P.S this story starts a few years before the start of our favorite DXD verse!
AND I DON'T OWN ANY DXD MATERIAL, ALL CREDIT TO THE ORIGINAL WRITERS!
"Talking out aloud"
'Thinking with ones mind'
"Spirits inside the sacred gears talking"
Without further delay, lets start the chapter!
Kuoh Academy
There was no signal. No shouted command, no raised hand, no drawn-out stare between combatants to mark the moment the battle truly began. There was only the space of a single held breath, and then that breath was gone and so were the two Devils at the front of the line.
Marid Gremory and Sairaorg Bael crossed the ruined courtyard in the time it took Kokabiel to blink.
The Cadre had fought a great many foes across his long centuries, had stood against heroes and holy knights and monsters that the modern world had forgotten the names of, had raised his light in the ruin of the Great War against the God of the Bible Himself, and he had learned, among a thousand other brutal lessons, to read the opening half-second of any fight and know roughly what manner of enemy he faced. He read these two, and for the first time that night something in his ancient, arrogant face shifted that was not contempt and was not cruelty.
It was surprise.
They were fast. Not fast for Devils their age, not fast for high-class Devils, not fast in the way that a talented youth is fast when compared against his peers. They were fast in the way that made the primitive back of the brain, the part that had kept Kokabiel's kind alive through the ages, scream a single clear warning before the conscious mind had finished processing the sight. The son of Lucifer and the heir of Bael came at him from two angles at once, and the distance between them simply ceased to exist, and Kokabiel, Star of God, veteran of the Great War, had to move faster than he had moved in decades simply to not be where the first two blows landed.
He managed it. Of course he managed it. He had not survived this long by being slow, and whatever these children were, they were not yet his equals, and both of them, he noted with his warrior's instinct, were not throwing those first blows with everything they had. A deliberate restraint, a fighter's habit of testing before committing.
But he had been made to move. He had been forced, the Great Star of the Fallen, forced onto the back foot by a pair of devil brats in the first exchange of the fight, and that, more than the speed itself, was what made him laugh out loud, a great ringing peal of genuine delight rolling up out of his chest.
"Oh," he breathed, catching Sairaorg's follow-up forearm on a crossed guard that sent a shockwave rippling out across the broken field, twisting away from the silver flicker of Marid's hand before it could find him. "Oh, this is more like it. You two. You two are not like the rest of this rabble at all, are you?" His crimson eyes blazed with savage joy. "I had resigned myself to an evening of swatting flies. But this, this I am going to enjoy. I will not insult either of you by pretending otherwise."
Neither of them answered him. They did not have the breath to spare and they did not have the inclination. They simply came again.
And while the two monsters at the front occupied every scrap of Kokabiel's formidable attention, the real cage began to close.
Behind the front line, five of the strongest young magicians of their generation had already gone to work, and they did not waste their power on grand gestures or wild haymakers of demonic energy flung at a target that could burn such things out of the air with a flick of his will. They had been given their instructions, and their instructions had come from the Devil currently throwing cold silver death at Kokabiel's jawline, and those instructions had been simple and vicious in their economy.
Do not try to kill him. You cannot. Take his sky away from him instead.
Rias Gremory's crimson annihilation did not seek the Cadre's heart. It bloomed instead in the air above and to his left, a roiling curtain of destruction hanging exactly where a fighter of his pedigree would instinctively try to retreat to gain altitude. Sona Sitri's cold blue water-magic, dense and heavy and shockingly fast, sealed the low ground and the ruined colonnade where he might have ducked for cover. Seekvaira Agares laid her imperial purple across the broken middle distance in long, humming lines. Dagon Glasya-Labolas's deep green and Cleria Belial's shimmering gold took the remaining angles, the diagonals, the escape routes, the half-second lanes a veteran uses without even thinking to reposition in a melee.
None of it was aimed to hit him. All of it was aimed to tell him, over and over, with every passing instant, not there, not there, not there.
In his prime, with all ten wings intact and his full power coursing through him like a river in flood, Kokabiel would have treated such a web of lesser magic with the contempt it deserved. He would have flown straight through the worst of it and let it break against him like surf against a cliff, and he would have laughed while he did it. But he was not in his prime tonight. He was weakened, bleeding power from a hundred small wounds, his body aching from a fight it had not expected to be a fight at all, and three of his ten great wings were nothing now but charred stubs of bone and ash, courtesy of a certain lion who lay broken and defiant at the far edge of the field.
And so the lesser magic, which should have been beneath his notice, stung. Each near-miss scalded. Each wall of layered power he was forced to avoid cost him a fraction of a second, a sliver of attention, a small and grudging adjustment of his footing. And every one of those small and grudging adjustments pulled him a half-step further from where he wanted to be, and left him a half-step more open than he wanted to be, and into every single one of those openings came the two monsters at the front, relentless and precise, making him pay.
The cage had no bars he could break. The cage was made of the simple, grinding, inescapable fact that he could only be in one place at a time, and that seven of the most dangerous young Devils alive had agreed, very calmly, exactly where that place would not be allowed to be.
Kokabiel understood all of this within the first ten seconds. He was far too experienced not to.
And he grinned anyway, because he had never in his long life backed down from good odds, and he had certainly never backed down from bad ones.
The first blood of the battle came four exchanges later, and it was Marid who drew it, and Kokabiel would remember it for the rest of his life.
The Cadre had finally found half a breath of space, driving Sairaorg back a precious meter with a brutal knee that the Bael heir took on his crossed arms and grinned through, and in that half-breath Kokabiel conjured a sword. Not a thrown spear, not an arrow loosed at distance, but a true blade of condensed light held in a two-handed grip, blazing white-gold and humming with the particular lethal frequency that made every Devil nerve in range sing with instinctive dread. He brought it down at Marid in a diagonal cut meant to open the son of Lucifer from collarbone to hip, a killing stroke, fast as a falling star and twice as bright.
Marid raised his left arm to meet it.
Not a shield. Not a hastily thrown-up magic circle. His bare forearm, turned edge-on, and along that forearm there bloomed in an instant a wicked length of condensed magic, a blade of his own that ran from the back of his wrist past his elbow, black at its core and chased along its cutting edge with a cold, gleaming silver. He did not throw it up to meet the cut head-on. He angled it, slanting the silver edge so that Kokabiel's falling sword of light struck it and skated, sliding off and away to the side in a screaming shower of sparks rather than rebounding back the way it had come.
The two edges met with a sound like the sky cracking, holy light shrieking along lightless silver as the killing stroke was turned harmlessly aside.
And in that sliding instant, before the deflected sword could clear his guard and recover, Marid did something the Cadre's long experience had not prepared him for. He did not chase the blade. He did not strain to overpower it. He turned his wrist, hooked the black edge of his own under the crossguard of condensed light where it slid past him, and pulled.
