Freya
She had been observing him from the moment he regained consciousness. Even before he had fully taken in the ruined sanctum, she had known something was different. It was there in the way he sat up. In the way his eyes sharpened almost immediately. In the quiet, oppressive density his body now carried without effort, as though power had become his natural state instead of something he needed to call upon.
His bearing had changed. His presence had changed. Even the look in his eyes had changed — something sharper and more deliberate in them now, not unfamiliar, but unmistakably altered. A refinement. A deepening. Which meant this wasn't just a level up. Something in him had reorganised itself around that new power.
And still, despite everything, he had looked for her first. That small, unforced instinct — checking on her safety before anything else — sat at the heart of all her calculations and pleased her more than she cared to admit.
When he asked for a fight with Ottar before answering her questions, the request had caught her slightly off guard. Not because it was reckless — recklessness was practically one of his native languages — but because of the reason he gave for it. He wanted to burn off excess energy first. That single phrase slotted itself neatly into the picture forming in her mind.
As far as she was aware, his first level up had presented no such issue. Aside from the standard increase in capability, she had observed no oddities in him afterward, and none of her executives had reported any loss of control or instability either. He had adapted to that growth cleanly. Effortlessly, even. Which meant this time, the Excelia had not just settled into his existing structure. It must have overfilled it.
If he was asking to expend energy before he could sit still and speak with her, then whatever had happened during this Class Change had given him more than a simple rise in numbers. It had altered his body in a way that left too much power moving through it at once. Too much force. Too much momentum. More than a normal level up should have caused. So she had granted the request.
Part of her had done so because she wanted answers, and he had promised her they would unravel the matter together afterward. But the truth was that she had granted it primarily because she needed the time herself. There were too many conclusions crowding her thoughts, too many irregularities from the update itself, and she needed a few moments to put them into order before she began questioning him properly.
Then the crimson light had flared. Freya had braced herself on instinct. The first time Max had teleported her, the sensation had been abrupt and invasive. It had required closeness. It had pulled at her with just enough force to feel inelegant, as though the magic had seized space by the throat and forced it to comply. Effective, certainly. But raw, unrefined — like him, then.
This time, the difference was immediate, and she filed it away with everything else. They were not standing close together, and yet the spell reached all of them without strain. There was no awkward need for proximity. No sense of being yanked through space. No unpleasant wrench in her core. Even the magic circle, when it flashed beneath them, felt more controlled — less like something erupting, more like something obeying. Which meant his fine control had grown alongside his brute output.
She had just enough time to notice Ottar's tension beside her. Her captain hated this sort of movement. He tolerated it, because he tolerated anything she allowed, but the tightness in his shoulders and the set of his jaw made his distaste plain. Freya might have found it amusing under other circumstances; today, it was another small point on her inner ledger. Even Ottar's mere discomfort with the spell emphasised how much smoother Max had made it.
Then the world changed.
The acrid scent of ozone and scorched stone vanished. In its place came the heavy sweetness of blooming flora, damp air, soft earth, and something cool and mineral beneath it all. Her foot touched luminescent moss instead of cracked marble, and the transition was so smooth it felt less like traveling and more like reality had been quietly reshaped.
Freya immediately braced herself, instinctively attempting to clamp down on her aura. The abruptness of the transfer left her no time to get her divinity-suppressing cloak. Being a strong Goddess, she was sure the Dungeon would have already noticed her presence and should have already started screaming. She braced herself for the crystal walls to fracture and birth irregulars to eradicate the divine threat, as bringing a deity into the Lower Floors unshielded was an absolute guarantee of a catastrophe.
Yet... silence.
The Under Garden remained perfectly, impossibly peaceful. The soft light trembled over the petals, entirely undisturbed by her presence.
Freya's eyes widened slightly, her brilliant mind slowing down to carefully dissect the monumental impossibility before her. Why was the labyrinth not reacting? She looked at the fading crimson particles of his magic, then at Max himself. Her first thought was that his teleportation circle was actively suppressing her aura, insulating her in a pocket of space detached from the Dungeon's awareness.
But she quickly discarded the notion. For that to be the case, the magic circle would need to remain active, and there was no trace of his spell lingering in the damp air around them.
Then, her thoughts turned to a much wilder possibility: his Dungeon-linked Skill, Lux Tenebris.
She didn't know exactly what had transpired in the labyrinth before they first met at the Hostess for him to get that skill, but she knew it tied him directly to this place. And now, he had just undergone a massive Class-up, from a Low to a Mid-Class Devil.
Was the skill forcing the Dungeon to focus entirely on him instead of her?
The labyrinth was, fundamentally, a living organism. If it was currently dedicating all of its absolute senses to assessing him—monitoring this sudden, overwhelming evolution of his alien existence—it might simply lack the bandwidth to register a Goddess standing mere paces away. He wasn't hiding her; his very presence was acting as a total sensory eclipse.
