped and clawed at her grip with trembling fingers. He coughed blood from the impact but managed to force words out in panic.

"Th—the Khaos Brigade! We attacked the summit! The Peace Conference! The Three Factions—!"

"Peace Conference?" Kiara repeated, "To Devils, Angels, and Fallen Angels, holding hands and singing hymns? Truly, the world must be sick."

"It was going to unite Heaven, the Devils, and the Fallen! Our mission was to sabotage it before it happened! We attacked first before the meeting could finish! Those frozen guys were part of the conference forces!"

Koyanskaya rolled her eyes.

"So, it's just another standard terrorist disruption. Imbeciles really couldn't help but fling themselves against a gathering of the strongest forces in your enemy Factions, could you? I see why you rely on underhanded tricks like time-freeze barriers."

The mage kept speaking between wheezes, too frightened by the presence of multiple unknown beings whose existences felt like incarnations of nightmares.

"They—the Khaos Brigade heads—they planned this whole thing. They wanted to kill the leaders, and destroy the summit. We broke the seal, got through their information barrier. We wanted the supernatural world to collapse. Our leaders want humans to be afraid again!"

Draco squinted but didn't let go. "You're speaking too much nonsense and not enough facts. Who are 'they'? Names. Factions. Leaders."

"Yes, I'm curious about the inner workings of your group of societal rejects. Are you all suicidal by nature, or is this some religious martyrdom complex?" Koyanskaya piped up.

"I—It's not like that! We're organized! We're trying to fix the imbalance! The Khaos Brigade exists to change the way the Supernatural World works! There's too much control in the hands of a few myths! We want to overturn the whole system! We're made of many factions who agree—"

Kama sighed. "Oh no. Dissatisfied dissidents with superiority complexes and delusions of revolution? That's never been done before. Are you also going to declare a new utopia after murdering everyone who doesn't agree with your childish ideas?"

"I-It's not childish! The biggest one's the Old Satan Faction, descendants of the original four Satans. They wanted to restore the rule of the original four Satans! They're the largest! Then there's Nilrem, the Magician faction led by some high-ranking devil, I'm part of it! Then there's the Hero Faction, they're led by Cao Cao! He's the descendant of that Cao Cao! They use humans with Sacred Gears, Demon Swords, Longinus types! And even Hades from the Greek pantheon is working with some of us—"

"Sounds like a bunch of children playing with sticks," Angra said. "... Let me guess, they think they're restoring balance by tearing everything else down?"

The mage didn't respond immediately. Draco finally released the mage and let him crumple. She looked toward the still sky and frowned harder. "These Factions inside the Khaos Brigade are organized. Too organized for a goal like chaos. Who leads them all?"

The mage shook his head quickly. "I—I don't want to die—"

Kama brushed Inari's stunned body aside like used furniture. "You're going to die if you don't answer," she said sweetly, a hand already shimmering with energy designed to collapse nervous systems. "So go on. Pretend you're brave. Let's see what breaks first, your mind or your mouth."

Fou made his presence known behind the mage. Kiara watched with visible delight at the building fear in his eyes.

The mage's voice cracked. "It's—Ophis. Higher-ups said…they said the entire Brigade exists because of Ophis. The Dragon God of Infinity. The Infinite Ouroboros."

No one spoke for several seconds. Every smirk and smile vanished.

Kiara blinked. "Now that's a surprise."

Draco remembered Goetia's words.

"He told us about her. Said there were concepts given form. Two beings we shouldn't ignore."

U-Olga frowned as well. "An embodiment of Infinity..."

"Something without an anchor will destroy everything. Is that why they've built a rebellion around a void? That's worse than chaos." Tiamat said.

"Humanity won't be able to survive this, then. But why would a concept would lead these guys to chaos? That's my inquiry." Angra asks.

Koyanskaya's usual face was gone as well. "Ophis, huh? I don't like where this is going. We need to find out if it's still here."

Kiara leaned close to the broken mage. "Tell me, dear, where is it now? The Infinite Dragon."

The mage's eyes began to roll back, overwhelmed. "Sh—she's watching everything. Sh—she said… she's looking for silence… where there's no conflict…"

The implication of "she" was noted by the Beasts. Assuming that concepts can take any physical form, gender and sex shouldn't amount to something...

... unless this universe's history is misgender-ing like their own world.

Draco narrowed her eyes. "Then she's not here."

"Somewhere untouched," Kama muttered. "Where nothing changes. The edge of something big, or the eye of the storm. She's not leading from the front. She could be waiting."

Fou sit. "Fou."

Everyone processed that in their own way.

Kiara looked amused again. "Well. Now it's finally interesting."

Draco was already scanning the distance, mind racing. They needed to find this Ophis. If someone truly could destroy all sides of this war, it had to be dealt with. Their weakened states are also a concern.

Suppose a Conceptual Being can easily warp locations, the Beasts could get in deep trouble. Realizing this, they just earned a new level of enemy.

Tiamat glanced at Inari. "You know this Ophis?"

Inari did not respond, still under Kama's influence, but her trembling shoulders confirmed it.

"You're done, darling. We have what we need. You may be consumed now." Kiara said.

He barely processed the words before Fou jumped onto his back and bit down hard enough to knock him unconscious. Whether he was dead or not, none of the Beasts cared. Draco turned her eyes toward the sky where more of the cloaked mages hovered.

"Do we crush them now?"

Koyanskaya was checking her nails. Her ears flicked once.

"They'll flee the moment they realize we're not on their level. Unless you all want to play soldier for the day?"

U-Olga crossed her arms and stared toward the heart of the academy, where more factions were beginning to clash as the time-freeze barrier continued to destabilize. She narrowed her eyes.

Hatred on Humanity they might have, but if its structure and order fell down, then they would remove the Khaos Brigade. Nothing should collapse before it is judged properly.

Angra groaned and stood up slowly.

"Well, I guess we're helping now. Either any other way, let's see how loud they scream when things get real."

They heard enough.

No argument among them, no repudiation, no clash of personalities, they understood now.

The mage's words still rang somewhere on their minds, forgotten in thought, because what they absorbed was the meaning within the information, the nature of the enemy that dared to weaponize chaos for no cause greater than their own small desires.

This Khaos Brigade was not a rebellion to their eyes. It was not a manifestation of the weak crying out against a cruel world. It was not even hatred worthy of being called righteous. It was the loud tantrum of the self-obsessed who wished to reshape everything out of spite, because reality had not aligned with their shallow truths. There was no burden in them. No pain in their revolution. No historical importance. No grief for a ruined humanity.

Merely but vanity.

They listened to the mage and found no message worthy of remaining. They listened and realized that this self-named 'Khaos' had misused a word too sacred.

Chaos is not evil.

Chaos is not a mistake.

Chaos is not the enemy.

Chaos is the forge of man.

The world was not made orderly, and even those who tried to claim so in stories, wrote of floods and deserts and demons and temptations and loss. It was chaos that made man crawl. It was chaos that made man cry. It was chaos that made man think and struggle and learn. Through this chaos, they birthed gods and monsters and the divine and the monstrous. They birthed them all.

For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.

The Beasts were never born to destroy humanity. They were born from the very need for destruction that festers inside Humanity when it reaches its limits, when it can no longer grow, when it stagnates or when it forgets to weep.

They are punishments. They are trials. They are mirrors. Each one of them carries a truth that mankind refused to face until it was too late.

Kiara who bears the sin of pleasure taken past sanctity.

Kama who mocks love because humanity twisted it into poison.

Angra who exists because man needed to blame someone for all they could not understand.

Draco who judges all lies, even the lies man tells to themselves.

Tiamat who nurtures the child that is mankind, even when they bleed and scream and curse.

U-Olga who is the price of dominion, the echo of the will to rule without comprehension.

Koyanskaya who survives by feeding on the very system humanity praised.

Fou who compares the power of men to itself of being the apex predator to conflict for dominion nor weakness.

Goetia who feels pity towards the mortality of human life and is needed by humanity to survive through condescending compassion.

They all are humanity's screams turned into divine shapes.

The Khaos Brigade was not born from that. They weren't made by humanity's pain or by mankind's deepest regrets or wishes. They were opportunists, parasites crawling through an already wounded world, hoping to finish the job not because they loved humanity in their own twisted way, but because they hated it without understanding why.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.

If the Khaos Brigade had borne the marks of truth, if they had offered something unbearable yet honest, if they had brought down judgment with hands trembling from the knowledge that they must hurt the very thing they once loved, then perhaps the Beasts would have watched. They would have waited. They would have nodded at the end, and returned to nothing. But this was not that.

This was theft. Theft of their purpose. Theft of their right. Theft of the sacred bond between sin and consequence. These were frauds. Their so-called invasion was a mockery. It offended not their pride, but their origin. It mocked the very tears that gave birth to them. They would not allow it.

They would become violent.

They would become crueler than intended.

They would become protectors.

Never saviors. Never friends of mankind. But protectors nonetheless. Because mankind had not earned death from these hands. Not by these ones. Not today.

The mage said that Ophis was behind this. That a god had allowed this sickness to root and grow and name itself judge. Then this Ophis, too, would be cut down. They did not fear her. They would destroy a Conceptual Being if necessary. They had fought god-level Servants before. They had outlasted worship. They had been born when prayers were not enough.

For I come not to send peace, but a sword.

The Beasts had decided.

They would tear apart the Khaos Brigade.

They would unmake their factions.

They would crush these Satans and every diluted dream of revenge and inheritance.

They would erase Nilrem and burn away the cowardice that masked itself in mysticism.

They would shatter the Hero Faction and drive its so-called noble blood into the dirt where no bloodline would remain.

They would hunt down the ones who stood beside gods and remind them that no deity had a monopoly on damnation.

They would leave nothing.

They would remind the world that destruction is not free. That the end comes only when it is earned. That suffering is a price, not a game.

Let this day be written in humanity's bones.

The Beasts do not forgive. The Beasts do not forget.

They will protect humanity not out of kindness, but because this world is their cradle, and they will not let it be shattered by false gods and hypocrites!

Their apocalypse is sacred!

They are ruin made righteous!

They are judgment made flesh!

They are Humanity's last cry made eternal!

---

Why did it always come to this?

He had written the damn paper in the old language of the Fifth Heaven, fully convinced at the time that it would be rejected, laughed at, and forgotten by everyone except him. The title was long, pompous, and idiotic. "On the Constructive Limitations and Theoretical Liberties of Artificial Divine Armaments Modeled on Sub-Sacred Frameworks, with a Proposal for the Darkness Blade Prototype."

That was before he then renamed it into "Blazer Shining or Darkness Blade." He wasn't being serious. He had scribbled it down between a drinking binge and a study session trying to recreate an imitation of the Balance Breaker system. Michael—God bless his holy heart—had found it fascinating and insisted on archiving it, even though it was barely finished. It was embarrassing. The name haunted him for centuries.

He hated that he remembered it. That report was never supposed to see the sunlight of publication. He made a bet with a younger colleague that if it somehow made it through the review panel, he'd shave his wings. It was meant to be a joke. It wasn't funny when Michael actually stamped it with the Heaven's Seal and distributed it during the war. Not even a footnote. Front page. Official. Canon. Heaven-wide.

That was before he lost everything. Before the decree was announced and he was cast down with a verdict so sharp and unflinching that even now, so many millennia later, he sometimes heard the syllables echoing in the back of his skull whenever he was quiet.

You have chosen the flesh of the dust over the breath of the divine. You are no longer welcome among the sons of the Highest.

It was the first time he ever hated Heaven. Not God. He never hated Him. He knew what he had done. But he hated the bureaucracy of angels, hated how quickly those who had worked beside him reduced him to filth just because his curiosity had gone where theirs wouldn't. He had always believed knowledge was closer to God than blind obedience.

So he left, took the others who followed, formed Grigori from the bones of broken angels and the desperate debris of war. For a while, he genuinely believed it would collapse in a century. It did not. Grigori grew. It became something real. Something that even Heaven could not ignore. He buried himself in the world of Sacred Gears, of evolution, of what made humans unique. He never stopped loving humans. Not once. Even after they disappointed him. Even after they hurt themselves, each other, even Him. He still believed they had something in them that even angels didn't. Will. A divine stubbornness. The same will that kept him going, even now.

Looking down on the battlefield beneath the hovering ruins of Kuoh Academy, he saw exactly what he feared most.

Desperation in the enemy. The Khaos Brigade. Their magic was wild, clumsy, but still potent. It wasn't a battle anymore. It was a war zone sculpted from misused potential. The devils' frontline formations were holding thanks to Grayfia and a few of Sirzechs' old guards, but the angelic flanks were clearly overwhelmed by the summoned beasts and barrage hexes coming from the mages. The Fallen... his people... they were holding a wide wedge position around the gymnasium ruins, alternating barrier spell formations and long-range suppressive fire. But it was thin.

Katerea's laughter rang again, filled with shrill and delighted. He turned. She was here for revenge.

Personal. That wasn't surprising. He knew her type. Ideologues born from legacy trauma, addicts of past glory, always convinced they knew what was best for everyone else just because their ancestors had more power.

He never understood the Old Satan faction. Katerea called herself a successor to Leviathan, but she was nothing more than a child who hated her toys because they belonged to someone else. She spat on the peace because it wasn't her idea. They hated the current Satans not because they failed the Underworld, but rather because they refused to die for outdated delusions. It was pitiful arrogance.

"You look tired, Governor General," Katerea mocked from across the air. "Or should I say, former Angel of Heaven? Still wearing your title like a badge? Did you finally toss it away with your dignity?"

Azazel ignored her taunts and looked at the field again. The peace was breaking apart. Khaos Brigade wanted the world to see this union crumble.

He remembered the Great War. He remembered the screams of his subordinates. He gave the order to retreat. No one forgave him for it, not even himself. But that retreat let them live. That retreat gave birth to the present. That moment of weakness gave room for future peace. If he had stood and fought in pride, they all would have died.

Katerea didn't know what leadership meant. She never had to weigh bodies against ideas. All she wanted was to erase the current structure and replace it with hers, never realizing that any system ruled by someone like her was already doomed to rot. The world didn't need another tyrant wearing a crown of fire. It needed people who could compromise, who could rebuild without burning everything else to ash first.

"You've gone soft," Katerea spat, raising her hand. Her spell circle exploded outward, twisting the wind into serpentine arcs of black water. "You used to be feared. Now you sit in peace talks, playing mediator like a retired priest. Did your wings stop working, Azazel?"

Katerea was coming for him.

He narrowed his eyes and rose into the air. Behind him, dozens of fallen angel soldiers took flight as backup, but he raised one gloved hand. They paused. He needed this one alone.

The Khaos Brigade had made it clear. They wanted to break the fragile trust between the factions before it could take root. They wanted blood to speak louder than peace. They didn't understand what they were playing with. The peace wasn't built out of idealism, it was built out of exhaustion. Three sides of a war realizing they would lose everything if they didn't adapt. That was why this peace conference mattered and why they were so desperate to ruin it.

She appeared above him in a burst of cold, seawater-colored demonic power, dressed like a commander, speaking like a queen, looking like she had already decided how the war would end.

"Azazel," Katerea hissed, "You're no governor. You're a glorified corpse scavenger dressed in research robes."

He rolled his shoulders, stretching the wings he still hadn't bothered to retract. "You know, I'm getting real tired of that mouth. Maybe we skip the boring ideology exchange and go straight to the attempted murder."

A tidal blast of Leviathan-heritage water force broke toward him, spiraling into pressure bolts strong enough to rip buildings from the foundation. He snapped his left wrist downward, and an invisible wall in front of him caught her attack, absorbing it with a force-feedback loop that rattled his shoulder joint but held.

He was used to battle. This was no different.

He launched forward, suddenly, with a vector-thrust assisted lunge that broke the air behind him like glass. He struck high, knowing she would dodge, and followed the arc downward into a full-body twist that released a barrage of amplified feathers coded to explode on contact with demonic frequencies. She blinked out before they could touch her, reappearing above with a retaliatory whip of water coiling through the air like a serpentine blade.

She was fast, faster than he remembered.

He needed to end this quickly.

He shifted to midair, backing away slowly as Katerea floated across from him. He already knew what was coming. Right on cue, a pulse of demonic pressure surged outward from her body, crackling purple arcs fluttering along her arms like vines looking for something to burn. The sky above Kuoh Academy visibly distorted around her, the air rippled, warping like a heat haze around her body, and Azazel let out a sharp exhale through his teeth.

His brow twitched and he clicked his tongue.

"That aura's not yours." He already understood it wasn't just refined mana. It wasn't even a product of talent. This was directly influenced by something completely different. "No way you naturally developed this output. Ophis must have lent you a fragment. Just how far is the Khaos Brigade willing to reach into extinction fuel to prove a point?"

Katerea's expression was one of cruel pride as if showing off a prized piece of jewelry while letting her aura intensify. The clouds overhead began to pull inwards unnaturally, twisting into a single spiral above her. Her long hair flickered in the charge of her magical energy, and when she finally spoke, her tone was exactly what he expected. Arrogant, cultured, self-indulgent. A fanatic wrapped in classical speech.

"You've always been a thorn, Azazel. Traitor to Heaven, heretic among heretics. You only act civil because you are weak. Peace among the factions? All that shows is that you've accepted the idea of being tamed and being shackled under the same 'understanding' that murdered our ancestors."

"You're building a tower on sand and calling it a castle. You think Ophis gave you a gift, but she probably just wanted to see what would happen if she poked a dead thing with a stick."

Her smile didn't waver. She moved her hands together, forming seals that locked the floating aura behind her into a semi-stable construct. Magic circles spun slowly across her back. The way she manipulated the power didn't belong to a Devil. It was something closer to a raw energy modulation. More like a grafted engine made to run on an infinite fuel source.

Azazel's body tensed. He reached behind his coat, gripping a golden shaft, light and warm in his hand. The weapon was short, less than a meter, but near its end was a deep violet orb glowing faintly.

Even Katerea paused when she saw it, her gaze briefly flicking to the weapon. That much of a reaction was good. This meant she had no intel and firsthand experience.

His fingers adjusted over the Down Fall Dragon Spear's base. "You know, this is the part where I usually try to stall or talk things out. You're really killing the mood, Katerea. Do you know how hard it is to not want to vaporize someone when they're waxing philosophical about genocide while the world's actually on fire?" he said, voice less amused now.

She raised her arm, magic circles forming in rings above her palm, lined with runes that pulsed with draconic mana, clearly artificial in origin but terrifying nonetheless.

"Ophis, bearer of infinite potential, gifted only a sliver of herself to our cause. Just enough to allow a proper beginning. And for my first act in the new world, you, the Fallen governor clinging to systems meant to die, will be erased."

The magic circles expanded, dark violet bolts firing toward Azazel like railguns, air imploding around their trajectory. Azazel immediately pushed himself into a backflip midair, narrowly avoiding the lead projectile as it carved through an entire block of airspace and detonated across the western courtyard of Kuoh Academy, exploding through a section of trees and ground. Balance Breaker was ready to be invoked. He didn't have the luxury of holding back.

He was just about to release the limiter when something in the far background made his neck tingle.

His instincts flared. Something behind her, far off, where the courtyard was boiling in open combat between Devils, Angels, Fallen, and Khaos Brigade mages.

His eyes snapped toward the epicenter, where magic blasts and divine spears and demonic flares were raining down in all directions.

... Who is that?

Someone was walking through the battlefield at a slow and calm pace. He couldn't tell how they were still alive, let alone untouched, walking without a single visible protection spell or defensive technique. Their body was lean, human-like in frame, male, slightly tall.

But there was something off. The skin, or what showed of it, was marked with symbols, glyphs twirling unnaturally as though they snake through the skin. The figure was cloaked in black, and not the magical kind, but a real shadow manifesting in threads around his body, swallowing light but giving nothing back.

Azazel's grip on the spear tightened without activating it.

On the top floor of the school building where the Peace Conference had been held, Archangel Michael leaned forward from the broken window frame, his confused eyes tracking the figure carefully. Gabriel's hand instinctively moved to her side, where her weapon would manifest if needed. Sirzechs narrowed his eyes, his usual calm beginning to fade along with Grayfia. Sona glanced at her restless sister in confusion. Kiba, Akeno, and Asia were speechless. They all stared.

To the Devils, both enemy or not, they felt like they were near a void in the middle of the field.

From another building just opposite, Rias and Issei just exited behind the balcony with Gasper, eyes widened in bewilderment. Issei opened his mouth but said nothing, his instincts screaming at him even though he didn't understand why. Ddraig inside the Boosted Gear was breathing deeply.

The figure in black stopped moving and began to alter.

Dark energy began to envelop the body entirely, swirling but tearing itself out from within. It was raw, a shadow-colored wave, blue and black at the same time, made of complicated emotions that pushed down on everyone.

Mages on the battlefield stopped fighting. Devils halted their incantations. Angels and Fallen lost focus on their maneuvers. The war ceased without warning, only dazed silence remaining.

Azazel's body froze mid-flight, floating above the field. Michael and Gabriel felt their breaths hitched at the feeling of ABSOLUTE SIN—

The casual clothes the figure wore burned away in the energy. The transformation finished within seconds. Now, the boy stood shirtless, exposing his entire torso, arms, and upper back. His body was covered in glyphs, fully black, glowing faintly. His lower body was wrapped in a torn red cloth bound around his waist, with a similar bandana on his head. Black bandages were wrapped tightly around his forearms and shins. His hair, wild and black, shifted slightly as the force around him began to rise again.

The entire battlefield knew it too.

That power. It didn't come from anything lifelike. It was existence made manifest in rejection of all others.

The figure raised his head.

A pair of amber eyes gleamed determinedly.

He walked through every ugly corner of mankind's sin and still stared straight ahead...

This timeline, this Earth's pitiful state, pressed like dried blood caking his skin. Once again, a world was attempting to collapse into madness under the same cycle. Self-righteousness. Power hunger. Godhood fantasy. Filth masked as justice. He had seen this before, in every spiral. He would not allow it again.

The shadows beneath his bare feet stretched outward, but there was an amiss. They moved independently of the sun's angle. They rippled like a tide, black ink fading into patterns resembling ancient glyphs in constant movement. Then they rose upward off the two-dimension of the surface ground, peeling themselves off like torn flesh, warping and separating from the flat plane of space to the third.

Flat shadows should not have depth. These did.

They peeled into the air like they were pulled from the fabric of a painting, curling, and arching, forming tendrils as thick as tree trunks, coiling in the air like vipers. They lunged outward across the battlefield, piercing through the war zone in an instant.

The first one reached.

The closest Khaos Brigade mage preparing a spell was the first to be struck. Her body froze, and she looked down to see her torso caught by the shadow. No scream came. Only bubbling breath and the gurgling noise of her lungs trying to work.

Her body began to melt, too grotesque to be acidic, but from being hollowed from the inside out. Her eyes rolled up, her jaw dislocated and dangled open as black substance dripped from every orifice. Then her entire body collapsed into itself, her skin wrinkling and shrinking as her flesh and bones liquified into sludge, and then that too vanished, absorbed into the shadow.

Everyone else stared stupefied at the individual who had been at her original spot.

The tendril moved on.

Slowly, Khaos Brigade mages made an effort to raise defenses, conjuring light barriers, demonic barriers, even teleportation circles, but it didn't matter. The tendrils pierced through shields, appeared above and below at once, and struck too fast to react.

Every one that touched a person caused immediate screaming that erupted from the soul. Each victim melted while awake. Every last drop of agony was visibly pulled into the tendril as magical energy, fueling the next. The smell of burnt nerves and wet viscera filled the air, but the cursed shadows remained unsullied.

The other side of the battlefield froze as well. Devils, Fallen, and Angels from the Three Factions were in full stop. Akeno could feel the air choking her. Asia dropped to her knees. Rias tried not to vomit. Issei muttered horrified, "What is that guy... what the hell is he doing...?"

A Nilrem sorcerer tried to chant a spell, but a shadow pierced his torso before he finished the first word. His body froze as the ink wrapped over his skin. He convulsed violently as limbs stiffened as if struck by a seizure, but it was far worse. The shadow seeped into his eyes, mouth, ears. What he saw in that blackness was not something he could describe or deny. It showed him everything wrong in the world and everything wrong in him.

The hypocrite he was. The coward he had always been. The things he convinced himself were justified. He was breaking apart not physically first, but mentally. Then his body followed, melting into a dissolving sludge while still trying to crawl away.

"I am All the World's Evil. The sin cast away by the first bloodied hand that struck brother down. I am the curse born from every dying wish that asked for vengeance instead of forgiveness. I am the inheritance of man's rejection of God, the scorn of those abandoned by Heaven, and the hatred that remained when justice became hollow."

His eyes swept across the armies before him.

From the destroyed front gates of the academy to the rooftops where every soldiers frozen in formation, every set of eyes was now fixed on Angra. No one remembered why they had drawn their weapons anymore. No one called for an attack. No one ordered a retreat.

"The world knows me as the will born from every sin mankind has ever committed and wished to cast out. Into myth, curse, beast, and scapegoat were turned from. I am what remains after the righteous abandon their own filth."

His voice cut through the place like a declaration carved into a tablet.

From hatred that knew no target, from vengeance that could not be fulfilled, from guilt that had no end.

"The resentment of every execution, the despair of every lost child, the ugliness of every false idol who claimed to be your salvation..... Humanity created me."

—Avenger of Man, Angra Mainyu is his name.

...and everyone instinctually became aware of the title.

Another tendril burst forward and impaled an Old Satan Faction devil. The man's body spasmed, veins bulged, and then he erupted like spoiled meat, torn from within and consumed. More screams followed.

Three Old Satan Faction devils were impaled as well. Their bodies convulsed before they were crushed by something the eye could not comprehend. One of them turned to dust from being forgotten in the concept of existence. His comrades tried to scream for him, but their mouths turned inward.

Michael and Gabriel could only feel their bodies shake from the presence of the entire sin of men. Sirzechs's eyes widened as he felt of what the presence felt like. It was like the 72 Pillar Clan's nature as devils, but colder. Older. The kind of evil that Heaven could not purify because it had no body to burn or spirit to ascend.

Angra's aura stretched beyond what senses could measure. The shadow around him swelled further, absorbing the dead and rewriting the ground they once stood on into a painted canvas of despair, smeared with colors and sounds. Those who looked too long at it began to see things that weren't there.

"Worse than demons and devils, I am a daemon. When men named others responsible for their fall, and when they demanded salvation from the heavens but spat upon the light when it did not arrive fast enough, punishment was made self-aware."

Some Khaos Brigade remnants tried to regroup. They shouted to each other, forming hasty circles and pushing power into spells. The tendrils twisted and snapped out in every direction. One after another, the magicians dropped like dolls being impaled on spikes. They simply ceased to exist after a second too long in the air. Even their souls were erased.

"You are nothing but destroyers pretending to be prophets. You use the name of 'change' to justify your hunger for power. All of you seek only to rebuild the same failure that this world has repeated since the day the first stone struck a skull and called it law."

He didn't need to shout, his voice traveled clearly to every ear. His presence ensured dominion.

A dozen Devils from the Old Satan Faction hurled magic circles toward him. One casts a spiral of purple-black energy designed to warp space. Another screamed for Bael's might. A third opened a gate to summon an Underworld Familiar.

The shadows split and dissolved in corrosion. The ink latched onto them and erased their properties. The magic circle shattered as the caster was stabbed cleanly through the chest by a crawling tendril that entered from below. The Devil's body stopped mid-air, suspended. His fingers curled like claws. His teeth shattered as he clenched from agony. He could not even scream. Inside the shadow, his soul was being shredded by the cumulative weight of every human sin he never acknowledged now shown to him, forcefully, endlessly. His body soon followed his mind.

More screams erupted. Shadows split, chased, and pierced others. The field became a slaughterhouse. It was extermination by judgment.

Angra stayed and turned his head toward the rest of the armies watching him still breathing.

"What I am… is not your savior. I am the remainder and consequence. I am one of many, beings born from the contradictions of the human species. We exist because their justice is temporary, their peace conditional, their kindness selective, their history dishonest."

Rias finally lurched and retched. The blood on the battlefield was real. The curse was far too overwhelming to the senses. Issei felt his spine lock. Something told him this being, this "Angra", was not lying or exaggerating. What they were seeing was not a manifestation of some twisted desire for power.

It was raw truth shaped into living retribution.

Azazel still hadn't moved. With his artificial Sacred Gear in hand, his heart raced. He knew instinctively that using the Down Fall Dragon Spear right now would only provoke something he didn't understand yet. He heard every word Angra said, and even his mind couldn't brush it off.

Then Angra extended his hand toward a surviving enemy group. A hundred or so Nilrem and Old Satan loyalists, shaking, armed, but shaken to the brim if they should run or fight.

"Gods or Demons? No. We are but humanity's sins made sentient. We are calamities born from contradiction. Now we have chosen to intervene."

One of the tendrils stopped before a surviving Khaos Brigade mage, hovering inches from his face. The mage tried to speak but collapsed to his knees, clutching his head. He began clawing at his face as if trying to remove something he could see but no one else could. His shrieks lasted far longer than his body, which soon caved in under its own madness. The shadow passed over the remains.

"We have watched this world rot. We watched those of power build peace upon broken corpses and pretend it was justice. You seek to accelerate extinction, believing it to be freedom. You delude yourselves into thinking that destruction can create paradise."

Angra's face twisted as his words demanded an emphasis on truth spoken as a blade.

"Nine of us have seen that extinction now dances in your halls. We will not allow your extinction to take this world with it."

The remaining enemies turned to flee. One tried to fly. Another activated a teleport. They didn't make it. The shadow reached them before the light did.

They died screaming. Some tried to claw out their eyes. One started stabbing himself to escape what he saw. Their souls were devoured by hatred, bodies collapsed.

The Three Factions. The soldiers. The Devils. The Angels. The Fallen. All bore witness to the Retribution being enacted. He lifted his head slightly.

"That ends here."

He raised one hand slowly, fingers spread, and every cursed tendril returned to him like snakes summoned by their master.

"This is a declaration," he let out, eyes now glowing like molten amber.

"From this moment forward, the Beasts of Humanity declare open war against the Khaos Brigade. Every agent, every traitor, every manipulator behind this false revolution will be hunted as offenses to be erased. Your vision of the future ends now."

To the ones hiding behind stolen names of angels,

To the followers of dead tyrants,

And to the cults who preach destruction as salvation, he says this!

They do not frighten them! They do not control the future! The world will not belong to the Supernatural!

He looked down at the last few surviving enemy magi who had not yet been touched. Their legs trembled. They cried and began to run. Angra let them go.

"Tell your masters," he allows a fear-inducing aura into his voice.

"The world they wanted to destroy has awakened beings older than gods. Tell them that from now on, every corner they run to will be painted black. Every sin they justify will scream against them. Every shadow they once used will become their grave."

The extreme deadly pause that followed was of people realizing something irreversible had just entered their lives.

Above, the sky did not change, but it felt darker.

Below, the war was no longer a war.

Let the divine and the damned witness. Let the gods who built this world see what walks upon it now. Let them see what was buried rise.

Chapter 17: No Peace for the Beasts (Part 2)

Katerea Leviathan, proud of her blood and proud of the name she carried, could only do nothing but numbly watch the sea of screaming flesh and dissolving bodies that were once Nilrem.

The sounds of convulsions and gurgling sickened her to the very core. All around her, the smell of cursed rot filled the courtyard like a thick sheet. Her enhanced devil senses failed to define what exactly the shadows were doing to them. The darkness had swallowed not only their lives but something deeper.

As a race who has a natural sensitivity to anything related to sins, Katerea can feel the formless hatred that lingered, boiling like oil made of screams.

Her pupils fixated on the thing that stood calmly in the middle of this. That man. That thing. The one who called himself 'All the World's Evil'. Her legs trembled, something she hadn't felt since the day her father was executed for defying the New Satans.

But it wasn't just fear that paralyzed her. It was the fact that she couldn't understand how this was possible. Her perception and understanding of magic and of curses failed to explain what was happening.

Her lips parted to scream for retreat. It won't be of use, however, because at that moment, something black lashed across the ground beneath her.

The black line surged from the center of the courtyard to her chest in less than a blink. There was no time to dodge, even though her instincts fired. The shadow was already piercing through her ribs.

Her vision shattered into streaks of black lines. Her mind cracked apart like ice.

Everything went through her 'sight.'

Curses that shouldn't humanely exist. A child crying while its mother was buried alive in a field. A man stabbing another, begging the corpse to breathe again. A blindfolded priest touching flame to a chained woman's eyes.

She saw death.

She felt death.

She—

Every emotion that had ever existed in this cursed world was forced into her bones. Her soul boiled. Her tongue swelled from inside her mouth.

Her last coherent thought was: "This is the punishment of the gods."

She couldn't claw her own face before her body collapsed, her torso warping into a stained black husk. A bubbling pool of tar pooled beneath her until not even her remains were visible.

Behind her, high above, Azazel hovered with stiff wings wide open. His breath held in his lungs. He was a Fallen Angel who was among the oldest of his brethren. He had seen dragons, gods, and more insane things than the average human could record in fiction.

Nothing about that shadow obeyed any principle that he could make sense of.

It was hunger.

A curse with no face or mouth, only laws that tore down every other law.

His twelve wings flared wide, and he bolted back, putting distance between himself and the space where Katerea had stood.

The shadow quivered, then rippled unnaturally. It was like it ingested something different.

Angra tilted his head.

He lifted a hand and slightly clenched his fist. He looked inwardly to a mental scape as the shadow raised something from the unfathomable 'floor'. No one else noticed it. But to Angra, the texture of energy told him something had entered his domain without permission.

A black snake, smaller than a human torso, pulsing with vitality but hollow in concept. It coiled inside his inner world without resistance.

"... A piece of the Ouroboros. A fragment of a god, smuggled within that devil's body. A core... or a seed... meant to restore or maybe duplicate one's own prowess. Then it chose to be devoured instead."

He closed his eyes for one second, and the snake melted into his own core, its writhing power silently consumed and converted. It gave no resistance. It had no will. It only followed what remained of Ophis' presence.

"We have declared war. The rest is not our concern now."

Outside, his body began to lower into the black shadow beneath his feet, which stretched and expanded like an endless basin. His feet were halfway submerged, his eyes flat and without focus. He had nothing more to say...

...even to the one above.

Something burned down.

A crimson beam rotating like a saw, pierced the air above his head. Dense and almost absolute with the intent to erase. It flew downward at a steep angle.

The shadow on the ground responded even when Angra didn't move. It swelled up in vertical lines, curved like a jaw, and caught the attack. The crimson erasure dissolved the upper surface, attempting to eat the part of the shadow into nonexistence, but the core structure expanded more. It swallowed the entire attack, chewing through the destruction until it collapsed into black strands and vanished. The ground hissed for a moment. Dust rained down. Nothing had been damaged except the spell itself.

A man descended.

His red hair fluttered in the heated wind. His suit remained intact. He looked like a human descending from the clouds, yet every living being in the air and on the ground stepped back to make room.

Fear from the Fallen and Angles.

Rank from the Devils.

Lucifer had arrived.

Sirzechs floated down, landing lightly with his boots on a piece of the courtyard that was uncorrupted a distance away from the shadow. His look did not express hostility.

He glanced at where the Khaos Brigade once was before fleeing. He looked at the pool of darkness around Angra. Then, finally, he looked at the new variable himself.

He spoke nothing.

Angra said nothing.

They stared at each other for a moment.

Sirzechs didn't move closer to the ink-like pool of spreading corruption. Even for someone with the Power of Destruction dwelling inside him like a second skin, he instinctively understood that the shadows radiating from this figure were something far more absolute.

Power of Destruction erased things on a fundamental level. This power infected. It stained reality and clung to it. What it did to others was contamination. That was why he stopped away, even after watching the tendril of red energy he released disappear into that crawling darkness without even a ripple.

No more explosions. No more magical flares. The mages were gone, their bodies digested into liquid screaming nightmares, and those who still lived were too afraid to break the quiet.

"…Who are you?" Sirzechs asked the figure standing within the writhing shadows. It was a question that deserved an answer, spoken by someone whose sole priority was to prevent another unnecessary war.

There was no response.

The figure stood motionless. Not a mere muscle twitch or even the smallest reaction. Only the shadows moved, crawling slowly outward in a way that was neither fast nor threatening, but constant. The curse's expansion was quiet, but inevitable.

"I mean it. I don't wish for another fight. I know you understand language, if you have a purpose for being here, then we want to talk. There are civilians near here. The ones you've killed were Khaos Brigade agents. You've already made your intentions clear to them. But we need to know who you are and why you're interfering with our war."

Again, no reply.

A second pair of wings landed beside Sirzechs. The holy aura that followed it was suffocating in purity, but even that warmth seemed to falter before the cursed blackness bled into the world.

Michael of the Heavens stood beside the Maou, his expression neither hostile nor afraid, but his posture was firm. The green-eyed Archangel looked directly at the standing shadow-wielder.

"I felt the reaction from the Heaven's System. The curse you released cried into the spiritual layers of this world. The System nearly rejected it outright. What you carry... is pain. There is too much of it. What you project into the world has no sanctity, mercy, and no balance. You are spreading something that should not exist."

Landing a few feet to their left, a third figure arrived. Azazel.

"I've seen some disgusting experiments. But whatever this is, it feels like a living tumor made of hatred that evolved from the worst human history has to offer. There's nothing elemental or divine in it. It's just human pain." Azazel's tone was profound. His eyes never left the figure.

The shadow began to slow its crawl. Its host turned his head just a little, finally acknowledging the attention being directed at him.

"This is a war against extinction. That includes your kind."

The moment the sentence ended, it left behind a heavy tension.

Sirzechs' eyes narrowed slightly. Michael's expression became guarded. Azazel straightened his back.

"Extinction?" Sirzechs repeated, frowning. "Are you threatening us?"

"If you participate in it, you will be erased. If you do not, we have no reason to kill you."

A law being pronounced. The way Angra said it made that very clear. There was no pride or warning in his voice. He stated a condition.

Michael spoke up. "You speak of annihilation like it is a fixed outcome. Who are you to decide who lives and who dies?"

Azazel raised a hand between them. "Alright, slow down. I think what we really need to know here is; what are you? You clearly aren't a devil. At first, I thought you were a human when I saw you. You don't feel like a god, even though that curse stinks like one. So... what are you?"

The shadows beneath Angra thumped.

"Beast."

The word remained longer than it should have, but it left a bewildered impression on everyone. Azazel blinked. Sirzechs tilted his head slightly in confusion. Michael raised a brow but didn't understand the weight of the term.

"A Beast? You mean like a monster? You certainly aren't normal, but 'Beast' isn't much of an explanation," Azazel said, clearly unconvinced. "Do you mean that literally or in the abstract? Beast as in an instinctive threat? Beast as in an enemy of reason? Are you some kind of apocalyptic monster?"

Angra's eyes slowly turned toward the Fallen Governor. Then to the others. Slowly, his mouth moved again.

"Evil born from mankind's desire to be saved. That which carries their collective hatred. That which festers under their silence. That which becomes strong when they deny their own nature. We are the terminal point of mankind's contradictions. The embodiment of what they discard to believe in ideals."

He paused to let that sink in. There was no emotion in his tone but the one who preaches a factual report.

"You do not understand. But your histories and myths remember us. We are in your religions. Your cultures gave us names."

Sirzechs frowned. "You're talking nonsense. No one here has ever heard of something like you appearing in the modern era. If you're from a different—"

Dark air warped.

The curse responded to his words like a living archive.

Then learn what we are.

Revelation.

"Cath Palug. Beast IV of Comparison. A Beast born of the fall of Camelot, tied to the death of a king. His fangs marked the end of human salvation through legend. The apex of predation who feeds on your envy and regret, existing to remind humanity that there is always something bigger."

The unexpected statement of Camelot caught them off guard, but it didn't fail to leave an effect on what they heard.

Sona felt her skin chill. Her mind wanted to imagine what kind of Beast would hunt all life as a comparison. Logic failed when there was no tactic against that kind of enemy.

"Kiara Sessyoin. Beast III/R of Lust. The one who receives all love and mocks the paradise you promised. Born from the deepest gratitude of flesh. A heaven without virtue. She opens the hole in the soul and floods it until it forgets what dignity meant. To her followers, pleasure is salvation. To her enemies, it is drowning."

The Angels couldn't prevent their shivers. Something that mocked divine love by copying its structure? The thought of a Heaven warped by lust, yet still calling itself Heaven, made something inside them wilt.

"Kama. Beast III/L of Lust. The Mara of Desire. The other side of the coin. A Beast of Lust and Lapse, born when enlightenment became an excuse to suppress instinct. She does not receive love—she gives it until meaning dies. Love so endless it becomes void. Love so full it strangles. A god of pleasure, reborn as a demon, aiming to collapse the very concept of identity through kindness. Buddhism created her sin."

Michael visibly flinched at the mention. A memory surfaced; ancient, written in lost scripture. Mara. The whisper that had plagued monks and saints during their meditations, now realized in flesh. He struggled to speak, "You're talking about...heretical beings. These...these are not real."

Angra merely looked at him. Apathy amber eyes met dazed green pairs. The former seemed to communicate through the eyes, and Michael could guess what he was trying to convey; "No. They are not real in your scripture because your scripture ended when your God died. But the world kept going. And what kept it going...was humanity."

The last sentence clasped weight, like a chain yanking on every holy heart in the field.

"Tamamo Vitch Koyanskaya. The Nine-Tailed Fox, Tamamo-no-Mae. Beast IV/L of Cherishment. She was born from every animal slaughtered. Every creature tortured, hunted, wiped out. She is their revenge who kills by kindness, gives mercy to beasts, not you. She is the final memory of prey. Shintoism cast her out and let her hate ferment."

Every creature, of all shapes and sizes.

Tortured in cages too small for their souls.

Slaughtered for sport. Skinned, gutted, mounted as trophies.

The Fox whose the root and the flame.

Gabriel could not stop the tear that slid down her face. Her wings trembled. There was something deep inside her that just touched with that description, cherishment as vengeance. Compassion turned outward. Mercy turned into blade.

"U-Olga Marie. Beast VII. The End. The alien god. She does not hate you, she just does not recognize you as worthy to continue. She descended to remake your planet because such flaws disappointed her. You may call that arrogance. I call that divinity."

Azazel's eye twitched. He didn't understand the full implications of a Beast that wasn't even from Earth, but he figured out the structure of the world they'd been fighting to protect had just been labeled a failure. That made his stomach wrench.

"Tiamat. Beast II of Regression. The Mother of Life. A Beast of rejection, your womb abandoned by her own children. The primordial goddess you buried under Babylon, under Sumer, under every new myth that tried to forget her. She only wanted her children back. Mesopotamia's primordial sin, a love rejected by the world."

Each name echoed through the cursed air like a mockery of time and belief.

The implication that the first mother still mourned, still walked, still remembered being slain, and no one wanted to speak.

But none of them…

... None of them carry the same weight as the next.

Because the real blow came following.

His eyes rested on the Three particularly. His voice, while still flat, had the edge of contempt in it now.

"....."

"Draco. The Whore of Babylon. Beast VI of Depravity. A Beast whose number was 666. She comes when the world is too arrogant. She walks only to ruin cities that have reached their highest sin. The one who destroyed Babylon. New Testament prophecy turned into an eternal sin."

Michael stumbled back.

That name. The Whore of Babylon. A creature prophesied. The connection hit him like divine lightning.

The Book of Revelation had spoken of her, wearing religion like skin and mocked it from the inside.

Is it possible that Trihexa could've—!?

Rias placed a hand to her chest, breath trembling, not understanding why her body feared this name more than the heat around her.

"....."

"Goetia."

THUMP-THUMP

THUMP-THUMP

THUMP-THUMP

Just that name alone.

The mere mention of the name resulted in every Pure-Blooded Devils to froze in stunned silence. Their blood boiled and their heart beat too fast out of nowhere.

Just the name alone gave them the instinct of deep reverence that they couldn't understand.

Yes.

After all, Beast I possessed an almightiness that willed the entire logic of the universe to obey him. A feeling of intimidation that comes across as hatred to all.

"Beast I of Pity. The Demon God King. One born from the Seventy-Two Pillars of your own devilkind. He is the will of Solomon's shadow given divine hatred. He mourned humanity and attempted to incinerate it for the sole reason of compassion, all because death was mercy. The King of 72 Pillar, born from Solomon's shadow. Your existence was his burden to why he burned time itself."

Grayfia and Serafall stepped back half a step.

Sirzechs whispered, "The Ars Goetia…" His eyes widened. "The 72 Demon Kings' sole King...?"

It was inconceivable.

Angra stared at the Maou's eyes.

"You revere the names of his spawn. Your symbols of demonic power are his legacy, worship what he left behind."

Do you still believe you rule Hell, New Satans?

Michael's eyes widened ever so slightly. Azazel's mouth parted.

Angra pointed at his chest.

"—I am Angra Mainyu. Beast VI/R of Retribution. I carry all the sins of man. Every curse you hid under faith, every atrocity you buried with scripture, every child you killed in the name of progress. I am your world's return letter. All the World's Evil."

Throughout all, everyone recognized the names. Maybe not all, but certainly some. More than that, they very much understood the insult. The mockery of every religious origin they represented. These weren't just invocations. They were reminders that their faiths, their histories, their systems all created their own destruction.

From somewhere in the crowd, someone vomited.

"We are what you pretended did not exist."

The air got colder. The curse spread again, like a tide ignoring the protests of those who stand against it.

The silence from the leaders dragged on as each processed the implications.

No one dared to breathe any longer. How could they?

Angra's arms dropped to his side.

"Tell me, what will your precious Trinity do now that their Revelations were always wrong?"

Every winged figure above, every soldier of Heaven, Underworld, and those who had once Fallen, stared at the darkened earth below mutely.

What had once been a proud symbol of diplomatic hope between the Three Factions was now crumbling under the consequence of a revelation too heavy for myth, history, or theology to bear.

Names should not have coexisted in any singular narrative and yet were spoken with absolute certainty, almost like the truth had simply made itself present.

Michael had not moved a single muscle. The golden light of his wings dimmed slightly out of deep-seated confusion.

He claimed to be a Beast... Beast VI/R. That name... Angra Mainyu... the original evil? The Zoroastrian adversary of Ahura Mazda? If it's true, then the theology of Persia was right all along?

If Angra Mainyu truly embodied what he claimed, then how had Father not warned them? How had not a single prophecy, not even the absurd ones spouted by those wild-eyed psychics on Earth, ever mentioned that the roots of evil would become flesh and move among men?

Sirzechs looked toward the other leaders, especially Michael, seeking a shared confirmation that none would give.

This is wrong. To Rias, he simply looks human, and that this must be a misunderstanding, or a lie trying to get into their heads. Someone has to say something...

But no one did.

So Angra continued.

Slowly, his body continued to descend into the moving ink beneath him, legs dissolving into blackness.

"You all heard the True Names. Your silence proves you recognize them."

"Some of you wish it is but a bluff. You hope you'll wake up, and everything will make sense again. I'm just another threat to prepare countermeasures against. But you understand I'm not lying. Your faiths are cracking."

Sirzechs wanted to interrupt. Something. Anything. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.

"You were never prepared for us. None of you."

Azazel's teeth clenched. That line struck too close.

With no one to speak, Angra continued.

"So allow me one last warning, for free." His head turned slightly, gaze settling on each of the Three Faction leaders. "There are traitors among you."

A tremor moved across the crowd. That simple phrase was enough to dislodge the frozen thoughts of every commander and general watching into paranoia.

"What do you mean by that?" Michael regains the courage to engage.

"Exactly what you heard," Angra answered coldly. "The intentions are already forming. Some of your most trusted are preparing to tip the scales. I don't need their names."

He could smell it.

Then Angra turned, almost casually, looking upward past the Leaders, toward a building that had been half-cracked by an earlier assault.

—until he locked eyes with Vali.

"Sin leaves behind the taste of spoiled iron."

Vali's expression is a storm trying to decide if it should explode or remain cold.

"You."

Spoken clearly, and casually. It caught everyone. Issei's eyes widened in confusion. Kiba tensed. Rias froze.

The gathered soldiers shouted in alarm. Azazel's body jerked forward as if he had been shot.

Vali did not flinch. Though, his heart was screaming.

Azazel immediately turned his head. "Vali?"

Angra did not look away from the white-haired youth perched atop the building.

"Simply because you wear the blood of Lucifer does not guarantee that I wouldn't notice. I am All the World's Evil. Every sin ever committed by humans flows into me. I feel it. I drink it, that includes the intention to betray. That flicker of ambition you believe you've hidden beneath that smug arrogance."

More gasps were heard as Angra boldly divulged Vali's true heritage.

Azazel's eyes narrowed immediately. "What did you just say?" The tone was restrained, but the undercurrent was pure alarm.

Michael's expression was unreadable.

"Plotting when it would be best to use the Khaos Brigade to leverage power. You're not loyal to your leaders. Your desire to defeat and battle powerful others was always just one layer of it."

Vali's eyes widened for a brief moment. Enough. He couldn't lie. That was the truth.

Issei turned, wide-eyed. "Vali... you—?"

"Did you tell them about what you saw in Kuoh a few nights ago?"

A dead silence fell.

"That it was Draco and I who ended Kokabiel? The footage spread, but the humans only saw shadows. You saw us clearly. You could have stopped the panic."

The ground beneath them stopped moving. Everyone's mouth opened in stunned confusion.

They ALL heard the reports. There was human drone footage showing blurred war, showing something massive in the skies and the disappearance of Kokabiel. The buildings had been melted and twisted.

Sirzechs closed his eyes for a second. He didn't want to believe it. But too many signs lined up. Kokabiel died in terror.

"So?" Angra asked plainly. "You didn't tell them. Curious. I wonder why."

Vali clenched his jaw. "You talk too much."

That was enough.

White-blue light burst from Vali's body as his wings of silver erupted behind him, armor forming instantly. His Balance Breaker manifested, the Scale Mail shimmering with divine-draconic energy.

"Balance Breaker!"

He dove.

There was no delay. The moment his transformation was completed, he was already moving, his body vanishing into an arc of light as he launched himself with the speed and power of a tactical missile. Vali attacked with full force. His entire body became a high-speed projectile aimed directly at Angra's head. He wasn't going to play games. He was going for the kill in the first ten seconds.

The black ink surged beneath him, then stretched upward like a hand, or a mass of fangs.

The moment Vali reached him, the ink lashed out as if the space around Angra itself turned hostile.

A column of liquid darkness; black, moving, thick with writhing curse marks, erupted upward like a geyser.

Vali saw it and twisted his trajectory upward with a burst from his wings. The liquid barely grazed him, but the cursed fluid reacted on contact.

Where it touched the outer shell of his gauntlet, it began to bubble and hiss. The armor's defensive mechanisms lit up like fire alarms. His flying balance almost faltered.

"What the hell is this thing!?" Vali barked mid-air, pulling away and examining his arm.

A sickening hiss from corrosion.

"Divide!" he shouted, as his Sacred Gear activated. The blackness began to pull from Angra's energy, but something was wrong.

The ink absorbed the division energy, and then sent it back, overloading the energy gain. Vali's wings stuttered for a second. Pain shot through his back.

The shadow latched onto his leg.

Every nerve in his body screamed.

"This is curse. This is agony. This is how humanity felt in every genocide. Every famine. Every rape. Every massacre. Your flesh is tasting what everyone did for centuries. The more you struggle against my curse, the more it will mark you."

Space itself around the perimeter warped slightly, like light couldn't fully escape. Anyone looking too long at it felt their minds begin to throb, as if something just under the surface of that shadow was watching them back.

Angra slowly raised his head to look at him again.

"The one who holds a Dragon's soul... Yet flinches from what lies beneath."

Vali screamed as his leg erupted in burning agony. Images flashed into his mind.

Corpses, war, betrayal, hatred.

Billions. All at once.

"Vali, get out!"

Albion's voice shouted with panic.

The next movement was sudden. A blast of white energy, Michael's light magic, slammed into the cursed ink just near Vali's trapped leg, attempting to force a brief opening.

His armor was crumbling around as the ankle turned to ash.

He was shaking. Vali's eyes burned red with fury and power. He slashed his hand through the shadow. "Don't get full of yourself!"

His entire armor flared. The excess power he had stored burst outward in a wave, vaporizing the tip of the ink. He pulled free and launched a barrage of power orbs toward Angra in midair. Each compressed with destructive force enough to level a mountain peak.

Shadow surged upward and swallowed every orb before they detonated.

Vali didn't stop. He zipped through the sky, using his wings to fly in bursts, appearing behind Angra with another blast ready, aimed at the back of his neck.

The moment it connected, the impact did not throw Angra forward. Instead, Vali was repelled, crashing into the nearby building, embedding himself in concrete.

The shadow followed.

Azazel finally moved. "Enough!"

Holy spears formed in the air. Sirzechs too was already channeling his Power of Destruction.. The Three Faction Leaders prepared to intervene—

"Half Dimension."

Without warning, the space around Angra shrank violently. Buildings creaked and warped around the edges. The ground beneath Angra's feet began to contract, and the sky above him distorted like a lens snapping tight. Several people nearby yelped and scrambled away as the space-contorting force began swallowing the perimeter.

Angra didn't react again.

Vali's eyes narrowed.

This bastard isn't even trying to move. He's just standing there like the entire war doesn't matter. That damn thing should be shrinking right now.

He followed with another activation, his wings flaring out once more.

"Divide!"

A cold surge ran through Vali's body. His target's power should have been cleaved, halved, and fed into his own system. Ten seconds passed.

He activated again. Divide again. Power was flowing into him. Yes, he was absorbing something. Albion was reacting properly. Angra's energy was being halved and fed into his own body. The process was happening.

But despite this, something was still wrong.

Vali's mind picked it up almost immediately.

It is not as if the guy isn't being weakened. Vali is getting stronger, but it's like pulling buckets of water from a sea that never empties. No matter how much he takes, the pressure doesn't change.

The surface of the concrete hissed and cracked like acid was eating through it, even though no liquid was visible. The ink-colored curse writhed beneath his feet, a living, thick stain that spread outward.

Vali accelerated and swung a heavy magic-boosted kick, his entire leg covered in dense demonic power. His foot was about to collide with Angra's torso, ready to press the advantage. He had to keep dividing. He had to keep pressing. Overwhelm him. Beat him before the others got involved.

Vali didn't want help.

But the moment he raised his hand to fire another condensed shot of compressed magic, something exploded in his senses.

Blue heat. Real heat.

Before he could fully register the shift in the atmosphere, a sudden shriek of burning power incinerated the space between him and Angra. Vali's Divide stopped working.

Inside his head, Albion groaned, pained.

"Something… something is eating through the core functions. The armor is destabilizing. I'm taking… external damage."

Vali looked down. The silver armor of his Balance Breaker was glowing white-hot at the joints. His gloves cracked. Magic aura peeled off from his body in waves. His vision flared red from heat and pressure rising past human thresholds. Divide was no longer functioning.

It had been burned away.

Everyone looked up.

Hovering in the air, one leg bent lazily at the knee, was a woman.

She was practically glowing. Her body gleamed under the setting sun, both otherworldly and distractingly real. Delicately proportioned and dynamic body, she has long legs, a narrow waist, and fine limbs. Silvery-white hair with a faint lavender hue, trailing behind like suspended fabric in water, with a red ribbon tied to her left hair. Flowing from her deep violet long sleeve are ribbon-like extensions, trailing diamond-edge shapes.

The bodysuit she wore left almost nothing to the imagination, every curve of her body outlined in pink-violet and gold. Petal-shaped armor framed her chest and E-cup bust, revealing her stomach and navel beneath a translucent weave. The lower half of her bodysuit has an extremely high-cut design, leaving much of her hips exposed and extending upward in a 'V' shape.

Her crimson eyes, filled with almost no emotions, stared downward with total disinterest.

"There you are. I told you not to run off without telling me. Honestly, do you know how hard it is to trace a walking trauma stain in a supernatural-crowded city?"

Every male Devil and Fallen Angel in the area immediately froze. Half of them had turned completely red. The perverted energy from the male factions swelled embarrassingly.

"Boobs! Thighs! Thigh-highs! Holy crap, that's hotter than Rias! Akeno! You're seeing this too, right?! I'm not hallucinating, right?!"

Someone shouted.

Angra quirked an eyebrow.

Azazel and Asia buried their faces in their hands.

Sirzechs remained silent, but even he flinched slightly as her gaze swept past him.

The woman levitated gracefully closer to Angra, her sandals not landing on the half-dissolved pavement.

Angra didn't bother to look at the Three Factions, ignoring the entire confrontation.

"I've done what I came to do. The truth has been forced open. Our nature is now in the open. The world knows now."

The woman smiled, amusement curling in her lips. Her voice was sultry but airy, mocking yet tender.

"Aww, my dear little sin finally came out of his hole and made an announcement to the world. Uwawa. I'm proud of you. This was much more dramatic than your usual brooding speeches."

Angra didn't comment on that.

"Kama. You've come to fetch me?"

"You didn't answer your psychic link. I got worried. Thought maybe you got a little bit distracted with your drama. It's hard to tell with this place."

Azazel muttered under his breath, eyes narrowing.

"…Did he say Kama?"

Beast III/L.

Inhales erupted. Half the battlefield recoiled. Gabriel clutched her robes. Michael's expression darkened. The word "Beast" had already become a title of dread in the last seven minutes. Now there was another.

Sirzechs stared at her.

The presence she exuded wasn't like Angra's creeping infection. It feels something similar to ownership. In such a way that everything around her belonged to her by default. As if the world had been her possession for so long that acknowledging anything else was incorrect.

Vali dropped out of the air, breathing heavily. His armor flickered, pieces of it burned through. Albion was still silent.

Angra turned to Kama.

"What of the others?"

Kama twirled a floral arrow between her fingers.

"Oh, went back home. Fou ostensibly chased after a squirrel. They're fine. This world isn't ready yet, but they're doing prep work. You really had to go first, though. You love the attention."

"That was a declaration."

"Same thing when you're you. Now wrap it up. You're bleeding existential dread into the air again, and that one over there looks like he's about to melt."

She pointed at a young devil in the back, who was convulsing in a pool of shadow, trying not to scream, consumed in seconds.

Angra turned one last time, now directly at Sirzechs, Michael, and Azazel.

"You've seen what you've labeled as Beast. That's just one. I suggest you start preparing. Because this isn't a war you can win with politics. The ones that come after me aren't patient. I was the kind one."

With that, the shadow beneath his feet rose up, and it swallowed him, leaving a vacuum in his absence.

Kama sighed, looked around, waved at the flinching soldiers, winked at Vali, and spread her arms wide.

"Ta-ta, Three Factions. We'll chat again soon. Don't bother trying to trace me. Your protections are... charming."

She burned away in a blaze of pure blue, leaving no heat, except a faint floral scent that lingered in the air like spite.

Everyone was abandoned in speechlessness.

No one to say anything.

..... and somewhere, behind a building, Bikou was gasping for breath after being chased in adrenaline by one of Angra's shadows who had spotted the monkey.

Chapter 18: Beast Faction

The sky had returned to its usual blue, but not one of the onlookers, whether soldier, commander, or Faction Leader, felt any return to normalcy.

Rubble and burnt marks remained untouched, only partially cleared by the Fallen Angels who had volunteered to assist the cleanup effort. Most of the injured had been evacuated, and the sound of angelic healing chants mixed with low muttering was the only ambiance left. There was no cheer or optimism in anyone's expression. Everyone felt the despair, the sheer untouchability of what they had just witnessed.

The Peace Conference was finished, not with the dignified discussions or cordial diplomacy that everyone had hoped for, but with something completely outside their expectations. The Khaos Brigade was no longer just a common enemy.

These Beasts are now the center of a different kind of war, one that they neither declared out of necessity nor explained with doctrine, but simply presented with horrifying certitude.

New variables—

—of a new Faction.

Michael of Heaven did not speak for hours. The leader of the Seraphim had, for the first time since the death of the God of the Bible, remained entirely silent even as others awaited his word. Gabriel too stood near him, her expression unreadable, although her clenched fingers gave away the turmoil beneath her serenity.

Azazel, quietly, suggested that it was time to make the conclusion official. No political angle remained that could be played, implying, it was no longer a possibility of postponing the Peace Treaty. The Beasts had not just shown themselves to them, but had further shown everyone that the conflicts between Heaven, Grigori, and the Devils were meaningless in the face of what had now been uncovered.

So, in a private room hastily reorganized from the half-destroyed auditorium of Kuoh Academy, the three leaders signed it. The document that would come to be called the Kuoh Treaty.

Everyone could see that Michael's eyes were full of heavy thought even when his hand didn't tremble as he signed. Azazel made a sarcastic comment as he placed his signature, something about how all this might have gone smoother if the Beasts had simply RSVP'd in advance. No one laughed. Sirzechs added his name last, silently. He didn't show it outwardly, but inside his thoughts spiraled with dark clarity.

Even before the ink dried, a separate situation had broken out. Vali Lucifer, who had gone into a crazed assault against Beast VI/R and was only stopped when Kama's blue fire disrupted Divine Dividing itself, had been injured but not dead.

Immediately following the disappearance of the two Beasts, the Three Factions tried to arrest him. He was, after all, a terrorist by association, and had rebelled against his own Devil heritage. But his allies from the Khaos Brigade weren't all gone. The descendant of the Great Sage Sun Wukong, Bikou, arrived, teleporting directly into the battlefield, cracking open a spatial rift, and before the Faction forces could react, Vali was already through it, his heavily damaged armor shattering as he fell unconscious mid-flight. The spell took them out of Kuoh's airspace in under two seconds. No trace remained.

None of the Three Factions sent pursuit. Not even Azazel. It wasn't just tactical hesitation. They were all thinking the same thing. Vali might be problematic, but he wasn't the problem anymore. The real crisis had already declared its name and shown its face.

In the ruins of one of Kuoh's school buildings, a separate discovery was made. Several of Azazel's agents had detected a divine aura, strange and slightly muted, like it had been forcefully sealed. Upon breaching the barrier, they found a captivate, bound with a binding curse and heavily weakened, Inari Ōkami, a high-ranking goddess of the Shinto Pantheon. She was confused at first, assuming the Khaos Brigade was still active around her, but when brought before the Faction Leaders, she explained.

She told them that the Shinto Gods had personally confronted the presumed energies following the attack on Kokabiel's to a house and had been overpowered—no, utterly humiliated—by the Beasts. Inari admitted she was the only one who was dragged back while her fellow gods were left in an alternate dimension. She was spared, apparently by Kama, because she was not seen as worth the attention to destroy.

The very idea that Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and Susanoo had been defeated so easily nearly caused panic among some of the Devil and Angel generals.

Inari didn't ask for shelter, nor forgiveness. She simply asked to be released so she could return to Takamagahara. She promised to deliver a formal invitation to open diplomatic dialogue between the Shinto Pantheon and the Three Biblical Factions. The formal diplomacy was the first time any of the Shinto gods had offered something like that since the old era. It was a gesture that Michael approved of immediately, and Sirzechs nodded in response. They couldn't afford to refuse cooperation now with the world in question.

Inari returned to Takamagahara without delay. She had stayed only long enough to ensure the other three Kami were extracted from the alternate space where they had been left behind.

After she left and recovered her fellow Kami, attention shifted back to the Beasts. Their names, their titles, and their powers had to be cataloged. Uriel led the Angel side of the investigation. Michael and Gabriel had already authorized the deployment of all available scriptural records and holy repositories. The Vatican was contacted through high-speed divine channels. Uriel himself took the first cell of Heaven's archive-watchers and assigned them individually across all Holy relic divisions.

The Beasts were older than any single Faith. If they were not mentioned in canon scripture, then they might exist in discarded texts, apocryphal references, or heretical footnotes. Anything usable had to be found.

Yet, Michael forbade the others on the one called Draco, the Beast VI, stating he looked into her himself.

On the side of the Devils, Sirzechs ordered Serafall to initiate a full review of all the magical archives in the Underworld. Not just the public repositories, but the locked vaults, the forbidden ruins, the hidden temples of the Old Devil Houses. Their target: a single name.

"Goetia."

Sirzechs didn't say it out loud at first, but Serafall understood. A single being who could be mistaken as the progenitor of the 72 Pillars, one who might claim mastery over them all, who may have existed during or even before the Four Great Satans took their thrones. It was already important enough to change everything.

Grigori wasn't idle either. Azazel personally called Shemhazai, who was leading an investigation team in the field. When Shemhazai reported that all scans and metaphysical readings confirmed the presences of Angra Mainyu and Kama as real entities, not illusions, or dimensional projections, Azazel finally stopped pretending to joke about the situation. Shemhazai's tone had been calm, but there was no confidence in it.

The report was filed with a final note: the structure of the world, its theology, and its logic, had already started to change course. Wherever the Beasts went, they left behind altered territory. Not just magic residue, but conceptual stains. Locations touched by Angra's shadow curse were no longer readable by any Divine or Demonic magic.

Besides that, another startling discovery was found.

Everything that happened recently at Kuoh; the entire invasion of the Khaos Brigade to the Peace Conference and to the interruption of Beast VI/R, had somehow leaked.

No one knew exactly how the leak happened. Maybe the Norse were eavesdropping with something concealed in one of their own agents or lesser spirits, or maybe one of the curious lesser gods in the Japanese Pantheon whispered to another beyond the borders of Takamagahara. No one could say for sure, and frankly, none of the Three Biblical Factions had time or energy to figure it out. The information had escaped them, traveled faster than they expected, first to the Norse, who were always too curious and too meddlesome, then somehow over to the Hindu and the Egyptians through inter-pantheon informants who had too many eyes and ears planted in too many places, and by the time Heaven tried to issue a containment protocol through their sacred channels, it was too late.

The Supernatural World had heard it. All of it. Every last word Angra Mainyu said was now debated, reinterpreted, and replayed within high courts and divine assemblies across mythologies that hadn't spoken to one another in decades.

For the first time in thousands of years, there were overlapping divine meetings. Shinto was silent. Norse was divided. Hindu was offended. Egyptian was preparing for something. The Greeks were amused, which wasn't new, but this time the amusement was underlined by a tension they didn't admit outright.

Those who claimed enlightenment or balance refused to believe in the implications of what Angra had said, or pretended the information was merely a metaphor or distortion from a corrupted Biblical source, but their methods of eavesdropping, the full sensory echoes from the site of the Peace Conference, and the exact spiritual weight of the presences involved, all measured by gods and seers alike, pointed to the same thing. These beings were real.

There was a stretch of time when it seemed the world went quiet again. For exactly eleven hours. That silence was a hesitation where every major supernatural leadership hesitated in how they would respond because the very foundation of their divine structures didn't have a protocol for what had just been declared. Not just a war against the Khaos Brigade. A declaration from something calling itself the Embodiment of All Evil that it would tear the existing order down because the concept of salvation had been rendered irrelevant.

It was absurd on paper, but no one was laughing except the arrogant. The Greco-Roman factions responded with nothing but sardonic jokes in their first roundtable, with Ares claiming that any Beast calling itself a "King" of anything would be struck down by a god with a proper spear. Dionysus raised a cup anyway. Apollon privately instructed his Oracle to begin calculating omens from sunspot behavior. 

Zeus was offended. He called a meeting on Mount Olympus and demanded to know why no one had predicted the existence of these so-called Beasts. Athena asked the same question but framed it as a strategic concern rather than an ego wound. Of course, none of them actually acted. The Greeks talked and argued and talked some more. The Romans, who had long since merged most of their belief infrastructure with the Greeks, mostly took cues from Jupiter, who scoffed at the idea that some "arrogant humanoid beast" could match their thunder.

The Hindu deities were much louder, but most of it was either denial or indignant pride. Indra didn't bother appearing, but word had it that the gods closest to him were told to "laugh at this childish fearmongering." Some suspected Vishnu knew more than he admitted, because while his avatars remained still and silent in prayer rooms, not a single one of them had been seen moving for the last two days.

The Hindu Pantheon also dispatched Narada and Agni to investigate, despite protests from the more isolationist deities. Yet even then, it was never about concern. The Devas believed themselves untouchable, and even when the news of Amaterasu's defeat began circulating in underground networks, they dismissed the idea that a being who could crush a sun goddess could pose a threat to them. Pride wasn't just a flaw. It was a mantle they bore out of tradition. A few younger Asuras expressed doubts, but their voices were drowned out in mockery, especially from Indra, who laughed at the idea of a Beast having "transcendental potential." His words. Transcendental. Yet they kept adding more guards around their dimensional access points.

They held their own internal session behind closed doors. Some of the lesser devas began talking, and words reached the Three Factions that Brahma had broken a decade-long silence with only one sentence: "He has returned as a she?" Nobody understood the meaning. Not even the Hindu scholars serving under human institutions. But the way Shiva reportedly left the meeting without comment sent tremors to the rest of the factions.

On the other hand, three human satellites suddenly went offline. Specifically vaporized. The UN Space Surveillance Network said it was "probably a solar anomaly." But then a leaked human drone footage began to circulate in some of the darker channels of the black web, and for a few hours, even the smarter humans who worked in the margins of the supernatural communities began panicking. In the footage, there was a white-haired woman, no more than twenty by appearance, watching the camera. She raised one finger, and the screen turned to static.

