Dawn in the realm of the Aesir did not arrive with the rising of a sun. In Asgard, morning was a shift in frequency, a celestial exhale from the World Tree itself.
The eternal twilight of Yggdrasil, usually a deep, oceanic green, began to bleed into a sharper, piercing gold. High above, the colossal branches that held up the nine worlds shimmered, shaking loose mana dew that drifted down upon the golden halls of Gladsheim like a gentle, luminous rain. It was a sight of breathtaking, mythic beauty—the kind of view that would bring mortal poets to their knees.
Ren Ming, however, was cracking his neck.
Pop. Pop. Crack.
He stood on the stone balcony of the guest suite, stretching his arms high above his head until his spine aligned with a satisfying snap. The Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique hummed beneath his skin, metabolizing the dense Asgardian ether as easily as a man breathing air. Behind his soul, invisible to the naked eye but heavy on the spiritual plane, five Fate Palaces rotated like planets orbiting a dark star.
He leaned against the railing, his eyes—deep, ancient pools swirling with gray light—scanning the horizon. Below the glorious architecture of the gods lay the Iron Forest. It was a scar on the landscape, a jagged expanse of black metallic trees and rusted brambles, silent and waiting.
"Alright," Ren muttered, his voice scratching with morning rasp. He flicked his sensory perception outward, the Immortal Soul Bone acting as a high-fidelity radar. "Let's do a vibe check. Who's conscious?"
He didn't need to guess. The signatures flared in his mind's eye.
Rias was a steady, simmering crimson star, radiating a resolve that felt harder than it had the night before.
Akeno was a storm front of suppressed lightning, crackling with a dangerous, playful energy.
Koneko was a dense, compacted node of Touki, coiled tight like a spring.
Asia was a soft, unwavering candle of life-force, burning cleaner than ever before.
Issei was… well, Issei was a chaotic, sputtering rocket of draconic hormones and adrenaline, currently vibrating with the urge to do something cool.
And Kiba was a line of razor-wire Sword Intent, already outside, carving invisible patterns into the morning mist.
Ren smirked, a look of casual satisfaction crossing his face.
"Good. The vectors are live."
...
Rossweisse met them at the massive outer gates of Gladsheim.
The Valkyrie was in full professional mode. Her silver armor gleamed under the Yggdrasil light, her hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail, and she held a long staff etched with Norse runes. She looked every inch the bodyguard of the All-Father, a stark contrast to the chaotic group of Devils she was escorting.
"Form up," she commanded, her voice crisp and efficient, cutting through the morning chill. "We move as a single unit until we reach the designated training perimeter. The Iron Forest is classified as a high-risk zone for a reason. The flora is metallic, the fauna is aggressive, and the mana density can cause hallucination in the unprepared. Do not—under any circumstances—wander off."
She paused, her aqua eyes flicking toward Ren, who was strolling up with his hands in the pockets of his track pants, looking like he was heading to a convenience store rather than a death zone.
"Ren-sensei excluded," she added, her tone dry enough to strike a match on.
Ren gave her a lazy, two-fingered salute. "I'll try not to trip and fall into a dragon's mouth. No promises, though. I hear they're high in protein."
"Please take this seriously," Rossweisse sighed, the eternal suffering of the straight-man character evident in her posture.
Rias' peerage lined up. The transformation from the previous night was subtle but undeniable. The emotional knots that had been tangled in the corridor—the jealousy, the fear of unworthiness, the confusion—had been untied. They stood straighter. The hesitation that usually haunted their eyes when facing the unknown had been burned away in the fires of honest communication.
Rias stepped forward. Her crimson hair fluttered in the cold wind like a war banner.
"We're ready," she said simply.
Ren looked them over, his gaze heavy and assessing.
Rias. Akeno. Koneko. Asia. Issei. Kiba.
Six Soul Palaces, each hovering at the fifty percent condensation mark. Six engines revving in neutral. They had the Myriad Origin Scripture looping perfectly, recycling their energy, but they were hitting the ceiling of what mere "technique" could achieve.
They weren't kids playing at being devils anymore. They were cultivators standing at the threshold of the Dao.
"Good," Ren said, stopping in front of them. "Because today? You're going to break."
Asia gulped audibly, clutching her hands together.
"Break… what, exactly?" Issei asked, his eyes widening in alarm. "Like, mentally? Or physically?"
"Your bottlenecks," Ren replied, rocking back on his heels. "Or your bones. Ideally the first one, but hey, sometimes we get a two-for-one deal. That's just Tuesday in my line of work."
He took a step closer, his casual demeanor sharpening into something more pedagogical yet menacing.
"Listen up. You're all stuck at the same point. Soul Palace at fifty percent. You've got the structure. You've got the Myriad Origin loop. You've got the amazing power. But you're still treating power like it's a tool. Like it's just something you need when you need to blast something."
He tapped his temple hard.
"Soul Creation isn't about using power. It's about being power. It's the moment your Soul Palace stops being a room you visit in your head and starts being the main system your entire existence runs on."
Rossweisse blinked, her pen pausing over her notebook. Main system… existence… She quickly scribbled the metaphor down.
"You're all different," Ren continued, pacing down the line like a drill sergeant from the streets. "Rias, your vector is erasure. Akeno, yours is synthesis. Koneko, density. Asia, inversion. Issei, redirection. Kiba, conceptual cutting. You are not allowed to copy each other. You're going to bleed your way into Soul Creation with a Truth that belongs only to you."
He stopped and shrugged, looking bored by the prospect of their safety.
"I don't care how long it takes. Hours. Days. You're not leaving that forest until you break through or pass out. I'll handle the perimeter. Try not to die in ways that are embarrassing. It reflects poorly on my resume."
Issei raised a tentative hand. "Uh, quick follow-up, Ren-sensei. What exactly counts as a 'embarrassing' death?"