It was a staggering deduction which made a spark of reckless curiosity flared in Freya's chest. She felt a sudden, profound urge to test the absolute limits of this theory—to release a deliberate, concentrated pulse of her divinity into the air just to see if the Dungeon was truly too fixated on monitoring Max to notice her.
Her aura hummed, a fraction of a second away from expanding, before she ruthlessly caught herself.
No. If she pushed too far and broke whatever strange distraction Lux Tenebris was providing, the crystal walls would immediately shatter to birth an Irregular. It would plunge them into a survival situation and completely disrupt the spar Max had just brought them here for.
With that conclusion made and her curiosity firmly suppressed, she let out a soft exhale. She could only muse, with a flicker of dark amusement, what Ouranos's reaction would be if the ancient God ever realized an uncloaked deity was currently strolling through the 28th Floor without triggering a single alarm.
That was when she finally examined the floor around them. If it had been any other day, she might have lingered on it. The Under Garden was beautiful in a way that felt almost unreasonable. She had seen it before through the flow of Excelia and secondhand perception, but that was not the same as standing within it. The great crystal formations caught the ambient light and returned it in fractured glimmers. Vast beds of flowers stretched across the cavern, silver and blue and pale violet, soft light trembling over their petals. The entire floor looked like some impossible meeting place between a garden and a dream.
It reminded her of her first meeting with Mia, in a garden of similar variety, all those years ago. The memory brushed across her like a stray breeze — old and soft and not entirely unwelcome. Here, with only Kairu and Ottar and Max, she let it show on her face for a moment, then released it.
The thought passed quickly. She had more urgent things to occupy her after all.
Kairu settled beside her almost at once, his gelatinous body taking up position with the easy instinct of a creature that already understood its role. The slime remained close enough to shield her if needed, looking in his usual form as if what he had absorbed earlier hadn't left any trace.
Freya spared him the smallest glance of approval, then turned her full attention to the clearing ahead.
In the moments she had spent analyzing the impossibility of their surroundings and fighting her own reckless urges, the fight had already begun.
Max had discarded his ruined shirt and gone in bare-handed. That, more than anything else, told her something about his mood. He was not approaching this as a measured drill or a neat little test. He wanted impact. Resistance. The direct language of force meeting force. He wanted to feel where the limits of his new body actually were. Which meant this was as much diagnosis as it was indulgence.
Ottar understood that immediately. He did not indulge Max. He did not patronize him. He tested him. The Warlord opened at what Freya judged to be roughly Level 4 stats, which was the correct decision. Against a fresh Level 3, it should have been more than enough to establish control of the exchange. More than enough to pressure, overwhelm, and define the shape of the spar within seconds.
Instead, Max met him head-on.
Freya watched the first several exchanges in silence. Parry. Deflection. Counter. Adjustment. No wasted movement. No startled scrambling to keep up. No signs of being forced into a pace he could not manage. Each clean response ticked another box in her mind. If anything, the opposite was true. Max was reading him cleanly and answering with unnerving certainty, his body moving with a speed and confidence that turned what should have been a one-sided fight into a genuine contest almost at once.
In a few moments, he did more than match Ottar's rhythm. He disturbed it.
That was the part Freya found most revealing. Matching strength was one thing. Matching speed was another. But interfering with Ottar's rhythm — forcing him to reset, compensate, and re-evaluate in real time — was not the behavior of someone barely surviving the gap. It was the behavior of someone whose foundations were so absurdly dense that the normal hierarchy of levels no longer applied cleanly. His EX stats were doing exactly what the Falna should never have allowed them to do. They were turning a freshly advanced Level 3 into something that could contest power a full level above him without breaking.
It did not take Ottar long to recognise that. Freya saw the shift in him before most mortals would have. A little more weight behind the strikes. A little more compression in his movement. A little less generosity in the intervals between attacks. His Level 5 stats. The equation changed; she felt it as clearly as if someone had rewritten a formula in front of her.
Logically, that should have ended the ambiguity. Instead, Max held. He did not dominate — not completely, not yet — but neither was he driven back in any definitive sense. His muscles tightened under the strain, his fists wreathed in the faint dark crackle of Demonic Power, and he traded blows with Orario's apex as the shockwaves of their impacts tore through flower beds and opened fresh wounds in the dungeon.
A shockwave tore through the crystal beds, displacing the damp air and rattling lightly in Freya's lungs. The sensation dragged her back, inevitably, to the moment of the level up itself. This violence, multiplied, had shredded her sanctum.
His body had not merely adjusted during the update. It had convulsed under the pressure of a transformation too large to contain cleanly, and when control slipped, his magic had lashed outward with enough force to wreck her chambers without discrimination. They were not fragile rooms meant only to impress; they were reinforced, warded, resilient. The destruction Max had unleashed had ignored that distinction completely. Which meant the power moving through him now was not operating on normal mortal tolerances at all.