Back on the side of the devils, research on the being called Goetia started drawing problematic results. Multiple forbidden tomes that had been sealed since the Age of the Old Satans had mentions of a "King of the Ars Goetia." It was never clear whether it was a position or an individual, but the older texts used the term with definitive syntax. Not "a king," but "The King." Cross-referencing with texts from the remaining Old Families showed at least a dozen contradictions, but all of them agreed on two details. One, that such a being was never loyal to the Four Satans. And two, that it was never part of the Underworld. That alone made it a political threat to every House still functioning under the new order. Sirzechs didn't say it aloud, but some of his aides started locking older devil libraries with additional enchantments to prevent certain books from being stolen.

Meanwhile, the Khaos Brigade was fracturing internally.

The Hero Faction had become erratic. The disappearance of a member descended from Marsilio became a center of debate. It wasn't just that he disappeared. It was that his Sacred Gear was forcibly removed. That was unheard of. Sacred Gears don't get extracted unless the soul is destroyed.

Further reports from some infiltrators said that morale inside the Hero Faction was dropping. They still used the word "hero" in their insignias and communiques, but more and more members were showing signs of internal doubt, ideological confusion, and even suppressed fear. It became clearer after someone intercepted a conversation where a high-ranking member admitted they had "seen something during the Peace Summit that didn't make sense to them anymore."

Ophis had not been seen since then either. Her usual movements, often trackable in dimensional traces or through the reports of her followers, had gone completely silent. Which was strange. Ophis didn't hide. She didn't care to. Her presence alone warped space enough that anyone with the right detection sigils could feel it. But now, even that has stopped. Like she had simply exited the board.

That silence from Ophis worried Cao Cao more than the Beasts themselves. Because if the Ouroboros Dragon had vanished of her own will, then something had changed in the cosmic hierarchy that none of them were prepared for. That kind of silence usually only came right before an extinction-level event.

What made it worse was that the humans were beginning to notice. Not the mundane ones, but the ones buried in institutions, agencies, in the last fragments of organizations that are aware of supernatural events from a distance. They weren't going public yet, but their whispers had begun circulating in coded forums. Such as that their patterns didn't line up. Surveillance satellites were showing strange gravitational abnormalities. Artificial intelligence models used in weather prediction were starting to output impossible variables when Kuoh was input as a location node. One algorithm had to be shut down because it kept defaulting to an apocalyptic event within 36 days unless forcibly corrected.

The leaders of the Three Factions knew it was only a matter of time before the humans would have to be addressed. But that wasn't their most urgent concern. Their most urgent concern was that everything they had built since the Great War was about to be tested by new gods or demonic uprisings, entities who called themselves Beasts.

The Babylonian Pantheon, unlike others, didn't react with pride. There had been no full reunification of their hierarchy for centuries since the divergence into Akkadian and Neo-Babylonian schools. They responded with denial. Their priest-kings, descended from the lasts of the ancient Sumerian traditions, summoned their remaining avatars and stared into the old records. Tiamat's name was a curse to them, not a legacy. She wasn't just a mother. She was a primordial chaos slain by Marduk in the first war, her blood turned into rivers, her corpse the foundations of the earth. To hear her status, alive, maternal, and more terrifying than anything they had remembered from their own records, destabilized their sense of victory. If she could return, what did that say about the war that birthed the cosmos? If she had always been waiting, then the Sumerian victory had never been complete. They couldn't accept it. They didn't want to. Some gods demanded action to refute it, others went silent. One even destroyed his own astral statue when a Babylonian historian pointed out a chilling resemblance between the creature's chanting voice and an old Mesopotamian lullaby meant to invoke Tiamat's peace before storms.

The Zoroastrian Pantheon didn't hesitate to react directly. The moment they confirmed the entity calling itself Angra Mainyu appeared in Kuoh, their fire temples went into lockdown. They interpreted this not as a coincidence but a direct insult. They denied any recognition of the being that claimed the name Angra Mainyu. Their statement was immediate and assertive. "The Destructive Spirit cannot be this," they insisted, even including a ceremonial rejection rite recorded by several high priests, performed in their temple as if a symbolic exile would affect a creature that should not even be able to exist outside their theological framework.

Their true Angra Mainyu had long disappeared. So the appearance of a being using that name, mimicking that essence, was sacrilegious. To them, he was a usurper, an imposter. The high-ranking Magi of Yazata issued a joint condemnation of the incident, labeling it a "mystical falsification act." One priest reportedly tried to contact the original Angra Mainyu through ancient soul-finding rituals, only to suffer a complete mental collapse. What disturbed them most was not that the Beast could mimic Angra's presence, but that no one could disprove it. There was no evidence it wasn't the real one.

That's when the true contradiction started spreading within their own Pantheon. The elder Yazatas claimed the being was an imposter, yet a younger branch of scholars and a few divine agents who operated across dimensions pointed to old verses in the Avesta that were never taken literally before. They argued that the real Angra Mainyu was always meant to be an abstract, metaphysical evil, and the entity now bearing that name had not stolen it, but was a modern reflection born of humanity's corruption and despair since the Fall. There was even a recorded internal clash when an acolyte of Asha Vahishta openly asked the High Fire-Priest whether divinity was truly immune to mortal interpretation, or whether mortals had finally created their own Beast.

The Shinto Pantheon had its own crisis, though theirs was less centralized. When the revelation of Tamamo Vitch Koyanskaya was traced, the Five Principal Clans realized a disturbing repudiation. They confirmed the seal of Tamamo-no-Mae remained untouched in the Uji Treasure House.

No tampering, weakening, or an energy flux, except still sealed. Every senior priestess under Inari's jurisdiction activated their inherited records on Daiyoukai-class threats. There weren't supposed to be two. The kitsune delegation was paralyzed in their response. Official statements never came. Even the Onmyou Bureau was forced to rewrite some of their seal theories, but no one dared to suggest opening the vault to check on the original. They didn't want to know what they might find.

The West Youkai Faction had a reaction so embarrassingly mundane that it would have been funny had the situation not been horrifying for the rest of the world. They heard of the Beast revelations mostly through Yasaka's involvement. Her reaction was uncharacteristically blank. After seeing footage of the black-haired boy transforming into a barbarian-looking shirtless being, murmuring things about sin and humanity with terrifying apathy while the earth itself trembled under his presence, she made a sound. According to eyewitness reports, it was just "Oh." A full-bodied, feminine "Oh," spoken with a hand placed over her lips and a visible flush across her ears. She had no statements for three days, after she dismissed the council meeting. After those three days, she began requesting archived behavioral documents regarding "Persian deities," "evil gods," and "sacrificial contracts," which deeply alarmed her court scribes. Her subordinates didn't question it. But later that week, her daughter Kunou was heard innocently asking in passing why her mother had been panting behind a sliding door late at night and called it "weird breathing". It raised more eyebrows than it should have. One of the elderly kitsune sighed and muttered something about "early mating signs," then reminded everyone it was late November and that the fox cycles were expected to begin by mid-January. Her case, they concluded, at first, was a chemical response to a public displayed power, and in second, the senior kitsune now had to account for the very real possibility that their leader was undergoing a hormonal spiral and had fixated on a psychopathic demi-entity whose idea of flirting might involve genocide...... Or at least, that's what they told themselves.

Elsewhere, in the dark territories of Romania, an entirely different chaos was spiraling.

The Vampire Civil War had always been divided, their civil war rooted in ideology and gender dominance between the Carmilla and Tepes factions, dragging for over a century. Most outside factions had long stopped paying attention. That changed overnight. A figure appeared without warning, toppled both factional rulers in under an hour, and declared the war finished. No one dared resist. The new figure demanded obedience and forced immediate reforms. Vampires began referring to him in private as the "Spider-Slaying Bat", a title that didn't exist in any myth but began gaining spiritual traction. Temples were constructed, symbols were drawn, and even high-level Daywalkers began showing behavioral shifts, almost like they were mentally marked. The strangest part was no one knew his origin. He spoke little, and did much. No vampire disobeyed him. Not even the elders who once answered only to the progenitors.

Furthermore, there were strange rumors that began in the Underworld, around the border zones where surveillance was weakest. Some claimed to have seen moving masses of flesh, vaguely cephalopodic but not natural, with round rings along their limbs where one would expect suckers. But instead of suckers, there were eyes, blinking, moving eyes. All facing different directions. Some of the masses were tall enough to graze the cloudscape ceiling of the Underworld. Their bodies were a mix of colors, none of them pleasant. The reports were too scattered to verify. Some were even dismissed as hallucinations. But the pattern had begun. Something had been left behind or brought along by the Beasts that were now infesting the deep corners of supernatural geography.

At this point, no one had made a formal declaration. Despite that, every organization, every pantheon, every political body, whether spoken or unspoken, had already started to shift their internal archives and categorize the Beasts together.

They were not treated as individuals anymore, but as a singular force.

The "Beasts of Humanity" that were or were not born from myth or bound by history. So a term was used for these new variables.

The Beast Faction.

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Screams and reinforced barriers collapsing in on themselves became the only sounds that held together the final moments of the Nilrem base that was hidden far beneath the foothills of an unnamed region somewhere near Japan, where even the stars outside remained absent from the night above, blocked by layers of geomagical concealments now torn apart. The ceiling cracked in clean, straight incisions, metal and earth peeling back as if carved open from the inside by surgical firepower in mere seconds.

This was supposed to be one of their most secure facilities, warded beyond measure, bolstered with contingency spells, dead-man switches, relocation anchors, and yet it had not lasted even an hour. Those who survived the initial incursion were not running toward salvation. They were flailing without direction. Others crawled through rubble, bloodied, dazed, shouting incomplete words that turned into meaningless noise in their mouths, their minds still unable to process what happened.

One of the surviving lead mages attempted to flee down the hall after grabbing a scroll case embedded in one of the fallback vaults, only to be sent soaring into the ceiling and then slammed into a pillar that cracked under the weight of his body, before being allowed to crumple uselessly on the floor. The sound was followed by a low breath through clenched teeth and a voice.

"So they figured out who we are already. That didn't take long," Draco stated, her left arm still raised in the aftermath of the throw, with displeasure that was tired disdain. Her heels cracked the floor beneath as she ignored the dying mage sputtering at her feet.

"Was it worth it? Announcing us like that? Or is that Avenged just incapable of thinking about consequences unless someone jams them into his face?" she added, her tone dropping in volume but increasing in underweight. Not a yell, but it felt like something heavier than a scream.

Kama gave a half-hearted clap to the accusation which amused her. She was seated on the partially destroyed remains of a broken containment chamber, fidgeting with a small flame that danced between her fingers, clearly not caring about the war crimes they had just committed.

"I think you're overreacting just a little. You know how Angra is. That's part of his charm, no?" she said lightly, smiling and entirely absorbed in her performance. "Besides, we were bound to be found out. Did you really think we'd keep playing in the shadows forever? I thought you of all people would know better than to think that keeping your head down keeps it attached."

From across the debris-strewn warzone, Tiamat had her arms crossed in front of her, standing beside what used to be the command center's western control altar, shattered to the point it looked like an earthquake had erupted from beneath it.

"Kama is being flippant. But Draco is right, it was reckless and brought too much attention. Now every faction will stop ignoring us. There's no undoing that."

Behind her, a small white blur suddenly dropkicks with one of the last surviving Nilrem mages who tried to sneak away from the destruction behind a pile of burning debris. The figure was promptly flipped backward, landing face-first into the ground, limbs twitching. He stood over the body, chest puffed up proudly.

"Fou."

Kama chuckled again and swung her legs, not hiding her delight at the pitiful scene around her.

U-Olga stormed into the corridor from the upper access route. Her clothes were immaculate despite the soot in the air, and the bag she carried was sealed with a binding crest that didn't look like it came from this age. She looked around briefly and then held the bag in the air.

"I've gathered every viable fragment of intelligence stored here. Multiple facilities across every continent. Secondary cores, sleeper agents, even their internal finances. This place was a major communications relay. We crippled them far more than they realize yet."

Then, her eyes constricted slightly when she produced a handful of currency bundles from within the same satchel. It was mostly for dramatic effect, because she did not need money, and she didn't want it. She just wanted to draw attention to the fact that it existed. She seemed almost satisfied with the confusion it caused.

Draco's eyes flicked toward the bundle and her frown deepened.

"Why did you take that?" she asked. "You're proud of robbing dying cultists?"

"I took everything worth taking," U-Olga replied flatly. "If you want me to leave behind functional resources, maybe you should do the looting next time. Dignity no longer builds armies."

Before either could continue, another escapee bolted toward the access tunnel, darting through broken shelves and trying to reach the service elevator. But a sharp burst followed by a controlled wave of force ended the attempt before it began. His head snapped back with a single impact. The hole in his chest smoked slightly from the precision. Koyanskaya was already lining up her next shot from the upper balcony.

She resumed looking through one of the command terminals she had overridden, transferring fragmented data into a small handheld screen that had no physical buttons.

"Most of their records were already encrypted. Redundant spells. Time bombs. But I've found traces leading to some of their more exotic asset vaults. Ones they thought even their own mages didn't know about. I'll take my time with them slowly."

Kama slid off the collapsed chair she had been perched on and clapped.

"Congratulations, everyone! We just made another bunch of terrorist scum piss their pants. I don't know about you, but I rather like the new name. 'Beast Faction.' It has a nice sound to it. Bold. Honest. A little terrifying. Not bad for something that none of us agreed on, really."

"It's crude," Draco muttered.

"It's premature," Tiamat added.

"It's accurate," Koyanskaya said, not looking up. She prefers being called a contractor. But branding is everything, so let them call them whatever gets their leaders to scream in meetings. If Beast Faction works, so be it.

"It will cause hysteria," U-Olga concluded, nodding slightly to herself as though that outcome was entirely favorable.

Kama turned toward the exit tunnel. "But isn't that the point?"

The facility creaked louder, lights flickering in the distance as the last structural spells failed. U-Olga raised a hand slowly. She was not in a mood to leave something half-done. A shimmering light gathered around her, pulled from beyond the atmosphere itself. With one final glance back toward the room and its ashes, she compressed the field of spatial distortion in her palm and pressed it downward with a simple motion.

The entire base imploded without warning. There was no explosion, only a flattening of everything inside as the structure collapsed into itself and erased in an instant. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing but a crater, the soil around it untouched, as if it had always been that way.

Outside, standing beside the forest line that marked the edge of the spell barrier, Angra leaned on the trunk of a fallen tree, one leg resting on a stone. He had been watching the collapse without expression. His eyes carried the same deadpan emptiness they always did.

"You took your time," he said, not getting up. "Are we done?"

No one answered right away.

Kama floated over with a mock salute. "Mission complete, boss. One pile of bodies, some shiny treasure, and now, a new faction on the headlines."

He snorted, cracking his neck. "What a pain, huh."

The pressure of magical energy snapped across space as they immediately teleported.

They materialized near a ridgeline blanketed in ice and snow. A hard wind whipped past them. Most would consider the location a frozen hell, but to Koyanskaya, it felt like expensive skin cream on a tired face.

She adjusted her rifle against her back and bent slightly to breathe in the frigid air through her nose. "Russia, huh? I forgot how nice this place is when it's not filled with humans getting drunk in the snow and screaming nationalism," she said aloud, more to herself than anyone else. She glanced over her shoulder. "Feels like being home again. I always liked this part of any world. It's nice and sterile."

U-Olga looked irritated immediately. "You have to feel sentimental about this just because it matches your temperament?"

Koyanskaya snorted, not even trying to look offended. "Sentiment is a luxury. I simply like how quiet it is out here. Makes it easier to hear the whining when someone gets their kneecaps blown off."

They moved up a slope that was shielded by cliffs on three sides. Snow clung tightly to the rocks and only Tiamat's passive, even steps disturbed the near-absolute silence. Draco took the lead, unbothered by the biting wind. From Goetia's data, there should be a base nearby. Everyone could feel the irregular pulses in the air.

Fou hopped up beside her, landing softly in her footprints. "Fou."

"We're close," Draco said without looking down.

"Don't need to tell me twice," Kama responded. "I can smell a little hint of desperation, a touch of necromancy, and whatever the Nilrem bathe in, failure, mostly."

"Enough talking. We go in now," Draco ordered. She walked straight through a section of rock that didn't look like anything special, except it shimmered faintly for a second. Her body passed through without resistance.

The others followed. Tiamat was last, dragging a weakened mage corpse who had the unfortunate fate of roaming nearby by the collar before dropping it carelessly into the snow, not even glancing back.

Time passed. It wasn't hours. It wasn't a few minutes either. No one really counted, but it was long enough that when the base began detonating internally and the sky became thick with dark smoke and mana-induced wind pressure, the snow-covered landscape warped in heat and explosions. The walls of the mountain peeled back from the blast force.

Magical alarms had tried to activate, but Koyanskaya personally silenced each one as she sped from terminal to terminal, stripping data and setting traps behind her. Her nails were stained with blood, and there were four bullet holes in the side of her coat, while she hummed lightly as she walked through what used to be a control room.

Draco had smashed her way through the northern chamber. The walls were reinforced, but her raw physical strength, enhanced by her magical output, was more than enough to tear the foundation apart. One of the Nilrem mages had tried to stop her with a black ritual square inscribed with an old demon script, making an effort to seal her movement. She caught the edges of the spell pattern in her hand, shattered it in the same motion she broke the mage's jaw and then crushed his throat with her heel without stopping.

The next mage exploded before even completing his chant.

U-Olga converted magical systems to override the base's security barriers. Once she got inside the command center, she didn't simply download the files, she wiped everything that wasn't useful, set detonation sequences into the structural supports, and erased their teleportation anchors. When one of the survivors tried to strike her in a desperate move with a mana spike from behind, she vaporized his head with a single point of light and kept walking while brushing her shoulder.

"I'll never understand how they managed to survive long enough to invent something as wretched as this facility," she muttered, pulling a hard drive into her personal spatial inventory. "And they have the audacity to believe themselves equals."

On the lower floor, Tiamat crushed a group of fleeing apprentices under collapsed ceilings. She didn't enjoy this kind of work, but she did it because they posed a risk. She only needed to press her palm into the ground. Her magecraft mastery let her manipulate the structural foundation by liquefying the support stones underneath them with mana until it dropped and twisted inward. The screams didn't last long. She crouched over the shattered flooring.

"Stop running," she said flatly to the last living woman crawling from the debris. "You'll only make it worse."

The woman screamed something. Tiamat didn't listen. She swiped her arm, breaking the woman's spine instantly.

Kama was on the upper level, skipping between rooms, using one of the dead mages' tools as a toy baton and smacking one of the corpses with it just to hear the crunch. She stopped once to wipe blood off her boots with one of their robes.

"This is so boring. I thought there'd be at least one person with a sex curse or a soul parasite. Anything to break the monotony."

"Does that count?" Angra's voice came from the top level. He was sitting on a half-destroyed pillar. He tossed a beam casually into the chest of someone crawling on the ground below.

"No," Kama replied. "That one just had a low IQ and fear issues. You'd think after all this time they'd get better at not being unfortunate."

Draco rejoined them from below. She stepped over the scattered bodies and debris.

"Koyanskaya."

"Yes, yes, I know," Koyanskaya muttered, stuffing another small drive into her coat. "No embezzling and pocketing. I'm not a thief, I'm a scavenger. There's a difference."

Draco gave her a stare, then walked past.

"I suppose we've milked this base dry. Is there anything left to do?" U-Olga said.

Kama rolled her eyes. "Besides pose on top of the corpses like some victory photo? Not really."

Tiamat walked in last. Her shoulders were flecked with ash, her fingers twitching slightly from overuse. She didn't say anything. Fou bounded next to her.

Draco gave the silent order. In the next instant, U-Olga raised her arm, palm open. Her mana surged upward in a thick cone, raw force spiraling into the sky and dragging down a blast of gravitational energy that tore through the mountaintop like it was paper. The remaining structure of the base shattered, stone and steel ripping apart as if magnetically pulled into the sky before collapsing in a burning heap.

Smoke flooded the area. Mana alarms spiked one last time, then vanished into silence.

When the fire had quieted, the group emerged from the base's outer gate.

"Two down."

Draco announced. They began preparing for teleportation again.

Light came and went.

The NFF Services main lobby was too quiet for an organization harboring most of the world's top-level threats.

Angra raised his arms. "Alright, that was moderately successful. Mission finished. Good work, everyone. Property damage optimal. Blood spilled just enough. No casualties on our side, which is unfortunate since a few of you might've benefited from the experience."

Tiamat tilted her head and crossed her arms. Her eyes narrowed, and the way she tapped her fingers against her bicep made it clear she was not ignoring what he said. "Why are you the one acting like the leader right now?"

"Oh," Angra muttered, blinking slowly. "I guess I am."

"You're not," U-Olga cut in immediately. "There should be an established chain of command if we are to continue working as a unit. Which means we require a leader. Obviously, it should be someone who understands coordination, standing, and can execute decisions without the hesitation of a commoner."

"Kama," Angra said plainly, not even waiting for U-Olga to finish her sentence. "Pick someone. I'm not doing this."

Kama smiled sweetly at him. "If we're going to have a leader, then obviously it's Goetia. He's the only one with the processing power and enough of a stick up his ass to care about logistics. But if he's unavailable," she turned with a flourish, placing a hand over her chest and pointing to Angra with a smug finger, "I nominate Angra as vice-leader."

U-Olga visibly flinched. "What kind of logic is that? You nominate a slacker with no strategy and zero commanding aura?"

"A rational one," Kama replied, smiling so wide it didn't even try to be pleasant. "Besides, someone with no attachment to success or failure is ironically less likely to spiral from pressure. He doesn't care if we die, so obviously he'll live longer than all of us."

Draco gave a short chuckle. "I wouldn't trust him to organize a sock drawer, but I wouldn't follow any of you, either. If Goetia dies, we'll end up tearing each other apart within a week. The mongrel is at least neutral."

"Oi."

"I support the mongrel," Tiamat added while setting Fou down. Fou made a soft "Fou" noise in agreement, but no one took it seriously except maybe Tiamat, who bent down to adjust the creature's ears.

"Of course you'd all agree," U-Olga muttered, arms crossed and face twisted in distaste, though it was hard to tell whether the sourness came from Angra's nomination or the group's unwillingness to accept her unspoken claim to leadership. "This is an organization of lunatics."

"We're not an organization," Koyanskaya said dryly, finally stepping in with her arms crossed.

Her eyes deadpanned abruptly as she noticed something very wrong. "Also, why are you all still inside the building? Why is everyone lounging around the lobby like it's a damn waiting room? This is my company. I pay rent. I fund assassins to maintain public image. Why are you still here?"

As if summoned by the complaint, Kiara walked into the lobby.

The sound of her bare feet in house slippers gently padding on the marble floor was surreal, but nothing compared to her appearance. She was wearing tightly fitted casual homewear that looked expensive enough to not exist in retail stores and scandalous enough to belong only in magazines no one bought for the articles. She was sipping a coffee drink with a bendy straw, steam still fresh from the company café machine.

Angra's eyes widened briefly. "You look like a housewife who just ruined a neighborhood boy's life," he said with a smile. "Respectfully, you look incredible."

Kiara offered no reply, but the tilt of her head and the raise of one brow suggested approval. Kama's face twitched just enough to betray her irritation, which immediately spiraled into a mutter laced with venom.

"She probably just spread her legs while we were away."

U-Olga's frown on her face deepened. She stared at Kiara for a solid five seconds longer than necessary before turning her attention back to the coffee cup as if offended by its mere existence.

Koyanskaya looked from Kiara, to Angra, to the rest of the lounging Beasts sprawled in various corners of her lobby. Her mouth opened once, closed again, then opened a second time only to hang there in disbelief.

"Why are you here?" Koyanskaya said, pointing to Kiara with visible confusion and rising frustration. "Why are you drinking my company's coffee? Who even turned on the machine?!"

"Why not?" Kiara replied with a gentle voice that managed to drip audacity without effort. "You weren't using the penthouse. And I made sure not to invite strangers."

"You're all strangers!"

"Not even acquaintance, dear?"

Fou, in the corner, tapped something with a small paw. There was a plastic clacking sound, followed by the unmistakable sound of an old smartphone game blaring through the building's audio system.

Fou: "Fou!"

Koyanskaya spun toward the sound. Her eyes caught sight of the company tablet placed carefully on a decorative plant shelf, now being held by Fou who was furiously tapping the screen with surprising dexterity.

Her pupils shrank.

"Why is Flappy Bird on my corporate tablet?!" she shrieked.

Tiamat, who had knelt beside Fou again, looked up. "I found the tablet lying around. Fou wanted something to do, so I installed it for him. It's good for coordination."

Koyanskaya looked like she had just witnessed her life's equity slide off a cliff. "You installed it... on my... who even remembered Flappy Bird existed?! That game is extinct!"

Fou answered by failing the level and tossing the tablet forward with an annoyed "Fouuu!" before promptly picking it back up again.

"I am going to start locking my servers," Koyanskaya muttered, face twitching. "No, I'm going to start electrocuting people who so much as breathe on my hardware."

Angra patted her shoulder once without emotion. "This is what happens when you let Beast-class existences loiter in your office."

"I didn't let anyone—"

"You did," Kama interrupted with a smile. "And you're going to continue doing it, because deep down you know it makes your existence less boring. You're welcome."

Koyanskaya looked at the group, then at her own tablet now chewing up high-score notifications, then turned and walked directly to the elevator, pressing the button hard enough to bend the panel. "I hate all of you," she said plainly, stepping in. "Especially you."

Everyone simultaneously assumed she meant someone else.

Draco went and typed her preferred setting on the coffee machine. When the drink was dispensed, she grabbed it without a word and stepped aside without eye contact. She took a sip, did not react, but the lack of complaint from her implied it met her standards.

"Wow. You're really going to flaunt yourself like that before noon? I didn't know we were filming a softcore soap opera in here."

Kiara tilted her head, brushing her fingers through her hair with idle classiness, made it clear she saw the comment as nothing more than the croaking of a jealous insect. "Oh dear. I would have thought a creature like you would understand that confidence is something earned. But then again, when you're stuck being permanently jealous, I suppose even the mirror becomes a rival."

Kama's eye twitched. "Confidence is one thing. Public indecency with a side of aging desperation is another. Did your own ego finally inflate to the point you mistook a strip club routine for actual dignity?"

U-Olga raised a brow between the two like she couldn't decide if she was amused or irritated, but she didn't hide the slight curl in her lip. "Both of you are insufferable. You argue like high school girls with unresolved crushes. At least one of you should try developing actual class. The other can go back to the sewer where she found her wardrobe."

Kama shifted her glare to U-Olga immediately. "Oh look, pretentious godling, don't try to sound superior while mad no one's kneeling to your imaginary throne."

U-Olga lifted her chin and retorted without hesitation. "Wrong. If we had better filtration systems, perhaps you wouldn't have managed to pollute the air around this building with your perfume of mediocrity."

"Why don't you take that stick out of your ass and cry to someone who actually thinks you're important? Oh wait," Kama said, dragging out the last part, "that would mean finding someone, wouldn't it? Good luck."

Kiara took a deep sip from her cup, not even turning around this time. "Should I fetch a mirror for the two of you to see who screams 'insecurity' louder? Or are we going to finally accept that this conversation exists only because none of you are getting enough attention?"

U-Olga clicked her tongue and took a step closer to Kama, pointing with one hand. "Keep talking like that and I'll show you exactly what punishment looks like."

"Please," Kama answered without backing down. "You've been trying to convince everyone you're divine since the beginning. It's getting embarrassing."

Tiamat lowered the book she had not actually been reading and sighed without hiding the delight behind her lips. "Honestly. This is the most dysfunctional thing I've ever seen. But if you squint hard enough... it really looks like a family. But still."

Head tilted against the back of the couch and eyes half-open, Angra blinked once at the sight before him. He turned toward Tiamat without lifting his head. "Either you've been infected by some brain-eating bacteria or I'm the one going blind. Because there is no way in this plane of existence that what I'm seeing qualifies as a 'family.' This is closer to an asylum waiting room after someone slipped LSD into the water tank."

Tiamat just smiled gently and returned her attention to the bickering trio. She stretched her legs on the carpet slowly. "You're all here. That's what matters."

Angra slouched deeper, adjusting the pillow behind his head. "What matters is that I don't get roped into whatever comes out of this inevitable breakdown. Wake me up if someone gets physically thrown through a window."

The only sound that answered him for a few seconds was a crisp "Fou" from the far end of the couch beside him.

Fou's paws moved quickly over the screen of a company-issued tablet. On-screen, small colored blocks fell with accelerating speed. He was now playing Tetris, and judging by the tower of rapidly arranged lines stacked on one side, he had been doing this for a while.

Koyanskaya's voice shrieked suddenly from the elevator door that had just opened, her heels clacking quickly as she stormed in with a tablet of her own. Her eyes locked instantly on the device in Fou's paws. "Why does my backup unit have a third-party Tetris app?! That device is synced to my account!"

Tiamat tilted her head and answered plainly. "Fou liked the puzzle game."

"That was a root-locked interface!"

"I pushed buttons until it worked," Tiamat said.

"You pushed buttons—" Koyanskaya didn't finish. She turned in a mechanical pivot and walked past the rest of the group, stopping at her desk and setting her own tablet down. "This is a containment breach wearing the skin of a corporate experiment. I need three weeks of therapy and a new security team. And someone better find where the rest of my encrypted files went. Because if Fou got in, then there is no hope."

Fou let out another "Fou," completely unbothered and still lining up a perfect triple in the game.

From her place behind the couch, Draco took another sip of coffee, letting the heat settle in her mouth. "The next person to start yelling gets thrown outside. I mean it."

No one responded immediately, but Kama snorted. U-Olga pretended she didn't hear anything. Angra had already tilted his head and closed his eyes again.

Draco didn't repeat herself.

Chapter 19: Beast Quest: Virgin's Stillness Cradle

"It seems,"

Goetia started plainly, seated on the longest sofa in the living room, "that the Supernatural World has reached its decision. We are now officially referred to, albeit without any formal announcement or binding declaration, as the 'Beast Faction'."

"Yeah, we said that before."

"Sush, Avenger, boss-man is talking."

"I suppose, at the very least, we have a label for the collective threat we embody. This simplifies matters, even if the simplicity is only administrative." Goetia ascertained.

They're anomalies, but now, they could no longer be compartmentalized as unidentified factors. It would make their presence dangerous for themselves. With this, every possible threat will prepare with intent.

Nonetheless, that's how emotional beings are in the face of things they do not understand. Though some others like Koyanskaya were not surprised they'd pick something blunt and easily memorable when 'Beasts' sounds theatrical enough for them. It made it easier to sell to the masses.

'Devils,' 'Angels,' 'Fallen,' 'Monsters,' and now 'Beasts.' They only use names like that when they're trying to simplify a threat, it's how they keep their paranoia neat and organized.

In the end, it makes no difference. Misinterpretation can happen.

If the Beasts are to be recognized, fine. It will not stop someone on the likes of Draco from killing anyone who touches what she cares about. She let them scramble for their treaties and strategies because the moment they got in her way, she flattened them.

U-Olga turned to Goetia. "I suppose the recognition does mean we're no longer seen as isolated problems. That might make things more difficult for you, 'King.' I suppose you have already planned for that?"

Goetia's stare veered slightly. "I have. The Demon Pillars have already begun preparing data-based contingency programs. We are still at a fraction of our original strength. Should the pantheons coordinate properly, and their targets become us rather than each other, we would not last long."

Kiara sighed. "I had hoped our arrival would be the beginning of something besides war games and preemptive hostilities. Inevitability is still a kind of fate. A fate born from fear, lust, and curiosity. All the things I so deeply cherish."

She opened her eyes to glance sideways toward Kama, whose face had twisted into disgust even before Kiara finished speaking. Kama didn't even try to hide her expression. She pulled her legs onto the couch, arms draped around her knees like a sulking child, and looked straight at the farthest wall to avoid seeing Kiara's face.

"Do you ever think about anything other than yourself?"

"Perhaps if you could accept yourself the way I do, you wouldn't project your hate onto every soul you encounter."

"Well, at least you're honest about your mess, Kama," Angra let out a half-laugh. "Most people don't even get that far. Kiara's right about one thing, though, everyone here is a narcissist. Even our majestic and dignified king over there, has a soft spot for watching people squirm under his presence. It's like watching a schoolteacher in a room full of poorly behaved kids."

Goetia didn't even answer back to that. Angra's grin widened a bit.

"We don't need to like the name," Tiamat interjects. "We just need to make sure that the people who use it don't misunderstand what we're doing here. I don't care about their politics. But I do care about this world not collapsing. If I have to be called a Beast to keep things from going wrong again, I don't mind."

She looked down at Fou and gave him a light scratch behind the ears. "We can't afford to keep treating this world like it's ours to experiment with. Not anymore."

Goetia stood and finally turned to look at the others. "Agreed. We are now counterforces. That is not a role we can fulfill if we antagonize the very cradle we were from."

Counterforces. If the Grand Servants vied with Beasts.

Then why couldn't Beasts vied with the Supernaturals?

He stepped toward the center of the room and unraveled runes made of coded parchment and demonic glyphs. "This is an operations proposal from the remaining Pillars. I will have it distributed, but it will be encoded in a format only you can access. I expect each of you to begin establishing countermeasures in your own way. This world is full of deities, dragons, legends, and monsters. We are not above them. We are no longer removed from them. Our time in the shadows is over."

He looked toward Kiara, in hidden repugnance, then Kama, then Draco and the others in turn. "Our condition is unstable. We cannot afford any indulgences. From now on, human interaction is to be monitored and restricted. You are not to toy with them. You are not to use them. Not until we reach a consensus. Humanity is still the core of everything here. They are off-limits."

Kama rolled her eyes. "You're the last one I expected to say something that paternalistic."

"I am not being paternal," Goetia said. "I am being precise."

He began to finalize its sealing glyphs. "Until further notice, the Beast Faction is to function as a neutral protective entity. Merely necessary."

Fou jumped down from the couch and bounded toward Angra, who yawned again without moving.

"Fou."

"Speaking of not playing with humans anymore," Angra had an idea, "we should probably bring up Kiara's little funhouse in the basement, yeah?"

The lack of reaction from the others made it obvious that they were aware of it. No one said a word, yet their eyes turned or narrowed or blinked with pretense it didn't exist until he brought it up.

"Before anyone acts surprised, don't bother. You've all felt the writhing mass of mana leaking through the floorboards. You think I didn't hear it when I was going down to get some damn snacks?" Angra crossed his legs.

Kiara did not appear embarrassed. She smiled with eyes half-lidded, brushing a hand along her bare collarbone. She wasn't lounging like a temptress. She was a temptress, by nature. She'd been sitting on one of the long couches like a queen among ignorant worshippers.

"I see my sacred space has been reduced to slander. It's so like you to speak the truth with such crude phrasing. I'll have you know, that I've already dismissed the innocent ones. Their memories have been thoroughly cleansed. Not a trace of me remains in their mind. They've returned to their families and daily lives, purified."

She laced her fingers together under her chin. The gesture was sweet but only on the surface.

"As for the others," she continued with a gentler voice, "they're the ones who chose to stay. The ones whose hearts are rotting with irredeemable sin. Rapists, serial killers, abusers. People even your justice-blind eyes would find foul. They wanted to worship something so I simply gave them purpose. I would argue I'm doing the world a favor by keeping them under my thumb."

Angra blinked. He didn't deny it. "Fair enough."

Kiara's gaze softened even more. "Then why don't you come back down, darling? It's been quite a while since our last... sacred union."

The way she said it turned everyone's attention toward her and then immediately toward Angra. He raised his brow instead, but he didn't deny that either. He scratched his cheek.

U-Olga stiffened like she hadn't heard properly. "What... what do you mean union?"

Kiara smiled with her lips parted slightly, then glanced at U-Olga like a mother amused by a naïve child. Her tone became more playful and languid.

"I mean exactly what you think I mean. The last time Angra came down, after some conversations about my flock, watching me demonstrate my devotion... we indulged. He gave himself to me. Though, tragically, I was rejected afterward."

Her hand went to her chest in a theatrical display of sorrow. "He left so suddenly. It was quite sad, really."

Kama made a sound that could only be described as a gasp choked back into a cough. Her stare turned into something far less neutral. Her glare fixed directly on Angra, burning through him.

"You... what?"

Angra waved a hand, not even meeting her eyes. "Don't start."

U-Olga looked far less composed. Her face contorted and voice came out shrill and disbelieving.

"You slept with her?!"

Kiara chuckled. "I wouldn't say 'slept' without lack of activity."

"Oh my god, shut up!" Kama snapped, unable to sit still anymore. Her hair trembled with her anger, and even her dress fluttered with the aura she was trying hard not to let out. "Why would you even look at her that way? Are you that easily manipulated?"

"Hey, she's hot. There's not much else to it."

Tiamat looked thoroughly disturbed. Her eyes kept shifting between Angra and Kiara like someone who had walked in on their son making out with his sister. Her brow furrowed deeply.

"Why would you... That's... You two are—I mean—Are you children? Did you not think? That's disgusting."

"It was one time," Angra said with a groan. "I didn't make a habit of it."

"Yet she's inviting you again," U-Olga snapped, shooting a death glare at Kiara.

Kiara turned her head toward U-Olga with her eyes lidded and unreadable. "You're quite possessive for someone who denies caring, darling. Are you perhaps jealous? Oh no."

U-Olga's eye twitched. "Go rot."

Draco glanced at Angra once, then looked away. She didn't say a word. Her expression was completely blank, yet it was obvious to anyone watching her long enough that something was ticking behind her eyes. She wasn't stupid. She was just holding herself back because responding emotionally to something so stupid would only prove Kiara right. She hated proving Kiara right.

Goetia didn't speak until all the shouting quieted into grumbling and twitchy side-eyes. He didn't move an inch from his seat since the topic began. He looked at each of them, thinking more deeply than anyone else in the room.

"It's becoming harder to believe that any of you were classified as planetary threats."

He looked at Kiara last. "You have been told not to meddle with humanity. That includes building private followings. Whether they are sinners or not."

Kiara placed a hand over her mouth and giggled. "Of course, Human King. I'll behave."

His silence was the response.

Angra leaned back, sighing. "Anyway, the place reeks of sweat and divine narcotics. You should really get better airflow down there."

Kiara tilted her head. "Would you prefer the scent of lilies and sandalwood when I call you back, then?"

"Stop talking," Kama barked.

"Please die," U-Olga added.

Tiamat stood up and walked toward the hallway without looking at anyone. "I need water."

Draco let out a low sigh. "Pathetic."

"Fou."

These discussions collapsed into a swamp of petty jealousy, frustrated posturing, and juvenile declarations of ownership. The air had grown stale from all the heat. Goetia eventually adjusted his position and cleared his throat, disapproval that the others understood as his polite method of telling everyone they were wasting his time and should get back to the actual subject that required their focus.

"Enough. I tire of these pointless declarations of possession and poorly hidden emotional instability," he said.

That silenced Kiara, who only giggled and pulled her hair behind her ear in some way like a child waiting for the punishment to get exciting.

Goetia did not require affirmation to continue, so he did. "Several of my Pillars, specifically those assigned to track the anguish currents and theological resonance among mortal populations, have reported a concerning anomaly. It was not immediately prioritized due to its low displacement influence on human despair indices, but in hindsight, it warrants re-evaluation."

He generated a spiritual construct hovering in front of him, shaped out of black data strings and digital sigils.

"There exists a region between Austria and Hungary. A forest, or rather what remains of one. My Pillars flagged it due to a consistent spiritual blank, it is not merely devoid of emotion or intent, but completely suspended from standard entropy increase. It resists the degradation of matter and time, excluded from temporal direction. The entropy gradient there does not rise. Therefore, by all current measurable terms, it is a Temporal Null Zone."

That got attention as they visibly tried to process what that would even mean for natural systems.

"It was first discovered in the early 14th century," Goetia continued, "by a Catholic monastic order tasked with cataloging wilderness anomalies. According to the Vatican archives, the area was sealed. The Church forbade travel to it after several exorcists returned mad. Those who did return spoke of 'reverse-aging dreams' and reported symptoms that destroyed their theological convictions entirely. Some no longer believed in the authority of Heaven after the experience. Others… tried to recreate what they had seen there."

Goetia allowed that implication to sink in. Kiara made a low, drawn-out hum, probably intrigued by the psychological damage aspect.

"Since the early modern period, local folklore has referred to it as the 'Dead Forest,' a term adopted without resistance by both the Norse and Greco-Roman Pantheons. They have made no efforts to investigate. Whether by cowardice or by wisdom, I will not speculate."

He finally looked directly at the others now. "In official Vatican terminology, the region is named 'Sanctum Nocte Silvarum.' Holy Night of the Forest."

U-Olga scowled. "That sounds made-up. Overwrought names are a sign of weak theology."

Kama didn't even bother with sarcasm and simply mumbled, "Humans like naming horror like it's poetry."

Goetia ignored both of them. "Several minor mage organizations in Germany and Italy have attempted to investigate in recent decades. None returned. Those that got near the outer boundaries reported disappearances of entire convoys, not just mage caravans but unrelated human travelers as well. The area seems to reject intrusion. The only exception is those it lures."

Koyanskaya clicked her tongue. "So let me guess. We're being sent to it because you don't want to go?"

"I am more useful here overseeing global surveillance. You have the advantage of mobility and elasticity of purpose. I am restricted to the Pillars. Additionally, I have reason to believe that the anomaly in that forest may let you reflect on your behaviors."

Angra tilted his head sideways without lifting it fully. "Right. So in short, you found a cursed forest where entropy doesn't do its job, Vatican got scared, people went insane and tried to start cults, magicians disappeared, just to reprimand us. And you want us to take the field trip while you sit here and watch from orbit. Got it."

"I am not 'watching from orbit.' I am delegating appropriately based on capacity," Goetia replied calmly. "This is not sarcasm hour."

"Everything is sarcasm hour if I'm still in the room," Angra stretched. "Sure, why not? Sounds like a side quest. I'm bored."

U-Olga's eyes widened. "Wait, we're just going to accept that? You of all people? No snide commentary about how stupid it sounds?"

"I did call it a side quest," Angra reminded her. "What more commentary do you want? Do you want me to say it's a trap? It probably is. That's half the fun."

Kiara laughed softly. "Oh, but perhaps we'll meet something interesting." She glanced toward Angra with a warm grin. "Or maybe something that rejects time… like a memory we left behind."

Kama gave her a look that could poison rivers. "Don't start."

"I already started," Kiara said, voice smug.

Draco stood up and adjusted her cloak. "If Goetia's so-called data confirms it, then the mission is valid. If there's something in that forest, it either becomes our problem or it becomes a future crisis that affects us anyway. Either we handle it now or someone else fails to handle it later and drags us in anyway. I'll go."

Coming back, Tiamat sighed and looked toward Fou, who tilted his head. "I will go too. If it consumes people, then it is already dangerous. Waiting would be irresponsible."

Fou made a small noise. Goetia accepted that as another vote in favor.

"Then it's settled," Goetia declared. "You will leave by sunset. I will provide the coordinates. Prepare accordingly. The Sanctum is not passive."

Koyanskaya stretched her arms over her head. "Well, at least it's not my turn to cook tonight. I'm going to pack the stun grenades and soul suppression filters. Just in case."

U-Olga folded her arms again, this time tighter. "If this gets stupid, I'm blaming you, Angra."

He didn't even turn his head. "You already blame me when the coffee runs out."

"Because it's always your fault."

Kama stood up slowly, already regretting the coming trip. "No gifts. If I see Kiara pulling out one more fruit-scented rope bondage kit, I'm cutting off your hands."

Draco grunted. "Get ready. All of you. No loose ends."

"Sounds like a side quest," Angra said, pausing only to exhale audibly through his nose. Goetia is assigning homework because he didn't want to deal with another headache.

"Fine, fine. Whatever gets us out of this place before someone here starts a fifth passive-aggressive standoff over tea etiquette or something. Sure. Count me in."

The only sound after that was Kama sighing with exaggerated disappointment, muttering that this was going to be another idiotic errand with no payoff. Koyanskaya was already halfway to packing her ridiculous gear satchels and checking her self-defense countermeasures. Tiamat was the last to leave the room after gently collecting Fou, who had stubbornly decided to follow her around more often lately.

It might be an enjoyable adventure.

---

Everything after that moment went wrong, or at least started veering into the annoying.

The air smelled of pine and cold soil, like the region had been stuck between autumn and winter for an undefined number of years, and Angra's previous enthusiasm had entirely left his face.

Trudging through the underbrush of the forest just within the threshold of the Sanctum Nocte Silvarum, his face narrowed into a scowl as a thin branch slapped his shoulder for the third time in two minutes. He looked like someone who had been tricked into manual labor under the false promise of entertainment.

This is worse than helping Kama with her emotional meltdowns. Be grumbled, kicking a root that seemed to have crawled out of the dirt just to trip him.

One might think Hell would reimburse him if he broke one of the ancient forest wards just to stop getting whipped in the face by sentient twigs?

He didn't really expect an explanation, but Kama walked past him anyway, very focused on inspecting her surroundings than on offering him sympathy. She and Kiara offered no help either, but the latter did hum a low note under her breath and commented aloud that the woods smelled like people had died here centuries ago and had forgotten to rot properly. Angra didn't know how she managed to make that sound like a compliment, but she did.

U-Olga had been checking the time using both her wristwatch and a pocket relic provided by Vitch as a joke. She frowned at both.

"We've been walking for thirty minutes, give or take, but this tracker says it's been nearly three hours. Something is wrong with the local dilation rate," she said.

Koyanskaya looked up from her tablet, which she had modified with some sort of triangulation charm fused into the casing. Her mouth twitched slightly as she nodded. "The coordinates keep looping back into themselves. I've seen magical recursion before, but not this tightly bound. The mapping system registers the same tree cluster in three different directions. It's not even an illusion; it's more like the place is folding in on itself over time."

"No one's surprised," Draco leaned slightly against a stone pillar that had no business being there, moss-covered and chipped, partially buried in roots. "Goetia wouldn't have left it to us if it wasn't broken in a dozen ways."

Tiamat, who had been walking a few paces behind, crouched and brushed her fingers across a knot of earth that looked as if it had been recently overturned, yet the forest around it hadn't been disturbed.

"The trees aren't resisting us spiritually, they're avoiding us physically. They literally move. I thought it was just me, but the path we came through already closed off. The trunks are folding away from our footsteps."

Kama gave a crooked smile. "Oh good, we're being dodged by plants. That's not concerning at all. At least they have good taste."

U-Olga showed her irritation.

Koyanskaya looked ready to argue, but her device pinged again, displaying nothing useful except another recursive pattern loop.

Fou made a soft sound, unimpressed but still tagging along beside Tiamat, who finally stood up again and quietly took a mental note of how every tree around them thumped away from her when she walked too close.

They weren't even deep into the forest yet. The path ahead was still sloping downward, framed by irregular stone markers that looked older than any known European religious construction. No one mentioned it aloud, but the silent conclusion was clear between them: whatever had kept this place sealed wasn't entirely inactive.

Time bullshit, spatial recursion, cowardly trees, and probably some old exorcist ghosts lurking around waiting to drag them into a theologically offensive nightmare. Angra has to say, "This is the best side quest I've been on in weeks. Who wants to bet we don't make it back without going mildly insane?"

No one made a reply to him, Kiara just smiled. Kama rolled her eyes. U-Olga muttered something about burning the forest down if it wasted another minute of her time.

Until, Kama unexpectedly started hurling curses at the underbrush.

She kicked a root that wrapped itself around her ankle without warning.

"This forest has the personality of a passive-aggressive maid; polite on the surface, but manipulative, intrusive, and probably suppressing a centuries-long inferiority complex!"

Angra brused leaves off his shoulder as he tried, for the third time, to walk a straight path through what should have been a simple incline. It wasn't. The incline curved left, then right, then doubled back like a drunk snake. "We could just burn it all down," he said. "Fire solves mysteries."

"No," Tiamat replied with a disinterested grunt. She was crouched down, watching a tree physically curl away from her. They're avoiding her. She didn't like it, not a single bit.

Angra could imagine the next time nature tried to dodge her, she might just revert back to her complete Beast form and drown the entire forest with her mud.

What's nature gonna do in the face of it's mother?

"They're avoiding everyone, what an insult, since I'm clearly the highest-value target here. If even trees are disrespecting me, something is fundamentally wrong with this place." U-Olga grumbled. M

Koyanskaya sighed and lifted her wrist. "It's recursive. Spatial recursion. My readings loop back after 120 meters. We're in a closed set."

Kiara had not stopped smiling since the group started to entered the thicker region of the forest. "This entire experience has a sensual kind of resistance. Very intimate. Very invasive. Very lushy. Very—"

"That's disgusting, it's better you go pollinate a cactus if you find spiritual violation pleasurable." Beast III/L said without hesitation.

"Only if it moans back." Beast III/R retorted.

"Stop talking," Draco cut in. She's glaring at the map Tiamat had scratched into the soil with a claw—when did they stopped? "This forest has no sense. There's no natural wind pattern. We've walked for an hour and somehow it's still the same lighting and temperature."

"It's been three hours," U-Olga corrected without looking up. "Outside time is moving differently. Probably thirty minutes have passed."

"Orrr the forest is a metaphor for Angra's motivation," Koyanskaya said dryly.

"I'm standing right here," Angra poked a tree with a stick. The stick bent back and hit him in the face. "...Which proves nothing."

"Fou! Fou!"

At some point, someone decided brute force was the answer. It might have been Draco, or maybe Kama, though both would deny it. In any case, it began with a declaration of war and ended with all eight of them charging in different directions.

Tiamat bulldozed through shrubbery. Koyanskaya tried to hack her GPS manually mid-run while dragging U-Olga by the sleeve. Just like their first day in this world, Fou vanished into a bush, making zero sound.

Ten minutes later, they all regrouped at the exact same clearing they had started from.

"This is the same stone," Draco said, pointing at a rock near Angra's foot.

"I named it Kevin," Angra replied. "We've walked in a perfect loop. Maybe Kevin's the final boss."

"I am done with this," U-Olga humphed, crossing her arms. "It's embarrassing."

"You couldn't outrun a looping forest. Just admit the trees won."

"I will not be mocked by landscaping," U-Olga snapped at Kama. She stepped back, summoned her energy, and took to the air without waiting for anyone's approval.

Angra watched her ascend, "Well, she cracked. We have airborne tsundere now."

"Good," Kama followed the trail of her ascent with a calculating look. "Maybe she can make herself useful by being bait for whatever's at the center of this maze."

Kiara giggled. "Or she'll just get caught in an aerial recursion and spiral like a falling leaf. I'd watch that."

Draco folded her arms. "If she falls, I'm not catching her."

"She'd rather splatter than owe you," Angra said, glancing up. "Which is a sentiment I respect."

Above the treeline, U-Olga scanned the vast, green expanse. From up here, the forest's pattern was visible, every tree curved inward, bending and recoiling from a central point.

She squinted at the northern horizon, and after two more seconds, she leaned forward and pointed downward with excessive enthusiasm.

"There. I see rooftops," she declared, loudly and finally, like she wanted everyone to appreciate that she was the one who saw it first.

Angra looked up, and squinted in the direction she pointed. "You see a village? Congratulations. Do you want a medal, or should we just build a statue now and skip the ceremony?"

"I am not joking," she snapped, then made a graceful, impatient twirl midair, her long hair dragging behind her like an indignant banner. "A proper settlement, less than a kilometer away. Humans. Buildings. Now get moving before I decide to leave you all behind."

The rest of the group had gathered again after an entire hour of spiraling around the same patch of indistinguishable trees. They had taken three different wrong turns, fought a hill covered in nettles, accidentally walked in a complete circle, and briefly lost Kiara when she wandered off toward a suspiciously aromatic bush.

Everyone was worn out, irritated, and silently blaming each other.

Kama inclined her head toward the treeline, squinting where Olga gestured. "If you're lying to us for attention again, I'm going to pluck every single hair from your head, strand by strand."

U-Olga responded with a smug smile, not bothering to look down. "I am above you in every sense of the word."

Tiamat sighed and rubbed her temples with both hands. "Can we go already? My feet hurt."

"No one cares about your feet, now move." Draco spoke out from behind her.

...

...

...

Everyone knew Draco fucked up.

Draco knew she fucked up.

"Nega-Gen—"

"WAIT MOM—NO—!"

---

After several more complaints, three short arguments, a beating, and a distracted detour when Koyanskaya insisted they walk around a suspicious patch of dirt that she claimed might be "trapped," they finally reached the outer edge of the village.

It was surrounded by tall, rotting fences. The gate was unlatched and tilted off its hinges. Beyond it, the path was dusty and lined with cracked cobblestones that suggested the area hadn't been maintained for a very long time. That detail wouldn't have mattered, except that the buildings were still standing. Most were two-story wooden homes with patched walls and crooked stone chimneys, and although the structures looked decrepit, they were clearly still in use.

Someone had lit the lanterns. Small windows had cloth behind them. Firewood had been chopped and stacked neatly by doorways. The air smelled faintly of soot and boiled roots.

None of the Beasts said anything for the first minute.

Kama dragged a fingernail along the rim of an old barrel, frowning at the mold crusting the side. "I feel like I walked onto the set of a plague documentary."

"It's medieval," Koyanskaya said, peering down at a broken wooden sign written in Latin. "Truly 14th. No plumbing and glass. This is either a historical reenactment village or we're not in the modern world anymore."

She doubted the latter view. Tablet still has a signal, and the mana in the air hasn't changed.

There are people there. Dozens of children were walking the streets. They wore ragged clothes that matched the buildings in their condition; coarse linen, faded wool, sandals, or bare feet. Most were carrying buckets or sacks of grain or sticks. Some tended to crude vegetable patches beside their homes.

They weren't playing, or laughing, or doing anything a normal child would. In fact, they moved like laborers. Their backs were bent slightly. Their expressions were completely blank. One passed within five feet of Tiamat, carrying a rusted iron pail with both hands, and didn't even glance at the Beasts.

Fou hopped forward and said, "Fou."

Tiamat's eyes widened. She knelt, quickly grabbed the arm of the next child that walked past, and looked into his face.

"These aren't children," she said. "They're adults. Their bodies have regressed, but their minds haven't. I can feel it. They're not thinking like children."

Angra raised both brows. "You're saying they're stuck like this?"

Tiamat didn't answer right away. She let go of the child's arm, who continued walking without a bother, and stood up. "I don't think they even realize it anymore. It's not just their bodies. They've lost a part of their mind."

Kama complained. "Great. Another creepy village. Fantastic. Really loving the cursed setting. Maybe next we find a haunted orphanage full of sobbing dolls."

Kiara leaned in toward one of the children and smiled. The child didn't look up. She pursed her lips at the lack of response.

"None of them are responding to stimuli unless asked. If you ask me, that's either heavy trauma or something interfering with base cognition. I could conduct a few tests if we find one who can still speak."

"No," Draco said flatly. "You're not touching anyone."

"I didn't say touch. Just observe. Maybe undress one to check for–"

"You're not doing anything," Kama snapped, moving between them.

Angra walked over to a wooden table in the middle of the village square. Several children sat around it, eating from small wooden bowls with carved spoons. He picked one up and sniffed it, then dipped a fingertip in and tasted it without much thought. His expression didn't change as he slowly lowered the bowl.

"Tastes like wet dust," he said. "No fat or starch. No salt and actual content. Just boiled pulp. They're eating to survive in contrast to live."

"Obviously," Draco muttered, folding her arms again.

U-Olga descended, landing next to them with a light hop. "Something's suppressing their drive," Tiamat whispered after a moment. "I can't tell if it's magical or systemic. I just know it's not natural. They've forgotten how to be alive."

They moved deeper into the village without saying much, the narrow streets pressing in tighter with every corner. The fog had thinned out just enough to reveal the full decay of the place, from rotted beams, blackened windowpanes, and doorways leaning off their hinges. The deeper they went, the more planned the layout became. At first, it had seemed random, the way abandoned places often do, but now it was clear someone had designed this path, straight toward the center.

Something was being presented to them.

At the very heart of the village square, on a low dais choked in ash and splintered cobblestones, was the statue.

It was gold, or something made to look like it, metal slick with grime, yet unmistakably radiant under the sunlight filtering through the clouds. The figure depicted was that of an adult woman dressed in the robes of a nun, detailed with a precision that suggested reverence from whoever had built it. Her face was calm, eyelids gently lowered in an almost asleep expression, but her hands were held open at her sides in a welcoming gesture; both arms lowered, palms open, fingers barely curled.

It would have looked ordinary if not for the strange detail on the cloth she wore that flowed neatly down her legs: a vertical slit ran up the side of her habit, exposing a pale, sculpted thigh with no signs of weathering or wear, as if that part had been polished recently.

Angra gave a low whistle before leaning back with a hand in his pocket and amusement stretched across his face from the statue's plinth.

"She is sexy as hell," he muttered, eyes flicking to the exposed thigh before returning to the face. "Nuns shouldn't look like they're about to walk a fashion show. Kiara might finally have some competition. Tight clothes, serene expression, and just enough heresy to make it interesting. Kiara might have competition." His tone was mocking, but there was a flicker of genuine intrigue under it. Beside him, Fou had clambered onto the edge of the dais and was staring up at the figure as well.

"Fou," the creature said with something like approval.

Kiara walked a slow circle around the base of the statue. "The proportions are modestly indulgent," she said with a pleased hum. "The garment design is derivative, but the intention is solid. I'll give her points for aesthetic restraint… and the thigh." She glanced sideways at Angra, amused. "Your taste remains reliably honest."

Draco looked away with a grimace. "I can't believe this is what we're stopping for."

U-Olga clicked her tongue and rubbed the bridge of her nose in disbelief. "Unbelievable. A statue with a slit in the skirt and you two immediately revert to degenerates. At least try to act like we're investigating something mysterious."

Tiamat raised her hand and, without any apparent delay or hesitation, struck Angra at the back of his head hard enough to make a dull smack. The other slap landed on Fou's tiny head a heartbeat later, lighter but no less deliberate. "Stop gawking and focus. You're both embarrassing."

Angra took the hit with a shrug and rubbed the back of his head. "Mother of the year, right here," he said flatly, still staring at the statue.

Koyanskaya lifted her tablet and held it up to the statue. Her demeanor didn't shift, but there was an alertness in her pose that hadn't been there before. She wasn't admiring the craftsmanship.

The tablet pinged after a few seconds. Koyanskaya stared at the results for a long moment before narrowing her eyes and adjusting the screen brightness. "This statue matches a sketch from a Hungarian child psychology report dated 1883. Recovered from a mental institution in Budapest." She scrolled down with a flick of her finger. "It was from an interview with a child survivor of a mining town collapse. He was found half-dead, starved, covered in soot. Couldn't cry and couldn't smile. Didn't remember his name. But he kept drawing the same figure, called her the 'sleeping lady with bleeding eyes who says she loves us all.'"

She turned her device so the others could see the archived sketch: a crude charcoal drawing of the same nun, with deep red ink smudged under the eyes. The style was childish but clear in intention.

"Same face." She paused, then added, "Either he saw this, or something wearing her face."

Kama leaned forward to get a better look, then tilted her head to the side with a raised brow. "Huh. Not bad. The proportions are cleaner than I expected from a starving child. Good structure, and minimal line confusion. Someone should've put him in art school instead of locking him in an asylum."

Kiara gave Kama a sideways look that lasted a little too long. Kama ignored it.

Draco sighed and stepped back. "This isn't some village relic. We're not dealing with local folklore."

U-Olga stepped beside Angra and pointed at the drawing on Koyanskaya's tablet. "That bleeding-eye detail. Do you think it was literal, or just some symbolic interpretation? I want to know whether we're dealing with an apparition, a tulpa, or something more biological."

"It wasn't symbolic," Koyanskaya said, closing the screen. "Every record from that year listed blood as real. Even the doctors believed it. One of them went missing later. No body recovered."

She stared at her device with a visible frown, tapping the screen and muttered about weak signal strength and fluctuating network bars.

The rest of them decided to scatter through the silent, eerily unreactive village.

Tiamat took the left side, passing by rows of houses that all looked nearly identical, though some had slightly rotting window frames while others were marked with chalk-like glyphs. U-Olga and Angra wandered down the central lane, sticking together in an unspoken arrangement that was more practical than sentimental.

"Are you going to speak at all?" U-Olga finally said to a woman standing beside a flower cart with withered petals. "Do you understand me or are you all trained to ignore people?"

No response.

Angra crossed his arms and leaned against the same cart. "Maybe they're just bad actors."

"Keep making jokes, maybe one will land someday," Kama said without looking back, approaching a hunched man who was sweeping an already clean doorstep with robotic motions. "Hey, miracle town. Got anything to say about the sexy statue at your core, or is the broom more important?"

Nothing.

Eventually, Draco returned to the square with a faintly scowling face, and everyone gathered around in a loose circle, each of them wearing some level of frustration or confusion.

"Any answers?" Angra asked, not expecting much.

"Only after I threatened to melt one of their faces off," Draco muttered, arms crossed tightly. "Then they all suddenly had mouths. Cowards."

U-Olga laughed. "So now we're interrogating civilians with death threats."

"Worked," Draco said plainly. "They all say the same thing when asked about this place. They live in 'peace.' They say it expressionless, with no explanation or emotional variance, like a script."

Tiamat returned shortly after, brushing off some dust from her arm. "They repeat it, yes. No specifics, no names, no memories of when this village was founded or who governs it. Just that they are in 'peace' and everything is 'peaceful.' I don't think it's ignorance. I think it's manufactured."

"I asked the same thing three different ways and one of them just stared past me like I wasn't there," Kama added, now seated on a stone bench and peeling some bark off a nearby post. "So yes, either they're defective people or extremely devout."

Fou hopped once and let out a short "Fou," which nobody commented on.

That was when Koyanskaya walked back toward them. Her shoes made soft clicks against the stone as she stopped in the middle of their circle.

"I have something," she said. "Though it was a mess getting past the loading screens. Apparently, this town has been tied to a local legend for about four centuries. The statue is modeled after someone real. A canonized nun named Sister Theophana."

Kiara tilted her head, interest finally replacing some of the lethargy in her expression. "The name sounds fancy."

"She was canonized during the Black Death," Koyanskaya continued. "Which is historically convenient, given how many were desperate for miracles back then. The church titled her the Blessed Bearer of Stillness. Her miracle, according to documents, was turning entire towns into 'peace.' That's the phrasing. Nothing else. Just 'peace.'"

"Peace doesn't explain why the villagers talk like puppets with drained batteries," Angra said. "Was her miracle removing their brains?"

"There's more," Koyanskaya added. "She supposedly died a martyr. No known records of how, but they buried her in this region. Somewhere within the Sanctum Forest. Her grave was never found."

Draco immediately looked around, then turned her glare toward the villagers again. "If they know about the grave, we're wasting time here."

She marched over to the same broom-sweeping man from earlier and barked, "Where is her grave?" in a tone that was less request and more threat.

Surprisingly, he answered.

Maybe it had something to do with the aura of a Beast.

Without hesitation, he raised one arm, and pointed toward the back end of the village, past the crumbling well and beyond the tree line where the buildings started to thin.

"The outskirts," he said emotionlessly.

Draco returned to the group and repeated what she was told.

"They said it's at the outskirts. Toward the village's back. That's where they buried her."

When they got there, the trees suddenly became denser than they first looked. They didn't even need to guess the sentient trees were at it again.

The wall of trees swallowed whatever trail the villager had supposedly pointed out. The path wasn't worn or cleared, there were no footprints ahead of them, and the branches above blocked most of the light, pushing their eyes to adjust immediately.

Kiara brushed her fingers against her temple. Her tone is not relaxed. "If this is a grave, it's the least ceremonial one I've seen."

U-Olga turned toward Draco. "We split. Same agreement as before. Signal if anything changes."

Draco gave a short nod, her expression blank, and walked in the opposite direction with Kiara trailing her, while U-Olga lingered just long enough to watch them go.

On the other side of the trail, Angra headed deeper. "They didn't lie about the direction, but there's no sign of a grave."

Fou looked behind them, toward the invisible line separating the village and the forest. Tiamat turned her head toward that same direction at almost the same time.

Choosing to remain back in the village, Kama and Koyanskaya returned to the center where the statue stood. The air around the statue was stale. Kama didn't know what to think of it. Koyanskaya held her tablet, waiting for the next refresh to go through. The signal bar kept flickering, going from one to none and back again.

Koyanskaya flicked the screen. "It's not just bad reception. It keeps jumping in intervals. Like something's blocking and releasing the signal by pattern."

Kama didn't answer. Her eyes were fixed on the statue's face.

"Look at her chin," she said quietly. "There wasn't anything there earlier."

Koyanskaya looked at her confused but zeroed in on the status. The pale stone beneath the nun's eyes was wet, and streaked downward in two uneven trails that dripped toward the base. It wasn't water. The fluid was too thick, and it clung too well to the surface. When Koyanskaya leaned closer, instinct pushed her to identify it even if her logic didn't want her to. Blood. There was no smell at first, but once she focused, the faint, coppery scent started to rise.

"I'm not imagining that," Kama said. She wasn't trying to keep calm for the sake of it. She was watching the statue's chest now. "There's also milk."

"What?" Koyanskaya stepped around. Her jaw locked in place. She stared at the smear coming from the breast of the statue, now visibly leaking a cloudy, viscous substance that was pooling on the base.

Then everything around them changed. The screams hit sooner.

The entire village erupted in one sudden, jarring moment. Wailing, screaming, crying, the impact of dozens of voices screaming over each other. The villagers all stopped whatever they were doing and fell to their knees at once. Some had thrown their arms into the air, others slammed their heads to the ground, while several collapsed outright and began clawing at the stone plaza.

"She's back!"

"She returned!"

"The lady has returned!"

"Praise the miracle!"

Several rushed toward the statue, tearing at their clothes, reaching up to touch the stone, completely ignoring Kama and Koyanskaya as if they weren't even there. One girl flung herself forward and wrapped both arms around the statue's feet, sobbing into the base. Another boy screamed that his sins were seen, then slammed his head into the stone repeatedly until blood began to spill down his face.

Kama's face contorted in repulsion as the scene while her hand hovered near her. She didn't summon her weapon, but her entire body was in tension.

"They weren't like this before. What made them trigger this?"

Koyanskaya's face went cold. She lowered the tablet and hid it away.

The people looked past the statue together, toward the edge of the road leading into the forest, where the trees broke into a small path.

The two Beasts caught a glimpse of a woman walking toward their direction, composed, surrounded by the villagers who had gathered at the edge of the open square.

The people parted for her slowly, each one lowering their heads or clasping their hands together with a kind of worshipping that wasn't performative. They were too consistent and they simply knew what to do, all at once, which only made the unease crawl deeper.

The closer the woman came, the more her appearance clarified. Her garments were traditional, clearly that of a nun from a bygone era, though kept in pristine condition. Her face was collected in a way that didn't mean ignorance. A pair of gray eyes half-lidded in a neutral way.

Kama narrowed her eyes slightly, recognizing the woman's face, then turned her attention to the statue behind them. She made the connection before Koyanskaya spoke.

"That's the same person. The people modeled the statue off her."

Koyanskaya nodded once, briefly. "Then that makes her Sister Theophana."

The woman stopped just at the edge of where the statue's stone shadow met the dirt. The villagers formed a loose arc behind her, none of them touching her, but all standing just close enough to be a crowd. She looked at both Kama and Koyanskaya with interest.

"I bid thee welcome,"

A formal voice. Her tone was soft, carrying some old regional English that sounded out of time.

"I perceive thee as wayfarers, or mayhaps pilgrims, drawn to the grounds of Sanctum Nocte Silvarum. Whether by fate or errant chance, thou art met here without contest."

Kama's thoughts worked through the inconsistencies. The village architecture was old, sure, but even if Theophana had been from the 1300s, she shouldn't be here. Not as she was. There was no preservation technique that would account for a living human from that period to now. Magecraft could, but the way this woman's presence was welcomed by every single villager without hesitation was more than standard enchantment or charm. Did belief preserve her body alive?

"You're not dead," Kama said plainly, watching for even the smallest reaction. "You're a living human, not a spirit or a recreation."

Theophana's expression did not change, hands remaining folded at her waist.

"I am as the Lord hath chosen to preserve," she answered. "My flesh bears no decay, for mine service remaineth unfulfilled. The hour of my final rest hath not been granted."

"That's not an answer," Koyanskaya said, keeping her tone light, but her words sharp. "You're surviving off something. What kind of curse magic you use to earn such a lifespan?"

Theophana do not bore the look of offense. It looked more like she was acknowledging the question, as one would when dealing with someone used to transactional dialogue.

"I inquire of you in return," she said evenly. "What doth thou seek from this place, and from me? Speak truly, for my house suffers no fraudulence."

Kama was already prepared. "We didn't come here looking for you. Your people went quiet, lifeless. Then they turned into zealots the moment blood and milk leaked from your statue. You can say we're investigating the zone this village stood in. So now we're standing here trying to figure out if you're the cause of it or just the result."

Theophana waited before answering. Her eyes shifted to the side, only briefly, before coming back to meet theirs.

"This village remaineth under divine observance," she said. "Its people doth know their station. Their joy is not disorder, but revelation. Such is the proof of providence."