The sword of light did not bend. It shattered.
It came apart in Kokabiel's grip in a spray of dying white sparks, the beautifully condensed holy construct simply coming undone against that cold silver edge, as though the darkness had reached into the weapon and switched off whatever will held it together. One instant the Cadre held a blade that could injure a high-class dragon. The next he held a fistful of nothing, his own momentum carrying his empty hands forward into the space where his guard should have been.
For the first time that night, genuine shock flashed across Kokabiel's ancient face.
Marid did not waste it. His right hand was already coming around in a haymaker that had every scrap of his terrible, condensed strength behind it, a blow aimed square at the hinge of the Cadre's jaw, a blow that would have put Kokabiel's head through the remains of the gymnasium wall forty meters distant.
It did not land clean. Because Kokabiel, even caught flat-footed, even with his weapon destroyed and his balance broken, was still Kokabiel, and a thousand years of killing is not undone by one clever trick. He wrenched his head back and to the side, a desperate snapping motion that took his skull a hand's width out of the path of Marid's fist, and the haymaker roared past his face close enough to part his hair with the wind of it.
But he was fast. He was not quite fast enough.
Because it was the same hand. Marid's right fist carried the haymaker, yes, but along the back of that same right forearm rode a second wrist-blade, the twin of the one that had just unmade a sword of light, and when Kokabiel leaned out of the path of the punch he leaned directly into the path of the blade. The cold silver edge opened a long, clean line across the Cadre's cheekbone, from the corner of his eye nearly to his ear, shallow but real, and a thin thread of blood, red as any mortal's, welled up and ran down the side of his ancient face and dripped from his jaw onto the broken earth.
The whole battlefield seemed to go still for a quarter of a second.
Kokabiel, Star of God, Cadre of the Grigori, veteran of the Great War that had scarred three worlds, had been made to bleed. By a child. By a Devil not yet old enough to be considered properly grown by the measure of his own long-lived kind.
The savage joy drained out of the Cadre's face and something far uglier took its place.
"You," he snarled, and his voice had lost every trace of its earlier amusement, every scrap of the indulgent lord enjoying a sporting diversion. The cut on his cheek was nothing. The cut on his pride was everything. He had been first to bleed, in a battle against beings he had come here fully intending to swat like insects, and that was an insult so profound, so fundamentally wrong in the ordered hierarchy of his understanding of the world, that it momentarily drove every other thought from his mind. His head snapped back toward Marid, his remaining wings flaring, raw light gathering between his spread fingers to annihilate the impudent whelp where he stood—
And Marid's free hand came up, open-palmed, and the air in front of it turned white with cold.
Kokabiel's instincts screamed and he obeyed them, throwing up a defensive circle of his own making, a dense disc of layered Fallen light that blazed into being between his body and the sudden rush of frost. It was a good shield. A veteran's shield, raised in a fraction of a heartbeat, proof against demonic fire and holy steel alike.
It was never in danger. That was the part that would gnaw at him afterward. Marid's ice did not so much as crack the surface of that shield.
But the force of it, the sheer concentrated pressure of the cold that Marid poured out of that single open hand, a blast of killing frost so dense that the air itself froze into a visible white cone leaping from his palm, struck the shield like a battering ram and drove Kokabiel backward. Not a stagger. Not a half-step. The Great Star of the Fallen was shoved bodily through the air, boots skidding and screaming across empty sky, flung back a full twenty meters by a blow that had not even scratched the barrier he raised to stop it.
He had time, in that moment of helpless backward flight, to understand exactly how badly he had misjudged this evening.
And then he had no time for anything at all, because Sairaorg Bael had followed the ice.
The Bael heir had used Marid's frost as a wall to hide behind, had come around the edge of that white cone at a dead sprint across the sky with his monstrous physical power tearing the air into a visible, warping distortion around his body, and when Kokabiel came skidding helplessly out of his backward slide, Sairaorg was there, already loaded, already committed, and he hit the Cadre in the center of his face with a straight right hand that carried the full and unrestrained weight of the strongest young body in the Underworld.
The sound was horrible. A wet, decisive crunch that everyone on the field heard and that several of them felt in their own teeth.
Kokabiel's nose broke. His head snapped back. And this time there was no wrenching aside, no veteran's grace, no clever escape, because you cannot dodge a blow you did not see coming from behind a wall of another man's magic, and Sairaorg's fist drove the Star of God straight down out of the sky and into the ruined earth of the courtyard with the force of a falling meteor.
The impact crater was ten meters across.
And into that crater, before the dust had even begun to settle, before the half-stunned Cadre could so much as lift his head, came the second wave. Dagon Glasya-Labolas's roiling green, Rias Gremory's crimson annihilation, Sona Sitri's crushing blue, Cleria Belial's gold, all four of them unleashed at once, no longer sealing escape routes but committing, a four-fold column of demonic power pouring down into the hole in the ground where Kokabiel lay.
It was, the historians of the Underworld would later agree when the full account of that night was finally pieced together, the most concentrated damage any single Fallen Angel had absorbed in one moment since Kokabiel himself had stood against Vasco Strada in the man's prime during the latter days of the Second Great War, when the Strongest Human Being Alive had nearly ended the Star of God's story a full human lifetime ago.
Kokabiel saw it coming. That was the bitter thing. Even half-stunned, even with his face a ruin and his ears ringing, his instincts worked. He saw the four columns of annihilation descending and he did the one thing his body knew to do, the thing it had done ten thousand times across the centuries: he brought his great wings forward and down, mantling them over his body like a living shield of feathers and light, the ancient, reliable last defense of his kind.
But he had ten wings no longer. He had seven. And three charred, ruined stumps where the others had been, three gaps in the feathered shield that his instincts had not accounted for because his instincts had been formed across a thousand years of fighting with a whole and perfect body.
The four-fold assault poured through the gaps in his broken wings, and found the Cadre underneath, and burned.
Kokabiel came up out of that crater screaming.
Not in pain, though there was pain, genuine and grinding and unfamiliar. He came up screaming in pure, incandescent rage, the rage of a creature who had walked the world as an apex predator for longer than most civilizations had existed and who was now, impossibly, humiliatingly, being hurt by beings he had come here to murder for sport.
Above him, Seekvaira Agares had begun to weave something larger than her fellows' battle-magic. Her imperial purple no longer flickered in short hard lines across the battlefield. It had begun to resolve into a vast and intricate geometric lattice in the air, a thing of nested rings and slowly turning sigils, and anyone who understood the deeper arts of the Agares line would have recognized it for what it was: the opening movements of a sealing array, the kind of working that could bind even a Cadre-class Fallen Angel in a prison of frozen space and borrowed time, if only she were given long enough to complete it.