"Anything involving tripping, slipping on a banana peel, or monologuing about your tragic backstory for more than twelve seconds," Ren answered immediately, deadpan. "Also, if you get taken out by anything smaller than a truck, I'm disowning you."
"Harsh," Kiba murmured, a small smile playing on his lips.
"Accurate," Koneko added, adjusting her gloves.
Rossweisse cleared her throat, checking the sky. "We should move. The mana currents are optimal right now; the Iron Forest is at its daily peak in ambient density."
Ren flashed her a quick grin, sharp and charismatic. "See? This is why I keep hyping you up. Logistics queen. You keep the trains running on time."
Her ears turned pink under her helmet, flustered by the sudden praise, but she turned away quickly to hide it.
"Stay within warding range," she ordered, her voice going up an octave. "I'll maintain a moving barrier net."
The group set off, leaving the golden safety of the halls behind.
The path to the Iron Forest wound down from Gladsheim's plateau in a series of broad, ancient stone switchbacks. Above them, the branches of Yggdrasil cast shifting patterns of pale light and shadow; below, the metallic canopy glinted like a lake of hammered obsidian, vast and foreboding.
The closer they got, the heavier the air became. Gravity seemed to intensify, pressing down on their shoulders. By the time they reached the treeline, every breath felt like sucking in molten iron filings.
The trees here were nightmares of botany. They were less "wood" and more vertical spears of cursed ore. Black trunks twisted into agonizing shapes, studded with iron thorns the size of daggers. The ground wasn't dirt; it was a mosaic of shattered metal plates and cooled slag. Each step rang faintly, clink, clink, like footsteps on a buried bell.
Issei swallowed thickly, looking around. "This place feels… mad. Like the air itself is angry."
"That's because it is," Ren said cheerfully, kicking a piece of scrap metal. "The Iron Forest is what happens when a realm's mana gets into a long-term toxic relationship with murder. It's the perfect training ground. Tons of beasts, plenty of lingering resentment, and excellent reception."
"Reception?" Asia echoed, confused, tilting her head.
"Signal strength," Ren clarified, tapping his chest over his heart. "The Dao is loud here. Your Soul Palaces will hear the universe yelling at them crystal clear out here. Less noise, more truth."
Rossweisse exhaled, a cloud of frost blooming in front of her face as she raised her staff.
"Wards going up," she announced.
A constellation of intricate Norse magic circles flared to life around them—transparent, layered, and geometrically precise. They didn't clash with the environment; they sank into it, locking onto leyline knots and pressure points with mathematical elegance.
Ren watched her work, his eyebrows raising. "Sixteen layers?" he guessed. "Twenty-two if you count the passives?"
She shot him a sideways look, a spark of professional pride in her eyes. "…Twenty-three. I added a kinetic impact dampener for Issei-san, considering his fighting style involves face-planting into enemies."
"Rude, but fair," Issei muttered, checking his Boosted Gear.
"Alright," Ren said, clapping his hands once. The sound cut through the oppressive, heavy air like a gunshot.
"Deployment time. Rias—north quadrant. That's the heavy gravity zone. Akeno—high atmosphere and canopy. Koneko—ground-level, seek heavy contact. Asia—mobile support, no fixed position, you follow the screams. Issei—mid-range vectors, focus on moving while cycling. Kiba—wide patrol, cut anything that breaches into anyone else's zone."
He pointed a finger toward a distant, darker section of the jagged forest, where the mana currents twisted into a visible, suffocating spiral.
"The densest zone is over there. That's your wall. Push into it until your bodies and souls start to complain. When the complaints turn into screaming? You're close. When they turn into silence? That's the threshold. Don't stop there. Smash through it."
He let his gaze sweep over them one last time, his gray eyes hard as flint.
"And remember: I'm watching. Not to save you. To see what you do when you think no one is coming to help."
Rias' eyes burned with crimson fire. Akeno's lips curled into a sharp, sadistic smile. Koneko's tail flicked once, hard, under her armor. Asia took a deep, steadying breath, her knuckles white on her uniform. Issei rolled his shoulders, the Boosted Gear humming its engine noise. Kiba simply nodded, his hand resting on his sword hilt.
"Move," Rossweisse commanded.
They scattered. Like arrows fired from a single bow, they vanished into the metallic gloom of the forest.
Ren stayed where he was for a moment, eyes half-lidded. The Immortal Soul Bone rotated through inputs, processing the energetic data of the forest.
He saw them all. Six bright, struggling nodes weaving through a field of ancient, metallic predators.
"You're really not going with them?" Rossweisse asked, stepping up beside him. Her aqua eyes were tracking shifting mana readings in a holographic projection from her staff. "Not directly, I mean?"
"If I hold their hands, they'll think I'm the solution," Ren said, leaning back against a twisted iron trunk. "I want them to learn they're the engine, not the passenger. I'll babysit from the shadows."
He tilted his head toward the deeper, darker part of the forest, where the trees grew so thick they blocked out the Yggdrasil light entirely.
"Besides," he added, a predatory smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "We've got our own homework. Odin didn't give me hunting rights out here so I could stand around looking pretty. I have needs."
Rossweisse tried very hard not to react to that phrasing, but her eyebrow twitched.
"…The Iron Forest is home to multiple species of draconic-class beasts," she said, retreating into the safety of data. "Wyverns, Basilisks, Iron Drakes, sub-adult Wyrms. Most are at least Ultimate-Class in terms of raw physical parameters. Some of the older ones approach Satan-Class when enraged. They are biological weapons left over from the old wars."
Ren's eyes lit up with a terrifying, greedy gleam.
"Perfect," he said, pushing off the tree. "I need live batteries."
He gestured into the gloom. "Come on, Shieldmaiden. Let's go mug some dragons for their kidneys while we monitor the kids."
