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The ticking of the old grandfather clock, located in the corner of the Occult Research Club, had never sounded so shrill, so metallic, and so damn rhythmical. Every swing of the bronze pendulum seemed to strike directly against the temples of those present, marking a countdown toward the unknown.
The afternoon sun had already begun its descent, filtering through the windows of the old school building and dyeing the wooden floor with long orange shadows that resembled pools of dried blood. However, despite the visual warmth of dusk, the temperature inside the main room was glacial. An invisible frost of psychological terror and absolute paranoia had clung to the lungs of the Underworld's two proudest peerages.
Rias Gremory, the heiress of ruin, stood before the window with her back to the rest of the room. Her arms were rigidly crossed beneath her chest, and her breathing was shallow, calculated, as if she feared that exhaling too hard might alter the atmospheric pressure and trigger the end of the world. Her mind, usually a temple of political strategies and aristocratic confidence, was a nest of ashes.
She had spent the last twenty-four hours assimilating the reality of her own fragility. She looked out toward the school courtyard, watching the last lingering students leave the premises, laughing and chatting. For them, the world was a safe place. For Rias, the very structure of that world had revealed itself to be a thin sheet of rice paper that could be torn, burned, or rewritten by the whim of a single teenager.
The sound of porcelain striking a saucer broke the sepulchral silence of the room.
Akeno Himejima, the Queen of the Gremory peerage, was serving tea. It was a routine action, almost mechanical, a desperate attempt to cling to the normality of her club life. But the fine thread of amber liquid falling from the teapot trembled violently. The hands of the lightning priestess, those hands that enjoyed inflicting pain and dancing among electric storms, were unable to remain steady. A few drops spilled onto the immaculate coffee table, staining the white tablecloth. Akeno did not even make a motion to wipe them away. Her usual sadistic and provocative smile had been erased from her face, leaving only violet eyes shadowed by a survival instinct screaming at her to flee as far away from Kuoh as possible.
"The tea is getting cold," Akeno murmured, her voice devoid of its characteristic honeyed modulation. No one answered her. No one had the stomach to ingest absolutely anything.
At the opposite end of the elegant leather sofa, Sona Sitri kept her gaze fixed on her own hands, resting on her lap. The Student Council president was not carrying her usual fountain pen, nor holding her record tablet. The phantom sensation of oak wood vanishing beneath that minuscule sphere of annihilation still made her nauseous.
For a devil of her intellect, losing at chess was acceptable if the opponent proved to be more cunning. But what they were facing was not a chess player. It was the entity that had decided the board, the pieces, and the rules were irrelevant. Sona closed her eyes behind the lenses of her glasses, reliving the exact moment her desk was erased. The cleanness of the technique. The absolute lack of aura fluctuation. The existential implication that the entire Underworld depended on a high school boy not growing bored of his peaceful life.
Tsubaki Shinra remained standing exactly half a step behind Sona, as dictated by her position as Vice President and Queen. Her posture was straight, martial, but her knuckles were white from gripping the invisible handle of a weapon she knew she would never summon. She had experienced the terror of standing before the apex predator. If she dared to materialize her Naginata in that room when he crossed the door, she knew with chilling certainty that she would not only be killed; she would be eradicated along with her entire bloodline, without leaving even a memory in the minds of her loved ones.
"President..." Genshirou Saji's voice trembled in such a pathetic way that, in any other situation, it would have earned him a severe reprimand from Sona. The blond Pawn of the Sitri clan was curled up in one of the chairs in the corner, biting his nails with bulging eyes. "Are we really... really going to just sit here and wait for him? We should evacuate! We should call Maou Leviathan! If that guy erases us, no one will even know we died!"
"Shut your mouth, Saji," Koneko Toujou hissed from the other side of the room, her usually expressionless tone stained with a sharp and hostile edge. The small white-haired Rook was not eating sweets. She was sitting on the floor with her knees pulled to her chest, her feline pupils dilated to the maximum. "If you call the Maous, you're condemning them too. The air... is already different."
Kiba Yuto nodded slowly, leaning against the frame of a bookshelf. Rias's Knight had not drawn any of his demonic swords. In fact, he had left his mental arsenal completely sealed. He knew that any spark of hostility or battle instinct would be detected by the senses of a being who had dodged attacks from behind at hypersonic speed.