When that wave of Destruction had come toward her, she had felt something she had not felt in a very long time. Not concern. Not irritation. Not even anger.
Fear.
Not for herself. She was a Goddess. At worst, the loss of her vessel would have sent her back to Tenkai. An unwanted ending, certainly, but not a true death. Under ordinary circumstances, that would have been merely infuriating. But Max was not ordinary. Max was a foreigner. If she had been sent back, and he later died here, what then?
If Max died here, she did not know where that impossibly layered, alien soul would go. It might not return to the Tenkai she knew. It might slip back to whatever strange reality had forged it, or fall somewhere else entirely, out of her reach. The possibility that he might simply vanish from her grasp — unrecoverable — made something cold and ugly twist in her chest. She hated not knowing. She hated anything that suggested he was not entirely hers.
A violent crash dragged her attention briefly back to the clearing. Max had turned one of Ottar's heavier strikes aside just enough to spoil the follow-through, then answered with a counter that forced the Warlord to shift his footing. Clean. Efficient. Infuriatingly graceful. The sight soothed something raw in her even as it sharpened the next line of thought.
Pride stirred warm and sudden in her chest. Freya ignored it for the moment and returned to the next problem: the Class Change itself.
That had been the second anomaly, and perhaps the more profound one. It had not been a simple rise from one level to the next. She had felt the difference immediately when the divine script reformed under her eyes. His transition from Low-Class to Mid-Class had not behaved like a mere adjustment in status. It had felt like a deeper layer of himself had surfaced and made a claim on the body that housed it.
She could see the result in him even now. His whole presence had changed. The beginning of that strange symphony she had sensed in his soul before was no longer only spiritual. It had begun to materialise in the flesh. There was something more defined in the set of his shoulders, in the carriage of his head, in the effortless nobility that now clung to him without affectation. Predatory, yes. But not only that. Refined. Elevated. Which meant the Falna had not just strengthened his vessel; it had dragged more of his underlying nature into view.
And he had aged. Not dramatically. Not enough for a mortal eye to necessarily remark upon at once. But Freya saw it plainly. If she had taken him for fifteen before, she would now place him closer to seventeen. The reconstruction had not merely strengthened him; it had advanced him physically, dragging him toward his prime as though his body were trying to catch up to the truth of whatever he already was. Nineteen, perhaps twenty, at full maturation.
The thought made her heart skip. That was embarrassing. It was also difficult to resist. If this shift had taken two levels to manifest, then the next Class Change would likely do something similar — perhaps around Level 5. The idea of what that might make him was enough to send a quiet heat through her that she very deliberately did not indulge for more than a moment.
Because behind that excitement lurked a more sobering thought.
The level up had proceeded with a degree of autonomy she did not find acceptable.
Freya's fingers tightened lightly against her dress. Ordinarily, a deity did more than simply unlock the process. They interpreted. They guided. They drew the Excelia where it needed to go, explained the Developmental Abilities, confirmed the shape of the update, and brought divine order to mortal growth. That was not ornamental. It was part of the structure. Yet with Max, her single drop of ichor had felt almost incidental after the fact.
The Falna had moved as though it already knew what to do. As though something within him had prepared the route in advance and only needed her ichor to authorise it. Independent Action. Her thoughts turned, once again, to that hollow stretch in his suite. The vast expenditure of mana. The strange sense of construction rather than combat. She had not understood it then. Now, the pattern was clearer, and she disliked every possibility it suggested.
Had he built some magical protocol in private? Had that magic interfaced with the Falna itself? Had he, knowingly or unknowingly, created the conditions under which even a level up might begin to bypass her? If so, then this wasn't just an anomaly. It was a precedent.
Freya's silver eyes narrowed.
No.
That would not do. The idea that she might one day become unnecessary to his updates — worse, unnecessary to his level ups — landed somewhere between insult and threat. She could tolerate many things from him. She could even admire ingenuity at her own expense, on occasion. But she would not calmly accept being reduced to a ceremonial presence in the maintenance of Max's Falna. Especially not by some magic tied to a Grimoire she herself had enabled him to use.
That conversation would happen today. Even if she had to drag every answer out of him one by one.
She exhaled slowly and put the more venomous edge of the thought away. Not discarded — filed. It would be retrieved the moment she had him across her with no more excuses between them.
When her attention returned to the battle, it had already moved on without her. At some point the hand-to-hand exchange had ended. Armor had appeared on both of them. Steel now flashed through the flower-lit cavern, and she had not seen the exact moment Max had drawn his sword. That, in itself, was mildly irritating. She disliked missing details, especially where he was concerned. The anger had cost her something, and she made a quiet note of that too.
