Rod swiftly pulled a shirt over his bare torso from his storage space.
The moment Kuroka sensed danger surrounding her sister, even the food in front of her lost its appeal.
Lavinia grabbed her wand at once. Asia, slower to react, still hadn't sensed anything unusual, but seeing Kuroka's expression turn grave, she understood it could only mean trouble.
The fallen angel trio were already trembling. Once they focused their senses, they too detected the overwhelming aura of a Fallen Angel executive.
Before being defeated by Rod, they had trespassed into devil territory to stir up trouble. After their defeat, they became his maids, effectively betraying Grigori. Now, they assumed the higher-ups had finally come to settle accounts.
"Raynare… w-we're not going to die, are we? I'm actually scared of dying now…" Mittelt whispered, not even daring to look out the window, afraid a Fallen Angel's face might suddenly reflect in the glass.
"I… don't know," Kalawarna replied. Her voice was calm, but her lower body trembled like leaves in a storm.
"Useless cowards!" Raynare snapped, though her own heart was pounding just as violently.
Deep down, she still felt a faint attachment to Grigori. But on one hand, Rod had placed a curse upon her. On the other, her life here had been… unexpectedly pleasant.
At the very least, it was far better than her time in Grigori, where anyone stronger could step on her without consequence.
Rod glanced at the three of them and said bluntly, "Relax. You're not important enough for a Fallen Angel executive to come after personally."
Cannon fodder was still cannon fodder.
No matter how many died, to those at the top, they were nothing more than numbers.
What truly mattered were executive-class Fallen Angels.
In the original storyline, Kokabiel's crime of instigating war was worthy of execution. Yet Azazel merely froze him, calling it an "eternal imprisonment," though in reality, it was a form of protection.
Hearing Rod's words, Mittelt and Kalawarna visibly relaxed.
Right.
They were small fry.
An executive wouldn't bother with them.
Raynare, however, felt oddly dissatisfied.
So what if they were small fry? Even small fry had dreams.
Rod instructed Asia to remain inside the house.
Kuroka, worried about Shirone's safety, had already rushed out. Rod lifted Lavinia in his arms and ascended into the sky. As fierce winds battered them, he formed a barrier of Ki around his body, deflecting most of the gusts.
At least his hairstyle wouldn't be ruined.
Kuoh Town wasn't large. Taking the city center as the core and including the surrounding residential areas, its diameter was barely ten kilometers.
In less than a minute, Rod arrived above the battlefield.
From afar, he saw several monstrous creatures rampaging through the streets, each with two dog heads and bodies the size of delivery trucks.
"That's a Hellhound," Lavinia said, her arms wrapped around Rod's shoulders. "A creature that inhabits Hell."
"So it really is Fallen Angels," Rod muttered.
This was Rias's territory. Aside from remnants of the Old Satan faction, no devil would dare launch an attack here.
The Fallen Angel domain, meanwhile, lay not far from the Underworld's borders, separated by a vast primeval forest teeming with magical beasts.
Rod landed on a rooftop and gently set Lavinia down, refraining from intervening immediately.
This wasn't how the script was supposed to unfold.
Originally, Kokabiel would leisurely lure Rias and her group to Kuoh Academy, then toy with them while they struggled helplessly beneath him. Aside from damaging the school grounds, not a single building in Kuoh Town had been harmed.
But now, Hellhounds were tearing through the city center itself.
Rod wasn't sure whether Kokabiel's behavior had become more logically villainous after deviating from the original plot, or whether that line he'd left behind—
"Rias Gremory was here. If you're my brother, come and cut me down!"
—had genuinely provoked him.
Of course, even if it had, Rod would never admit it.
In any case, the scale of this incident far exceeded the original timeline.
And, arguably, it made more sense.
After all, if you were Kokabiel, a Fallen Angel executive willing to risk execution to ignite a war, why would you sit in a school like a dungeon boss, waiting for the protagonists to come challenge you? Was this a video game?
Ignoring the Hellhounds for the moment, Rod searched for Kokabiel.
Soon enough, he spotted a dark figure hovering in the night sky.
Under the glow of the city lights, his features became clear.
Sharp, angular facial lines. Skin so pale it bordered on translucent, making his crimson eyes appear almost demonic in contrast. Long black hair cascaded loosely over his shoulders. A cruel, contemptuous smile lingered at the corners of his lips. Five pairs of black wings spread behind him, proclaiming his status.
Though,
His face was shaped like a shoehorn.
Compared to the Satanael Rod had eliminated in Kyoto, Kokabiel resembled Sephiroth even more.
At that moment, Kokabiel floated high above, watching with twisted amusement as civilians below struggled to escape the Hellhounds' jaws.
That damn sister of Lucifer.
A mere High-Class Devil, how dare she mock him to his face?
Earlier that evening, after receiving no updates from his subordinates for far too long, Kokabiel left his hideout and arrived at the designated base outside Kuoh Town.
What he found was a field of corpses.
Valper and his experimental subject, both dead.
The Holy Swords, gone.
But what truly shattered Kokabiel's composure was the message scrawled across the backs of the corpses:
"Rias Gremory was here. If you're my brother, come and cut me down!"
He had no time to analyze the plausibility of Rias writing such a thing.
All he knew was this,
He, an exalted Fallen Angel executive, had been mocked by what he considered prey, a filthy High-Class Devil.
Enraged beyond reason, Kokabiel discarded his previous plan of leisurely torment. Instead, he descended directly upon the city center, releasing the Hellhounds he had brought to force both Lucifer's and Leviathan's younger sisters into the open.
And now, those very sisters fought like desperate firefighters, trying to suppress the Hellhounds before the monsters could slaughter civilians.
Compared to Sona Sitri's team, who were clearly struggling, Akeno and Koneko fought with far greater ease.
After awakening their bloodline power, even just a few days of training had transformed their strength dramatically.
Akeno could now summon spears of light with confidence, light being lethal poison to demonic beasts. With Yuuto Kiba's swordsmanship and Koneko's control-based senjutsu supporting her, they quickly brought down one Hellhound.
But the situation remained dire.
Because the true threat was not the Hellhounds,
It was the ten-winged Fallen Angel who had yet to make a move.
He merely hovered there.
And that alone was enough to suffocate the air around them.
The malice radiating from him was so overwhelming that even Rias and Sona, both High-Class Devils, felt their scalps prickle.
They couldn't win.
There was no way to win.
Akeno suspected that the moment that Fallen Angel chose to act.
None of them would last even a minute.
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