"Koneko is right," Kiba murmured, looking at his own gloved hands with deep bitterness. "Preparing defenses or trying to run is an insult to his intelligence. He dictated the time and place. If we aren't here, accepting our position in the food chain, the consequences will fall on our families. Today, we are not devils, Saji. Today, we are dust begging not to be swept away."
The Knight's harsh words echoed against the wooden walls of the old building, extinguishing any spark of rebellion that might have remained in the young blond's heart.
In the middle of that living funeral, seated at the center of the main sofa, was Hyoudou Issei.
The brown-haired boy kept his hands interlaced between his knees, his gaze fixed on a knot in the wooden floor. His adolescent brain was being subjected to pressure that threatened to burst his blood vessels. On one hand, he was surrounded by the most beautiful, powerful, and imposing women in the entire academy, his superiors and crushes, and all of them were literally sweating cold, reduced to a state of total psychological submission.
And on the other hand, the one responsible for that abyssal terror was the same guy he had fought to the death over a damn melon bread in the cafeteria. The same rude and lazy boy whom his girlfriend, Sylvie, scolded and dragged by the ear if she found him peeping in the bushes.
The cognitive dissonance was unbearable.
Issei remembered the crimson fury, the split sky, and the way he himself had prostrated on the asphalt while crying fanboy tears and begging Kaiju to accept him as a disciple. He bit his lower lip, struggling internally. He knew Kaiju's monstrous side, but he also knew his human side, the one that rejected problems and only wanted to eat carbohydrates in peace.
Rias finally stepped away from the window. She walked with heavy steps toward her desk, but did not sit. Instead, she placed both hands on the surface and fixed her eyes on her Pawn.
"Issei."
The brown-haired boy gave a small jump in his seat, immediately straightening at his mistress's call. "Y-Yes, Buchou?"
"Repeat it," Rias ordered, her voice devoid of inflection, a demand born from the desperate need to cling to some controllable variable. "Repeat his conditions exactly. I want to be absolutely certain that none of us will make a miscalculation when he crosses that door."
Issei swallowed, feeling the piercing gazes of Akeno, Kiba, Koneko, Sona, Tsubaki, and Saji dig into the back of his neck like icy daggers.
"I... I already told you yesterday, Buchou," Issei stammered, rubbing his neck out of pure nervousness. "He doesn't care about our factions. He doesn't care if we're devils, or if the chess pieces exist. He only wants his normal life. He told me that as long as you don't get in his way, or try to spy on him, or involve Sylvie or Asia in our problems... he doesn't care at all what we do in Kuoh."
Sona lifted her gaze for the first time all afternoon. The dusk light reflected in the only intact lens of her glasses.
"A peaceful coexistence based on mutual ignorance," Sona analyzed, pressing her lips together. "A non-aggression treaty where one of the parties does not even consider the other a threat worth registering. It is... the most absolute form of contempt."
"A contempt that keeps us alive, Sona," Rias replied bitterly, closing her eyes. "We are not combatants in his war. We are, at best, background decoration in his school life. And today he summoned us here to make sure we accept that role without protest."
Silence devoured the room once more.
Issei looked at Rias, noticing for the first time how fragile her shoulders looked beneath the school uniform. The unbreakable and perfect Gremory heiress was terrified. And suddenly, a spark of empathy, born from that stupid and honest devotion that characterized the brown-haired boy, pushed him to speak.
"Buchou... Sona-kaichou..." Issei scratched his cheek, breaking the tension with a tone meant to be reassuring, though his voice still trembled slightly. "I know he's really scary. I almost pissed myself when I saw him crush that Fallen Angel. But... Kaiju isn't an irrational monster."
Everyone in the room looked at him as if he had just blasphemed in a church.
"If he wanted to kill us, he already would have," Issei continued, gesturing clumsily with his hands. "Yesterday he scolded me for being pathetic and told me to train so I wouldn't get killed so easily. He let us live. And even if his methods are horrible and his power is insane, deep down, he saved Asia. He saved someone we couldn't save because of the rules. Maybe... maybe today's meeting isn't to execute us."