"…That is a deeply upsetting way to describe hunting," she muttered, but she fell into step behind him.
They moved in tandem—Ren in front, walking with an arrogant, open gait, and Rossweisse just behind, her wards expanding out in a stealth dome as they walked. The Iron Forest reacted to them like a body reacting to a virus. Rust-colored mist swirled in, shot through with shimmering razor motes. Predatory mana signatures flickered at the edge of perception, tasting their scent.
Rossweisse raised her staff, the runes glowing blue. "Contact. Three o'clock. High velocity."
Ren didn't even look. He just flicked his gaze to the side.
ROAAAAAR!
A wyvern broke from the canopy—a massive, nightmare creature of rust-colored scales and shredded metal wings. It was easily the size of a bus, its eyes glowing molten orange, its maw dripping with acidic saliva that hissed as it hit the iron ground. It carried an aura of gravity so heavy that the trees around it bent and groaned.
"Big one," Rossweisse noted, her analysis spell spinning rapidly. "Classifying as Elite Wyvern. Gravity aura, corrosive breath, sub-Drake intelligence. Extremely dangerous."
"Dangerous for them," Ren corrected.
He moved.
He didn't use a magic circle. He didn't use Touki. He simply stepped, and the Fate Destroying Noble cultivation base flared. Space folded around him. He appeared above the wyvern's head in a blur that the human eye couldn't track.
His hand came down like the judgment of heaven.
He didn't punch. He grabbed.
His fingers closed around the invisible axis of the wyvern's gravity aura. The Myriad Origin Scripture roared to life, seizing the runaway vector of the beast's power. It didn't clash with the gravity; it stole it.
For a split second, the massive wyvern went weightless, its roar cutting off into a confused squawk.
Then Ren twisted his wrist.
"Sit."
The stolen gravity snapped back—magnified and inverted.
BOOOM!
The wyvern slammed into the metal ground with the sound of a collapsing skyscraper. The impact created a crater ten meters wide. Half its bones fractured instantly under its own mass, the iron earth buckling beneath it.
Ren landed lightly beside its head, dust settling around his sneakers.
The beast tried to rise, thrashing, its eyes burning with ancient rage.
"Shh," Ren whispered conversationally, dropping a hand onto the crown of its armored skull. "Don't struggle. This won't hurt me at all."
He dug his will in.
Ancient Ming Bloodline: ACTIVATE.
The air temperature plummeted. Shadows that had no source began to bleed out from Ren's feet. A sensation of absolute, bottomless hunger filled the clearing—a hunger that felt old, regal, and terrifyingly gluttonous.
The wyvern froze. Its instinct, honed over centuries of survival, screamed a single word: Predator.
Ren's bloodline latched onto the wyvern's core. It didn't just drain mana; it corrupted the energy, broke down the beast's resentment, its life force, its very essence, and dragged it all out like a extracted tumor.
The wyvern convulsed once, violently, and then went slack.
Visually, the beast was intact. But to Rossweisse's magical sight, the creature had been hollowed out. Its core—a dense knot of mana and instinct—was gone, swallowed whole by the human standing next to it.
Ren straightened, exhaling a puff of gray steam. The newly stolen energy threaded into his loop, the Myriad Origin Scripture taking the chaotic, poisonous draconic resentment and refining it into pure, crystallized power, feeding it into his Fate Palaces.
He glanced back at Rossweisse. She was staring at him, her staff lowered slightly, her expression a mix of professional awe and primal fear.
"What?" he asked, wiping his hand on his pants.
She blinked, rebooting her brain. "…You just neutralized a wyvern's innate gravity field, used it to crush its own skeletal structure, and extracted its core without rupturing the physical vessel. That… that isn't magic. That violates the laws of conservation."
Ren shrugged, grinning. "Yeah. Laws are more like guidelines when you have the right bloodline. Waste not, want not."
He jerked his thumb at the corpse. "Bag the body in a stasis rune for later. The scales are good for armor, and dragon meat is high in calories. I'm mostly here for the resentment energy, but no reason to leave good loot."
Rossweisse sighed, the normalcy of "loot" grounding her again. She moved her staff, weaving a set of complex spatial runes. "You are terrifying, Ren-sensei. Truly."
"I try," he said.
As she worked, sealing the massive corpse into a pocket dimension, Ren's gaze went distant. The connection to his "students" tugged at his mind.
He saw Rias brush against a mana vortex and deliberately not erase it, testing the resistance.
He saw Akeno dancing with multiple streams of lightning, her aura fracturing and reforming, laughing maniacally.
He saw Koneko disappearing under a pile of metal wolves and refusing to call for help, her fists glowing white.
He saw Asia standing alone in a clearing, hands shaking, facing down a charging Iron Bear, whispering a prayer that sounded more like a battle cry.
He saw Issei sprinting between trees, taking hits on purpose to gauge the kinetic transfer.
Ren's lips curled into a proud smile.
"Let's go check in on the royalty," he said. "I think the Princess is about to make a move."
...
The north quadrant of the Iron Forest was a storm of crushing pressure.
This was where the forest's mana congealed the most—where the air felt like liquid lead and even sound moved sluggishly. The trees were thicker here, their blackened trunks fused together in grotesque braids, forming natural pillars that reached up toward the distant, uncaring glow of Yggdrasil.
Rias Gremory stood in the center of a natural arena, ringed by jagged spires of cursed ore.
She was alone.
She had driven the lesser beasts out. They could sense her aura—the Crimson-Haired Ruin Princess—and wanted nothing to do with it. Even the mindless monsters of the Iron Forest knew better than to touch the Power of Destruction when it was leaking this heavily.
Her Soul Palace pulsed behind her consciousness—a half-built cathedral of crimson light. Its arches and pillars were majestic, but they were still wrapped in the scaffolding of her uncertainty.