Kokabiel recognized it too. And that, more than the broken nose, more than the burns, more than the cut on his cheek, was what finally tipped him over the edge from furious to unleashed.
"ENOUGH!" The word came out of him like a thunderclap, and the pressure of his aura rolled across the field in a wave that cracked stone and flattened the smaller fires still guttering in the rubble. "Enough of your games. Enough of your little web and your pretty colors and your clever tricks. You wish to see the Star of God? You wish to know what it is you have been playing with?"
His seven remaining wings snapped fully open, and the sky itself seemed to dim around him, and the raw power that he had been metering out all evening, the power he had held in reserve while he toyed with them, came off the leash all at once.
"I had thought," he spat, and there was blood on his teeth, "to let you live a little longer. To savor it. But you have cost me my patience and you have cost me my blood, and now I find I want only one thing from this night." His crimson eyes lifted past them all, past the battlefield, to the dark sky and whatever watched from beyond it. "I want Sirzechs Lucifer to arrive too late. I want the Crimson Satan to break that barrier and step onto this field and find his precious heir and his darling sister and the whole bright future of his wretched nation lying cooling in the mud. Let that be the war. Let that be the spark. I will burn this generation to ash and let their fathers' grief light the world on fire."
And then he stopped holding back, and the true fight began.
It was, for the next several minutes, the most dangerous place in the world to be standing.
Kokabiel moved like the veteran he was now, no longer penned and harried but attacking, and the difference was night and day. He stopped trying to escape the cage and simply started tearing at the bars of it, and the bars were people. Light arrows came off his hands in volleys now, not single careful strokes but storms of them, each one capable of punching through a high-class Devil's defenses, and the beautiful, grinding, defensive machine the young Devils had built began, for the first time, to take real damage.
Seekvaira nearly died in the first ten seconds. A light arrow meant for her throat missed by the width of a held breath, close enough that the holy energy of its passage seared a line across her cheek and set the ends of her hair smoking, and only a desperate sideways wrench of her own space-magic, abandoning the sealing array she had been so patiently building, saved her life. The array came apart half-finished. All that careful work, gone, and the knowledge hanging over all of them that there might not be time to rebuild it.
Sairaorg and Marid took the worst of it, because they had placed themselves where the worst of it would fall. They were not only the two strongest fighters on the field; they were the two bodies standing between Kokabiel's fury and the five magicians behind them, and between those magicians and the broken, half-conscious handful of Rias's and Marid's peerages lying at the field's edge. Every volley the Cadre threw, the two of them met, Sairaorg's Touki-wrapped body shrugging off glancing hits that would have killed lesser Devils outright, Marid's black-and-silver aura drinking the light arrows that found him and smothering them against that lightless edge. They bled for it. Both of them. Shallow burns, scored lines across arms and shoulders, a long scorch down Sairaorg's flank that made even the Bael heir hiss through his teeth.
But they held. And while they held, they hit back, and that was the whole grim arithmetic of the thing. Kokabiel was landing blows now, yes. For the first time he was doing real harm. But he was taking two for every one he gave, three for every one, and he was already hurt, already burning low, already bleeding power he could not replace, and the children would not stop coming.
The moment that very nearly broke them came in the eleventh minute.
Kokabiel, for all his fury, was still thinking, and his ancient mind found the flaw in the beautiful machine arrayed against him the way a master swordsman finds the gap in an unfamiliar guard. The young Devils' entire strategy depended on him being contained, on him being unable to disengage from Sairaorg and Marid long enough to reach anyone softer. So he stopped trying to beat the two monsters in front of him, and instead, in one explosive burst of movement that cost him a brutal exchange with Marid's wrist-blades to buy, he simply left. He blew past them both, took a cut across the ribs doing it and did not care, and for one terrible instant the Star of God was loose in the soft center of the battlefield with nothing between him and the vulnerable behind.
And in that instant, Cleria Belial was not looking at him.
She was looking, along with Rias and Sona, at a stray light arrow, one of the dozens Kokabiel had loosed in his storm, a single bolt that had gone wide of its original mark and was now streaking, fast and lethal and perfectly aimed by nothing but cruel chance, directly toward the cluster of broken bodies at the field's edge. Toward Kenta, who could not stand. Toward the others who had nothing left to defend themselves with.
Cleria did the only thing she could. She turned her shimmering gold upon the arrow and spoke the name of her clan's terrible inheritance, the power that had made her brother the undefeated champion of the Rating Games, the quiet, absolute authority of the House of Belial.
"Worthless."
And the light arrow, a bolt of holy energy that could have cored a building, began to die. Cleria's nullification did not blast it from the sky or throw up a wall against it; it reached into the thing as it flew and began, remorselessly, to unmake what it was made of from the inside out. The bolt answered the only way it could. It slowed. Its searing white-gold brilliance guttered and dimmed toward a sickly grey, its lethal speed bleeding away meter by meter as the very power that gave it shape was wrung out of it. It was Cleria's working alone that did it, the inheritance of Belial answering to Belial blood and no other, and so Rias and Sona did not try to lend their power to hers. They turned it instead to the people behind the arrow, snapping a dense, double-layered barrier into being over Kenta and the broken bodies at the field's edge, a net thrown up to catch whatever of the dying bolt still got through, in case Cleria's unmaking left enough of it to kill. And the net was needed. Cleria's unmaking had bled the bolt of most of its lethal power, but not all of it, and what little was left still carried the weight of a thing that had been born to kill. The fading arrow crossed the last of the distance and slammed into Rias and Sona's double-layered barrier, and the shield shattered under the blow, blowing apart in a spray of crimson and blue light. But it held exactly long enough. Between Cleria's working that had wrung the strength out of the arrow and the barrier that spent itself absorbing what remained, the combined effort of the three of them did precisely what it had to: the light arrow died against the breaking shield, a hand's breadth from the wounded, and went no further.
It was exactly the right call. It was the call that saved three or four lives at the field's edge.
And it was the half-second of distraction that Kokabiel had been waiting for.
Dagon Glasya-Labolas saw the peril of the girl he'd grown up beside a heartbeat before anyone else did. Cleria was committed, her attention wholly on the nullification, her body still and unguarded, and the Star of God was dropping on her from above with his fist cocked and the full, unrestrained power of a Cadre loaded behind it. There was no time to shout a warning. There was no time to raise a shield around her. There was only time for Dagon to do the one thing he had never once questioned he would do for any of the friends he had grown up alongside: he threw himself into the path of the blow.
He got his own body between Cleria and the descending fist, and he got one arm up to take the impact, and Kokabiel's full-powered punch landed on Dagon Glasya-Labolas's raised forearm with a sound that was not a crunch but a snap, clean and final, the sound of a bone giving way entirely. The force of it did not stop there. It drove straight through the broken guard and flung Dagon across the entire width of the ruined courtyard like a thrown doll, and he hit the shattered face of the new school building and went through it, through brick and steel and three interior walls, and vanished into the dust and the dark with the whole structure groaning and sagging above him.