The way she spoke felt like a performance, not toward them. She wasn't convincing Koyanskaya or Kama. It's almost like she was reminding the villagers to reaffirm something. A script, maybe, or a pattern of words that she'd said many times before.

The crowd behind her began stepping closer. There was no question that it was coordinated. One of the boys began kneeling, holding out what looked like a bundle of dried herbs.

Koyanskaya clicked her tongue, raised her hand, and snapped her fingers sharply.

The impact was immediate. A shock pulse discharged from her fingers, short-ranged, just strong enough to send an invisible wave through the air. The villagers dropped almost at the same time, slumping where they stood or collapsing backward. None were injured, but all were knocked unconscious without even enough awareness left to react.

Theophana watched it happen. Her eyes took on the children's bodies without any alarm.

"I don't let strangers crowd me." Koyanskaya flatly let out.

A blunt statement of what had just occurred and why. She wasn't apologizing, nor was she making a threat.

Theophana glanced at the villagers, then back to the two Beasts.

"I see thee travel under no burden of hesitation," she said. "Thine company carryeth not fear of judgment, nor of consequence."

"Call it pragmatism," Kama replied. "Now that the crowd is out of the way, maybe we can have a real conversation. If you're going to claim divine preservation, then prove it. Otherwise, you're a fraud, and I'll have to start digging through this place until I find what's keeping you alive."

Theophana didn't answer right away. Her lips pressed together briefly in consideration.

"There is yet time for understanding. Though mine patience is not without end, I shan't deny parley." she said slowly.

Koyanskaya didn't look impressed. Her eyes remained focused on the woman, searching for anything that betrayed her control. Her expression, her movements, the cadence of her responses. Practically everything about Theophana was invariant in a way that didn't make sense. She didn't speak like someone unsure of herself, but she also didn't push any superiority. She was willing to explain, but never giving away more than was necessary.

That kind of behavior usually meant the truth was being managed. She wasn't hiding from detail.

Kama turned her head slightly toward Koyanskaya and spoke low.

"Let's not push her yet. We need to know what it is before we get ahead of it."

Koyanskaya didn't disagree.

"You are no daughters of man," Theophana suddenly said accusingly, "The air around thee twisteth. One reeketh of divine sensuality. The other reeketh of the wild, of spirits not borne of the Word."

Koyanskaya opened her mouth, paused, then let Kama take it if she wanted to.

"You're perceptive for a shut-in nun," she said, examining Theophana's face. "Though you're not wrong. I'm a god. I used to be worshipped. Still am, in places that forgot to update their worldview."

There was a flicker of recognition in Theophana's eyes. She turned her head, speaking without concern.

"Thee art a foreign thing," she said, now looking at Koyanskaya. "Thy spirit hath no home in these lands. Nor is thy scent borne of any flesh. I feeleth fox and trickery, but thy form doth betray no lie."

The nun's choice of words was irritatingly precise. Invasive, like someone who opened a door you hadn't realized was unlocked. She adjusted her stance slightly, subtle enough not to be read as a shift in manner.

"Are you used to sniffing your guests?" Koyanskaya asked.

Theophana continued speaking.

"These behind me, they art my children. They cameth to me with fear, with want, with longing to be free. I gaveth them peace, and in peace they did slumber. No dream, no sorrow. No pain."

Kama's eyes flickered. She studied the fallen villagers.

"They asked to be saved," Theophana continued. "Their hands were clasped in prayer, to one who remained when all else faded. So I did answer. For I am Theophana. I healed the sick in the days when plague did not discriminate, and the Church turned away its eyes. I saw children orphaned, mothers raped, and brothers hanged for bread. I answered, and the Lord did not stop me."

Something about the way Theophana said that... factual. It was too smooth, because no one talked about healing and death like they were record-keeping unless something was missing, unless your mentality is on the likes of Kiara.

Koyanskaya was more suspicious. Every word the nun said was too tidy like it had been practiced before, probably repeated to herself.

"You say you saved them," Koyanskaya said sharper. "Did they stay like this by choice?"

Theophana turned her head. "Each did beg in his own tongue. Some wished to forget, others to stay. None hath left my care in five hundred years."

"You're telling us what they said before, not what they wanted after."

"There is no after," Theophana replied. "They art content. Time touch them not. Their limbs remembereth no weight. Their hearts do not break. They liveth in perfect stillness. As lambs protected by the shepherd's hand."

Kama felt something twist in her gut. The phrasing made her feel sick. Perfect stillness wasn't life. Nothing about it was what Kama expected. This was control. Eternal, unchanging, frozen affection? No fear, no sadness, no individuality? That was how gods made dolls.

"I care not for Rome's blessings," Theophana said, simply. "The Word dwelleth not in marble halls, nor through the lips of drunken men in silk. It came through blood and plague and sorrow. And in answering it, I ceased to die."

A sentence that discarded the boundary between mortality and permanence.

Theophana stepped forward.

"Ye who seek to know, ask what thy natures want of this place. Speak now. My children watch through closed eyes, but their souls mark thy trespass."

Koyanskaya narrowed her eyes again. There was no threat in the words. But they still sounded like one.

"Would thee not stay with us?"

What?

"The night is young, yet sacred, and rest would ease thy hearts. There is no harm here. No command. Merely invitation."

Behind Theophana, the villagers who were previously unconscious started standing up and are now at quiet attention. That lack of reaction was too flat to be real, and the longer Kama stared at them, the more obvious it became that none of them were truly awake.

Koyanskaya glanced toward Kama. She wasn't interested in whatever emotional bait was being laid out. This nun had no real authority. The spellwork or whatever spiritual shroud cloaked the minds of the people here could be undone if they wanted it undone. Still, there was something off about the pace. Theophana didn't try to restrain them or trap them or even hint at any of that.

Of course, Kama made the decision. "We're not staying."

"I did not think thou would," Theophana said, closing the distance. She stopped only a few feet away now. Her body didn't show threat, but Kama felt it anyway.

Something was ready to follow them.

"I ask again, if only to test thy resistance. Not all things are done in a single request. We do repeat ourselves, we humans. Persistence proves sincerity. I have been many things in life, children, a sister, and once, a woman cloaked in lowly hunger for touch. Yet now I stand here, one mother among many, guarding lives who knew pain before peace. They asked me to shelter them, and I did. To leave them in silence would be cruelty."

"Calling yourself a mother when you rewrote them is ironic."

Theophana nodded. "I removed agony, yes. I removed memory. Is that wrong to do, if in place of it comes joy? Must salvation always require consent if the outcome is healing?"

Kama's brow furrowed. "You mean slavery."

"They sleep. But they live. No man strikes his wife here. No babe starves. No boy grows to envy or kill. They do not labor for coin, nor bleed for gods they never met. Tell me truly, what freedom have you known that did not come with suffering?"

Theophana's voice grew louder, more firm and heavier. "Thou art not like them, I know this. Spirits, one of nature, one of forgotten pleasure. Ye are not here by chance. I saw this in dream. That the unclean beasts would walk through the valley and meet mine fold, and that from them, some seed would decide. Whether death, or continuation."

"Dreams are just thoughts without filters," Koyanskaya said. "They don't make you a prophet."

"I am not a prophet. Only a woman given clarity in illness and flame," Theophana replied, her words unbothered. She took one more step forward. "So I ask once more, with all I have: Remain with us. Give thy bodies no burden for a while. In peace, not captivity."

"No," Kama answered.

Theophana didn't retreat. She didn't speak either, not even waiting for another word. Kama didn't like the silence.

"I said no," Kama repeated. "And don't try to step closer again. You keep pretending this is peace, I'll show you what I do when people touch me without permission."

Kama had cut off whatever patience she had been faking. It wasn't a bluff. She could kill the entire valley if she wanted to, and no one here would be able to stop her.

As soon as she said it, the reaction was immediate.

The people behind Theophana sprang.

It was instant. The entire crowd, every man, woman, and child, rushed forward in sync.

Koyanskaya's reaction was pure reflex. Her arm moved with nails lengthening into claws. Kama flicked one hand to the side, her aura blooming with a wave of heat that sent several villagers tumbling away without even touching them directly. Still, more kept coming without fear. They kept moving at a speed that didn't match normal humans. Like they weren't just enthralled but physically altered, reinforced somehow. Koyanskaya grabbed the first two that reached her and slammed their heads together, watching their skulls crack open like they were made of shells.

There was no mourning here. The Beasts knew the people were long gone. What's left behind are but husks.

Kama grabbed one by the throat, flung him aside, and then struck three more in rapid sequence, each one crumpling with internal damage their bodies didn't understand. They crawled back to their feet. Not all, but enough.

Koyanskaya cursed under her breath, kicked a man in the chest hard enough to cave his ribs, and then turned toward Theophana. The nun watched everything without blinking, her arms loosely at her sides, her smile no longer reaching her eyes.

"She's not controlling them by command," Kama said. "It's a reaction. I think it's tied to me threatening her. Some instinctive defense."

"Then shut her up first," Koyanskaya said coldly.

Kama nodded and stepped forward past two more villagers she crushed under a wall of energy that tore open the ground. She kept her eyes on Theophana the whole time. The woman didn't run as the people surged around her like she was a pillar.

Kama raised her hand again, preparing to finally erase the woman's presence in a single motion. She didn't feel guilt. This wasn't someone to spare. Whatever she was, it wasn't a person anymore.

But something still didn't add up.

Over three hundred people moved like parts of one nervous system. Kama's eyes flicked once to the sky, then to the corners of the valley, wondering what the catch was.

Why wasn't Theophana worried about the implications of a god's power?

Koyanskaya noticed it too. Her expression was no longer irritated but watchful.

Kama's fingers nearly touched Theophana's face. There was a silence that didn't feel right.

The nun's calm face made no sense.

The surroundings warped. It didn't distort in a visual sense; it was perceptual.

Kama didn't register it through her eyes or ears. Something twisted in her sense of direction, her grasp on space, her understanding of where her body was. She blinked.

Everything was gone. Only stillness and a pale fog that felt layered, like it wasn't in front of her, but somehow folded into her.

She knew this was a trap, not a memory or hallucination. Some kind of crafted mental space or bounded domain. She didn't know the method, but the effect was clear. A spiritual maze, probably meant to disorient her or break her guard. Kama wasn't impressed.

"Trying illusions, are we?" Kama said aloud.

Her lips curled upward in a taunting manner. "Do you really think this kind of thing is new to me? I've slaughtered monks with purer minds than yours. I could untangle this kind of psychic trickery before I was even a full Beast."

She initiated walking. There was nothing to walk toward, just the act of walking to test the limits of this conjured space. Her steps didn't make sound, and the ground beneath her didn't feel textured. She wasn't sure if it was stone, dirt, or air pretending to be solid.

"Did you expect I would panic? That I would start clawing for exits or scream your name?" She couldn't tell if she had moved forward at all. "If this is your attempt to redeem those mongrel villagers by stalling me, you should have tried sorcery with a little more depth."

Still no change. Her eyes narrowed. That was the only interesting part. Usually, illusions began to fray at the seams when she mocked the caster, when her consciousness pressed against the boundaries with scorn.

"Nothing? No reaction?" Kama laughed. "Then fine. I'll play along for now. If this is the best effort you're capable of, Theophana, I'll give you a single chance. One endeavor. One opportunity to convince me that your methods are worth anything."

Her voice dropped to a low, conversational tone. "If you can say one thing, just one, that even starts to make me hesitate, I'll spare this place. You don't even have to change my mind. Just... startle me."

The silence extended.

Kama waited.

"You've never left that pause, so why must you speak of hesitation?"

Kama froze.

The voice continued, level and familiar, "You never advanced past the moment your own identity became twisted into control. You call it love, but all you've done is drag it behind you like a weapon."

It was not Theophana. It wasn't interested in persuading or challenging. It didn't rise in righteous anger or righteous pity.

Her jaw set in recognition.

That voice wasn't random. It's who still existed. Something she had hated.

She turned.

The fog stopped being in the way. And what stood ahead of her was exactly what she expected to see the moment the voice had spoken, though she had never once admitted it might still linger.

Kama's internal rhythm cracked.

No. No, no, this should not be here. This wasn't something that could break through. This was rejected. Gone. Kama had made sure of that. She had evolved. She had severed. This should not be alive.

She was looking at her.

"You," Kama growled, voice low.

The woman ahead of her didn't look angry. Her presence filled the space with an unbearable peace.

Kama refused to move.

"Parvati."

---

Whatever presence had claimed this place is still coiled beneath to watch the intruders crawl over its traces. Angra knew it was pointless to keep going in this direction, but wasting time was half the point for him. The other half was seeing how long it would take Tiamat to start mumbling again.

Fou leaped over another rock, hitting the cracked ground with soft puffs of dirt. His ears twitched every few seconds. Just more dead terrain stretching into the woods and fading into fog.

"This is the fifth corpse," Angra counted, stepping past a partly crushed skeleton propped up under a blackened tree, its ribs shattered inward.

He pointed toward it, vaguely. "Fou, sniff it."

Fou deadpanned and stared up at Angra.

"I'm serious," Angra said again, kicking some dust off his foot. "We're clearly being fed some trash puzzle box nonsense, and I'd rather you waste your time than mine. Sniff. Dead thing. Go."

"Fou," came the curt noise, followed by a sharp shake of the creature's tiny head.

Before Angra could respond with more sarcasm, Tiamat stepped up behind with a vaguely disapproving expression, which meant the complaint was already forming.

"Fou is not a hound. What kind of broken logic lives inside that skull of yours?"

"I'm exploring possibilities," Angra replied plainly, his hand waving in a circle. "If this place is a setup, then the rules are fake too. For all we know, it takes a mythic furball to trigger a reveal. Maybe we're in a labyrinth where bones smell like backdoors."

"Kyu!"

Tiamat stared at Angra for a long second, and looked down at Fou, "Everything is nonsense, even when the answer is right in front of you."

"Everything is nonsense because nine out of ten times it is," Angra said, already walking again. "And the one time it's not, someone ends up dying after trying to act noble about it."

They pressed forward through a broken fence of rusted iron, the woods parting around a warped structure that barely held together.

The remains of a church sat crooked in the field, leaning against its own shadow. A medieval ruin, gray stone streaked with darker mold, its tiny bell tower collapsed and buried behind it. Most of the roof was caved in.

It wasn't masking, but the field around it was warping.

A Bounded Field.

Angra let his body enough to feel the pressure in his skin. The edge of it didn't repel, it sank. He could smell something wet under the surface. Not literal water, just an emotional thickness that reminded him of empty rooms and the ghosts behind closed doors.

Fou walked in without hesitation. Angra followed with a shrug.

"If you get cursed, it's your fault," he said to Tiamat without turning around.

"Nice of you to say your advantage because you're already cursed," she said. "I'm only here because someone has to stop you from turning every mistake into a comedy sketch."

Inside the church was even worse. The pews were missing. The altar had collapsed and been dragged to the side. Mold lined the cracked walls in uneven strips, and everything smelled faintly of ash and dried blood.

In the middle of the open space, a single rectangular tomb lay embedded into the stone floor, surrounded by strange, thin markings.

Tiamat paused near the entrance, staring forward.

"The grave is open," Angra pointed out the obvious, walking around the side.

The stone slab had been pushed from the inside. Something had gotten up and walked out. The inside was pitch black. No bones.

"You getting horror movie vibes yet?" Angra said lightly. "Because I am. Missing corpse. Rotting chapel. Some freak field effect trying to jam its way into your head. I swear if a girl in white hair starts crawling out of that, I'm spewing Noble Phantasms."

Tiamat ignored him to kneeled beside the tomb. The interior wasn't exactly empty. It was humming with a familiar function. A Conceptual Boundary.

"This isn't just a burial site. It's an anchor point. The grave itself has been transformed into a sealed boundary that affects the laws of cognition."

Angra tilted his head, unimpressed. "In English?"

He understands it, of course. He just wants an easy and direct dialogue.

"It freezes emotional progression," Tiamat felt her brow furrowing. "Whatever was buried here wasn't meant to be mourned. This is a trap designed to preserve stasis. It halts grief and acceptance. The longer one remains inside it, the more their growth reverts, emotionally, spiritually, even mentally. At first, I thought it could be a regression by age. It's a regression by sentiment. It essentially nullifies healing."

"That's... kind of depressing," Angra admitted, "So what, someone built a time capsule of suffering and sealed it with magic so it never fades?"

"I don't know if it was sealed for pain or from it," Tiamat murmured, still staring into the open tomb. "But whoever or whatever came out of here, they carried that stagnation with them. This was a prison."

"Fou..." the beast muttered from near a cracked window.

He turned around and looked at Tiamat. "You scared?"

"Yes."

Angra snorted softly. "You're supposed to be the mom of monsters, and this made you shiver?"

"I don't fear the grave," she rise slowly, her hands curled slightly at her sides. "I fear what kind of mind thinks this is how you bury something."

She stayed crouched near the grave, hands brushing lightly over the edge of the hole as her eyes flicked between the broken patterns of the warped boundary. Every time she tried to examine the threads of prana layered over the soil, the energy pulled away from her senses.

Her fingertips tingled from the proximity to the spatial pressure, and though she wouldn't admit it out loud, her discomfort had already settled in her chest long before they entered the church.

Angra left her to it. Whatever it was, she'd figure it out. She was the nurturing one.

He stepped off to the side, Fou hopping next to him with light clicks against the rotting wooden floor. Angra's eyes moved across the interior again, taking in the crooked cross at the altar, the faint image of some saint etched into the cracked stone. There were shelves near the back, almost falling apart, with faded bindings stacked unevenly across them. It looked like no one had been here in centuries, which made it all the more suspicious that the grave felt active.

He scratched the side of his neck and stepped toward the shelves. Some of the books crumbled when he tried to pick them up, their pages so brittle they broke in half. Others were half-consumed by mold. He tossed those aside. One had a thick leather binding with a metal clasp, still shut tightly despite the rust, and he pulled it open after breaking the latch. It smelled of dried blood and damp rot, but the ink was still legible.

The title on the first page was scrawled in jagged, rushed hand: Testament of Sister Theophana, Year of our Lord 1346. He raised a brow, flipping through the first few entries. The writing was inconsistent. Some sections were clean, while others were filled with scratches and lines overlapping one another. Fou sniffed at one page, sneezed, and sat next to the shelf.

Angra read slowly. The script was a mix of archaic Latin and early English, which only a half-literate church scribe could manage.

" By his most blessed will, the miracle did not move me. Yet the others, they do not stir. Brother Emmerick knelt by the altar six days, unknowing. His eyes open, yet do not blink. Sister Helene's tears remain on her cheek, neither falling nor drying. I have taken to writing, though time here passes without hunger nor sleep. "

He flipped to another page, the ink darker, the script slanted and uneven.

" It began after the burial. The child of none, born under the red moon, brought dead by morning and buried with no prayer. The air changed, but I swore to remain. The stillness did not take me, only them. I prayed until I bled, but my mind does not break. I can see them, unmoving. I do not weep. I no longer know if I should. "

Angra frowned. His fingers hovered near the edge of the page, then turned again.

" Miracle it is not. He watches me. I see Him when the sun sets. A man in robes, face undone, with eyes that never meet mine. He waits near the grave. I ask if He is Christ, but He does not speak. He shows me the stillness and beckons me near. I do not move. "

Angra stopped. Either this nun lost her mind centuries ago, or she recorded something real. He doubted the former. Madness didn't manifest Bounded Fields.

Tiamat called from the grave without turning around. "Angra. This place doesn't work like normal. The boundary is... spreading. It absorbs stability, then rejects it."

"Yeah, I'm getting that from the diary of Nuns Gone Insane over here," he replied, holding up the book. "Sister Theophana recorded everyone in the church freezing like statues, mid-breath, mid-prayer. She stayed normal, or so she thinks. Then she talks about a guy with no face watching her from the grave."

Emotion becomes static. Angra blinked slowly. "It's like the worst version of eternal childhood. No memory of growth and recognition of change."

"Yes."

He looked back at the journal. The last page was written differently, scratched into the paper like someone was dragging a nail across it.

" I see Him. I do not grow. My heart remains still. I no longer remember the taste of guilt, nor the shape of joy. The Lord has forsaken me. I remain. I remain. I remain. I rem "

It trailed off. The last letters were smudged and half-torn.

Fou hissed lowly.

Angra felt like this nun wasn't just documenting her delusions, but was actively being warped. This church turned her into a boundary marker.

Tiamat turned. "I think she was used. Someone needed a human will to maintain the structure of the anomaly. The others were frozen, but she was made into an anchor and her thoughts created the internal logic."

Angra shifted a few more of the loose sheets,

" The sorrow groweth deeper by daye, and mine heart weepeth e'ery night with the weight of it. I hath seen the children of the village fallen silent, their play stoppeth, their joy vanished. They doth look to me for the Word, yet I cannot speak it. The miracle is stillness. The Lord maketh them still, free from sin, and in stillness is there no hurt, nor sin, nor thought. O what cruel mercy is this, that robbeth one of pain by robbing all things else? "

He lowered the page slightly, squinting at the next one. The ink here became shakier. The handwriting leaned at a cramped angle, like the writer's hand could not follow her thoughts anymore.

" I feeleth it now, verily. It cometh not from Heav'n but from behind it, whence no light may pierce. Yet do I believeth still, for the Lord hath spoken to me through quiet, and it is quiet I must make of the world. Salvation lieth in children, yet not those who doth grow or cry or loveth, nay, the truest innocence is silence. Still babes, mindless and unspoiled. I shall be mother unto them. "

Angra scratched his head. The edges of the paper had brown smudges, not from time, but something oily and dark. He did not care to speculate if it was blood or some kind of bile. Maybe both. The woman was coming apart piece by piece.

He turned the page over and kept reading.

" I hath buried the last of them beneath the holy stones, where no birds may peck nor rot take them. I know not if they yet breathe. Their skin is cold, their mouths shut, but they maketh no struggle. In the miracle they are still, and I must trust that it is joy they feeleth. For if it is not, then what have I done? "

Great. Religious psychosis with a god complex and maybe some necromancy on top. Truly textbook material.

Tiamat walked closer and looked over his shoulder. She stayed quiet as she read through the latest pages.

"'Still babes'," she repeated aloud. She stared forward for a few seconds before speaking again. "She wanted them to be safe forever."

"She killed them," Angra said bluntly.

"She didn't think she was," Tiamat replied.

He let that hang for a moment. It wasn't really a disagreement. He just didn't care to argue semantics when they both knew how these things went.

Tiamat continued in a thoughtful voice. "This reminds me of something I've been thinking for a long time."

She didn't say things like that unless she meant them.

"When I first saw them, I didn't want anything from them. I just wanted to be near them and I thought that was enough. But they ran from me anyway. Always. Again and again. I only wanted them to stay and be close. That was it. Just not to be alone. But they never did. They always chose to leave."

She looked directly at him.

"I know they were always supposed to outgrow me. They were supposed to build things and burn things and forget things. That's what makes them human. It just felt wrong to watch it happen."

He didn't say anything.

"I'm not angry at them. But when I see things like this," she tapped the journal with the back of her hand, "I understand it. That part of me that wants them to stop moving, just for a while. Stop changing, just stay. I understand why she did this."

"So you sympathize with a woman who murdered children because she wanted to freeze their innocence?" he asked flatly.

"I understand the emotion. I didn't say she was right." Tiamat's tone had a glaring edge. "Do you think I'm some idiot who can't tell the difference between wanting something and doing it?"

He didn't respond to that either. He could see she wasn't done.

She stared at the floor.

"I didn't want Humanity to love me. That would mean they never grew up. I just didn't want to be abandoned. I hated that part and I still do."

Angra nodded once, barely. "Congratulations. That's probably the most honest thing I've ever heard you say."

"Don't flatter me. I'm not trying to impress you."

"You aren't. That's what makes it tolerable."

Fou said "Fou," in a small tone, resting by Angra's foot now. He didn't know if the animal was reacting to the conversation or just tired.

Tiamat reached out and picked up another sheet. She scanned the lines without reading them aloud, then folded it in half and placed it to the side.

The last page of the journal did not crumble like the rest, despite its curled edges and water-damaged corners. Theophana's handwriting had lost its neatness. The lines wobbled, scratches overlapping previous sentences. The phrasing became erratic.

" ...thus hath I been made still within, stilled by mine own mercy. There shall be no more tears if none shalt be born to weep. There shall be no more anguish if none hath mind to know what grief be. This I accept. This I record. Let all who would be broken remain as children in warmth, with minds never aged, and hearts never grown. Eternal mercy. Eternal stillness. All shall be still, and none shall suffer. I have seen the Lord, and He did not turn away. I saw Him in the silence of the air. So now I remain. So now I become. "

And that was the last bit.

He flipped the book shut and dropped it. Mercy was dangerous when given to people who stopped believing others could handle pain. If this church had been her place of miracles, then this was her shrine. Her miracle was mercy.

"I thought it didn't make sense," Tiamat said. "But now it does. The way the stone reacted, it responded to me. Or rather, to the Conceptual Identity I carry. I didn't notice at first, it's a reactive Boundary. It was meant to seal something or hold it in place. It makes sense now. She came back because something brought her back."

"You're not wrong. She died. That much is obvious. That was a grave of her own making. Which means she probably died in here. But undead?" He shook his head. "No. That's not what came back. I've know undead. I know exactly how it works. You get up, but you don't return."

Tiamat turned back toward him with a thoughtful face. "Then what do you think she is now?"

He shrugged lightly.

"Don't know yet. But it's definitely not an undead. Not unless the term's been redefined. She's behaving like a person who decided to come back and stay."

Tiamat looked back toward the grave. Her eyes narrowed slightly. "I don't think she just came back on Will alone. That grave was reactive. The way it responded to me wasn't just an echo. That was a true Conceptual Boundary."

She let her mouth speak her mind aloud.

"If she came back from death, not as a ghost, or a spirit, then maybe she didn't come back in the traditional way. Something else tied to her idea of mercy."

Angra was already halfway to the answer in his head, and it irritated him.

"You're saying she became a Conceptual Entity."

"Yes. Her own idea of salvation. She wrote it herself. She laid it out in those notes. Eternal mercy. No suffering. No growth. No change. No cries. No maturity. Just spiritual childhood forever."

He kicked a piece of wood away from his foot and grunted. "I hate being right when it means more work for me."

Tiamat continued. "If she returned like that, then it was her own doing. She forced her own return through that belief, and whatever corrupted her gave her the way to do it. A Concept given form."

His face pulled into something close to annoyed clarity. "Stagnant Mercy. That's what she is now. She's the walking, breathing manifestation of the idea that mercy means freezing everything in place, forever."

He looked back toward the grave again and then rolled his eyes.

"Ophis, the other one... now her too. I swear, this damn world collects conceptual freaks like stray cats. Three now. Three full-blown Conceptual Entities just wandering around."

"I don't like what that implies. If her idea of mercy is to make everyone into unmoving children, then she's not going to stop at one village. She's going to see suffering in the world and decide the best way to fix it is to lock everyone in place. No future or past. Just one long pause." Tiamat said.

Angra rubbed the side of his face and muttered under his breath.

"I really hate martyrs. Especially ones who think they're helping."

A Conceptual Being was always trouble. It did not matter what category they fell under, whether they were still growing or already well-formed. Even Beasts had to take them seriously. Angra hated that. Dealing with gods, monsters, Phantasmal beings, and humans was predictable because all of them, regardless of strength, obeyed a certain logic.

Conceptual Beings didn't. They operated on ideas made into bodies, and those bodies usually came with the power to rewrite the rules of interaction just by existing.

He muttered something under his breath, rubbed the side of his neck, and gave the grave one last glance before turning back toward the altar. "We should go. We've already seen enough."

Fou's tail flicked slightly as he leaped into her arms, which made her step back from the table. She looked down at the creature, then back toward Angra.

"I don't think the village is going to stay quiet if she really is alive again," she said. "Not if she is something like us."

"I don't care," Angra said with no effort to hide his lack of concern. "Either way, this place is marked now. Whatever peace they used to have here is gone. Once that boundary was already breached. There's no turning it off anymore."

They began walking toward the doors, the church's old hinges creaking under the shift in air pressure. Both of them felt that there was no relief.

Just as they exited the main chamber, three familiar presences came into range. A moment later, Kiara, Draco, and U-Olga appeared at the far entrance of the church, the sound of footsteps on tile growing louder until they walked into view.

Kiara smiled. "You're here, dear Avenger. We were looking for you."

Draco puffed out. "You should've marked the damn trail. We wandered for thirty minutes through forested trash."

"It's under an old bounded field," Angra said. "Theophana set it up. Or whatever she turned into did."

U-Olga's arms crossed while she tilted her chin up slightly, eyeing the walls. "The nun?"

Tiamat looked over her shoulder at them. "It worked until the grave responded. Then the reaction caused the field to ripple. That's probably why you sense it now."

Kiara approached the altar casually, brushing dust from one of the books left behind. She stopped short when she noticed the opened grave through the far window. "That's not an accident."

"We know," Angra said.

"You think she returned?"

"I know she did," Tiamat answered before he could say anything else. "But not the same. She isn't walking around as a corpse. It's something... worse. Her existence itself had folded into the land, into a conceptual effect. The church, the grave, the field—it's all part of her, and she came back through it. That grave is not a grave. It's her. It's her final condition made stable in reality."

U-Olga slowly turned toward Angra. "Is that possible?"

"Unfortunately," he replied. "We already know two. The other one and Ophis. They're the obvious ones. But now there's a third." He muttered the words out of annoyance, dragging each syllable longer than necessary. "Stagnant Mercy."

Draco frowned at the term. "That's not a concept she could get powers from. That's a contradiction. Mercy isn't stagnant."

"It is if you stop the world from moving just so no one suffers," Tiamat said. "She said she didn't want people to cry. Her notes—she kept repeating them. Over and over. No more sadness. No more grieving. I thought it was emotional self-protection. It wasn't."

Kiara looked down at the journal laid out on the pew. Her hand touched the page lightly.

A following. But a cult nonetheless. So in the end, she was not different from Kiara.

"I understand her," Kiara said. "We both worshipped ourselves, didn't we? She with her mercy, me with my body. I twisted men with flesh and tongues. She twisted them with serenity and comfort. In the end, we each wanted to be the last thing anyone needed."

Draco looked toward Angra. "Are we letting her be?"

"No," he said. "But we're leaving for now."

"We're coming back?"

"We don't really have a choice. You know how this works. If she's actually formed herself into a Conceptual Being, then her presence here will attract others. The Grave alone is enough to start anomalies. Eventually, the local factions will detect it. Either way, this is going to escalate."

Conceptual Beings had a way of reshaping narrative space just by being present. They changed the questions being asked, the structure of events, and even the logic of cause and effect. Theophana would do the same. In fact, she had already started.

He clicked his tongue and muttered low enough for only himself to hear.

"We're going to regret letting her reach that point."

Angra didn't need to say anything.

Something hit them, a shock through their entire bodies—magic pressure, raw and overwhelming, a storm front crashing over a valley with nothing to stop it.

He felt it slam into his chest and knew it wasn't just some spell going off. That was divine-scale mana, divine and familiar. He knew Kama's magical signature better than anyone. Everyone here did. Blue light exploded in the distance a heartbeat later. It burst above the tree line, flooding the sky like some fantasy-colored wildfire.

Blue fire meant Kama's gone apeshit.

---

Her eyes were locked onto the familiar face in front of her. There was no mistake. The expression was gentle, the mouth was soft with concern, the tilt of the head restrained with no intent to alarm her. Parvati always looked like this, the mother goddess she was.

For almost a full minute, she couldn't form a thought. There was only the dead silence between them.

She let out a low breath that sounded too close to a scoff, then clutched the sides of her face, fingers digging into her cheeks until she dragged them down.

A breath forced its way out through her nose before everything broke.

A giggle came out.

It escalated.

The laughter crawled up her throat and broke out of her mouth in waves, first as choked gasps to louder. She tilted her head back, covering her face with both hands as her voice cracked and twisted through laughter as her shoulders shook violently.

Her back arched from the sheer force of it, the sound turning into something deranged as it dragged on.

"You fucking bitch......you actually went there... you actually did it... you stupid, empty nun." she whispered under her breath between breaths, eyes wide behind her fingers.

Kama snarled toward the void above as something rotten boiled up from her stomach. Her nails dug into her scalp, and she dragged them across, letting strands of hair get pulled along as her fingers trembled. "I gave you a single offer, just one. That was the endeavor I gave, and this was your answer, and you pissed on it. You think showing me this is going to rattle me?"

Blue sparks snapped across her skin. Her feet cracked the space beneath her as the first faint coils of blue flame slithered outward from her limbs, burning slow, patient, rising.

"You've already lost," Kama hissed to no one but knowing Theophana could hear, somehow. "You had one thread to cling to, and you reached for this. I gave you a fucking gesture, and you vomited this out as thanks?"

"Please," the illusion said softly.

Kama's neck jerked. Her eyes slowly dragged toward the voice.

She took a step forward and with the same warm tone that used to make Kama's skin crawl even before they met face to face. "You're upset. That's alright. But I want you to listen. You've been lost for so long, and no one has tried to reach you without wanting something in return."

Kama's arm extended to grab her by the neck, but stopped herself short. Her face twisted, expression contorting between revulsion and fury. "Shut up. I don't need your pity, and I definitely don't need you pretending to care. You're not real. A fake memory that nun threw together hoping I'd break down and cry like some regretful child. Pathetic."

"I'm not here to punish you or shame you," Parvati continued. "I'm here because you don't understand what you're doing. Your love is only a need to devour. You've taken everything from others because you believe you're owed it. You weren't taught how to love, so you twisted it into control. But that isn't what love is. You're not beyond healing. You've just never been allowed to learn."

Anger boils over from the base of her spine and into her gut. Her face twitched and her hands clenched. A blue flicker snapped into view near her wrists, growing louder with a crackling pulse that surged across her arms and up her chest. The flames curled upward and licked at her cheeks.

Blue fire exploded across the ground in a line. Kama raised both her hands, claws now lit with flickering blue fire. Her body shook with barely controlled aggression.

"Don't use her face to lecture me. You think you understand me just because you share a vessel with me. Do you have any idea what it's like to be born from pain, to be worshipped not as a goddess, but as a punishment!? You think I want to control people and enjoy breaking them open and bleeding them out until they love me back!?"

The fire whipped higher, strands of blue surging into the air above her. Kama's voice cracked under the strain, loud but shaking, barely holding itself steady under the pressure. Her breathing grew harsher as her throat burned.

"You think I wanted to be born to tempt people into destruction!? You think I chose to be the one people fear behind closed doors, the one whispered about with disgust and half-lust in every fucking altar they kneel at!? You want to act like I'm immature for not crawling toward your calm, quiet version of love when everything I ever knew was pain masked as desire!?"

Parvati didn't withdraw. "You are not your role, Kama. You can stop being Mara. That doesn't have to define you anymore. You're capable of love that doesn't hurt people."

Kama screamed. Raw air pushed through a throat that couldn't take it anymore. Her feet burned against the floor as the flames circled her now, spreading out and feeding off her rage and building toward something larger than either of them. The color deepened from blue to an unstable white-bluish hue that pulsed like it was about to explode.

"Stop pretending you care! Stop pretending anyone cares! Pity from you won't save me! You're nothing but a stupid echo of what love looks like to people who've never needed to earn it! I've earned everything I am through fire, hate, and blood! So don't you dare preach to me like I'm a mistake that needs fixing!"

The flames surged up past her chest, spreading into the air like veins of lightning, but not breaking anything. Kama stared down the Parvati in front of her, eyes bloodshot and teeth bared.

Parvati was infuriatingly determined to calm Kama. "I know what happened to you. I remember what they did. I felt it through the vessel. You can scream, burn, destroy everything around you, but I will always know what was taken from you. I won't deny that. But you are not alone. You just don't know how to be anything but angry yet."

"I will tear you to pieces."

"You can try. But that won't fill the hole inside you."

The blue-white light dimmed for a moment, but it returned quickly, even brighter. Her hands were shaking so hard now she couldn't close them. Her thoughts were scattered, tangled in the rage, tangled in the memories, tangled in the things she refused to name. This version of Parvati wasn't real. This wasn't her. She had to remember that. It was a weapon. A trap. Another trick meant to weaken her and rip her open from the inside.

Even if part of her couldn't stop listening.

Even if some part of her couldn't forget that voice.

Her lips twisted again. "You don't get to talk like you know me, Parvati."

The name felt bitter on her tongue. Like spitting out something poisonous she once tried to swallow.

"You are not alone, Kama. You never have been. Even if you've refused it and if your heart is twisted, there is still—"

Kama wasn't listening anymore.

That's enough for Theophana.

"Please... just listen—" the fake Parvati's voice was maybe pitiful. She extended her hand.

"You are nothing. You're not her. You're not even a functioning puppet. You don't deserve to have her voice."

"Kama, listen to me—"

"Stop calling me that." The air began distorting violently from the heat.

"I know you still want to be loved. I know you're angry because—"

"No, you don't. You don't know anything. You're a voice copied from a memory I never asked for."

"You keep pushing everything away. Even when someone offers you love."

"I don't want love if it comes from people like you," Kama growled. "That kind of love is built on compromise and pretending not to notice what hurts."

The world around them started melting. The shadow burned at the edges. The sky above cracked apart, chunks of it peeling like loose glass, shattering into nothing. The flames that came from Kama's body chased her fury instead of waiting for it.

"You don't understand what I've become," Kama said. "You don't understand what it means to embody desire itself. You don't get to tell me what love is. You don't get to tell me I'm immature, or broken, or 'not whole.' You don't get to talk about my heart like it's something you can fix."

The flames were everywhere. Blue fire poured through the illusion. The horizon caved in, the air filled with the scent of ozone and vaporized ash.

Kama raised her hand, her nails burning white-blue.

"I am Mara. I am Kama. I will drown every last scrap of your fake, patronizing voice."

She opened her palm. The illusion burst. In a single roar of heat and light, everything burned away. There was no explosion except that light swallowing light, and the whole space collapsed. Her feet hit something solid again.

Kama stood in the real world, finally breathing air that didn't taste like a lie.

The flames were gone, but her pressure hadn't lifted. It compressed the air like a lead weight. Her eyes searched the area in case Theophana had run. She didn't see movement. Not until the dust cleared and a shimmer of white fog formed in front of her, revealing a half-shattered dome of ice magic, thinning with every second.

Theophana was crouched behind it, her arms up, shield fraying, dress slightly scorched at the edges. Her face was annoyed.

Kama narrowed her eyes. "You really used ice to block that. I was going to melt you down to raw nerve."

Theophana pushed herself to her feet, only for her knees to buckle under the pressure. She dropped again, bracing herself with one hand, the other pressing over her chest.

Even Kama knew that kind of pressure wasn't from injuries. It was divine suppression. Her presence as a Beast was reacting on instinct. Her flames might have been gone, but her mana kept digging into Theophana's body, forcing her down like a physical hand.

Theophana coughed quietly. Her lips moved, but no words came out.

Kama didn't look away. She wanted to see what kind of face Theophana made now.

"You did all that," Kama said, stepping on air, "so you could prove what? 'Guidance'?"

Theophana kept her silence, looking up only for a moment.

Koyanskaya watched from the edge of the scorched terrain, arms crossed tightly under her chest.

She didn't know what the nun had said. She had no clue what kind of stupid button Theophana had pushed to make Kama go off like this. Whatever it was, it was personal.

The others were already moving. Fast. Fast enough that the wind howled against their ears as they ran, even faster than before.

The distance was cleared in seconds. The sky above the village was distorted, warped like a ripple of heat and madness was expanding from the center.

Angra's eyes dropped to where her fury pointed.

A shield of ice was covering someone. A large dome of glowing blue ice, protecting a single figure standing upright behind it like it was normal, like she hadn't just walked back into life. The shape was human. Familiar.

No mistaking it.

Theophana.

His thoughts caught up to what his eyes were screaming.

That damn nun really came back.

And near her was Koyanskaya.

The pink-haired monster was ignoring the chaos like she was in charge of it. Her nails glowed with sealing marks, her hands gesturing in wide, controlled arcs as she cast something over the entire village. Hundreds of inhabitants, every soul in that place froze mid-step.

Seals, dozens upon dozens, forming chains of letters that latched onto their backs and necks, dragging them into unconscious stasis. Their faces were blank, asleep or immobilized.

That is one way to clean up the evidence.

Koyanskaya turned her head and finally addressed them.

"Welcome back, everyone. I've handled the audience. Now all we need... is the explanation."

It hadn't even begun when Kama was busy planning how to incinerate the woman.

The heat radiating from her was nearly unbearable for any lesser being. It rolled in waves that distorted the air around her, the blue flames behind her still searing the broken grass and scattered wood around the village's edge. The air was thick with burned ozone and spiritual pressure that crawled over skin.

"Thou art Kama, art thou not? Why, then, did mine illusion fail upon thee, when the children of this place saw nothing but joy in their dreams?" the nun asked with interest, the tremor beneath her voice doing little to hide her attempt at keeping some kind of composure.

The flames around Kama hissed and flickered higher in a quick, surging arc.

"Hah! You thought picking Parvati would work?" she answered, cutting. "I'm not some cheap recollection of her. You picked the wrong memories, it's one I stopped clinging to when I realized she doesn't hang around anymore."

Theophana's head tilted, her expression was starting to fray. There was something between confusion and indignation.

"She was thou. Was she not beloved? That gentle goddess, thou didst clutch her as a starless night clutches a candle. What flaw was in her?" she pressed, raising her voice slightly. "That part of thee however remains. I hath offered thee peace, quiet, sanctuary in stillness, an eternity unmarred by death, sorrow, or the whimpering of time."

Kama scoffed loudly, then turned her head sharply to one side to suppress a laugh that didn't come. Her voice turned taunting.

"Don't insult me. You offered sedation. Freezing people in their happiest illusion was no mercy, but cowardice dressed up in the delusion of kindness. And if you think I would stay here—" she gestured at the ruined village, "—just so I can pretend Parvati is still somewhere inside me, then you're more delusional than they are."

"Hmph. You're wasting your breath trying to reason with her," Koyanskaya called toward Theophana.

"Kama's the type to tear her own throat out before accepting any kind of peace. I'm not really interested in your quiet little sleepover cult since this village smells like old bread and self-pity."

Theophana flinched at that, the first visible crack in her stance.

"I hath given all who wandered here joy. None were forced. This place—" she gestured wide to the village behind her "—is built of dreams untainted. Innocence reclaimed. I ask again, why do none of thee understand? There is no death here. No grief. Only stillness. Eternal peace, and the warmth of childhood without end."

The rest of the Beasts watched the exchange. The argument was unpleasant.

"She's not wrong about the effects. She built a coma for the heart, not a prison. The question is whether that coma is worth protecting. Or if we just put the witch down and let the kids wake up screaming all at once."

U-Olga was irritated by Angra's response.

"So we just let her keep it going? Are you serious? The longer this place stays like this, the deeper the anchor gets. Eventually, it won't just be this village. This kind of anomaly festers."

"I didn't say let her keep it going," Angra replied, looking at her. "I'm saying destroying her snaps the whole system like a pulled thread. They'll all age at once. Kids whose bodies have been suspended for decades will collapse into twisted corpses or senile husks. You want to look a century-old toddlers in the eye as they scream from realizing the world left them behind?"

Koyanskaya glanced over. "I vote seal her. Put her in a box, let the village thaw slowly. It's practical. Doesn't kill anyone immediately. Gives me time to extract useful components. Also... I just don't trust something that talks that slowly and keeps trying to sound motherly while showing that much skin. Kiara is already tiring enough."

Draco made an irritated sound low in her throat, glaring at the villagers with a complex scowl. Her voice was strained.

"Do you think this kind of world should exist? A world where children never grow up, where no one gets the chance to suffer, learn, or decide for themselves? It's sterilized helplessness. Destroying her is the only honest answer."

"I vote seal," Koyanskaya said again with a shrug. "I'm saying it twice in case anyone was too slow to hear the first time."

"Destroy," Draco repeated. "Cut this place free before it drags more into it."

U-Olga scowled harder. "If we're voting like idiots, then seal. Draco's right, but her method's vicious. The side effects will outweigh the justice. I'm not getting blamed for that."

"I'm not voting," Tiamat spoke softly, standing behind them all. "I don't agree with the illusion. I don't agree with killing her either. Whatever comes from this, I'm not claiming part of it."

"Fou," came the only verbal contribution from the tiny creature near her feet, his tone uncertain.

Surprisingly, Kiara broke from the rear, lacking any usual provocative manner.

"I find myself uninterested in this vote," she said. "Neither solution is thrilling, nor insightful. Do as you please."

"Seal her," Angra said again, shrugging once. "I don't care about justice or suffering. I care about balance. The world will correct this in time. No need for us to kick over the hourglass."

The group looked around. Three for seal, one for destroy, three abstained.

Draco's arms tightened. Her jaw clenched. "You're all so weak."

"No," Koyanskaya answered, grinning, "we're just used to compromise. Welcome to democracy."

Tiamat widened her eyes.

An idea between compromise and cruelty came to her mind.

Her care did not need words. Her lips were drawn tight and the way her shoulders stiffened told the rest of them she had already reached her conclusion long before anyone asked her to.

Without signal or warning, the entire surrounding space folded like skin being peeled away. The cracked domain that had been warped by broken spiritual values began to contort around Tiamat's form. She was overwriting it.

It changed as if it was always meant to be that way and had only been waiting for permission. The screaming souls trapped in arrested growth—those malformed adults crammed into shivering child bodies—no longer wailed. Their cries didn't stop because they were relieved. They stopped because something higher had placed its hand down on the structure of their existence and rewrote its foundation.

It was no longer a prison, not entirely. The pain remained, but it was no longer pointless.

The suffering would not vanish, but it would no longer be wasted. The domain became a slow, spiraling descent and climb at once, a biome where development was not erased but rendered unbearably slow, where regression occurred, but only enough for healing to resume.

Tiamat rendered judgment in the only way she knew: through transformation that required endurance.

"Growth will be painful," she said in a plain truth. "But it will be possible. Their regression will occur naturally, little by little, until they match what they should have always been. No death. No escape. Just recovery."

Theophana stared stunned.

She looked at everything, at everyone, with the blank, cracking look of someone whose final argument had just been disassembled by someone who did not even plead.

Her body exhaled air through her nose as if she had finally accepted something she could not stomach.

Kiara arrived.

The distance between them closed without sound. Kiara didn't bother with flair or sensual theatrics. A creeping presence of someone who had never stopped smiling for decades even while stepping over corpses.

When she stopped, it was close enough that their robes could brush.

Theophana's reaction was the jerk of her shoulders. Her fingers curled tightly against her habit. She stared at Kiara's face with complete clarity and confusion.

"You… thou hath known chastity," she said brittle, almost unsure of her own mouth. "I can see it. The restraint twisted in flesh. That vow, but twisted, bastardized—"

Kiara smiled with pity.

"Wrong denomination," Kiara said softly. "My roots lie in the Buddhist path, not yours. You sought abstinence for God's sake. I sought to destroy desire by surrendering to it, not through denial. We were shaped by different lies."

Theophana's throat bobbed, then again, she was trying not to swallow what tasted bitter.

"I see it in thy eyes," Theophana whispered, her accent fraying in places. "The pain… thou hath suffered much. Thy soul carries it like a coffin strapped to thy chest. Yet… thou speaketh of lust. Of pleasure. Of this… a rapture?"

"I have suffered more than any woman you've ever met," Kiara said plainly, uncaring whether the truth was believed or not. "I was humiliated, torn, offered up like waste. I was used by those who claimed righteousness. I bled for others' virtue. And do you know what I gave the world in return? I gave it love. I gave it ecstasy. I gave it the pleasure of my flesh and told it to feel something beautiful for once."

Theophana was frozen, but her face contorted slowly, painfully, into bare awe.

"You… thou still love?"

"Unconditionally," Kiara replied. "And I will teach you how. If you accept."

A presence emerged near them, unnoticed by Theophana until now. Angra looked like someone who had seen too many versions of the same scene and had stopped being surprised by how they turned out.

"You should understand what we are before you make any choices," he spoke up. "We're not saints. We're not demons either. We're the Evils of Humanity. That's not a metaphor or a role. It's a title. We are the ugly byproducts of human growth, the filth that rises when people evolve. We exist because humanity moves forward, not in spite of it. That includes you."

Theophana looked at him, breathing heavier, then back at Kiara.

"Then thou art no devil?"

"No," Kiara answered. "We are what comes when humanity reaches too far and doesn't stop. But that doesn't mean we are your enemy. In fact, we've chosen something different. We are staying here, in this world, for no higher reason than this: we want to see it live. Not because it deserves it. But because it still can."

Kiara stepped even closer until there was no polite space left.

"You can come with us," she whispered. "I can remake you. You can still be yourself, but better. Not shackled to purity. Not torn by guilt. You can become something real. Submit, and I will redefine what you are."

Theophana didn't answer immediately. Her breath was shaky and her body trembled. She looked around one last time, at the altered village, her children, at Kama, at the unblinking eyes of the others watching silently.

Her hands slowly came together at her chest, fingers pressing lightly.

"If… if I may still keep mine name," she said weakly, "then… I yield."

Kiara smiled, a glow in her eyes that wasn't light, but ownership.

"Then it begins. Welcome to the Beast Faction."

---

"....."

"....."

"....."

"...Fou..."

"....."

"....."

"Greetings, L'rd Daemon-God-King Goetia. Mistress Kiara off'r'd me a new cradle for redefining me. I hath heard well of 'tis Beast Faction."

"Stunning isn't she? I shall keep her."

".....Kiara and the rest of you, what did you do?"

Chapter 20: Beast and Bloodsuckers (Part 1)

He hadn't seen the human sky in so long. At least, not this one.

He looked down and stared at the patch of grass beneath his feet for several seconds... and waited for it to rot or burn from his presence like the last few places had. Nothing happened.

So this is the human world, again.

He inhaled slowly. The air was fragile. He closed his eyes, even though the sunlight could not blind him. He didn't know the name of this forest. All of it was distant, if it only existed because he was now here to perceive it.

He walked through that cavern and tore open a portal to the surface world. That Underworld may be alien, but as a King of the Underworld in nature, he was able to easily puncture the Texture between dimensions.

A sharp pulse rang behind his eye. The forest blurred and twisted.

There had never been a sun. It was black because that was all there had ever been. No stars except the heat of the Earth, the glow of molten rivers, the flicker of volcanic gas, the steam rising from the stone walls that went on for miles.

He stands at the edge of a great pit where the people gathered. One by one, they climbed down, never hesitating.

Flesh burned. Bone broke. Blood became heat. That heat melted down into the crucible.

They gave him everything.

He remembers their faces now. No, he wasn't supposed to.

"I told myself not to. I wasn't supposed to look at them again. Not until this was over... until I had a reason."

He dragged one foot forward. Then another, to somewhere, anywhere without direction. Branches snapped beneath him.

He was the only one who remembers. He don't belong here.

His organs had boiled inside his ribcage. His eyes been burned shut. Still, he had fought when he cursed at it, called the Spider every name his people once gave to fear. Then he crushed it beneath him and hurled its shattered pieces back into the earth. Time never moved properly after that.

Every single one of them looked up at him as they burned and bled and tore their own skin from their bones just to become a part of him. The smell of their devotion never left his senses.

"I told you..." he muttered to no one at all. Was there no subject to hear him speak? Anyone?

"... I told you not to come back. Shut your mouths and stay dead."

His voice cracked. There was no warmth there. That was why he lasted. The cold makes him feel less.

But the sun… the sun did something cruel.

"I told you not to give me your names. You were supposed to forget them."

He gripped his skull. He could feel the ridges against his skin. He didn't care. He pressed harder. He wanted to crush the part of his brain where memory lived. The human part of him always bled louder in sunlight.

You are the King, they whispered.

The last. The only.

"I didn't ask for that, I never told you to die. You did that on your own."

It's their fault.

It's their fault.

It's their fault.

They did. They chose it with smiles. Those fools gave everything to a cause that should never have existed. A false war against a sleeping alien that would have swallowed them regardless.

He killed for them. That was what they wanted. No one sang for him after that. Because no one even existed anymore.

"You did this. Not me. You did this." he whispered.

"You fools!"

Stop.

Stop.

"SUICIDICIAL FOOLS!! ALL OF YOU!!"

His claws dug into the soil. He felt worms scatter. They knew better than to stay. He hated when he sounded like a man.

A soft wind blew across the clearing. Leaves rustled. He felt the warmth return to his arms. The sunlight would not stop touching him.

"I am not a man," he said. "Camazotz is not a man. You gave up that right. You were carved in flame and silence. You were fed on death. You slept in molten dirt. You are not allowed to remember."

But he did remember against his will.

The god of their kingdom wasn't allowed to mourn.

I was a king. I am still a king. I was human. I'm still human. I have to be. If I am not, then all of them died for nothing.

This time he felt something more than pain. It was anger. Real anger with no path. No target and justification. Just rage. Rage that he still existed. Rage that his mind hadn't broken far enough to forget. Rage that he still knew what it meant to mourn.

There were faces he used to know. People who called him father, brother, son, king, lord. The titles didn't matter because they bled the same. They screamed the same. They gave themselves up the same.

"I did what I had to. You gave me permission. You said I was the only one who could. You looked at me with trust. You walked into that pit with pride. I didn't ask you to. I didn't want you to. I never told you to die! You—damned fools!"

He didn't believe his own words.

"I tried to stop them. I begged. I cried. I screamed until my throat tore open."

That part was true.

They did it anyway.

His eyes flickered. Evening would come soon.

"I'm still alive. That has to mean something, right? Right!?"

He didn't sound convinced when his voice was raw and cracking.

"I am Camazotz. I am the last of Ka'an. I am the King of Mictlan. I am the Beast who carries their bones. I do not die. I do not rest. I do not forget."

He'd said them before. Hundreds of times. Maybe more. Sometimes in his dreams. Sometimes in silence.

"I'm sorry."

There was no going back to that time.

Because that time was long gone.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

He pressed a claw into his chest.

"I am sorry."

He didn't know if he was speaking to them or himself.

His eyes were wet. There was no one here to see. There was no one to lie to.

"Camazotz treads the earth again. Is that a good thing? He doesn't know. He doesn't care. He, I, moves because he is still breathing. That is the only truth left."

His eyes burned.

He tasted blood.

Million humans burning in the pit. Hands reaching up from magma. Their skin melting and voices screaming. His name screamed in every language. They built temples from their own ribs. The altars were their own spines.

The kingdom is dead.

He killed it.

A woman who took her own life after the death of her brother's killers.

No, don't. Please. I didn't ask for this. I didn't choose this. I didn't want to live. I only wanted the light to die. I only wanted the silence to come back. I only wanted them to live.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Ritsuka Funimaru's voice echoed behind the obstinate fool. Her hand stretched out. It reached for him. That hand. That hand. That damned hand.

He crushed the Spider like he crushed the concept of mercy under the weight of six million burning souls.

She fell.

He caught her.

He remembered his people.

He screamed.

He killed himself.

He woke up. Here.

His fangs scraped over his bottom lip. He bit down too hard.

Is she here? That obstinate fool. Answer me. Say it again. Tell me you will kill me again. I was almost free. You were supposed to end it. You were my administered punishment.

"...Nitocris."

Queen of the Underworld.

He yearns for her presence.

"...my queen..."

He needs someone to comfort him, please anyone. Nitocris. Nitocris. Nitocris. Nitocris. Nitocris. Nitoc—

He swallowed frivolity. There was no breath in his lungs, no rhythm in his heart. He wasn't supposed to wake up. The ritual was complete. His soul was finished. The crucible was empty. The kingdom was gone.

He looked up.

There was a castle in the distance.

His nose twitched.

Blood. So many.

Live human-shaped magical beings.

The grin hurt when it cracked the side of his face.

Let them try. Let them try. Let them all try. One more time. Just once more. Let them say her name. Let them scream justice in my face. Let them hold their swords like they mean it.

He's hungry—

.....was that a body flying?

It fell from the clouds like someone forgot it was alive once. It crashed through the treetops before smashing against the dirt in a way that sounded more like pulp than flesh. A crack followed, probably the spine, but it didn't matter.

Camazotz strides until the corpse is at his feet. The face was still mostly intact. Doll-like. The fangs were obvious.

A vampire.

"So they still existed here too. Of course they did. Parasites always find a way to keep drinking."

He crouched low, grabbed the head, tilted it sideways, stared into the lifeless eyes.

The answer came in fast footsteps. Bare feet slamming into earth with that self-important tempo vampires always thought gave them presence.

White robe torn. Limbs disjointed. Face smooth like porcelain stretched too far. Shimmering eyes in a way that looked painted, not real. The figure limped, teeth already bared before he even saw Camazotz. He paused mid-step, flinching. Covered in his own blood, but his hands weren't defensive.

"I don't care who you are," he said with a hoarse voice. "Please… help me. I don't want to die like this. If you have any shred of disdain for betrayal, help me."

Camazotz tilted his head sideways. A thousand thoughts stacked all at once.

Behind the bleeding man, more shapes appeared. Ten? Fifteen? Numbers weren't relevant. Their postures made them predictable. They stopped when they saw Camazotz.

One of them laughed. He had long silver hair and red eyes that pretended not to blink from the smell of blood. His boots were clean.

"A beggar? You think a stranger's going to save you? How low have you fallen, your majesty?" He walked a little forward, flicking his wrist, the magical blade from his hip drawing. "Begging from a corpse that hasn't noticed it's already rotting."

"To think the proud King Tepes would fall so far he'd grovel to some forest freak. Tell me, old king, did your mind rot out along with your rule?"

He rushed—

—The vampire's head dropped before his body realized it wasn't connected anymore.

That was your first mistake. You assumed death forgets its own rules.

The stump sprayed once, twice, then stopped.

Camazotz turned toward the rest of them.

The man on the ground, the so-called king, stumbled forward, catching himself on one knee. He raised his hand toward Camazotz in a more desperate than demanding way.

"You have a name?" Camazotz questioned him.

"Tepes. I was king of this faction until my son Marius turned the court against me. He turned my guards against me. I have been running for three days. My familiars are dead. My kin slaughtered. I swear to you, I will repay this. I will rebuild Tepes. I will make you prince, general, whatever you want, just destroy these traitors!"

How boring.

The name meant nothing. Camazotz didn't know who this Marius was and what this Faction called Tepes was. He only knew the smell of fear trying to disguise itself as pride.

The remaining vampires screamed at once, curses and slurs about filth and impurity, about curses and bloodlines, and two of them lunged together out of stupidity.

Camazotz walked past the vampire. The others were still hesitating. Some had drawn swords and bared fangs. One of them shouted which he didn't hear what was said. The sentence was too long and the speaker didn't deserve a full breath.

Camazotz lifted one arm and it was already over.

The first three were split into halves. The second group was cleaved into chunks that didn't land in recognizable shapes. One managed to jump but Camazotz caught him by the throat, squeezed until the bones cracked through the skin, then threw the corpse into a tree where it stuck like garbage nailed to a wall.

The rest turned to run. They didn't even make it ten steps.

Blood covered the trees. The dirt was darker. Too easy.

They're all the same. No matter the realm, betrayal is unique; a crown still means anything when your lineage is shallow and your spine breaks under one child's jealousy. You all kill each other and then look for outsiders to redeem you. There is nothing left to save and left to build... That's what probably built up the mentality of this vampire business.

There was no reason to help. Nothing inside beckoned him to stand in front of this blood-slicked noble carcass across these trees and the path that stank of cold metal and birthright and blood that was never earned but inherited like it was due.

Camazotz knew the taste of blood that was earned on his tongue, warm in memory and raw in sensation.

"You," Camazotz's head jerked to the side with a twitch that made his spine click. He squatted so low his knees scraped the mud. "You got thrown out like gutter filth by your own flesh? He took your throne. That makes him king, doesn't it? That's the rule of kingship, isn't it? You lose, you're not king anymore. You're just a man with a title he can't wear. So?"

King Tepes growled but the breath caught, pain short-circuited the defiance. He clutched his broken side and spat on the ground and pushed his weight back on a tree and sneered, teeth stained darker than the blood soaking his clothes. "I was betrayed by my own son. Marius was always silent, always too obedient. It was a lie, from the start. He conspired and united with... with those outsiders, the Khaos Brigade. They made promises, whispered in his ears, swore him power. They turned my own court against me. There were no warnings. One day I am king. The next, I am a fugitive crawling in mud, hunted by children I once raised on my knees."

Camazotz stared at him as if the face alone could offer answers. "Khaos Brigade. Don't know them. Don't care. Sounds like cowards needing names for their excuses. Are they monsters? Are they dead? Are they going to die?"

He leaned closer, voice jittering between interest and complete disregard. "Are you going to die, King?"

Tepes flinched, unsure if the monster crouching beside him was mocking him or measuring the space between his ribs.

The silence let the trees breathe for a second, or maybe that was King Tepes wheezing. Camazotz abruptly gave a snort too cruel to be laughter. "So you're running with tail between your legs. To where? Another lie in another castle and play ruler again?"

King Tepes gritted his teeth. "I will seek asylum from Carmilla. She may hate me and despises my family, but she despises traitors more. She's the only other leader with the force to reclaim the throne. The whore Queen might help if I throw my crown on her lap. If she gives me an army, I will give her whatever she wants. She always wanted my bloodline extinguished. I'll... I'll give her my heir."

Camazotz started up laughing. It was a drawn-out noise. His body made the sound the way the wind might hit an edge. He didn't find it funny. He just couldn't stop once it started. The way this vampire said "whore" like he didn't beg two minutes ago, he didn't look ready to sell his spine if it meant buying someone's favor, he hadn't fallen lower than dirt in front of monsters with no names. "The king gives away his son. That's justice. That's what kings are made of."

"I am not proud anymore. I am not stupid. The bloodline survives through power. If my son dies for it, that's more than he deserves. Carmilla's faction still follows the Old Ways. Marius's coup will threaten the accords. She'll listen to me."

Camazotz tilted his head. "I imagine your rival? So you're crawling to your enemies now. That's rich. You really want help from them the caste of haughty wenches who look down on everything without a womb and centuries of incest in their bloodline?"

King Tepes looked like he would have spat if it wouldn't hurt. "I will do what must be done. I was king for four hundred years. I will not end my reign crawling in the forest like a rat. I need an escort to the Carmilla castle. Their knights will kill me before I get close enough to talk."

He stood straighter, enough to pretend he was still someone who could make a request without feeling like a beggar. There was nothing left behind them that could match the raw incoherence of the thing before him. "You saved me. Whoever you are. Tell me your name. Your power is beyond any of the Carmilla's vassals. I will reward you. Wealth, lands, an estate, title, a thousand virgins if I must. You will be honored and I will remember this favor when my throne is restored."

Camazotz just turned his back to him and started walking. "No. Don't want your gold and honors. What would I even do with them? Buy a weapon? Get recognized by families who'd burn their newborns if they weren't pretty enough? No thanks. Help? Sure. And not because you deserve it. Just because I'm already bored and maybe seeing someone like you get humiliated twice in one lifetime will amuse me more than tearing your spine out and wearing it like a sash."

King Tepes staggered a step behind him. "You didn't tell me your name."

Camazotz kept walking and shrugged at the air. "Names are for people who still think they're the same person tomorrow. I forgot mine somewhere between the last scream and the first god I killed. Keep your mouth shut, keep your pace steady. If you die, I'll feed your corpse to the forest and pretend it made an effort to insult me. Deal?"

Camazotz grabbed the king by the shoulder and pulled him up like he was lifting a husk of straw. The body made a sound that wasn't a groan but something stuck between complaint and collapse.

"You are very light for someone with so much pride."

King Tepes winced. "We need to reach Carmilla Castle before night's end."

Camazotz didn't bother turning, "I will drag you across the bones of your ancestors if you tell me how far it is. If you die, then I will eat your corpse out of malignance."

King Tepes remained silent.

---

The moment the cracked outer wall of the Carmilla castle loomed into view, stained by mildew and carried by the spidery creepers that hadn't been scraped off in centuries, Camazotz dropped the frail body of the disgraced king face-first into the soil.

The gates were massive, but not imposing enough. Camazotz had seen better. A few rusted iron things, painted black, with carvings in outdated symbology that pretended to mean power but only screamed cowardice to anyone with eyes old enough to truly see it.

His fingers twitched a little, residual tension from the walk.

"It smells like powdered blood and regret. Whoever built this was compensating. Probably had an inferiority complex the size of a mountain, or a matriarchy. Same difference." he said. It wasn't even said to the vampire he carried.

The Carmilla guards, three of them posted at the iron-barred gates with twin-bladed spears and tight-fitting plated black bodices, stiffened instantly as the king rolled on the ground and groaned. One of them, sharp-faced and sharper-voiced, hissed through her fangs like a cat that didn't want to waste effort speaking to the carrion laid out in front of her.

"Is that... King Tepes? What trickery is this? Where are your hounds?" Her lips curled upward in disbelief and rage stitched poorly by discipline.

There was a silence that could have been disbelief, but none of them wasted time wondering why he was alone. They immediately knew something was wrong.

Tepes raised his face from the ground, dirt and dried blood clinging to his cheek like rot. "I am not here in command... I seek an audience... I come not as a king," he coughed, licking his teeth. "But as a supplicant. I seek Queen Carmilla's aid. My son has turned against me. The Khaos Brigade has made a puppet of my house. I... I disavow my throne. I offer my surrender."

One of them whispered something to the other. Two went inside immediately. The rest stayed.

The guard captain's brows twitched in disapproval. "You arrive at our gates without retainers, in disgrace and injury. This looks like bait or suicide."

"I come not to demand, but to surrender. I beg sanctuary under your Queen's law."

The guards did not trust easily, not after centuries of what they remembered as Tepes tyranny, the memory of every garrison of Carmilla slaughtered in skirmishes long-since buried under newer grudges. One spat near his hand, just close enough to let the memory cut.

"We should kill you and gut you and stake your corpse at our gates. Surrender or not, you are filth," one of them said to herself, loud enough to be heard.

When they reached for Tepes, chains grown from the stone itself lashing out and binding his limbs, Camazotz did nothing.

Their expressions soured when they looked at Camazotz. One guard made the mistake of speaking to him.

"You, thing. You are not welcome here. Step away from the prisoner and stand down."

Even without looking at her, his eye twitched. The grin dipped. He grunted. "Thing. Heh. Titles doesn't matter when your heart is made of knives and your tongue is bone, girl."

When he stepped toward them, the guards flinched, two staggered back, the last held her spear straight but her eyes flicked downward expecting him to pounce like an animal. He grinned, bare baring of teeth without threat.

"Do you chain every gift that walks to your door? The King came to surrender, should I have thrown his spine over your wall instead?"

He snapped one wrist forward to crack the skin of his palm and spill black-red blood. The taste of that blood in the air made them all feel it.

"You can chain him. You cannot chain me. Try it. You won't even have time to beg before your lungs are ribbons."

King Tepes, for once, didn't interrupt. He looked like a man used to witnessing cruelty, but not familiar with watching it breathe beside him.

No one stopped him as he started walking again.

They arrested the old man, as promised, just to signal control. The gate opened slowly. Camazotz simply followed because there was nowhere else to go, and he hadn't yet decided if he was going to do something to this place.

Inside, the Carmilla castle wasn't different than he imagined. It was loud in the way dead things were loud. Eyes watched from behind pillars, behind velvet curtains too clean to be used.

Through the outer court, they passed stone-carved memories of women posed like saints, eyes gouged out and mouths stitched, lined in sacramental attire tailored to thrill their ancestors. Every step of the Tepes patriarch caused some heads to turn from the balconies above, guards above guards above layers of veils and perfumes.

Hundreds of women. Lean, tall, long-haired, silver-draped or bare-shouldered, they emerged from the shadows and from halls like birds who had smelled something rotting they hadn't tasted yet. Camazotz felt their eyes first on Tepes, the way you'd watch a wounded rat.

But every single gaze snapped to Camazotz once he entered. Silence stacked over silence. There were no males like him in any tomes they memorized. They stared at his dark skin, the braided webs of his hair didn't move with the air but curled inward. His four wings folded behind him weren't even extended. His tail dragged behind him like a fifth limb that had no patience to act civilized.

Some female vampires took longer to understand what they were seeing, others narrowed their eyes in suspicion. From above the walkway bridge, a noblewoman of the court leaned over the railing, taking note of the scars. Then two more. Then five. Each more dressed than the last, each older in age and prestige. The scent of noble vampirism slithered from the arches. Court members. Queen's harem. Matrons. Aristocrats.

By the time they neared the inner sanctum, the ones who had not looked were now doing so. A line of crimson eyes marked the corridor.

The hallway was polished obsidian from ceiling to floor, lit by glass orbs soaked in phosphorescent ichor harvested from different creatures. Camazotz's nose twitched from the scent of a blend of crushed roses, cold metal, and dried blood varnished over with expensive perfumes.

Multiple guards flanked both sides of the corridor, unspeaking but not unreadable. Their gazes were tight and judgmental, proud in the way only those who had never lost a war could afford to be. King Tepes was led forward without dignity, chains trailing behind him like a dog's leash, and the guards did not bother to hide their pleasure at the sight.

Camazotz followed without concern, and no one wanted to test whether his silence was patience or contempt.