Still, the shape of the escalation was clear. What had begun as a brutal test of body and movement had sharpened into something more dangerous. Their blades met with enough force to send displaced air rushing across the cavern. Flowers bent and tore under the pressure. Fresh cracks spread through the ground where they landed. The beautiful floor around them was being methodically ruined.
Freya minded less than she perhaps should have. Her thoughts moved to the final cluster of anomalies.
Fortune reaching F was a leap, yes, but not an incomprehensible one. Max had a talent for walking knowingly into situations that should have destroyed him and emerging with the world itself looking complicit. If the Falna had chosen to recognise that pattern aggressively, she could at least follow the logic.
But Devil —
That was absurd. A duplication of his own racial nature, written again into another category as though the Falna had looked at him and decided one acknowledgment was insufficient. And then the Integrated Abilities — simply there, unprecedented and undocumented, because with Max apparently even the Falna had lost any interest in behaving normally. A new Developmental Ability beginning at G instead of I, suggesting not a fresh acquisition but a continuation: recognition that his time as a Low-Class Devil had already established a baseline that the new entry was merely making visible.
EX stats. Two level ups in a fortnight. A Class Change in the same span. Autonomous update behavior. Integrated abilities. A racial-developmental overlap that should not have existed and yet did.
Logical. Infuriating. Fascinating.
Freya almost laughed. In all her time in Gekai, with all the prodigies, disasters, monsters, heroes, and divine absurdities she had witnessed, this was what finally gave her a proper headache. Not war. Not politics. Not ancient wagers. Not even losing to Hera.
And still, the headache was not the strongest thing she felt. That was the truly irritating part.
Beneath the strain of analysis, beneath the unease, beneath the cold edge of uncertainty about what he was and what he was becoming, there was exhilaration. Real exhilaration. Not the mild, cultivated pleasure of watching a promising soul exceed expectations. Something rawer than that. The thrill of standing before something genuinely new — something she could not predict cleanly, something powerful enough to resist being fully understood, and something that looked back at her with the same unnerving attention she gave it.
She had walked this world for a very long time. She had seen prodigies and catastrophes, heroes and monsters, gods playing at mortality and mortals grasping at divinity. She had been surprised, occasionally. She had been moved, rarely. She had been unsettled perhaps a handful of times in all her time in Gekai.
Maximus was all three at once. He was absurd. He was dangerous. He was enigmatic in ways that made her want to pry him open and worship him in equal measure. And worse, he had the wit and the charm to make his impossible nature even more compelling every time she thought she had measured it.
Across the ruined floor, he slipped just outside the path of Ottar's blade and answered with a strike of his own — fluid and lethal and smiling as he did it.
Freya felt her own lips curve.
She did not know how long she would be able to maintain any meaningful restraint if he continued like this. The uncertainty should have troubled her more than it did. Instead, to her private irritation, she found herself looking forward to discovering exactly where her limits were.
-◈ -
As she lost herself in that tightening knot of thought, the battle changed. It did not happen with a shout or a dramatic pause, but with the quiet, seamless logic of two combatants who had simultaneously run up against the same conclusion. Flesh alone was no longer enough to settle the question between them, and without any apparent signal, magic entered the exchange.
Max's Destruction surfaced first. It did not erupt outward the way it had during the Goliath fight. It clung to him instead, wreathing his arms and shoulders in dark, unstable currents, and Freya noted with quiet interest that he was no longer simply releasing it. He was shaping it — using it to punish proximity, to make contact itself a dangerous proposition. That distinction mattered. It told her something about what the Class Change had done to his control.
Ottar answered the only way Ottar ever did. Beastification took hold, and the Warlord who had already been holding back nothing on a physical level became something harder to contend with entirely. His durability climbed to heights where Max's Destruction — for the first time she had witnessed — failed to dominate cleanly. Her captain stopped working around the magic and simply went through it, and the balance of the fight shifted in his favor with brutal immediacy. Max paid for every attempt to close distance.
And yet the smile on his face only widened.
Freya watched that detail with considerably more attention than she gave the actual exchanges. The physical toll was mounting, the pressure was real, and he was reveling in all of it. He was being forced to adapt in real time, and it pleased him. She found that more informative than any technique.
At some point the Destruction condensed, pulling inward from its broad, ruinous spread into something darker and more precise, concentrated along his blade rather than thrown across the clearing. The floor around them, she noted idly, had long since ceased resembling anything worth the name Under Garden. Flowers, moss, crystal — all of it was ash and ruin now.
The frantic edge of the exchange eventually settled into something tighter. The excess she had observed in Max's movement since the level up was gone. His body had found its footing at last. The realisation passed between the two combatants before a word was spoken. One exchange, then another, and then both of them disengaged at the same moment and let the distance between them breathe.