Cleria screamed his name.
And Kokabiel, having broken one of them at last, having finally tasted the kill he had been denied all evening, turned his crimson eyes upon the rest of the soft, undefended center of the field, upon Rias and Sona and Cleria, upon the girls whose fathers and brothers he most wanted to grieve, and he smiled a bloody smile and gathered his light to finish what he had started.
Marid's Peerage — the field's edge
Yumi had been on her knees for the last four minutes, and she had not stopped fighting once.
She had nothing left. Her demonic reserves had run dry sometime during the earlier horror, in the long stretch before the Big Eight had arrived, when it had been only Kenta and Issei and the exhausted remnants of two peerages against a monster out of legend. What she had left now was her sacred gear and her will, and she had been pouring both into the same desperate working for what felt like a lifetime: Lunar Aegis, her barrier-type Sacred Gear, a pale silvery construct of defensive light anchored to her left hand, held up and out over the broken bodies of her comrades like a mother bird's wing over a nest.
Beside her, Asia Argento knelt in the same posture, the golden glow of Twilight Healing fading and guttering as the last of the little nun's own strength gave out, her sprite dragon curled protectively and uselessly around her shoulders, both of them adding what little they had left to Yumi's failing shield. And behind them both, over the worst of the wounded, over Kenta most of all, Akeno Himejima had thrown her own body, her magnificent and terrible power spent down to the last ember, nothing left to give but the shelter of her own flesh, her arms spread wide over the broken lion who had burned three of a Cadre's wings and paid for it with the use of his arm and most of his blood.
They were the last line. And when Kokabiel's storm sent a light arrow screaming toward them, toward the undefended heart of Rias Gremory's and Marid Gremory's assembled peerages, there was no one left to stop it but a kneeling girl with an empty tank and a shield of pale light that had been failing for four minutes straight.
Yumi felt the arrow coming. She felt the heat of it, the lethal holy weight of it, bearing down on everyone she loved in this world, on the brother-in-all-but-blood lying broken behind her, on the little nun at her side, on the gentle, ferocious queen sheltering them all with nothing but her own spine.
And something in Yumi, some final door she had never known was there, came off its hinges.
No.
She did not have the power to stop that arrow. She knew it with cold certainty. Lunar Aegis at its best, at its freshest, with her reserves full, might have turned that arrow aside. Lunar Aegis now, running on fumes and spite, could not.
No. Not them. Not him. Not while I can still move.
She pushed. She pushed past empty, past the floor, past the place where there was supposed to be nothing left to give, and she demanded of her Sacred Gear something it had never given her, and the Sacred Gear, as Sacred Gears sometimes do in the exact moment of a wielder's greatest need, answered.
The pale silvery light anchored to her hand flared, blindingly, and changed.
It was not a formless barrier any longer. The light drew in on itself, condensed, took on edges and structure and intricate, deliberate design, and resolved into a thing of beauty and purpose: a shield, a true shield, worn upon her forearm, its face a disc of layered crescents that overlapped like the phases of the moon from which it took its name, each crescent chased with silver filigree that glowed with its own inner light, the whole of it humming with a solidity and a reality that the old formless barrier had never possessed. And as it took shape upon her arm, a voice she had heard only in the quietest moments of her own heart spoke, for the first time, loud enough for the whole field to hear.
"Full Moon's Unbroken Bastion, Balance Breaker!"
Yumi had reached her Balance Breaker.
She did not understand it. There was no time to understand it. She understood only that the pale, failing wing of light had become something physical, a shield she could feel the weight of, a shield that she somehow, instinctively, knew could be made to grow, to spread, to retract and extend at the speed of thought, a barrier that would not merely resist what struck it but could take the worst of an impact and drink it down, neutralize it, render it spent. She threw her newly-shielded arm up and out, and willed the crescent-moon disc to grow, and it grew, blossoming outward into a great curved wall of overlapping silver light that spread across the entire undefended edge of the field like a dawn.
The light arrow struck the new shield.
And where the old Lunar Aegis would have shattered, the Balance Breaker held. The holy bolt slammed into the layered crescents and the shield bowed and flared white at the point of impact and held, and Yumi felt the lethal energy of the arrow pour into her shield and spread out across its whole surface and dissipate, neutralized, drunk down, reduced to a spreading warmth and a shower of harmless sparks.
She was not alone in the catch. Rias, seeing the new shield bloom, flung her own crimson across the gaps Yumi could not cover; Cleria's gold and Sona's blue wrapped the edges; Asia poured the dregs of her light into the lattice. Together, with a kneeling girl's brand-new Balance Breaker at the heart of it, they caught the thing that should have killed them all, and held it, and let it break against them instead of the other way around.
But holding that line had a cost, and the cost was that for one critical instant, their attention was there, at the field's edge, catching the arrow, and not in the center of the sky, where Dagon Glasya-Labolas had just been smashed through a building and Kokabiel now hung loose and murderous and unopposed.
The Star of God chose the kill in front of him. He turned from the shielded, defended edge and fell instead upon Rias and Sona and Cleria, the three girls whose grief he most desired, who had committed everything they had to the catch and had nothing in the instant left to defend themselves, and he came down on them with his bloody smile and his gathered light and every intention of ending three of the Underworld's brightest futures in a single stroke.
He did not reach them.
Because Marid and Sairaorg had never, for one second of that entire exchange, stopped running toward him.
They hit Kokabiel from both sides at once, the son of Lucifer and the heir of Bael, and dragged the Cadre bodily out of his killing dive a bare arm's length above the heads of the three girls he had meant to murder. Marid's wrist-blades carved twin lines of cold silver fire across the Star of God's back; Sairaorg's fist found the Cadre's broken ribs and made the injury very much worse; and the three of them went tumbling and crashing away across the sky in a brawling knot of darkness and distortion and furious light, and the center of the field was, for one more precious moment, denied to the enemy.
"Dagon!" Seekvaira Agares did not hesitate. The instant the Cadre's attention was ripped away by the two front-liners, she was moving, her imperial purple carrying her low and fast across the courtyard and in through the ragged hole Dagon's body had punched in the school building's face. She found him in the dust and the dark, half-buried under a fallen interior wall, his forearm bent at an angle forearms do not bend and a long, ugly gash torn open along the side of his head where he'd struck the steel, blood sheeting down over one eye, but breathing, cursing, already trying to shove the rubble off himself with his one good arm.
"Hold still, you enormous idiot," Seekvaira snapped, hauling the wall off him with a lever of hard purple light. "You threw yourself in front of a Cadre's fist. For Cleria. On purpose."