Fifty percent condensed. Stable. Functional.
Insufficient.
She flexed her fingers, watching tiny motes of Power of Destruction appear and vanish around her porcelain skin—little red-black stars that erased the flakes of floating iron dust wherever they touched.
"Power isn't my problem anymore," she muttered to herself, her voice echoing in the silent clearing. "Control isn't, either. I can shape it. I can fire it. I can calculate the trajectory."
She closed her eyes, blocking out the metallic world.
Memory washed over her.
Last night, Ren's hand around hers. His voice calling her a queen, not a piece on a board. The honest thrill in his eyes when she'd nearly erased Sigurd's spear from existence.
"You'll be walking on it as a queen. Not as a girl begging to be chosen. Never that."
And on the balcony: "Soul Creation is when your Soul Palace becomes your main system."
Rias frowned in the dark of her mind.
"So what's my system?" she whispered.
The old answers rushed forward to fill the void.
Gremory. Protector. King Piece. Pillar of the Underworld. Sirzechs' little sister.
She rejected them.
Those identities were inherited. They were robes someone else had tailored and draped over her shoulders. They were heavy, stifling, and not hers.
She reached deeper. Past the politics. Past the peerage system. Past the fear of Riser Phenex.
Rias.
Who was she?
She was the girl who had been ready to gamble her life in a Rating Game just to breathe free air. She was the girl who had chosen her peerage with her heart instead of her political acumen. She was the girl who looked at Asia Argento and saw a friend, not a pawn.
But she was also a Devil. A creature of desire. A being of destruction.
Her Soul Palace responded to the introspection.
The crimson cathedral flickered, the spiritual masonry groaning. The Gremory crest etched into the central dome shimmered, warping. It melted like wax, losing the rigid edges of her family's crest and reforming into something new. Something sharper. Less formal. More… absolute.
"My Power of Destruction doesn't have to be a cannon," she realized, her eyes snapping open.
The crimson light in her irises flared, consuming the blue.
"It doesn't even have to be a bullet. Why am I throwing it? Why am I treating it like a grenade?"
She raised her hand, palm facing the dense, twisted wall of iron trees.
"I am not a gun."
The Myriad Origin Scripture pulsed in her core, seizing on the declaration. It took that emotional vector—that crystallization of self—and fed it into the loop. It recycled every fragment of self-doubt, every ounce of "I should be better," and turned it into fuel for a single, terrifying intent.
Rias inhaled, and the air around her darkened.
"Myriad Origin Scripture…"
The world seemed to hold its breath.
"…Throne of Ruin."
WOMM.
Power of Destruction didn't shoot out of her. It poured out.
It wasn't a beam. It was a tide. It sank into the ground, seeped into the iron roots, and climbed into the air. It didn't explode; it saturated.
Within a hundred-meter radius, reality shifted hue. The vibrant blacks and greys of the Iron Forest washed out, replaced by a monochrome world of deep, silent crimson.
The iron trees began to flake at their edges. Not melting. Ending. Tiny slivers of their existence simply decided to stop being. The mana currents in the area slowed, then halted, then knelt. Every vector, every law of physics in that circle bent toward a single center point:
Rias.
Inside her soul, the change was cataclysmic.
The half-built cathedral snapped into focus. The scaffolding dissolved into mist. The central chamber condensed rapidly, turning from a vague hall into a Throne Room of pure ruin-light. Every pillar was etched with the concept of Erasure.
The condensing rate ticked upward.
51%... 54%... 58%... 60%.
Click.
The sound was audible only to her soul, but it rang like a bell.
Soul Creation: Achieved.
Rias exhaled slowly. She felt… heavy. But it was a good weight. The weight of authority.
At the edge of the clearing, the underbrush crashed open.
An Iron Boar—a tank-sized beast of muscle and plated steel, eyes burning with mindless aggression—charged into the clearing. It saw Rias. It roared, digging its hooves into the ground, preparing to trample the small, red-haired figure.
It crossed the invisible threshold of her domain.
Rias didn't turn. She didn't raise her hand. She didn't fire a blast.
She simply looked at it.
And she disapproved of its existence.
The Iron Boar didn't explode. There was no flash of light. No sound of impact.
The beast simply… ceased.
One moment, it was a charging tonnage of death. The next moment, the space it occupied was empty. The air rushed in to fill the vacuum with a soft whoosh. The forest floor beneath where its hooves had been was untouched.
Absolute erasure. No trace. No residue. It was as if the universe had simply edited the file and pressed delete.
Rias let the field return to baseline, the crimson tint fading from the world, though the air around her remained terrified.
"Good," she said quietly, her voice steady and regal. "From now on, anything that challenges my authority in my domain… dies before it reaches me."
She smoothed her skirt, a small, satisfied smile playing on her lips.
"And I didn't even have to yell."
Miles away, Ren paused mid-step.
He felt the shift in the atmospheric pressure. It wasn't wind. It was a localized reality override. A chunk of the world had just been rewritten by a superior will.
His five Fate Palaces rumbled in deep, resonant approval.
"What was that spike?" Rossweisse gasped, looking toward the north, her knuckles white on her staff. "The mana readings just… flatlined. It looked like a void opened up."
Ren grinned, fierce and proud.
"That wasn't a void," he said. "That was Rias."
He looked toward the north quadrant, where the sky seemed a little darker than before.
"Looks like the Queen got her throne."
...
High above the jagged expanse of the Iron Forest, Akeno Himejima drifted on the breath of a storm.
Here, the air was thin, biting, and electric. The canopy below was a jagged sea of metal spikes and rusted brambles, but the upper atmosphere was a chaotic theater of warring energies. The ambient mana of the Iron Forest, toxic and heavy, constantly discharged upward, seeking to ground itself against the divine, rhythmic hum of the World Tree's branches miles above.