Across the ruined clearing, Ottar shifted his grip and gave a single, small nod. Max's answer was a smile and a nod of his own. Freya felt Kairu press closer to her side.
What followed was not an exchange so much as a mutual decision rendered in force. Both of them gathered everything that remained — Max compressing his Destruction until the air around him warped with the wrongness of it, and Ottar drawing on the deep, old weight of a martial technique that had survived the extinction of the Familias that had carried it — and they launched themselves at each other.
The resulting collision shook the floor. The shockwave obliterated what little of the surrounding clearing had not already been destroyed, and Kairu surged upward ahead of it, expanding into a wide translucent barrier that caught the displaced force before it could reach her. Even through his body, Freya felt the impact in her feet and the air against her skin.
Then it was over.
The dust settled slowly. Torn petals drifted down through the haze, and when the air finally cleared, the crater at the center of the clearing was deep enough that it looked capable of dropping them directly to Floor 29.
Freya regarded it in silence for a moment. That, she thought with dry resignation, would require some effort to be filled.
-◈ -
Max
The first thing he noticed was the silence after the impact. Not true silence — the Dungeon was never truly silent. Stone was still settling, dust was still shifting, and somewhere off to his left, a large crystal fragment cracked down the middle and collapsed into itself with a brittle, glittering sound. But compared to the violence of the final exchange, it felt like silence.
He exhaled, tasting copper and ash.
His whole body ached, his arms were heavy, his reserves dragged low, and there was a deep, satisfying soreness threaded through muscle and bone alike. But the restless, overflowing pressure that had been crowding his body since the Class Change had finally burned down into something clean. Something usable.
He rolled one bruised shoulder, then flexed his fingers around the hilt of his sword, his grip slick with sweat. Yes. That was better.
Across the crater, Ottar lowered his weapon. The Warlord's chest rose and fell heavily beneath scored armor, his partially beastified form receding by slow degrees as the golden light around him thinned and died. For a moment the two of them simply looked at one another through the dust.
There was something new in Ottar's gaze now. Respect, certainly. That part Max had expected; he had earned it. The other part was harder to miss once he noticed it. Not fear — Ottar was not a man who frightened easily — but something adjacent to unease. A hard, private recognition that Max's rate of growth had crossed the line from remarkable into deeply abnormal.
The Warlord said nothing, and neither did Max. Silence hung between them, heavy and honest.
He simply inclined his head in quiet gratitude for helping him.
-◈ -
Freya
The dust was still drifting when she stepped out from behind Kairu's shield. For a moment, she said nothing. Her eyes moved across the ruined clearing in silence, taking in the crater at its center, the wreckage of Floor 28's flowers, the shattered crystal, and the two figures standing on opposite ends of the devastation they had wrought.
Max was breathing hard, but the wild excess that had clung to him was gone. It had burned itself out in exactly the way he had wanted. The instability was no longer rolling off him in ugly, unfinished waves. It sat differently in him now—contained, obeying, his once more. Which meant the test had worked and he had succeeded.
Freya felt a small, private note of satisfaction stir beneath her composure. The spar had served its purpose. He had his control back, Ottar had his answer, and now the truly interesting part could begin.
Now they could talk.
Her gaze shifted briefly to Ottar. He had already lowered his weapon, but his posture remained straight and severe, every line of him still carrying the afterimage of battle. Even in stillness, he looked braced for violence, as though his body had not yet accepted that the exchange was over.
"Ottar." Her voice cut cleanly through the settling quiet. He turned at once. "Return to Folkvangr and see to the repairs in my sanctum. When dawn arrives, see that the communication bracelets Max has prepared are distributed among the rest of the executives."
Ottar bowed his head without hesitation and turned to leave.
And stopped.
It was not dramatic. He did not speak. But Freya knew him too well to miss the way his weight shifted almost imperceptibly back toward her — just a fraction.
She held his gaze, then let it move slowly to Max, then to Kairu settled close at her side, then back to him.
Something in Ottar's posture eased. Not fully, but enough. He gave a single, slow nod.
Before he could turn again, Max stepped forward and held out one of the bracelets. "For you," he said, explaining its use in quiet, efficient terms. Ottar listened, accepted it, and gave a second nod toward Freya for the instruction about the executives.
Then Max glanced at the ruined clearing and back to Ottar. "No point walking twenty-seven floors," he said. "I'll send you directly."
For one brief, invaluable instant, Freya thought she saw Ottar's face twitch.
It was a minuscule thing. Gone almost as soon as it appeared. His spine went so rigid she was briefly reminded less of a man preparing for transport than of a warrior composing himself to endure something he had already decided not to complain about. He looked as immovable as the walls of Orario and only marginally more pleased about what was coming.
For a man who would gladly charge a Floor Boss bare-handed, it was a fascinating contrast.
Rock-hard composure closed over the reaction in an instant.
"Acceptable."