"She'd have done the same," Dagon ground out, and let the Agares heiress drag his arm across her shoulders and haul him upright. His legs held. Barely. "Everyone still alive out there?"
"For now. Walk. We're not done."
They came back out of the building together, the Agares girl half-carrying the broken Glasya-Labolas, and rejoined the line, and Cleria made a wounded sound at the sight of the blood all down the side of her oldest friend's face and then set her jaw and put her shimmering gold back up, because there was no time to weep and every reason to fight. Dagon could not punch anymore, not with that arm, but a Glasya-Labolas did not need his fists to be dangerous, and his roiling green went back into the web of covering fire one-handed and hateful.
And the beautiful, grinding machine, battered now, bleeding now, down a sealer and a striker and a dozen reserves of power it could not replace, re-formed.
This was the shape the battle took, then, through its long and brutal middle passage. Marid and Sairaorg at the front, always, trading blows with the Star of God in a close and savage dance that never stopped moving, the two of them alternating their attacks with a coordination that looked almost rehearsed, never both committed at once, so that one was always set and ready to cover the other's recovery, so that Kokabiel never, ever got a clean second shot at disengaging into the soft center again. And behind them, from the middle distance, the magicians: Sona reading the whole battlefield like a game board and calling the adjustments, he's drifting left, seal the left, Rias high, Cleria the gap; Rias and Cleria and Dagon pouring covering fire into every lane the moment it opened; Seekvaira darting and weaving, her space-magic knitting hitches into the air that fouled Kokabiel's footing at the worst possible moments, a half-second of slowed time here, a warped meter of distance there, never enough to be a seal but always enough to be a nuisance, always enough to cost him.
They made sure, with a discipline that would have done credit to fighters three times their age, that no one was ever again caught looking the wrong way. That no one ever again stood undefended. That every single one of them was always covered by at least one other, so that Kokabiel could never find a second Cleria, a second half-second of inattention to punish. And they ground him down. That was the whole of it, in the end. They ground the Star of God down, one grudging, costly exchange at a time.
Kokabiel understood what was happening to him with perfect, bitter clarity, and the understanding did nothing to help him.
He was not losing because any one of them was his equal. That was the maddening part. Take any single Devil off that field and put them in front of him alone, and he would kill them. The girl with the water, the girl with the time-magic, the Glasya-Labolas boy with his broken arm, even the Gremory heiress with her vaunted Power of Destruction, he could kill any of them, had killed their betters, would kill them still if he could only get one of them alone. Individually, by the measure that had defined power and worth across the whole of his long life, not one of them should have been able to so much as inconvenience a Cadre of the Grigori.
But he could not get any of them alone. That was the whole of the trap, and it was an elegant trap, and he hated it. They had stopped being individuals the moment the fight began. They had become a single organism, seven-bodied and many-handed, and it defended itself as a single organism and it attacked as a single organism, and against that organism his own vast individual power was like a great sword swung at the sea: it could not miss, and it could not matter. Every stroke found water, and the water closed again behind it, and the sword grew heavier, and the sea did not tire.
And he was already hurt. That was the thing that turned the slow grind from an indignity into a genuine danger. If he had come to this field whole, with ten wings and a full belly of power, the organism's thousand small cuts might have been merely annoying, a long and tedious evening's work before he finally wore them down instead. But he had not come to this field whole. A lion had taken three of his wings and a great deal of his reserve before the Big Eight had ever arrived, and now these seven were taking the rest, a sliver at a time, and he could feel the floor of his own power coming up to meet him with every passing minute.
He looked, between exchanges, at the two who troubled him most. At Sairaorg Bael, the Bael heir who could not wield a drop of the destruction his clan was famous for and had become, in its absence, perhaps the most purely dangerous physical creature of his generation, every ounce of his monstrous body honed into a single weapon. And at Marid Gremory, the son of Lucifer, who moved like water and struck like winter and carried that strange, lightless, silver-chased aura that unmade light itself on contact and that Kokabiel had never in all his centuries seen the like of.
They were extraordinary. He granted them that, privately, with a warrior's grudging honesty. They were the genuine article, both of them, the kind of talent that came along once in an age, and had he met either of them alone and whole he would have had the hardest fight of the modern era on his hands.
And they were not using their full power.
The realization, when it crystallized fully in his mind somewhere in the fourteenth minute, very nearly made him laugh again, except that it also made him want to scream. He had been bleeding and burning and breaking himself against this seven-bodied wall for a quarter of an hour, and these two, these two children, the two strongest things on the field, the two who were actually hurting him, were fighting him with a governor still on the engine. He could see it. A veteran of ten thousand duels could not fail to see it. Sairaorg's blows were monstrous, yes, but they were controlled monstrous, measured, a man throwing ninety percent and keeping ten in reserve out of sheer disciplined habit. And Marid, Marid was worse, Marid's dark aura never once flared or billowed or spent itself in grand display; it stayed condensed, coiled tight against his skin, a fraction of itself deliberately shown and the rest held back behind a decade of careful, deflecting habit, and the boy fought him like a surgeon rather than a berserker, spending exactly as much as each exchange required and not one drop more.
"You insult me," Kokabiel snarled during one of their close passes, catching Marid's wrist-blade on a construct of hardened light and holding it there, their faces inches apart once more. "Both of you. You stand there, the strongest things on this field, the only two who have made me bleed, and you fight me with your off hands. You keep your true power leashed like a dog while your friends bleed to cover for you. Why? Is it arrogance? Do you think so little of the Star of God that you will not even show him your best?"
And Marid Gremory, lightning-blue eyes cold and steady over the locked blades, gave him an answer the Cadre did not expect.
"No," Marid said quietly. "I think a great deal of you, Kokabiel. You're the most dangerous thing I've ever fought." He twisted his wrist; the light-construct groaned. "Which is exactly why I'm not going to hand you the satisfaction of seeing everything I have. You came here to make my father grieve. You came here to start a war with a spectacle." The black-and-silver aura pulsed, once, tight against his skin. "So you're not going to get a spectacle. You're going to get ground into the dirt by children, quietly, efficiently, with power to spare, and the whole world is going to hear how the great Star of God was put down by a pack of Devils who didn't even have to try their hardest. That's not arrogance." His voice dropped. "That's the most insulting thing I could possibly do to you. And we both know it."
Kokabiel's face went white with fury, and then, because the Star of God had never in his life lacked for a certain terrible honesty, it went white with something that was almost, almost, a kind of respect.
"...You wicked little thing," he breathed. "You are exactly your father's son."
"No," Marid said, and there was no amusement in it at all. "I'm worse. Sairaorg. Now."
The end came fast, once it came, the way the end of a long fight so often does.