The result was a perpetual, erratic dance of lightning.
CRACK-BOOM!
A fork of Nordic lightning, pale blue and singing with the authority of Asgard, hammered down.
Akeno didn't dodge. She didn't weave a defensive circle. She spread her arms wide, her shrine maiden hakama fluttering violently in the gale, and welcomed the strike.
The bolt slammed into her.
For a lesser Devil, this would be suicide. Divine lightning was anathema to her kind; it was poison designed to scour the unholy from existence. But Akeno didn't flinch. Her smile was serene, bordering on the ecstatic.
Her own demonic power, thick and viscous like dark syrup, surged to meet the intruder. Threads of Fallen Angel light—her father's hated legacy—flickered within the darkness, acting not as a contaminant, but as a bridge.
She swallowed it all.
The Myriad Origin Scripture roared within her core. It was a tyrannical engine of digestion. It stripped the "Holy" tag from the Nordic lightning. It stripped the "Demonic" tag from her heritage. It stripped the "Fallen" tag from her blood. It broke them down into their rawest, most primal components—Energy. Vibration. Destruction.
Then, it looped them.
The energy didn't settle in a pool in her stomach. It began to spin.
"Ren-kun was right," Akeno whispered, her voice lost in the howling wind. "I've been treating lightning like something I hold... like a whip I pick up."
She looked at her hands. Sparks of violet-gold electricity—the fusion Ren had helped her stabilize—jumped between her fingers. They were hungry. They wanted a path.
"I don't just want lightning that is mine," she murmured, her violet eyes glowing with a terrifying lucidity. "I want lightning that remembers me."
Memories flashed behind her eyes, brighter than the storm. The label of Priestess. The sneer of Fallen. The pity of Traitor's Daughter. The whispered fear of Sadist.
Ren's voice, devoid of pity, cut through the noise: "All of that fits in the same box. I see all the dirty parts, and I don't care. Why should you?"
A breathless, liberating laugh bubbled up from her throat.
"If he doesn't care," she told the thunder, "then I won't either."
Deep within her spiritual sea, her Soul Palace shifted. It had been a volatile sphere of clashing storm clouds—a reflection of her inner turmoil. Now, as she fed her new intent into the Myriad Origin loop, the chaos began to organize.
The clouds didn't disperse; they aligned. Lightning rails formed, connecting the thunderheads in precise, repeating geometric circuits. The chaos of a storm resolved into the terrifying precision of a diagram.
"My lightning isn't about purity," she decided, the realization settling over her like a heavy mantle. "It's about... continuity."
She closed her eyes and cast the spell. Not outward, toward an enemy, but inward.
"Myriad Origin Scripture... Heavenbreaker Circuit."
ZZZT-THRUM.
The violet-gold lightning didn't shoot out. It wrapped around her.
It coiled tight against her skin, sinking into her pores. It traced along her nervous system, fusing with her meridians, weaving itself through muscle fiber and etching into bone. It turned her entire biology into a living, breathing superconductor.
Her Soul Palace locked the concept in. The condensing rate on her interface spiked.
52%... 55%... 59%...
Click.
60%.
Her body hummed. The sound wasn't human; it was the low-frequency drone of a high-voltage transformer.
A lance of wild, green forest lightning—heavy with the Iron Forest's resentment—arced from a nearby cloud and slammed into her chest.
Akeno didn't absorb it into a battery this time.
She let it ride the circuit.
The energy hit her sternum, traveled instantly down her right arm, looped through her spine, accelerated up her left, crossed her heart, and erupted from her fingertips.
PYEW.
A beam of violet-gold light, no thicker than a needle, erased the air in front of her.
It didn't explode. It pierced. It tore a precise, vacuum-sealed line through three layered storm clouds, stretching for miles, before whiplashing back along the same path to return to her hand.
She caught the returning energy, the loop closing.
Silence reclaimed the upper atmosphere.
Akeno opened her eyes. The violet hue was electric, glowing with a dangerous predatory light.
"That felt..." She shivered, a flush rising to her cheeks. "Intoxicating."
She flexed her fingers. The lightning didn't crackle wildly anymore. It flowed like water, docile and eager, waiting for the slightest twitch of her intent.
"This isn't just about big attacks," she realized. "If my whole body is the circuit... then every touch is a shock. Every movement is a strike."
Far below, a pack of Iron Wolves leaped between the metallic branches, chasing a smaller prey beast.
Akeno looked down. She didn't chant. She didn't summon a magic circle. She just pointed a finger, like a child playing pretend.
"Test shot."
A single thread of violet-gold light connected her fingertip to the alpha wolf's spine.
There was no thunder. No flash.
The wolf simply stiffened. Its nervous system was instantaneously overclocked, frying the signals from brain to muscle. It dropped mid-leap, dead before it hit the ground.
"Hm. Playful," Akeno mused, a sadistic smile curling her lips. "Non-lethal by default, over-lethal by choice. I think I'll keep it."
Miles away, Ren paused, feeling the shift in the atmospheric mana. He let out a low whistle.
"Sparky just built a railgun inside her own spine," he commented to the empty air, shaking his head with a grin. "Terrifying woman. She'll get really dangerous when it's raining."
...
Deep in the gut of the forest, where the metallic trees grew so thick they blotted out the sky, gravity seemed to hold a personal grudge against Koneko Toujou.
She was losing.
Deliberately.
An Iron Basilisk—a monstrosity that was less a snake and more a sentient train of overlapping blade-scales—was coiled around her. Its body was as thick as an ancient oak, and it was squeezing with enough force to turn a boulder into dust.
Koneko spat a mouthful of blood. She wiped her mouth with the back of her gloved hand, her golden eyes dim but focused.