Freya had to restrain the faint curve threatening her lips. It was not often she was given something quite so small and privately satisfying from him.
The crimson light rose. Ottar did not flinch and in the next instant he was gone, sent directly to her ruined sanctum in Folkvangr.
The clearing fell quiet.
Freya let the silence settle for a breath, idly amused by the discovery that her captain was not, in fact, entirely without dread. It made him feel marginally more mortal. She found she did not entirely mind.
Then she turned to Max.
"Let's go to Babel," she said simply.
The corner of his mouth lifted. "With pleasure."
The crimson light rose once more, broader this time, curling outward to encompass all three of them and the ruined basin of Floor 28 vanished without ceremony, taking its crater and its scattered petals and the last of the settling dust with it.
-◈ -
Max
The transition from the Dungeon to the highest point in Orario was instantaneous. The ruined, ash-choked air of Floor 28 vanished, replaced by the plush, lavish stillness of Freya's chambers atop Babel.
As they teleported, neither of them moved for a long moment. Max allowed the untouched quiet of the room to wash over him. It felt like a different world entirely after the wreckage they had left behind in the labyrinth; the silence here was no longer charged by combat, but close, deliberate, and carefully chosen.
Freya crossed the room first. She took her seat on the chaise near the window with unhurried grace, silently giving Max the space to ground himself on his own terms.
He remained standing near the center of the room, letting the last of his battle-adrenaline bleed away.
Taking in the immaculate surroundings, he was struck by the jarring contrast between this unbroken peace and the absolute devastation he had unleashed upon her sanctum in Folkvangr earlier that day. And then, a colder, much sharper realization hit him.
The full weight of what he had just done finally caught up to him. Not just the wrecked sanctum, but the sheer, thoughtless stupidity of his impromptu teleportation. He had dragged an uncloaked Goddess directly onto the 28th Floor without a second thought. No suppressing items. No warning to Kairu to shield her. Nothing. He had simply grabbed her and gone, completely swept up in the high of the Class Change.
They had been lucky. Embarrassingly, inexcusably lucky. If the Dungeon had noticed her presence and spawned an Irregular, he would have been forced to deal with it half-drained from the spar, Ottar would have had to shoulder the burden alone, and the entire situation would have turned catastrophic. All because he hadn't stopped to think for even a single moment.
The battle-adrenaline faded entirely, leaving behind the dull, quiet embarrassment of someone who knew better and had simply failed to act like it.
He turned toward her, and without a word, lowered his head.
"I'm sorry, Lady Freya," he said simply, his voice quiet in the vast room. "For the sanctum. But more importantly, for my recklessness. I teleported you into the Dungeon without suppressing items, without even warning Kairu to shield you first. I was completely carried away by the Class Change. It was foolish of me."
There was no performance in the gesture, no attempt to justify or deflect. He simply held himself with a quiet stillness, keeping his gaze lowered waiting for whatever recompense she deemed appropriate.
Freya let the silence stretch for a long moment. She watched the tension in his shoulders, understanding exactly what he was bracing for, before she finally rose from the chaise. She crossed to the low table between them, moving with measured purpose as she lifted a crystal decanter and poured two glasses of deep red wine before stepping close enough to hold one out toward him.
"There is nothing to apologize for," she said. Her tone was absolute, carrying the certainty. "If anything, today has only confirmed what I suspected since the moment I first saw you. Your situation has never been ordinary, Max."
She pressed the cool glass into his hand, her touch lingering just long enough to ground him. "Sit."
He took the seat opposite her, looking down at the dark wine in his hands and then back up at her. Something behind his eyes went briefly uncertain as he tried to reconcile the punishment he had expected with the quiet grace he had just been given.
The silence stretched between them, carrying the heavy texture of something about to be said. He took a slow sip, letting the wine settle his nerves, before meeting her gaze with deliberate care.
"I think I understand what happened," he began, resting the glass on his knee. "With the Class Change. The explosion. All of it."
"I am listening," Freya said, leaning back against the chaise, genuinely intrigued.
He laid out his theory with the methodical clarity he brought to everything. He explained how the sheer, unprecedented volume of Excelia he had accumulated logically should have pushed him well past a standard level up. Yet, instead of a conventional gain, the Falna had diverted that overflow. It had used the raw experience as fuel to force the biological transition itself, pushing his lineage from Low-Class to Mid-Class, while simultaneously building the integrated structure needed to contain what his body was becoming.
Freya listened without interrupting. At some point she had set her wine glass down entirely, resting her chin lightly against her fingers, her whole attention turned toward him. When he reached his conclusion, she nodded once.
"That matches what I felt from the other side," she agreed. "The Falna did not merely update you. It reconstructed the vessel. Your new Developmental Ability, Devil - G, follows the same logic. It was not a fresh acquisition, but the system's recognition of what already existed within you, catching up to a baseline that was already established."