Issei's words floated in the air, naive, raw, and loaded with an uncomfortable truth. The devil peerages were bound by ancient laws, Underworld bureaucracy, and an aristocratic pride that paralyzed them before political danger. Kaiju Hano, on the other hand, was a hurricane free of chains, judging the world by his own absolute standards.
Akeno let out a small, almost imperceptible laugh, devoid of joy but full of irony.
"You're right, Issei-kun. The rules do not apply to him. And it is precisely that absolute freedom that terrifies us. A being who can rewrite the memory of an entire country just so his new protégée can attend history class... is someone whose morality we cannot predict."
The grandfather clock struck six in the evening. A deep and resonant chime vibrated through the wooden walls of the club.
It was the exact hour.
The eight devils present simultaneously stopped breathing. The temperature in the Occult Research Club seemed to drop drastically. There was no physical change, but the primal instincts of their immortal souls activated, warning them that something massive was about to happen.
Rias Gremory stepped away from her desk and walked toward the center of the room, placing herself in a position of absolute diplomatic submission. Not as a Maou in training, nor as the sister of Sirzechs Lucifer, but as the humble hostess of a superior power. Sona stood beside her, with Tsubaki immediately behind. Kiba, Koneko, Akeno, and Saji formed a perfect half-moon behind them, lowering their gazes toward the rugs on the floor.
Issei, infected by the protocol panic, jumped up from the sofa and stood at attention at one end of the line, swallowing so loudly the sound was audible in the room.
The wind stopped blowing outside. The birds in the school's back courtyard fell silent. The entire world seemed to hold its breath.
In the hallway outside the old building, the faint and unmistakable sound of lazy footsteps began to approach. Each step against the old wooden boards echoed like a hammer blow in the eardrums of the Underworld's heirs. There was no hurry in that walk. It was the stride of someone who had nothing to fear and nothing to prove.
The double oak doors of the Occult Research Club, which for years had been the safe boundary of the Gremory peerage, creaked lightly on their hinges.
The metal handle turned with exasperating slowness.
Rias and Sona interlaced their hands at waist level, gritting their teeth, prepared to surrender their pride, their territory, and their future to the will of the God who was a millimeter from crossing the threshold.
The heavy oak doors of the Occult Research Club were not blown down with a magical explosion, nor opened with a gale of power. They simply slid inward with a dull, mundane creak.
Rias Gremory and Sona Sitri held their breath, their peerages tense to the limit behind them, prepared to receive the herald of destruction. They expected a solitary being, an apex predator wrapped in an aura of annihilation, floating above the floor or radiating a killing instinct that would freeze their blood.
But what crossed the threshold made the brain of every devil present suffer a systemic collapse.
Kaiju Hano walked in with his hands shoved into the pockets of his school pants, his jacket unbuttoned, and his usual expression of deep and absolute laziness. However, he did not come alone. The club room, designed to comfortably house a dozen people, suddenly became claustrophobically small.
At his right, clinging to his arm with a mixture of shyness and unbreakable devotion, walked Sylvie. She wore her immaculate Kuoh Academy uniform and looked at the devils with surprising calm, supported by the absolute certainty that, as long as she held that boy's hand, not even the apocalypse itself could touch her.
At his left, walking one step behind but staying very close to him, was Asia Argento. The young blonde nun nervously toyed with the folds of her habit, lowering her gaze upon feeling the dense and dark demonic energies in the room, but remained firm beneath the teenager's protective mantle.
And then, the true terror entered the building.
The wooden floor of the old club began to creak, splinter, and sink under a weight that defied the structural integrity of the entire building.
Behind the trio, floating with aristocratic elegance, entered Lala, the Shiny Gardevoir, radiating a psychic pressure that made Akeno and Tsubaki feel a painful buzzing in their ears. But she was the most subtle one.
Char, the immense Charizard with the scar on his snout, had to crouch to pass through the doorframe, exhaling a plume of hot smoke that raised the room's temperature by ten degrees in a single second. Beside him, Tiburoncin, the alpha Garchomp, dragged his claws across the wooden floor, leaving deep grooves as his cold reptilian eyes scrutinized Kiba and Koneko as if they were appetizers.