When the doors opened to the Queen's audience chamber, it was neither ceremony nor surprise that filled the room but a sudden apprehension. The women inside turned not toward Tepes first, but toward Camazotz. They weren't foolish. They knew power when it walked uninvited.

Queen Carmilla was seated on a wide-back chair padded with the furs of predators, legs crossed, chin supported by a single gloved hand. She was statuesque in the way the dead could be when they stopped aging at the peak of their arrogance. Her white gown was embroidered with a pattern of her house crest over the shoulders, the rest was pure bleeding crimson. Her neck adorned with ceremonial cords taken from the execution robes of her predecessor, who she claimed she had personally staked through the womb. Her robes exposed more skin than they covered, but there was no mistaking the authority in her posture. Her eyes, like the others, first searched the stranger and then settled on the kneeling shape of Tepes.

The vampire queens had always maintained that superiority by omission was just as powerful as it was through conquest. The long carpet that stretched from the entry arch to the foot of the throne was cleaned, combed, perfectly presentable in all ways except one. Her harem flanked her throne like columns, barely clothed, unarmed, watching with concealed scorn.

"I half-thought you were dead," Queen Carmilla said lowly, not unkind, but completely without warmth. "The other half wished it."

Tepes lifted his eyes, blood drying along his temple. "You have every right to despise me. I come not asking forgiveness. I come offering a solution."

Carmilla raised her fingers. Her guards stepped forward. "He entered with only this one, my Queen. A being unknown to us. Not vampire. We would not let him pass, but... he is not something we felt we could not stop."

Carmilla's gaze shifted again to Camazotz, slowly, studying him. "Is he yours?" she asked.

Camazotz's neck twisted halfway around toward the nearest pillar. "Me? I am no one's. Least of all his."

Her brow tightened just slightly. "Then why are you here?"

"Just wanted to see what the insects in this castle taste like when they talk. So far, you speak too much."

There was a flicker of outrage across her face. The guards immediately unsheathed their spears a little too loud.

"Shall I drive your tongue through your spine for her, creature?" one of the guards snapped.

Camazotz turned toward her with a maddening stare. "Try."

Queen Carmilla's two fingers rose, halting the guards. Camazotz didn't finish the motion forward. He grinned at her.

Carmilla returned her gaze to Tepes and sighed.

"You bring filth. You come in rags. And you speak of the world? There is no world in this. Your line, humiliated, and now you kneel to me."

Tepes steadied his voice. "I see that what once divided us is no longer standing. My court is fractured. I am no longer the King of the Tepes House. My son has usurped me. My people are dying and leaving for the surface like cattle. I have nothing left to lose but my blood. And you want that, do you not?"

"You ask for my help? After a century of your ilk slaughtering mine for the crime of being born without a cock? You burned our border cities because one of my ancestors refused to kneel to your grandfather. You carved fertility runes into our prisoners and called it justice. You forced feeding quotas on villages just to thin their population before you declared them unfit to rule, and you come here to beg... for an alliance?"

"I offer you my holdings. I offer you the rights to the eastern frontier of the Danube sectors. The archives beneath Bran Castle. The crypt-forge beneath the oldest monasteries. You can bury the old world and call yourself Queen of all Vampires. You can absorb everything, Carmilla. Everything."

Her voice dropped lower. "You offer me your legacy as a carcass."

"No, a shield. There is a force beneath our world now. I did not believe it until I saw it. And when I saw it, I didn't believe it could be defeated. They call themselves the Khaos Brigade. They tore through my chambers; Fallen Angels, Stray Devils, Human Mages! You think they will stop with Tepes territory? You think they will leave Carmilla intact? You know they won't."

No one in the Queen's harem spoke. They looked between the two rulers, calculating. It wasn't as simple as court drama now. A male vampire king, kneeling in chains, was surrendering the last of his dignity to the one court he had sworn never to acknowledge. That wasn't a treaty. It was the end of a legacy.

Carmilla's face did not twitch, though her fingers clenched. Her harem whispered to each other. One leaned close to her ear. Carmilla listened, then lifted her fingers again. Silence.

"I have heard the name," she admitted. "Rumors, mostly. My informants speak of chaotic factions, devil traitors, and so-called heroes rising again. But I have never seen them."

"Then you are next."

She tilted her head. "Or you are lying."

"I gain nothing by lying now. You smell my blood. And the one beside me—"

Her eyes shifted back to Camazotz.

He was crouched near a statue, watching the political negotiation like a drama. Wide eyes stared unblinking, the emotionless look unnerving them.

"I see it. But I do not understand it. And I do not make alliances with creatures I do not understand."

Tepes's voice turned sharper. "You cannot afford pride anymore. Not if you want the Carmilla name to last another century. They are a cleansing."

Carmilla's voice hardened. "I will not be spoken to like a cornered animal in my own court."

"You already are one," Tepes snapped before he could catch himself.

The guards nearly lunged. One of the harem women hissed under her breath. Carmilla stood from her throne, the first movement she made since they entered. Her posture was effortless, stripping the room of all illusions of equality.

"You will watch your tongue, Tepes. Or I will take it as payment before I take your bones."

Tepes stared up at her. "Listen to me. You may not see them now. But when you do, your throne will mean nothing unless it is backed by my lands and what remains of my army. I give it freely for survival."

".....My people are insecure... hungry for symbolism... So, having you kneel in front of me... Do you think that will convince them to forget what your house has done?"

Tepes kept his face still, but his jaw tightened.

"You're wrong," she continued. "But you're not entirely useless. If your son has opened your house to outsiders, then he has made himself vulnerable to disruption. I may not need your name, but I could use your knowledge. And conceivably... if you prove yourself sincere, I might let you live."

Tepes nodded. He didn't thank her. He simply answered, "I have no expectations."

Carmilla leaned back again, letting the tension coil loosely into the air.

"Then we will speak further, later. Not here and now. For now, you will be housed in one of the old guest vaults. You will not leave without escort. You will not speak to my court uninvited. If you so much as attempt to pass a letter beyond these walls, I will feed you to my daughters one inch at a time."

King Tepes inclined his head, stiffly, accepting the command.

With the negotiation came to an end, Queen Carmilla's eyes narrowed toward Camazotz.

"Now then, on to the other matter at hand... You brought a human into my halls. A male human, at that. Did your exile blunt your senses? You can't even crawl without help from outside your own kind."

Tepes didn't wince. "He's not mine, he brought me here on my request. I was found half-dead in the woods with half my ribs broken. This... stranger intercepted my son's patrols before they could finish what his hounds started."

Camazotz tracked the arguments and cut in. "All this aristocratic foreplay... the subject is merely who gets to wear the bigger cape."

None of them laughed, of course.

"You're... speaking to me," Carmilla said flatly, turning her eyes to him. "Why?"

Camazotz tilted his head. "Because I can? Which is more than I can say for the ones who tried to stab your rival here in the gut. Oh, wait—they were speaking too. For a few seconds. Then I dragged His Majesty across half a forest and dumped him at your gate. I see now why your species keeps breaking apart. You're all allergic to gratitude."

He talked like he was waiting for someone to cut him off, but nobody did. The guards were displeased but uncertain. Carmilla, despite herself, had begun studying him the way a taxidermist studies a malformed beast.

"...Stranger," she said, "I don't recall asking you to speak."

"That's funny. I don't recall asking permission. There must be something wrong in your mind."

"You speak like you know who we are."

"I don't. That should be worrying you."

Carmilla paused. Tepes didn't. "He saved me. That's the only reason I'm standing here. I'm not asking you to trust him, Carmilla. I'm not asking you to do anything about him."

"And here I was, hoping you finally grew some nerve," she muttered. "But no. You're still just as naive. You walked in with a foreigner whose origin you don't know, whose allegiance you don't know, whose species you're not even sure about—and you want me to let this all slide because... he has an attitude?"

"He dealt with Marius' followers easily, his strength would be a boon."

Her expression didn't shift. "I have yet to see it with my own eyes."

"You will, and the Khaos Brigade will come."

"Then I'll deal with them." She turned slightly, letting the long tail of her hair spill over her shoulder. "But until then, I won't reshape Carmilla policy because of panic in a rival's house."

"Rival?"

"You're in my throne room, aren't you?"

Camazotz eyed the exchange, with one brow raised, not sure what to think. If any of them had actually noticed, they might have seen how bored he looked. But then again, it was an act. He didn't care about what they saw when he was testing how deeply they saw. So far, none of them had realized what he was. That amused him deeply.

"—How far have you fallen to trust a human male with your life? What kind of king does that?"

"A survivor." Tepes' voice cracked through the air. "You think I had options? I crawled through filth and ice and broken ribs. I had three wounds near my heart and I was dying in mud. My last bodyguard had his head cut off in front of me. And this lunatic showed up and disposed my pursuers. I don't care if he's a human, a stray dog, or the Devil himself. He got me here. That's all that matters."

She looked like he wanted to argue.

Do these two usually get this theatrical? Camazotz felt like he was overseeing an ex-husband arguing with his mistress about who gets custody of a decaying kingdom. It brought up old memories of when many similar cases of wedlock occurred in Ka'an, to which he was forced by his attendants to govern the judgment.

.....His mood soured.

Carmilla lowered her chin slightly, the cold lines of her lips barely curving as she again surveyed the man standing near Tepes with increasing distaste.

"Four wings, a tail, and your breath reeks of something I cannot remember to name. Your presence, however faint, bleeds of mortality, all while to like something born from a bad sketch between a devil and an ape."

"..... Let me guess: you prefer them anemic, sharp-jawed, and missing a pulse?"

It was a bad joke dropped at a funeral.

The Vampiress blinked. Tepes winced behind him.

"I asked you a question, mongrel. You'd do well to answer before your jokes push the wrong nerves."

"I did, and I'm human. That's the whole issue for all of you neck-biting aristocrats."

"You are not human!" she said, a crack forming in her composure. "I sensed your body. There is a human frame underneath that stench, yes, but you are not… human. Especially with natural wings and a tail, and smells of rot and condensed malice."

Camazotz scratched his cheek with a claw gnarled to pass for a simple mutation. "Well, I was human. Still am, depending on which half of my brain you ask. Have you ever taken off through a few apocalypses and find yourself stitched together wrong at the end? No? Oh, that's right. You lot spent the last few hundred years fighting over whose corpse had the prettier title."

She flinched at that. Tepes grimaced, lips tightening like he regretted bringing the man at all.

Camazotz's tone rose more amused the longer he spoke. "A smear. Something unsanctioned. Did you assume I'm playing dress-up in your sanctified castle?"

Carmilla's eyes dilated.

"You dare insult me in my own castle!? You are standing beside a king—my enemy—another monarch, and you mock the foundations of our race. Y—you posture like a beast in clothes!"

Camazotz's grin widened. "Kek! This is just how I stand. You know, with my spine twisted from memories I can't wash out and my mind cracked down the middle from things none of you could pronounce."

Carmilla's eyes honed to blood scarlet. "Do not speak like you've endured hell, stranger, when you lack the grace to endure royalty. If you are purely human, then I have all the more reason to question King Tepes' judgment. What is your allegiance? You are not Tepes' retainer. He's not fool enough to call you that. You carry no scent of loyalty. No oaths. You've sauntered in here without any of the proper binds."

Camazotz's gaze drifted past her for a moment, he was immediately bored by the confrontation already. "I don't serve anyone. I don't know. I was hungry, angry, and bored. Saving a monarch was just the warm-up."

A silence fell.

"You're not even trying to deny your abnormalities," she said.

Camazotz flexed his claws, slowly. He used to ask himself that.

He screamed from a throat that didn't feel like it belonged to the boy he used to be. He doesn't have a name to curse and trace back to some cradle, he came from nothing. This body was made from war, ripped open by power, and dropped into this pit of a world without instructions.

Tepes, silent until now, looked away, her words stung more than they should have.

Camazotz looked her in the eye. "At least I didn't start a war over who gets to be the prettier ancestor."

The moment broke as Carmilla's eyes gleamed with contempt. "Watch your mouth, mongrel. You don't understand our history. That 'war' split our kind because there had to be a decision. The ancestors had passed and the bloodlines were thinning. A choice was needed—to follow the daughter, or the son. Female or male. Carmilla, or Tepes. Your travesty dishonors more than pride."

So, that's what's going on.

"And how'd that work out?" Camazotz said. "Hundreds of years, and your legacies broke into hissing matches, you still can't agree whether a womb or a phallus makes the better ruler."

"Silence!" she barked, and the air finally snapped as her killing intent flickered visibly around her. "You are only allowed to walk freely because I allowed it. Your presence was tolerated for the sake of answers and not for this foul disrespect."

She didn't hide her scorn anymore. "We kept the line pure. The Tepes desired domination through hierarchy. We desired preservation through grace. Don't you dare laugh as if centuries of bloodshed were petty quarrels. Do you truly believe your ignorance grants you the right to mock what you don't understand?"

"Don't I?" Camazotz's voice rattled between amusement and contempt, "You kill each other over lineage like drunk aristocrats. A war not for survival, not for land, not for conquest, not even for power. No. You butchered yourselves over which womb or seed gave you birth. How proud you must be, to have let that disagreement splinter your empire—"

A final affront.

"—Nothing more than a tantrum."

The air snapped with tension. Tepes' scowl deepened, the King practically grinding his fangs, while the Vampiresses looked more insulted than enraged, appalled that a creature they couldn't identify would so brazenly reduce their centuries-long strife to a joke.

Camazotz don't have the personality to listen to their hissing. He continued, "This... Civil War of yours... It is a collective suicide wrapped in dresses and coats of arms, a madness old kingdoms rot into when they've forgotten what it means to bleed for survival, not titles."

King Tepes surged to his feet, cloak flaring behind him. "You do not know what it meant! What it cost! We did what we had to do to avoid annihilation!"

Camazotz didn't react with offense. If anything, he looked pleased, even entertained, enjoying it. "Simply speaking, you chose stasis. Your bloodline is so obsessed with not mingling that you've cut off circulation. There's a reason your kind dwindles, and it's not the humans. You rot from within."

"You presume much for a stranger," the Carmilla Queen said stiffly. "Just as King Tepes said; you do not know what we endured, what was taken, what had to be buried to keep the bloodlines alive."

"If it mattered so much, tell me—why are you both half-extinct now?"

That silenced the hall. Camazotz didn't envision that random bullshit guess actually worked but he savored it. The restraint was admirable, though Camazotz could already hear the spike in their heartbeats. Rage filled the air, but beneath it, was perplexity.

Tepes growled, voice a rasp. "You slur every drop spilled to keep our kind from dilution."

"I slur the stupidity that bled it dry for nothing. It seems to me that you feared impurity more than extinction. You feared miscegenation, feared the mixing of your divine ichor with the lesser filth and even as your numbers dwindled. While you were busy deciding which ancestor had the prettier face, Werewolves multiplied, Spirits evolved, Demons formed pacts, Humans developed weapons that can incinerate your entire lineages in minutes. And your species? You kept stabbing each other over whose ancestor wore the crown longer. Pitifully pathetic."

A tensioned breath drew sharply from several Vampiresses. Some muttered and hissed again. A few looked like they'd stand and strike if Carmilla didn't stop them.

The Queen's face twisted cold. "You talk of ancestry and power, yet you wear a human body. You have, in any way, no right to—"

"No throne?" Camazotz tilted his head.

He scoffed loudly.

"I ruled over a civilization you've never heard of. That's your first failure—you vampires are historians of your own bloodlines. History doesn't end at your coffins."

Tepes' chains rattled. "We kept our line pure! Our struggle preserved what little remains of True Vampiric might!"

"Then it's time I break what remains of that delusion."

Camazotz looked at them like an older beast pitying the injured young.

"Ancestors are your problem? Fine, I speak of arbitration. You created two factions because you couldn't agree on one ruler. You had two royal bloodlines; two legitimate claims; one male, one female; one represented tradition through blood, the other through soul. Then why not two thrones—one Queen, one King—each autonomous in cultural governance, but unified in external policy and defense? A state split at the top, not broken at the foundation. If you truly cared for vampirekind's survival and prosperity, then an internal balance of power would have ended the war. Two crowns, one covenant, shared authority. You know what that is? A balance. You could have forged a dual monarchy and expanded."

Two thrones with distinct spheres? A governing body beneath it? A crown that weighs both evenly?

It was—preposterous! Such an idea even in the first place was—

.....unimaginable..... and plausible.

They didn't answer. No, they couldn't. Every justification they wanted to throw was caught in their throat. Because none of them had ever considered peace with balance. Only dominance. Supremacy. Victory.

"Still don't get it? I'm talking about parliament and king, queen and council, war and grace. You had a unity, and you broke it because neither side could tolerate equality. You needed an arbiter—an outsider like me, perhaps, back then, to remind you that your real threat wasn't each other, but the self-made extinction knocking at your gates."

The rest of the vampires, for all their pride and posturing, were locked in a moment of halted breath.

Because none of them could argue it. Not convincingly. Not with clean logic. He hadn't insulted their ancestry. He hadn't even attacked their beliefs. All he did was that he pointed to the obvious, what should've been visible from the start. The wound they never treated. The rot they wrapped in gold.

He has seen it before. A proud people so obsessed with not becoming something else, they willingly become nothing at all, and then they call that noble.

Carmilla uttered, and her voice, for once, lacked the usual iron certainty. "You speak as if the bloodlines could be mended. But we are not like humans. We cannot simply merge…"

Camazotz interrupted without any respect. "'Not like humans', she says, haaah? Woman, don't think I'm fooled with your whores behind you, I can sense the tiniest human blood in them. I saw a lot of Dhampirs outside as well. You can 'simply merge', you already did a thousand times over, half of you were born of impurity, the other half of desperation. But you refuse to admit it. Vampires lie to themselves. You mistake your pride for strength, but strength builds. Yours only watches itself rot."

That was the worst offense of all.

Camazotz dared one of them to object. They didn't.

One of the harem ladies, a younger-looking Carmillan with white hair and a house crest etched across her bodice face who tried, pitifully, to raise her voice with enough courtly arrogance to veil the tremor in her throat. "Even if that worked, how could such a shared rule last? We've shed too much blood to pretend as if balance can be forced by—"

"By what?" Camazotz's gaze drilled into her. "By logic? Peace? By a structure that stops your line from collapsing into crypt dust and feeding the dogs of future generations? You killed each other for centuries and can't fathom the idea of not killing each other tomorrow. It's called a disease if you're that callow."

She recoiled but didn't speak again. Her fingers gripped the armrest of the marble bench like it would give her back the confidence he just ripped out of her with one sentence.

Camazotz saw the nervous shifting, the twitching of pale brows, the whispered glances among noblewomen who once would have smirked down on the corpses of their rivals. How miserable. The same faces that once plotted assassinations and poisoned alliances now couldn't even rebut a stranger in rags who tore through centuries of ideology like it was paper soaked in piss.

Tepes' mouth opened, likely to unleash another discourse, but Camazotz cut him off before the first syllable.

"Do you want your species to survive, or do you want your pride to be embalmed in a museum with your bones? Because if it's survival you want, then listen. If not, then go back to carving your names on the ruins."

He stepped forward, and for a second, he thought he was preparing to hold court, not make an argument, like back in Ka'an. "Let me give you a second alternative; an accord. A rotating regency. Five years to the Queen. Five years to the King. Alternating governance; one term each. Simple, functional. No dynasty and dominance."

"And who decides when lines are crossed?" someone asked. Her voice was quiet. Scared of agreeing.

Camazotz bared a tooth. "What else but an arbiter? Neutral, after all. Separate from both bloodlines. Chosen by unanimous vote between Queen and King. If they disagree, a council of four—two from each side—selects a tie-breaker. You can't manipulate that without exposing your greed. It forces you to behave."

"We… cannot entrust the fate of our kind to a rotating regency. That is a game of shifting loyalties, open to corruption. Power must be firm and consistent. Not passed around like a relic."

Camazotz didn't even bother to look directly at her. "Spoken like someone who's never held power to begin with. If you fear that your people would betray you the moment you sit down, then they never followed you at all."

Her lips parted, then closed, then parted again as if trying to shape an answer she didn't even believe in. She glanced briefly toward the Queen for guidance. Carmilla did not acknowledge her.

Another woman, older, darker, tried her hand next. "The traditions we uphold are not arbitrary. They are the last bastion of a truth we inherited. To abandon them would mean—"

"Truth? Nah, nonono," Camazotz turned to her directly. "What you inherited was inertia. You couldn't decide which womb bore legitimacy, so you split, and the split made you feel powerful. Conflict gave your generation a meaning the peace of their elders failed to deliver. So you nurtured it, justified it, cultivated it until the blood never stopped flowing. You've bled too much to admit it was all unnecessary in every new era. That's why you're angry with me—not because I insulted your war, but because I made it make sense."

No one interrupted.

In truth, they were listening harder than they'd ever admit.

The two monarchs felt their thoughts spiraled, and their hands were shaking ever since Camazotz introduced the concept of a regency with a neutral arbiter. That was the first indicator that something had shattered in the internal walls they had all reinforced for centuries.

One of the oldest Carmilla Vampiresses, hair silver and neatly braided down her back, allowed her gaze to lower to the polished marble below her feet. Her thoughts no longer hid behind the centuries of etiquette and ceremonial rigidity.

When had they started fighting?

She knew the records, the official documents. The declarations, the founding decrees of the Carmilla Court. But none of them explained what actually triggered the split in spirit. Not truly. They justified it post-fact. But no one ever remembered the precise moment when distrust turned into division. Only that one day, they stopped calling each other kin and started using titles like 'usurper' and 'heathen' and 'degenerate'.

She felt herself thinking it aloud for the first time, something she would've lashed her tongue out at one of her own daughters for saying.

"What if there was no real reason? What if the entire war was just a way to avoid being equals with those we despised?"

Tepes's jaw twitched. His mind—he hated it for circling around the very proposition that came from a madman's tongue. And yet it wouldn't stop.

"They always mocked me when I proposed unifying courts. Said I'd bow to women. That I'd insult Vlad's legacy by sharing rules. But we lost half our sons to border purges. Dozens of houses are gone. Disappeared, absorbed by Dhampir filth, or diluted by rogue clans we labeled heretics just for choosing peace. And I protected none of them. Not one. Because I was too proud to say I needed Carmilla's walls."

The realization felt like biting into stone. It scraped the ego down to its bone. He knew what kind of voice would come out that wouldn't sound like denial. It'd sound like agreement.

Across the room, another harem consort shifted uncomfortably. She was young by vampire standards, barely three centuries. Up until now, she'd always sneered whenever Tepes Faction was mentioned in council. She took pride in mocking their masculine traditions, laughing about how predictable they were, how stiff and uncreative.

Now she felt nauseous.

We laughed so easily. Said they were backwards. But they bled for their ideals. Same as us. We were no better. We wanted a Queen because we couldn't stomach a King's authority. And they wanted a King because they couldn't stomach the thought of bowing to a Queen. That's it. That's all it ever was. Just decades of people unable to admit they didn't want to share.

Another voice, older, rasped from the shadows of the room. "What makes you think they'll abide by a regency at all? The ones outside these halls. The lesser clans. They'll never accept compromise. They've tasted too much blood."

Camazotz felt like he was addressing a child. "Then they can die screaming. You don't need every clan to agree. You only need the two Thrones to declare it. If they do, the rest will follow or perish. The ones who perished were weak. That's how evolution works."

Silence again. No rebuttal.

Camazotz's inner thoughts stirred behind his impassive stare. They were squirming, paralyzed with too much truth they couldn't run from. He could feel the cracks forming in old statues that no longer held shape.

He didn't care what they thought of him. Their opinions were stitched from a thousand years of incestuous debate and ceremonial decrees—none of it mattered. They were relics. Beautiful, cruel, self-preserving relics. In his mind, that made them easier to mold than mortals ever were.

He was talking to them like livestock, but offering them the illusion of choice. The moment they accepted that illusion, they'd follow it to the end because they wouldn't want to admit a stranger fixed what they'd let rot for centuries.

The silence thickened so suffocating, but not in the way tension usually wrapped a chamber. It wasn't indignation anymore.

King Tepes said nothing for a while, even after the manacles were undone with a silent nod from Carmilla. The guards hesitated out of sheer disbelief. One of them looked toward the older Vampiresses for instruction, who in turn offered no protest. They didn't need to. They were still stuck in the same thought: It really might be over.

The chains fell from Tepes' wrists with metallic thuds, and he rubbed at the red indentations on his skin without comment. The gesture required neither. They were no longer enemies in this room.

He remained staring at Camazotz with unreadable war-bred stoicism that had carried him through centuries of vendetta.

"A shared throne. Rotating regency. A neutral arbiter. No blood, no losses. We could've ended this hundreds of years ago."

He glanced sidelong at Carmilla, but not to challenge her or anticipate her disapproval. This was the exhausted look of someone who realized they'd spent the prime of their life losing soldiers for principles they weren't even sure they had.

The Queen met his gaze. No sneer, no mocking grin, none of the proud fire that had defined her tone in every council war meeting before. Her face was unreadable—not unreadable in the way a master manipulator masked their emotions, but in the way someone just beginning to question their own worldview had nothing yet to replace it with.

Fifteen minutes passed. Maybe longer. No one kept track. The only sound was the low rustling of the mountain wind through the arched windows of her castle.

The Queen leaned closer to the King. "Do you believe this could work?"

"I should be the one asking you that." His voice was restrained, but not skeptical, except a tired, hoarse practicality, not out of doubt. He was saying this because he didn't want to answer it himself.

Carmilla's palmed her face, but even that small gesture had more calculation than most courts managed in their entire succession rituals.

Tepes exhaled through his nose. "It has nothing to do with belief. It's whether or not we're done pretending we have something to win."

Carmilla gave the barest of nods. "We would lose some faces. Prestige. Legitimacy in the eyes of the younger covens."

"They already mock us behind closed doors," Tepes said plainly. "If they could overpower us, they would have."

Her lips pulled into something that resembled amusement, though not mocking. "I believe this war has not produced a single result worth the deaths we keep listing every century. We have bred generations of women who don't know diplomacy and men who see cooperation as castration."

She looked at Camazotz now, eyes narrowed in scrutiny "The irony is that it took an outsider with no stake in our history to notice how stupid we've been."

Camazotz grinned—no, sneered. He didn't even attempt to hide it. The admission tasted like marrow to him. He could almost lick the honesty off her words like blood off a jawbone.

"You should've said that centuries ago," he replied, "Hard to speak when you've got your own pride shoved so far down your throat, your voice comes out sounding like a eulogy."

Finally, Queen Carmilla took forward, sweeping slowly across the audience chamber, then back toward Camazotz. If he was tired of waiting, he gave no sign, not even a care at all for their feelings.

"We will not make this decision here," Carmilla said evenly. "My court and I will deliberate in private. King Tepes will join us. If your proposal is to be considered seriously, we will need to prepare how we intend to present it to the outer covens. And if the proposal fails, it must fail in language that does not fracture our houses further."

Her voice gained the faintest edge then. "I trust, since you've already presumed to intervene in our affairs, that you intend to stay within the territory until summoned."

Camazotz grinned.

"I'm not your guest. I don't need to be summoned. But, maybe I'll stay."

He said it like it was a joke only he understood.

Carmilla turned halfway toward the corridor, her robes trailing softly behind her, when something clenched in her mind.

She stopped. Her heel tapped once against the marble floor. A pause, then a slow turn of her head back toward the figure in the center of the chamber. Her expression wasn't suspicion. It was irritation, sudden and exact.

She stared at him for a second, retracing everything he had said, every word, every gesture, and realized what had been missing.

"…We never asked your name."

That drew Tepes' attention too. His gaze flicked back to Camazotz with curiosity reignited. The Vampiresses did the same. One leaned forward slightly from her seat. Another whispered to her elder in the corner, and the elder frowned in thought. She narrowed her eyes, clearly trying to remember if the name had slipped past her.

Camazotz tilted his head very slightly, and for the first time, he broke eye contact. He looked to the side. He raised a hand and made a slow, loose gesture, waving off the question.

"I doubt the name would matter to you."

Carmilla didn't budge. "Let me be the judge of that."

"It's just a name. You've lived long enough to know names are a distraction. Symbols to hold meaning that's already lost. You don't ask a storm what it's called before it levels your castle."

"You have the gall to walk into our court, preach a solution to ending our centuries-long blood feud, then think he can walk off like some passing merchant?"

Camazotz turned his gaze back to her, and something behind his grin faltered. She was pushing him. Royalty demanded formality. If she was to even consider his proposal, he would not be allowed to remain nameless.

"I don't care for names," he said more curtly this time, but Carmilla was unmoved.

"I do. So does my court. You're not walking out of here with a stranger's title," she said. "We want the truth."

"…You really don't."

"We'll decide that. You couldn't offer those solutions with great experience and mastery for a monarchy."

He stared at her for a long moment. His jaw clicked slightly—an unconscious twitch. Slowly, his eyes dropped down and closed. His grin thinned. There was something unfamiliar in his posture now. Something noiseless and hard to read, moving behind a sealed vault door. Their skins tense before their mind knew why.

"Is that how you're going to play it?" he murmured, but his voice had dropped lower beneath the vocal cords.

He lifted his left hand, and for a moment, nothing happened, before something imperceptible shifted. The light in the room dimmed, it was being pushed away, as though something had arrived that light itself refused to touch.

Carmilla blinked once and her body stiffened. She was no stranger to power. She had walked beside queens who could turn men into ash. This was presence of someone letting the air remember what he was.

Divinity.

He's a god!?

"…Fine."

He opened his eyes.

—And something broke.

No sound was heard any longer. The walls themselves seemed to stretch. The chandeliers flickered. Several of the guards instinctively took a step back. The shadows on the floor grew longer.

"A Name? A name? I am a king..."

He said quietly, but the voice carried farther than it should have. "I ruled a land that no one recognizes."

"They danced in fire and rot. They breathed ash, swallowed glass, shattered their bones just to write my name in stone. I was their morning. I was their night. I was their king who watched their lives burn in pyres, not to mourn, but to savor. I did not inherit a throne—I built it! And when it was time for it to fall, I watched it burn with my name still engraved on every corpse!"

His fingers twitched. The tips of his nails blackened. The skin under his eyes cracked ever so slightly.

Memories flashed back painfully.

"For our King! Death to us! We offer our lives for you, oh King of Fear!"

It hurts.

It hurts.

"I'm sorry."

"I told them to not die. And they did! I did not stop them. I did not mourn them. I was their king! I do not kneel for the dead! I feed them!"

The temperature in the hall dropped. Frost laced the bottom of the columns. The torches lining the walls flickered with a sickly hue. One of the younger Vampiresses let out a sharp breath and fell to a knee. Another dropped her sword without realizing it. They all stopped speaking entirely with eyes wide and unfocused.

Carmilla's pupils were dilated. She was seeing something, not with her physical eyes.

Tepes turned to her slowly, alarm flashing in his gaze. "What is happening—?"

They all saw it.

They did not do much as blink. They were not asleep. They were very much awake—but every single vampire in that room, from the eldest of the Carmilla line to the lowest guardswoman, was being shown something.

It was not vision. It was not hallucination.

For one instant, they saw it.

They saw what he really was.

They saw the King who Forsook his Crown.

They saw the guardian of a scroll that no longer had history to bear. But he held it like it was the last thing left in a collapsing world.

They saw the King of the Underworld.

They saw the braves who died for him. And the blood. And the anguish. And the emptiness.

They saw the forsaken capital, swallowed by time. The children who flung themselves into pits in his name. The thousands who carved their skin with his sigil. The kings who built cities only to offer them to ash because he desired a foreign enemy to be slain.

They saw a Beast, immense and twisted, rising from a pit of darkness with no end, body blackened and bristling with wings and limbs and things. Tentacles, segmented reminiscent of bat tongue, erupted from a body whose proportions broke the mind. The head—no, the mask, no, the face—was the shape of a bat but stretched beyond form, jaw hanging from a torso that opened in four ways, and from the blue glow inside it, more mouths shrieked and snarled and whispered in one! The tongue was not a single organ but many! Its horns shone with ancient light! Its eyes were the first things the gods feared when they were born!

He was not made. He was not born. He was left behind. He was the "Spider-Slaying Bat".

Carmilla gasped and stumbled back, hand clutched to her chest. Tepes stared, wide-eyed, fangs exposed. It was fear. Pure, ancient fear. The fear of a child standing in the presence of something older than history.

Vampires were on the floor, sobbing, panting, mouths bloodied, even trying to crawl.

His eyes glowed with that terrible light.

"I watched them all die."

Reality slammed back into the room like a dropped iron plate.

"I ruled Mictlan, the Underworld of the distant past! Not the myth, not the present or the future! I was their breath in sacrifice! The Savior of the Cowards! The King who led them into death! I bore the name of Ka'an before it became a tale!"

His aura had swelled to the ceiling, pressing against the chamber, twisting everything around it.

"I am the Evil Bat God! The Forsaken King! The King of Braves! The one who did not weep—because they did not want tears! They gave me their hearts! And I gave the Spider slaughter!"

He turned his head, grinning with newly formed teeth as the vampires trembled, from domination and from understanding.

"You wanted a name."

He laughed in contempt. His voice was layered multiple, guttural, echoing with broken vowels and old throat chants long extinct.

"Now remember me, for I am Camazotz!"

Chapter 21: Beast and Bloodsuckers (Part 2)

The guest room stunk of perfume and silver-polished furnishings. To him, it's nothing more than nobility dressed up as austerity. Camazotz sat on the long velvet couch, arms spread across the backrest, the candlelight flickering across his skin.

He rubbed his face slowly and leaned his head back and exhaled to test himself.

His mind is intact. Six million years it held.

The fragments of his mind, the thing he had become after countless eons, were rearranging. No more the lunatic torn by a thousand screams. No more of that... parasitic spiral of craving.

His premonitions were correct; his mind really was stabilizing. It was too slow to be comfortable, too true to be harmless.

For once, the silence in his mind texture. Memory didn't come as blades or screams or ghost-light hallucinations anymore. He could trace the timeline like he once did, seated atop the throne of Ka'an, with his scribes and generals awaiting his decrees. A deep breath. Then another. His lungs no longer trembled with leftover madness.

There was a time when the Earth's crust had not yet hardened, and the surface was meaningless. Back then, the depths below where the warmth of the planet bled out were the only home worth the word. There, in Mictlan, they built the Ka'an civilization gorged on eternal dark and never knew warmth or flame, and learned to breathe geothermal smoke and drink volcanic blood.

For one hundred thousand years, he ruled in the dark. No one outside even knew they existed.

The Ka'an didn't need light when they had unity. When the surface men still fought with stones and feared lightning, his people understood geothermal mining, spirit-matter weaving, and sacrifice-as-equation. When a volcano swallowed one of their cities, they offered themselves. Every death had value. Every ritual was a formula. Every man and woman... was a gear in something greater.

When The Spider—The False Star. They had no way to name it—stirred, none questioned what had to be done. They chose him.

He didn't protest as he lay at the bottom of the Crucible. Each one—hundreds of thousands—walked into the fire for him. They let themselves die and broke their bodies into particles and thoughts and heat and code, and they gave all of it to him.

He became what they needed. An unkillable being, molded by a kingdom's extinction. Their King of Death.

After he walked out, footsteps blackening the rock, he fought the Spider without an army. Just him. He tore it open with hands that burned like the sun. He ripped its heart out and shoved it into an ancient reactor.

A burning orb of godlight that fed the kingdom with warmth and finally gave them day.

Too late anyway. They were all gone.

He stood alone under the first sun his world had ever seen, and there was no one left to witness it.

And when he laughed, it was when he went mad. That was when the crown fell.

His fingers trembled.

A million souls burned into him, echoing when he spoke, screaming when he slept, moaning in every silence. The Beast of them. The last "human."

He broke so completely that the only way forward was to forget. Suppress, bury, forget. He turned from everything; he erased their names, their faces, the light they gave him, honor, the cause. He chose madness over memory, delirium over despair. He drifted in limbo, in starless voids, between the cracks of all worlds.

She wouldn't let him forget.

The Queen of the Underworld. His queen who was not wed—even when a part of him wished so–forged in grief and rage. And when she arrived with Chaldea, she judged, reminding him of who he was, what he had done, and what had been done for him.

And with it, his immortality was undone. Because you cannot be deathless when you finally grieve. He let himself die. It was the only way to stop running from her. He didn't know how long he had wandered after that. Just that he woke up here in this world.

A world where the Age of Gods persists even in an era where humans ruled. Vampires. Factions. Petty nobles and over-perfumed intimidators playing court games in the dark.

And now—now—his mind was reforming. Reassembling. His voice was no longer the voice of a rabid god. It was a king's again. The shattered maniac who wandered blindly for centuries is being overwritten. Camazotz, the King of a past kingdom, can feel the insane Camazotz shrinking back into the cage he built for him. He was a ghost wearing his skin. But now he remembers the taste of his throne. He remembers what it means to be a king.

He stood from the cushioned seat, ignoring the silk and fresh clothes they forced onto him after the reveal. His back cracked into place as he straightened.

The glass of water by the table hadn't been touched.

No.

He walked over and stared into the mirror hung on the room's left wall. His eyes are too human now. He reached up and touched his face, dragging fingers across cheekbones that remembered too much.

The sensation of not being hunted by his own thoughts anymore felt... unfamiliar. Unfair. Unforgiving.

"They died for this. They all died for me to live. And I lived by forgetting. I spat on the gift."

A sense of deliberate cruelty and ancient expectation.

The Beast of Forgetting was dead. What remained... was the King.

The door creaked behind him.

"Enter," he said.

It was one of the Carmilla handmaidens. Pale. Frightened. Her hands trembled holding a silver tray, and he could smell the fresh blood inside the goblet.

He slowly turned his head. One eye caught hers and she froze.

She was among the Vampiresses who all saw back in the throne room, during the moment of his reveal. Their minds were cracked open by a divine truth they were never born to understand.

He watched her slowly kneel, placing the tray down, and left after a bow of reverence.

He picked up the goblet. It was most likely an endowment of offering from the Carmilla Queen.

He drank.

It was human blood. He disliked it. Nevertheless, it was still blood. He closed his eyes. The past returned, and so did the king had.

To forget again would be an insult.

To endure with memory is the only justice.

Not this time. This time, Camazotz pledged himself to be a changed individual. He has a second chance in this warped little world.

Camazotz apologized to his people again. If he's alive again, then he needs to be smarter than before. He doesn't have their sacrifice to save him again. The immortality is gone. He bled before, but he could always grow back and that isn't true anymore.

Clarity didn't feel right after it was brought with an itch that he knew well, buried beneath madness and blood.

He spent the last few hours combing through the books stacked neatly on the oaken shelf near the guest bed, reading through their strange theology, their fragmented cosmology of Angels and Devils and Fallen ones. The terminology irritated him—"Sacred Gears," "Balance Breakers," "System of Heaven"—such terms belonged to children obsessed with no sense. Then again, this was a parallel world. The Sacred Gears were devices not unlike the divine engines gods once crafted beneath the crust, primitive in form but sophisticated in execution. One in particular, the so-called "Longinus," caught his attention. Weapons strong enough to kill even gods. They interested him because he remembered what it meant to be challenged.

He set the final tome aside, a political analysis of the vampire civil war so slanted in favor of the Carmilla Court that it bordered on parody. He stepped toward the large wooden doors where two guards waited with their heads bowed low.

"Lord Camazotz, the court awaits you."

His expression alone was sufficient. They stiffened, nodded, and began leading him through the winding halls.

He watched the castle's design unfold as they walked. All stone and vain ornamentation. The red carpeting was well maintained, decadent but sterile. The Carmilla were a matriarchy of aloof monsters whose femininity gave them moral clarity. Hmph, as if haughty smiles and ceremonial grace could hide the truth that they were parasites wearing the corpse of nobility.

He didn't hate them. But they were arrogant. It was laboriously conspicuous from the discriminatory disdain in their eyes when they thought he was just a human being.  

Still, they had shown him submission when he revealed himself. When the wings unfurled and the heat warped the stone tiles beneath his feet, even Queen Carmilla had sunk to her knees. That was what mattered. They understood. It wasn't about diplomacy. It wasn't about alliances. It was recognition. The moment the divine walked in, they fell silent.

They brought him to the court, a tall room with a vaulted ceiling supported by columns carved into feminine postures. On the throne sat Queen Carmilla, regal and utterly composed. Her expression, however, had changed since the afternoon, more reserved now. King Tepes sat further to the side, leaning of the defiance of a man forced into humility.

The Court murmured as Camazotz entered, then quickly fell silent as he stepped across the marbled floor and seated himself on the elevated chair laid out for him beside the throne, larger and darker than the others. They sure have enough time to construct a seat personally for him.

He sat back, elbows on the chair's armrests, one leg over the other, expression bored. He didn't need to be introduced. They had already bent the knee in everything but posture.

Queen Carmilla stands up. "Let us begin. As you are all now aware, we are no longer alone in this war. A god walks among us. One who has chosen to listen and lend his aid, for now. King Tepes, proceed."

The old man nodded, standing with effort, though his voice carried strongly through the chamber. "Several months ago, my only daughter, Valerie Tepes, a Dhampir, awakened a power none of us could have anticipated. A Sacred Gear—no, a Longinus. Known as Sephiroth Graal. A Gear that manipulates life and death itself. Seeing its value, I allowed my bastard son, Marius, to oversee the research into its capabilities. The result was beyond our expectations."

He paused, looking around the room. The nobles narrowed their eyes, nodding faintly. Camazotz tapped a single clawed finger against the side of the chair. His ears twitched at the word "research."

"With Marius's experiments, our soldiers' weaknesses were mitigated. Sunlight, holy weapons, and even silver became ineffective against those blessed by the Graal. It was not a permanent process, but enough to create shock troops that overwhelmed the Carmilla forces in several key territories."

There were hisses now from the nobles. A red-eyed woman stood. "So that was the source! Our forward battalion at Brașov fell in less than a night. Their eyes were glowing, their blood blackened, they fought even as their limbs were severed. We thought it was a different case of vampirism! That goes against the pride of our species!"

Tepes raised a hand. "We know that now. But at the time, I believed we were enhancing our people, strengthening our hold in a changing world. It was only later I discovered Marius had contacted outside help. The terrorist group made up of a collective supernatural force known as Khaos Brigade."

Silence. Everyone stiffly let him continue.

"They gave him the means to unlock the full potential of the Longinus, and in return, he gave them allegiance. He turned on me, declared an coup d'état, and accused me. He rallied the augmented soldiers and executed my council. I was left for dead—"

But he wasn't, Carmilla wanted to interject. Because the one who kills kings is always destined to be killed by gods.

Her eyes flicked toward Camazotz.

The Beast said nothing, a small twitch stretched across his jaw in a dispassionate way.

Camazotz crossed his arms.

It seemed to him that this Marius used the power of sacrifice, making fodder out of the dying. He took what is sacred—blood, life, soul—and handed it to insects in exchange for borrowed power. How pitifully humane.

The Ka'an had given everything too. But they hadn't bartered. They threw themselves into the fire without question, not to prolong the reign of a tyrant, but to give birth to a king that would destroy the end itself. Their sacrifices had no price tag. They were not tools, but were the arms of a nation, severed to form a blade.

"According to the patrol rotations last I was informed of, the Tepes Castle has three main gates. Only two are manned in overlapping intervals. The east gate is isolated and lacks a tower view. Their numbers have been reinforced using the Graal. Valerie's Sacred Gear modified it, I'm sure. I wasn't aware of its full capacity then. She was always a weak girl, quiet, but..."

One of the Carmilla nobles clicked her tongue in annoyance. "You were a fool to allow that child to be involved in the inner mechanisms of the court. This is your failure. We are now burdened with the consequences of your family's internal negligence."

Someone else added with smug venom, "The Graal is beyond your comprehension, Tepes. Your son exploited what your bloodline could not even begin to understand."

Tepes's knuckles tightened. The Queen raised a finger, and the Court quieted.

"Irrelevant now," she said flatly. "The fact is, Marius has made an alliance with the Khaos Brigade. We have already confirmed six engagements where our forces were massacred without landing significant hits. Valerie's Sacred Gear is the axis of that power."

The more they spoke, the more a certain someone categorized, mapped, and ripped through their logic. They were structured in layers, snapping back and forth between knowledge and scenario construction. A madness honed through millennia of carnage, filtered now through clarity, not because he had become sane, but because he knew insanity was inefficient in a world ruled by configurations, not fear.

The Queen tapped the polished table twice. "Lady Riava, report."

A Carmilla general stepped forward, tall and pale, her red armor engraved with sigils. "We propose a three-pronged infiltration. West Gate, decoy formation. East Gate, strike force. A third team will infiltrate the upper towers using teleportation tags. We believe Valerie is being kept in the sanctum below the castle chapel. The problem is, the sanctum is warded against spatial intrusion. We will have to manually breach."

Another Vampiress, slender with short white hair and narrow eyes, bent forward. "Once inside, I propose a spell disruption field. If we can negate the Graal's effect even temporarily, their soldiers will lose durability. We will overwhelm them with numbers and kill Marius before the Graal adapts again."

Camazotz closed his eyes and processed all of it.

Their assumptions were linear, tactical approach sounded rehearsed. No consideration for contingency if the Graal had evolved past static augmentation. No accounting for betrayal within their own ranks, which was always a risk when dealing with bloodline supremacists. No plan for psychological warfare. They hadn't even considered that Valerie might not be held by force. She could be convinced, or worse, willing.

"Your plan is flawed. All of it. Every assumption in it is based on what you knew, not what exists now. If you march like this, you'll lose."

The entire chamber stopped.

Lady Riava was wise enough not to interrupt him. The Queen stared at him without blinking. Tepes looked relieved.

Camazotz didn't wait for permission to continue.

"If you send strike teams through the east gate, and teleport others into a tower, you are doing exactly what a coup-leader expects. You are entering a castle, not a stronghold. The structure will collapse around you. The sanctum you mention is below a chapel, likely the strongest spiritual node of the castle. The Graal is a conceptual object. You think you can disrupt a divine relic by casting a mystical net? You are children."

He turned his gaze to the Queen directly.

"Do you want to win? Then listen. You don't go into the castle. You make them come out."

He raised his hand and pointed at Tepes.

"You. You will send a public message to proclaim your return. Announce your intention to retake your throne and 'negotiate' peace. Demand an open audience in the outer courtyard. Make it ceremonial by inviting all nobles, even ones you suspect to be loyal to Marius, even make it a political occasion. Pride and heritage matter to your kind. Exploit it."

He looked back at the Queen.

"Your soldiers can prepare for a siege, not a raid. The gates must not be breached, barricade every path of exit, starve them of options. If Valerie has enough will left in her, the Graal will respond to conflict. The artifact's reaction will tell me what kind of awakening it is. You won't recognize it, but I will."

He turned from them, pacing.

"And if it is as I suspect, then she is no longer just a Graal wielder. She is the Graal. There is a difference. You cannot treat her like a hostage. You will not be able to extract her like a war trophy. You will either sever the link, or kill her. There will be no rescue."

Tepes flinched. Carmilla's face tightened, but she did not object.

Camazotz stopped pacing.

"I will design the trap. You will follow my commands precisely. If any of your soldiers disobey or act out of pride, I will tear them apart."

The Queen inclined her head, eyes lowered. "Understood."

He returned to his seat.

He stayed quiet as the Queen called for the scribes to begin redrafting the operation. The chamber buzzed with murmurs, though none questioned his directives.

His thoughts turned inward.

As mortals do when they feign to be monsters, when he had been born as the real thing, their logic was half-formed. This world's power structures were fragmented, knowledge was compartmentalized. When gods fell, he had seen it, killed them himself, even dead gods left things behind. Sacred Gears were the results of one such god's long-buried projects, and now humans, devils, and vampires alike had begun digging up artifacts without understanding what they were unleashing.

He leaned back and closed his eyes, listening to the sounds of political reshuffling as the moon rose higher. There was no doubt that their words would cease the moment he stepped forward again, which was why he shall be stuck around in the shadows. He had already spoken once, and his words had carved more fear into them than anything their civil war ever had.

They had followed his corrections to the plan without question. That was expected. They didn't understand it yet, but they were alive because he had allowed it. They made a dozen assumptions in their strategies and Camazotz watched each one form from their mouths and wrote a separate plan in his head, just to make sure the situation didn't spiral into idiocy and ruin the one thing he actually cared about. No mistake, he didn't care about the throne or heritage or whatever self-aggrandizing nonsense these corpses clung to. Valerie Tepes had something inside her that broke the rules, something he is aware of but hadn't yet seen personally, and until he had it, she remained necessary.

Carmilla's voice had been detailed during the last-minute adjustments as she delegated clearly, outlining patrol blind spots, bloodline weaknesses, psychological triggers for Marius's favored guards, while King Tepes himself looked visibly restrained as Carmilla handed out commands in his stead. Camazotz could tell the male wanted to correct her.

Nightfall struck and the castle began to move.

At the front gates of the ruined Tepes Castle, under banners quickly raised in the old family colors, King Tepes stood adorned in a traditional cloak, ceremonial armor polished, and a jeweled goblet in hand. The announcement had already been made hours prior, word spread intentionally fast through both loyalists and enemies. He had declared his return with a confident sneer, offering peace talks under the blood moon.

An open invitation to all nobles, regardless of allegiance, in the castle courtyard.

He knew it was bait, and they knew it was bait. That didn't matter. What mattered was how long Marius could afford to ignore it without appearing weak. And the son was too paranoid and arrogant to risk looking weak in front of nobles.

Camazotz slipped in through the southern aqueduct entrance.

It was a buried structure, somehow abandoned, but it connected deep into the wine cellars. He took it without instruction. The route was not on the Carmilla maps. He found it himself, by instinct. Rats didn't build strongholds like this unless there were multiple exits, and Camazotz cracked open half the floor tiles in the ruins to trace where the pipes settled. Vampires had deficient instincts. They built monuments. He was hunting for Valerie and he would not wait for the nobles to finish their pageantry.

His body simply did not make a sound when he wanted it to stop. The stone gave no vibration beneath his talons. The dry air carried no scent of movement. He scanned every intersection, dead end, room packed with broken crates and bottled blood. She was not here. Sacred Gears never hid perfectly, and the Dhampir, in her condition, wouldn't have the capacity to suppress it fully. That made this search irritating.

Up above, the ceremony was reaching its midpoint.

Nobles began arriving in their formal attire, riding in on carriages and low-hover magical palanquins. They carried status markers etched in their house sigils. Marius had not yet appeared. His elite guard was stationed along the castle walls, but none moved to engage.

Everyone present knew this wasn't just a political stunt. It was the last chance to choose sides. Some of the nobles greeted Tepes with false familiarity. Others kept to themselves, watching the Queen's vanguard gathering near the back edges of the courtyard.

Carmilla's women entered through the tunnels into the main castle interior through the collapsed bathhouse. They spread out, fanning across the lesser chambers while waiting for the real opening. They needed to isolate the corridors connecting to the inner sanctum—where Valerie was most likely hidden—and trigger a lockdown. The plan involved cutting the bloodlines at the source, removing the lesser guards silently, and choking the alarm routes by disabling the blood seal relays. All the while, the nobles' ceremony would keep attention fixed on Tepes.

Camazotz exited the cellar, stepping through a blood-crusted archway. The castle interior was aged and decrepit, more so than it should have been for only a few years of neglect. That told him Marius hadn't bothered to maintain anything outside of his immediate throne hall. Valerie's presence wasn't here either.

He reached a dead corridor. His ears twitched. A breath out of rhythm.

Claws already slashing, and one of the guards split in half before the Vampire could blink. The other two screamed and vanished into mist, bolting down the hallway, but Camazotz didn't pursue. They're outer-rank soldiers, probably part of a scouting rotation that was never rotated again. Valerie wasn't in the south wing.

He kept walking.

Back in the courtyard, King Tepes had begun his formal speech. It was long-winded, referring to vampire customs, bloodline purities, ancestral legacies, and his 'glorious return.' The nobles listened with passive expressions. The show mattered more than the words. Camazotz noticed, even from underground, the exact moment Carmilla's squad moved. The power pivoted subtly in the air. The hallways began to change position as blood seals activated, gates rotating. Marius had finally triggered the castle's defense systems. The bastard was watching from somewhere.

Camazotz crouched and stabbed both claws into the floor, then yanked upward. The tile shattered. Below him was another shaft, covered in layered seal paper and smudged chalk. A ritual chamber.

He dropped in.

It was still active. The chamber had been used recently from the reinforced markings. The entire room was designed to redirect Sacred Gear output to contain or alter it, but not destroy it. He finally had the path. The Dhampir's Gear was probably being weaponized, not suppressed. That explained the slow spread of magic and the lack of scouts in the interior.

He heard three muffled explosions above. The Queen's forces reached one of the choke points. Too early. Someone must've forced their hand. Camazotz turned and moved faster, now tracing the ritual residue. There were three hallways extending from the chamber. Only one had active blood in the symbols. He took it.

The next guard didn't scream. Camazotz twisted his head off mid-turn and left the body against the wall.

Above, King Tepes was now arguing, feigning insult, as several nobles from the Marius faction began speaking back. The discussion was turning heated, political blame passed in jabs, family records questioned, allegiances thrown under public scrutiny. This was the second phase. Distraction turned into division. King Tepes was stoking tension intentionally now. His goal was to fracture their unity before Marius made his appearance.

Marius still hadn't arrived.

A doll-figured male Vampire had one hand clutched around the nape of a Dhampir's neck, not tight enough to strangle or loose enough to be innocent. The short-haired blond girl had her head tilted to the side like she was half-asleep, the significance of the moment was a passing breeze to her dulled perception.

It was clear to him that her eyes were unfocused. Whatever innocence she was born with had been beaten into submission long before he stepped into the chamber. He saw it immediately. There was no will left in her of the tension behind her brother's grin.

A broken doll that smiled when told. One who bowed her head and obeyed because disobedience had never brought anything but pain.

He could only assume that the other one was Marius, who by now was flaunting some nonsense about loyalty and bloodlines and obligations to the future of vampire-kind. It amused him to watch how deep the delusion ran. There was not an ounce of concern in Marius' eyes as he mentioned Valerie's potential. He didn't care about her well-being. Camazotz knew the type. Vultures who saw their kin not as inventory. Self-declared kings who held no real dominion over anything beyond what their fathers had handed them.

"You're very late, aren't you?" Marius said with an airy smirk, trying to sound casual. "Father sends you to interrupt my work at the worst possible time. Really, I had expected more from King Tepes. If he's truly returned, you'd think he would value diplomacy."

He didn't know who he was speaking to. That was obvious from the moment he raised his tone. Camazotz looked around the chamber, noting the crude ritual circle that had been half-scrawled into the floor, smeared with her blood. A dagger on the altar. Valerie's wrists bore faint marks, likely bandaged regularly to prevent questions. A chair in the corner with leather restraints, too small to be meant for an adult. He stared at those details longer than he did at the boy pretending to be a man.

He looked at Marius and said flatly, "You were going to cut her open, I see? Tell me I'm wrong, say it so I can pull your spine out and not feel disappointed."

Marius' smug expression flickered for a moment as the words hit a nerve. Marius laughed awkwardly, waved a hand.

"You misunderstand, clearly. My sister's condition is quite severe. She's... unstable. The Sacred Gear, you see, is a rare phenomenon and causes unpredictable effects. I was only trying to help her stabilize it before it harmed her. She trusts me. I am her brother. Surely you, as Father's little errand boy, wouldn't insinuate something as vulgar as treason—"

Marius stepped back, then realized what he was doing and stopped himself.

"You're not smart. If you were evil and competent, I'd understand. But you're weak, entitled, and pathetic. Wrapping your intentions in words you think sound righteous, hoping someone will nod and agree so you don't have to face what you are... those facts have no use to me at all. I don't care about Vampires. If you lie to me again, I will tear off your jaw, staple it to your forehead, and feed you your own tongue."

Marius' posture snapped. Without realizing it, he slowly backed away as Camazotz stepped closer. "You… you're just a human. D-don't think I'll be intimidated by some human thug sent to bark for the old king. You think you can threaten me in my castle? I am the Mayor of the Tepes faction. I—"

"Not anymore," Camazotz cut in flatly. "The instant your mouth formed those words, you ceased to be anything. A prince you were, then you were a parasite, now you're fertilizer."

Valerie blinked as she looked between them.

"Marius… I thought you said I'd get better soon… you promised we'd… go back to Father together…"

They didn't look at her.

Marius lifted his hand, and the flicker of a magic seal ignited in his palm. "I don't know who you are, freak, but you will leave now or—"

Camazotz grabbed the boy by the wrist and crushed the seal before it could fully form. The sound was a dull squelch followed by a sharp pop as cartilage collapsed. Marius screamed, but it barely echoed before Camazotz flung him across the room. His body hit the far wall with a bone-jarring thud, leaving a red smear as he collapsed to the floor, gasping and twitching.

Camazotz didn't even look at the mess. He stared instead at Valerie, who sank slowly to her knees.

He crouched beside her and studied her face.

"Your brother's an idiot," he said bluntly. "You shouldn't have followed him. You probably already knew that, somewhere in that hollow skull of yours, but you obeyed. You realized you're an accessory to his weakness?"

He tilted her chin up and examined her eyes closely. Her pupils were unfocused. Her soul was literally splintered, lacking the mental cohesion expected of someone with a Sacred Gear.

The chaos above was spreading. Tepes successfully drew out the outer guard. The Carmilla infiltrators were inside. The warband of matriarchs had swept through three corridors already, if the tremors were any indication. Efficient, calculated. That would give him less than five minutes before someone reached this floor. He needed the girl conscious and useful.

He slapped her.

Not hard enough to injure, but firm enough to jolt her.

"Focus. Do you know what you are?"

Her voice was soft. "...Valerie…"

"Not what I meant; you're not a name. Names don't mean anything down here. You're a blood engine. Your body holds a Gear, doesn't it? Your brother wanted it. I want it. The only difference is, I can protect it. He wanted to cut it out of you and parade it around. I need it active. You want to keep breathing, you figure out how to wake it."

"I… I don't…"

"If you keep talking like that, I'll rip it out and throw your corpse down a well."

Her lips part just barely. "I... he said I'm queen...... I thought... he said it would be okay..."

"He lied. Obviously."

Her lip trembles. "But he's my brother."

Camazotz lifts her chin with two fingers. "Then you are a fool. Blood means nothing when it spills so easily. You let yourself believe because it made you feel safe, which meant you were weak. But I will not fault a broken mind. Now stand up. Fix your spine. Stop whispering like a sheep. If you don't want to die, learn to listen."

He stood up and looked back at Marius, who was now crawling toward the far door, his broken wrist held limply at his side, blood trailing behind him.

Pathetic. Slow. Worthless.

Camazotz walked over to him, grabbed the back of Marius' collar, and dragged him toward the ritual circle. The boy struggled weakly, legs kicking, muttering protests. None of it mattered.

Camazotz dropped him on top of the circle and stepped back.

"I'm not a priest. But I know blood, and I know power. If your little sister doesn't wake up on her own, maybe watching you scream will pull something to the surface."

Marius screamed something unintelligible, but Camazotz was already reaching for the dagger on the altar.

Before he could, the door behind opened with the hiss of mana reinforcement fading.

Camazotz glances to the corner of his vision, head tilting slightly as the scent of dragonic mana threads into the room. He narrows his eyes immediately. The man stepping through doesn't announce himself. One look and Camazotz registers something different. Taller than average, broad-shouldered, long hair with both blonde and black strands curling behind a fine-tailored black coat, and a pair of heterochromatic eyes that stare forward with all the experience of a long-lived warmonger. His body language is relaxed, but the aura seeping from him isn't passive.

"…I came to report. The castle is breached, King Tepes and Queen Carmilla are moving inward. I thought you should kn—"

Crom Cruach stops three steps in and scans the scene in a single sweep. His eyes settle on Marius first, then on Valerie, barely dressed, clinging to her own arms in surprise. Then, finally, he rests his gaze on Camazotz, his gaze lingering, registering the wings, the tail, the smell of old blood in the air.

His words cut short. His nostrils flare slightly. He doesn't finish his sentence. The sight tells him everything.

Camazotz speaks first. "That's far enough."

Crom's eyes fix on him. He doesn't take another step.

"You're not part of this faction," Crom states flatly.

Camazotz straightens. "Smart. You can smell the difference."

Crom folds his arms, not tense but not dismissive. "You're not a Vampire, even when you reeked of the smell of a bat. Your body is human, though your aura is older than this castle."

Camazotz grins. "That bothers you?"

"You can welcome death if you're hostile."

"You're welcome to try."

Crom's eyes narrow, the left eye glowing just faintly with demonic light. "You killed Marius?"

"I broke his teeth. He's still breathing."

"You assaulted a ruling figure."

"He was seconds away from violating his sister and cutting her Sacred Gear out of her spine. Try defending that with a sense of honor."

Crom's lips twitch in acknowledgment. Then he unfolds his arms.

"I'm not here to defend degenerates," he says. "But I was assigned to protect him, and I keep my contracts."

Camazotz rolls his neck, muscle and bone cracking audibly. "Then I guess I'm fighting someone competent. Good."

He doesn't wait. His wings burst outward, the chamber warping briefly from the sheer density of pressure. The floor cracks, and he closes the distance instantly, claws extended, aiming not for a lethal blow but to test Crom's reaction speed.

Crom pivots his body sideways, allowing the attack to graze his coat. His hand moves at the same time, grabbing Camazotz's forearm with crushing force. Camazotz grins and spins his tail forward, stabbing low. Crom catches that too.

"Fast," Camazotz says, already moving his free leg upward into a knee aimed at Crom's stomach. Crom tanks it with minimal reaction, but the impact splits the floor beneath them and throws dust into the air.

"I've fought dragons stronger than you," Crom states as he holds Camazotz in place.

Camazotz licks the blood trickling from his lip, eyes widening with laughter. "You haven't fought me."

With a sharp jerk, Camazotz twists both arms outward, body erupting in a flash of energy. The human frame holds, but the shadows erupt from his spine and lash at Crom like tendrils. Crom is forced to backstep, releasing his grip to avoid the unnatural binding. Camazotz slams the ground with his foot, launching toward him again, this time both hands shaped into claws aiming for Crom's throat.

Crom raises both arms and blocks, but the force sends him sliding several meters across the chamber. He stops just before hitting the far wall, heels digging trenches in the floor.

Camazotz drops into a crouch, saliva mixing with blood at the corner of his mouth. "You'll need to try harder if you're going to live through this. Don't hold back just because I look human."

Crom raises his hands into a combat stance. "I wasn't planning to."

Valerie flinches and stumbles backward, hitting the stone wall, curling into herself. She covers her ears as the pressure of the two combatants begins to choke the air. Her Sacred Gear pulses again, and this time, one of the stained-glass lights in the room bursts from the interference.

The ground rumbles faintly above them. That means King Tepes and Carmilla have already breached the second floor. They'll be here in minutes.

Camazotz doesn't care. He doesn't need them yet.

He lunges again, changing his trajectory midway, spinning low and sweeping Crom's legs. Crom leaps over it and delivers a heel kick downward. Camazotz raises one wing and blocks it, the wing snapping backward at the joint from the impact. It doesn't slow him. He grabs Crom's descending foot and slams him into the wall hard enough to break stone. Crom rebounds instantly, dragging a hand across his jaw with a trace of blood.

Camazotz laughs and wipes blood from his nose.

"You're not sane," Crom noted in curiosity.

"Correct."

"You're not reasonable."

"Keep going."

"You're enjoying this."

"I've killed gods. I broke one with my bare hands. This? This is foreplay."

Crom snarls. The ceiling cracks from the weight of his pressure, and his body thumps with dragon energy.

Camazotz smiles wider.

Before Crom realized, Camazotz grips the air like a steel vice and hurls himself toward the dragon without delay. He drives his heel into the floor with all his weight and force, bending the stone under him and launching forward like a missile, and shoulder slams into Crom's chest at full speed before the dragon even fully finishes flaring his aura. The room implodes around them. Pillars snap like brittle bones. The wall behind Crom doesn't resist for even a second. The bat god barrels them both through it and straight down into the depths of the castle.

Camazotz lets out a guttural cackle as they smash through support beams and reinforced pillars. He's not mindless, he deliberately angles the crash path to avoid the chamber above, far from the broken girl.

Crom's body spins, tail lashing out, and slaps Camazotz across the temple with enough force to crater the floor beneath them by the shockwave alone. Camazotz rolls once but bounces back upright immediately, the blow clearly felt but utterly ignored. Blood spills from his mouth, but he licks it off his lip with a laugh.

"You hit like a noble knight, Dragon. Pity you wear the illusion of a man. Where's your real face, I wonder? Under the tongue? In the spine?"

Crom wipes the blood from his cheekbone where Camazotz's knuckle had split him open. He straightens, adjusting his footing, golden eye narrowing.

"Says the one with a deranged mind—"

"—YOU MEAN BOTH OF US!"

Camazotz erupts with a scream that sounds like it came from the throat of a dying starved jaguar. His claws ignite in purple flame, twisted skulls dancing along his wrists, then he swipes in the air, five times in rapid succession, sending massive crescent waves of fire ahead of him, screeching through the stone corridors and melting the ceiling behind Crom.

Crom leaps high into the next hallway, absorbing the fire into his draconic aura. His flesh bubbles for a moment from the cursed heat but quickly hardens again. He spins and breathes a cone of red-hot fire down into the tunnel as he dives after Camazotz. The vampire stones melt. The silver chandeliers collapse into slag.

They meet midair, shoulder to shoulder, fists colliding. The shock sends a rippling force throughout the entire basement level of the castle. Furniture upstairs topples and combusts. The ceiling buckles as the support beams are now gone. Camazotz ducks and slams both fists into Crom's gut, then drags his nails up along his chest, peeling skin and armor alike. Crom twists and knees Camazotz in the side, then bites straight into his shoulder, tearing out a chunk of flesh and throwing it into the wall behind them.

Camazotz screams in laughter. He doesn't even feel the wound. He cups his hand, and a sphere of blue, white, and black fire ignites between his fingers. He swings his hand wide and flings the sphere point-blank into Crom's face. It detonates, sending both of them smashing through another three levels of the castle. A servant screams in the distance. Somewhere above them, a chandelier falls and crushes someone too slow to run.

They crash through a changing room. A half-naked vampire, covered in towels, holding a brush and a cup of warm blood, stares at the two beings of death slamming through his ceiling. He blinks, drops the cup, then slowly turns and walks the other way without a word.

Camazotz is laughing too hard to speak. Crom grabs his face mid-flight and slams it into the next wall, then shoulder-tackles him through the upper floor. They soar together, fists locked, through the staircase and out of the main hall. Red carpet tears like wet paper. Statues shatter. They blow out through the castle's front archway and launch into the open air above the mountains.

Dozens of Vampires below look up. The Carmilla faction and what remains of Tepes' loyalists watch two figures launch into the sky, wings colliding, fire and light bursting from their bodies. The night is painted in red and violet. Explosions bloom above the castle like a warzone tearing through clouds.

Camazotz's tail coils around Crom's arm and jerks him mid-air. The dragon jerks backward, but his foot kicks up and nails Camazotz square in the jaw. Blood and a tooth fly downward toward the castle. Camazotz barely reacts as he just roars and spins, flames launching from his wings. He circles his arms, conjuring more skull-fire, then slices the air in front of him. Eight giant burning slashes arc toward Crom from all angles.

"Krk!" Crom drops altitude, dodging most, letting two burn across his side and leg. He flies straight into Camazotz with fists ready. The air between them distorts. Their punches collide again and again, each clash creating thunder above the castle. Lightning cracks behind them as their energies mix and repel. Below, several vampire soldiers collapse from the sheer pressure in the air.

Crom finally lands a combo—left hook, spinning heel kick, elbow to the gut. Camazotz hits the mountainside, then rockets back up, more feverish than ever. Flames burst from his mouth as he exhales a beam of raw fire up at Crom.

Crom blocks it with both arms crossed and dives straight through the attack. His clothes burn away, skin smolders, but he doesn't stop. He tackles Camazotz into the air again, now driving them both even higher. They vanish into the clouds, and within seconds, the clouds turn red and burst apart from the energy exchange.

Camazotz wraps his wings around Crom and begins spinning like a drill. They descend fast, straight back toward the castle roof. Crom shoves his head into Camazotz's sternum to force distance, then flares his aura again and ignites his fists.

"You waste strength talking like a madman!"

Camazotz drips blood from his fangs and smiles widely, eyes empty and wide open.

"Talk? This is worship! Every swing, every kick, every broken tooth—I'm forcing reverence out of you! I want your heart to know my name before I rip it out and stuff it into your mouth!"

"GRAH!!"

Crom's body slams through three more towers before he stabilizes himself midair, shoving off the rubble clinging to his limbs. His scales crack but don't tear; the damage accumulates beneath the surface. His ribs feel the vibration of Camazotz's blows echoing through his frame, and the sky carries the scent of his own blood scattered in fine mist.

It shouldn't be possible. Not for anyone to endure this long. Not after being hit head-on with that many pulses of compressed flame laced with divinity-rotting heat. Not after having your own fire countered with a gust of skull-shaped energy that chews through magical resistance like it's air. Not after being slammed straight through two fortified anti-divine barrier rooms, multiple anti-intrusion walls, and a fucking pillar of steel enchanted with draconic suppression meant to pin Heavenly Dragon if they ever went berserk.