"Exactly," Max said. He leaned forward slightly, energized by her agreement as he caught the thread and pulled it. "It was a biological override."
Freya did not reply immediately.
Her expression shifted. The warmth in her eyes cooled by slow, measurable degrees into something far more deliberate and piercing as she turned that specific word over in her mind.
"An override, yes," she murmured. Her voice dropped into a register that made the air in the room feel suddenly heavier. "It would seem that your Falna has developed a somewhat independent sense of judgment, Maximus."
Max froze.
The casual energy drained from his posture instantly. The silence in the room took on a sudden, razor-sharp edge as his mind raced back to the description of his magic—Independent Action. It was one of the scenarios he had quietly feared when he first read the text: the possibility that his magic could automate the divine process itself.
He looked at her, catching the flash of cold vulnerability hiding just beneath the surface of her eyes. He understood immediately that she wasn't just observing a magical anomaly; she was confronting the terrifying implication that she might become obsolete in his growth. A mere spectator to his ascent.
He did not rush to fill the silence. A panicked defense would only sound like guilt. Instead, he set his wine glass down on the table with deliberate care.
"I know what you're thinking," Max said, holding her gaze to ensure she heard the absolute honesty in his voice. "And I won't lie to you—the moment I read the description for Independent Action, the possibility that it might automate my Falna occurred to me."
Freya's jaw tightened imperceptibly. The silver of her eyes remained unblinking as she waited for him to navigate the minefield he had just stepped into.
"But I truly don't believe that's what happened here," Max pressed on, keeping his voice steady and calm. "I haven't programmed any 'Auto-Update' protocol into my magic."
He gave her a moment to absorb that, letting the truth of it settle before he gestured lightly to his back.
"What happened today wasn't magic usurping divinity," he explained softly. "Because this was a Class Change, the moment your ichor fell, the biological fluctuation in my body and soul was simply too violent. It overpowered the Falna's standard intervention. The system panicked. It tried to contain the explosion of my class evolving, and forcibly guided the Excelia to the optimal outcome by locking in the Devil ability to stabilize me."
Freya watched him, her eyes searching his face. She took her time with the answer, letting the silence stretch as she weighed the logic of his words against the fear in her own chest.
She turned it over carefully, measuring the difference between a deliberate attempt to replace her and a biological accident that had simply demanded too much from the system all at once. While the sting of being bypassed was not easily reasoned away, she eventually offered a slow, reluctant nod.
"I will accept that," she said quietly. "For now."
The two words carried everything the nod did not — that she had heard him, that she believed him, and that she had not entirely finished thinking about it.
The tension did not vanish. It simply moved, settling somewhere lower and less immediate.
But looking across the table at the Goddess, Max could still see the faint, lingering shadow of uncertainty behind her eyes. The fear of the unknown.
He understood it. The ambiguity that had once been armor was starting to cut the wrong way.
He looked at her — at the careful stillness she was holding over the uncertainty he could still see — and made a decision.
He was done being mysterious about this.
Max nodded to himself. The idea felt right. It was time to pull back the veil.
"Lady Freya," Max said, his voice dropping into a quieter, more solemn cadence.
She looked up, her expression carefully neutral but her eyes sharp and attentive.
"I know you've been ruminating on this for some time," Max continued, leaning forward and resting his hands on his knees. "Ever since I arrived, I've been intentionally ambiguous about my origins. It was a reflex. A defense mechanism to protect myself until I knew where I stood in this world."
He met her gaze steadily, letting the walls drop. "But you've kept my secrets. You gave me a place in your familia knowing the risks, strengthened me through Baptism and spars, protected me from Evilus and the worst of their schemes, indulged me in my experimentations and faced the terrifying reality of my magic losing control today without flinching, and your only concern was whether I was trying to cut you out." He offered a small, reassuring smile. "You are worried about where I'm going. But you can't understand that until you know where I came from."
Freya's attention snapped into razor-sharp focus. Any lingering trace of her earlier unease vaporized instantly, replaced by a profound, breathless curiosity.
"You asked me what I am," Max said gently. "I think it's time I gave you a proper answer."
Freya didn't speak. She simply leaned forward, her eyes locked onto him, hanging on his every word.
"The world I come from is not like this one," Max began, his tone carrying the weight of history. "It is a world where all the gods you know—and many you don't—are real. But unlike Gekai, which is still in the Age of Gods, my world exists in the modern age, where humanity thrives in the light, completely oblivious to the shadows."
He paused, gathering his thoughts to condense a universe of complex lore into something she could understand.
"In those shadows, where everything from the divine to the demonic lay hidden, one of the major conflicts revolved around three factions. The Angels, the Fallen Angels, and my people... the Devils." Max held her gaze, ensuring she grasped the sheer cosmic scale of it. "All three factions originated from a single, absolute source—a powerful, solitary god known as the Biblical God. From what I understood, his name was Elohim."