They had been building to it for several exchanges without Kokabiel quite realizing it, the way the whole machine had been subtly herding him, drifting his position with every forced adjustment, steering him by inches toward one particular patch of the ruined courtyard. He had been too busy surviving to read the longer pattern. He read it at last in the final seconds, when Sona's water sealed three of his four escape lanes at once and Seekvaira's space-magic fouled the fourth and he found himself, for the first time all night, pinned in open air directly above a wide, intricate magic circle etched into the earth of the courtyard, a circle of dull, sullen crimson light that had been lying dormant and ignored on that field since before the Big Eight had arrived.
Valper Galilei's circle. The one the mad priest had spent his last hours inscribing. The focusing array, the great bomb, the working meant to channel the fused power of four Excalibur fragments into a single apocalyptic detonation that would have erased Kuoh from the map at Kokabiel's word.
It had never been triggered. Valper was dead, and the fragments had been scattered, and the circle had sat there dormant and harmless all through the battle, a ruin of a plan. But a focusing array is a focusing array, and it did not much care what power was poured into it, only that power was poured.
And Kokabiel was hanging directly above it.
He understood, in the last half-second, exactly what they had done and exactly where they had put him, and he opened his mouth to curse them all one final time—
And Marid and Sairaorg hit him together, from above, one from each side, each of them seizing a fistful of the Cadre's remaining wings and the collar of his robes, and they folded him, the two of them wrapping their arms around the Star of God in a single shared, bone-crushing grip, and then they drove him down, headfirst, with the full and now entirely unleashed strength of both their bodies behind the motion, arcing him over and down and down in a brutal, beautiful, perfectly-executed aerial throw, and they slammed Kokabiel, Star of God, Cadre of the Grigori, skull-first into the dead center of Valper Galilei's bomb.
The circle took the impact and discharged all at once, every scrap of ambient power still stored in its dormant lattice detonating upward into the body pinned at its heart, and the courtyard vanished in a pillar of crimson fire that climbed into the barrier-dome overhead and splashed against its inner surface and lit the whole sealed battlefield the color of blood.
When the fire cleared, Marid and Sairaorg were crouched at the lip of a fresh and enormous crater, both of them having kicked clear at the last possible instant, both of them scorched and smoking and grinning fiercely at one another. And at the bottom of the crater, driven a full body-length into the broken earth, lay Kokabiel.
He was not dead. Even that, even all of that, had not been enough to kill the Star of God.
But he was, at long and bloody last, unconscious, his seven ruined wings splayed limp across the shattered ground, his ancient face slack, the terrible crimson light finally, mercifully, gone out of his eyes.
The barrier-dome held its red glow for one more heartbeat.
And then it shattered.
It did not shatter from Kokabiel's defeat. It shattered from the outside, from a single point high on the dome's curved surface, a point of searing white-blue brilliance that punched through the great containment barrier Sona Sitri's peerage had held around the school all night as though it were wet paper, and through the breach came a figure in armor.
Every exhausted Devil on that field turned toward it, nerves screaming, the awful fear flooding through them all at once that this was reinforcement, that after everything, after all of it, there was more.
The figure descended slowly into the ruined courtyard, and the moonlight caught its armor, and the armor was white. White and blue and silver, a sleek and gleaming suit of dragon-scaled plate, and from its back spread not feathered wings but great wings of blue-white light shaped like jeweled vanes, and the whole of it hummed with a power so vast, so casual, so utterly beyond the spent and gasping young Devils arrayed across that field, that several of them felt their knees go weak with the pure animal recognition of a predator entirely out of their weight class.
[...So. The Vanishing Dragon.] Draig's voice rumbled up out of the gauntlet on Issei's arm, where the pawn lay propped against a chunk of rubble, too battered to stand but conscious and staring. There was something in the old dragon's tone that none of them had heard before. Something almost like longing. [Of course it would be tonight.]
The White Dragon Emperor touched down lightly amid the wreckage, folding his wings of light, and surveyed the battlefield, the seven heaving, bleeding heirs, the broken Cadre at the bottom of the crater, with an air of faint, detached interest.
"Relax," he said, and his voice through the helm was young, bored, and entirely unbothered. "I'm not here for any of you. Frankly, from the look of this place, you've had a long enough night without me adding to it." He tilted his helmed head toward the crater. "Governor Azazel sent me. I'm here to collect that." A gauntleted finger pointed at the unconscious Kokabiel. "The Grigori like to handle their own garbage internally. He's been a problem for Azazel a lot longer than he's been a problem for you. So. I take him off your hands, I save everyone the diplomatic headache of a Cadre in a Devil holding cell, and we all get to go home. Any objections?"
Marid held up one hand, a clear wait, and with the other he traced a quick, precise communication circle in the air beside his head. It flickered to life, and his father's voice, taut with a tension that had been wound tighter and tighter all through the long helpless minutes of watching from beyond the barrier, came through it at once.
"Marid. Marid, are you—the barrier's down, I can see the field, who in the name of the Maous is—"
"White Dragon Emperor," Marid said quietly into the circle, keeping his eyes on the armored figure the entire time. "Balance Breaker. He says Azazel sent him to collect Kokabiel. Dad. Is that true? Did Azazel tell you he'd be sending someone?"
There was a pause on the other end, a pause full of the sound of Sirzechs Lucifer rapidly recalibrating a night that had already held far too many surprises. When his voice came back it was careful, and it was shocked, and it was, in the end, grudgingly affirmative.
"...He did," Sirzechs admitted. "Not an hour ago. Azazel contacted me directly, said he'd learned Kokabiel had gone entirely off the leash, said he would send his own man to deal with it before it became a war between our factions. I did not expect his 'own man' to be the Hakuryūkō. Nobody told me Azazel had the Vanishing Dragon in his pocket." A breath. "But the offer stands, and it is a true one. Let him take Kokabiel, son. A Cadre in our custody is a political catastrophe waiting to happen. Let the Grigori deal with their own. You've done enough. You've all done more than enough."
Marid closed the circle. He looked at the White Dragon Emperor for a long moment.
"All right," he said. "Kokabiel's yours. Take him and go."
"Sensible." The armored figure strode to the lip of the crater, dropped down into it without ceremony, and hauled the unconscious Cadre up out of the broken earth by the collar, slinging the Star of God's limp body over one shoulder-plate as casually as a man carrying a sack of grain. He turned to climb back out—
And then he paused, and his helmed head turned toward the far edge of the field, toward the scattered dead, toward the crumpled white-and-grey heap that had been Freed Sellzen, the mad exorcist who had tormented Issei and Asia and died for it earlier that same terrible night. "Hm. And Azazel said to tidy up loose ends while I was here. This one's a former church attack dog, isn't he? Grigori'll want to know what the church was really up to, sending a thing like—"
"No."
The word came from Marid, and it came with a weight behind it that stopped the White Dragon Emperor mid-sentence.