"Ren-sensei said..." she gritted out, her ribs creaking audibly, "...I rely on brute force too much. Need... better center."
The Basilisk hissed, a sound like steam escaping a high-pressure valve, and tightened its coils.
Pain flared—white-hot and blinding. Koneko's Touki, the life-force aura of a warrior, flared automatically to reject the intrusion. It burst outward in a white shockwave, trying to push the beast away.
No.
The Myriad Origin Scripture caught the flare. It grabbed the wasted energy, the centrifugal force of her panic, and folded it back in.
Don't push, the scripture whispered. Anchor.
Her Soul Palace—a compact, overbuilt bunker of raw willpower—shuddered. It sat at fifty percent, stubborn and immovable.
A memory surfaced. Last night, on the balcony. Ren's hand, large and warm, resting on her head. The way he had looked at her not as a child, or a mascot, or a monster, but as a force of nature.
"You are pure violence."
And her own whisper into his chest: "I'll walk this path too."
Koneko's trembling stopped.
"I'm... not a mascot," she growled, the sound vibrating deep in her chest, resonating with the earth below. "Not a 'for her size' anything."
The Basilisk roared, opening a maw dripping with acidic saliva, preparing to bite her head off.
Something inside Koneko snapped. It wasn't a bone. It was a limitation.
"Stop," she commanded.
Not to the beast. To herself. To the instinct that told her she was small.
Inside her spiritual sea, the bunker unfolded. The walls didn't expand outward to make more room; they collapsed inward, increasing in density.
She wasn't building a fortress. She was building a singularity.
"My Touki isn't just muscle," she realized, baring her teeth. "It's... gravity. It's the weight that keeps me here."
She inhaled sharply. She grabbed every scrap of her scattered aura and slammed it into a single, imaginary point just below her navel.
"Myriad Origin Scripture... Immutable Core."
The air around her warped.
Her aura, which usually exploded outward like a bomb, suddenly inverted. It imploded, condensing into a dense, invisible sphere around her body.
The Basilisk squeezed.
Nothing happened.
The beast strained, its muscles bulging, scales grinding against each other with a screech of metal on metal. But the small girl in its grip didn't compress. She had become an immovable object.
Instead, the ground gave way.
Unable to support the sudden, conceptual weight of Koneko's existence, the forest floor cratered. A ten-meter circle of iron plates buckled and collapsed, sinking three feet instantly. The Basilisk's coils groaned as they were forced to expand, its own leverage turning against it.
Koneko's Soul Palace condensed violently. It was no longer a room; it was a node. A black hole of physical intent.
55%... 58%...
Boom.
60%.
The Basilisk panicked. Its reptilian brain screamed that something was wrong, that the prey had suddenly become heavier than the mountain itself. It tried to uncoil, to flee.
Koneko moved.
She didn't leap. She didn't use fancy footwork.
She simply took one step.
She placed her foot on the thickest part of the Basilisk's tail.
THUD.
Reality seemed to lag for a split second.
Then, the tail snapped. It wasn't crushed by strength; it was flattened as if a skyscraper had just been dropped on it. The bone shattered with the sound of a gunshot.
SKREEEEE!
The beast screamed, thrashing wildy.
Koneko blurred. She used the recoil of her own "weight" not to jump, but to launch herself like a cannonball. She slammed a simple uppercut into the underside of the beast's jaw.
CRACK.
The impact was sickeningly solid. The Basilisk's head snapped back so hard its neck vertebrae disintegrated. The shockwave traveled down its body, rippling the scales, and lifted the multi-ton creature into the air before slamming it into the forest wall.
It didn't move again.
Koneko landed. Dust settled around her sneakers.
Her Touki flared again, but this time it was a thin, terrifyingly controlled outline hugging her skin.
She flexed her fingers, feeling the density of her own existence.
"So... I'm a tank," she deadpanned, looking at the devastation. "But now... I'm the floor too."
She smirked, a tiny, rare expression. "Ren-sensei is going to make so many bad mass jokes."
Hundreds of meters away, Ren laughed, the sound echoing off the trees.
"Oh, that's evil," he grinned, feeling the spike of conceptual gravity. "She just turned herself into a walking anchor. Good girl."
...
Asia Argento stood in the quietest, most deceptive corner of the Iron Forest.
Ren and Rossweisse had funneled the apex predators away, leaving only the smaller terrors. But "small" in the Iron Forest was relative.
An Iron Bear—a hulk of muscle and plated steel standing twelve feet tall—lumbered toward her. Its eyes glowed with a sickly yellow hunger, and its breath smelled of rust and old blood.
Asia's hands trembled. She clutched the simple rosary at her neck, her knuckles white.
Her instinct screamed at her to put up a barrier. To hide. To wait for Ren Ming, Issei, or Rias, or Kiba to save her. That was her role. That was who she was. The Bishop. The Support. The Damsel.
"You're not a Devil because you decided to be evil," Ren's words floated back to her. "You're a Devil because your biology changed. Your heart didn't suddenly grow horns."
"My heart..." she whispered.
She looked down at her chest.
Her Soul Palace was a chapel of light. It was beautiful, serene, but fragile. Half the stained-glass windows were boarded up. The altar was bare.
Fifty percent. Always enough to help others. Never enough to stand alone.
"I want to be greedy," she said suddenly. The words tasted strange, forbidden, on her tongue. "I want to be greedy... for warmth. For staying. For... him."
The Iron Bear roared, sensing prey, and charged. The ground shook with its gallop.
Asia didn't run. She closed her eyes.
The Myriad Origin Scripture ignited within her. It didn't find rage or battle lust. It found desire. It found the terrified, selfish, beautiful wish of a girl who didn't want to be abandoned again.
The scripture seized that vector. It took her guilt, her fear of "sin," her ingrained habit of making herself small, and crushed it. It refined it into pure emotional fuel and fed it into the foundation of her Dao Heart.