-◈ -
Freya
She listened with rapt, absolute attention.
To hear of a world so vast, operating under such fundamentally different architectures of divinity and myth, was both fascinating and deeply sobering. She, a Goddess who had seen the rise and fall of countless mortal empires, was listening to the cosmology of a reality where an entity—Elohim—had forged not just mortals, but entire supernatural races that rivaled the divine.
The name itself was a whisper from a distant corner of her memory, a title she had perhaps heard once or twice in the endless, murmuring halls of Tenkai. It belonged to an ancient, solitary deity who had existed outside her circle, an isolationist who had never shown any interest in the games of the lower world. To learn that such a being had been the architect of entire races... it was a staggering revelation.
Knowing that Max was a distant, altered creation of this 'Biblical God' was incredibly enlightening. It explained the terrifying density of his soul, the sheer unadulterated power of his Destruction, and the reason the Dungeon itself seemed to react to him not as an enemy, but as a potential asset.
But out of all the emotions swirling in her chest—awe, curiosity, the dizzying thrill of cosmic discovery—one feeling rose above the rest. It eclipsed everything else with its desperate, blinding intensity.
Hope.
If Max was not a normal mortal... if he was a biological member of an ancient supernatural faction born from a high deity... then the cruelest law of Gekai might not apply to him.
Unable to control the sudden frantic fluttering of her heart, Freya leaned forward, her hands gripping the edge of the table.
"Max," she breathed, her voice trembling with a vulnerability she could not hide. "Your lifespan. If you are a Devil—how long do you live?"
Max blinked, completely derailed by the sudden intensity of the question.
"Oh," he said. His eyes widened in realization as he rubbed the back of his neck, looking genuinely sheepish. "Right. I completely forgot that our lifespans aren't listed on the Falna like the other biological abilities. Sorry, it slipped my mind."
Freya felt her breath catch. Tell me. Please.
"But yes," Max continued, his tone casual and entirely oblivious to the monumental weight his next words carried. "It is said that no Devil has ever died of old age. Even for a Reincarnated Devil, a human turned into one, the lifespan is said to be at least ten thousand years. And for a Pure-Blood like me? I don't think anyone back home actually found out the full extent of our lifespan befo—"
He didn't get to finish the sentence.
Freya moved faster than he could react. The sheer, overwhelming wave of euphoric relief shattered her composure completely.
YES! FINALLY! her soul screamed.
She vaulted across the small space between them and threw herself at him. She didn't just embrace him; she captured him. Her hands framed his face, and before Max could even register the sudden flurry of movement, she pressed her lips to his in a fierce, breathless, overwhelmingly joyful kiss.
-◈ -
Max
His brain flatlined.
The Devil who had managed complex magical protocols and outmaneuvered a Level 6 Warlord was utterly, completely helpless against the sudden, overwhelming physical contact.
The scent of her perfume, the frantic joyful heat of her skin, the impossible softness of the Goddess of Beauty pressing herself against him—it was a sensory overload of apocalyptic proportions.
Max's eyes were wide open in shock.
Since arriving in this world, he had grounded himself entirely in the grind. Between his magical experiments, surviving the Dungeon, and his noble, singular goal of saving the Astraea Familia, he had been honestly, profoundly grateful that his teenage hormones had remained completely dormant. For twenty-nine days of "No Nut November," he had built an impenetrable fortress of willpower, forging a foundation of absolute, stoic Sagehood to survive the temptations of his previous life.
But as Freya deepened the kiss, pouring all of her relief and intoxicating affection into the gesture, Max distinctly heard the sound of that formidable, ironclad foundation cracking right down the middle.
Oh, no, Max thought. His hands hovered uselessly in the air, completely unsure of where to go. I am in so much trouble.
--> Devil in a Dungeon <--
AN:
DAMN, what a chapter. Hope the reward at the end was worth the wait :)
I am very happy how the chapter turned out in the end as Freya finally knows Max was not just another mortal and she decides to show her relief and joy in the only way she was holding herself from. And poor Max's path to Sagehood has been successfully interrupted, heh. Bro thought he would be successful since he was not in DxD and without its jiggle physics, he would get enlightened. Only for the Goddess of Beauty to hush those unrealistic goals with one kiss, literally.
Does this mean will Freya go full Yandere on him now? No. I would even say she would give him more freedom since she is reassured anyone he might end up with won't last too long. Though we have to see how Max tackles his situation now, although not fully broken, his formidable restraint has cracked a bit after all. I wonder what happens when it fully shatters?? Do share what you think how that goes...
Also what do you think made the dungeon ignore Freya? Were her theories right or she's just being delusional??
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Next update will be on Tuesday.
Ben, out.
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