The sky above True Cross Academy wasn't just torn; it was bleeding. Thousands of high-level demons poured from the spatial rifts, a screeching, chaotic swarm meant to overwhelm and slaughter.
Below us, Mephisto's secondary barrier shimmered to life over the main festival grounds. Through the translucent magical shield, I could still hear the muffled, upbeat pop music of the festival. Thousands of oblivious civilians were dancing, eating, and laughing, completely ignorant of the apocalyptic war hovering fifty feet above their heads.
These weren't standard low or intermediate-level fodder. I watched an altered, heavily muscled Naberius dive-bomb the barrier. A squad of on-duty Exorcists below fired standard holy water rounds at it. The bullets simply bounced off its reinforced hide. The beast swiped its claws, effortlessly slicing through a reinforced concrete watchtower before turning its glowing eyes toward the civilian crowd.
It was a genuine, terrifying threat to regular Exorcists.
But to me, it was just in the way.
I didn't even have to draw the Kurikara. I activated my Sky Step, launching myself into the center of the swarm.
I snapped my fingers.
The Naberius didn't even have time to roar. A localized sphere of blue-white heat materialized around it, instantly incinerating it into a fine, drifting powder.
I didn't stop there. I became a blur of conceptual fire, zipping through the night sky. Every time I flicked my wrist, a dozen altered demons were erased from existence. The heat was so intense they didn't bleed or fall; they simply vaporized. The sky rained white ash, drifting down onto the festival's invisible barrier like snow.
Within three minutes, the airspace above the academy was empty.
Now for the stragglers. I dropped down into True Cross Town, my boots hitting the pavement of a deserted alleyway. I shifted my vision, viewing the world entirely through thermal signatures. Through the brick walls of the surrounding buildings, I could see the glowing red outlines of a few dozen demons that had slipped past the initial clash and were trying to hide.
I didn't bother chasing them. I just flared my Mantle, projecting my conceptual heat directly into their spatial coordinates.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Through the walls, their heat signatures flared violently before winking out of existence entirely.
The town was silent again.
I dusted myself off, turned on my heel, and used a burst of thermal propulsion to launch myself back to the ruined courtyard.
When I landed, the scene was a mess of high-strung panic. Mephisto was repairing the spatial tears with his umbrella. The Exwires were huddled together, shaking. And standing near the edge of my molten crater were Yukio and Shura, both looking like they were about to have an aneurysm.
"You!" Yukio screamed the second my boots touched the ground. He marched toward me, his gun drawn and trembling violently in his hand. His face was pale, twisted in a mix of terror and absolute fury. "Do you have any idea what you just did?!"
"I think I just cleaned up the sky. You're welcome by the way," I deadpanned, wiping a speck of demon ash from my cheek.
"Don't play dumb with me!" Yukio roared, his composure completely shattering. "Lucifer used the Seraphim! He broadcasted your little chat—making sure to publicly thank you and your flames for curing his decaying body—and his message of war to every aligned branch of the True Cross Order in the world!"
Tch, so that's why he kept referring to me as brother, I cursed internally. Meticulous little bastard, ain't he?
Yukio leveled his gun at my chest, his finger shaking on the trigger. "You gave him the power to destroy Assiah! Do you even care?!"
I just rolled my eyes. "Relax, four-eyes. It was just an unfortunate accident. Yelling and getting all riled up won't solve anything. You're acting like I went and hand-delivered it to him myself."
Yukio's jaw locked. His arm shook wildly before he slowly, agonizingly lowered the gun, the terrifying realization washing over him that pulling the trigger wouldn't even leave a scratch on my skin.
"You're a sociopath, you know that?" Shura interrupted, aggressively rubbing her temples. She looked like she had aged ten years in the last five minutes. "The Grigori are having a meltdown. The Vatican is going to want your head for this. You need to think of something to clean up this mess."
I completely ignored her worries, letting my eyes drag up and down her figure. She was wearing the revealing, festive bikini-top outfit she had teased me about earlier.
"You know, the stress looks good on you," I smirked, leaning in slightly. "But I'd much rather see less of that festival outfit."
Shura blinked, genuinely staggered by the sheer, brazen disrespect of me flirting with her right after accidentally buffing the enemy of mankind.
Her hand instinctively twitched toward the hilt of her sword. "Keep your eyes up, you arrogant brat," she snarled, her face flushing slightly with a mix of anger and disbelief. "Or I'll see if a 'God' can grow his tongue back."
I laughed with my hands in a mock surrender.
"Are you insane?!" Bon shouted.
I turned my head. He was staring at me, his fists clenched so tight his knuckles were bleeding. He was looking at me not like a classmate, but like a monster.
"The only thing you're mad about is Lucifer taking a piece of your pride," Bon spat, his voice laced with pure, unadulterated disgust. "Do you even care about Kamiki? Do you even care about Shima? Are we all just collateral to you? You're just as bad as the demons."
My smirk vanished, replaced by a cold, apathetic stare.
"Should I get angry and lose myself in my emotions like what you're doing?" I questioned, my voice chilling the air. "When I do something positive, people get mad. When I do something human—make a mistake, people still get mad. What do you expect me to do in a lose-lose situation? Beg for forgiveness? I choose to be the master of my own misery."
I laughed as I looked down at him.
"Besides, I don't know why you're upset at me," I said, my voice dropping to a casual, cruel timber. "Your friend's the one who betrayed you. Shouldn't you be questioning if your bond is really as tight as you thought?"