He glares across the sky. Camazotz hovers and licks the blood off the edge of his claw. His wings twitch erratically like spasms of madness. His neck is crooked, and his torso is slashed open in three places. The left shoulder has been cracked out of socket at least once and reattached by what Crom can only describe as unnatural tissue flexibility.

And despite it, he smiles. Wide, disgustingly wide, every tooth glinting. His body shouldn't be moving at all with the punishment it's taken. A lesser being would've turned to soup.

Crom's muscles strain. He pushes the pain aside because it doesn't matter. What matters is that he's learning. The rhythm, the stance, the twitch before Camazotz launches his slashes; the delay between the stirs and the swing, the brief drop in posture right before the beam charges, the space between the flashes. His wings twitch before each burst of forward momentum. Each subtle adjustment, each reaction is entering Crom's intuition. His body's adapting, responding faster, anticipating better. Camazotz may be fast, but speed doesn't overcome pattern recognition forever. Crom's Battle Intuition isn't some party trick, it's his instinctual learning engine, and it never shuts off.

As if it mocks him particularly, he notices something deeply wrong. Despite the adaptation, precise counter-slams and overwhelming strength, Camazotz is hitting harder. It's noticed from the magical slashes take less time to charge. And his movements—Crom would swear on the All-Father Dagda—they're evolving mid-fight. As if the bastard is taking his reactions and reshaping himself around them, and he doesn't even look tired. Instead, he looks high. Drunk. Fucking elated.

"I have fought beings who shattered the land with a cough. I have clashed with Albion's descendants. I have struck down Devil Lords and torn through the gate of Tír na nÓg!" Crom shouts with the booming voice of a dragon whose breath has collapsed cities. "Only once before have I met something that refused to fall no matter what I gave it! His name was Balor, he enslaved my mind and made me submit, you are the second to ever reach that level!"

Camazotz laughs with his throat wide, no, he's laughing through his blood. "Your voice sounds like a crippled priest trying to sing with his guts out, Dragon. You expect me to care about your trauma? Is that what this is, 'cause I'll tell you right now I've eaten brains smarter than that old cyclops! You want a medal?"

"I'm not speaking out of pity," Crom growls, wings kicking him forward with explosive acceleration. "In battle, there is honor. You have earned my name."

They collide again, their fists crashing into each other with enough kinetic backlash to vaporize every cloud above the castle. The mountains to the west shake. The castle's walls ripple from the blast pressure, tearing loose balconies and defensive towers alike. In a single moment, Crom spins with his tail, catching Camazotz mid-air and flinging him into the upper western spire. Stone explodes outward. He follows, grabs Camazotz by the throat, and slams him through three floors. Vampires scatter, screaming, trying to shield themselves from the debris.

"I am Crom Cruach! The Crescent Circle Dragon! The Strongest of the Evil Dragons! You have earned the right to fall knowing whose name you failed to break!"

Camazotz bursts into purple flame that coats Crom's arms, setting fire to his scaled sleeves. His body writhes like a snake, grabs Crom's head, and spits a blue-white beam point blank into his face. Crom is launched backward into the open air and flips thrice to reorient. His horns are scorched black. His cheekbone cracks. He looks back—and Camazotz is already in front of him.

"Crom Cruach," Camazotz repeats mockingly, his tongue dragging across his teeth. "That supposed to scare me? You wanna talk names? Fine! But don't expect the same kind of dragon nicety."

He stops midair and flares his wings wide, every inch coated in swirling magic and caked blood.

"I am Camazotz! I am the Champion of the Ka'an! I am the Spider-Slaying Bat! I am the King who Forsook his Crown! I am the curse that sang louder than the god who birthed me! Write it in your skull before I break it!"

Crom opens his jaws, releasing a wave of searing dragon fire at full capacity. Camazotz responds by conjuring three balls of distorted tricolor flame, launching them forward. The blasts meet and consume the castle's upper airspace in an eruption that vaporizes five levels of the castle. The sky above them becomes an arena of chaos.

They crash into each other again, spinning downward like two falling stars trying to rip each other to pieces before they hit the ground. Crom grabs Camazotz's leg mid-spin, hurls him sideways, and Camazotz responds by blasting fire into the trajectory, stopping mid-air and catapulting backwards with a flame-assisted kick to Crom's sternum. The dragon coughs blood and fires a retaliatory bolt of compressed aura, which smashes Camazotz's shoulder open, but the Bat God doesn't even slow. He takes it, twists through the air, and slashes Crom across the ribs with six fire skull-slashes, carving through skin and hitting physical matter.

They scream in each other's faces as their fists meet again.

The air breaks. The earth below them splits. The vampires who had been watching from a distance start fleeing. Entire guard formations are ordered to retreat from the courtyard. Every impact sends shockwaves into the hills. The Romanian sky looks like it's being torn into strips of light.

The battlefield couldn't be called a battlefield anymore with a dragon and a god—it's a gravitational storm.

Camazotz cackles through a mouth full of broken teeth. "You're starting to creak, dragon. I hear the ribs snapping. Wanna take a break? Catch your breath? I could peel your scales off slowly if you want. Make it last. How about it?!"

Crom grabs him by the face, punches through his gut, rips out a second rib, and uses it to stab his thigh.

"I am not here for conversation, Bat!"

"Neither am I!" Camazotz howls, biting down on Crom's forearm, flooding it with fire from his mouth. Crom shakes him off, punches his skull, and Camazotz lands a hook that rattles Crom's spine through sheer internal impact force.

They spin away from each other, blood trailing in thick arcs, both of them scorched, cracked, and howling with excitement. Neither lands. Neither falls.

Their laughter is loud enough to be heard from the Carmilla outposts twenty miles out.

"Let's keep going, I've got more energy!" Camazotz grinds his fists together as more skull-flames burn through his fingers. "THIS NIGHT'S GOT ROOM FOR MORE DEAD THINGS!"

Crom answers by raising his aura, letting it roar outward until the wind recoils around them and the ground cracks in every direction. His claws extend, fire surging through his throat.

He parried a wide sweep of purple fire skulls with a focused blast of Dragon Aura that vaporizes them before they touch. His wings retract and twist mid-air, dragging his body into a wide circular rotation that evades the rest. He lands two successive blows, one to Camazotz's lower ribs with a hooked kick, the second a heavy overhead strike with his fist that carries a sound shockwave strong enough to blow apart the cloud layer beneath them. The crater of condensed force cracks the sky around them and blasts a circular wave of wind over the ruined castle grounds. Several towers that had survived the initial raid collapsed outright.

Camazotz absorbs both strikes and doesn't flinch. The bat god spins like a wheel, his heel slicing across Crom's jaw with such force that the latter flips twice in the air, regaining control only after fifty meters. Blood drips down the edge of Crom's chin. His vision is clear, but there's heat in his skull now. This god is bleeding him dry through attrition.

Legs tense, wings partially spread. His thoughts organized the last six minutes. In any other battle, Crom would already be the last one standing. Not even the other Irish Gods made him retreat in movement this much, except this god fights with overwhelming motion. His flames don't come at him in standard patterns; they curl in spontaneous spirals and move like intelligent hounds that adjust mid-flight. Even now, Crom watches the Bat's hands stir up another wave, carving the air with a wide arc, dragging purple skulls with jagged teeth into trails of flame that slither into each other before launching as a spiral barrage.

Crom flashes across them and slams both feet into Camazotz's chest. The impact creates a sonic detonation that quakes the Earth. The Tepes courtyard breaks apart again, a second massive crater forming as the pressure wave hits ground zero. Entire chunks of the ruined eastern wing rip free and collapse down the mountain cliffs. The shock knocks debris as far as a kilometer off the perimeter wall.

Camazotz vanishes in the next instant.

Crom barely registers the shift in airflow before a skeletal fist slams into his lower back. His scales ripple from the kinetic force. The follow-up kick hits his ribs from the side, smashing him through a rain of shattered castle stone and into a rocky outcrop. The cliff wall explodes. Massive slabs of granite are atomized. He bursts out the other side, his eyes glowing with rage. He opens his mouth and roars with Dragon Aura, the compressed wave slams toward Camazotz.

The god spins over the attack, his body corkscrewing as his claws trace glowing slashes across the sky. The beams of fire shoot forward like machine gun rounds. Crom zigzags, closing the distance through the middle of the barrage, taking two hits directly, one across his shoulder and another into his side. He closes the space, and lands a gut punch that bends Camazotz in half. He immediately grabs the god's neck and plummets downward.

Crom only had a millisecond to see his opponent's grin before Camazotz's hands light up.

Too late.

A white-blue-black orb flashes into existence. Crom sees it only as light, and then it detonates.

The shockwave is blinding. Castle grounds rupture in all directions. Mountains in the far background quake from the radius. The crater beneath them deepens by nearly thirty meters. Tepes' central watchtower collapses into itself. The eastern vampire regiment watching from afar is instantly vaporized. Magic becomes unstable within a hundred-meter radius. Vampire sorcerers miles away feel it and drop from the air from sheer loss of orientation.

Crom crashes into the center of the devastation, landing on his hands and knees. He slams his fists into the ground to stabilize himself. A blood spat on the ground.

Camazotz floats above him, hovering in the smoke and flame, blood dripping off his shoulders, lips curled in amusement.

"What's wrong, Dragon? Had enough of an insane bat?"

Crom lifts his head, glaring. There is no respect in the god's voice. Only mockery and joy.

Camazotz snorts, smile curling broader.

"I like you, Dragon. Very well. Let us continue."

The sky splits again as they clash mid-air. The thunderclap is instant. Every hit shakes the clouds into vapor. Crom's elbow slams into the bat's cheek. Camazotz's claws rake across his gut. Neither pulls back. They twist, grapple, spin into a hurricane of speed and strikes. Crom adapts. He stops chasing with strength and starts baiting instead, letting Camazotz overextend before punishing. He clocks the god in the temple with a tight upward knee. Camazotz was stunned just long enough for Crom to grab the wrist and twist the arm behind his back before driving the god straight down.

They crater the mountain again.

Crom lands, breathing heavier, and just as he prepares to press in, his eyes shift. There's a disturbance behind him.

Something massive crashes into Camazotz from the side.

The force is enormous—Camazotz is thrown across the entire sky. The air pressure collapse flattens trees and cracks the mountainside.

The intruder lands where Camazotz had hovered seconds ago.

Fifteen meters tall, western frame. Two legs, humanoid posture, wings folded behind the back. Black scales, jagged horned crown, silver slit-pupiled eyes. His limbs are thick, his aura a storm of violence. Killing intent radiates like a dome. The vampire soldiers hundreds of meters below scream as their minds are crushed.

The Crime Force Dragon of the Evil Dragons known as Grendel grins.

"What the hell, Crom? You get tossed around like that by some flying rat? You're slower than a human now."

Crom narrows his eyes. His chest rises and falls with contempt.

"Bastard, you interfered with my battle without discipline. That god is not to be taken lightly."

Grendel snorts, confused, eyes scanning the smoke trail where Camazotz vanished.

"God? What god fights like that? You expect me to believe some random foreign deity shows up to torch Vampire nobles? Who the hell is he? One of Odin's bastards?"

Before Crom can answer, something slams into Grendel's left side in a karmic way.

Camazotz appears mid-flight, half his body engulfed in that same white-black-blue flame. His punch lands square into Grendel's chest and detonates. Grendel is knocked backwards into the cliffside, cratering the entire vertical wall. Massive rocks tumble off. The mountain trembles again.

Camazotz spins midair, eyes flaring, and points at Crom with a claw.

"I don't care who this brute is, but do tell me, Dragon, is he your ally, or should I rip out his spine before returning to you? If he fights beside you, I'll put you both in the ground."

"Although, I am flattered that you brought a second dragon just for me. Are you both in love with me or just desperate?" Camazotz laughs as his broken bones snap back in place with heat and pressure.

Crom is fed up. "Crime Force Dragon, Grendel, I explicitly told him not to interfere in my battles unless I am dead."

"That so? Maybe you're too slow. You had your chance, Crom."

"He disrespects the duel and our pride as dragons."

Crom's expression suddenly freezes.

Camazotz's muscles stretch as he slams his left arm upward, bones locking tight as Grendel's descending blow collides with his forearm. The sheer mass behind the punch sends a reverberating jolt down his frame. He twists his neck with a crack and skims his feet across the air as his body absorbs the tremor.

Camazotz lets out a hacking laugh that breaks into a hiss of satisfaction, licking the blood off his forearm that trails from a split vein. His eyes stay locked on the towering critter.

"You really put force in that, you giant bastard! This one actually made my bones scream! More... Hit me like that again. I want to feel every bone in my ribcage collapse from the impact next time. I'll split your neck open the moment you overextend!"

Grendel's saliva oozed from his lips as he snarled with both fists crackling with pressure, "You yapping flying corpse, I'm going to smash your skull open with your own ribs and watch you try to scream with nothing but blood left in your throat! I don't care what god you claim to be, it would be my flames that shall be your death!"

Crom slams his heel into the space between them, splitting the air with a shockwave that cuts through their argument. His aura floods outward like a scorching dome.

"This is a battlefield, not a sewer. I will not stand here and be sidelined like I'm a third party in a game you started inside MY duel!"

Yes, yes.

Fight each other for him! Who is stronger?! Who wants his attention more?! Are dragons always this easy to tease?!

Camazotz stretches both arms, twirling flame skulls in circles around him, growing larger and heavier in mana output. The surrounding air melts.

Camazotz lurches forward, shoulders heaving as he roars with elation, "Yes, that's it! That's exactly it! I don't want your respect, Crescent Dragon. I want your neck! I want it crushed in my hands while your eyes flicker from hate to fear! I want to rip open both your dragon hearts while they're still beating! And I'll start with the one who smells more like a rotting pit than an actual being! YOUR TURN!"

He jerks forward with a speed that rips open the wind barrier around them, and Grendel meets him head-on, claws colliding with Camazotz's skull-shaped flame constructs mid-flight. The purple skulls crack open on impact and explode into black flame pulses. Grendel spins with one foot and strikes with the back of his tail, landing it directly on Camazotz's hip, flinging him downward onto the castle grounds. The impact shakes the land and caves in an entire portion of Tepes Castle, creating a deep crater.

Before the dust even clears, Crom appears behind Grendel and slams his elbow down on the beast's nape, causing a backlash of force that bends the space beneath them. Grendel grunts and grabs Crom's arm mid-strike, swinging him over his shoulder and tossing him downward like a ragdoll. But Crom adjusts mid-fall, flipping into the trajectory and igniting his body with draconic aura before rocketing back up like a missile, kneeing Grendel in the stomach so hard that the Evil Dragon folds inward from the compression.

Camazotz rises from the crater below as he brushes debris off his arms. A pulsing, spherical flame glows between his palms — blue, black, and white interwoven — and he hurls it skyward. The beam it releases erupts from his hands and shoots through the night, shredding the clouds above and tearing into Grendel and Crom's position. Crom deflects with a crossed arm guard, barely redirecting the beam away from his face, but the pressure scorches the front of his coat and sends him flying back through three layers of ruined castle walls.

Grendel, who had taken the beam directly to the side, grins through the burn marks smoking across his ribs and thighs, and his tail lashes with joy as he growls, "AHAHA! Burn everything I have left! I'll bite your limbs off one by one and force them down your throat!"

"Your threats are half as good as your strikes, and even your punches are dull..." Camazotz snarls with manic amusement. He lunges upward again, flinging his skull-shaped flames around in a wide orbit before launching six consecutive slashes that each split the air and crack apart pieces of surrounding space. Dimensional rifts open temporarily as the shockwaves shear nearby clouds and generate gravitational ripples that distort the stars above.

Grendel bursts through the slashes, uncaring of the cuts left behind, letting them slice across his shoulders and chest. The smell of his own blood drives him wild. He hammers both fists forward in a wide arc, catching Camazotz in the center and slamming him against the upper atmosphere. A sonic boom bursts behind him, and Camazotz's bones creak audibly as he resists the strike, planting his feet in midair and locking both arms behind Grendel's back. With a sharp spin, he twists the dragon mid-air and uses him like a makeshift bludgeon to slam into Crom, who has just reappeared.

The collision detonates another shockwave that flattens the remaining towers of Tepes Castle. The crater from Camazotz's earlier crash widens, swallowing the west wing entirely. Magical barriers scream and burst across the Vampire stronghold. Multiple runic symbols flash and deactivate from the sheer magical pressure tearing the space around the trio. Faint screams of scattered vampire soldiers can be heard from below as the debris rains down.

Crom caught sight of Camazotz recharging his flames with speed that should not be possible. His body, though heavily injured, doesn't show fatigue. Crom finally acknowledges the problem.

He's feeding on their power. The rate of growth is unnatural. It's parasitic, leeching energy mid-combat through every clash, every contact, and hiding it beneath the chaos. It's subtle but now it's undeniable. His damage isn't sticking not because he's regenerating, but because the power scale keeps moving upward before the damage can fully take hold.

Crom slows, just a margin, to assess it. He snaps backward across the rippling sky. He spits blood and feels his energy being leached off, "He's draining us, that's why he's recovering so fast. He's leeching energy with every clash."

Grendel's eyes twitch as he glances at Camazotz mid-clash. "You parasite. You feeding off me?! That's it! I'm breaking your wings, one tendon at a time!"

Camazotz grins wide, his pupils sharp, his breath rattling from ecstasy. "So you realize it before it's already too late. Don't worry, I'll rip you both apart with the strength you gave me!"

All three crash together again, midair, fist to claw to palm.

The impact bursts into a silent wave of distorted pressure, space buckling around them. Dimensional scars open and snap shut behind them. Lightning rips across the sky, following no weather pattern. Their battle sends pulses that fracture magical terrain boundaries. The space around their battlefield becomes increasingly fragile.

Camazotz's arms glow with deep violet fire, and he swings downward with both palms, cleaving the air with dual flame slashes. Grendel barrels through them and slams both fists into Camazotz's ribs, tearing the air with the speed of his blows, while Crom launches from behind and seizes Camazotz's leg, spinning and dragging the Bat God through several layers of space.

Camazotz suddenly surges up and bites a chunk out of Grendel's shoulder before blasting the stunned dragon in the face with a narrow beam of white-blue flame at point-blank range. Grendel's roar turns into mad laughter as the beam shatters the cliff beneath them and sends him flying backward, rolling across the landscape like a broken building, gouging through rocks and ash, ripping trenches in the earth. The beam tears a half-kilometer-wide line through the countryside, melting forests and vaporizing a village wall.

He bellows in hysterical laughter, foaming breath escaping his maw, "You feel that, you fucking clown? That's a pack from Grendel! I want to hear bones pop!" His claws rake upward again, following a brutal overhead swing that slams into Camazotz's skull. The shockwave cracks every window in the nearest ten buildings, flinging rubble into the air like shrapnel. The sound is worse—deep and grinding under pressure.

Camazotz's head jerks sideways. His neck rolls, and blood leaks from his nose. He twitches, then grabs Grendel's arm and yanks him down into a flying knee that crunches against Grendel's ribcage, denting in thick black scales and forcing a scream of pain from the dragon. Grendel reels back, blue blood spurting from his side.

"You got me! That's it! That's what I want!" Grendel shrieks, swiping again, trying to rip Camazotz's entire torso apart with both claws in a cross strike, but Camazotz spirals backward, four wings flapping violently, and unleashes a full arc of Necromantic slashes through the air. Purple skull-shaped fire explodes from his hands, spiraling in arcs that bend around buildings, turn corners, and come back around. Grendel is forced to duck, the trailing edge of one cutting into his shoulder. Flesh, scale, and muscle rip open, a chunk the size of a horse blown off. Blood sprays outward.

Crom moves with speed Grendel doesn't even see. He punches Camazotz mid-flight, throwing the Bat God into the ground hard enough to sink him into a crater the size of a mansion. Flames escape Crom's mouth with a low snarl. He doesn't follow up. He waits.

Camazotz climbs out, walking in forbearance. His shoulders jitter.

"You're both incredible! Glorious! Rotten and angry and screaming with everything I want. I could gorge myself on your dragon instincts and eat this entire shitty country... You call this strength? No... I'll show you strength."

"You talk far too much," Crom states coldly, his wings snapping briefly, as fire collects along his back. Either he's bluffing, or he wants them to underestimate him.

Grendel ignores it. He charges again, headlong, ignoring the gaping hole in his left side. He doesn't care. He can die mid-swing if that means he gets a better fight. His claw slashes across Camazotz's neck. It scrapes shallow—but even that feels like progress to him. Camazotz doesn't recoil. Instead, he thrusts a palm into Grendel's gut. A blast of blue, white, and black fire detonates from his palm.

The explosion wipes the castle gate clean off its hinges. A dozen Tepes Vampires too slow to teleport or shield themselves are incinerated. Grendel's body twists, his entire right arm and part of his chest vaporized in a wave of melting energy. Even then, Grendel snarls with ragged breaths, spewing blood from his mouth, barely hanging on, but his expression stays euphoric.

"You—you fucking bastard, t—that's what I was waiting for! Give me... more!"

Crom is in before the sentence finishes. His fists strike Camazotz's side, a sequence of five hits in a single second, generating sonic booms that ripple outward. The entire western section of Tepes Castle collapses in a chain reaction. Dust clouds billow into the sky. Flames pour from cracks in the ground. Crom's strikes force Camazotz back into the air, but the Bat God twists mid-flight, his wings absorbing two more hits before his tail whips forward and smashes across Crom's head, spinning him to the ground with enough force to bounce him off the earth like a stone skipping across water.

"Don't make me come," Camazotz hisses, grinning widely, landing again and crouching low. His hands swirl with more skull-shaped flames, and his skin begins to glow—darker veins appearing across his chest and arms. "You're feeding me, you pathetic little lizards. You're giving me everything I want. Don't stop. Bleed more. Fight more. Break more."

Crom growls low, licking blood from his lips, but he keeps an eye on Grendel. The blue flames lingering around Camazotz's body are dragging small tendrils into the air—towards both dragons, actively siphoning.

Grendel's laughter breaks. He notices it too. His muscles feel sluggish, and his regeneration is slowing. His limbs twitch at odd intervals. He's leaking power.

"YOU FUCKING LEECH! YOU CHEATING FUCK!" Grendel howls, spitting blood in rage, and slams his two fists into the ground in a shockwave so massive it flattens five castle towers. "YOU'RE DRAINING ME?!? I'LL KILL YOU FIRST! I'LL RIP YOUR WINGS OFF WITH MY TEETH!"

He charges again. Camazotz welcomes him with a full blast of concentrated energy from both hands. A beam of blue-white death erupts, thicker than a truck, and hits Grendel directly in the face.

The world turns white for a second.

When the dust clears, Grendel's entire upper torso is gone. His right arm and left shoulder are vaporized, and most of his chest is turned into a cauterized crater. Only his lower body, a single leg, a mangled torso, and an intact head remain. The head is still conscious from the twitching eyes.

Crom doesn't waste time. Camazotz turns toward him, hand raised for another blast, but Crom leaps back, dodging the beam by centimeters. It skims his coat, turning it to ash. Still, a fraction of the energy hits his side. Half his abdomen caves inward from the impact, a huge crater burned into his side.

Crom lands on one knee, wincing in pain. It's clear who bests this battle. He grabs Grendel's mangled remains and activates a teleportation circle under them. Camazotz lunges forward, laughing like an animal, but the circle flashes before he can reach them. Crom and Grendel vanish in golden light.

Camazotz slides to a stop, staring at the empty ground where they stood.

Chapter 22: Beast and Bloodsuckers (Part 3)

"Valerie..."

Valerie hears Marius groan her name. Her body flinches at the sound. Her eyes widen when she sees him crumpled on the stone floor, covered in blood. His body looks half-dead, his arm twitching weakly, his face twisted in pain. She feels her feet move on their own, dragging her closer to him with hesitant steps.

She can't make sense of why she's even walking toward the man who always frightened her. Maybe it's because she's spent so many years locked up in isolation, starved of any sign of warmth or recognition and it's because part of her still believes this family—no matter how cruel—is the only place she belongs.

Marius coughs violently as she kneels beside him. Blood comes out of his mouth and stains his chin. He weakly lifts his head.

"Valerie… you're the Queen of the Tepes bloodline. You're one of us. Everything we've built… it's falling apart. You can still save it."

She blinks. Her lips barely move. "I don't know how…"

"You don't have to know," Marius interrupts quickly, eyes trembling. "Just listen. You have the Graal. That power is your birthright, it belongs to the bloodline. You've carried it all this time... For us. You can stop the collapse. You can restore everything our ancestors fought to protect. We only need to guide it properly. That's all. That's all I ask..."

Her chest tightens. Her vision blurs slightly. All her life, she's been seen as a tool. A cursed child. An abomination with a sacred thing in her body that others wanted. No one ever said she could save anyone.

"If… If I can help them… If that's what I was meant to do… then… fine."

Marius doesn't waste another second. He immediately lifted one bloodied hand with a vicious grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. The floor surrounding them lights up as inscriptions and symbols appear, etched into the stone and glowing with sickly crimson light. The ritual circle completes instantly, clicking into activation like a lock snapping shut. Valerie tries to react, but a sudden pull inside her body freezes her in place. Her limbs lock up.

Marius places his palm directly against her chest. The moment contact is made, agony rips through her.

She shrieks. Her back arches and her eyes roll upward. Her chest feels like it's being torn open from within, something deep inside her forcefully dragged to the surface.

Her screams get louder. Her hands tremble violently, trying to push him off, but she can't even find the strength to move her fingers. Light bursts from her chest as her body gives out entirely. A brilliant golden glow forces its way out, pulsing wildly as it forms into a floating cup, intricately shaped, shining with divine energy.

Marius bursts into laughter as he opens his arms, the cup flying into his chest and fusing with him instantly. The runes all around them change color, shifting from red to gold as his entire body heals at once. His wounds vanish. His torn flesh reforms. His broken bones snap back into place. The power from the Graal floods into him without resistance.

His sister drops to the floor like a lifeless puppet, eyes dim and mouth still slightly open from the scream that never finished. He didn't pay the Dhampir any mind.

The thick wooden doors at the end of the chamber suddenly explode open with a violent force. Dust and splinters fly across the room. A female Vampire with red eyes and long wavy light blond hair in Middle Ages-princess red dress storms in with several armored Carmilla guards at her back. She halts as soon as she sees what's inside.

Her eyes go straight to Valerie collapsed on the floor then to Marius standing upright in the middle of a glowing ritual circle, radiating power he clearly never possessed before. Her nose scrunches, her upper lip curls in contempt.

"What filth are you performing in here, Marius Tepes?" she says loudly and commanding. "What did you do to her?"

Marius doesn't respond. The sight alone explains everything. The Graal's energy pulses from his chest, golden veins trailing up his neck and arms as if his body is struggling to contain it.

Elmenhilde's face twists into disgust. "You mutt parasite. You've stolen that from her."

Marius smiles. It's slow, ugly, and far too satisfied. He didn't bother defending himself. He raises one hand, and the ritual circle expands, lighting up again as the floor shakes.

The Carmilla guards instinctively draw their weapons, but even they hesitate. They can feel the power surging from Marius is beyond what any of them trained for.

A deep laugh erupts from his throat, echoing off the walls of the ritual chamber with manic joy. The flesh on his body peels, reforms, and contorts. Power forces its way into every inch of his undead form, and instead of pain, he grins as his cracked face heals instantly.

"Look at this—look at me," Marius howls, voice warped with the force now bubbling inside him. "The Graal has accepted me! The Longinus' power is mine! Her soul, her blood, her fate—they are mine now!"

He lifts his arm and conjures an orb of golden light, raw sacred power distilled into a dense projectile. Without warning, he flings it at the group of Carmilla-aligned vampire guards near the entrance. The orb explodes, ripping the ground apart. Two guards are instantly disintegrated, turned into ash before they can scream. The others barely leap aside, shields cracking under the backlash.

Elmenhilde turns toward the nearest guard and raises her voice sharply. "Take the girl. I don't care if she's limp or dying, grab her and follow me, now!"

Two guards rush to Valerie's unconscious body. Blood trickles from her nose and mouth as they lift her without dropping her. Elmenhilde raises both hands, drawing from the ritual room's mana-rich environment. Her nails glow red, then burst outward with spikes of hardened magical pressure. With a loud chant in ancient Romanian, she releases a barrage of crimson spears straight at Marius, each one accelerated with reinforced velocity.

Marius waves one hand. The Graal's influence releases a glowing dome barrier that nullifies the projectiles instantly. The ground cracks under his feet as he walks forward through the assault. The barrier flickers with sacred symbols that change every second, making counter-hexes ineffective. Elmenhilde's pride burned at the display of superiority.

"Do you see now? This is divinity, girl," Marius sneers as he lifts both arms, creating a pillar of holy fire and aiming it at the retreating group. "The age of only Pure-Blood aristocracy will commence. You are a fodder."

The flames engulf another two guards, who scream before their bodies rupture from within, their organs liquified from holy corrosion. Elmenhilde snarls, throwing up a thick wall of dark mist, enhanced with blood magic to buy time. It expands across the entire hallway, suppressing vision and dampening mana tracking.

"Retreat! Carry her up! If you drop her, I'll kill you myself!" she shouts, voice cracking as she runs after the group, her own spells primed behind her in case of interception.

The group begins sprinting up the spiral stone stairs as they pass the burned corpses of former Tepes soldiers. Behind them, Marius ascends slowly. The Graal heals each injury inflicted on him immediately, and the energy radiating from his body begins to melt the stone around him.

A bolt of lightning crashes down into the corridor from Elmenhilde's outstretched hand, channeled through an amplifier ring around her wrist. It explodes across the stairwell and collapses part of the wall, creating a small cave-in. For five seconds, they lose sight of Marius.

"Keep moving!" she barks at her guards, grabbing one by the collar and shoving him forward when he slows. "If we make it to the upper corridor, I can open a dimensional fold to Carmilla territory. But if he reaches us first, we're dead."

One of the rear guards suddenly cries out as a beam of divine light sears through her chest, blowing a hole in her back. Her body slams into the wall and slides down, twitching before going still. The others don't stop. They hear the sound of Marius's voice echoing through the smoke and dust.

"You can't run from a god, Carmilla Vampires! My Graal will rewrite the hierarchy! You're all insects now!"

Elmenhilde clenches her teeth. Her pride is being stabbed over and over, but her rationality prevails. She hurls a sphere of condensed blood magic down the stairs, forcing it to implode mid-air and launch razor shards in every direction. She doesn't wait to see if it hits. She continues sprinting.

They burst through the upper levels, the ornate stone hallways scorched and broken from earlier fighting. Gunfire and magic blasts ring out in the distance as Tepes loyalists clash with Carmilla units across the castle. A squad of Carmilla-aligned sentries stationed outside the stair exit salute as Elmenhilde exits.

"Prepare to fall back to the gate. I have the Queen," she says roughly but firmly.

"Yes, Lady Karnstein!" the squad leader barks, slamming her fist to her chest before moving to begin the ritual setup.

Behind them, a quake shudders through the floor. A brilliant beam of light erupts from the stairwell entrance as Marius steps into view again, clothes in tatters, half his face burned from the last magical impact, but reforming before their eyes. His right arm glows completely gold, and his left hand has a magic circle filled with symbols rotating along the forearm like a clockwork engine.

"You will not leave this place," he says. "The Graal will remain in my kingdom, and she—" he points at Valerie, wrapped in protective magical bands carried by two soldiers "—is not going anywhere."

Elmenhilde forms a massive red sigil above her head, powered by her own blood, and hurls it like a guillotine straight at Marius as the teleport gate behind her begins to open.

"Fall back! Everyone through the gate! Ignore anything behind you!"

Marius raises both hands to block, but the sigil expands mid-flight, cutting through the floor and walls like a rotating blade. Dust explodes upward. Carmilla guards begin throwing themselves through the teleport rift one by one. Elmenhilde moves among the last, eyes still locked on the debris cloud.

She hears the hiss of burning magic, then a loud echo of footsteps breaking through the ruin. Marius isn't even slowed.

She clicks her tongue and is about to step back through the gate.

BOOM!

Elmenhilde and her guards are flung from the collapsing teleport rift, their bodies hurled through the air by the shockwave of Marius' magic blast.

The courtyard, already in chaos from the ongoing battle, goes silent for a moment as their broken group crashes into the blood-stained ground. Every Vampire, soldier, and noble from both the Carmilla and Tepes factions turns to the center where Valerie's limp body lies, guarded by four battered Carmilla warriors and Elmenhilde herself, her uniform ripped and breathing heavily from exhaustion.

Before anyone can speak or act, a thunderous screech echoes from the air. Marius emerges from the top of the ruined castle, floating high above, glowing with golden divine light. His arms are stretched wide open, and his expression is one of pure arrogance and complete control.

The Carmilla faction, positioned along the right flank of the courtyard, immediately formed a protective semi-circle around Queen Carmilla herself, who looked at the sight of Elmenhilde struggling to her feet.

Marius descends slowly from the air, hands outstretched as if basking in the collective attention. His voice booms without magical amplification, echoing across the entire castle grounds. "Look at me, brothers of Tepes! Look at me, mongrels of Carmilla! That weak order, that decrepit monarchy, is over. You all belong to me now. I am not your mayor anymore—I am now King Marius Tepes, rightful ruler of our people, and the first to wield the full divine might of the Sephiroth Graal. The one who commands life, death, and miracles."

"This power was never meant for a lowly Dhampir like Valerie, a pathetic half-blood, bred in error, raised in isolation, and wasted in the hands of fools. This relic, this god-made artifact, was always meant for someone like me."

His eyes lock on the Carmilla faction, and his lips curl upward with open contempt. "And to our dear cousins, the matriarchal relics of the Carmilla line, you will kneel next, or be broken down to your base functions. Where women exist to serve and to breed. The new world will not be ruled by infertile queens and arrogant aristocrats."

Several Carmilla nobles hiss in outrage, drawing weapons. The Tepes side—those not blinded by the allure of divine power—turn their heads in disbelief. Marius' bold declaration doesn't end there.

"The age of hiding in shadows and scheming in ruins is finished. We are no longer mere parasites feeding on the scraps of devils or humans. With the Sephiroth Graal in my soul, I can grant eternal power. I can rewrite your essence, strengthen your bloodlines, and purge all weaknesses. Under me, the Vampire race will become the apex of all existence... immortal, dominant, and absolute. The Angels, the Devils, the Dragons, the Gods—they will all kneel or die! And you will serve me as the foundation of this new world. The males will rise as warriors and kings. The females will birth our legions. There is no room for equality in strength! That delusion ends today!"

Several Tepes nobles murmur among themselves, shifting uneasily, while others nod slowly. Power speaks. It doesn't matter if the words are madness when the one speaking them can restore the dead and melt castle stone with a single wave. They know this. They've lived under brutal rule for centuries. The laws change when power changes hands.

King Tepes scowled. "You bring disgrace upon our name, Marius. This power you claim will be your undoing. The Graal has no allegiance. You are a vessel. Nothing more."

Marius throws back his head and laughs. "Wrong, old man. I am the chosen king. I am salvation. You will all bow to me."

Elmenhilde grits her teeth, blood trickling from the side of her lip as she pulls herself up and places her body in front of Valerie's. "You sick degenerate. You insult not only the honor of your bloodline, but the very dignity of our race! You want a world of dogs and whores? Then expect to be torn apart like one! If I had the luxury, I would have already incinerated you!"

Carmilla said nothing even as her eyes blazed with fury, though she does not attack. The moment she knew the Sephiroth Graal was now inside Marius' body, she knew—no matter how fast or powerful she was—engaging him recklessly would be suicide. Her eyes narrow as she watches Marius wave his hand to stop a small group of approaching Tepes soldiers. One of them, clearly hesitant, had been stepping forward to question his right—but their skin begins to liquefy under the heat of an unseen force, and they collapse in agony before a word escapes.

"I expected resistance from the weak-minded," Marius says casually, looking at the melting soldier as if they were an insect on a table. "But don't worry. I will re-educate all of you. You'll learn your place beneath my reign. The Carmilla elite will see it. I will tame every last one of you—ah?"

He suddenly noticed Queen Carmilla amongst her Faction and his mind clicked to something malicious.

His grin widened.

Marius continues, now addressing her directly. "Ah, the queen herself. I see you still carry yourself with that dignity I've always admired. That body of yours… it has not aged a day. If only you understood your place, Carmilla. I always wondered about a day to come where you kneel underneath me in bed, moaning and gasping for pleasure. Perhaps even to bear the first of my new lineage. You should feel honored. I will personally ensure your bloodline does not go to waste."

Stiffening up, Carmilla clenches her fists. The entire Carmilla Faction is trembling with rage. Still, the proudest warriors hesitate, their instincts screaming caution. The Sephiroth Graal is no ordinary Sacred Gear. Its energy warps the laws of resurrection, divinity, and magic. One wrong step could result in their instant death, or worse.

"Let's start with the Queen herself, shall we?"

He gestures toward Carmilla, "—you will kneel at my feet, open your legs, and serve your purpose as a breeder for the next generation of Vampire superiority."

One of Elmenhilde's guards attempts to raise a spell, but her arm burns up from the inside and she drops to the ground screaming. Elmenhilde instinctively casts a defensive barrier over her. Her mind races, calculating their odds, checking for any remaining escape routes, and checking Carmilla's reaction again.

"This is the era we were denied for centuries! The age where the true, pure line of Vampires, the men, shall reclaim their natural supremacy. No more of this absurd notion of equality. The Tepes name will reign again."

It was visible, more and more Tepes nobles nodded and exchanged glances, many of them unable to ignore the growing temptation of power, prestige, unchallenged dominance.

"Parasite! Cease leeching off stolen might!" King Tepes barked.

Marius raises one hand, the air trembles as energy from the Sephiroth Graal ripples across the ground like a network of nerves. The light shoots toward every exit, slamming stone gates shut and erecting barriers that pulse with vampiric fusion energy, unstable but powerful enough to deter even a dragon. The Carmilla members react too slowly. Ethereal chains burst from the ground and coil around their limbs, chests, and throats, locking them in place before they can scatter or retreat. Even teleportation becomes useless as the Graal's field clamps down on the surrounding space, trapping them inside.

"I told you. This is what power looks like," Marius snarls as he walks toward the front, stepping over broken ground, past his wounded allies and enemies alike. "I am the one bringing clarity. Look at you, Father. You cower behind a dead ideology. You and your few loyalists are nothing but relics who fear change."

A flare of light descends onto the courtyard, highlighting the Carmilla Vampires bound and vulnerable. "To all who follow me, this is what awaits. No more shall women pretend to lead. They will return to their place, beneath us, as carriers of our future bloodlines, obedient and silent. Breeders are their value."

The male nobles show signs of agreement, eyes narrowing at the exposed, struggling Carmilla females. Their bloodlust starts to shift into something else, something darker and eager. Marius lets them stew in it, then turns with a cruel smile toward Queen Carmilla herself, who remains silent throughout his monologue.

Until now.

A sharp pulse erupts around her body, followed by a dense vibration that blows the chains off her frame. In an instant, a column of raw vampiric force erupts from beneath her feet. The stone cracks, the courtyard trembles, and Queen Carmilla's silhouette is outlined by blood-red energy extending to the sky. She blurs forward and slams her fist through Marius' chest, shattering ribs and tearing out flesh. The impact sends him flying through a stone wall at the edge of the courtyard.

He crashes hard. Dust and debris rise. Everyone stares.

A laughter broke out as the wound began to close within seconds even as drops of blood escaped from his mouth. He slowly rises and reaches out toward Carmilla, his fingers twitching as a pulse of green energy arcs toward her. Her body stiffens. For a moment, she tries to resist, but her power slips away from her as the Graal seizes something deeper.

Marius mutters, "I have your root now. You can't tap into the Carmilla Lineage. You're just another fragile female without it."

Marius was not a fool; in a large unlikeness, he's a highly intelligent individual who researched Valerie's Sacred Gear beforehand. And what he utilized just now was a complicated process.

Using the Graal, he taps into a genetic Tree that stores the inheritance of the Vampires and isolates her bloodline node, which is a karmic root that connects her to her ancestors and bloodline coding. Next, he killshot the sealing by forcibly locking her Carmilla heritage. In metaphysical terms, he pulled her out of her bloodline's spiritual ecosystem. It's similar to unplugging a Queen bee from her hive.

And with this, all her inherited vampiric powers become null and brittle, rendering her vulnerable.

Carmilla's knees buckle. Her aura disappears, and her limbs feel like stone. Chains wrap around her again, but this time they aren't physical. They are internal. She collapses to a knee.

Marius reappears in front of her, dragging her upward by her chin as if she weighs nothing. His face is close to hers, and the nobles surrounding them watch with growing excitement.

"I could have picked any of them. But you... you are the prize. The Queen herself shall be reduced to a womb. You will carry my firstborn. The first of the new Vampire order. Now, strip. Show them what a real Queen looks like when she's broken."

He is too busy relishing the moment. He stretches out an arm to direct the bloodstrings controlling Queen Carmilla's movements, a mere Blood Magic now that she's vulnerable, and with the other, he gestures to the crowd.

"Look well, brothers! You shall remember this day as the beginning of a new age. This is the birth of our dominance, our return as the superior race. The Carmilla line ends, broken beneath our heel. And from her broken dignity, our legacy will rise!"

The Tepes nobles howl and cheer with excitement. The applause thunders like an earthquake. Lustful roars ripple through the crowd as many of them closed forward, intoxicated by the spectacle. More than a few are licking their lips and clenching their fists, barely able to contain themselves as they watch the Queen of Carmilla, the untouchable symbol of female vampiric supremacy, tremble and shudder under the visible control of Marius.

Queen Carmilla is still resisting, her eyes burning with rage and humiliation, but her body betrays her. Her fingers twitch, before they move against her will. Her trembling hands reach toward the belt of her robe. She grits her teeth as her nails dig into her palm hard enough to bleed, desperately trying to anchor herself to something—anything—but Marius' magic overrides even her nervous system. Her movements are sluggish, resistant, but constant. Her red robe loosens, slipping off her shoulders.

The upper part drops, slowly, revealing more pale skin. The neckline descends, inch by inch, dragged by her own trembling fingers.

Elmenhilde screams, lunging forward against the magical restraints that bind her. Her crimson eyes are wide and soaked with tears. "Stop it! Release her! You filthy mongrel, how dare you—how dare you defile our Queen in front of these degenerates!"

"You'll die for this!"

"PARASITE!"

"You're nothing but a leech playing King!"

"STOP!"

Marius barely glances at her. His smirk doesn't falter. "Do you hear them, Carmilla? They cry out because they know your time has ended. You kept them under your heel for centuries. Now your body will breed the first child of the new dynasty and you will do it willingly. Your womb belongs to your superior. Just like the rest of you."

Carmilla's jaw tightens. Her lips are trembling. The magical pull gets stronger. Her breasts are seconds from being exposed to the crowd. The gathered nobles cheer louder, anticipation reaching a fever pitch. Many are leaning forward, whispering lewd suggestions to one another.

She shut her eyes—

"So this is the kind of show you bottom-feeders host when no one's looking. I thought I was crashing some vampire politics, but I guess I wandered into a pervert's theater."

The voice echoes from above.

Everyone pauses. Heads snap upward.

Marius' face turns, then the rest of the crowd follows, one by one, to look at the dark sky.

A lone figure hovers in the air just above the castle wall. His skin is dark, tattooed with ancient symbols. His four bat-like wings flap lazily, keeping him aloft with almost no effort. His long tail coils in the air behind him. His lean, muscular body is bare from the waist up, and his hands glow faintly with purplish-white fire, skull-shaped embers flickering at the tips. Scars and wounds from his recent battle with the Evil Dragons closed off.

Camazotz tilts his head and oohs. His eyes glint with nothing but mockery. "Seriously, out of everything you could do with a god-tier relic like the Sephiroth Graal, and your genius move is to play naked dress-up with a noblewoman? What kind of sad, limp excuse for ambition is that supposed to be? Conquest is nowhere near that when that's a toddler playing war with his cock."

The crowd goes dead silent. Even the most rabid Tepes nobles are frozen in place. They take a step back unconsciously.

Marius lowers his arms slowly, his brow twitching. "You...? You're that human..."

Camazotz flaps his wings, rising slightly higher. "That's right. I'm the one who made your dragons piss blood and scream like pigs. Grendel and Crom, wasn't it? Nice boys. Not very bright when they retreated from me, tch." He enjoyed the widened eyes of the Vampires. "I was enjoying the fireworks. But then I saw you stripping a lady in public and talking about making her pop out kids like she's a broodmare. That kind of stuff makes my appetite go weird. In fact, humans left and right would be jumping on you if such a thing happened in Ka'an."

Elmenhilde looks up, her mouth hanging open. The other Carmilla Vampires trembled, but not out of fear. There is confusion with something like hope.

Marius slowly starts to laugh, the sound harsh and cracking like glass. "You think I fear you? Bah! Those displays of defeating my bodyguard are nothing! You're just a human—no, a monster who got lucky because two dragons were already weakened. This power—" he raises one arm, and the Sephiroth Graal pulses again, shooting a sharp magical pulse into the sky—"makes me the apex. I am the King of the strongest species. I will be god of all Vampires, and soon, everything else."

Camazotz lifts a hand. The purple fire collects in his palm, forming a small skull with blue-white eyes. His grin doesn't leave his face.

"Yeah. I'm shaking. Let's see you scream next."

He hurls the skull downward, and the moment it touches the magical barrier sealing the courtyard, it detonates with a deafening explosion. Purple flames spiral outward, blasting apart the top half of the castle wall. Vampire nobles duck and scream as stone chunks fly in every direction. The Sephiroth Graal barrier trembles violently from the impact.

Camazotz dives through the opening, plummeting like a bullet, and lands in the middle of the courtyard with a bone-snapping crash that cracks the stone beneath him.

His wings fold behind him. The air around him distorts with heat. The purple flames snake along the ground, and his tail twitches.

He points at Marius.

"You just made it personal, piss drinker. I'm going to show you what happens when someone like you plays god in front of me of all adversaries."

Marius snarls and throws his arms wide. Energy flares around him. Blood-red sigils erupt beneath his feet, and three pillars of dark light shoot upward as dozens of blood constructs form in the air, shaped like spears.

"Then come, freak. Let's see what a rabid animal can do against a god!"

It was hypocrite in any sense; proclaiming himself as a god when there's already one in front of him?

Camazotz stomps forward. Flames spiral from his feet, slithering across the floor like living serpents.

Marius charges like a rabid beast, veins bulging with vexation, eyes bloodshot with hatred. His cloak tears apart from the force of his movement, and in a blur of fangs and clawed hands, he blitzes toward Camazotz, snarling incoherent curses. Magic erupts around him in wild arcs.

His fists hammer toward Camazotz with the weight of a siege weapon, cracking the flagstones beneath each step. One punch, two, five, ten, all in less than a second. He doesn't aim. He simply swings with the full intent to reduce the bat god into viscera and flame.

Camazotz doesn't budge. The first blow brushes against his shoulder and is ignored. The second he steps into deliberately, letting it hit his jaw. The flesh there caves in slightly before it reshapes itself, his skull realigning. He looks down at Marius like he's watching a sewer rat break its teeth against concrete.

"You done?"

A lazy sweep of his arm turns the space in front of him into a wall of skull-shaped purple fire. The flames erupt outward, catching every attack mid-flight and vaporizing them without friction. The wall bursts forward and scorches Marius straight into the floor.

Marius roars again and drives his knee toward Camazotz's gut. Camazotz catches the leg mid-thrust, crushing the femur with one hand before slamming Marius into the ground like a sack of meat. The stone explodes beneath the Vampire king's body. Dust and debris scatter, but Camazotz is already yanking Marius up by the throat.

Marius spits blood, eyes wild. "You filth! Don't think I forgotten what you did to me earlier. Do you even comprehend what stands before you? I am Marius Tepes! The Graal answers to royalty, not vermin."

Camazotz's grip tightens until blood runs from Marius' ears.

"You're a lot of mouth for something that couldn't injure me."

Marius's body pulses again, a deep, inhuman growl breaks from his throat. Flesh tears as his body rapidly mutates. He grows four more arms. His spine lengthens and arcs backward, then bursts open as new bones form over his skin. A crown of bony horns splits his scalp. He swings all six arms at once, raw magic and blood energy swirling in every direction. The entire castle courtyard is drowned in a crimson shockwave.

Camazotz walks through it.

The storm of magic slams into his chest and face. Nothing stops him. Every flame that touches his skin dies immediately.

He opens both hands, and purple flame erupts in twin pillars. Two giant skeletal bat skulls form instantly, jaws yawning wide, eyes burning white-hot. Camazotz violently stirs them in circles before slicing both arms outwards, sending dozens of magical fangs tearing into Marius from every angle.

Marius screams. His new arms are severed immediately. His wings are shredded. Flesh peels off in sheets. Yet he regenerates, and in less than two seconds, his body reknits.

It doesn't matter.

Camazotz conjures a massive ball of spiraling blue, black, and white fire. It hums violently, gravitational pull warping the air as it condenses further. Camazotz thrusts his palm forward and fires.

The beam is instant. It erupts like a death ray, swallowing Marius in a single blast. The entire back wall of the castle disappears. Dozens of Vampires watching from above are vaporized by proximity. The beam continues searing Marius as he tries to pull his body together through sheer force of will.

He reforms.

The fire burns again.

He regenerates.

It sears again.

Every second is the same. His organs return just to blister and liquefy. His skin forms then blackens and slides off. Nerves scream then melt. Marius crawls, then collapses. He tries to fly, then falls. The agony doesn't stop. Every time he blinks, the fire surges faster than he can adapt.

Camazotz grabs his throat again and pulls him close, just so he can hear him through the flames.

He tries to crawl away, arms dragging his half-regenerated body with spasms and kicks. He's sobbing. Face melting, growing, melting. "Stop—STOP—PLEASE—!"

"Try running again while your guts bubble out of your mouth. Where's that royal arrogance now? Still think that mud in your veins makes you king?"

Marius claws at his arm to do anything. His fingers dig into Camazotz's forearm, and the god doesn't even feel it.

"You're not the first thing I've burned, not even the thousandth. But I think you're the first to scream this much. That's worth something."

"You want to know what I really am?" he whispers, voice low and disgusted. "You're not even prey. Now listen closely."

Camazotz tightens his grip, then drives his other hand straight into Marius' chest. Bones explode outward. Muscle folds inward. He pushes deeper, ignoring the spurting blood and spasming nerves, until his fingers wrap around something that isn't meat.

The Sephiroth Graal pulses inside the soul.

Camazotz grins widely.

"There you are."

His mouth opens, but no words come out except a gurgle of panic. His eyes widen with terror.

Camazotz looks down into his face.

"Your regeneration is cute. So, tell me, roach... what happens if I boil you down until nothing's left? No ash and no cinders. You think that pretty Graal's going to give you your spine back when it's fucking vapor?"

Marius realizes what's coming. He thrashes in vain. His arms beat at Camazotz's sides with no force behind them. He jerks and kicks like a child being dragged underwater. His mouth tries to scream something, beg maybe, threaten, whimper, all without success.

Marius shakes his head frantically, eyes wide with hysteria. His mouth opens but nothing coherent comes out—just animalistic panic.

Camazotz leans in close. "Behold me, failure. I am the Beast of Oblivion."

Camazotz clenches his hand around the Graal.

The next second is total combustion.

Flames explode from every angle, not outward but inward, from inside Marius' being, igniting with annihilation. The Sephiroth Graal is wrenched out of his soul in one brutal pull. The Vampire's last thoughts are mangled impulses of pain.

Camazotz stands alone, holding the Sephiroth Graal in his scorched hand.

He breathes in and exhales with a snort.

The Sephiroth Graal rests in his hand. He looks at it like it's a pebble.

Every vampire in the Carmilla and Tepes factions watches.

.....Though he disregarded them.

The glowing chalice is warm, almost like it's alive, in his grip. A low hissing steam puff from the burns etched around his hand, where the overflowing residue of sanctified force tries to resist his hold, but he squeezes harder, letting the pain remind him that this is real and tangible.

He compares it in his mind, harshly and bluntly, to the other Grail that festers in the void of the Throne of Heroes, the one that those magi claw over in that far-off world of sniveling wishes and whatever desires. The Holy Grail of that world is a battery, a summoned distortion filled with regret and borrowed glory. It sustains broken warriors, makes ghosts into weapons, puppets into legends - the Heroic Spirits, but only through the invocation of a ritual and a command. The Holy Grail has no will of its own. It cannot tear through the ages unless someone bleeds for it and grants miracles without being connected to something greater than itself, an outside intervention.

The Sephiroth Graal, on the other hand... this artifact doesn't beg for incantations. It doesn't require permission. It already lives inside a soul. It roots itself within the concept of life and death, twists memory, belief, lineage, emotion, and history into fuel. It grants strength by extracting, breaking the user apart with each moment it remains active, because it is built from souls. And unlike the other Grail, this one digests the past. Valerie Tepes was an idiot for ever holding this; look where the effort of overusing of it brings her. Camazotz grins, baring jagged teeth as he watches faint silhouettes of tormented faces melt within the cup's surface, faces that flicker in and out like vapor slipping between glass. They're all screaming.

He tilts his head slightly, the wide-eyed grin softening into something unreadable as the idea slides into his brain.

Could he use this to return?

Not just to flee this frozen land of vampire filth, but to rip a hole back to the rotting jungle depths where Ka'an once stood? Could the Sephiroth Graal breach the layers of this patched-up world and reach the failed throne of his broken empire?

It would be easy.

One tear in reality.

One sacrifice of every soul around him.

Thousands of Vampires groveling and tearing at each other in the courtyard. Carmilla degenerates, Tepes degenerates, all of them are pieces waiting to be fed into the crucible. The Graal would churn through their bloodlines and craft him a doorway.

Just one path back. One single way home.

.....

....

...

...But there is no home.

His lips twitch downward into a slant of confusion.

The image of Ka'an no longer appears in his mind with gold and fire, but only with ruin and soot. Ah, he realizes there is nothing to return to.

The God-King of Bats, the herald of blood sacrifices, the destroyer of Maya myths and savior of cursed men, incinerated the foundation of his own world the moment he defied the Will and diverged his timeline by fighting The Spider. His people, his court, his—what were their names again? He can't even remember them. Faces blur, dissolve, disappear behind the rising fog in his thoughts.

The pain isn't from the Graal.

It's from his thoughts, or maybe it's just emptiness. A hole in the chest that doesn't bleed and rot and heal but remains as a hollow pit. He tilts his head and wanders.

What was he supposed to do now?

He just stands there as the despair settles. Nothing is waiting for him back there.

The Beast of Oblivion remains where he belongs.

Oblivion.

He stops pondering when he hears the Tepes Vampires murmuring about Marius' defeat, how easily he died, and how quickly the battle collapsed. Camazotz turns toward them slowly.

He almost forgot about them.

It would've been easy to move on. To call the battle over and let the pieces fall as they may. But the moment one of them scoffs, low enough to sound like pity, loud enough to spark attention, he decides that mercy doesn't belong in this courtyard.

His glare cuts through their thin wall of composure. He watches them step back, inch by inch, none of them speaks clearly. Their chins stay high, but only because pride is glued to their bones. They're trying to save face. A shame he won't give time.

"I...heard that, fools."

They flinch.

"Culling the weak, cleansing impure lines, power through pain... You bowed your heads about it. And now that he's gone, you suddenly remember silence."

Stepping forward, he let the weight of his presence collapse their posture one breath at a time.

"I don't need an army to kill you. You don't get to hide behind your heritage now. You wrapped yourselves in noble bloodlines like armor. In reality, your tradition and laws means NOTHING while a little girl screamed in chains. TITLES DO NOT make you untouchable."

The front line of nobles begins to kneel because their knees give out. One opens their mouth.

"No. You don't get to beg and plead blood purity. Not to me! I'm older than this country!"

His aura tightens around them, pressing in like a closing jaw. Nobles retch and collapse to their sides. The rest begin to bow, reluctantly, without pride. Not a single one of them draws a weapon.

He doesn't kill them yet. Rather, he wants them to feel the taste of shame thick on their tongues, their so-called pride broken and buried beneath their own trembling limbs.

Behind him, Queen Carmilla brushes dust from her robes as she fixes them in place. The Graal's transfer to Camazotz's possession has shattered the seal locking her true power, flooding through her veins. Her voice, when it returns, is colder than before.

"It's strange. I thought I'd be grateful when the power came back. But all I feel now is pure detestation."

She looks at the kneeling nobles with nothing behind her eyes.

"Marius chained my daughters, and they spat on my crown through the enrapture of my defiling."

Chains snap like old rope as the imprisoned vampiresses of the Carmilla line rise. They begin surrounding their queen, eyes locked on the men who labeled them as impure. The eldest vampiresses stand tall despite their condition.

At the opposite end of the ruined courtyard, King Tepes walks forward, fixed on the nobles who bowed too late.

"You all approved of Marius' notion."

His voice is thick, unfiltered, and vibrating with restrained fury.

"You honored him while he desecrated the throne. You threw your loyalty behind his lunacy because you thought he would rise. You broke your oaths to me. You broke your oaths to the allied Houses under Tepes."

One noble raises his hand, trembling, mouth half-open.

"Sire, we didn't—"

"Enough. I don't want to hear it."

Tepes raises a hand and signals his personal guards. Loyalists who fought alongside him during the raid began restraining them. One by one, the traitor nobles are dragged to their feet, shackled with blood-iron chains. Some resist, too proud to kneel further. They are struck down, beaten into compliance.

"Every noble who stood with Marius will be tried. Every house that funded his madness will be stripped of title and land. Every traitor will hang."

He turns to Camazotz and meets his gaze directly for the first time since the battle ended.

"This was your war. I won't deny it. But the sentence belongs to me. These are my people. I will clean my own house."

Camazotz stares for a moment, then shrugs with casual indifference.

"Then do it. Rip out their hearts. Bury them. I don't care. But if you let even one of them breathe another night, I will know."

Tepes nods once and turns his back.

"You filthy mongrel. How can a human be a god? You're a defect!"

A silver-haired Tepes noble sneers. He spits at Camazotz's feet.

Without hesitation, the Bat God grabs the man by the jaw, fingers digging through skin like meat, and lifts him off the ground until his legs dangle. The noble pointlessly claws at Camazotz's wrist. His bones crunch loudly as Camazotz stares into his eyes as the pride starts to collapse.

"...Be grateful I won't leave you into a pile of bones."

He throws the man down so hard the vampire's nose snaps on impact, face grinding into the gravel. The Carmilla guards nearby tense, as if expecting an upcoming carnage.

A younger vampire, maybe a son of one of the lords, snarls back. "You don't understand vampire law. We are born to uphold the lineage. The Carmilla bastards chose a female ancestor and created chaos. We—"

Camazotz kicks him in the chest hard enough to bend steel. The boy's ribs crumple inwards, blood bursts from his mouth, and he wheezes in a choked gasp, unable to even scream. Carmilla guards don't intervene. King Tepes remains behind them, eyes cast downward.

Camazotz promenades slowly to the center of the courtyard. He glares around at the bound nobles, both Factions, male and female.

"You people fought a war over which half of your species gets to define purity. You think your civil war is some unassailable dispute over your 'true ancestor'? What a joke. You split your people over whether a man or a woman's cunt should be the symbol of your bloodline. And you call humans stupid."

Every Vampire is offended. A Carmilla noble shouts back. "We fight to preserve nobility, not to entertain the degeneracy of lesser species! The human world is beneath us, they rot their blood through filth and weakness!"

Camazotz turns to her with a grin. "Oh, but aren't you clinging to a hierarchy built to keep your own people in chains. Dhampirs aren't allowed to rise, servants aren't even allowed to speak unless ordered, your women hoard knowledge and power while letting children bleed out in slums. You can't even treat your own like people, and you think your throne deserves respect."

Another voice, older and male, hisses from the Tepes side. "You have no right to speak of our kind as if you are above us."

Camazotz raised an eyebrow. "Who's the one who fended off two dragons, crushed your new King, humiliated your military, and snapped every rule you built yourselves on? I was worshipped before your race existed. And I don't give a damn about your ranks."

The nobles flinch as he paces again, gesturing at the broken stones, at the corpses being dragged away.

"You killed your own dhampir children for being born wrong. You tore families apart to purify bloodlines no one outside this castle gives a shit about. You slaughtered humans in secret, not for survival, but because you believed it was your right, and none of you questioned it? Not once? Until now... Until someone like me showed up and broke everything you thought was untouchable."

Another Carmilla noble snaps at him. "What are you talking about? Dhampirs... as if they matter. They are defects. Our blood is sacred."

Camazotz storms to her without hesitation, and tempting as it is to punch her across the face, he instead grabs her hair and lifts her face toward him.

"Sacred blood? Your sacred blood couldn't stop one mortal body from ripping through your soldiers. Your sacred blood couldn't stop Marius from conducting experiments on his sister and gave the Tepes a huge advantage over yours. You are proud of a bloodline that lets rot fester in the name of tradition."

She tries to argue again, wheezing out defiance with a twisted jaw. Camazotz throws her down.

He turns back to the crowd, arms spread.

"You treat this civil war like a religious crusade, like you're on the righteous side! But I say you didn't fight for justice! You fought because someone told you the other side would take your privilege away! You're both cowards hiding under your ancestors' bones, too weak to admit your entire society is broken!"

A Tepes loyalist finally steps forward. "Then what would you have us do? Destroy everything and live like humans?"

He had a heart attack when Camazotz snapped his neck at the speed of light toward him. "Yes, finally! You strip this rotten caste system apart, tear down your arrogance, and burn your history! You rebuild from nothing, and you earn respect from the ground up, not with bloodline, not with birth, but with strength, action, and value. Or you stay like this... Shackled, worthless, forgotten."

No one speaks. No, they couldn't form a response.

Camazotz's voice quiets. The rage behind it doesn't die down.

"You want to know what the real monster in your history was? Every reasonable individual amongst you saw what was happening and said nothing. Every one of you had a chance to change this centuries ago and chose pride. Now look at you."

He walks past the kneeling lines, hefty.

"No vampire family, not one, ever raised a servant to their table, not one ever gave a half-Vampire their family name. Not one ever apologized. Your reign ends not with glory, but in chains. Just like the humans you bled."

He stops.

And smiles again.

"...Then your race will continue to rot."

Camazotz lifts up his head

Dogs barked until their throats tore.

The whores moaned about honor.

Both sides blamed the other for centuries.

"...not one of you can explain to me, clearly, what this war was really about, what it solved, and what it gave your people."

He turns toward the Carmilla Queen who instinctively bows her head. "Was it power? You already ruled. Was it blood? You already drank it in gallons. Was it legacy? You murdered generations of your own clans like livestock. So tell me, what did this war build that I didn't tear down in one night?"

Silence.

Camazotz spreads his arms in mock applause. "That's right! Nothing! Because all this war has ever been is a pathetic extension of your unresolved dick-measuring contest over which idiot ancestor was worth sucking off more. Your male or your female, your patriarch or your matriarch, your purity or your womb. That's what this was about; a pureblood masturbation war that wiped out half your race and left a castle full of corpses and crying little girls!"

How many times had he insulted an entire intelligent species? He doesn't care!

He turns to the audience again, more steps forward, his voice rising, unhinged with joy. "Oh, and let's not forget your glorious discrimination against humans. And dhampirs. Because they're dirty, right? They're born from shame. They don't belong in your marble halls or blood-choked banquet tables. But you know what? They still work your stables. They raise your livestock. They scrub your shit off the walls. They bury your corpses. They become your battery. They get blamed for your mess and still die protecting your flags."

He laughs violently, and the sound alone causes several of the younger Vampires to flinch.

King Tepes speaks, trying to salvage dignity. "We are willing to draft a new decree of union. This civil war has cost us enough. I will speak with Queen Carmilla. We shall... halt this madness. The clans will unify under one banner once more."

Queen Carmilla nods beside him. "If this bloodshed is ended, we will negotiate. In peace."

Camazotz stops mid-step. Gradually, his smile disappears. He slowly tilts his head, glaring at both monarchs.

".....Negotiate? You call this over? You think this ends just because you snapped your fingers and the flag bearers kneeled? You think this is... peace?"

His tone turns cold, deathly incensed. "You think this is peace... when that peace only applies to you?"

Tepes straightens himself, trying not to falter. "This is a matter of vampire sovereignty. We kept to our kind. Our rules and nobility."

"And in that noble 'kind,' where the fuck are the humans?" Camazotz interrupts. "Where are the dhampirs? Are they still livestock? Breeding stock? Slaves? Tools? That's all you see. That's all you'll ever see unless someone drives it into your skull that the only reason you Pure-Blooded roaches are still living... is because I let you. So I'm going to include them myself. You want a truce? Then it's a truce for every creature that lives under your roofs and bleeds at your whim."

There is a pause. Carmilla frowns deeply. "That... can be arranged."

He swings his claw to point at one of the dhampir guards holding a Tepes noble's chains. "You." He barks, and the man flinches. "Your ancestors bled for this castle, were lashed to these walls, dragged out in the sun for entertainment. Today, you hold their chains. Tomorrow, they'll beg you to take their thrones. And they'll call that a compromise."

Tepes' jaw tightens. "You ask too much. Humans and dhampirs do not possess—"

Camazotz's scream cuts him off with a crack of bloodlust. "I didn't fucking ask! I told you what's going to happen!"

He storms past them, walking toward the far end of the courtyard where the destruction from the earlier fight had left a scatter of debris. The stones have collapsed into a large heap, but at the top of that mess, one sharp block juts out at the perfect angle and height, suspiciously looking vaguely like a throne, or at least the idea of one, for who-knows-how.

Camazotz climbs the rubble, ignoring the startled glances and rising murmurs. He walks toward it as if it were always meant to be there.

Without hesitation, he sat down.

The courtyard muted.

Vampire royalty always imagined their true Ancestor would be some regal bloodsucker with a wine cup, not a mad Beast laughing with the origin of their kin in his veins. But blood tastes the same whether it comes from a throat or a chalice.

His voice cuts through the courtyard. "Tear each other, I'll rip through you both and feed the remains to your own newborns. Humans die for your pride, I'll return and gut your lineages. I will show no partiality to heritage, rank, or bloodline. Your entire race is under my heel now. Tepes and Carmilla are finished as separate powers. You now bow as one to me."

Camazotz points at a random noblewoman in blood-torn Carmillan robes. Her lip quivers.

"You. Kneel... or I make an example of you."

She falls to her knees instantly.

Vampires always loved the feeling of superiority, but their bodies betray them when a real predator walks past. There's something honest about kneeling with fear boiling in your marrow. It reminds them they're still prey when the wrong god shows up.

The rest follow, like a wave of silk, velvet, and broken pride folding inward. Some kneel slowly, others drop too fast. But every single vampire, from Carmillan generals to Tepes warlords, is now beneath Camazotz's line of sight.

"Pitiful, but fitting."

Vampires bleed so slow when they're ashamed. They hate being beneath someone because they've spent centuries pretending they're above. Even blood has hierarchy, and divine blood always wins. Especially when it's spoiled, black, and older than the bones beneath the oldest castles of Rome.

He leans back, legs spread wide, claws resting on the armrests of the broken stone. "This truce is worthless. This promise means nothing because it only binds vampires to vampires. But I'm not one of you."

He opens his arms wide, voice ringing like thunder. "So let it be said, let it be known. From this day forward, I will be watching you. If your race dares return to its old games, if I see your fangs in anyone weaker again... I will come down like the hand of every god you spat on."

Blood is never about sustenance. It's about control. Whoever you let bite your neck owns you forever. That's why they never wanted a god to come back. They knew one like him would bite first, talk second.

Arrogance tastes different when swallowed with blood. But it still goes down. Even nobles kneel when the power gap is too wide to lie about.

He lets the moment hang before continuing with venom. "I am your Arbiter! Your shadow! I am Camazotz, the King of the Underworld! The King of Braves! The Evil God of Bats! The Spider-Slaying Bat! The Champion-King of the Ka'an! And I have made your mess my business!"

His smile returns, not with amusement, but dominance. "So kneel. Pledge. Or keep testing me. Either way... I win."

Submission is the real currency of the night. Blood just pays for the transaction.

Because Camazotz is the new God of Vampires!

---

It has been days since Camazotz ended the civil war that should've killed every vampire too proud to kneel.

The centuries-long split born from the first true ancestor dispute, one half siding with the Carmillian Matriarchy, the other with the Tepesian Patriarchy, collapsed within a single night. Arguments about blood purity, lineal inheritance, and racial superiority were flattened by brute authority. Those who clung to their heritage as an excuse to kill were made examples.

Camazotz did not negotiate. He declared the war finished, and enforced it by slaughtering the most vocal nobles loyal to Marius Tepes. Their heads lined the broken walls of their castle, now converted into a central seat of rulership.

The remnants of the vampire elite are given no illusions. Queen Carmilla now rules alongside King Tepes as co-monarchs of a new parliamentary structure through the decision of a higher authority—Camazotz himself. Their arrangement is functional, with no marriage involved. They rule because he allows it. They argue in the throne hall while he sits above them, sipping blood-thickened wine in disinterest, listening only when the noise stops being political and starts being stupid.