But the nightmare had only begun. Tanque, the colossal Aggron, and Tery, the Tyranitar, forced their way in. The room's walls groaned. Tanque had to hunch his steel-covered back to avoid destroying the ceiling, while Tery released a low, guttural growl that made the windowpanes vibrate. Finally, closing the rear, Pinzas, the enormous Kingler, settled into a corner, snapping his giant claw with a hollow and threatening sound that resembled a guillotine closing.
The full Alpha Team. Six absolute predators, six monstrous beasts that did not emit magic, but rather a life force so brutal and overwhelming that the very air became toxic to the devils.
Rias Gremory took one step back, losing all composure. Sona Sitri's eyes opened wide, feeling her knees threaten to give out. Issei, at the back, covered his mouth to avoid screaming, staring at creatures that seemed taken directly from his worst nightmares.
Kaiju stopped at the center of the room. He looked at the petrified devils, then at his colossal companions barely fitting inside the room, and let out a small sigh, scratching his cheek.
"I thought the etiquette for this type of meeting required a certain formality," Kaiju said, breaking the sepulchral silence. His voice was calm, ringing clearly over Tyranitar's low growl. "I noticed you brought your full peerages. Your 'families.' So it seemed very rude not to bring mine. I hope you don't mind the crowding."
Saji, Sona's Pawn, released a small whimper of terror and fainted while standing, falling backward without anyone making the slightest effort to catch him.
Rias swallowed, forcing herself to take a step forward to maintain her façade as leader, though her voice trembled slightly.
"It is n-no trouble, Kaiju-san," the Gremory heiress managed to articulate, gesturing toward the sofas, which seemed ridiculously fragile before the presence of the Aggron. "Please... take a seat."
Kaiju nodded. With a subtle white flash in his one healthy eye, he transmuted the leather sofa into a titanium structure covered in velvet, ensuring it would withstand his weight and the girls'. He sat in the center, with Sylvie immediately settling beside him and Asia sitting at the edge, escorted by Lala. Charizard reclined behind them, acting as a living wall of fire.
Sona and Rias sat in front of him, stiff as boards. The rest of their peerages remained standing, not daring to make the slightest sudden movement.
Kaiju leaned back in the armchair, crossed one leg over the other, and interlaced his hands on his lap. He looked at the two devil heiresses with an expression of analytical coldness.
"Let's skip the courtesies and false apologies," Kaiju stated, getting straight to the point. "You believe I'm a threat to your territory. I believe you are a magnet for problems that attracts scum like the Fallen Angels to my city. However, there is one important detail causing a communication gap between us."
Rias and Sona exchanged a quick look, not understanding what he meant.
"A detail?" Sona asked, adjusting her glasses cautiously. "If we have offended your territory in some way, I assure you it was out of ignorance of your presence."
"That is exactly the problem, Sona," Kaiju interrupted. "You assume I know who you are. You assume I know your rules, your pacts, and the politics of your hidden world."
Kaiju leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. His brown eyes, devoid of any mystical glow at that moment, looked at them with brutal honesty.
"The truth is, I don't have the slightest idea what is happening on this planet," confessed the scarred boy, leaving every devil in the room absolutely speechless. "I was an orphan. I self-isolated from both the human and supernatural worlds since I was two years old. I've spent my entire life training, traveling to other dimensions, and taking care of my own. All I know about you is that you smell like dark energy and call yourselves 'devils.'"
Akeno, Kiba, and Tsubaki's jaws nearly hit the floor. The being who had disintegrated a Fallen Angel with a single word, the monster who had split the heavens with a blue beam of light, and the god capable of altering the memory of an entire city... was completely ignorant about the supernatural world?
"Are you saying... you don't know about the Three Factions?" Rias asked, her voice reflecting an almost comical shock.
"I don't know what a faction is, I don't know what a 'Maou' is, I don't know why those black-winged birds wanted Asia's magic, and honestly, I didn't care until they started dirtying my park." Kaiju leaned back again, gesturing with his hand for them to speak. "So, since we are gathered here peacefully, you are going to do something for me. You are going to give me an intensive class."
Kaiju crossed his arms, flanked by his colossal monsters and his two protégées, adopting the posture of a king demanding a report from his vassals.