Marid had not moved, but something about him had changed. The exhaustion was still there, the scorches and the shallow wounds and the bone-deep weariness of a quarter-hour spent trading blows with a Cadre. But underneath it, that lightless black-and-silver aura, which had stayed so disciplined and condensed all through the fight, had begun, very quietly, to build.
"Kokabiel, you can have," Marid said, and his voice was perfectly level. "That was agreed between Lord Lucifer and Governor General Azazel, and I will honor it. But Freed Sellzen stays. His body stays. On this field, with these people, where there are questions that need answering and a church that needs to account for what it sent here tonight. You don't get to disappear him into a Grigori vault so that everyone who deserves the truth gets handed a convenient hole where the evidence used to be." His eyes were very steady. "Freed stays."
"And if I decide he doesn't?" The White Dragon Emperor's tone was still mild, still bored, but there was a new edge of interest in it now, the faint curiosity of a predator seeing whether the prey intends to be amusing about it.
Marid did not answer with words. He answered by letting the aura build a little further.
And he was not alone. Beside him, Sairaorg Bael cracked his bruised knuckles and let his monstrous distortion warp the air once more, grinning through a split lip. Behind them, battered as she was, Yumi climbed to her feet and raised her brand-new crescent-moon shield, its silver light undimmed. Issei Hyoudou, who could not stand, dragged himself upright against the rubble anyway, Boosted Gear flaring. Rias, Sona, Cleria, Seekvaira, one-armed Dagon leaning on Seekvaira's shoulder, every single one of them, spent and bleeding and running on nothing at all, turned toward the White Dragon Emperor and began, quietly, to gather what little power they had left.
The armored figure looked at them. At all of them. At a field full of children who had just ground a Cadre of the Grigori into unconsciousness and who were now, visibly exhausted, visibly outclassed, visibly aware that they were outclassed, squaring up to do the same to the Vanishing Dragon over the corpse of a man who had done nothing to earn their protection except die on their soil.
And he laughed. A short, genuine, surprised bark of it.
"You're serious." He shook his helmed head slowly. "You've got to be the most exhausted collection of Devils I've ever seen, and you want to throw down with me, over a dead exorcist, on principle." He hefted Kokabiel higher on his shoulder. "You do understand that all of you together, right now, in the state you're in? You wouldn't last a minute. I could put every one of you back in the dirt before your little shield-girl there finished raising her arm. You know that, yes?"
"Oh, I'm sure you could," Marid said, bored right back at him, though the aura around him did not diminish by a hair. "Keep dreaming about it, if it makes you feel strong. But look around. You're inside what's left of a barrier that's already broken, standing on an open field, with my father watching through that breach and half the Underworld's reinforcements inbound. You start a fight here, now, over a body, and you turn a clean handoff into an incident between the Grigori and the Devils on the very night Azazel sent you to prevent one." He tilted his head. "So unless you're planning to put that bubble of yours back up and make a real evening of it, I'd suggest you take Kokabiel and leave with him, while the leaving's good. Before I decide the diplomatic headache of killing you is worth the trouble after all."
For a long moment the two of them simply looked at each other, the spent Devil lord and the fresh Vanishing Dragon, and the whole field held its breath.
Then the White Dragon Emperor snorted, and the tension went out of him all at once, and he stepped back from Freed Sellzen's body. "Fine. Keep your corpse. It's not worth the lecture Azazel would give me." He turned toward the breach in the barrier above. "You've got more nerve than sense, son of Lucifer. I'll give you that much."
But before he could spread his wings of light and go, another voice spoke, deeper and older than either of theirs, rolling up out of the gauntlet on Issei's arm.
[Albion.]
The White Dragon Emperor went very still. And from his own armor, from somewhere deep within the gleaming white plate, a second ancient voice answered, and the whole field felt the weight of two primordial enemies recognizing each other across a battlefield for the first time in a very long while.
[...Draig. So. You've found yourself a host at last. A loud, half-trained, barely-conscious one, by the look of him. How fitting for you.]
[Says the dragon riding around on the back of a brat who thinks he's bored,] Draig rumbled, and there was a terrible fondness in it, the fondness of an eternal rivalry finally within reach again. [It's been a long time, old enemy. Too long. I can feel it, same as you can. The pull. You want this as badly as I do.]
[I will not deny it,] Albion said. [But not tonight.] There was a note of something almost like regret in the ancient dragon's voice. [Look at your host, Draig. He can barely stand. He emptied himself hours ago against a Fallen who was toying with him, and he has nothing left. If my host and I fought yours now, it would not be a battle. It would be a slaughter, and a boring one, and it would settle nothing between us. There is no honor in it and no satisfaction in it. I would win in a heartbeat and be left as hungry afterward as I am now.]
[...Agreed,] Draig said, and the old dragon's voice was heavy with the same longing and the same discipline. [When we settle it, we settle it true. Both hosts whole. Both of us at our full and terrible strength. A fight worthy of the name Heavenly Dragon, not this.]
[Then it is a promise,] Albion said. [Grow strong, Red One. Grow your host strong. Because the next time we meet on a field like this, there will be no barrier to collect anyone, and no excuses, and no mercy.] A pause. [I look forward to it more than I have looked forward to anything in a thousand years.]
[As do I, old friend,] Draig rumbled. [As do I.]
The White Dragon Emperor shook his head slowly, as though waking from something. "...Dragons," he muttered, with the air of a man who had heard that particular speech one too many times. "Fine. A promise. Grow strong, Red Dragon's host, so my partner stops sulking." He spread his wings of blue-white light, Kokabiel's limp form slung over his shoulder. "Try not to die before then. It'd be embarrassing for everyone."
And then he was gone, a single streak of white-blue brilliance punching back up through the breach in the barrier and vanishing into the night sky, carrying the unconscious Star of God away with him, and the ruined courtyard was suddenly, shockingly quiet.
Kuoh Academy — the aftermath
For a long moment, nobody moved. Nobody quite dared to believe it was over.
Then the barrier-dome, no longer needed, came down at last as Sona's spent peerage finally let it fall, dissolving into motes of fading light, and the real night sky opened up overhead, cool and ordinary and scattered with indifferent stars, and the cool ordinary air of the real world rolled across the battlefield, and it was, at last, over.
The breath went out of all of them at once.
Rias Gremory sat down heavily in the rubble, not gracefully, not as a noble heiress should, just dropping where she stood as her legs finally gave up the argument, and she began, quietly, to laugh, a slightly hysterical, deeply relieved sound. Akeno half-collapsed over the still-breathing form of Kenta she'd been shielding and let out a long, shuddering exhale. Sona Sitri closed her eyes and permitted herself, for exactly three seconds, to look as tired as she felt, before the mask of composure slid back into place. Cleria Belial had an arm around her bleeding, one-armed friend and was holding onto him like she might never let go. Seekvaira sat down in the dirt beside them both and did not say anything clever at all, which for Seekvaira was its own kind of eloquence. Issei Hyoudou simply passed out against his chunk of rubble, the adrenaline finally running out, a small satisfied smile on his battered face.