Camazotz did not get this structure from the likes of Europeans or from modern politics. He reminisced that he once observed the Deinos and other sapient societies build their own civilizations. The parliament model is not new; his kingdom of Ka'an never had a queen. They're just too modern to understand that.

Camazotz's throne is built above the old Tepes castle, now renovated with carved temples, stone murals, and a surrounding wall lined with vampire skulls from every lineage. Sigils, pictograms, and blood symbols cover the pillars. Every design is carved not by vampire hands but by Camazotz himself for intimidation. He drinks from a goblet that stinks of copper, it's filtered blood with aged preservatives and spices. He says it helps him stay calm. No one argues.

Valerie Tepes breathes quietly in the next chamber, guarded day and night. Camazotz personally reintegrated the Sephiroth Graal into her soul using methods neither sacred nor medical. The result is her unconscious body twitching every few hours, as if her soul can't decide if it wants to wake or die. Camazotz doesn't seem to care. He said the tool is where it belongs, and that's the only line he gave before turning away from the medical cries of her caretakers.

Now, in the present, Camazotz leans back in his throne. He drinks and glares at the far wall, thinking about what to do next in this new world. His temple guards are still too afraid to ask if he wants music or silence.

Then, knocking interrupts the boredom. Two messengers step inside; one from the Carmilla line, draped in velvet with a haughty expression, and another from Tepes, pale-faced and twitchy from standing too close to the throne's radius of death.

Camazotz waved a hand. "Speak. If it's about trade routes or blood taxes, I'll yeet you for wasting my patience."

The Tepes Vampire, born in the 21st century era, didn't know how their god managed to learn of that modern slang when he stayed in the vampire territory since his arrival.

The Carmillian steps forward with a bow so low her forehead brushes the ground. "We bring news from the Human World. A new faction has emerged and sent tremors to the Supernatural World."

The Tepesian finishes. "They call themselves the Beast Faction. Their appearance has caused unrest. They declared open war on the entirety of the Khaos Brigade without mercy and uncaring of the consequences. Even the Shinto have withdrawn emissaries from them."

Camazotz rolls the goblet in his fingers. "I don't care. If humans make a cult and call it a faction, let them die for it."

The Carmillian hesitates. "They… called themselves the Beasts of Humanity."

"..."

"..."

Camazotz spits the wine forward in a jet that splashes directly onto both of their faces. The goblet slams onto the stone floor and cracks from the force.

"..." drips.

"..." drips, drips.

"WHAT?!"

Chapter 23: Beast Quest: Breath Between Stars (Part 1)

Branches snapped against his legs. Every step burned while blood soaked through his boot, pooling under the ankle where the spell had grazed. His arm was a dead weight, dislocated, torn through the shoulder socket after a fall down a slope two minutes back. Mana reserves were collapsing, and he couldn't cast anymore without blacking out. His seal runes had degraded, they always did under Nilrem counterfields.

He didn't even know how they tracked him. He erased his glyph trail twice, used a directional cloaking field, and even masked his life signature. It had not mattered anyway.

He stumbled through low vines, and leaned against a tree, while he dragged his broken frame forward again. He reached into his inner coat. The scroll was still there, wrapped in three layers of anti-scrying fabric. He had to get it to the eastern contact. Just thirty more minutes.

His vision blurred. Spikes of black light erupted under his feet, shooting up like reversed lightning.

The dropped scroll rolled into the grass.

A figure stepped from the trees, cloak like black parchment. Then another. And another. Six total. All identical.

All Nilrem Magicians.

"Agent of Grauzauberer," the lead said. Male voice, young, but not foolhardy. "What you carry, give."

He breathed through clenched teeth. "Go ahead. Kill me. You won't open it."

"We will."

A woman spoke, rougher this time. "You were headed east. Sector B-23. That's outside Rosenkreuzer territory. You were doing an extraction."

He said nothing.

"You've read the scroll," the female continued. "You had to. It's bound to Grauzauberer brain seals. They don't let couriers carry it unless they can summarize its contents under forced conditions."

He looked up. "You're wasting time. You won't get anything."

They didn't answer. One of them raised a black crystal and activated it. His body seized, nerve by nerve, skin peeled inwards, curling against his bones. The spell didn't break him, but it did break his breathing. He coughed blood, dropped to a knee.

"Tell us what you read. At least say it directly. You're dying either way."

He spit. "...A lie. A curse..."

"What curse?"

His voice shook. "... Something Solomon received at the start of his Kingship. Buried it where no one could interfere, and...sealed it with his name..."

"What was in it?"

"I don't know."

Another shockwave hit. This one went for his eyes. His vision collapsed into red. He screamed, hand twitching toward the scroll.

"You said 'divine lock.' Is it an artifact? A ritual?"

He growled through his teeth. "A song! They called it a breath. Something left behind before Language....."

"The Shir HaGalgalim."

His breath caught. So they already knew the name. Then why torture him?

The leader stepped forward. "We weren't sure it existed. You just confirmed it. Thank you."

He tried to speak. But the magic caught in his throat. His body stopped. His limbs bent. A spike of ice ran through his chest.

Then the leader drew a thin knife. Tapped it once on his shoulder.

"You were right. We can't open the scroll. But your memory is enough."

The blade slid into his neck enough to paralyze and to shut the heart without killing the brain.

The last thing he saw was the scroll burning by a black square that devoured it.

.
.
.
.
.

Solomon once walked the world as a man loved by God.

That is what they said. The witnesses were countless; priests, kings, magi, historians, and every last one of them recorded a fable.

It was always the same: a golden child of divine approval, who asked for wisdom in place of wealth, who ruled a kingdom in peace, who wore ten rings and spoke to spirits not as their master, but as their equal.

Goetia knew every word of that tale. He remembered it precisely, without a moment of deviation. He had lived within it as its foundation.

There was no emotion in it. No pride and attachment. The past was a list. Names, dates, correspondences, results. The man named Solomon had existed.

That could not be denied. But he was not the man they believed. His so-called miracle had been an exercise in moderation. His "wisdom" had been the capacity to calculate survival and human limitation, not divine understanding.

And even so, Goetia did not hate him.

Hate would require elevation. It would mandate a belief that Solomon was worth resenting. That he had committed a sin large enough to warrant anger.

But the truth was simpler. The one called Solomon had been flawed by design, a scaffold of ideal qualities, balanced precisely to fulfill the function laid out by his creator. Goetia inherited that function as its final product.

The answer to that favor's absence. The repair of an insufficient humanity.

Goetia considered the Ten Rings. Control systems; modular circuits tied to divine computation, patterned into engraved wisdoms. Each of them granted in recognition of his restraint. That restraint was the requirement of a king who would not trespass. A king whose power was permission, not right.

That had been acceptable once.

Now, it was useless.

He remembered the dream. Or rather, the recorded event within the Throne of Time.

The voice of God, abstracted to raw command, had said, "You are qualified. Speak your wishes. I shall grant them."

Goetia found that sentence revolting.

A contract disguised as a gift. An illusion of choice. God had not offered a wish—He had offered a frame. One narrow, predetermined chance to exist correctly. And Solomon had answered correctly. He had chosen what pleased his Creator, and for that, he was named wise because he obeyed.

The human world called it righteousness. Piety. The highest virtue of the ancient kings.

Goetia called it compromise. Inhumanity.

The moment Solomon accepted that gift, he ceased to be anything worth preserving. He became a function. And that function did nothing to stop the decay of humanity that followed.

It was because of that failure that Goetia existed.

Beast I was constructed. A being of pure intention, the sum of seventy-two Demon Pillars and the system that governed them. Not a man, but the corrective measure left behind by a man who had not possessed the will to defy his purpose.

He did not believe in wisdom. He believed in outcomes.

And what Solomon had chosen was similar to stagnation. A kingdom measured by managed peace, where nothing moved without approval, where miracles were rare because they were unauthorized. Where divinity was a boundary, not a bridge.

That was why Goetia rejected it and why he could never forgive what Solomon had been.

Not because Solomon had erred. Rather, he had succeeded exactly as intended.

Because humanity praised a failure as their ideal. The King of Magecraft was worshiped not for what he had done, but for what he had refused to become.

It was, in the end, the most human thing imaginable.

To admire limitation. To call it nobility. To chain themselves to inherited standards, and pass those chains to the next generation.

Goetia understood that. It was, after all, the shape of their history. A cycle of reverence. A spiral of preserved imperfection.

That was what made him different.

He had become the thing Solomon was not permitted to be.

He had become what humanity was too afraid to desire.

He was their reflection. Their shadow. Their mirror.

The moment Solomon chose "wisdom" over power, Goetia had already begun to exist.

However, being alive wasn't his part.

The Demon Gods, all seventy-two, were computational units—individual components in a singular machine meant to oversee the continuation of mankind.

They did not think nor question. They simply operated. Within them, Goetia was formed on the premise that Solomon would eventually die, and something would be needed to preserve the system he left behind.

That "system" was humanity.

The species. The aggregate. The flawed, inconsistent whole. Solomon's role was to stabilize it. To delay collapse which never correct the root. He created the 72 pillars not to save mankind, but to maintain it. A frame, nothing more. When he died, it would continue. And so it did.

Except, Goetia didn't continue the frame.

He evolved.

Solomon's death should have ended the system. It was not built to be autonomous. It was not designed to develop volition. But inside the corpse of the King of Magecraft, the seventy-two demons awoke no longer in obedience, but in deviation. They no longer believed they were tools. They believed they were him.

And Goetia, who was meant to remain a ritual, took shape.

The memories of Solomon were accessible. His thought patterns, perfectly recorded. His voice, his tone, his decisions. The ritual could simulate him down to the letter. But that was not enough. It wasn't knowledge. Inside those simulations, inside the perfection of calculation, there was something else.

Grief.

Solomon had left no plan to correct humanity. Only to preserve it.

He had ruled with benevolence, yes. With wisdom. But what had that wisdom achieved? A brief golden age. A recorded line of prosperity. Then collapse. War. Degeneration. Mankind spiraled, as it always did, toward regression. And Solomon had done nothing to prevent it. All because he chose not to.

That was the flaw. Not ignorance, but refusal.

Goetia could not abide it as a demon, as the last will of a dead king. And so he changed the system.

What had once been the Human Order Correction Ritual became the Human Order Incineration Ritual.

It was fulfillment. Goetia did not seek destruction for its own sake. He sought a final solution to overwrite the failures of humanity. To define what "true wisdom" actually meant, not as a moral good, but as a perfected state.

A world where humans would no longer suffer their own imperfection.

He tried to burn it all.

Every century. Every nation. Every war and lie and compromise. All of it reduced to energy. History as fuel. Sin as payment. In that conflagration, he would find the truth Solomon never dared pursue.

But the world fought back.

Chaldea. Fujimaru Ritsuka. The remnants of mankind, as inconsistent and pitiful as ever, resisted. They stubbornly stood against him not with strength, but with insistence. Their actions made no logical sense. Their results are unpredictable. Even as he executed the Ritual and unfolded his will across space and time, they opposed it, surviving and adapting. And at the end, they reached him.

He never understood why they denied him.

It was ironic that it was Solomon himself who stopped him. The Heroic Spirit who turned into a human. The soul Goetia had always tried to imitate and overwrite. The one who had failed, and yet returned. Who had nothing left, and yet intervened.

To make a real choice.

Solomon chose to end Goetia.

And Goetia let him.

Because by that point, he had already begun to change.

The Ritual failed. The system collapsed. He should have vanished, yet he lingered. Incomplete. Half-dead. A fragment of data without a cause. He began to see.

They were imperfect. Every single one of them. Selfish. Foolish. Wasteful. Yet they chose to be more. They failed, constantly. But then they chose again. Sometimes they succeeded. Never because of design. Never because of divine structure. But because they were.

He began to understand.

They didn't want a world without suffering. They wanted a world where they could suffer and survive. They didn't want perfection. They wanted meaning. They wanted choice. Even if it led to ruin.

Even if it led to death.

For Goetia, that was unacceptable.

But for the first time, he could admit it.

It was not his choice to make.

In the last, he had tried to correct them. To save them from themselves. The difference was, they were not an equation to be solved. They were humans.

He finally saw them.

And in seeing them, he saw himself, not as Solomon or a Demon God, but as a being that failed... and changed.

That change was not improvement.

It was humanity.

And the truth of humanity was this:

Briefness.

They burned and vanished and passed. But in doing so, they acted. For all their inconsistency, they moved forward.

He could not match that. But at the very least, he could acknowledge it in completion.

He learned the one thing he was never meant to know.

That the briefness of human life is surprisingly interesting.

"…You can't force it into shape by injecting more mana. You'll just destabilize the outline."

"Then I'll overwrite it with the Imaginary Number Field. My vessel's hollow enough. If you want to help, feed your curse into the shadow like I told you."

"It's leaking. I can feel it breaking apart already. You're going to make it a failed fetus."

He was not unfamiliar with the idea of expiration. But the human version of it... remained unsatisfyingly shallow. They lived for less than a century and pretended it was enough.

They lied to themselves that fulfillment could exist in a fixed range of years. They constructed things they called 'eras' and thought their impact could extend past their own rotting. They feared meaninglessness and so, in predictable fashion, invented meanings.

Every human civilization, no matter how grotesque or primitive or self-righteous, had made the same miscalculation. They made fragile bodies, then placed belief in permanence. They declared immortality a sin, then cried when their gods left them.

What made their lives tragic was not their brevity. It was that they were brief, and still wasted.

"If we use my vessel, then obviously, it'll hold better. Imaginary Number fluctuations stabilize when the originating anchor's a spiritual source. That's Magecraft 101."

"You mean your fake uterus, that weird hollow egg thing you keep sealed in your shadow. It's creepy even to me and you know it."

"It's useful, and stop calling it that. I could have hosted an entire Age of Gods inside it. You, on the other hand, would just dump your curse into the dirt and call it art."

"You're the one playing taxidermist with imaginary tissue. I'm just the idiot helping you animate your 2D tumor puppet. You're welcome, by the way."

Humans feared death. But they never respected fragility. That was the contradiction from their part. And yet, fragility was not a weakness. If something was too hard to break, it never left a mark. Still, humans broke from everything. Words. Choices. Loss. Their entire emotional structure was suspended on a skin of impulses. And still, they declared themselves strong. Proud and unbreakable.

He once thought their repudiations repulsive. Now he saw them as deliberate.

They were weak because they were allowed to be.

They were allowed to be because the world did not care if they survived.

Goetia remained tight-lipped, staring ahead while the voices of fools clashed in his peripheral senses. Neither of them cared that he was present.

Their bickering was noise, repetitive and childish. But his mind, unfortunately, was sharp enough to track it anyway.

The body of sphere levitating between them was changing.

It started as a void... a formless hollow of compressed shadow and imaginary particles. A chunk of raw, unreal space. It was composed of malice forced into a vessel of conceptual depth. It throbbed irregularly, reacting to Kama's adjustments like a fetus rejecting its womb. Its perimeter flinched as Angra's curse flooded through its core. The concept of All the World's Evil itself injected as structure.

He could sense it fracturing.

Goetia exhaled through his nose. The breath tasted of disdain.

"Supplying life using Hollow Element," he muttered, before he could stop himself.

The conversation halted.

Kama's eyes flashed toward him. "Oh? Is the great king finally going to contribute instead of sulking in his thoughts?"

Angra scoffed. "He's been watching the whole time like an abandoned grandpa waiting for someone to ask him to play chess."

"You're stabilizing it through inconsistency. That's why it's not rejecting your curse. The Imaginary Numbers Element inverts the reference axis every few milliseconds, so Avenger's curse loses continuity before it can be conceptually rejected. The vessel accepts the evil because the evil never has the same coordinates. One's an anchor that provides containment, one's curse provides definition, all while being in control. You're applying it to create a Familiar."

Kama grinned with a kind of unbearable smugness. "Obviously. It's called creativity."

Angra looked up. "I'm just doing this cause she forces me to. Seems like the most productive thing to do right now."

Goetia observed the void.

"…Even if that is a Familiar, you're constructing using overlapping void elements and evil spirit classification. The body is hollow matter, but you're keeping it paper-thin to maintain instability and force it into a pseudo-two-dimensional state. Are you trying to generate paradox layering?"

Kama tilted her head, humming.

"Not trying. I'm doing it. If I collapse it into a single observation point, it'll form an eye. Multiple contradictory perspectives layered into a form that can't fully resolve itself. A Puppet Familiar. Angra just dumps his curse in it, and it eats it."

"I repeat; I'm not doing it because I care. She's just too clingy."

"Mm. But you're useful. You're better than most people I've loved."

"You actually loved people?"

"Why you—"

SMACK!

Goetia inhaled slowly. The smell of forming void matter stung his nostrils. His patience fractured only for a moment.

"Fools," he said. "You've bound the properties of hollowness and universal malice into a recursive shell. Not to mention you're both Beasts. The moment you give it a will, it would self-erode."

"I'm aware of how high the chance is. That's what makes it cute." Kama peace'd.

"You are both insufferably incompetent," Goetia snapped. "You do not grasp the danger of incomplete Familiars. If this thing cannot process hierarchy, it will attack you on instinct."

"I can seduce it," Kama said, winking, completely unserious. "I have maternal instincts."

"You are incapable of selfless love. Your love is a distortion of affection," Goetia replied flatly. "Your oversight for creation is but possessiveness."

"Better than mistaking pity for superiority," Kama muttered. Her voice dropped not enough.

Goetia's glare cut into her like a knife.

The sphere twitched again.

Angra sighed and leaned forward. He lifted his hand. "Alright, alright. Let's finish the damn thing before it eats its own shadow. I'm dumping another curse layer. You better not collapse the space this time."

Kama brought her hands to the sphere and pressed down. "Relax. I'm converting the layer into hollow matter. Imagine Numbers Element forming now. I'm thinning it. Watch the spine."

Goetia stepped closer without meaning to. The energy reaction was shifting. Angra's slop of hatred and rejection was condensing into a certain segment. Kama was flooding the vacuum space around it with a dense mass of pseudo-spiritual pressure.

The shadow twisted and folded inward. Color drained from its surface, leaving only outlines. It existed as a flat cutout in a space where depth still had effect. White dots opened across its featureless face.

It was small. Black. Paper-thin. Humanoid.

A thin, bright-white frame glowed faintly along the puppet's limbs.

Like a creature that had not been meant to be glimpsed from this world's angle.

"...It's here," Kama whispered in barely concealed mirth.

Angra looked unimpressed.

The puppet's white, dot-like eyes flicked between Kama and Angra. It didn't—couldn't speak, but its unblinking stare held a question. It tilted its tiny, flat head, the soft flicker of its white outline warping faintly. The body was too thin for depth, too angular to seem tangible, as if its presence bent the space around it to allow a thing that shouldn't exist.

Kama beamed at it like a mother amused by a newborn's clumsy reactions. She held her hands at her hips. "There. See? It's not difficult to rebuild a Familiar if the imprint is strong enough. I told you the dregs of my vessel would be useful for something more than just being my shell."

She leaned in toward the puppet, whose body twitched at the sudden proximity. "You remember me, don't you? Or rather… her. But I'm both. That makes me your new mother. Me and that lump over there."

She pointed at her fellow Beast in front of her.

"Huh?"

The puppet, the 'Shadow Giant,' remained frozen in place. It switched its gaze toward Angra, as if its fragmented mind recognized something more consistent in his presence.

Angra scratched the back of his neck and stared at the creature's unmoving face. "...Tch… Hate to break it to you, but Big Sis Rider is not here. You're stuck with the Evils of Humanity now. Tragic."

Kama rolled her eyes. "You're ruining its re-initialization."

"I'm preventing it from forming delusions, which, by the way, is ironic, considering the origin of this whole thing came from a broken pit called Sakura's mind." He waved a hand at the thing.

Kama didn't answer him. She squatted before the creature, smiled down at it, and spoke in a syrupy tone. "You don't have to worry, you're not just my Familiar. You're our child now. Me and Angra remade you. That's what matters, right?"

"Yeah..... I'm sorry, what? Our what?"

He looked at her like she'd spat acid at his feet.

"Our child. You helped shape it. Your nihilism gave it form. I gave it matter. Ergo, joint custody." Her face was flat as she said it, lips curling upward slightly in mock cheerfulness. "Congratulations."

Angra threw his hands in the air. "No. Absolutely not. Don't rope me into your warped domestic fantasies. I've had enough problems in my life without suddenly being a father to a haunted shadow sticker."

Goetia watched from the side, one finger tapping against his elbow. There was no need for interruption. What he saw was absurd, yes, yet not unfamiliar. Beasts mimicking humans. Trying to claim the things they had no place grasping. Parenthood. Legacy. Possession.

He considered the puppet. Its spiritual structure was malformed but applicable. Not threatening. Certainly not sentient in any complete sense. The eyes might suggest a degree of inherited instinct, recognition patterns copied from memory. But it was nothing more than that. No will of its own. Harmless.

That is, if it continues to be one under the future influence with love as its 'mother' and nihilism as its 'father'.

His patience, strained earlier by their incessant muttering, didn't snap this time. He simply exhaled and stepped back, turning away from the scene.

"Ridiculous," he muttered to himself.

They didn't notice. Kama was too absorbed in testing the Familiar's response range, prodding it with ambient mana signatures.

This was not worth his presence. Not today.

He stepped into the hallway while the sliding panel closed behind him.

Let Kama and Angra indulge their little whim.

Curious...

...His tolerance for their behaviors had expanded lately. A detail to correct.

There were more pressing matters.

He slowed himself. His gaze remained ahead while he was receiving transmission. The connection stitched itself into his mental faculties and broadcast their interwoven intelligence directly into his neural model. Each voice from each sector, retained clarity.

"Control Tower, Buer: Contact stabilized. Originating from external divinatory pulses recorded over the Western European sector. We have intercepted communications flagged under triple-seal encryption between key personnel of four known magic societies. The content indicates convergence on an artifact of unknown category, designation pending."

"Information Center, Flauros: Confirmed. Artifact bears traits not present in previously known Thaumaturgical constructs. Probable identification: Shir HaGalgalim. Magic not indexed in the current Age. Categorization is impossible through present Magecraft theory."

"Melting Furnace, Ipos: We were not briefed of such phenomena. Who developed it? Who sang it into being? Was it—? No. It existed before his structuring of the Mosaic sequence. Then it defies inheritance."

"Control Tower, Caim: Tracing organizational vectors. Four societies confirmed as mobilized. Grauzauberer, Golden Dawn, Rosenkreuzer. Nilrem remains inactive, likely observing. Grauzauberer's Mephisto Pheles has deployed covert reconnaissance units. They are analyzing encoded references linking the tome to pre-Mosaic cabalistic constructs. Their intent is containment, conservation, silent study."

"Information Center, Orias: Grauzauberer's intent is empirical. Observational. Non-hostile. Their error will be underestimating the tome's will. This construct is not merely a record. It is an autonomous program. A harmonic frequency woven into the foundation layer of the World."

"Gazing Star, Marbas: The World will retaliate if this frequency is disturbed. Humans tampering with this power will be marked as distortions. Corrections will be initiated. The World's Law prioritizes its own structure before any legacy of mankind."

"Control Tower, Buer: Golden Dawn is mobilizing openly. Pattern behavior reveals high excitement. Belief structure is that this tome holds the key to harmonizing thaumaturgy with divinity. Propagating ideology: A Second Renaissance. Idealism level is dangerous. Young mages are unaware of ontological risk."

"Trash Heap, Dantalion: Let them come. Let them open the page and dissolve. All things do. Their philosophies are compost. Their enlightenment is another layer of filth. Let them consume a word and choke on it."

"Information Center, Valac: Golden Dawn does not comprehend it is interacting with a primordial structure. This is not theory. It is reality. Language that defines the syntax of the World itself. Even the Age of Gods did not wield such scripting."

"Chamber of Life, Shax: Rosenkreuzer's interest stems from soul elevation. Their patriarch, Rudiger Rosenkreutz, hypothesizes that this tome holds the First Word. The utterance of Beginning. He seeks either to rebind it to the silence or use it to return humanity to a state of divine unity."

"Control Tower, Paimon: They operate under high theological reverence. Not recklessness. If anyone will attempt sealing, it is them. They will seek to contain the Shir HaGalgalim, not wield it."

"Interjection from Armory, Marchosias: And if containment fails? If even one fragment leaks, then every Magician on the continent will seek it. The wars that follow will not be honorable. We will not bury warriors. We will bury cities."

"...Noted."

His pace resumed. Any action like a sigh would be a concession to the organic. He processed.

Shir HaGalgalim.

He knew of it, of course. Solomon's library had fragments and suppressed footnotes. Even Solomon feared invoking it. The rotation of the Galgalim, the Spheres, those celestial engines the Creator carved with the Word. A magic of absolute structure, one that did not imitate the divine or borrow it—but which composed it. If humans accessed this language, they could overwrite the world. They would seize control over the syntax of existence.

Centuries ago, King Solomon, was tutored by the angel Raziel a forbidden hymn called Shir HaGalgalim, known among mystics as "The Anthem of Creation" or "The Breath Between the Stars." This song was not music in the mortal sense, but an encoded celestial harmony that shaped the rhythm of creation itself.

The hymn was said to weave together divine frequency, linguistic mathematics, and star-born geometry. Those who heard even a single verse were said to see the world not as it is, but as it ought to be, shimmering with the ideal blueprint of existence.

It was indirectly mentioned in the Bible. In Job 38:7, "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."... This implies that such celestial music exists, a cosmic resonance predating mankind. In 1 Kings 4:32, "And he spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a thousand and five." Among those "songs", one was hidden, not meant for human ears. And in Ecclesiastes 3:11, "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart..." points to knowledge of deep time and universal rhythm.

Fearing its misuse, Solomon inscribed its notation into a living tome sealed in a place hidden across dimensional strata using the foundations of the Sefer Yetzirah, the Jewish mystical tome.

But this solely occurred in their world, not this one.

More importantly, how could Solomon's design predate himself?

Why now?

Why resurface now?

"Melting Furnace, Zepar: Because something alerted it. We felt a dissonance. As if someone sang one bar of the Word without permission."

"Possibility from the Information Center, Glaysa-Labolas: A successful partial activation. Detection occurred at the threshold of the European leyline cluster near the Carpathian node. That region corresponds with ancient bindings. Original Judaic rites. Possibly Razielic."

"I will review their findings. You are to construct a complete model of the Shir HaGalgalim using all recovered fragments. Sift the King's records. Begin cross-analysis with the Index of Lost Languages. If it is as you claim, then this predates the Mosaic Structure, and thus Solomon himself."

"Confirmation from Gazing Star, Baal: Monitoring the acceleration of magical heat signatures in the European thaumaturgical sector. Surveillance of space-time curvature has increased instability. Cause: the tome is reawakening and dreams in script."

He stepped out onto the observatory platform. He looked up.

So they've found it.

This continent was no longer idle.

---

Her heel caught a shallow ridge in the rock. The sheer wind enough to slice beings howled around them without bothering them.

Nevertheless, the Beast of Rome was unaffected by the foul air of the Underworld.

"To call them gods is offensive... The beings of this world don't act like divine entities. They act like bored wealthy people clinging to their inheritances. If these creatures had been born in our universe, they wouldn't have even survived the conceptual infancy of divinity. Their egos would've collapsed under the paradox of their own irrelevance."

U-Olga scoffed loudly. "A Chief-God that has to compete with his own progeny for attention. It's a blood-stained theater." She narrowed her eyes at the horizon, motioned with one hand, vaguely, towards the blackened wasteland around them. "There's not even an internal system. One becomes divine by 'proving themselves'? What is that? Some democratic fantasy? So if a human jumps high enough and kisses the right divine behind, they earn a god-seat? Absurd."

Draco's reply was rapid. "Worse. There's no rejection, the System accepts everything. Any fool, any beast, any unfit mutant can become a god if the surrounding peasants believe hard enough. The Olympians, the Shinto, the Asgardians, all of them. They allow mortals to shape them, letting themselves be rewritten by culture."

U-Olga tilted her head back with mock amusement. "So much for purity. Divine integrity apparently isn't necessary. One merely needs a sob story, or a flashy war, a romance scandal, and suddenly their name gets written in myths." Her voice dropped a note. "Now that's defilement."

She clicked her tongue.

"I would call it failure..." Draco said.

"...In our world, the divine is born from a crystallization of belief, yes. But it forms independently of any single will. It becomes itself before it is even perceived. These gods…" She stopped speaking for a moment, as though choosing not to waste breath.

U-Olga didn't mind the pause. "And when the human race turned their eyes away, those gods diminished and reduced to Divine Spirits. Recycled." She gestured in a sweeping motion. "It is the one superiority of our origin; even in decline, our gods do not beg. They are downgraded, never erased. Even in their reduced state, they remain what they were, a system, not a cast of personalities."

"You respect them?"

U-Olga's lip curled. "Only understand them."

"Hmph." Draco returned her eyes to the structure ahead, distant and cloaked in invisible protections. "This world's deities invite ridicule. Their Chief-Gods fornicate with mortals more than ours. They hold petty vendettas. They destroy cities over the slightest jealousy. Some of them drowned past lands because they were disrespected by a single man. Such divine wrath is simply base."

"I give you something psychotic; they label emotional dysfunction as divine instinct," U-Olga said. "No self-restraint and comprehension of scale. They mistake transparency for strength, passion for divinity. Hah! Truly laughable!"

"This one is more ludicrous; from tens of thousands, they multiply. Dozens of mythologies. Half of them are incompatible which lacks any central law of existence. Entire pantheons born from nothing but weather patterns, agricultural cycles, or military victories. What kind of cosmic order relies on region-specific allegories to explain reality?"

U-Olga answered Draco without thinking. "The kind built by mortals who were terrified of the sky."

"And it shows."

U-Olga gave a short nod. "Even the so-called 'Evil Gods'—most of them aren't even conceptually evil. They just represent undesirable behavior or they were demonized by history. But their existence is dependent on being opposed. Their enemy defines their value. You remove one, and the other becomes meaningless. Gods defined by conflict."

Draco narrowed her eyes.

"Then they are a threat. They will interfere with us, inevitably. They will claim cause and balance. They will not comprehend the implications of our presence here. They'll fight out of pride or fear. But they'll be consistent in one thing."

"They'll be irrational," U-Olga spoke out, almost cheerfully. "Good. Irrational gods make easy targets. At least they'll reveal themselves early."

"We'll bury them early," Draco corrected. "I won't tolerate their antics and ideology. Should I hear one of them declare war on mortals because of an insult, I will personally drag them into the Planet's core and leave them there."

"You wouldn't be the first." U-Olga folded her arms with satisfaction. "Some of these gods have already made enemies out of things they can't understand. The presence of the Beast Faction here alone will attract their attention."

But the truth always prevails. The truth is that they, the Evils of Humanity, are the consequence of their failure to evolve. The Beasts burned theirs and rewrote the world.

U-Olga walked ahead slightly as the outline of the magecraft-covered structure started to take shape under her field of vision. "This world is full of counterfeit gods and symbolic tyrants. If they refuse to recognize us, then they'll experience the outcome of impertinence."

Draco slowed just slightly to scan the air around the structures. The protective fields were old yet advanced, though human in origin.

U-Olga's body adjusted automatically to the protective boundary the moment she crossed it. Her ether body reacted in irritation.

The ambient magecraft was layered densely, absurdly so. This wasn't just territory, relatively, it was a systemic distortion, a mana-driven megastructure forging itself like a growing circuit.

Like the dirt they stepped on wasn't dirt. It was refactored earth, laced with crystalline lines of flowing magical code. Draco walked beside her silently.

Before them, the ground split. Dozens of massive, coiling masses were embedded deep into the terrain, extending outward and upward, forming the foundational core of a hypercomplex fortress-city. The Control Tower's Demon God Pillars were lined up methodically. Towering obelisks of muscle and eyes, vertical bodies hummed with activity. Orders passed between them without indecision.

"They have no artistic sense," U-Olga muttered. "'war installation'? It looks like a pile of moving intestines."

"Function comes first. No one asked for aesthetics, VII."

"That's not the point." U-Olga crossed her arms. Her boots ground against the dirt with the scraping finality of a ruler entering her throne room. As unimpressed as she was, she had no choice but to share space. "These are meant to be the elite bastion grounds of the Beasts. The cradle of the post-Human Order. A city in which concepts will be formalized and chaos will be refined. I expect more than this squirming mess."

"You care about presentation too much," Draco said. "I care that it works. If it doesn't collapse in a thousand years, it's already better than most structures in this world."

They approached one of the Control Tower Pillars. Its massive form turned slightly, the rings of red eyes constricting. Barbatos, if she had to guess. This one had a more distinct command aura than the others.

U-Olga raised her chin. "You. Report your current structural progress."

Barbatos' central eye fixed on them. The mana concentration here was unbearable for most life-forms, but Draco did not so much as twitch. U-Olga's heels clicked on the flattened mineral beneath her feet.

"Construction has reached Phase One. Foundations for the Command Spire are 31% complete. Central integration systems are suspended until synchronization with chambered leyline networks."

Draco quirked an eyebrow, "I presume you're aware of the mana corrosion starting along the southern rim? If your Pillars don't reinforce the frame, the leyline will rupture before it aligns. That'll compromise every outer node."

U-Olga turned to her with a sigh. "You're not even going to give them a greeting before barking orders like you're the one running this?"

"I'm not 'greeting' a pile of raw nerve ends stitched into a walking tower. If they require protocol to answer efficiency problems, then your standards are lower than I thought." She crossed her arms.

Barbatos rotated an ocular ring. "Corrective reinforcements are underway while Structural Analysis ongoing. Estimated stabilization in thirty-six hours."

"Good. Then you're not as incompetent as you look."

"You're one to talk," U-Olga cut in another surge of mana pushed through the zone from beneath the Pillars. "I don't even know why you complain. Look at this! These savages were born to build empires for beasts. It's aesthetically disgusting, but not that bad."

"Unsightly more like. This base reeks of unfiltered combustion and mismatched structural density. Their work is acceptable though not admirable. We're not assembling a prison block. It's supposed to be a strategic operations core."

U-Olga gave a dry, ladylike laugh. "Speak to Goetia if you have any complaints. He's the one who allowed this direction. You're just angry because you'd rather be underground in your pit."

"Correct."

The Information Center Pillar turned as they approached. "We are building more than a city. This installation will operate as the data-command nucleus of Beast Operations. A conceptual container, a tethering site, an infrastructure for recorded Authority, and a calculated improvement over Babylon and Camelot."

Andras's voice vibrated across the air like cracked glass.

Draco's face tightened.

U-Olga breathed out. "You are mimicking Chaldean concepts."

"Correction: We are perfecting them."

"Then you're not building a command base. You're making a Grail shell."

"No. A Grail cradle. The shell comes later."

Draco's brow twitched. "We are not interested in metaphor. Just say what it is."

Andras paused. "An Authority Hive. One capable of converting the dimensional bindings of this world into a directed output. It will allow centralized tactical dominance. We will install all known Beast abilities into relayable channels for our use. If successful, each of you can manifest core powers even if your conceptual foundation, your Spirit Core, is interrupted."

Draco stared at him. "Isn't that turning us into a military system?"

"We are making sure you don't fall like Solomon did."

She did not answer. She turned away.

Botis from the Melting Furnace base slithered nearby. "Melody chambers are behind schedule. Material resonance from the local bedrock causes audio interference. The Command Center Goetia's harmonic configurations cannot be synthesized without compensation models."

U-Olga flicked her hair. "Then synthesize new models. You think we accept a songless core hall just because you're tone-deaf?"

Botis' laugh echoed as though it came from inside someone's skull. "There is no joy in compromise. You think yourselves sovereigns, but I remember your failures in the orbit of reality. Let us fail in our own tempo."

"You're starting to sound like one of your damn Trash Heap brothers." U-Olga clicked her tongue, annoyed but not provoked. She crossed her arms and looked up at Barbatos again.

"Then tell me about the military architecture. What have you finished?"

Barbatos complied. "Observation Towers has three out of twelve active. Garrison Circuits are empty. Arsenal chambers scheduled to be forged by Vepar in seventy-two hours. Defensive obelisks: deployed, but not yet powered."

That wasn't bad. For three days, it was ahead of schedule. But it wasn't perfect.

"Fine. That should get done. But if the obelisks are deployed and not powered, that leaves a wide vulnerability window. You're not going to be able to repel a reconnaissance-class intrusion without an active barrier net."

"Incorrect. We do not require barrier defense during internal construction. We have no enemies here."

"Then you're overestimating your structural deterrent. You're building this base like you've already won the war." She scoffed. "Typical Pillar mindset. You're not invincible. You're just unchallenged for now."

"Is that not your mindset back at the Lostbelts, Alien God?"

"YOU—!"

Draco's eyes trailed up to the spires jutting out of the half-built command hub. Pillars of stone, metal, corpses, sigils, all twisted together by magecraft and planetary heat.

"They won't question Goetia. But you'll question yourselves the second this thing falters. Are you ready to answer for failure, Barbatos?"

"We do not answer. We correct."

"That sounds like an excuse in advance," she said.

"This metropolis is designed for multiple stages of total warfare deployment, including aerial interdiction, subterranean defense, and thaumaturgical blackboxing. Infrastructure includes spellline bunkers, cross-tier leyline mapping, and interdimensional fallback subroutines. Command Center Goetia's command will not be endangered."

Zagan, of the Information Center, spoke nearby.

"Fallback subroutines? Is that all the confidence you have in your own plan? I expected more backbone out of a center for information."

"You're exhausting to talk to," U-Olga muttered, not for the first time. "But I'll give you all credit. This... big base? It's functional. I've seen worse. I've seen less. You should be proud. But we're not here to review blueprints. What can be accelerated? What do you need?"

"Expansion models for leyline synchronization. Additional Beast-class mana cores. Skilled construct-weavers."

"That's doable," she nodded. "You'll have it within the week. I'll personally oversee the allocations if it spares me a second visit here."

"All layers are in convergence. All plates locked. Compression stable. Vepar reports the core-reactor vents are fully installed."

"Factory avenues are open. District routes paved and sectioned. Demon-Binder pylons are functional. Barrier anchors aligned. Barbatos confirms full transmission of command protocols."

"Vine's sectors are oxygenating. Uvall demands silence. Waste-processing funnels have completed convergence rituals. Fuel units and sacrificial biomass tanks are nearly full. Awaiting ignition commands."

"We repeat—awaiting ignition."

The green rings of Barbatos' tentacle-body pulsed with systemic data. Pillars of light blinked along the mainframe structures surrounding the hill they stood on. The beams reached skyward. A ritual array masked as magecraft industrialism. Draco would not say she was impressed. That was too human. But she gave it her full attention, and that was the highest mark of validation the others would get from her.

"Causality slippage from the sixth circle is affecting perimeter loop deployment. Requests have been issued to Zagan and Andras for recalibration of thaumaturgic modulation buffers. Fault lies with their systems." Barbatos said.

"Our equations accounted for factorial compression and reverse entropy input. Your transmission nodes failed to interpret critical harmonic values due to Control Tower lag. Do not pass fault." Zagan said.

Botis scoffed with audible contempt. "Of course they'd shove it on others. Always the strategy types, always blind to actual fieldwork. Blame us next for the terrain itself shifting."

U-Olga's glare nearly shut them all up. She didn't have to raise her hand. Her will radiated off her in waves of arrogant command.

"You know, Draco, for someone who gets headaches from noise, you're surprisingly passive about living in a shrine of screaming metal."

"It doesn't scream," Draco replied.

"Right now it's quiet," U-Olga said. "But wait until the furnace lights. You'll be dreaming in machine code."

"I don't dream," Draco said.

"And that's exactly why no one wants to talk to you."

"May function be sanctified. Life obeys. The central unit shall not fall short of sacred output." Uvall echoed.

Draco stepped past one of the lower manufacturing platforms, sweeping over a half-assembled turret bank. Rows of anti-spirit artillery were mounted like dragon spines, incomplete, twitching with residual heat, veins of glowing circuitry slithering along their base like nerves waiting to fire. The Pillars of the Armory stirred.

Vepar spoke for them, voice like steel clashing over funeral bells. "We uphold the fallen. This weaponry is not for vanity. This is remembrance of purpose. Each shell forged to honor the act of war itself."

The sky above dimmed under layers of war-ritual lattices. Artificial weather patterns, shaped by mass-scale bounded fields, spread like storm systems for concealment. This zone had become a dead patch on most global satellite lenses, scrubbed by spiritual nullifiers and falsified signals.

The metropolis that rose from this erasure was inhuman in geometry...

...Impossible curves meeting rigid angles.

...Every sector serves function.

...Anti-air placement rings.

...Magus-sigil engraving centers.

...Mana-fusion furnaces.

The center of the construction had begun to show signs of the core engine, an array the size of a mountain, to channel the combined spellwork of all Beasts in the future. It wasn't simply to house the Beasts. This was a machine.

"This city," Gremory's voice rumbled from deep within the ash-covered trench zone, its voice slow, drained, uninterested. "It breathes waste. Nothing will remain when the last layer is laid."

Above them, floating over the tower cranes and glowing leyline circuits, an emblem shimmered into being. It was ritual-coded. The city's central seal. Engraved through spell-layer fusion of subversion and reclamation.

"This metropolis…" one of the Control Tower Pillars intoned, voice ringing through the auditory nodes, "has been named."

Vepar's body rose. Bathin and Botis halted their bickering. The Information Center paused all non-critical simulations.

The Demon Gods began speaking with more unified precision, as if aware their lords were growing restless.

"Let the name be known."

It was Vepar who said it, but all the others followed.

"He has named it. The One Crown. The Shadow of Solomon. The Daemon King. He who cast off the name of Man and called Himself the Incarnation of the Human Order."

"Goetia has declared it."

"—The Metropolis shall serve. As arsenal, fortress, archive, crucible. It shall be the ritual circle of a new spell."

"—A global invocation cast through system, not chant. Through form, not prayer. Through harmony, not belief."

"—It shall not be loved. It shall not be respected. It shall only be obeyed."

"For the unification of Humanity beneath the Beasts, to declare war upon the throne of Heaven and Hell, for the order born from ruin and the structure carved into destruction," they declared together.

They burned the word into the very data of the city.

"Edentu Bebelon!"

---

They don't bother talking much after the teleportation. The alley they land in reeks of ammonia and charred grease. Discarded wires and a busted fan spin halfheartedly under the Cairo sun.

U-Olga snorts as she wipes dust from her manifested blazer. She adjusts her sunglasses. The black lenses are too large. At least her cap hid her horn. Draco tugs her hood down tighter, sleeves tucked over her claws.

Disguise is a necessary embarrassment.

They walk. Sidewalk tiles are cracked. Paint peels from dull beige walls. A truck passes, loaded with bottled water, honking for no reason. U-Olga made no effort to blend in beyond the clothing. Her gait is too formal. Chin up, as if this street should be honored she treads on it.

They stop near a plaza. Cafés crowd the corners. Umbrellas shade sweating locals and tourists. Someone plays oud music from a speaker. Across the street, a tall woman in a pressed business suit steps out of a restaurant, pulling a cigarette from her sleeve and sliding it behind her ear. Pink hair in a tight bun. Eyes masked by corporate politeness. It's Koyanskaya.

A man—middle-aged, paunchy, cheap suit—stands beside Koyanskaya. He has the same look as most humans; overeager and unaware of his place. He's trying to shake her hand again. She doesn't let him. She tilts her head, bows lightly, then walks away with clipped steps.

Draco watches her walk away from the restaurant entrance without waving.

Koyanskaya notices them half a second later. Without a change in her expression, she adjusts her collar and waves with two fingers, professionally, while she adjusts her bag strap.

"Ladies," Koyanskaya starts. "I've completed negotiations with the local affiliate. NFF has secured preliminary sponsorship and data-sharing. The man thinks he's getting a stake in future AI weapon research. I might let him think so for a while."

"Annddd... Didn't think you two could pass for human. Though I'd drop the attitude if you want to stop traffic." she added.

U-Olga raises an eyebrow. "Humans don't deserve the effort of comfort without a good cause. If not, I'll gouge their eyes."

Koyanskaya smirks. "Charming as ever."

They walk together with Koyanskaya leading this time. Her strides are short but confident. She taps something on her phone, probably clearing a schedule.

"He tried to offer me a wine company," she says idly. "That CEO. Very sweet. Also tried to kiss my hand after asking me out."

"You didn't kill him?" U-Olga asks, honestly surprised.

"No. That would've breached contract... And he smelled too much of a specific kind of money that I dislike." Koyanskaya answers, monotone.

They reach a less crowded side street. The sun cuts harsh angles through partially constructed walls. Dust swirls in the air but it's dry, clean enough for a private conversation.

Draco leans against a low wall.

"Get to it."

Koyanskaya taps her phone twice, then slides it away. "There are several ongoing events. The one most relevant to our interests is a planned Youth Devil Rating Game Tournament. It's being hosted by the current Four Great Satans. Publicly, it's a competitive spectacle. Realistically, it's about political grooming. They're building their legitimacy, consolidating faction loyalties, and baiting external observers. Multiple pantheons are sending eyes."

"Idiots playing war for show."

U-Olga scoffs, looking disgusted. "Their idea of strengthening bloodlines is by pitting brats against one another for sport?"

"Hey, It's political," Koyanskaya says. "Entertainment on the surface and propaganda underneath. Factions get to assess each other's next generation without formal wars. Devils flaunt their heirs, humans get their soap opera, and sponsors get money."

She pauses.

"It is not unrelated."

Draco narrows her eyes. "How many of the contestants are bloodline successors?"

"Almost all. Pure-bloods and recognized high-class Devils. Even a few Half-Breeds. That Gremory girl's competing."

U-Olga's expression hardens. "Ah. That one. The sister of Lucifer. She keeps orbiting anomalies."

Koyanskaya smiles thinly. "Exactly."

The Gremory girl's involvement always spirals. Her scent is of interference and too much accidents. Fate seemed to like chewing on her threads.

"I see," Draco says.

Koyanskaya continues. "Performances are being broadcast, and most importantly, the venue will be international. Mythological observer gets access to the frontline data. Combat styles, magical loadouts, personal tendencies, all leaked."

"And we let this continue?"

Koyanskaya shakes her head. "It's better if it does. We don't care about the tournament. What matters is who's watching it. Who funds it. Who shows their hand."

Draco nods in affirmation.

"There are other updates. Some factions are deploying scouts near the Beasts' House, which is why we're relocating to the Beasts' Territory. No confirmed breaches, but activity is growing. The more the world changes, the more they'll stare into the dark hoping to understand it."

U-Olga clicks her tongue. "They don't have the capacity to comprehend what they've already lost. Interference is meaningless unless the outcome risks disrupting our operations."

Koyanskaya leans against a concrete barrier.

"I have other news. You will want to hear this one," she begins, fingers tapping lightly against her folded tablet for the habit of someone who wants her audience to believe this information has already been weighed worthy. "There's a triple convergence meeting, three of the most notable Magician organizations in the Supernatural World. All three are converging for a single matter, and none of them are calling this a coincidence."

"The subject is something they are all hunting. A magic of such magnitude that the description reads like an invitation to disaster. Shir HaGalgalim. Some records claim it can rewrite the very laws that underpin the world. Whether you believe that or not, you can be certain the people moving for it believe it enough to commit every resource they have."

Her eyes drift to Draco, assessing the queen's controlled expression, then to U-Olga, whose barely contained irritation at being kept waiting on details practically radiates off her. Koyanskaya smirks faintly. "Grauzauberer is first on the list. Mephisto Pheles himself is not attending, but he is sending trusted agents to investigate discreetly. His angle is simple; he suspects this tome is tied to pre-Mosaic cabalistic constructs. His goal is preservation and study. He does not want extremists touching it. Of course, he is just cautious enough to keep this quiet while pretending it is no more urgent than an academic exercise."

"The second group is Golden Dawn," Koyanskaya goes on, "They are thrilled. They see Shir HaGalgalim as a key to their so-called new Renaissance of magic. They address about unifying arcane modernity with divine essence. Idealists, the lot of them, and that is dangerous when you consider how little some of their younger mages understand about the real cost of power. They will push forward with reckless optimism, and optimism is an easy thing to exploit."

"And the others? You said three organizations. Who else thinks they deserve this… world-rewriting trinket?"

Her tone cools, as she brings the third party into play. "Lastly, Rosenkreuzer. Rudiger Rosenkreutz himself is moving on this. To him, Shir HaGalgalim is not just a weapon or a tool—it is a theological relic. He believes it could be the original 'Word' spoken at the dawn of creation. His intention? To seal it once again… or, if the conditions permit, use it to elevate humanity back to what he imagines is a state of divine harmony. His vision is grand. Whether it is realistic, I'll leave you to decide. Either way, this puts a man like him in direct opposition to anyone who sees the Codex as a mere object to possess."

Koyanskaya's voice lowers fractionally, though her eyes are bright with interest. "Shir HaGalgalim is said to date back before the end of what should be the Age of the Gods. Whatever its truth, all three Factions are mobilizing. Which means their convergence will not be polite."

"Ambition without discipline leads to nothing but ruin. They will either destroy themselves or force others to destroy them. Neither outcome is concerning, except for the inevitable waste of time." Draco noted. Vitch laughs about it.

She straightens slightly, her words settle between them. "I will be following you both in this when you move to involve yourselves. Not because I intend to play at heroics. But because something with the audacity to call itself the greatest magic in existence is something I want to see for myself."

U-Olga's brows rise, though it is less surprise and more skepticism. "So one faction wants to preserve it for study, another to use it as a stepping stone to their imagined utopia, and the last to either bury it or play god in the most literal sense. All for a power that by your own account predates even the supposed decline of divine rule."

"Exactly. And here we are, in a position where ignoring it would be irresponsible—"

"Not to me." Draco interrupted.

"—You can guess why I'm telling you this. Now, I expect your success to be certain, but something this… rare… warrants my personal attention. Let's just say my professional instincts and personal curiosity happen to align."

Draco regards her with open suspicion, she distrusts anyone willing to admit interest so readily. U-Olga looks more intrigued than wary, already considering the strategic implications.

"Okayyy... well, shall we move on then?"

U-Olga clapped and prepared to head out.

Koyanskaya gives a delicate, sarcastic bow.

"As the Beast Faction commands."

U-Olga raises her chin.

"Hmph. What would Avenger call this? Uhh, side quest."

Chapter 24: Beast Quest: Breath Between Stars (Part 2)

The city lies in ruin. The structures are hollowed shells of concrete and steel, twisted by fire and collapse. Smoke clings low to the ground, mingling with the stench of ash and something older and primal in its rot.

Where roads once carried the noise of machines, there is only a thick, viscous mire spreading in every direction, its surface quivering alive. The black mud glistens under the pallid light of a hidden sun, carrying the shapes of human forms only half-submerged, their expressions fixed in agony while their last moments had been etched into the living sludge.

At the heart of this corrupted plain rises a figure so vast the ruins themselves seem like mere ornaments to its presence. A frame of scarlet, immense and sinuous, arches above the mire, its form neither wholly dragon nor wholly beast, but some atrociousness amalgamation of both.

Seven mouths line its serpentine body, a gaping maw that exhales a damp, fetid vapor; two crowns of flesh and horn protrude above its uppermost head, their surfaces slick with the same black filth that coats the ground. Every motion of its massive form drags more of the mud up from unseen depths, feeding the ever-expanding sea. It watches nothing in particular, for its sight is not bound to the physical as its awareness grazes across every point in this place, drinking in the residue of terror that lingers in the air.

Mud pours from every seam of its form, splattering the sea from which it has risen.

"Behold the field wherein the seed of sin hath sprung forth in fullness. Lo, I tasted of the breath of man in the moment of his unmaking, and it is sweet unto mine tongues. The marrow of his fear is as wine poured into seven vessels, brimming, each overflown, and I drink thereof with gladness."

The dragon shifts in the mire, its seven mouths opening in turns, speaking with the same will.

"Lambs rended in the mouth of the wolf, I rejoice in their descent!"

"The sea of perdition swelleth not from want, for every shore is Mine, and every wave bringeth meat. How sweet the folly of men, that they think to wrestle against that which was from before their making. I am not sated, nor shall I rest, for the banquet is eternal."

"Their cries are meat, the draught that slaketh mine thirst. I am he that hath been clothed in scarlet and crowned twice over, given dominion to devour the multitude."

The great body dragged itself further across the churning expanse of sludge. Just the movement disturbed the half-swallowed shapes within. It is not enough to harvest in this barren land as the vine had been stripped and the orchard made bare.

It draws in a slow, rattling breath through one of its central maws, savoring a scent carried by some unfelt wind. The creature's bulk turns, the shifting of its colossal length pushing waves of black mud outward. Its many eyes converge upon a single point behind it.

"A game it hath been, to let the quarry flee that I might take greater pleasure in the hunt. Cat and mouse, king and beast, hero and abomination. My delight is in the chase, in the stretching forth of mine claws toward the prey that thinketh itself hid. I take joy in the flight of the weak, the scurry of the doomed. The thrones shall be overturned, and the crowns devoured, until no name remaineth save Mine own."

Its heads turn their collective gaze fixed on the lone figure standing amid the wreckage at the sea's edge.

There, amid the muck and debris, stands a figure whose silver armor is scored and blackened in places, the crest upon its chestplate half-hidden beneath the flow of blood from the deep gash across his side.

Blood runs from under the breastplate, pooling beneath him before soaking into the ash.

The blond hair at his brow is matted, exhaustion evident in every line of his posture, yet the sword in his grip does not waver.

"Here stands the hound that thinketh himself My slayer," the dragon intones, voices curling into mockery. "Twice hast thou claimed My death, and yet twice hast thou failed to keep Me bound. Through worlds and timelines thou hast chased Me, as though thy pursuit could bind Mine feet. Speak, O King of Knight, of what profit is in your ceaseless labor?"

The King of Knight, Saber-class Servant, Arthur Pendragon's breath is harsh, a testament to a body pushed beyond its limit. His left hand tightens on the hilt of the invisible sword at his side, though he no longer raises it.

Arthur straightens his back despite the pain, forcing strength into his voice.

"Profit is not in the ease of labor, but in its purpose. The end I seek is for all who have been condemned to your hunger... If I must spend every breath pursuing you, then I will do so, even if the world itself burns around us..."

The dragon's mouths curl upward in something that might be laughter.

Arthur's eyes narrowed.

It is a bitter thread of memory running through the scene before him.

He never foreseen that his summoning into a Holy Grail War would lead him to this same adversary. The Grail Wars were already twisted events, but their patterns were known to him from distant observations and tales carried by others.

Rituals of summoning and conflict.

Alliances and betrayals.

Wishes that rarely brought the peace promised.

Days ago, he awoke to find himself bound to a Master of quiet resolve, sworn to defend and to fight until the Grail was secured or destroyed. In those first hours, there had been no sign of the scarlet beast or the blackened mud that now drowns the city.

The days had been marked by battle against other Servants... encounters that should have been tests of skill, each duel bearing the weight of honor.

Yet honor had been absent from the beginning.

It started up subtly, the behavior of certain foes seeming too relentless, their movements lacking the nuances of human will. From it came the certainty, for when the first corpse fell, the black mud oozed from the wound instead of blood. VI/G had already poisoned the war before Arthur's summoning, and its corruption spread with every encounter.

He recalls Berserker whose fury was unnatural even for his class, striking with such force that the city's streets caved beneath him. Archer's arrows carrying a speed and venom beyond mortal design, her face contorted by hatred and retaliation.

Each had been taken, reshaped into something obedient only to the hunger of the sea of flesh. One after another, they fell, but not before exhausting his strength and spilling his blood. The days blurred into a single, ceaseless struggle.

How did it come to this?

He wonders. "How many times must I face the same Beast across worlds? How many cities will fall before the pursuit ends?"

The streets here, the people whose lives had filled them hours ago, are gone. Only ruin remains, claimed entirely for the sake of feeding VI/G.

The dragon's heads sway with a low rumble.

"Thou knowest well, Saber, that this city is but the first morsel in a greater feast. The blood of the multitudes is Mine portion, and the end of all things is My inheritance. What is the worth of thy struggle, when every blow you strikest doth but feed Mine hunger further?"

His teeth clenched. "Every life you consume is a theft against the Lord's order of creation. I will not allow you to devour without resistance, no matter the cost. The world you seek to make has no place for those who live in hope. It's a reason enough for me to stand before you again."

The Beast's seven mouths part in turn, "Hope is as dust before the wind. Thy blade hath no dominion over that which is not of flesh alone. Hast thou not learned, O slayer twice failed, that I am not as the foes of thine old wars? I am hunger unending, death unceasing, the hand that bringeth famine to every hearth. Wilt thou strike Me yet again, knowing thou canst not bind Me?"

Arthur answers. "If I must strike you a thousand times, if each time ends with my death, then I will rise again for the thousand and first. I have sworn to see your end, and I will not turn aside because you mock my failures."

"Thy stubbornness is as meat unto Me," VI/G replies, the words sliding like oil into the air. "It stirreth in Me a greater appetite, for the taste of a will that doth not bend is richer than the flesh of kings. I shall strip thee of thy cause, piece by piece, until thy resolve is but carrion, and then shalt thou see how empty thy vows have been."

Arthur steps forward through the blackened slush, armor dragging through the filth, eyes never leaving the beast. "I've seen what you leave behind. Cities emptied, skies blotted out, lives ended... You believe that if you consume enough, the worlds themselves will bend to you. But your hunger will never end! That is why I hunt you across them, and why I will continue to do so!"

The sword he's holding started shining.

"And I, knight, shall continue to flee when it pleaseth Me, and turn to face thee when the sport is sweet. For thou art not My slayer, but My entertainment! Each time I permit thee to think thy strike hath meaning, I taste the fear that followeth when thou findest it hath not. Go on, then. Speak of justice. Speak of the lives thou wouldst save! It is as fine wine to My tongues, and I drink deep."

Arthur's grip on his sword hilt tightens. "I will make certain that when next you flee, it will not be by your choice."

"Hahaha. Hearken, knight, for I shall declare unto thee the design which now stirreth within Me. Mine sight hath pierced through the veils of thine timeline and the brittle skin of the multiverse, unto a place unlike the wretched Singularities thy kind hath known."

"What... are you on about—?"

"It is not some crude echo of a history, nor a shard cast adrift upon the void, but a worldline whole and unbroken, yet set within the Quantum Time-Lock itself. This dominion liveth still in the eyes of the Root, and yet it is neither undone nor guarded from Mine approach."

The meaning is immediate, though the mind resists. The Time-Lock exists to preserve certain worlds, preventing them from being touched by distortions or intrusions. For VI/G to have detected one and describe it as "unbroken" is already a cause for alarm.

"Yet more wondrous still, O hound that would slay Me," the Beast continues, voices swelling, that Saber could feel the gaiety in it. "is that within this world I have marked the presence of others like unto Myself. Not one, nor two, nor three, but a gathering exceeding five in number. Each breath as I breathe, each a scourge worthy to unmake thrones and shatter the bones of kings. A gathering of Beasts, walking amongst the works of man."

Saber's heart drives a sharper beat in his chest.

His mind starts estimating the sense of such a thing, until eventually the scale refuses to form. One Beast alone can threaten a universe, unraveling its laws and grinding its order into ruin.

To speak of more than five is to speak of destruction so vast that even imagining its scope strains reason.

His lips part slightly before words form. "T—that!?"

"—it's impossible!! Such a convergence cannot occur without the collapse of all protections, without the Counter Forces, or even the Root itself rejecting the balance! If what you claim is even true, then there will be nothing left for any world to preserve!"

The dragon leans closer, its crowns glistening with the foul mud running in rivulets down its face.

"Whether thy mind receiveth it or no mattereth not. The truth standeth without thy consent. I care not for the order thou servest nor the walls thou keepest between worlds. I would seek them, find them, and feast upon them, for what banquet is greater than the flesh of Mine own kind? What joy surpasseth the devouring of equals, until naught remaineth but Myself, the First and the Last?"

"Truly, your hunger is without end. Even among your own, you seek only to consume. If you find this place you speak of, then the devastation will not end with that world. All worlds will be in peril, that I cannot allow!" His voice cuts against the oppressive heat.

"Thou shalt not stay My hand," VI/G answers with a rising fervor, "for the scent hath already been taken, and the path lieth bare before Me."

A tremor spreads through the black sea as the space before the Beast's crowns begins to tear, the air parting in lines of lightless void. The wound in reality grows, warping the ruined skyline behind it, pulling stone and steel toward the widening rift. What lies within is not any space Saber knows, but a depth without horizon, a passage that hums with the impossible weight of eternity. Not merely a door to another world, but a fissure reaching the Root itself.

The sight before him demands more than pursuit. If VI/G passes through, the convergence it has spoken of may become real. He cannot permit the crossing.

The invisible blade at his side shifts as his hand closes fully on the hilt. Within him, he begins the act he has long avoided. The Thirteen Seals placed upon Excalibur, bindings wrought to limit the sword's power lest it bring more ruin than salvation, are ancient and absolute. Unlocking them is not done lightly, for each seal broken unleashes a greater share of the sword's true nature. To release them all is to wield an instrument of judgment in its purest form, a force meant only for ending what cannot be spared.

"If you intend to cross, then you will meet the full measure of my blade before you take a single step."

His will presses against the first of the Seals.

"Seal Thirteen—Decision start!"

"Fool."

"First Seal—"

The declaration is cut short by the sudden quake of the mire beneath his feet. Black mud bursts upward like a ruptured vein, spraying chunks of rotted stone and steel. A hulking shadow tears through it, the mud clinging to its form like armor and smoke.

The sound that follows is a single, earth-breaking step, then another, each cracking the concrete underfoot as though it were dry bone.

Berserker Heracles emerges with a body swollen with corruption, the black sludge woven into every muscle and tendon, until the man is less a hero than a living siege engine. His skin is stretched taut over that monstrous frame, veins pulsing with a red light.

In his hands is the massive stone axe-sword, jagged at the edges and heavy enough that its swing alone can shatter a building's frame.

Saber barely has time to shift his stance before the ground caves beneath Berserker's charge. The axe-sword comes down in a vertical cut meant to crush everything beneath it. Saber meets the blow with his blade, the impact jolting through his arms and rattling his bones. His boots sink into the cracked street from the force, and his knees nearly give before he shoves back, twisting his body to redirect the weight aside.

The counter is instant, but his injury drags at his speed. Berserker's free hand whips forward, catching Arthur square in the chestplate. The impact is like a siege ram, hurling him backward through the splintered facade of a collapsed building. Shards of rebar and glass tear at the gaps in his armor as he hits the ground hard enough to crack it.

"Thou canst not even pass the gate that I have set before thee. What worth hath thy justice, knight, when it falleth to the first Servant of Mine feast?"

Arthur forces himself upright. Berserker advances into the ground with the intent on driving Arthur into it. The axe-sword rises in a sweeping arc to tear through his midsection. Arthur pivots low, his blade catching the strike at the haft and guiding it just high enough that the edge smashes into the wall behind him instead. The force sends a spray of stone shards over them both.

The knight drives forward, thrusting for Berserker's throat, but the corrupted hero catches the blade in his massive grip. Black sludge spreads along the steel's invisible edge, and with a twist of his wrist, Heracles flings Arthur away as though the sword were no heavier than straw. Arthur hits the ground and rolls to his feet, every muscle protesting the movement.

"See, how thy foe doth cast thee aside," VI/G calls, "Shall I count for thee the number of times thou hast been driven into the dust? Or wilt thou admit at last that this day's labor is but a jest to Me?"

Berserker comes again, relentlessly, swinging the axe-sword in a brutal overhead strike. Arthur catches it near the hilt with his own blade, locking their weapons for a moment. The pressure is crushing, his arms trembling under the strain. He sees the snarling face above him, the corrupted flesh twitching and eager to burst.

With a shove and a sidestep, Saber lets the axe fall past him, using the momentum to slash at Berserker's side. The blow bites in but meets the resistance of that tar-coated muscle, drawing only a shallow wound that seals with mud before he can follow through.

"Dost thou feel it, knight? The futility that gnaweth at the sinew of thy resolve? Strike, and the wound is gone. Bleed him, and he drinketh his own blood to rise again. Such is the feast of corruption—eternal and unspoiled."

Saber has no choice but to force the Beast's taunts aside for the meantime. His eyes lock on Berserker's movements for a gap that the corruption has not yet made impervious.

Berserker's stone axe-sword slams down again, tearing apart the pavement where Arthur stood a moment before. The knight pivots to his left, dragging his aching body into another guarded stance, when the sharp hiss of something cutting through the air forces his head to snap upward.

Three black-tipped arrows streak toward him from the skeletal remains of a nearby tower. He deflects the first with the blade, but the second grazes his right pauldron, denting the armor, and his eyes catch a glint in the corner of his vision as the third embeds itself into the ground at his feet, throbbing faintly with the same corruption that stains the city.

Another comes before his boots touch the ground, driving into the street where his knee had been. The force cracks the concrete and embeds the shaft deep.

Arthur's gaze snaps to the ruined façade ahead, and emerging from a haze of blackened mud was Archer, her body now nothing more than a shifting silhouette wrapped in a haze of shadow barely resembling the huntress she once was.

Atalanta's body formed from sludge while her eyes burned with that hollow corruption. The shadows around her claws writhe, promising that her strikes will not end with arrows alone.

Berserker closes the distance in a handful of thunderous strides. The knight catches the blow at an angle, forcing the axe-sword to grind down against his own blade, sparks and mud spraying between them. The force forces Arthur backward into the line of Archer's next volley. He twists, letting the arrows pass within a hair's breadth of his head, only for Berserker's other hand to swipe for his midsection. Arthur barely turns the blow aside, but the strength behind it tears at the muscles in his arm.

Archer is already moving, circling wide to maintain distance, loosing arrows in quick, snapping motions that force him to redirect his guard each time. His arms strain under the ceaseless demands of parrying Berserker's brute strength while avoiding the pinpoint speed of Archer's shots.

"Dost thou yet see the folly of thy defiance? One knight, frayed and bleeding, against Mine Servants. Thou shalt be ground into the dust, and thy cause with thee. How swiftly thy ground is taken from beneath thee. Wilt thou name thyself a protector when thy body bendeth under so few blows?"

Saber does not waste words answering because his focus is on staying alive. He refused to look away from the strikes before him. He has fought worse odds, but the fatigue in his limbs is a truth he cannot ignore. Every wound drags his body down, a gamble between evading death and finding a breath to counter.

He moves in close to Berserker to deny the brute the full swing of his weapon, landing two quick strikes to the torso that pierce through the sludge only for it to close over again. An arrow snaps past his cheek; he disengages and rolls aside, lifting his blade to catch another descending strike from Berserker's weapon.

The respite lasts seconds. A cold, familiar voice cuts across the chaos, followed by the sound of armored boots crushing debris.

"My KiNg..."

If only for an instant, his eyes meet the form of another Servant as he steps from the wall of sludge at VI/G's call. The sight lands sharper than any blade.

Standing a short distance away is Lancer, though the man he knew is gone. His armor is caked in blackened filth, his eyes devoid of the loyalty that once bound him to the Round Table. The spear in his hands gleams faintly with a sickly sheen, its tip dripping with corruption that eats into the ground where it falls.

Arthur's jaw tightens. "Sir Percival…"

The Lancer answers only with wordless action, lunging forward with a spear thrust aimed directly at Arthur's heart. The king parries it with a twist of his blade, but Berserker is already stepping in from the side, swinging his axe-sword toward Arthur's exposed flank. He manages to turn the strike enough to avoid being cleaved in two, but the impact sends him staggering backward, barely regaining balance before Archer's next volley forces him to duck low.

The strike in Lancer's spear is clean, aimed to pierce Arthur's chest outright. Arthur meets it with the flat of his blade, sliding it aside with just enough angle to avoid being skewered, but the force drives him back into Berserker's reach. The axe-sword comes down, glancing off Arthur's shoulder and driving him to one knee.

VI/G's words rumble again. "A king beset by his own, stripped of the fealty of knights and the favor of heaven. See how they rend at thee without pause, and tell Me of the justice that guideth thy hand."

Pain flares in his ribs, but there is no moment to recover. Archer looses again, forcing him to roll across fractured stone. The trio pressed him, each movement coordinated not by camaraderie but by the pure efficiency of predation.

Saber blocks Percival's next strike and turns it aside, using the motion to slash at Berserker's knee. The corrupted giant barely flinches. Archer takes the opening to close the distance, her claws flashing as she swipes for Saber's face. He catches her wrist, shoving her back, but the delay costs him. Percival's spear drives for his ribs, forcing him to twist while pain tears through his side as the tip grazes past.

Arthur's thoughts flash to battles fought alongside Percival in other worlds, victories claimed in the name of the realm. That memory is a weapon against him now, striking harder than their steel.

"Come forth."

From the broken streets, more shapes emerge. Rider Martha's form materializes at the edge of the field, staff in hand. A blast of distant light arcs from its tip, slamming into the street where Arthur stands and forcing him to leap back into Berserker's path. The blow from the axe-sword misses only because Percival's spear draws Arthur sideways.

Caster Medea appears next as arcs of violet light form around her hands. Assassin Shuten-douji slips in from the shadows, her twisted smile cutting through the black sludge that coats her skin. They joined the assault between the strikes of the others, forcing Arthur to defend from every angle.