"Talk. Explain everything to me about this supposed supernatural world. Who you are, what you want, and why the hell you're all fighting in my city. I'm listening."
Rias Gremory and Sona Sitri, seated rigidly on the transmuted titanium sofa, processed the young man's confession. The "Ghost" of Kuoh, the hidden deity capable of rewriting collective memory and disintegrating Fallen Angels with a command, had just admitted he had no idea who they were, what they did, or how the hierarchy of the world they lived in operated. His power did not come from a political faction of the Underworld, but from a mystical self-isolation he had maintained since childhood.
Sona Sitri was the first to recover her composure. Adjusting her glasses with one finger, she exhaled softly, letting her strategist's mind reorganize the map of the situation.
"If you lack knowledge of our existence, Kaiju-san, then it is our duty to enlighten you," Sona began, her voice recovering the formal and analytical neatness that characterized her. "This world is not governed by a single force. Behind the veil of human society, reality is divided and ruled by what we know as the Three Factions."
Rias Gremory nodded, interlacing her fingers over her lap, taking the floor with the innate elegance of the Underworld's high aristocracy. Her crimson hair caught the last orange reflections of dusk.
"Those three great forces are us, the Devils, the Angels, and the Fallen Angels," Rias explained, keeping her gaze fixed on the teenager's one healthy eye. "Originally, the three factions were submerged in a Great War that devastated the foundations of the supernatural world. A destructive war that, fortunately for Earth's continuum, ended long ago due to the exhaustion of all three sides."
Sona resumed the explanation, subtly deploying her knowledge to structure the current hierarchy:
"We, the heiresses you see in this academy, belong to the Old School Devils. Specifically, we represent the 72 Pillars of the Underworld's high nobility. Rias is the heiress of Clan Gremory, and I am the heiress of Clan Sitri. After the war, the population of pure devils decreased drastically, forcing our society to evolve in order to survive."
Rias subtly gestured toward Issei, who remained standing rigidly at the edge of the room, sweating cold before the Charizard snorting smoke behind him.
"To counteract the loss of life, the high factions created the Evil Pieces system based on chess," Rias continued. "This system allows us to reincarnate ordinary humans or other beings with exceptional potential, turning them into devils and granting them a place in our peerage, just as I did with Issei a few days ago after finding him on the brink of death. Those who deviate from the laws of their respective clans and commit atrocities using their power become Rogue Devils, the same creatures your... familiars have been cleaning from the streets of Kuoh."
Sona deliberately shifted her gaze toward Asia Argento, who remained seated on the edge of the titanium sofa, tightly holding the silver cross of her habit.
"The opposite pole of our existence is the Angels of the Church, servants of light who operate under Heaven's system and whose sacred prayers grant them blessed power lethal to our race," Sona added coldly. "And the third faction, the one that interrupted your rest last night, is the Fallen Angels. Beings who once belonged to Heaven but fell from divine grace after harboring impure thoughts or straying from the path. The creature you eliminated in the park, Dohnaseek, and the girl who deceived Issei, Raynare, belong to Grigori, the organization that gathers the Fallen."
Rias stared at the immense titans of the Alpha Team crowding the room, feeling that every word she pronounced was being evaluated by the psychic Gardevoir.
"The Fallen Angels constantly monitor this city with one purpose: to hunt and assassinate humans who harbor Sacred Gears before they become a threat to them," Rias concluded, her voice ringing firmly in the room. "Those artifacts are miracles encapsulated in the souls of certain mortals, created by the Biblical God. Issei is the bearer of one of them, and that was the only reason they tried to murder him in cold blood on his first date."
Silence once again took over the Occult Research Club. The two heiresses had exposed the foundations of the supernatural world, laying bare the politics, wars, and pacts that governed the city of Kuoh.
Kaiju remained leaning back on the titanium sofa, absorbing every fragment of information with unshakable calm. His analytical mind arranged the concepts of devils, exorcists, and fallen angels within his spatial control map, finally understanding why the city's air stank of so many different energy frequencies.
The "Ghost" of Kuoh looked at Rias and Sona, and a small, lazy smile appeared at the corner of his lips. The Three Factions had their wars, their chess pieces, and their disputes over territory, but none of those immortal entities had the slightest idea that the true game board had just changed owners.