Inside the chapel, the altar changed.
It wasn't empty anymore. A reliquary appeared—a golden vessel designed to hold sacred things.
My friends' lives. Their hopes. My selfish wish to keep them.
Asia's eyes snapped open. They weren't just green anymore; they held the profound, verdant depth of an ancient forest.
"Twilight... Suppression," she whispered.
Then, she shook her head.
"No. Not just suppression."
The Iron Bear reached her. It raised a paw the size of a sedan, claws gleaming like scythes, and brought it down.
WOMM.
It hit a wall. But not a hard wall.
It hit a dome of soft, jade-colored light. The air inside smelled of incense and hospital antiseptic. The bear's claws didn't bounce off; they sank into the light like it was thick gelatin.
Asia's Sacred Gear, Twilight Healing, flared on her fingers. But the healing light didn't move toward a wound. It flooded the dome. It saturated the very air.
It was life energy, compressed, repurposed, and weaponized.
The Iron Bear howled.
Its muscles spasmed, violently over-stimulated. Its heart beat uncontrollably fast. Its cells began to regenerate so rapidly they exhausted the body's energy reserves in seconds.
"Rest," Asia commanded. Her voice wasn't loud, but it carried the absolute authority of a head nurse in an ICU.
The bear's eyes rolled back. Its brain was flooded with a tidal wave of calming endorphins and forced sleep signals. It sagged against the barrier, sliding down like a drunkard, and began to snore loudly enough to rattle the pebbles on the ground.
Asia panted, sweat beading on her forehead.
Inside, her Soul Palace solidified. The chapel walls thickened into fortress stone. The reliquary locked into place.
54%... 57%...
Ding.
60%.
She wasn't done.
"If I can make enemies sleep..." she murmured, her voice trembling with a mix of fear and excitement, "then... I can also keep them awake."
She turned, looking toward the distant, flaring mana signatures of her peerage. She could feel them. Rias's destruction. Issei's fire. Kiba's sharpness.
She extended her hands.
"Twilight... Reliquary."
Ghost lights flickered into existence across the forest.
Tiny, floating symbols—crosses, runes, little coiling snakes—manifested out of thin air. They latched onto Rias's shoulder, Akeno's wrist, Koneko's collarbone, Issei's chest, Kiba's neck.
They were marks. Beacons.
Asia's Soul Palace pulsed, the reliquary storing the potential energy.
"If they fall," she whispered, tears pricking her eyes, "I can... pull them back. At least once. Maybe twice. Even from the edge."
She smiled, a fierce, possessive expression that looked startlingly like Rias.
"I'm allowed... to keep them."
Ren nearly stumbled mid-step. He stopped, staring in Asia's direction with wide eyes.
"Holy..." he muttered. "Did she just...?"
"What?" Rossweisse asked, looking at her readings. "I'm picking up a massive surge of life mana, but it's... static. It's not doing anything."
"She just built remote save points," Ren said, awestruck. "On a live battlefield. That is... honestly? That's insanely broken."
Rossweisse stared at him. "Save points? You mean she can..."
"She raised the baseline survival rate of this unit to nearly 100%," Ren grinned, pride swelling in his chest. "That's my anchor."
...
Issei Hyoudou was doing everything Ren had told him not to do.
He was getting the absolute shit kicked out of him.
An Iron Wyvern dove at him, its gravity aura dragging him down into the mud. Issei didn't dodge. He slapped its wing aside, taking a glancing blow that would have shattered his humerus a week ago.
The Boosted Gear on his left arm glowed, the emerald jewel pulsing like a second heart.
[BOOST!]
He didn't yell back.
Ren had drilled that habit out of him with a stick. "Don't broadcast your power level, you moron. Be the variable they can't calculate."
Issei gritted his teeth and let the Myriad Origin Scripture spin.
Every time he got hit, he took it.
Kinetic force. Impact vectors. Heat. Even the emotional intensity—the killing intent rolling off the beasts—he swallowed it all.
Myriad Origin: Cycle of Waste.
It all went into the loop.
He sprinted through the Iron Forest, a chaotic blur of red and green, dragging a conga line of pissed-off monsters behind him.
"Okay, okay," he panted, vaulting over a rusted log. "Think. Ren-sensei said Soul Creation is when the Palace becomes the main system. So what's my main System?"
He ducked under a swipe from an Iron Stag, skidded across a patch of shredded metal, and shoulder-checked the beast hard enough to dislocate its neck.
Thump. More energy. More fuel.
What do I actually do?
He thought about his old style. Big beams. Big shouts. Dragon Shot. Dress Break. Big, dumb explosions.
That wasn't him anymore.
He remembered catching that gravity-enchanted greatsword during his duel. Absorbing the swing and turning it into a punch.
"That felt... right," he muttered. "Not because it was flashy... but because it was efficient."
He was still a pervert. He still wanted to be the Harem King. That wasn't going to change. But something else had taken root in his soul during this hellish week.
Respect.
The Valkyries respected clean technique. Ren respected sharp math. The Einherjar respected decisive violence.
He wanted to be worthy of that.
His Soul Palace, inside, was a messy teenage bedroom. Cluttered with discarded dreams, half-finished moves, dirty magazines, and old shame.
The Myriad Origin loop ran through it like a jet engine intake.
"What if..." Issei thought, sucking in a breath as an Iron Drake's roar shook the trees behind him, "...I stop thinking of myself as the cannon... and start thinking of myself as... the engine?"
He skidded to a halt in a large, jagged clearing.
The beasts thundered in after him. Iron Wyverns. Basilisks. Bears. Stags. A whole menagerie of metallic murder.
Issei planted his feet. He extended his left hand, palm up.
"Come on, then," he said quietly.
They obliged.
Claws, tails, and breath weapons rained down.