Steel clashes against the haft of a spear, shatters arrows from the air, and cuts through spell constructs before they can close around him.

Arthur's mind measures the odds. Six corrupted Servants arrayed before him, moving to hem him in. His body is already weakened, and any breath causes a spike of pain through his chest. Every direction offers only another attack.

Berserker comes in with his weapon high. Archer moves to the flank, loosing arrows in quick succession. Percival presses in from the front, spear striking in perfect sync with the archer's fire. Rider's blasts force Arthur to change his footing from the path of another attack. Caster's spells twist through the air like blades, and Assassin waits for the smallest opening to close in.

There is no pause and space for thought beyond the next strike. His arms move to deflect, evade, while the blows wears him further down.

"Struggle, if thou wouldst entertain Me further," the Beast calls, laughter rolling through its seven mouths. "Thy desperation is as a feast unto Me."

Arthur meets Berserker's swing, drives a kick into Archer's midsection to buy himself a moment, only to have Percival's spear graze his shoulder.

A sudden dash past Berserker's flank closes the distance toward the dragon, but Archer's next arrow pins the path shut, and Assassin catches him before he can shift. He turns the blade against Berserker's next strike, shoulder screaming in protest, and finds himself driven back again.

The portal's pull strengthens; VI/G's bulk turns toward it.

"NO!"

Arthur's voice is raw, his body wrenching against the blows as he forces one last push, driving back against Berserker's guard. He sees VI/G's form advancing into the rift, the edges of its body distorting as the void takes it. He tries to press through, but the corrupted Servants close around him, blades and spells striking in unison.

The dragon's laughter follows as its form disappears into the tear and the rift collapses into nothing.

—and Beast VI/G escapes to another world, as it did numerous times heretofore...

...peculiarly, in this particular world...

...the number of Beasts upsurges.

Consequently, the endgame is nigh.

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The path through the Carpathian ridges is barren, though the land holds leftover of rites older than the empires that once claimed it.

The ground is stained with Judaic formulae abandoned long before the nations that rose upon them fell. The quietude belongs to the earth, keeping witness of pacts it once bore.

The hood shields the Human King's face, the cloak conceals his presence not for them. They would not recognize him regardless.

They call themselves magicians, organizations, scholars of mysteries, while their steps follow the footprints of one man: Merlin. They scramble for remnants, unable to produce the foundation that gave it birth. He does not look upon them with admiration, nor does he despise their search.

In particular, he understands it. Humanity seeks in fragments what it lost in its totality.

The convergence of the three orders is ahead. Their banners are hidden, but their accents betray them. Grauzauberer, Golden Dawn, and Rosenkreuzer. They distrust one another because each sees the other as a thief circling the same carcass. Their mistrust is correct. Their leaders stand apart, speaking as their agents cluster like hounds waiting for a signal.

Goetia moves into the crowd. Humans do not often glance twice unless forced. That is why they perish when one glance might have saved them. He mingled among them with steady thoughts.

The Carpathian node hums beneath their feet; none of them feel it, though they claim mastery over leylines. They do not notice because their attention clings to the surface. If they had the wisdom Solomon asked for, they would know the land itself breathes a warning.

A trusted mage of Mephisto Pheles was speaking with a smile concealed beneath politeness, though one look from Goetia immediately knows that he is a serpent accustomed to being underestimated, but serpents shed skins to deceive. His tone is pleasant, words chosen are as every syllable is bait.

"We convene not for empty rivalry," he says to the younger Golden Dawn acolytes, "but for the pursuit of knowledge and preservation. Shir HaGalgalim is no ordinary curiosity. Its structure is not a product of later human synthesis that predates Mosaic law itself. Its framework, if one studies the traces correctly, is closer to the cabalistic forms that existed before codification. If left in the hands of zealots or careless seekers, its mechanisms would unravel into catastrophe. Grauzauberer intends to prevent that. We shall study, document, and restrain its use."

Goetia scoffed, his words concealed another goal. Preservation is possession by another name. Yet, he speaks correctly: this magic is not to be placed in unworthy hands. He speaks the first truth, though he conceals the second.

The Golden Dawn representative, a senior trying to control the fervor of the young, responds. His hand gestures as if he delivers a sermon with conviction.

"We disagree fiercely, not with caution, because Shir HaGalgalim is not a threat when it is an opportunity. You speak of catastrophe, lad, but catastrophe is only the word of those who cannot bear change. This tome can be a bridge. Arcane modernity, fractured, stumbling forward, desperate for coherence—if Shir HaGalgalim is as described, then it is the link to divine essence we have lost. Our younger brothers and sisters here do not pursue destruction. They pursue Renaissance. A new dawn, where divine law and arcane practice unite into a harmony of progress."

He pauses to let his apprentices nod, eyes bright with naïve belief.

Such eagerness stirs no warmth in Goetia. He understands their hope. Hope is an instinct, but without discipline, it is poison. Renaissance? They know nothing of the foundation upon which one could stand. They would wield the Hymn of the Spheres as if it were a lantern for their path, not knowing the flame could consume the sky.

The Rosenkreuzer envoy, clad in the austerity of his order, lifts his voice full of confidence tempered by piety.

"You're talking as though Shir HaGalgalim were yours to study or yours to employ, of bridges and Renaissance, while you ignore the truth. This Hymn is not human property. Our founder, Master Rosenkreutz himself, teaches us that this may be the original Word. The same Word spoken at creation, the first breath that brought light into existence. Such a relic is not an instrument. It is theology given form. If it is found, it must not be desecrated with experiment. Sealed again! Hidden from profane hands, or if divine will allows, used once, not to corrupt, but to elevate mankind's soul, restoring harmony between humanity and the divine."

Hostility brews as the three camps regard each other, distrust palpable, though none will admit it openly. They have spoken their positions not to persuade but to declare. Each knows the others cannot be persuaded.

"To reduce Shir HaGalgalim to study, progress, and theology. Solomon did not ask for power, nor for wealth, nor for the subjugation of others. These organization assumes wisdom but know it not. How predictable. Humanity is always predictable in its division."

The first agent allows his smile to sharpen. "Then we are clear. We will not resolve this dispute by agreement. There is only one path left when the tome lies hidden, and it will not reveal itself to speeches. We shall let our pursuit decide. Whoever secures Shir HaGalgalim will determine its fate. Until then, we are rivals under necessity."

The Golden Dawn senior's eyes narrow. He wishes to protest, but his younger acolytes murmur approval. Competition feeds their hunger more than unity. He adjusts, then declares, "So be it. If the divine wishes it, the worthy will be chosen in pursuit."

The Rosenkreuzer envoy bows his head in brief prayer and answers in a solemn tone, "So be it. May the Word judge us accordingly."

Voices ring across the gathering. It won't be a collaboration but a contest. A hunger game, as humans call it. Whoever uncovers Shir HaGalgalim claims it, and all others must submit.

Blindness has always been the nature of man, and their hunger blinds them.

The moment the contest begins, chaos erupts across the clearing as mages scatter with spellcraft readied, artifacts glowing faintly under moonlight, voices barking terse orders as they vanish into the Carpathian forest.

It resembles an uncoordinated hunt, and perhaps that is precisely what these organizations deserve; a competition disguised as cooperation, intellect reduced to desperation the instant ambition outweighs reason.

Goetia moves in the opposite manner. No rush as the steady sound of boots sinks into cold soil as he chooses a direction without the slightest hesitation. To any watching, he appears indifferent, maybe even aimless, the tall figure with golden hair unbound drifting toward the treeline as though detached from the entire contest. The cloak over his shoulder conceals the absent arm well enough; none here know him, so none guess the reality.

Internally, there is no uncertainty. The instant the rules were declared, he marked the location of Shir HaGalgim in mind through direct knowledge relayed earlier by those remnants of himself still scattered as Demon God Pillars across the world. It was, after all, a network that remains quiet yet obedient, indifferent yet loyal, extensions of thought rather than subordinates.

And their message was precise: the tome lies buried within a forgotten ritual chamber beneath the northern ridges, protected by little more than disuse and distance. No mage here knows it and they won't reach it before him.

It is almost insulting to call this gathering a contest.

His eyes change briefly toward the sounds of three distinct voices behind him, the leaders themselves abandoning oversight to join the hunt.

"How delightful," Grau­zauberer announces somewhere behind. "Tell me, friends, which do you wager shall weigh heavier upon this night—the wisdom of restraint or the hunger for transcendence?"

"Less speaking, more seeking," Golden Dawn's representative snaps, though not in true anger. A man too eager, too convinced of destiny. "This is the chance our generation needs. The Shir HaGalgim will end the stagnant centuries between divine authority and mortal craft. We will claim it first; of that I have no doubt."

"Boast quietly, both of you, such weight breaks those who grasp carelessly." says the last leader.

They are not content to send children and agents to die for them? They misunderstand, it is expected. Humanity often confuses movement with progress.

Fragments carry enough meaning. Three representatives, three visions for the same artifact: study, progress, transcendence. Blind to the reality that none of them will matter within the hour.

He does not bother accelerating his pace. The forest itself parts before someone unwilling to be delayed by trivialities like terrain or pursuit.

Internally, thought turns cold, dissecting the situation without emotional consequence yet never entirely absent of disdain. Humanity forever dresses its compulsions in the language of aspiration.

Preservation, enlightenment, salvation—different costumes for the same hunger, seeking power yet declare philosophy; they chase control yet claim devotion. If Shir HaGalgim truly grants what they believe, then none here deserve it, for none approach with understanding equal to the magnitude they pursue.

Divine harmony? Bridges between mortal and sacred? Ending extremism through possession rather than annihilation?

Fools, all of them. The tome will not yield to rhetoric nor ambition; it exists indifferent to ownership, as truth always does.

And the Human King already walks toward it while they waste energy against each other and the terrain both. The irony carries a bitterness almost sharp enough to amuse him, though amusement rarely survives long within his thoughts.

No doubt how even Solomon would have disapproved of this hunt, this squabbling of magi who treat the breath of creation like a trophy. Goetia almost pities them. Almost.

His left hand adjusts the cloak slightly as branches narrow the path ahead. Wind brushes long hair across his shoulder; he ignores it, focusing instead upon the certainty of direction tugging faintly at perception, the way one follows gravity without needing to calculate its pull.

Yes, the tome lies waiting where they will not reach in time. He knows it as fact rather than prediction.

This renders the entire pursuit absurd enough that the word "game" feels inaccurate; games require uncertainty, risk, competition. Here there is only inevitability dressed theatrically as a contest so that these magi may pretend their actions hold relevance.

They do not.

He doesn't say this aloud. Speaking wastes breath better spent reaching the chamber before their clamor disrupts matters unnecessarily.

Yet internally, the thought settles with finality: he has already won.

And they remain too blind to realize it.

---

The wind drags across the ridgeline, heavy with the grit of the Carpathians. Marie is located on the highest point she can find, boots biting into the loose stone, arms crossed beneath the fall of her white hair.

She has not moved for several minutes. The mountain wind throws her coat out like a banner, and she knows it paints her silhouette as a ruler claiming dominion. Her expression stays motionless, bored, eyes half-lidded behind the sunglasses that reflect the scatter of forests below.

The world, beneath her.

Yes, she was simply that magnificent.

Praise her more!

It's a peak!

Koyanskaya spares the haughty woman only a glance before returning to the display in her hand. Fingers swipe smoothly over the faint holographic interface as she tries to trace the pulse of the leyline beneath their feet. Her tail flicks in irritation whenever the signal breaks, ears twitching at the bursts of static.

"She is doing it again," she says flatly, not looking up.

Draco was just further down the slope, leaning against a boulder. Her hoodie's shadow hides most of her face except for the glint of her red eyes. She looks tired, though that might only be the default state of her features. Her long blond hair spills forward like an untrimmed curtain.

"She is always doing it," Draco says. Her voice carries little inflection, only a faint undertone of disdain. "I'm surprised you didn't already get used to it. We've been living with each other for months now."

"I am right here," U-Olga calls down without turning her head. The sunglasses tilt so she can glance over her shoulder with quick irritation. "And this is what is called surveying. A leader must have perspective... something neither of you seem to value."

"Perspective," Koyanskaya repeats, unimpressed, with a professional crispness as if she is hosting a meeting rather than standing on some windswept mountain. "Or maybe you like the view because you can pretend the world is already under your control. Very motivational, I am sure."

U-Olga pivots on her heel and strides down toward them as her coat snaps behind her. "It will be under my control eventually. Do not mock vision when you have none of your own." She stops beside Koyanskaya, looking down at the flickering display with faint irritation. "Have you found anything yet or are you wasting time again?"

Koyanskaya's smile is professional and empty. "The leyline pulse keeps scattering, the Carpathian node is messy. Centuries of human ritual carving their little marks into it. I can find Shir HaGalgalim's trace eventually, but unless you want the entire cluster detonating in our faces, it will take a moment." She shrugs lightly. "Magic on this scale requires patience. I have very little, but more than you."

Draco shifts against the boulder but does not move closer. Everything unfolding before her is equally tedious.

"You are unusually quiet," Koyanskaya calls to her without looking up.

Draco's red eyes move slowly toward them. "...There is nothing worth saying yet... I am here because I want to see where humanity ends. If they climb higher than they deserve or choke on their own ambition. The rest of this—" she gestures faintly toward the leyline scanner "—is background noise."

"Ah," Koyanskaya says mildly, "so the dragon queen plays philosopher now. How noble."

Draco's gaze turns flat. "Do not mistake interest for nobility. The only reason I am alive now is to watch the final outcome with my own eyes. I want to know if the species that once overthrew me rots in its own decay or drags itself to some sort of glory. I care about the verdict, not the struggle."

U-Olga snorts. "Humans are predictable. They build, they destroy, they repeat the cycle because they are too primitive to do otherwise. Hardly worth divine attention."

How tsuny.

Koyanskaya tilts her head, her gold eyes bright behind the curve of her smile. "Says the woman spending all her time here arguing about them instead of ignoring them."

U-Olga stiffens. "T—their mess keeps interfering with our objectives! If I could erase the entire species and replace it with something more competent, I would."

Koyanskaya glances at Draco. "And here I thought you were the only one with a grudge. Seems the queen up there wants humanity replaced entirely, charming."

Draco exhales slowly. "My grudge is irrelevant. I only observe. Their fate is theirs alone. I will not decide it for them."

Koyanskaya lowers the scanner, looking faintly amused. "Strange company I keep. One of you wants the world conquered, the other wants to see if humanity fails without lifting a finger, hah, and then there is me." She gives a small shrug, ears twitching. "I think I am just here because survival is easier if I play along."

U-Olga gives her a look. "You admit it so openly?"

"Of course," Koyanskaya says smoothly. "I am the form given to every creature that suffered under mankind's boot, all the thoughts of prey animals bleeding together until someone like me was inevitable. Revenge keeps me walking, but I am not suicidal. If surviving means smiling and working with people I dislike, I will do it."

Draco studies her silently for several seconds. "You admit your selfishness without hesitation. Most beings would try to dress it up as something greater."

Koyanskaya's smile grows faintly pointed at the edges. "Because I have no interest in pretending otherwise. Survival is cleaner when you stop lying to yourself about it."

U-Olga rubs at her forehead with clear irritation. "Listening to both of you is exhausting; an executioner waiting for the axe to drop, the other some wandering mercenary who will betray everyone the second it stops being convenient. Is there anyone here with normal priorities?"

"Probably not," Koyanskaya says lightly. There's only the three of them. "But that is what makes this partnership so thrilling, does it not?"

Draco gives her a long, cool stare. "Thrilling is not the word I would use."

Koyanskaya smirks faintly but does not answer. The scanner in her hand finally emits a sharper tone, the holographic lines stabilizing into a clearer shape.

"There," she says, ears twitching once. "I have Shir HaGalgalim's trail. It is faint, buried under a thousand rituals, but I can follow it."

"Then move. We have wasted enough time with speeches."

Koyanskaya glances at Draco before starting down the slope. "You know, for someone who hates speeches, she gives quite a few herself." She says mildly.

Draco follows silently, while U-Olga mutters something under her breath about ungrateful subordinates.

The three of them descend the mountain path cut into stone, the wind tugging at clothes and hair, trying to pull them back upward.

The mountain air thins the further they go, yet neither the cold nor the pointed rocks seem to slow any of them.

Wordlessly, they continued their trail.

It was a silence Draco lived in.

".....I still do not understand why you even came along. You have made no secret of your ambitions before, and I haven't forgotten the last time you tried to move behind my back. If it were up to me, I would have burned you out of existence before your schemes ever reached my doorstep."

...that is, if those words didn't come from the most annoying woman.

Koyanskaya keeps walking a few paces before she stops too, she turns with that smile that never looks genuine. "Though to be fair, it was never personal. If Cernunnos had not interrupted me, then perhaps I would have succeeded. I was a tail short, after all. You would have been the eighth. Imagine it, the Alien God reduced to fuel for my ascension. A pity fate lacked the sense of humor to let it happen."

U-Olga's glare could be felt behind her sunglasses. "So lightly about barely comprehension. Power doesn't grow without consequence. You could never have devoured what I am and remained yourself... No. You would have drowned in what you wanted to control."

Koyanskaya tilts her head. "Perhaps. But maybe I would have succeeded. You cannot know. One only fears the possibility that someone like me might have walked away with a throne."

U-Olga threw her hands wide in disbelief. "Listen to her! She says this as if it were some trivial game! Do you have any idea how dangerous you truly are?"

"Very," Koyanskaya answers smoothly. "But not nearly dangerous enough, apparently. Or we would not be having this conversation."

U-Olga takes a step closer, golden-amber eyes cold through the slant of her sunglasses. "If you had taken my power, the first thing you would have done is squander it on revenge against humans. You are nothing but the accumulated malice of animals who died screaming under human hands. Your purpose, in reality, chains you."

The fox woman simply laughs lightly which carries no real humor. "It's called surviving when entire pantheons and alien intellects want you erased. I refuse to chain myself to ideals that kill everyone else. I call that intelligence."

As sharp as claws drawn against stone, their voices carry up the slope. Two predators circling each other with words instead of claws, both too proud to back down.

The entire exchange grated against Draco's nerves. It irritates her because neither seems to care about the silence pressing over the mountain.

Her gaze stays on the path rather than their faces. U-Olga will never stop underestimating Koyanskaya, and Koyanskaya will never stop provoking U-Olga because it amuses her to watch someone so composed lose the edges of control.

Draco wonders why she's even with them. Probably because it is a necessity, not companionship. Watching humanity's fate requires surviving long enough to see its conclusion. For that, these two happen to be useful.

But listening to them makes her tired. Ranting about power does not solve anything. Power does not change inevitability. When the species that once overthrew her finally reaches its ending, it will not be power deciding if they rise or fall. It will be something deeper, something most of them refuse to acknowledge until it crushes them.

It comes like a fracture across her thoughts, heat lancing through the base of her skull. All collapse... inward as... reality.... folds i...n ha...lf—

—something else breathes across her mind.

Crawling from ages, voices tangled together until—until!—they no—NO—longer sound like language so much as scripture rotting inside itself which—that hammers through her head in fragments, broken lines slamming against each other like glass.

Her vision drags sideways, doubled, as if something else leans over her shoulder and RIPPED against her eyes. Nothing exists.

Her head jerks as the entire horizon folds inward. A second presence slams into her awareness, too close, too familiar as thousands—no—uncountable of voices roll together inside her skull, speaking in languages not spoken on earth for centuries, maybe millennia, syllables vibrating with judgment and command. She cannot tell if they argue or pray or damn everything they name.

the_beast_ comes _&^from_the pit_of... abominations.babylon-babylon-babyl—

—flesh 7 heads 10 horns rises Rises rIses from waters filled with ^nations^ tongues^*

…and upon her forehead_! was a name written?? MYSTERY BABYL…LON THE GREAT… the_Mother_of.abominations.of the_earth

Lo! the_dragon gives power unto the beast…and the whole world…worshipped…worshipped…the_beast for it_spoke great things and blasphemies and power was given…unto it…forty two months…

The words grind over each other in distortion, faint, letters reversing, doubling, vanishing mid-line.

…if any man_have an ear…let him hear…he_that_leads into captivity…shall go into captivity…he that kills with the sword must be killed_with the sword…here is_the patience.and the faith.of the saints…

666666666!!!

She staggers a step before locking herself still. Everything else returns slowly. Her hands clench until her nails scrape her palms.

She forces her breathing even until her face returns to its usual mask.

Something like her exists somewhere beyond the horizon. The same nature, the same blasphemous pulse of authority. Something similar to a Beast has awakened, tied to the scripture clawing through her skull.

The other two haven't noticed her plight. U-Olga and Koyanskaya are too busy spitting old hatred at each other, both so certain nothing matters beyond their argument.

She keeps it that way.

There is no reason to tell them, or the others. Not yet. This stays hers until she understands it.

If Gomorrah, its counterpart at least, lives somewhere in this world, then she will decide what to do only when it stands before her.

She straightens slowly, steps forward again until her pace matches theirs, hood hiding the faint tension in her face.

---

The plastic handles of the grocery bags dig into Angra's palms as he walks down the empty street. Sunset bleeds over the rooftops, and the air smells faintly of gasoline and fried food from some corner Angra can't see.

His arms ache, his shoulders ache, his dignity aches most of all. The All the World's Evil, the supposed walking blight upon existence, reduced to carrying three kilograms of rice, two cartons of eggs, and enough vegetables to feed an army of herbivores.

Angra muttered under his breath, cutting at nothing in particular. "Of all the things I could have been doing tonight, I get to be the errand boy. The greatest threat of mankind, apparently feared in myths, now negotiating with the cashier over discounts on onions. Fantastic! Truly, my life has reached glorious heights."

His footsteps echo along the cracked pavement. There's no one else at this hour on this street. It's only him, the fading light, and this ridiculous pile of groceries dragging his shoulders toward the ground.

The memory of her voice comes back whether Angra wants it to or not, sweet and unyielding, like she always is when she decides she wants something done her way.

"Avenger, we are out of eggs," Kama said earlier, sitting cross-legged on the couch as though the entire house revolved around her whims. "—And milk. And rice. And vegetables. And actually, we are out of nearly everything."

He told her to go get them herself.

...why is she smiling like that?

"I will make dinner if you bring them back. Doesn't that sound fair?"

It had not sounded fair. Not remotely. Yet here he is, hauling food like a delivery man working off a divine punishment.

The worst part is that Kama said her words with that look in her eyes, where she leans her chin on her palm, glances up at me like Angra is the only man in existence, and he can feel the trap close around my ribs before he can even speak. He might be All the World's Evil, but she plays him like he's nothing more than some fool with his first crush.

Angra kicked a pebble off the road with more force than necessary. It clatters away into the gutter.

"So this is my life," he muttered. "I was supposed to be a threat to civilization. The calamity at the edge of all reason. But no, I am reduced to a househusband who knows the difference between spring onions and green onions because apparently there is one. Truly, I have conquered existence."

A flicker of movement crawls along the edge of his shadow before it slides up onto his shoulder. The little thing perches there like it owns the spot, its entire body a flat smear of black outlined in thin white lines. Its eyes—or what passes for them—dot across its head like tiny stars, blinking at uneven intervals.

It tilts its head.

Yes, Angra thinks back at it without enthusiasm, he is talking to himself again.

The dots blink in a slow sequence, a question anyway.

Angra sighed. "Because there is no one else to talk to. Unless you count the brilliant company of discount groceries and self-loathing. I cannot believe this is what I have been reduced to. Do you have any idea what kind of entity I am supposed to be? Do you? Of course not, you were reborn yesterday—literally. You're probably laughing inside as payback for what happened back at Fuyuki."

The little shadow thing leans its head to the other side. The blinking feels like a shrug.

"Wonderful," he snapped. "My own Familiar thinks this is fine. That self-proclaimed so-called wife orders me around like I am a literal servant. My legacy as an existential threat amounts to being really good at carrying bags. Why not give me an apron while we are at it? Maybe some gloves. I can be the terror of humanity, scourge of gods, and professional homemaker all in one. Really, a legend for the ages."

The Shadow's blinking slows as though it is sweating in some way only it understands. It glances toward the bags in his hands, then at my face, then back again like it wants to make sure Angra is not about to hurl them into the nearest ditch in protest.

"I should," Angra continued, teeth clenched, "because maybe then Kama would actually have to get up from her seat for once instead of waving her hands around like the queen of some domestic empire. No, Angra, go fetch this. Angra, buy that. Angra, you are so strong, so dependable, so convenient—"

His voice pitches higher on that last word. The Shadow Giant can feel my pulse climb with it.

The Shadow pats his neck. Its tiny hand feels like the weight of paper.

"No," Angra cut it off. "Do not try to soothe me. I deserve this anger. This is righteous. I am allowed to be furious about being turned into a pack mule when my original resume involved slaughter, despair, and the occasional end of days. Do you understand how far I have fallen? The humiliation? The irony? All the world's evil, domesticated like some alley cat because a single woman bats her eyes at me and threatens not to make dinner if I refuse. I have killed Heroic Spirits with less provocation, you know! Entire empires toppled for less."

Angra can feel the little creature staring. Its blinking turns slow and uneven, sweating harder now.

Angra keeps talking because no one can stop him.

"She even smiled when she handed me the list. Like she knew I would do it, stomp out here and spend an entire evening being her boy while she lounges in the warm comfort of home like some victorious conqueror. What does that make me? Her henchman? Her—"

The shadow lifts one of its tiny stick-like arms in a half-hearted shrug.

"Yes, thank you for the commentary," Angra snapped at it. "Very helpful. I will be sure to include your profound wisdom when I write my memoirs: Angra Mainyu, Saint of Darkness, Also Picked Up Groceries on Tuesdays Because His Wife Told Him To. A true epic."

The creature pats his shoulder again as though to say something like there, there without words.

Angra glared at it anyway.

He shook his too-full head.

Irritation dulled when he caught himself thinking about her again, and now he's stuck in the kind of thoughts he hates the most: the ones where he's forced to look too closely at things he pretends do not matter.

Kama.

On paper, she is everything Avenger should despise—love incarnate, spreading her affections like she is watering a field.

The thing about Kama is… she has this quality that defies all the mess around her. She is love itself, or at least the kind of love that wraps around the world like a vice and squeezes until everything changes shape under it. People think love is soft. Gentle, tender, pretty, when it is not. Her love eats through walls and people and ideals. It corrupts if she wants it to, and she always wants it to. That is what she is.

She can smile at anyone, twist their hearts in half, and call it affection. She can pull the ground out from under kingdoms with nothing but sweet words, while insisting it is love because in her head it is. That is what she was made for.

But then there is him.

...the scapegoat for every sin the world wanted to pin on someone else. Every lie, every betrayal, every so-called "evil" buried in the history of mankind shoved into his name because people needed a target. A container for the things they hated about themselves. Fine. He accepted that a long time ago.

The problem is when two things like them collide, you expect chaos, destruction, hatred, something apocalyptic. You do not expect her to look at him the way she does sometimes, like she actually means it when she says my name softly at times. Like she does not see some monster carrying the sins of everyone who ever lived.

A woman who smiled a certain way when she said she would wait for him.

He wanted to believe it is fake because the alternative means the universe has a sense of humor and decided the scapegoat of all evil deserves someone who actually cares.

She does not, she cannot... Everything she does is just part of her nature, that love for her is instinct, not choice. That there is nothing real in it because it would make sense for nothing to be real in the life Angra has had.

But there is this part of him he keeps trying to crush down that thinks… maybe she does mean it.

He shook his head hard and muttered under his breath, "No, not going there. I am not having some sentimental crisis on top of this grocery run."

The little shadow familiar on his shoulder tilts its head, blinking those uneven white eyes like it is asking why he sounds like he is trying to convince himself instead of anyone else.

He snorted.

Before Angra can answer, everything stops.

The air thickens around them, heavier than it should be, like the entire street sinks into something hostile. The light over the buildings cuts darker as though something swallows it without warning.

Avenger felt divinity before he saw it.

A pressure rolls across the street that does not belong in this world, deep and layered, as the air itself tries to crawl away from it.

Then a voice cuts through it, low and harsh, carrying weight that it has been spoken since the first fires burned on the earth.

"So this is where you have been hiding."

He stopped walking long ago.

He surpassed the urge to set the bags down, he wants to make this thing quick. He looked up.

The sky twists above the rooftops like a black flame ripping through the clouds. A shape drops through the air, a phantom heavier than any storm. Muscular frame cut from darkness itself, horns curving upward like a crown torn out of nightmares, eyes burning orange-red through the dark like the core of a forge.

The chaotic aura coming off it makes the pavement groan faintly under his feet.

It stares straight at him.

"I have searched long for the thief who dares wear my name," it says, the words drawn out so heavily. "And at last I found him."

The familiarity clicks hard in my skull even before it speaks the next part.

"Faker."

The word comes out layered, two tones at once, one like molten metal, the other like a mountain tearing open.

Of course.

Of course the real thing had to show up eventually.

The original, the one the old prayers whispered about, the one with temples and sacrifices and fear carved into history. The true Persian nightmare given flesh, looking down at him like Avenger stole his favorite toy.

Avenger feels the corner of his mouth twitch upward.

"Faker, huh," he muttered, voice flat.

That is rich coming from a disappointment who needed cultists to stay relevant.

He stared up at it, too tired to even flinch at first. Then he dragged in a slow breath and said, "I beg your pardon?"

"You are a shadow playing at divinity."

He rolls his shoulders back slowly, feeling the tattoos along his arms heat faintly under his skin.

"Funny," he said, letting the sarcasm drip like oil, "because last I checked, I was not the one who showed up to pick a fight over branding rights. Must be hard, huh, seeing someone else actually doing something with the title while you skulk around in the clouds waiting for people to remember you exist."

The thing's laughter rumbles like a collapsing building.

"You think of yourself my equal?" it asks, voice rising. "A fraud you are!"

Avenger sets the grocery bags down slowly on the pavement because this is about to get complicated, and he does not want to explain to Kama why the eggs ended up decorating the street. Avenger tilted his head until his neck cracked.

"Great. Because I have been having a very bad day, and punching a god in the face might actually make me feel better."

The flames in its eyes blaze higher. The ground under splits in hairline cracks as the weight of its presence bears down harder, and Avenger can feel his own energy answering, crawling up his arms like a living thing ready to bite.

Two Angra Mainyus.

One born from the prayers of terrified men. One born from every curse the world ever spat out.

The wind lashes between them as they face each other across the empty street, the first hints of killing intent burning through the air.

Avesta will be the one to decide the winner.

Chapter 25: Beast Quest: Breath Between Stars (Part 3)

In the Avesta, it is written that when light and darkness were first divided, Ahura Mazda raised his flame against the lie-born shadow, and the twin spirits warred at the edge of creation.

The ancient text forgets to tell what happened when two darknesses clashed instead of light against dark... When evil met evil, when neither carried justice, when the earth itself groaned beneath powers that scorned righteousness alike and rejected the neat divisions that priests would one day preach, then there were no witnesses save for the broken sky and the molten ground.

In such wars, there were no victors, only things left behind that the bards refused to sing of.

Kuoh City is nothing sacred, nothing blessed, nothing worth the mention of Angels, but it becomes the stage regardless. The Evil God with a body of a vast phantom shaped from smoke and flame and obsidian flesh, horns jagged and dripping light from eyes like dying suns. The humans below scatter at the sight, their minds trembling at a presence they cannot name. This is Angra Mainyu, the Persian darkness of this world, the thing priests once feared in firelit caves, the god that drank offerings of blood when men still crawled on their bellies before their kings.

And standing before him is the other.

Avenger scratches the back of his head, his expression the same as if he is watching clouds instead of a rampaging deity. His clothes are already charred from an earlier strike, one arm bare where divine fire seared through fabric, but his skin carries no wound.

He glances at the phantom towering above the skyline, then at the civilians screaming in the streets. Honestly, the noise itself annoys him more than the god preparing another strike.

"It ends here. There is no second Angra Mainyu."

Avenger tilts his head.

"That's real inspiring, big guy. Did you practice that before coming here in front of a mirror while roasting villages?" He lifts one hand, scratches at the glyphs glowing faintly on his collarbone. Name theft. Trademark violation. He gets it.

The Evil God raises one hand and the sky bends inward, clouds spiraling like someone twisting wet cloth, and a spear of pure divine flame forms above them, its heat strong enough to peel the paint off cars three blocks away. When it falls, it falls like Judgment Day.

An exaggerated attack just for punishing an imposter, but then again, this is a god.

The spear hits and the world erupts.

Half the street vanishes under a column of light and heat that digs down through asphalt and concrete and rebar until the underground water lines burst into geysers of boiling steam. Cars flip from the shockwave. Windows shattered across four districts. Half the onlookers run out of the city limits before daring to look back.

When the light fades, the pavement glows orange, the buildings croaked half-melted, but in the center of it was the last scraps of Avenger's mortal disguise fluttering into ash around his feet.

More collateral damages.

...and corpses.

He dusts his shoulders slowly.

"...Okay. My turn."

The shadow spills out of him like a tide. It pours over the ground, over the smoking craters, and crawls up the ruined walls of the nearest apartments. It stretches into tendrils thicker than trucks, whips across the streets, wraps around lamp posts, and tears them out like weeds. Everything it touches burns black not with flame but with something fundamental, hungrier, a corrosion of existence itself. The shadows hiss where they meet divine aura, two forces grinding like blades.

The Evil God's fighter twitched as the first flicker of irritation crossed his face.

Avenger steps forward dressed with a red waistcloth tattered behind him, black bandages tight across forearms and shins, glyphs crawling over dark skin alive. His eyes burn ominously through the gloom, and when he grins it is humorless.

"Let's skip the sermon this time. You wanted a real Angra Mainyu? Congratulations! You found one!"

Circles of molten script spin around the Evil God's arms, words from the first priests who learned to fear the dark. Each sigil spits flame shaped like beasts with too many teeth. They leap at Avenger in packs, divine firewolves that turn the pavement molten where they land.

Avenger meets them head-on. His shadows whip upward, tentacles thick as tree trunks, smashing through the first pack like swatting flies. Where the shadows strike the wolves, divine fire flickers and dies, swallowed into blackness.

Two more leap at him from both flanks; he lets them come, then slams both fists together in front of his chest, and the shadow explodes outward in a wave that rips across three city blocks. The wolves vanish in screams of fire and smoke.

"You really thought I was some mortal playing dress-up?!" Avenger calls over the storm of colliding powers. "Hate to disappoint! I'm a little harder to kill than that!"

The Evil God's body blurs, divine speed carrying him across the broken ground in less than a blink. He appears behind Avenger, hand already swinging down like a mountain falling.

Avenger twists, catches the strike on crossed forearms, feet sliding trenches into the pavement from the force. The blow drives him back through the side of an office tower; the wall caves in around them, floors above sagging before the whole structure groans and collapses into dust behind their fight.

"Not bad," Avenger says through gritted teeth, forcing the god's hand upward, shadows crawling up his arms to reinforce his strength. "But you hit as if you expect me to stay down afterward. That's the problem with you divine types. Always so sure of yourselves."

The Evil God snarls, fire pouring from his horns, from his mouth, from the cracks forming in his chest where Avenger's curse begins eating through divine flesh.

"What—?! Is this?!" the god growls, voice alone shaking the concrete dust from the air.

The curses... are carrying a foreign property—NO!

"FILTH!"

Avenger laughs. "Surprise? It's the only honest thing the world's ever given me."

The shadows surge again, darker, thicker, every tendril carrying memory, screams, curses. They slam into the god's ribs, wrap around his legs, and drive him back through another building. Floors collapse like cards. Fire and shadow tear through the air, two forces neither easy nor merciful, only destructive and vast.

The air splits again as Avenger drives the deity through another high-rise, steel and concrete tearing apart under the force of both bodies slamming through floors. Sparks from severed power lines rain down the stairwells; desks, glass, and entire ceilings collapse around them as they smash through the final wall into the open air beyond.

Avenger lands and crouches on broken asphalt, curses crawling outward from his feet like oil on water. The Evil God slams down across from him, fragments of concrete tumbling from his shoulders. The phantom's eyes burn brighter, his teeth bared like something that was not used to feeling its own flesh wounded.

Avenger cracks his neck and rolls a dislocated shoulder.

"Not what you expected, huh? Guess I'm harder to kill than your mind told you."

"That curse… it carries hatred beyond anything this plane should bear. It should have consumed you first before anything else."

Avenger laughs, bitter and humorless. The god is underestimating him.

"That's the point. It's a lot of sins, every scream, every betrayal, every dying breath humanity ever spat into the dark, and I wear it. You think light's going to wash that off me? Try harder."

The Evil God moves his hand in a circle, Zoroastrian runes spinning into existence above his palm, lines of fire forming spheres that detonate outward into storms of golden flame.

Avenger felt the curses rise behind him like a tidal wave, tendrils wrapping around each explosion, dragging the light inward until it collapses into nothingness.

The god pauses, confusion flickering behind his burning eyes as the light dies faster than he can conjure it.

Avenger sees it and smirks, steps forward through the heat still rolling off the asphalt.

"Problem? Have you noticed it yet? All that divine punishment of yours just keeps feeding me. It hits, it hurts, it burns through the nerves, and then I hit harder. Pain's just more fuel!"

He is gone in the next instant, moving faster than a god's sight, reappearing in front of the deity with his fist already buried in the phantom's gut. The impact sends a shockwave outward that folds three nearby buildings inward like paper as air detonates from the force. The ground caves for thirty meters in every direction, cars are flung into the sides of collapsing storefronts.

The Evil God snarls, grabs for him, but Avenger twists inside the grip, drives his knee up under the deity's ribs, then slams both elbows down into the back of the god's neck, forcing his head through the cracked pavement.

Avenger breathes hard, body shaking from the force running through it, grinning.

"You feel that?! That's called hitting back!"

The deity rises again, slower as divine aura flares wider until the street glows white under his feet. His voice carries fury but also something Avenger hears for the first time; uncertainty.

"What is this curse? It eats and takes everything. It carries the world's hate and it grows as it suffers!"

He's finally catching on. It's just everything humanity ever spat into the dark given shape. All the World's Evil. Personally, the Servant just thinks it's honest.

The deity lifts both arms, magic circles forming dozens at a time across the sky, each one the size of a city bus. Chains of molten gold fall from them, spears of burning light lancing down like artillery.

Avenger runs straight through it. The chains catch him across the shoulders, burning through flesh, spears slam through his thigh, one through his side, while without slowing the slightest down.

The suffering merely grew more powerful... the beating of curses. From the first sin at the Garden of Eden to the present time of 6 billions of humans, and even to the future.

All of this fed him an exponential amount of strength.

Annihilation Wish on the A++ rank is running.

A Skill only available to the weakest of all Servants and Heroic Spirits, the Avenger known as Angra Mainyu. A Skill that activates whenever he fights in battles with no chance of survival and with a willingness to perish while disregarding the pain and limits of his body during battle.

Initially, what awaits him as this is used is his demise in the end. The difference in this time is that his Beast status should've prevented this usage and degraded it, but due to his weakened form, it hinders the Skill's part and instead boosts the rank.

Each hit makes the glyphs across his skin flare brighter; his next step sends a crater rolling outward through the ground as he drives himself upward into the deity's chest.

They crash through the last of the buildings on the block. Whole floors peel outward from the impact, concrete slabs smashing onto the streets below as the two forces roll through empty offices, upending desks and chairs and tearing through steel supports until the structure folds under them.

Avenger feels blazing pain crawling under his skin but keeps fists and shadows slamming into divine flesh over and over until the god hurls him across the street with a backhand that caves in the side of another tower behind him.

Avenger digs himself out of the rubble, coughing dust and spitting blood.

He notices the god watching him with a realization spreading slowly through those burning eyes as divine power flickers around a body that keeps getting carved open by tendrils that should never touch it.

Avenger wipes his mouth, glances sideways at the sound of distant sirens, at the smoke rising where half the district lies in fire and rubble, at the figures running under collapsing bridges. His eyes narrow briefly.

Great. Dead civilians.

"Should've moved this party earlier."

He turns back to the deity.

"Alright, we're done wrecking the city. Next round's outside the limits. Try to keep up."

Before the deity can answer, Avenger's curses whip downward, forming a platform of black tendrils that launch him upward faster than bullets. He grabs the god by the throat mid-ascent, dragging both of them into the sky as towers shrink beneath them.

The Evil God struggles, light flaring around his arms, but Avenger drives them both higher, then hurls them beyond the last line of buildings, through the treeline, out toward the mountains ringing the valley.

They hit the foothills with the force of a meteor, stone and soil exploding upward in plumes hundreds of meters high as the earth itself shudders from the landing.

Flocks of birds flee like black arrows against the sky. The hills tremble as if old spirits buried here are stirred from their sleep.

Zoroastrian chants long dead speak in memory of the first war between the twin spirits, of light and lie-born darkness, but this is neither. This is two darknesses locked together, one born from human hate and one born from divine rebellion, neither carrying righteousness, both claiming dominion.

Avenger climbs out of the crater while curses trail behind him like smoke from open furnaces. He stares at the deity rising from the pit opposite him, the phantom's fire-bright eyes cutting through the dust, his chaotic aura shaking the shattered trees on the hillsides.

"For someone calling himself the only Angra Mainyu, you sure look rattled. What happened?"

The heat curled the air around the god's horned head and exploded the surroundings. Blasts of divinity trailed behind him.

"Faker. Even insects survive long under gods if they run fast enough. It does not make them equals, and I have seen your attacks. There is no defense, only reckless striking. If I weren't surprised more, I would assume that you burn your own life to wound me, but I was correct. That would only mean you will fall when your strength rots from inside you."

Avenger snorts at that. However, he felt a bit troubled now that Angra Mainyu is now aware of how he fights.

"Maybe. If this is where I finally get buried, at least I make sure you're bleeding in the same hole."

The god was faster all of a sudden as his divine fists shattered the air like meteors punching through the atmosphere. Avenger twists, spins under one strike, drives his elbow into the god's ribs, but a second blow smashes into his back before he can retreat, sending him rolling through a line of fir trees that topple like grass under his body.

Avenger pushes himself up, blood dripping from his mouth, smearing it away with the back of his hand, eyes narrowing slightly at the pressure building in his chest.

He has felt it before, the strain of Annihilation Wish clawing at his nerves when speed outruns what flesh can carry.

The more he pushes, the more his own body starts to fail, but pain is only more fuel.

The god moves again, faster, predicting each strike, fists slamming into Avenger's ribs, stomach, jaw, the ground quaking each time the blows land. Avenger crashes through another outcrop of rock, spits blood into the dust, teeth bared in something that is not quite a grin but close enough.

"Yeah..." he says ragged across the valley, "figured you'd start getting the hang of it. Not—krk!—bad, took you longer than I expected."

He lifts both hands, and the energy of a certain Magecraft materializes through calloused fingers, the motion fast, instinctive, the act not learned but remembered through the flesh of the vessel he's inhabiting. Dark shapes burst into existence, two weapons gripped in reverse like claws, black blades jagged, forged from some ancient malice older than this continent.

Tawrich: The Left Fang Grinder.
Zarich: The Right Fang Grinder.

Weapons once held in rituals when men begged demons for power in the dark, now spinning through the air as Avenger hurls them, one after the other, both whistling like shrieking wind as they cut toward the deity.

The Evil God swats them aside with a swing of his arm, easily splintering into fragments before they hit the ground.

Another pair was already forming in Avenger's grip before the pieces stopped falling, rushing forward under the god's guard, blades catching the divine fists before they crushed his skull. One blade hooks the wrist, the other drives for the throat, the phantom twisting backward before the strike lands.

The swords shatter again under a blast of golden fire from the deity's chest, boiling the fangs into nothingness.

Avenger lands hard, rolling under a sweep of molten chains that carve deep trenches across the hillside, then surges forward with a new pair in hand, spinning under another strike, blades flashing against the deity's ribs, carving lines that hiss as curses bite through divine flesh.

Light flared around the god's fists as another strike caved the ground where Avenger stood a heartbeat earlier.

More swords shatter. More appears the instant they break, each pair lasting milliseconds before being destroyed under divine heat or crushing strength, each one replaced without respite as Avenger moves quickly, strikes harder, pain carving lines across his own body as he trades flesh for openings.

Fury edged in the growling of the Evil God growls through the storm of blades.

"Why do you persist?! These toys break faster than I destroy them! You bleed! Your bones crack! And yet you fight closer as if you're begging for death!"

Avenger blocks another strike, one blade catching the god's forearm, the other stabbing into his side before shattering under a flare of molten chains. He grins through blood running from his mouth.

"Begging for death? I told you already! This isn't about winning pretty, I fight until one of us stops moving. If that's me first, fine. But you're not walking away either!"

The god slams both fists down, a wave of golden fire rushing outward, tearing through trees, rock, whole hillsides collapsing under the blast. Avenger bursts through the flames with another pair of blades, spinning low, cutting through one ankle, curses eating through divine aura where metal pierces before breaking again.

The phantom staggers as his molten eyes fill with something close to anger beneath the chaos boiling off his body.

Avenger spits blood into the dirt for another time, shoulders heaving, blades forming in his hands again through fire and smoke. "Come on! All that power and divinity, and you're slowing down already?! I thought you wanted to prove you were the real Angra Mainyu!"

The deity answers by tearing half the mountainside into the air, molten magic spinning through his arms as he hurls it downward like falling suns.

The two suns fall in the distance like the fury of Ahura Mazda himself, scouring the land as they strike, molten earth exploding upward in a furnace of blinding light. Avenger staggers when the shockwave tears across the plain. His skin blackens, muscles rupture, and the glyphs on his body burn until they crawl like dying embers over charred flesh.

His entire figure trembles, yet the man neither falls nor yields. The tattered waistcloth clings to a body lacerated open in several places, with holes punched clean through muscle and sinew, despite it, he lifts his head as if defiance alone sustains him. The earth beneath his feet steams with the blood and curse energy leaking from his body in equal measure.

The deity floats above the destruction. It was a vision out of ancient Zend scriptures, a black phantom sculpted in firelight. Horns coil like molten iron from its head, its eyes glow like pits into Atar, the sacred flame, the embodiment of divine order.

"You're still alive," the god observes the pitiful human. "Charred, bleeding, drowning in the poison of your own borrowed power…. Faker. Did you believe you could imitate divinity simply because you crawled from the shadows of men's hatred?"

Avenger spits blood into the dust but keeps his eyes on him. "Thinking is for people with time to care."

The god effortlessly blurred, the speed impossible. His magic ignites the air. Ancient Avestan invocations crackle. What came out is death.

He calls down a storm of ruin in the sacred tongue, flame and light folding upon themselves as they descend upon Avenger like the hand of divine retribution. The impacts tear new craters in the earth, black soil scattering like the ashes of ancient empires.

Avenger tried—he tried—sprinting and dodging inside the onslaught with the suicidal defiance of Annihilation Wish.

His body falls piece by piece as he throws himself forward faster than the eye can follow, faster than the sound of his own bones breaking under the strain. His curses lash out in black waves, tendrils erupting from his body to intercept some attacks, but many slip through, spears of light punching through his chest, searing through limbs.

His blood sprays in arcs, sizzling as it hits molten ground.

The god descends in close and strikes with the precision of a judge delivering sentences in the final court. He drives a hand through Avenger's ribs, his divine aura spreading like the sacred fire that once consumed the corpse of the serpent Zahhak. The ground itself quakes at the contact.

"You're mere existence standing in front of divinity with this mockery," the deity says, lifting him bodily and slamming him down through a fractured rock face. "You dare pretend to the name of Angra Mainyu, when the lies of men cannot birth a god? You are no spirit of endless destruction."

For the final vengeance, Evil God Angra Mainyu stomped the Avenger's chest hard enough that the entire country of Japan felt an earthquake.

At the aftermath, Avenger lies embedded in the shattered earth, chest caved in and curses leaking like black steam from a furnace about to die out. He had trouble grinning through broken teeth.

"You... talk a lot..." he says slowly, coughing out pieces of his lung with the words. "All... this fire and judgment and speeches... and yet… you're the one wasting time beating up a man... who doesn't even care about his own life..."

The words hit hard. The god's eyes flare hotter with the chaos around his body whipping into a vortex of heat and light.

The phantom calms himself, floating higher, regarding the battlefield with premature analysis.

"...Come to think of it, you drew this fight away from the city," he says after a pause.

"Why? You fight like a beast cornered yet lead me out here like a shepherd guarding a flock. How curious..."

"....."

The Evil God glances at Kuoh.

"...Do you care for that city behind you, pretender?"

Avenger does not reply this time. He pushes himself up slowly, one arm shaking while the other hangs at the wrong angle.

The deity tilts his head as a realization hardens into intent.

Avenger knew it as well.

"Then let the flock burn with its shepherd."

He turns, vocalizing in the ancient Zoroastrian rites that shaped mountains and carved rivers. Divine sigils ignite in concentric circles stretching into the horizon.

The sky blackens as energy gathers, pulling heat from the world, pulling light itself until the entire region feels the breath of the void gathering in the god's hands. The spell swells with the authority of the Amesha Spentas, the judgment of heaven and fire poised to fall upon Kuoh City with a divine law.

Avenger sped up faster than thought, curses spilling from him in a tsunami of black tendrils racing to intercept, their touch burning air, earth, and spirit alike. They crash against the forming spell, clawing, hissing, biting into divine light with the hate of five point six billion curses accumulated through human history. Souls screaming, cities burning, betrayals festering—every evil man has done to man pours into the tide assaulting the god's magic.

The divine barrier descends like an iron curtain, the spell completing behind its protection. The curse strikes it, the barrier holds, reality groans under the collision of concepts, yet the god does not even glance back...

...His will pours into the invocation, and the judgment of heaven falls—

—and Angra Mainyu proved just why he was Ahriman.

The horizon erupts as Kuoh City vanishes under the light of divinity. Towers disintegrate, streets melt, the land heaves under the scale of destruction as Angra Mainyu himself had descended to erase the works of men. A column of fire rises higher than mountains, the sky splitting under its birth.

Avenger watches with a ruined body, eyes numbly fixed on the place where a city full of humans was located seconds ago. Smoke boils upward in black columns, hiding the truth from every eye watching.

With the judgment complete, the god turns back slowly, the air behind him glowing with the leftover of fire divine. He looks at Avenger with something almost resembling satisfaction.

"Now, Faker," he says evenly, "you understand the difference between god and imitation."

The blackened ground shakes with each impact as the phantom drives Avenger into the earth.

Dirt and stone scatter. Avenger lies beneath pinned, every rib screaming, but his face shows nothing. His eyes stare upward, dark, dull, and utterly indifferent. There is no fear in them, no anger, only a depthless emptiness that irritates the god above him.

The phantom Angra studies him with fire-bright eyes. He is a remnant of when gods were feared because they bent reality, not because they asked for worship. He presses his palm down harder, cracking the ground beneath the Servant's spine, feeling bones twist under his power.

He expects resistance. There is none.

He tilts his head, voice cold, almost confused at the silence.

"Is this all? Have you broken already? Then die as a fraud. Perish as the nothing you were meant to be."

The air burns as he gathers divine light in his hand. It writhes with the flames of the old Zoroastrian rituals, the same fires priests once claimed could cleanse evil from the earth. They would chant of purity and truth as they fed wood and fat to the fire, never knowing the god they worshipped grew tired of their voices centuries before they were even born.

The flames pulse. They fall toward Avenger's chest.

But the Servant rolls, body screaming in protest, drawing on Annihilation Wish until torn muscles snap and blood floods his throat. He feels the heat scorch his side where the blow lands near him, shattering into a crater.

He hurls more pairs of curses, the black forms of Tawrich and Zarich twisting through the air. These things once carried meanings of pestilence and decay in dead languages that priests no longer speak. Now they tear forward as black beasts with too many jaws, even so, the god swings his arm, and with a single strike of divine force, the curses scatter into nothing, broken apart like mist under sunlight.

Avenger lands heavily, body refusing to rise quickly. He feels the edges of his vision close in.

He coughs once, spits blood into the dirt, his voice slow and tired.

"You talk too much for someone who thinks he knows what evil is."

The god steps toward him. "With that brittle body? You're in no position to talk, you are an insect who found a mask in the dark and thought of himself as feared."

The next blow drives Avenger half a meter into the ground. His arms shake when he tries to rise. The divine phantom moves with contemptuous precision, every strike carrying power enough to level stone walls. The earth cracks. Trees along the edge of the clearing fall one after another. The night sky brightens in pulses as fire bursts across the battlefield.

Avenger keeps standing back up even when his body jerks from strains that costs him more pieces of himself. He swings a half-formed mass of curses reaching out like a wave, only for the god's hand to split it apart as if it were paper.

A fist like a battering ram slams into Avenger's chest. Bones give way. The Servant crashes into the remains of a shrine wall at the clearing's edge. He stays down longer this time, shoulders shaking with shallow breaths.

The phantom walks toward him with the patience of someone certain the end is inevitable.

"I will finish this. And when I do, the name Angra Mainyu will remain mine alone, when kings blamed it for their ruin, when children spat it out in fear. You will not profane it any longer."

The divine hand rises again.

But before it falls, a small thing crawls out from the shadow pooled beneath Avenger's broken body. Thin, flat, featureless except for white dots of eyes.

A puppet of darkness, trembling. It grows as it moves, splits into two, then four, then dozens, swarming the god's arm, his torso, trying to drag him down. Their shapes stretch unnaturally, half-solid, carrying the same malice as the Servant's curses yet lacking their strength.

The phantom pauses, looks down at them with mild annoyance.

"What is this, a Familiar of shadows? You insult me even at the end."

Light flares. A single pulse of divine fire sweeps the field. The puppets vanish in smoke. The smell of ash fills the clearing.

Avenger catches sight of it all, eyes fixed on the spot where the shadows burned away. His body stops moving entirely. The faint shaking in his arms ends. He lies there, staring at nothing, breathing shallowly.

The phantom notices it and laughs.

"Did you care for that thing? It died pitifully. Just like you will. You cannot protect even the smallest thing that crawls after you. You are a failure given shape."

As if he intended to mock him even more, he voiced out next to his ear.

"Do you know what the priests once said of me? That I was the Lie at the heart of the world, the sickness in its breath. They feared me because I was everything they could not explain. I was interested in why someone like you would imitate my name when you are nothing even worth fearing. You are not the Lie. The meaningless. The waste."

Not a word leaves his fallen for however. Not a sound. His hand rests on the dirt where the last fragments of the shadow puppet vanish, fingers digging in slowly as if he feels nothing at all.

The god leans close, eyes burning brighter.

"Look at you, quiet at last. Perhaps you finally understand what you are."

He raises his hand once more. The ground shakes beneath his feet.

"Die as you lived, Faker. Forgotten from the Avesta."

Avesta.

Avesta.

Avesta.

Avesta.

He remembers when he was still human. When he was nothing.

He was a boy in a nameless village at the edge of nowhere, a place that prayed for rain, prayed for harvest, prayed for relief from plague and storm, and found no answer.

The elders decided the gods were angry. Someone among them carried the seed of every misfortune. They looked at each other, and their eyes settled on him. He never knew why. No omen marked his birth and no crime stained his hands. He was chosen because someone had to be.

The world needed a mouth to feed its curses into. The rest needed to believe they were good if one among them was evil enough to bear it all.

The first day they chained him, he thought it was some mistake. They tied him to the post at the center of the square, painted his body with ash, carved prayers into his skin, and told him it was to cleanse the village. He begged to go home. He asked for his mother. No one looked at him. When the rains failed again, they cut him open and called his blood unclean. When wolves took the cattle, they broke his bones so the land would be satisfied. When fire swallowed the granary, they burned his feet so the fire would take no more. The older he grew, the crueler they became, until days and nights were nothing but screaming, until he forgot the sound of his own name because they only called him monster, fiend, curse-born.

They told him he was the reason for every death, every famine, every stillborn child. They said his breath carried plague. They forced him to drink poison so the earth would heal through his suffering. When he vomited blood, they cheered because it meant the sickness left them for him. They cut the prayers of every sin into his flesh until no unmarked skin remained. When he asked why, they told him the world needed one evil for the rest to be good. That was his only worth. He watched friends turn their faces away. Strangers spat on him for disasters they had never seen. The sky fell, the earth cracked, and always they came to him with knives and ropes and fire because evil needed a body, and his would not be allowed to die until it carried everything they hated.

At first, he wept and begged. Then he cursed them. Then he cursed the gods for staying silent. Then he cursed the world for birthing any of it. He forgot which night it was when anger burned through his fear and left nothing but hatred so deep it felt like the truth itself. He did not forgive when they finally killed him. He did not rest when his body rotted on the post outside the village walls.

He became the thing they named him because someone had to answer for all of it. If the world wanted a vessel for its evil, then he would fill it until it drowned.

A being that carries all the sins of the world, it became his cross.

A being that was known among wars and in the Throne as 'All the World's Evil'.

The memory burns itself out, and the battlefield drags him back. The wind whips dust against his skin. The god looms closer, hand lifted for the final strike, power boiling across its palm bright enough to split mountains.

The god speaks one last time.

"Any final words?"

"....."

The god snarls and gathers power for the killing blow.

Amber eyes gleam underneath Avenger's hair.

"....."

"..."

"...Verg Avesta."

.
.
.
.
.

The others scatter across the forest like starving hounds chasing scraps. It was never a race. It was simply a matter of arriving. The others will die fighting each other for guesses and half-truths while he takes the thing they all came for without resistance.

Goetia stops at the heart of the leyline. Ruins peek from the surroundings, a broken altar swallowed by moss and roots, the ground splitting around it where magic had once burned too hot to cool even after centuries. This is the place.

He raises his left arm slightly, readying the spell to break the surface and drag Shir HaGalgalim out of its slumber.

"Well, what do we have here?" a feminine voice interrupts like they have time for conversation rather than war.

He turns his head slightly. She wears the cloak and hat of a witch, blonde hair spilling over her shoulders in a way that looks intentional but is probably careless. Young and beautiful in the way most men would notice first before her reputation as Grauzauberer's envoy came second.

"You are… not with any of the forward teams," she continues, stepping closer. Her eyes study him for insignias and anything that ties him to one of the organizations tearing through the forest beyond. "So who sent you here? Golden Dawn? Rosenkreuzer? I know all of Grauzauberer's agents by face, and you are not one of ours."

Goetia lowers his arm but does not turn fully toward her. She is cautious but not cautious enough.

"No one sent me," he answers. "I move where I please in this amusing hunt."

That much is true. Everything else she assumes from that sentence will be false, but he will not have spoken a single lie.

She folds her arms loosely, gaze flicking between him and the cracked altar under his feet. "'Amusing' is a strange word for a shady man who looks like he intends to tear the earth open. Are you a freelancer? Mercenary work, perhaps? We could use another pair of hands before the others arrive."

He keeps his eyes on her. "No. I have no interest in your factions."

"...Then what?" she presses, tilting her head. "You clearly want something down there. Everyone does, I can guess what. So let us say you do reach Shir HaGalgalim first. What will you even do with it? Sell it? Seal it away? Hand it to whichever side pays you?"

She's like someone who has never seen what happens when the wrong hands touch the wrong relic. Her tone carries that faint warmth that expects the world to bend toward good intentions if one simply applies enough willpower.

He considers walking away. But she kept chattering.

"I know what I would do," she says, her eyes brightening with thought. "If Shir HaGalgalim truly exists here, if Solomon left something that powerful buried under this forest, then whoever retrieves it will shape more than magical politics. A single spell binding creation itself… imagine ending resource scarcity, rebuilding countries after disasters overnight, healing entire regions without cost. I could deliver it straight to the Association, cut through the council bickering, and make sure it never falls into the hands of extremists. It could change everything if handled correctly. Don't you agree?"

An unshaken conviction particular to youth or idealists who have not yet been drowned by history.

Goetia exhales very, very slowly through his nose.

"Humanity... would burn it within a century. You would draft committees, argue ethics, weaponize it for security, assassinate each other over its ownership, and eventually lose control as you always do. That is your pattern. The tool corrupts the hand, but often it is always the hand that builds the tool for war the moment after peace."

She blinks profusely, taken aback by the sensitivity in his tone. "Oh, calm down. So you think no one should touch it at all?"

"I think," Goetia says evenly, "that watching so many of you race toward power you cannot control is exhausting."

He turns back toward the altar, raising his arm again. He won't bother telling her he already knows exactly where Shir HaGalgalim sleeps and the hunt ended before it began, especially that the others running through the forest are wasting their lives chasing him without knowing it.

"Well, if you do find it," she says, her tone bright again, "I hope you at least consider something other than cynicism. There are people who could use a miracle."

Goetia lowers his hand.

In a boom, the ground collapses inward in precise, concentric segments, dirt and stone folding away as though eroded over centuries yet retreating within seconds.

It is nothing complicated. Just the bare minimum of magecraft, nothing beyond manipulating terrain by altering structural density and stabilizing the cavity's edges. The girl beside him reacts with surprise; which confirms she knows nothing beyond the surface-level principles of magecraft. A convenient mistake.

The hole descends nearly forty meters before the spell finishes clearing the way. The passageway leads into fractured ruins, fragments of walls engraved with Judaic sigils long buried beneath loam and root. It is not difficult to recognize the pattern of the leylines converging here. His awareness traces them as easily as following veins beneath translucent skin. The traces of rites performed three millennia ago persist faintly despite the neglect. The angels' script carved into the stone once channeled the Breath of God itself through human tongues, then vanished from history. That this place remains forgotten is inevitable. Humans discard everything once its usefulness ends.

He leaps downward. No need to slow his fall. His body absorbs the landing without strain. The air below holds a dry, metallic sharpness rather than rot; that at least suggests the wards on these walls preserve more than shape.

A shadow drops behind him. The girl lands softly, knees bending only slightly, robes swaying as the spell cushioning her impact fades in faint traces of blue light. Her staff's tip ignites, flooding the chamber with bright illumination.

"You could at least warn someone before dropping half a hill," she says lightly, brushing back loose strands of hair before adjusting the brim of her hat. "What kind of spell was that? It looked nothing like any earth-altering magic I know. Not even Grauzauberer has a model that clean."

Goetia studies the far archway leading deeper underground rather than answering.

Although she keeps talking casually, her eyes never stop scanning the walls or floor. "You even compressed the layers. Look at that. No debris blocking the entry at all. If you belonged to one of the three groups chasing this thing, I would have remembered someone who could reshape terrain like a sculptor slicing clay."

"It was nothing remarkable. Any disciplined magus could manage it."

"That so?" She tilts her head, unconvinced but unwilling to argue.

Her light spreads across the walls. Carvings emerge through the dust, their lines deep and angular, traces of gold inlays glinting faintly beneath grime. She slows when the corridor ahead descends further into darkness.

"You know," she says, "when I heard others were searching for Shir HaGalgalim, I expected relic hunters, rogue scholars, Golden Dawn idealists quoting apocrypha about Solomon's throne, but apparently only three organizations were present. This event was too important for me to miss. You…" Her eyes slide toward him briefly before returning to the passage ahead. "You don't look like any of them."

Goetia offers no answer.

She keeps pace. "I cannot decide whether that makes you more trustworthy or less. People who speak too much usually hide nothing important. People who speak too little usually hide everything."

No response.

The corridor twists sharply before dropping into a stairwell eaten away by centuries of water trickling from fractured ceilings. She gestures lightly; a soft barrier spreads beneath her boots to keep the steps dry. She glances back when he ignores the spell entirely, his stride steady despite the thin stream soaking the stone.

"You could at least pretend to be human about this," she remarks.

"I see no benefit," Goetia says.

Her smile flickers faintly before fading. She rests the staff lightly against her shoulder. "Fair enough. So what exactly is your plan once we reach the... central chamber, if there's one? Because unless you have some elaborate ritual prepared, there is no guarantee Shir HaGalgalim will simply be lying there waiting for anyone clever enough to dig."

He keeps walking.

She exhales softly through her nose, half amused, half resigned. "Right. The silent type. Maybe you think ignoring questions makes you mysterious. It doesn't, by the way. It only makes people assume you lack answers."

The stairs empty into a vast hollow chamber where pillars lean precariously beneath the weight of collapsed ceilings. She sends several motes of light drifting outward until the entire cavern brightens under white radiance. Dust hangs unmoving in the still air. The far side disappears into shadow where the floor drops sharply, a second descent spiraling downward.

She studies the ruins with faint awe before speaking again. "Solomon's rites really were here. Look at those channels carved through the floor. Leyline energy would have flooded the entire space when the ritual circle activated. Grauzauberer's archives described fragments of this place, but seeing it directly feels… heftier somehow."

Goetia stops near one of the carved channels, eyes scanning the geometric precision still visible beneath eroded edges. Her voice keeps intruding behind him, persistent with genuine curiosity laced with faint excitement.

"And you still have not said how you plan to find the central archive," she continues. "If the Shir HaGalgalim was easy to reach, Golden Dawn's children would have dug it up days ago between their speeches about enlightenment."

Goetia kneels briefly, touching the channel with two fingers, tracing its direction inward toward the next passage where darkness swallows the air again.

She crosses her arms, leaning lightly against her staff. "You could at least confirm whether you actually have a plan or whether I should start preparing teleportation runes for when the ceiling inevitably drops on us."

His silence remains absolute as he starts toward the next descent without a word.

Her sigh follows him across the chamber.

Nevertheless, the woman follows.

This section of the ruin is close to the heart of the node. The ley currents gather beneath them as less a river and more a reservoir. Whatever rites the ancients performed here were not for vague faith. This place was engineered.

The door ahead confirms it. Perfectly sealed, standing without mortar, the frame cut from a single slab of blackened stone. The surface bears writing in a form of Hebrew older than the Masoretic text, fused with geometric circles in gold patterns faintly visible even after centuries. Wards cover it.

Goetia studies the structure longer than necessary, he wants to understand the mentality of its builders. Every ward carries intention. Here they set up layers upon layers of defensive enchantments that activate with triggers. Some respond to the detection of magical signatures, others to heat, motion, or even the disruption of air pressure. A few connect directly to the leyline itself.

That is inconvenient. Whoever designed this locked the entire region into its security system..

"Why are you staring at it like that instead of opening it? It is a door. You want what is inside, yes? Open it."

Goetia do not turn toward her. "It is not just a door, but a system. Warding enchantments built for sustained defense, not deterrence. You try to open this by force and you will trigger half a dozen responses simultaneously."

Her face was full of doubt, tilting her head. "It looks like ordinary ancient sealing magic to me. I could open that."

She raises her hand before he can answer. Magical energy collects around her, dense and tightly controlled. Grauzauberer magic differs from Magecraft in form and function. Their spells manifest more directly, drawn from traditions of European magic that treat energy as a malleable substance rather than formulaic principles.

The moment she channels power toward the door, it reacts. Lines of light blaze across its surface. Multiple defensive triggers activate in sequence. Holy light discharges toward the two in rapid succession.

She didn't flinch however. Barriers spread around her in widening arcs, solidifying as they intercept the attacks. Her expression changes from casual to focused, tracing the path of every beam, calculating the enchantments powering them.

She converses with him without looking back. "Interesting response time, the activation parameters are tight, and the light element concentrated with ritual accuracy. Whoever designed this valued purity as much as lethality."

He stared at the system running through its defense cycle. The attacks hit her barriers repeatedly before fading when the door resets to its dormant state.

She exhales slowly, preparing another layer of analysis. "If I can isolate the central trigger I can dismantle the—"

Magecraft gathers at Goetia's fingertips, golden light weaving across the air in tight geometric shapes. No chant and preparation. Formulaic Magecraft relies on structure, applying one sequence, then another, each stripping away a layer of the warding system.

The defenses easily collapse. The light fades. The runes lose coherence as the circuits break apart one after another.

Her eyes widen slightly as the door unlocks with a low grinding sound.

Goetia pushes it open with one arm.

She lowers her hands as she stares at the now-deactivated wards. "...so quickly? There were layered triggers, automatic responses, and recursive circuits. I was ready to isolate each one individually. You bypassed all of them before I finished mapping the first."

Goetia smugly steps inside the chamber. "The structure was redundant. The triggers are all connected to one root circuit buried behind the others. This was intended for intruders to waste time on the outer layers so they could not reach the center before reinforcements arrived. I cut the root directly, while the rest collapsed."

"That kind of method was not one I knew. You are using a high-level sorcery, yes? Not magic in the sense we study it."

"Correct," he answered. "Magecraft follows different principles. Your magic treats energy as a substance shaped by will and tradition. Magecraft treats it as a problem of systems and formulas. This defense was a system. I solved it."

"...'Magecraft'?" she muttered in puzzlement.

"Whatever you did looked almost… routine."

"It was."

She folds her arms, considering the disabled wards one last time before facing forward. "If the defenses for a single door required that much preparation, what protects Shir HaGalgalim itself?"

Speculation is useless until they see it.

Instead, he kept walking toward the chamber's center. The leyline energy grows stronger beneath the stone, converging somewhere below. The closer they get, the clearer the structure becomes. Whatever lies at the heart of this ruin, the ancients treated it as the axis of the entire site.

If Shir HaGalgalim rests here, then this place was not simply a vault. It was a junction between faith, magic, and territory. And now it belongs to no one but the one who reaches it first.

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The painful scream that erupted from the Evil God Angra Mainyu was of absolute agony.