They had done it. Against a Cadre of the Grigori, against the Star of God himself, exhausted and outmatched and terrified, they had held the line and they had won, and the city behind them slept on, safe, never knowing how close it had come.
The injuries were real, and they were many, but there were no dead among them, and that, tonight, was a victory beyond price. Sairaorg and Marid had come through the worst of it with the least to show for it, which was its own grim testament to what the two of them were, bruised and scorched and bleeding from a dozen shallow scores, Sairaorg's flank blackened, Marid's forearms raw where he'd caught light on his own skin, but nothing broken, nothing that would not mend in a day. The magicians were in worse shape, not from wounds so much as from the bottomless well of exhaustion that came from pouring out every drop of power one possessed and then finding a little more; Rias and Sona and Cleria and Seekvaira were all of them bone-pale and trembling and huffing like they'd run to the Underworld and back, utterly spent. Dagon Glasya-Labolas had it worst of the Big Eight by a clear margin, his forearm broken clean through and a long gash down the side of his head still weeping blood into his eye where Kokabiel's fist had flung him through the building, and he wore the whole bloody mess with the stubborn, lopsided grin of a man who had taken the hit for a friend he'd known all his life and would do it again without a second's hesitation.
And at the field's edge, the peerages: Kenta alive but gravely hurt, his arm ruined, his body a map of everything the Star of God had done to the lion who'd dared burn his wings; Issei unconscious and smiling; Asia weeping with sheer relief as her Twilight Healing, slowly recovering, went back to its gentle work; Akeno spent to the last ember but whole; Koneko and Kiba slumped together off to the side, battered and bruised and nursing their own wounds, and the two exorcists, Xenovia and Masomi, sitting near them doing the same, their blades laid across their knees; and Yumi standing over all of them with a brand-new Balance Breaker humming on her arm, the crescent-moon shield still raised, as though some part of her did not quite trust that the sky was really empty now.
It was Rias, still sitting in the rubble, who first noticed that one person on the field was not laughing, or weeping, or collapsing in relief.
Marid Gremory was standing very still, and he was looking at them. At her. At Rias, and at Sona, and at the whole assembled, exhausted, victorious crowd of them.
And the look on his face made the breath catch in Rias's throat and the laughter die on her lips.
It was not relief. It was not pride. It was not the warm, fierce, battle-forged camaraderie of comrades who had survived something terrible together. It was cold, so cold, a look of such profound and quiet fury that it seemed to lower the temperature of the whole ruined courtyard by several degrees, a look that would have made the sun itself feel like a dying coal by comparison. Marid stood there, battered and bleeding and victorious, and he looked at all of them with eyes like chips of winter sky, and not one of them, not Rias, not Sona, not the proud heirs of the great houses, could hold that gaze for more than a second before they had to look away.
The relief curdled in every stomach on the field.
Because whatever came next, whatever reckoning that look promised, they all understood, with sudden and sinking certainty, that the battle against Kokabiel had not been the hard conversation of the evening.
That one was still coming.
Chapter End
AND THERE IT IS. The one I promised you last chapter. The Big Eight vs Kokabiel, gloves OFF, and I hope to every Maou it delivered, because I have been dreaming about this fight for a VERY long time.
Let's talk about it. First and most important: notice HOW they won. Not one of them beat Kokabiel. They beat him TOGETHER, as a machine, and that was the entire point. Sona running the board, Rias and Dagon and Cleria sealing his sky, Seekvaira fouling his footing, Cleria's 'Worthless' eating light arrows, and Sairaorg and Marid as the hammer at the front. The whole thing was designed so the reader goes 'oh, THAT'S how you put down a Cadre' instead of 'lol one devil punched him really hard.' He's not weak. He's outnumbered by genuine heavy hitters AND he came in already hurt (thank you, Kenta, you absolute legend, those three burned wings won this fight). I really wanted the win to feel EARNED and tactical, not handed to anybody.
Second: MARID AND SAIRAORG NEVER WENT ALL OUT. I planted this EVERYWHERE and then had Kokabiel say it out loud, because it matters later. The Star of God himself, a thousand-year veteran, clocks that the two strongest kids on the field are fighting him with the handbrake on. Marid's aura stays CONDENSED the whole fight, never billows, never shows off. And that little exchange, 'you're going to get ground into the dirt by children, quietly, with power to spare, and the whole world will hear how the great Kokabiel got put down by a pack of Devils who didn't even try their hardest, that's the most insulting thing I could do to you'? THAT is Marid's whole philosophy in one speech. It pays to be underestimated. Remember this fight. We will absolutely be coming back to the question of what Marid was actually holding back. 😈
YUMI GOT HER BALANCE BREAKER!!! In the exact moment of 'not them, not him, not while I can still move,' shielding Kenta and the wounded. Lunar Aegis evolving from a formless barrier into that crescent-moon physical shield that DRINKS attacks? I've been saving that for a moment that mattered and I couldn't think of one that mattered more. My girl earned it.
Dagon throwing himself in front of Cleria = peak Glasya-Labolas family loyalty and I will not apologize for breaking his arm over it. And the SUPERPLEX. Marid and Sairaorg folding Kokabiel headfirst into Valper's own would-be Kuoh-bomb? The villain's doomsday device becoming the finishing move? CHEF'S KISS. I've wanted to do that for ages.
Then: the White Dragon Emperor. Azazel's cleanup man, in to collect Kokabiel, cool as you like. And yes, the Draig/Albion 'not tonight, we settle it TRUE, both at full strength' promise, straight from the heart of what makes that rivalry great. But notice Marid holding the line on Freed's body, a whole EXHAUSTED field squaring up against the Vanishing Dragon on PRINCIPLE even knowing they'd lose. That's the culture Marid's built around himself. (And no, before anyone asks, the Hakuryuukou's full deal is a story for another arc. 👀)
AND THAT ENDING. Everybody's relieved, everybody's celebrating... and then they see Marid's face. Because here's the thing the adrenaline let them forget: Rias and the others charged into a fight against a CADRE, and the whole reason Marid, Sairaorg and the Big Eight had to come save them in the first place is a conversation that is NOT going to be pleasant. The battle's over. The reckoning is not. Next chapter is going to HURT, and I can't wait.
As ALWAYS, please please PLEASE leave a comment and let me know what you thought! Constructive criticism is hugely appreciated, if something felt off or you spotted a plot hole, tell me! Your comments genuinely fuel these chapters.
Until next time, stay safe and have fun!
DGZalama out!
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