Issei moved. He didn't block; he parried. He took the impacts on his armor plates, angling his body so the force slid off him and fed into the Gear. It hurt. God, it hurt. But every pain was a number.
The Myriad Origin Scripture seized those numbers. It scrubbed the labels. Pain became Potential.
Inside his Soul Palace, the cluttered room cleaned itself in a whirlwind of energy. The walls folded outward, expanding into a sleek, circular chamber.
At the center, a massive, heart-shaped draconic engine formed. Pipes and hoses connected it to every part of the room.
His Soul Palace condensed.
52%... 56%...
VROOOM.
60%.
A symbol flared above the engine: a sideways figure-eight. An infinity loop.
Issei opened his eyes. They were slit pupils, glowing with a dangerous, radioactive green.
[Partner,] Ddraig rumbled from within the gauntlet, sounding genuinely impressed for the first time in centuries. [You finally figured it out.]
"Figured what out?" Issei muttered through gritted teeth, sweat pouring down his face as the energy capacity in his body reached critical mass.
[You were never meant to be a glorified cannon stand,] Ddraig said, his voice dripping with ancient pride. [You were born... to overclock.]
Issei laughed. It was a wild, breathless sound.
"Then let's... overclock."
He raised his right fist.
"Myriad Origin Scripture... Dragon Recycle Drive."
The reservoir of power he'd been building didn't explode outward.
It spun.
A loop formed between his Dantian, his Soul Palace engine, and the Boosted Gear. Every bit of impact energy he'd accumulated began to circulate, accelerating with each pass instead of bleeding off as heat.
The Boosted Gear pulsed, screaming.
[BOOST. BOOST. BOOST. BOOST.]
There was no pause. No cooldown. The ten-second rule was shattered by the sheer velocity of the recycle loop.
Issei's arm blurred.
He didn't launch a beam. He simply punched.
Once.
The Dragon Recycle Drive dumped the entire spinning reservoir into that single strike—but the loop stayed intact, instantly refilling from the recoil.
His fist hit the iron ground.
CRACK-DOOOM.
The shockwave didn't radiate outward in a messy cone. It tunneled.
A focused seismic lance shot through the geological strata of the forest floor, popping up under the beasts like a series of kinetic landmines.
Iron Boars flipped into the air like toys. Wyverns crashed as the air pressure vanished. The Iron Drake reared, roared—then toppled sideways as the ground under its front legs simply ceased to exist.
The clearing turned into a scrapyard in seconds.
Issei stood in the center of the dust cloud, panting, wobbling on his feet. The loop still spun under his skin, humming with a terrifying, limitless potential.
"Oh," he said faintly, looking at his smoking fist. "That's... dangerous."
Ren felt the vibration through the soles of his shoes. He chuckled.
"Not bad." He faintly smiled. "He just built a feedback engine. That idiot got some spunk."
...
Kiba Yuuto was learning the hard way that speed wasn't everything.
He was facing an Iron-Hide Behemoth. His demonic swords, usually capable of slicing through steel like butter, were bouncing off the creature's hide with pathetic clink-clink-clink sounds.
'Faster,' Kiba thought, gritting his teeth, sweat stinging his eyes. 'I just need to be faster.'
He blurred, striking a dozen times in a single second. Sparks flew, but the beast didn't even flinch.
The Behemoth roared—a sound like grinding gears—and backhanded him. Kiba flew, crashing through a metallic tree trunk. He hit the ground hard, coughing blood, his chest heaving.
'It's not enough. The Holy Sword Project... my hatred... my speed... none of it is cutting deep enough.'
Ren's voice drifted into his mind, irritatingly calm, cutting through the panic. 'Sword Intent isn't about cutting; it's about pressure. Weight.'
Kiba scrambled up as the Behemoth charged, the ground shaking with each step. He closed his eyes.
The Myriad Origin Scripture churned inside him. Until now, he had used the scripture to refuel his stamina, running his engine hot to maintain high-velocity movement.
'Wrong,' Kiba realized. 'I'm trying to be the wind. But wind breaks against stone.'
He stopped moving. He stopped trying to be evasive.
He channeled the Myriad Origin Scripture, but instead of circulating it for speed, he compressed it. He pulled the "waste" energy—the friction of his blade, the heat of his anger, the excess demonic power bleeding off his aura—and shoved it all down into his dantian, then forced it up into his right arm.
He visualized a mountain. No, not a mountain. A falling star.
Turn complexity into simplicity.
The Behemoth was five feet away. A massive fist was descending.
Kiba didn't slash. He didn't use a fancy multi-hit technique. He stepped forward, planting his feet into the iron soil, and brought his sword down in a simple, vertical cleave.
[Sword Intent: Heavy Earth Severing]
CRACK.
The sound wasn't a slice. It was an impact. The atmosphere around his blade distorted, heavy with the gravitational pressure of his condensed intent. The sword didn't just cut the Behemoth's hide; it crushed the space the hide occupied.
The Behemoth froze mid-motion. A thin line appeared on its forehead, running down to its groin. Then, the two halves fell apart with a wet, heavy thud.
Behind Kiba, the air shimmered violently. A phantom image flickered into existence—a majestic, ethereal palace gate constructed of jade-green energy.
It was the Soul Palace.
Originally at 50% condensation, the image suddenly sharpened. The blurry bricks became solid jade. The haze solidified into architecture.
BOOM!
A shockwave of spiritual pressure blasted outward, flattening the metallic grass.
Soul Creation Realm: 60% Condense.
Kiba exhaled, the breath visible in the cold air. He looked at his hands. He felt... heavy. But a good heavy. Like he was finally anchored to the world.
"Not bad, pretty boy," Ren Ming mused to himself, sensing the shockwaves. "You finally stopped swinging a toothpick and started swinging a hammer."