Bon violently flinched as if I had physically struck him. The color drained from his face, and his knees buckled slightly. The harsh truth of my words completely gutted his righteous anger, leaving him hollowing and broken.
Out of the corner of my eye, I felt a stare. Konekomaru was standing a few feet away, his eyes wide, his pupils darting back and forth rapidly. I didn't need to read his mind to know what he was doing. His analytical brain was entirely focused on me, desperately trying to categorize my threat level and find a weakness.
Before anyone could even blink, I moved.
I crossed the distance in less than a microsecond, appearing instantly in front of the bald Exwire. Konekomaru gasped, completely frozen in shock as I casually palmed the top of his head, patting him like a terrified dog.
"You're probably trying to calculate multiple scenarios in a way to survive me right now, right?" I whispered, looking down into his terrified eyes. I offered him a dark, knowing smile. "Don't worry, cueball. There is absolutely nothing anyone in this room, the Order, and especially you can do to me. So calculate away."
I let out a loud, arrogant laugh, the sound echoing harshly across the ruined courtyard.
"That's enough," Shura snapped, physically stepping between me and the terrified Exwires. She glared up at me, refusing to be intimidated. "Save the psychological warfare for the Illuminati."
I couldn't help but laugh harder.
"Stop it!"
Stop it?! But I was having so much fun.
Shiemi stepped right up to me, shoving past Bon. She was trembling, and the ambient heat rolling off my body was making her sweat, but her green eyes were fierce.
"If you're so mad at him, then prove you're stronger!" Shiemi yelled, her voice breaking with desperate emotion. "Go to their base, take back what's yours, and bring Kamiki home! Prove that he made a mistake stealing from you!"
Tch, she's trying to use reverse psychology on me or something, I thought, shaking my head. And it's working, cause she's got a point.
"Oh, the sheer audacity of it," Mephisto mused loudly, tapping his umbrella on the cracked pavement. A dark, knowing smile returned to his face. "A lesser King, taking the flames of a Sovereign, and parading them around as his own salvation. Tell me, Rin... are you really going to let a dying man plagiarize your divinity?"
"Tch, lesser king. You're saying that like he can't mop the floor with ya," I scoffed, then my eyes flaring ruby red. "But no, I'm going to burn him to a crisp and reclaim what's mine, and then some."
"Excellent," Mephisto clapped his hands together. "Although I should warn you. Shura wasn't wrong about the Grigori being in an absolute uproar. They are currently drafting—"
"Yea, yea, let them draft whatever. Anything they do won't matter," I waved the notion off.
A moment later, a sudden realization hit me. "Wait a second..."
I looked around at the traumatized Exwires.
"I was so caught off guard about the news of flashlight's upgrades that I forgot to ask," I frowned, genuinely confused. "Why the hell did they kidnap Eyebrows anyways?"
Yukio gritted his teeth, his gun arm trembling as he visibly struggled to maintain his sanity around me. "How should I know?! Shima just grabbed her and ran!"
"Allow me to illuminate the situation," Mephisto chimed in, his tone dropping its theatrical edge for a moment of dark seriousness. "Miss Kamiki possesses the blood of the Kamiki maidens. The Illuminati requires her unique lineage for a very specific ritual. They intend to summon and control the Nine-Tailed Fox."
Shiemi gasped, her hands violently flying to cover her mouth. "A ritual? They're going to use Kamiki as a sacrifice?!"
Bon's head snapped up, the sheer horror of the revelation momentarily piercing through his hollowed, defeated expression. "You're telling me that bastard Shima handed her over to be a vessel?!"
Yukio visibly paled, adjusting his glasses with a trembling hand. "The Nine-Tailed Fox... That's a deity-class demon. If they force an entity of that magnitude into a human body, her mind and soul will be completely obliterated."
"They aren't just experimenting," Shura cursed bitterly, her grip tightening on her sword hilt. "They're trying to build a biological weapon of mass destruction."
What the fuck did I just hear?! I did a double take. These bastards are trying to summon a Tailed-Beast?
"Riiiight. The fox," I nodded, not getting a single meaning of what they were talking about. "Okay, how the hell are we gonna track and find her?"
"Squeak."
Squeak?! The Fuck?! Are there demon rats now? I thought as the soft sound of squeaking drew my attention.
Standing near the back of the group was Takara, holding his pink bunny puppet. The puppet's mouth opened, speaking in a raspy, deep voice.
"I have already acquired her coordinates."
I blinked, staring at the guy who usually slept through class. "Come again?"
"Allow me to introduce one of my finest contingencies," Mephisto chuckled, gesturing toward the boy. "Nemu Takara is not merely a cram school student. He is an Exorcist with Senior First Class abilities, acting as a mercenary under my direct employment to monitor this class. And, more importantly, he is a master of puppet summoning magic."
"You planted a First Class mercenary in the classroom without telling me?!" Shura yelled at the clown, her hands balling into fists.
Mephisto just offered her a nonchalant shrug.
"Before the pink-haired spy escaped with the target," Takara's puppet rasped, "I managed to affix a summoned microscopic doll to her uniform. It acts as a perfect transmitter. I can track her exact spatial coordinates anywhere in Assiah."
Of course the clown had a spy spying on the spy, I thought, shaking my head at Mephisto's endless layers of paranoia.
"Well then," I said, a dangerous, fiery grin stretching across my face. I cracked my knuckles, the sound like thunder in the quiet courtyard. "Send me the coordinates, puppet boy. It's time to take a trip to Inari. I've got a King to dethrone."