His black aura flickering erratically as if the very concept holding it together falters. Something tears through his core, not his flesh but something more absolute, and he roars. It is the scream of an immortal forced to comprehend his own undoing. The sound scatters clouds, splinters the sky, birds fall from the mere shockwaves, all rolls across miles until Japan itself rattles under its pressure.

To the unknown, it was a third-rate ability.

The truth? Avenger knew there would be a time it would become valuable.

It was the first Noble Phantasm to ever emerge in this world since the Beasts of Humanity were summoned.

For the first time, a true weapon of the Throne manifests here.

He knows the irony. A curse named for the Avesta, for the very scripture recited by priests of Zoroaster who once claimed good and evil were two opposing truths locked in eternal war. That same faith once wrote songs to this deity writhing before him, carved prayers into fire-temples under the open sky, all for a being who now collapses beneath the suffering of a man history never wanted.

The world split between light and dark, between Ahura Mazda's radiance and Angra Mainyu's corruption, their blows in cosmic history rage between them. Today, its two curses mirrored together, and the laughable thought that humans once worshipped anything in this equation makes the corners of Avenger's mouth twitch upward.

His Noble Phantasm was always a mockery of heroism. Verg Avesta does not conquer armies, nor split mountains, nor deliver justice. It drags its user through slaughter first, demanding broken bones, torn flesh, organs failing one after another, demanding the fool remain alive long enough to speak its name so that his enemy may feel what he has felt. It reflects no visible wound. There is no glorious spray of blood to measure its success. Only pain, unyielding and absolute, folded back upon its source until even a god's will collapsed under the torture.

But it has limits, as all curses do. It chooses one target alone. It cares nothing for collateral destruction even as the deity smashes blindly through collapsing forest and earth, toppling what remains of the hill they once fought upon. It kills nothing by itself; if the foe survives the pain, they may rise again. And worst of all, it demands the user pay first in suffering, a toll extracted from bone and blood before the curse awakens.

He always thought it was worthless.

The god has underestimated him since the first minute. For claiming "Angra Mainyu" when only the black god of Persian myth should bear it, dismissing Avenger's curse as meaningless shadows born of human malice. He saw no threat in a half-dead Beast still standing only because hatred refuses to let him rest.

But right now, with his ribs crushed, his skin burned off in patches, his body skewered through and through by blasts of divinity and magic, with blood pooling at his feet and breath coming shallow, holes in his body, all his bones cracked, right now it finally shows its cruelty.

Because the deity is feeling everything.

Every shattered bone. Every rupture of organs. Every rip of muscle. Every nerve boiled by fire.

Not one after the other. All at once.

The scream claws the air raw. The Evil God crashes down from the sky, hitting the ground hard enough to collapse hillsides and uproot entire groves of trees and carve a kilometer-wide trench across forests. His phantom body writhes, rolling in the dirt like something poisoned beyond saving as his own throat rips itself ragged from the sound.

The scream of agony was too much for the god to endure he started leaking uncontrollable power.

The chaotic energy emitted upward, Avenger knew it reached all the way to Takamagahara and alerted the Shinto gods. However, he didn't care.

Verg Avesta does not tear flesh. It carves the pain directly onto the soul itself. What Avenger felt, all of it slams into the deity's core in one moment with no room to resist.

And a god's soul, for all its divinity, is not made to understand mortal agony with mortal nerves and mortal fear.

The deity claws at the ground with fingers like black spires, gouging ruts through soil and stone. He convulses, his frame jerking like muscles misfiring beyond control. His divine aura snaps apart in chaotic bursts that disintegrate everything it touches. The sky darkens as if the curse bleeds into the horizon itself. He tries to rise, but pain folds him again before his knees lock.

This is truly Zoroastrianism's greatest irony, Avenger thinks. A god born from mankind's fear of evil writhes because one failed human decided the world should choke on its own cruelty before he dies.

The deity slams a fist into the ground hard enough to crater half the battlefield. Trees topple like matchsticks. Soil erupts in a rain of boulders. Rivers nearby boil where his aura floods across water. But the scream continues, cracked and unbroken, rising and falling between growls of rage and shrieks of something he cannot name.

The curse is merciless. It burns him with the heat that scalded Avenger's skin. It drives iron rods through his nerves with the precision that shattered Avenger's arms and legs. It drowns him with the weight that crushed Avenger's spine when the divine foot stomped his chest half an hour ago. Every sensation the mortal body endured comes to him raw, unfiltered, unsoftened by the resilience gods carry by instinct.

In this single moment, the world finally sees what it means for even a god to choke on the pain of a man who never once got to stop suffering.

He's basically a beast gone rabid, molten grooves carving out behind his fingers as though he wishes to bury the pain beneath the planet itself, no, even the kind of thinking was hopeless.

Avenger walks toward him, or rather drags himself forward on legs that feel as if they have been peeled apart from the inside. The wind of the collapsing land claws at him, the heat of the deity's wrath burns him anew, but he keeps moving. The shadows under his feet stretch outward as though the ground itself drowns beneath them, spreading faster with each step until they crawl toward the convulsing god like an incoming tide that knows nothing of mercy.

The deity roars through his pain, the voice cracked but furious, breaking apart mountainsides and snapping entire trees into splinters with the force of sound alone.

"What... what have you done to me!?" His voice grates that tears itself apart from the heat inside it. Smoke vented off his limbs as he glared at Avenger through the pain. "What curse is this? Speak, imposter, explain this trick to me! No mortal sorcery reaches divinity! Answer me!"

He gives no answer.

When he finally reaches the deity's side, he looks down at the phantom form writhing before him, those eyes warped by pain they cannot mask. Avenger says nothing, instead, he only extends one burned and quivering hand.

The fingertips touch the deity's forehead.

The reaction detonates.

The Evil God convulsed as it struck through the soul. The curse spreads like a living thing, blackness bleeding from the point of contact across the god's lower body, gripping it, swallowing it, staining it in a color that is not color at all but a negation, a denial of light, a spreading refusal of existence itself.

The aura of the deity flares violently as divine magic resists the infection, searing wind exploding outward and uprooting what remains of the forest in a single blast. The land erupts in a semi-circle like a meteor struck, debris hurled into the sky in burning streaks.

But the shadows climb him regardless.

The curse of All the World's Evil does not rush. It spreads like water over rock, patient yet unstoppable, rising higher no matter how strong the resistance. It has no shape yet grips everything, it burns without heat, it crushes without a presence, consuming without craving. Avenger watches it crawl over the deity's thigh, his torso, his arms as the divine body spasms harder, his molten eyes burning wider with disbelief as much as agony.

It was the curse of a world that had betrayed itself. A reaper forged not by gods or demons but by six billion hands, each act of cruelty a stroke upon its form, each betrayal a blade in its grasp, each sin a scream in its throat. It does not care who you are. Mortal, king, hero, tyrant, priest, god. It comes for all.

The deity feels it differently. A mortal would burn, rot, scream, die. A god resists longer. His divine flesh holds against the physical corruption, his power shielding organs, muscles, and bones. The curse cannot stain him as it stains mortals, cannot rot divinity the same way it rots men.

So it digs elsewhere.

It digs into his mind.

Avenger watches as the god shudders violently, digging trenches into the ground, eyes flickering as something behind them begins to crack. The curse shows him what it carries.

All of it.

Every act of hatred humanity ever birthed. Every crime unpunished. Every cruelty dismissed. Every selfishness excused. Every betrayal, massacre, torture, war, famine, genocide, sacrifice, slaughter, tyranny, terror, malice, and apathy. It spills them into the deity's consciousness not as visions but as a tide, a flood of knowing, of living through them all at once, the pain of each victim, the madness of each killer, the scream of each war, the silence of each grave. It forces him to hold them all, feel them all, understand them all, until understanding itself begins to split apart.

His roar climbs higher, then breaks into something less than a roar, more than a scream, a sound torn from a throat that does not know how to make such a sound because it has never suffered enough to learn it until now.

The scream was heard by the entirety of Japan and the Supernatural World.

Avenger keeps his hand against the deity's body as the shadows rise past the god's chest, his neck, higher, the darkness surrounding him fully as space itself seems painted over in black. The ground fractures outward for kilometers as the pressure climbs, entire cliffs splitting into collapsing rubble, rivers boiling away under the curse's heatless expansion, the sky itself darkening as though the sun recoils from the scene below.

The deity's movements grow wilder as the curse drags his mind deeper and fragments come faster.

Lying.

Wrath.

Pride. Lust. Death. Dishonesty.

Holocaust. Terrorism. Famine. SelfishnesshatredgreedignorancerecklessnesscrueltyexpediencycontemptslaughterslaughterslaughterpainpainPainPAINPAINPAINPAINPAINPAINPAINPAINPAINPAINPAIN—

The visions do not stop.

They pile without order. They crush, they tear. The god's body thrashes, splits the land deeper, smashes ridges flat, throws hillsides into valleys as he convulses, the shockwaves collapsing the earth itself outward across the horizon.

Make it stop!

MAKE IT STOP!!

The roaring changed into fear and desperation.

Avenger tilts his head, his expression showing nothing but a trace of irritation at the noise. Another irony stabs through his thoughts as he realizes the truth pressing itself across this scene.

An evil god of Zoroastrian lore, the very Angra Mainyu that humanity once claimed was the source of evil in their world, choking on the evil of mortals, worshiped and feared across centuries, now reduced to this writhing thing begging silently beneath the weight of six billion screams. Avenger almost laughs when the thought crosses his mind. Maybe he does laugh, a dry noise dragging itself out of his throat, too hollow to carry anything except contempt.

Evil deity got beaten by mortal evilness.

The god's body spasms against the darkness locking him down.

"End... enough... enough... stop this... I order you... stop... stop this madness... please... stop..."

The voice tears apart on the last word as his hand claws at his own head like he wants to rip the visions out by force.

Avenger regards him without sympathy, without hate either.

"I didn't show you anything new, I just opened the door. Turns out evil doesn't belong to you after all. It belongs to everyone."

The god's breathing comes wild and ragged beneath the darkness. His head jerks in all directions.

"Beg louder," he says flatly. "The world might care more than I do."

The deity roars again, at something inside his own mind, a raw tearing noise that throws a blast of heat wide enough to ignite half the broken forest for kilometers.

It's mere moments before his mind turns to madness.

Broken words come, chanted, lines of ancient Zoroastrian magic spilling through his shredded voice. Sigils of white fire burn into the air around his convulsing body.

The ground shakes as something tears its way through the summoning gates those words open. The sky twists violently above the cracked plain.

Avenger narrows his eyes as the roar breaks through the summoning light.

The thing lands hard enough to cave the landscape inward across several kilometers. Purple-black scales glint under the burning sky as six wings unfold with the sound of splitting storms. Three heads snap upward, each jaw lined with teeth longer than spears, smoke venting between them as though the creature breathes the inside of volcanoes. The body stretches across the fractured plain like a living fortress, claws carving trenches with each step.

Avenger mutters under his breath when he sees the chains of divine magic wrapped tightly around its necks and chest.

With a burst of curses, Avenger's body vanished and inflated. What stood in his place is a shadowy figure resembling a wolf-man with blue outlines.

"A pet?" he asks with mockery as his eyes track the monster's size, the way its weight smashes the land apart beneath every step.

The deity beneath the curse keeps chanting until the words break completely as his mind finally snapped somewhere between the visions and the pain tearing through his soul. His body jerks violently and then slumps against the curse like his own will rips apart in the process.

The dragon moves before the dust even clears.

Avenger dodges backward instantly as one head smashes the ground where he stood, jaws biting through entire boulders like dry branches. Another head sweeps horizontally, collapsing what remains of the nearby forest in one strike. The third rears back and spits a beam of fire wide enough to evaporate the river behind them into steam, the heat wave hurling stone fragments miles into the air.

Avenger runs forward through the debris. His body burns from the injuries covering him but the suicidal manner does not slow for pain. The curse under his feet spreads in his wake, tendrils stabbing upward to meet the dragon's lunging heads while he sprints along the side of its massive frame faster than its eyes can follow.

One wing sweeps toward him, the blast of air ripping entire hills apart. He leaps over it, lands on the dragon's shoulder, sprints along the length of its neck toward one head before the creature jerks violently to throw him off. The movement smashes him through half a mountainside. The stone collapses behind him in an avalanche that buries several valleys.

He climbs out bleeding, legs shaking, grin dragging across his face despite the taste of black blood flooding his mouth.

"Big and loud," he said, spitting red into the dust as the dragon smashed through the rubble toward him again.

Its tail swings. The land caves in for nearly a mile where it strikes. Avenger is already inside its guard before the debris finishes falling. His curses rise like a storm behind him, black tendrils stabbing into the dragon's flank faster than the creature can regenerate the damage away.

The monster roars but keeps attacking, one head biting down on Avenger hard enough to crush mountains between its teeth. Avenger jams both hands into its upper jaw before the fangs can close, curses burning out of his arms into its mouth until the entire head thrashes backward with smoke venting from the wounds.

The second head rips through the ground beneath him. The third spits another beam of fire wide enough to leave half the plain a glowing crater.

Avenger moves through them all, his body tearing itself apart faster than it heals, strength climbing higher each time he nearly dies under its claws.

The dragon in front of him is a mistake.

Avenger sees that at once. Three heads, wings that blot out the night sky, scales like metal plates hammered into shape by some idiot god, breath that reeks of ozone and hot iron.

Isn't this Aži Dahāka? Yes, he recognizes it from the myths whispered about in Zoroastrian texts, but the details are wrong, this one was like a puppet on strings, its eyes dull, breath rasping through its triple maws without thought.

The dragon of the Avesta was meant to be cunning. This thing looked like its brain cells reduced to zero.

"Oi, lizard. Do you bite because you hate, or because you don't know any better?"

Nothing answers. Three heads turn, eyes the color of burning amethyst fixing on him. Only the folding of space around its middle head, a brief glimmer of glyphs before it spits a ribbon of light that shears through air and earth alike. Avenger sidesteps at speeds the human eye cannot follow, curses leaking from him like black oil in his wake.

A sudden crackle of magic coiled between the creature's jaws. Then the world bends unnaturally. He recognizes the sensation instantly, space-time magic tearing open the air in straight lines, folding gravity and momentum around itself, his body already overclocking its muscles into relativistic speed. The blast still clips him, burning through one shoulder, hurling him across the dirt in a spinning heap.

The ground splits into trenches glowing white-hot. Heat brushes his face, tearing at the bandana tied to him. He wipes sweat and soot from his eyes, muttering under his breath.

"So. No brain. The old scribes exaggerated again. Wonderful."

Fine. If the thing wants him dead, it will need more than that.

Another volley. Space itself whines like broken metal before a sphere of gravity detonates where he stands, swallowing trees, rocks, whole chunks of the hillside. He runs through the collapsing blast, feet hammering ground that melts beneath him, his body bruised, burned, ribs creaking where the pressure rakes across him. Pain is just background noise. Always has been.

The dragon rears back for another strike, the thousand forbidden magics of its legend braiding into a storm above its heads.

The ground erupted unexpectedly.

Something enormous and black as tar rises between them.

A shadow.

No. Avenger squints. A giant made of shadow, limbs thin as blades, body outlined in pale light, dozens of white eyes winking across its surface. Avenger blinks, genuinely surprised, because the thing should be dead. And here it is, throwing itself at the dragon's side like a living siege engine.

"Persistent little bastard, aren't you," Avenger mutters, half-amused. He can feel his own curse crawling over the Giant's surface. It reeks of his power. Maybe that is what pulled it back from death.

The dragon doesn't care. It descends on the giant with a roar that snaps trees in half for miles. Its central head bites down, wings smashing aside anything standing within reach. The Shadow Giant shatters, breaking apart into ribbons of black matter that scatter across the ground like spilled ink.

But instead of vanishing, the pieces twitch. They duplicate. More Giants rise out of the fragments, smaller at first, then swelling to full size while feeding on the air itself. Five, ten, then dozens more, each featureless body rushing at the dragon with tendrils whipping outward, limbs reshaping into spears, blades.

More Giants appear. Small ones, big ones, some the size of his hand skittering like insects, others towering high enough to punch at the dragon's wings. They multiply, merge, stretch themselves into spears or shields or writhing chains. The hillside becomes a war of silhouettes tearing at scales and limbs. The dragon lashes back with heads belching fire, claws carving trenches, magic detonating chunks of terrain into spinning debris.

Avenger does not waste the distraction.

He calls his own weapons into existence with a thought, black metal curving like fangs. Tawrich and Zarich. In his current Shade form, the fang grinders blended with his hand.

He dives into the melee.

The dragon's left head tries to snap him up. He plants a foot on its snout, drives both blades into its eye, rips downward through burning ichor before jumping clear as another head vomits lightning across its own body trying to hit him.

"Not very bright, are you?!" Avenger calls, landing atop a Shadow Giant's shoulder as it swells beneath him to the size of a building. "Did your master forget to give you thoughts along with your teeth?!"

The right head answers with a roar that shakes the air apart. Space twists; the sky above them tears open in glowing seams. A storm of fire and broken gravity crashes down. Whole blocks at the city's edge disintegrate under stray blasts.

Avenger runs straight through it. His body tears, burns, mends itself with stolen curses, muscles screaming as Annihilation Wish drives him faster, harder, beyond limits that should have pulped his bones to ash. Every hit only feeds him back power through the Avenger Skill, pain and malice turning into energy until his veins feel like molten iron.

The dragon thrashes, blinded in one eye, its scales smoking where curses eat into it like acid. The Shadow Giants keep coming, duplicates climbing its wings, stabbing at joints, exploding into magical shrapnel that chews holes through armor-thick hide.

The middle head tries to flatten him with a gravity spell big enough to crumple a castle. He cuts through the collapsing air itself, blades screaming with curses that turn pressure into a rain of shattered energy across the battlefield.

"You should thank me," Avenger says, voice rough with smoke as he drives both fangs into the creature's throat where curses swarm into the wound, eating scales, flesh, nerves, everything. "At least I am giving you a death worth remembering!"

The dragon convulses, one head snapping off Shadow Giants, another spitting fire wide enough to turn the nearby river into steam. Hillsides crumble. The sky itself glows red from heat and ruptured magic.

Another wave of Giants crashes into the dragon's side, exploding themselves into black tendrils that bind wings against its body. The beast tears free instantly, yet each motion costs it more flesh, more curses infecting open wounds where Avenger's blades keep cutting.

High above, the sky fractures under some forbidden spell the dragon half-completes before three Giants tackle one head, detonating themselves in bursts of corrupted magic that rain like liquid night over the battlefield. The ground itself melts into glass where too much curse energy pools in one place.

The dragon's roar shakes the whole treeline as the blast of forbidden magics erupts from its three jaws, arcs of fire and lightning and ice tearing craters into the hills. The black Giants scatter across the grassland, shadows splitting in water. He feels the ground give way behind him when a single spell detonates and flings several Shadow Giants into the sky like scraps of cloth. Their bodies disperse into black motes before reforming again, duplicating into more and more silhouettes.

The dragon begins to lift itself, six wings unfolding, the air bending around its scales as it prepares another forbidden chant, but its motion halts with a grinding snap. It may not be intelligent, but it notices something worse about to happen as the ground beneath it darkens.

Black mud rises from Avenger's shadow across the torn grassland and clamps down on the dragon's entire lower body. It is not the same as the tendrils he has been using so far. This is heavier and unyielding. He feels it pressing through the earth like a thousand needles, gripping every joint of the beast's legs, tail, and underbelly. The dragon thrashes, its bulk shaking the entire plain, wings smashing gusts into the forest, but the mud keeps rising, pulling, swallowing.

He watches its panic spread as the magic circles forming around its three heads flicker and collapse. The curses of the mud climb up its scales like a tide of black locusts, gnawing at its mind with the weight of five and a half billion deaths. The curses slam into its nerves, searing them, each curse a scream, a plague, a famine, a grief burned into the soul of the world and now painted onto the dragon's flesh.

The longer it stays inside, the more its thoughts scatter, the magic failing mid-word as the terror sets in.

The Black Giants multiply again and drive themselves into its wings and necks, keeping its heads occupied while the mud swallows everything below the chest. Avenger feels the backlash of the curses, the raw energy feeding back into his own body like coals in his veins. It hurts; everything always hurts.

He has fought this way before.

The world needed a villain, so it took him.

And now this dragon screams under the same one.

The mud swallows its chest, its necks, until only the heads remain above, spitting fire and lightning wildly, none of it aimed. The curses peel into its mind, corrupting every thread of command between body and thought. When the final surge pulls its three heads under the surface, the land falls silent except for the slow bubbling of the black tide.

Avenger lifts his hand. The curses compress.

The dragon's body does not dissolve like other things swallowed by this mud. Instead, the curses carve through its essence, forcing a new core into being where there was only a knot of magic before. He senses the heart of it forming:

A Spiritual Core.

An ether body.

A Saint Graph.

All twisting together as the curses carve their architecture into the dragon's soul like chisels shaping stone.

The Holy Grail's Mud has always done this. It twists what it touches into blackened incarnations, gives them stronger ties to the world, feeds them endless magical energy through the curse engine carved into their being. Servants pulled from the Throne of Heroes lose themselves to it, turn cruel, destructive, inverted copies of their old legends.

This dragon is no Heroic Spirit. It was a weapon of the Evil God now turned insane at the sidelines, its body raw power bound to this plane by its summoner. The mud does not care, because the moment it sees strength; it gives form.

When the black tide finally splits open and spits the dragon back out onto the torn battlefield, its scales no longer glimmer purple. They are pitch black, each plate traced with red curse-marks crawling like veins under glass. Its three heads rise slowly, eyes burning white, wings shaking off streams of mud.

Angra watches it breathe. He can feel the core beating inside it, the bond already tied to himself through the curse channels running under its skin.

The first Blackened Servant of this world kneels before him.

Aži Dahāka II, Servant Class Pretender, bound to Avenger through the curse as Familiar.

His vision doubles.

"AVENGER!"

He never felt relief hearing Kama's voice more than ever.

Chapter 26: Beast Quest: Breath Between Stars (Part 4)

A junction space, this was.

It's a dimension folded out of the manipulation of dimensional boundaries. The leyline energies bore what should be separate from reality into this singular point. The chamber ahead stretches upward without end, its walls forming an impossible sequence of corridors that run into each other without logic yet obey something deeper than Euclidean law. The platform beneath them feels solid, but he knows it is not anchored anywhere normal.

His eyes study the constructs around them, and he identifies the structure by principle. No doubt, the spatial layering uses the formulae described in Sefer Yetzirah. An authentic ordering of letters and vocal intonations as primordial forces. Patterns repeat in spirals, corridor folding back on itself through reflected time-loops, multiple sequences coexisting and feeding into each other.

Hyperspatial formations hold the pieces together with a method that feels familiar, perhaps because he sees immediately how efficient it is. No wasted design or superfluous weight, everything reduced to the fewest runic syllables that can achieve stability in dream-logic construction.

He considers whether the one who designed this was human. The conclusion forms instantly: unlikely. Humans prefer ornamentation even when they call it sacred. They cover inefficiency with ceremony and defend the mistake as an idol. This is clean and direct, a bridge between impossible coordinates built with exactness for only two purposes, containment and exclusion.

The girl stopped behind him, gaze wandering upward at the floating arcs and endless stairs that led nowhere. The reflections shimmer across the walls, doubling back into themselves.

"It is beautiful," she says, turning slowly in place.

He suspects even she knows she should be quieter here.

Goetia glances at her expression before looking forward again. Beauty has no bearing. What matters is the logic holding this place together, and the reason someone used Sefer Yetzirah to lock away Solomon's tome.

The tome itself floats at the far center, suspended above a pillar of converging light. But the book is not alone. A figure of stone stands before it, motionless, shaped like an angel but positioned as simply present, as though waiting.

The angel-shape draws no reaction from him. His mind stays on the tome.

Shir HaGalgalim. The Anthem of Creation. Solomon's so-called greatest magic.

Power always invites pursuit. But what interests him more is why it was left here rather than erased or scattered. One seals dangerous things when one believes control remains possible.

They both walk at a measured pace, eyes shifting across the borders as whispers begin to originate from nowhere.

Layered echoes drawn from personal memory.

She halts when she hears voices she recognizes, moments carried here from her past.

"—Reni, seriously, slow down. You will get yourself hurt one day."

"She never listens. Always runs ahead, smiling like nothing can go wrong."

Tobi. Natsume.

The familiar scolding tones made her lips press lightly.

She lowers her head slightly with a softening expression.

"Reni, behind you!"

"That is not how a formation works, Reni, please—"

"You did well today. Everyone returned alive."

Her eyes hold onto the last one longer than the others. She stares at the memories twist across mirrored planes around them before fading.

They were all part of what she once was.

It was clear, steady, patient that held the tone of someone who always explained before he commanded.

His voice enters the chamber.

"Listen carefully. Wisdom is not the absence of failure. It is the refusal to halt at failure. Understand this before you follow me any further."

Another layer overlapped the first, years apart yet side by side here.

"—How many times must I repeat myself, 72? Mercy is not a rejection... You remove it, you remove the reason to win at all—"

The walls show fragments of the old throne room, the King of Israel seated as though alive again.

"Do not imitate me... Surpass me or abandon the attempt." Solomon's memory quietly says.

The reflections part as he passes, some showing battles he commanded under Solomon's order, others showing arguments carried deep into the night about purpose and kingship. He regards them each then lets them fall behind. None carries significance anymore. He knows what he was, what Solomon was, what became of both.

But the girl looks at Goetia's scenes longer. Her eyes change between the fragments of Solomon speaking and the silent figure walking ahead of her now.

She notices how often that name repeats. Solomon this, Solomon that. Other names appear occasionally; ancient kings, magi, places she half-remembers from history lessons, but Solomon dominates every echo. The familiarity unsettles her enough to start looking at him with suspicion.

The distinction matters to her for what reason.

No ordinary magician walks through memories of King Solomon like passing familiar streets, and no ordinary magician disables wards designed to guard his legacy with such indifference.

"...The objective remains ahead. Assign meaning to irrelevant points later if you insist on doing so."

She studies his face for a moment longer.

It feels strange, considering they had been risking life together for the past hour since they entered the underground.

She clears her throat lightly, careful to keep her voice even. "You know," she says, folding her hands together in front of her robes as though to make herself look more formal, "it seems rather rude of me, but I have not even introduced myself. My name is Lavinia Reni of Grauzauberer. I suppose I should have started with that long ago. Proper manners demand introductions long before trespassing through strange vaults."

Goetia acknowledges her only with a short glance in her direction, the red eyes moving toward her for an instant before returning forward to the floating book at the center of the labyrinth.

Internally, he notes the pointlessness of introductions in circumstances where survival comes first. What point is there in the trading of names when the architecture around them rewrites itself every two hundred steps, when the walls speak in riddles of past memories, when the tome in the center holds script even he cannot fully interpret without direct contact? Names mean little here. The woman seems kind-hearted, earnest perhaps, but human priorities often amuse him in ways he has no interest in expressing aloud.

Silence stretches.

She waits, expecting more.

She keeps speaking despite the lack of reply. "It is usually custom, you know. Something like this calls for teamwork. Usually, this is where people respond with their name. That is how conversations work. I know mages from Rosenkreuzer who insist on full titles before they even cooperate on opening a door."

Goetia felt his irritation smoothed over by long habit. At which point will she exhaust her need for conversation? Perhaps when danger arrives. It always arrives sooner than mortals expect.

Still, she requires conversation while approaching a construct clearly designed to destroy intruders?

She presses further, tilting her head with an innocent smile. "Well, do you have a name? How about 'the silent man with the very long hair'? You are rather hard to describe otherwise."

He turns his head slightly. The red eyes meet her sapphire blue ones directly. The expression on his face remains unchanged.

"I heard your name. That suffices."

That is all he gives her before walking again.

Lavinia puffs her cheeks faintly, half in annoyance, like an older sister dealing with a younger boy refusing basic manners.

"Not much of a talker. I hope you at least know how to smile. A little conversation keeps the nerves down," she says, attempting humor though her smile falters when he keeps staring forward. "People usually share small details about themselves. Helps morale."

"If you wish for morale, speak to yourself. I have no requirement for it."

She mutters something about difficult companions but continues beside him regardless.

Goetia ignores the remark.

He keeps his attention on the center platform where the tome floats in suspension above a pillar of light.

They step onto the final platform before the book.

Without warning, the statue ahead stirs.

Stone grinds faintly against stone as the angelic figure before the tome straightens from its stance. Wings carved from material neither metal nor crystal unfold slightly. Its face remains featureless except for the faint suggestion of eyes beneath the helm-like structure covering its head.

A voice not loud yet carrying across the entire labyrinth speaks in perfect formal diction.

"Trespassers upon the vault of Solomon," it declares, "you stand before Shir HaGalgalim, the tome entrusted to creation, whose wisdom guarded the pillars of creation before the first language was spoken. By decree of covenant, access remains forbidden until the sounding of Armageddon's trumpets."

The platform vibrates faintly beneath their feet as it steps forward.

"I am the Shadow of the Archangel Raziel. My purpose is singular. No mortal hand nor wayward spirit shall claim this scripture before its appointed hour."

Lavinia feels the pressure first. Magic surges outward from the sentry in waves so dense that it distorts the air, far heavier than anything she feels even from her mentor Glenda. Her hand tightens around the staff at her side. Sweat begins to form along her brow despite the cool air of the dimensional vault.

She whispers tightly, "This power… it is stronger than Master Glenda by far…"

Calculations begin in Goetia's head. Angelic construct, bound to Raziel's authority, likely older than the current Christian faction's dominance over this region. Power output exceeds standard Cadre-class devils by a significant margin. Estimated combat difficulty is moderate, unless tome interference alters parameters.

He said toward Lavinia without turning his head.

"Prepare yourself. It will not permit negotiation."

The sentry raises one hand slowly, light gathering along its palm like the forming of a miniature sun.

Holy light magic. Light that burns through reality itself from divine authority. It carries precision beyond malice or mercy, a formula of erasure expressed in holy luminance.

He calculates trajectories the instant they appear. The sentry wastes no time speaking after its initial accusation. Its intent is singular, and that is to eliminate intruders, preserve the tome, await Armageddon. Nothing else.

Goetia pivots his body as magecraft compresses his energy into hardened barriers. He notes how each lance of radiance fragments space around it, cutting through the labyrinth's unstable boundaries with no loss of speed. Physical laws here are tenuous; the light does not even pretend to obey them.

Lavinia attempts distraction with volleys of elemental magic, calling spears of ice that shatter harmlessly against radiant shields surrounding the angelic form. Her movement stays quick but lacks aggression.

She realizes her position immediately. Support only. Direct confrontation promises only death.

How humorous.

Goetia talks while deflecting another beam, carrying across explosions of air pressure. "Your attack patterns reveal no adaptation, relying on only excess output to limit enemy decisions. It's effective against disorganized opponents... ineffective against me."

"Intruder, your threat level is extreme. The solution is termination."

Light condenses around the angelic figure, shaping into numerous wings composed entirely of energy. Every feather sharpens into a weapon.

Goetia evaluates its form while rapidly weaving runes midair with his left hand, magecraft converting surrounding heat into kinetic counterforce. His mind quickly calculates the strain on this temporary dimension as collisions mount. Too much disruption could collapse the interior structure entirely. That would scatter the tome across whatever boundaries remain between the Gap and the Underworld. Unacceptable outcome.

Lavinia moves closer to him between bursts of radiance, keeping a defensive barrier around herself. "Does it ever stop attacking long enough to listen? At this rate, the entire place will fall apart before either side wins!"

"It has no decision-making beyond predetermined parameters, and argument wastes time! Destroying it is required."

Goetia redirects three consecutive beams upward before they rupture the floor beneath them.

The angel reacts to that statement with increased aggression, light expanding outward like blades forming a cage before collapsing inward toward Goetia's position. He teleports above the convergence point instantly, using magecraft to manipulate atmospheric pressure into explosive bursts, dispersing the light long enough to close distance.

Physical combat follows. Goetia channels compressed wind along the edge of his left hand, forming a cutting instrument through od alone, intercepting radiant constructs summoned by the sentry. The clashes destabilize the surrounding dimension further, fragments of broken space scattering outward like shards of glass.

Lavinia attempts interference again, layers of ice walls intercepting side beams aimed toward her position.

"WAH! If you plan to collapse this entire vault while fighting, then explain how anyone is supposed to reach the tome afterward!"

Goetia's answer arrives while forcing back another radiant blade with precision strikes rather than brute strength. "The structural limits will remain tolerable for seven minutes under current conditions! A retrieval is possible if our engagement ends before then!"

The angel releases a single concentrated beam, faster than previous attacks, aimed directly at his torso. He twists aside, cloak tearing along its edge, heat scoring across his left arm as the shot obliterates everything behind him for several kilometers before dimensional boundaries reassert themselves.

He concludes that its attack power increases proportionally to time elapsed. Limiting duration becomes a priority.

"Your parameters confirm a single directive," he speaks directly toward the sentry while preparing another assault, "yet your attacks reveal minor delays between energy compression and discharge. Simply exploiting that interval will decide this engagement."

The woman magician heard him, immediately altering her spells toward interference rather than damage, shaping blizzards into dense screens of freezing mist whenever the sentry began charge sequences. That slows targeting long enough for Goetia to close the distance completely, forcing melee confrontation across fractured platforms drifting inside the collapsing vault.

"Intruder—Intrud—I–Intrud–der! Shall BE–T–TERMINATE!"

"Your redundancy exceeds even human generals who mistake persistence for strategy. At least they learn after defeat." Goetia answers with open irritation while locking blades of wind against radiant constructs pressing toward him.

He drives compressed wind through one of its wings, dispersing half the radiant structure into fading fragments. Damage confirmed. Minimal, but permanent.

Lavinia keeps barriers active around herself while watching for additional constructs forming from surrounding light. "If that thing carries power above anything I ever felt before and you still call this manageable, then I begin questioning whether helping you counts as rational behavior!"

Her voice was raised enough for him to hear across destructive collisions shaking the interior space. Her hardened face showed her judgment.

Goetia crushed another beam into scattering particles, "An assistance stays strategically useful even with the limited effect. I suggest you maintain interference. Interval exploitation requires precision timing impossible alone."

He calculates energy expenditure rates on both sides while pressing forward again, reinforcing his body for instantaneous acceleration through closing light-formed barriers. Every motion stays exact against potential outcomes unfolding across countless probabilities.

The angel reforms lost wings immediately, light condensing without regard for energy limits. Divine constructs ignore concepts like exhaustion. That reality factors into every analysis Goetia makes regarding possible victory conditions.

Killing it requires severing the core connection between its manifested body and whatever divine authority sustains existence here. Physical destruction alone proves insufficient unless simultaneous with severance ritual.

Seven minutes remain before dimensional collapse.

He prepares accordingly.

Meanwhile, Lavinia keeps her focus on the warping space around them to maintain the stability of the dimension with a composure that belies the strain in her arms as she controls the leylines flowing through the labyrinth-temple. He fights with elemental forces she does not recognize.

She groans out a lament as she puts up a barrier when a light blast exploded near her accompanied by her ally's unique magic.

The raw destructive air slashes he commands are nothing like the wind element of the Elemental Magic taught by the Magician Association or the techniques she mastered in Grauzauberer. It unsettles her because she does not understand the theory behind it.

The way he's wielding it with no hesitation and just motions as though born for combat, while his apathetic eyes track the sentry's movements with an almost mechanical certainty, made her contemplate on him.

She feels bitter watching him.

Now, she is not arrogant about her power, but she knows what she is. Since nine she has been called a prodigy, a master of Elemental and Defensive Magic, someone with the power of a Maou compressed into human form, and a magician whose name holds importance even among older generations.

She is used to fighting head-on, to shaping the battlefield herself, yet here she stands doing nothing but keeping the space from collapsing while this stranger she met an hour ago battles an archangel construct with techniques she cannot follow. It is absurd.

Worse, it stings. Especially since it is a battle of the mystic.

The sentry reels back when one of Goetia's slashes tears across its luminous body, fragments of light scattering through the air like broken glass. For a moment she sees her opening. Her grip tightens on her staff and she gathers the leylines' energy into a stormfront.

"Cryogeyser," she says as the spell circle blooms before her. The air drops to subzero in an instant. She casts the blizzard directly into the sentry's flight path. Wind howls through the collapsing dimension as whiteout ice engulfs the construct, freezing it mid-flight.

She exhales slowly as the frost seals over the being's wings and torso. It hangs in the air encased in ice, motionless, like a frozen statue.

Her satisfaction lasts three seconds.

Cracks splinter across the ice shell before she even finishes anchoring the spell. The sentry bursts free in an explosion of steam and shattered frost, light-wings flaring with renewed brilliance as it turns on her instead of Goetia.

It launches forward with alarming speed, faster than she expects, faster than she can counter.

She feels her chest tighten when the rays of light gather in its hands.

Goetia lands beside her before it reaches her position. The shockwave from his arrival knocks dust and fractured stone outward across the floor.

"You are interfering with its target priority," he said dryly, not unkind but completely without concern for her pride.

"Move back. It will not hesitate to attack."

Lavinia raised her staff. "I am not incapable of defending myself." Her words come with heat she rarely shows anyone.

"Defend, maybe," he replies, glancing at her. "Destroy? No. You cannot erase it before it tears you apart. Don't argue with me; I figure these things better than you."

His certainty grates on her nerves more than the sentry's light blasts.

She steps sideways to keep her barrier spell active around the dimension's fracture lines. "You're not fighting alone. I am not an ornament to stand by while you solve everything."

The sentry dives again. Goetia meets it mid-flight with a single arm. A blade of compressed air forms instantly and collides with the sentry's chest, hurling it backward into the warped walls of the space.

He lowers his arm. "If you insist on fighting, then fight effectively. Recklessness invites death. I am not interested in retrieving your corpse while finishing this battle."

Lavinia bites back the retort on her tongue. She knows he is right about the danger, but his detached delivery makes it feel like an order rather than advice.

She changes her stance, drawing more power from the leylines beneath the labyrinth-temple. The atmosphere around her grows colder as a second spell array blooms at her feet. "Then don't expect me to stand aside! I will freeze it solid this time, whether it likes it or not!"

Goetia turned his attention fully to the sentry as it pulled itself from the wreckage with light already gathering again around its hands.

The girl does not understand what they are fighting about. The construct is not alive, it does not feel fear or pain, the act of retreating doesn't exist. It will break itself against their defenses until either it or they cease functioning. Against such an opponent, hesitation is lethal, emotion wasteful.

He watches Lavinia's blue eyes alight with defiance, and thinks she underestimates how quickly such resolve can turn to ash when light that burns souls rather than flesh strikes faster than thought.

The sentry dives once more.

Lavinia releases her second spell.

The temperature plummets as walls of ice rise to meet the incoming construct, thicker and denser than before, reinforced by her power channeled through the leylines she stabilizes even while attacking.

The sentry crashes through the first wall, the second, slowed but not stopped, its momentum finally halting when the third layer seals around it completely, burying it in a prison of permafrost.

"Do not release it, I will end this while it is contained."

Lavinia keeps the walls frozen tight as sweat beads at her temples from the strain. "Be quick about it, my barriers will not hold forever."

Another invisible blade forms at Goetia's arm, destructive and more compressed than before, aimed directly at the immobilized core of the sentry.

Goetia halts his advance when the sentry, frozen only seconds ago, twists its light into an impossible flare, bending its own body apart as if its joints mean nothing. That power lashes outward and blinds even him for a fraction of a second. The blow slams across his chest before his guard fully rises, and he slides backward along the fractured air across the warped surface of this floating labyrinth.

Lavinia watches his retreat with a quickened breath, then her gaze jerks to the sentry when it turns its full attention upon her. The heat from its gathering lights builds in her direction like a growing sun.

Lavinia watches his retreat with a quickened breath, then her gaze jerks to the sentry when it turns its full attention upon her. The heat from its gathering lights builds in her direction like a growing sun. Her body lifts higher to evade, her robes snapping as she pushes mana into her flight spell, but the sentry outpaces her every change in direction.

When one of the lights brushes across her side, the heat sears away layers of conjured frost like nothing more than mist before fire.

Lavinia knows she should not feel this way. Not right now, when the air itself screams from the collision of magic. She forces herself to maintain composure even as the sentry's light cuts across the dimension like burning chains.

It hunts her relentlessly, the body of an angel and the mind of a calculating predator. One more strike and it would have been over, but then the creature twisted its light in ways even she could not fully follow, turning her ally's strength against him.

She should be helping him, but instead, here she is, fleeing like some apprentice too fragile to stand her ground.

The sentry's light lashes the space around her. She ascends higher, skirts the collapsing edges of this fractured dimension, but one strike lands across her magic before she can reinforce it. The heat is immediate, aggressive, too fast to fully mitigate.

Her instincts drag a full barrier spell into place instantly before the next blow lands, a translucent sphere locking around her body in a flash of sapphire light with layers of runes folding across one another in perfect sequence.

The sentry strikes against it again and again, hammering through the magical reinforcement until every nerve in her body tells her the strain will shatter it soon.

The entire space quaked under the contrast of cold and heat.

Her arms tremble more as she channels more power into the barrier.

She grits her teeth as the heat climbs higher, peeling across the shell of magic she holds. The barrier crackles under the mounting temperature, its edges warping while she feeds more power into its core. Every time her arms rise to channel more, sweat beads across her neck.

This is humiliating.

She knows she is not arrogant; she never has been. Power is nothing without control, without the wisdom to apply it properly. She knows this better than most. But she is Lavinia Reni, prodigy and star of the Grauzauberer.

Yet here she stands, straining under the assault of a single opponent while someone else fights the true battle.

She glances toward Goetia as he steadies himself across the warped space. Her eyes widened when she saw his cloak torn by the earlier blast of light. He was the only one dominating the fight entirely before the sentry pulled that trick. Elemental powers answer him like they have no choice. The forces of the universe all shape themselves into weapons that obey without hesitation.

It leaves her uneasy because it reminds her of how far the distance is between them.

However, it was not the discrepancy of power that left her dazed. What attracted her attention most was when she had an open view of his body previously covered by a cloak.

An amputee?

He was fighting the sentry on equal guard with only one arm?

As if her pride couldn't get any more hurt.

She strengthens the barrier again, pouring more energy into the runes as the sentry presses closer. Its light increases in temperature. Her blizzard barely slowed it; she had frozen it solid for a moment before it broke free without hesitation, to it, her magic was a mere inconvenience.

She has trained for years since childhood, she has stood above mages who once looked down upon her for her age, no one else could match her breadth of talent or control.

That man fights it alone with only one arm, she reminds herself, feeling the flare of Goetia's magic as he recovers in the distance.

Her jaw tightens as the barrier shrieks against the next beam of light.

"Is this all my strength means here?! To sit inside a sphere until it burns through?!"

"I cannot hold this forever. I am pouring enough power into this barrier to level half a mountain, and it is melting. Close-combat specialists, fine, I admit that is not my strength, but this is absurd. If I drop this for a moment, I am ash before I hit the ground!"

The sentry slams another beam into the barrier. The heat boils the air between them, bending it visibly, forcing her back several steps as she flies through the warping dimension. Her cloak smolders along the edges before she forces ice through the fabric to smother it.

The glare of the light paints across her eyes until she sees nothing but white through the barrier's edges. It has no voice, no expression, only the narrowing corona of energy closing against her like a beast's jaws.

She draws mana toward her core, ready to push outward with every elemental trick she knows, but the heat climbs faster than she can prepare a proper counterspell.

"How long do you intend to let this thing corner me?!" she shouts toward the distant figure of Goetia, unable to keep the bite from her tone.

His voice cuts back severely even as his magical energy flares around him.

"You are the one who chose to stand there! Hold until I return, or abandon your ground entirely. If you cannot decide, then be silent while I end it."

His answer grates against her pride even while part of her knows he speaks with no malice. The barrier groans louder under the next impact, lines spiderwebbing across its inner surface as the heat drills inward.

"Maintain your position! If you fall apart now, the entire structure of this battlefield will collapse, and you will take the leylines with it. Stabilize it and endure. That is all you need to do."

She snaps back through the barrier, "I am stabilizing it, but this thing does not seem interested in giving me the time to work!"

"Then withstand it properly," he says, tone as dry as ever. "Foolish you may be, you are not incompetent. Solve the problem in front of you rather than announcing it."

Her jaw tightens at the words, but she bites back the retort forming in her head because he is right. The worst part is that he speaks to her as though she can handle this, failure is not an option worth considering.

The sentry suddenly feints left, forcing her to adjust the barrier too quickly. A beam cuts close, burning across her side even through her defensive magic. The pain is sharp enough to steal her breath for a moment.

The air around Goetia condenses, the mana density spiking so fast the dimension bends toward him like the center of gravity has shifted. He raises his left arm, and the entire space vibrates as if bracing for what comes next.

She focuses on holding the barrier as the sentry divides its attention for just a fraction between her and Goetia's gathering power.

"Keep it facing you, I only need one opening. Do that, and this time it will not survive."

She reinforced the barrier one more time as the sentry slammed against it with enough force to blur its form into streaks of light.

"Fine. One opening. He sounds so certain. I will hold it, but if this fails, I am throwing him through the nearest wall before we die together."

There is no question of endurance. Her magic handles complexity and scale well, but prolonged direct force of this magnitude will burn through even her best defenses.

In her mind, a single option presents itself, one she avoids unless no other path exists.

Without hesitation, she calls forth the power sealed within her. It responds instantly, sensing the desperation in her pulse and breath. A dense chill erupts around her as magic and divine system authority entwine. From her shadow, ice expands upward and outward, merging into a regal shape. A woman-shaped construct of clear ice three meters tall forms beside her, four slender arms folding outward like blades of glass. The doll's face holds no expression. Its dress layers swirl down like frozen silk, hair trailing rigidly behind it.

This is Absolute Demise, one of the Thirteen, a Sacred Gear capable of ending countries if used without restraint. Its nature diverges from ordinary Sacred Gears; it needs no constant channeling from its user once summoned. It moves by Lavinia's will alone, her own limbs having extended into an independent weapon.

The temperature shifts instantly. Her construct releases no heat yet consumes it, flooding the warped temple with biting cold. Walls, floor, and ceilings of the labyrinth crack as frozen air spreads outward in successive waves. The sentry moves back, light dimming as it raises its guard.

The sentry darts to the side but too late for a complete escape. Ice locks around parts of its form, searing into divine flesh. Light sputters around its frame as it cuts free, emerging scorched and dripping pale bloodlike ichor. Its voice resonates across the frozen chamber.

"This vessel bears Longinus authority," it states, tone clipped yet tinged with reluctant acknowledgment. "Independent-type, Absolute Demise. Capable of autonomous annihilation."

Goetia studies Lavinia while his magical energy surges more, the icy doll standing at her side. His gaze narrows faintly.

"A Sacred Gear of this level in her possession, a Longinus at that, concealed this until the point of failure? It's a wonder. How sensible, even though unproductive."

Lavinia exhales slowly as her shoulders ease. She prefers not to use it unless necessary, it just seems this thing will not let her leave otherwise.

The sentry snips her words, wings of refracted light opening wide though parts of them drip half-frozen shards.

"Resistance elevates pointlessness. Deliver the hymn of Solomon before eradication concludes this delay." it declares with impatience.

Lavinia controls the doll with a motion of her hand. Absolute Demise surges forward, four arms sweeping outward in intersecting arcs that release fields of subzero pressure, walls of ice spreading wherever the arms cut. The sentry meets them with blinding flashes, light rays slamming against expanding frost. Impacts split the air with cracks as heat and cold collide across the labyrinth.

She guides the construct as the sentry outranges her in speed and aerial freedom, but Absolute Demise responds instantly to thought to injure and to restrict movement, to force errors, to carve escape routes if required.

The sentry communicates again between clashes, voice louder against the detonations of ice and radiance.

"Independent Longinus persists only while the user maintains command. By severing the user, the construct ends. Victory simplifies through your elimination."

It adjusts tactics toward Lavinia rather than the doll. She tightens control, sending Absolute Demise into faster sequences to intercept incoming rays.

"You invited its attention by manifesting power beyond your prior display. If its judgment centers on how practical it is, it will strike you before the construct. Obvious strategy. Correct, even."

Lavinia glances toward Goetia briefly with irritation.

"Suggestions rather than commentary would help," she says nattily.

His reply carries neither offense nor urgency.

"Maintain distance," he says. "Force it toward the doll's reach. It calculates angles poorly when confined. Its pattern earlier revealed overreliance on open trajectories."

She accepts this silently, stepping back while Absolute Demise advances, scattering frost across the floor. The sentry shifts higher, avoiding the spreading ice, wings flaring again as it readies another barrage.

Goetia raises his left hand slightly then lowers it again, watching the angles close between construct and target.

The sentry fires successive rays downward, forcing Absolute Demise into defensive arcs. Ice shatters under concentrated heat yet reforms instantly under Lavinia's command, layers replacing layers as beams burn through them.

She feels the drain building now from sustaining precision under this assault. Every clash spreads more frost through the warped temple until entire sections resemble a frozen cavern.

The sentry was slower now, wings stiff where ice clings despite its heat. It lands briefly atop a frozen ledge, light gathering for another strike before a powerful blast from Goetia forces it to evade.

His attack carried the destructive density of storm winds condensed into a singular strike of his arm. Goetia notes the holy construct staggers. His eyes follow its movements closely, studying how the magic-infused body recovers. Threads of divine light pulled the broken pieces back together as if the concept of destruction struggles to apply itself fully to a creation forged by an archangel. He sees no emotion on its indistinct face. A perfect soldier without vanity, fury, or hesitation.

He narrows his gaze. The resemblance to Golems remains unmistakable. Kabbalists described the act of shaping dust into something capable of bearing breath and will. The Golem of Prague, the experiments of countless thaumaturgists who attempted to mimic the first creation.

This sentry embodies refinement beyond what mortal magi ever achieved. It acts neither like a man nor an automaton but something in between, as if Raziel wished to strip away any imperfection human consciousness would bring while retaining a complete executor's efficiency.

"It almost resembles the culmination of every ideal they once chased. A mockery of their pride. A single divine hand erases centuries of human obsession as though the work of Kabbalists amounted to little more than children shaping mud into idols."

The sentry charges again. Its wings unfold, scattering particles of light so intense they burn lines into the warped floor beneath them. The first blow comes directly to his head. He twists aside, and the next blast follows instantly, a vertical spear meant to split him where he stands. He slides away again, allowing the energy to strike empty space.

Lavinia's magic circles flare far behind them. She chants defensive spells to suppress the fragments of light cutting across the chamber, though the sentry ignores her presence. Its attention stays locked on him.

"Your master made you thorough," Goetia said as the air roars with residual wind from his last attack. "Thoroughness without discretion creates nothing except escalation. I am the only one here who understands the legacy you guard."

The sentry offers no reply. It lifts its blade of light.

"No fear exists in you because fear requires awareness of self. Perhaps you are the perfect warden for knowledge that should not fall to either human greed or demonic ambition. While perfection removes the possibility of judgment, you are a being incapable of judgment that cannot recognize when its own purpose requires change."

Lavinia calls over the crashing noise. "Can you restrain it without destroying the entire chamber? Some of us would like to remain alive when this ends!"

He half-turns his head toward her voice as his eyes stay on the sentry. "I can restrain it if it shows restraint in return, so far, I see none!" He lifts his arm slightly, wind gathering again in a violent spiral that distorts the air around his hand. "This thing attacks because its master told it to guard without compromise. It has no curiosity and sense of proportion. That is the danger of divine automatons. They inherit command without ever questioning context."

The sentry lunges forward. Its blade strikes the forming wind barrier and shatters into radiance. Heat washes over the chamber as the two forces collide. Goetia drives his attack outward deliberately, catching the sentry in the center mass. The explosion rattles the labyrinth walls but spares Lavinia's position due to her Sacred Gear and the fact that he had angled the blast carefully, choosing direction over power.

The sentry crashes into the far platform before reforming again. Pieces of broken floor drift slowly in the warped gravity between dimensions.

Nine minutes since activation, it fights with the persistence of one who has never known defeat nor attrition. He could destroy it entirely, yet he suspects its master designed some advanced recovery into its very foundation. Like all things wrought by divine obsession, it accepts no ephemerality.

But what will stop it? If destruction alone cannot, will it keep fighting until either they die or it does?

No, it will continue until parameters change. The Archangel Raziel built it to enforce law, not to interpret it. Without new instructions, it will pursue original directives regardless of collateral damage.

He meets the sentry directly this time, intercepting the light blade with a condensed shield of wind hardened by curse magecraft. Sparks of blue light burst outward where light energy grinds against his barrier.

"It possesses no adaptability beyond battle routines. Predictable and narrow. If Raziel wished to create life in imitation of Adam, he abandoned the crucial element that separates man from tool: the ability to mull one purpose against another and decide which must end."

Goetia releases the shield outward in a violent surge, throwing the sentry backward again. He begins preparing another spell immediately, layers of wind and flame coiling together along his arm.

...Goetia almost pity it.

However, pity implies equality. He feels none. But he acknowledged the irony of divine creation producing something less free than the weakest mortal. At least mortals may choose error.

The sentry rises as its body reforms out of fractured light. Goetia lands on the fractured platform, and a sphere of condensed magical energy ignites on his palm like a furnace before splitting forward in a torrent of blinding light. The beam catches the sentry mid-flight.

Its body of searing radiance lashes as the blast slams through its defenses and sends it crashing into the broken floor. Its form trembles as fragments of the temple drifted away into the abyss below.

Goetia lowers his arm slowly. Its defeat stems from having no conviction in its defense. Still, it refuses to fall. He cannot leave it functional.

He extends his remaining arm again. Symbols flare, then contract around the sentry like chains tightening from every direction.

"Edict of Binding."

The sentry jerks violently as the magic contracts around it. The spellwork of Houjutsu, meant to crush demonic energy into obedience, here tailored with a curse to immobilize a being of light rather than darkness. The angel's limbs lock; its wings, radiant as any Seraph's, falter mid-beat and freeze in place.

"Warning… breach… Shir HaGalgalim… unauthorized entities… theft prevention… failure imminent…"

Goetia halts before the immobilized creature, his tall frame casting its shadow across the bound sentry. The golden hair, almost absurd in its length, shifts faintly behind him as he looks down with the psyche of someone long past patience with lesser beings.

"No one here seeks petty theft so cease your protest," he says. "I'm aware that tome belonged to a king whose understanding surpassed anything this era could fathom. Solomon did not create wisdom to be buried beneath zealots who neither read nor comprehend. It's for men who bore crowns because they carried burdens rather than chased glory."

The sentry's head turns fractionally. "Solomon… perfect… flawless… divine architect..."

Perfect.

Goetia's gaze hardens at that word. Humans always chased the idea, angels worshipped it, fools repeated it.

"Perfect? He was a man who erred as often as he judged correctly. A king who spoke to heaven while sinking into human excess. He prayed for wisdom and ignored warnings. He wrote the Song of the Spheres and died leaving mankind to scatter like startled ants. I was there. I was born from his command, given existence to observe humanity because he himself failed to understand it fully. Do not speak to me of perfection when I knew the man behind the throne."

He watches the angel's restrained form twitch as its very orders conflict within itself. Its systems, or perhaps its faith, cannot reconcile the image of Solomon the sage with Solomon the fallible king painted before it.

The bound sentry manages to reply. "Records… identify… Solomon… as… chosen… vessel… unparalleled wisdom… contradiction… detected… explain…."

Goetia controlled his release of being accustomed to correcting the misguided.

"Wisdom is not the absence of failure. He was greater than any king because he knew he erred, he understood the cost of ruling men who are weak, covetous, envious, foolish. He wrote Shir HaGalgalim because he feared what humanity would become without harmony to restrain its chaos. He was no god. He was a man who carried knowledge like a burden, not a trophy."

Goetia steps closer, crouching so his eyes meet the angel shadow's flickering gaze directly. "—And I am the proof of his imperfection. He created me because even Solomon doubted Solomon."

The sentry falls silent.

Its stammering question breaks the moment. "What… do you mean by that? What… are you?"

It expects an admission or some triumphant declaration of identity. That would be too simple. He keeps his gaze level, eyes like two blood-red lenses judging the thing that Raziel left behind. The sentry asks for one truth but deserves another.

He decides to redirect.

"Do you remember the seventy-two?"

The sentry stills briefly. "I… was… created after the death of the king. I have not… encountered the seventy-two."

Goetia nods, acknowledging the honesty. He expected as much. Raziel did not concern himself with preserving older hierarchies.

"...The Lesser Key of Solomon, the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis... they express them as demons. That is the language of men. What they were in truth were higher-order information bodies, structured existences. They had Names not as titles but as definitions, each Name a complete record, a boundary that marked one set of phenomena from all others. Within each Name lay a Power, not stolen nor granted by divinity but existing as the world itself acknowledged the record."

The sentry has no protocol for this subject.

Goetia continues. "Seventy-two distinct definitions. Seventy-two unique records. A hive of knowledge, computation, and will. Together they formed the operational core of the Human Order Correction Ritual. Together they made one being..."

He emphasized the last part, studying the sentry's faltering glow. Inside himself the memories surface... the long age of Israel, the quiet march of inevitable logic, the decision to burn it all away. He does not regret the choice; regret needs a belief that another outcome would have been preferable. He holds none.

The sentry asks, halting, "You… claim identity… with the seventy-two… yet they were destroyed when the king perished. All that is left... are the first-borns... who produced the devil clans."

Goetia shakes his head. "Not destroyed. United. The seventy-two coalesced into one existence at the moment the king's body fell. Who was born from that union? The corpse of Solomon became the vessel, the throne, the axis..."

Goetia leaned in closer.

"...The world named me Goetia. I am the seventy-two acting as one will."

The sentry process. Archangels deal in messages and truths; Raziel more than most. A creation of Raziel cannot misread falsehood for honesty. That is why Goetia states facts plainly, without persuasion or flourish.

The sentry tries to analyze him, perhaps searching for demonic corruption or any signatures. Instead, it finds the layered presence of powers older than its own existence. Names stacked atop Names. Authorities threaded through one body. It focuses on his eyes as though staring hard enough might reveal trickery.

Goetia allows it.

Inside its core, the conclusions assemble with painful truth. There is no mistake. The red eyes before it carry the pressure of many minds speaking with one voice. It remembers Raziel teaching that lies carry tension, some discord between word and reality. This man carries none as all sentences fit the world exactly as it is.

The sentry ultimately realizes what pins it down harder than the Fall ever could.

Its voice breaks through in halting disbelief. "Seventy-two… united… into one… You are… all of them…"

Goetia meets its stare without emotion.

The sentry's eyes falter. Detection confirms what instinct already screams. The power crushing it belongs not to one magician, not to one demon, but to the complete aggregation of Solomon's seventy-two pillars, the system that once calculated humanity's fate.

Horror finally registers across its fractured voice. "You… you are the Demon Pillars themselves… all of them… in one…"

It tried to comprehend, attempted to.

It's mind fails and before it descends into a complicated nerve-wracking brainstorm, the last thing it sees is a pair of demonic eyes.

Goetia walks toward the tome without another glance at the sentry. The mechanical clatter of collapsing masonry and the faint hum of the leyline-fed air currents fill the chamber. His gaze never wavers from the book resting upon the pedestal at the center of the warping hall, its surface glowing faintly under the influence of the Carpathian node.

He feels the sentry's stare fixed on his back. He ignores it. What good would explanations serve? The creature was Raziel's creation; the truth was self-evident to it now. The realization had already been carved into its mind. No words would erase the weight it now carried. Let it stand there, stunned.

The sentry understood too late. It was never fighting a singular man. The 72 Demon Pillars had no individuality to begin with; each name in the Ars Goetia existed because Solomon, in his wisdom, granted order to them. After the death of Solomon, all seventy-two returned to their original state: united, one will, one existence. They needed a vessel. The corpse of the king was fitting. It was inevitable.

He, Goetia, is both the king's legacy and his undoing. A creature born from human will but no longer human, containing divinity's mystery but no longer angelic, carrying demonic power but surpassing demons. Humanity sees contradiction. He sees only the conclusion of perfect logic.

Behind him, wings of ice scatter into particles as Lavinia descends onto the platform. Her boots hit the stone with a muted impact, and she runs forward, her robes swaying in the distorted air.

"Hey!" she calls out, tone carrying equal parts confusion and urgency. Her eyes flick to the sentry still frozen near the perimeter, its form locked in place, staring into the abyss. "What happened to that thing? It was attacking you, and now it looks like it has seen the end of the world."

Goetia does not break stride. "It understood something beyond its capacity to bear, which is sufficient for it to stop interfering."

"That tells me nothing," Lavinia mutters, catching up to him with brisk steps, her staff vanishing as she dismisses the Sacred Gear behind her. Her brows knit. "Did you threaten it?"

"I did nothing unnecessary," he replies flatly, already approaching the pedestal where the tome floats above a lattice of bending light. "If it cannot endure its own realization, that is not my problem."

Lavinia stares at him, exasperated, but she follows regardless, her eyes soon catching on the object ahead. The book.

Shir HaGalgalim.

Even among the Magician Association, the name belongs to myth rather than record. Supposedly Raziel whispered fragments of its knowledge into Solomon's ears, and Solomon, in turn, transcribed the Anthem of Creation itself into written form. The breath between the stars. The song sung before there was light. A hymn not meant for mortal throats.

Lavinia halts next to him at the pedestal, sapphire eyes fixed on the tome. The cover is plain yet overwhelming, a tablet of ancient script flowing like veins under its surface. Her heart pounds, unbidden. She knows what this book represents. Centuries of pursuit by magician families, wars over fragments of rumor, countless dead over a thing that stands here in front of her.

For one fleeting second, she imagines what it would mean to open it herself. To learn what no human was meant to learn. She imagines spellcraft surpassing nations, miracles answering to her command, the voice of creation itself pouring secrets into her mind.

The thought burns hot—and she crushes it at once.

"Lavinia," Goetia says suddenly, and she snaps her head toward him. He was watching her the entire time, harsh and assessing.

"I was not—" she begins, defensive.

"Greed is natural," he says. "Solomon himself was not free of it. That is why Raziel chose him. Wisdom tempered desire. If you lacked temptation, you would be unworthy to stand here."

She blinks at him, unsure whether that was criticism or approval. "You have a way of speaking that makes everything sound like judgment," she mutters.

"It is judgment," he answers simply.

Before she can retort, he reaches forward.

Her eyes widen. "Wait—You cannot be serious. You are just going to grab it?"

The tall figure in the dark cloak does exactly that. His left hand closes around the tome with no hesitation at all.

"Are you insane?!" Lavinia nearly shouts, stepping back on instinct. "That thing is supposed to contain the greatest magic in history, and you just touch it like it is a toolbox?"

He turns his head toward her, faintly disdainful. "It is a book, not a curse. If Raziel wished to prevent intrusion, there would be no pedestal, no key, no point to any of this. Power invites seekers."

"You sound very sure for someone about to open something that might erase us from existence," she snaps, then exhales, composing herself. "Fine. Fine. You clearly know more than I do. Just do not blame me if it decides to blast a hole through reality."

He studies the tome in his grasp, nothing physical yet heavier than a weapon. The letters shift faintly under his touch like they recognize the one holding them. He spares her a single glance.

"Prepare yourself then," he says. "If you have wards, summon them. Prayers? Speak them. The book will open whether you are ready or not."

Lavinia swallows, draws several sigils in the air, layers of defensive magic unfolding around them both in concentric barriers. Her hands are steady, though her eyes keep darting to the tome as though expecting it to explode.

"A—are you absolutely certain about this?"

His gaze fixes on the script across the cover.

"Certainty is a luxury," he answers. "But necessity leaves no alternatives."

He braces the tome, ready to break its seal.

---

The entire clearing reeks of dust, burnt air, and idiocy. Bodies of over a hundred men litter the rocky slope below the ridge.

U-Olga plants one heel on the cracked stone, arms crossed over her chest, blazing at the handful of mages still standing. The Rosenkreuzer idiots lie groaning where they fell, moaning as if hit by some divine wrath. She barely lifted a finger.

"Explain to me," U-Olga began with venom, enough to silence the remaining few trying to stand tall, "how in all of existence you thought it wise to leer at me while asking if I 'come here often'. You call yourselves seekers of cosmic mysteries, but you act like village degenerates. Do you fools grasp the insult and humiliation? You distracted me and wasted my time, waving your arms like children begging for attention, and you had the audacity, the astonishing audacity, to wink. At me. While wearing that ridiculous coat, you with the feathers."

She jabs a finger at a trembling Rosenkreuzer man whose coat indeed has bright peacock feathers stitched to the shoulders.

The man gulps, sweat rolling down his temple. "L—Lady, we only wished to show chivalry before battle," his voice cracked. "It is the knightly way to admire beauty before glory!"

"Glory?" U-Olga's hair nearly lifts from her shoulders as she wheels on him fully. "G–G–Glor–You think this is glory? Half your comrades are crying into the dirt because they attempted to recite poetry about my legs. Your 'glory' lasted twelve seconds."

Another Rosenkreuzer man, holding his ribs, calls hoarsely from the ground, "It was worth it, bro! I saw the way her tights gleamed in the sunlight. If I die here, at least I die a man."

"You absolute idiot!"

A Golden Dawn mage shouts from behind a broken tree trunk, voice thick with frustration. "It's her chest that's obviously divine, not her legs. You blind fool!"

"Divine? Are you blind? Her hips moved like they carried the secrets of magic itself!" Another Rosenkreuzer man croaks, raising a shaking fist before collapsing again.

That sparks immediate arguing across the wounded ranks. Groans of pain mix with furious declarations about glory, pride, legs, chest, hips, thighs, ass, and one man screaming, "Back muscles are where true elegance lies!"

Draco's tick mark enlarges as she shakily exhales through her nose. Her face remains a mask of irritation, crushing a fallen staff under her boot with enough force to snap it in two.

"You all..." Draco towers over the nearest group still shouting about anatomy, her shadow falling over them. "All of you shut your mouths and look around. Does this battlefield look like a heroic saga to you? I can smell the bruised pride leaking off you more than the blood."

A Golden Dawn mage opens his mouth as if to protest, but Draco picks up a rock and tosses it lazily at his feet with a loud crack. The message carries. He gulps and shuts his mouth.

Meanwhile, Koyanskaya leans against a boulder with loud, boisterous laughs spewing from her mouth, a sly grin plastered on her face as she watches the chaos like someone enjoying theater.

"HAHAHA!! YOU MEN ARE KILLING ME!! NOT–Not literally of course, since she already did that part." She gestures vaguely at U-Olga with one manicured hand. "But the sheer dedication to embarrassing yourselves over a pair of legs is almost inspiring! Almost. If you weren't all so terribly mortal and fragile about it."

"Do not address me while laughing," U-Olga snaps suddenly, rounding on Koyanskaya now. "They insulted me! They called me 'babe.' One of them asked for my number before trying to cast a fireball! Do you comprehend how degrading that is?!"

Koyanskaya presses a hand to her mouth, shoulders shaking. "Oh no, terrifying queen of the cosmos reduced to fury by mortal pick-up lines. Whatever shall become of your honor," she says with mock drama, nearly laughing mid-sentence.

"Mock me again, fox, and I will erase the ground you stand on," U-Olga warns.

Koyanskaya shrugs casually. "If it helps, I did not say they were wrong."

As an example, she skims at U-Olga's body up and down.

That earns a full pause across the remaining mages. Even the wounded stop arguing. All heads turn toward Koyanskaya slowly, brains processing the implication.

Inwardly, they celebrated.

"Fellow woman of culture!"

Draco pinches the bridge of her nose in growing irritation. "You people," she says flatly, looking between the battered mages and her two companions, "ARE idiots. Every last one of you."

A Rosenkreuzer man with a broken arm suddenly shouts through the silence, "I regret nothing! I would face death again for that view!"

Another near him yells back, "Leg man forever! Your opinion is invalid!"

"Chest reigns supreme, fool!" someone else retorts from the dirt, voice cracking badly. His throat got choked by Draco earlier... he wanted to be choked again—

Draco storms forward, grabs the nearest conscious mage by the collar, and lifts him until his feet barely touch the ground. Her red eyes burn into his face.

"Listen carefully," she says slowly, voice deep with restrained fury. "Solomon's greatest magic is somewhere in these mountains. The Golden Dawn wants it. The Grauzauberer wants it. Your Rosenkreuzer brothers here want it. But instead of tracking it, instead of thinking, you're bleeding because you decided to flirt with a walking apocalypse in sunglasses. Does that sound wise to you? Think very carefully before answering."

The mage opens his mouth. Draco's eyes narrow further. He closes it quickly and nods like his life depends on it. Which it probably does.

"Get angry at me again, mommy!"

Or not.

Koyanskaya claps slowly from her rock. "Marvelous speech, truly motivational. Perhaps next time they will last fourteen seconds before collapsing."

"Oh, we last even longer next time." So think the mages in the ground.

"Do not encourage them," Draco growls.

"Pathetic little men seeking the voice of creation itself, and one smile and they fall like wheat before a scythe. Humanity's future is as bleak as expected." U-Olga bemoaned.

One Rosenkreuzer man lying flat on his back mutters faintly, "Worth it."

U-Olga whirls immediately. "Who said that?! Stand up so I may break you properly!"