The echoes of Kiba's strike—a sound less like a sword slashing and more like a tectonic plate snapping—finally died out, leaving the Iron Forest in a stunned, metallic silence.
Ren Ming watched the dust settle from his vantage point. He didn't applaud. He didn't cheer. He simply nodded, a single, sharp gesture of affirmation, shifted his weight, and stepped forward.
Space didn't just bend; it folded neatly out of his way.
By the time the heavy, iron-dust haze cleared in the central clearing, the six of them had naturally gravitated toward each other. It was an instinctual formation, born of a week in hell.
Issei staggered in first. His armor was cracked, smoking, and looked like it had gone ten rounds with a trash compactor, but the Boosted Gear was still humming. It wasn't the erratic sputtering of before; it was a rhythmic, hungry thrum—a V8 engine idling, waiting to roar.
Kiba arrived next, no longer moving with the frantic, desperate speed of a wind that feared stopping. He walked with heavy, deliberate steps, his sword sheathed, yet a crushing pressure—Sword Intent—trailed him like an invisible cape.
Koneko padded in from the shadows. Her clothes were torn, her knuckles bruised a deep violet, but the Touki wrapping her small frame wasn't leaking. It was a closed loop, dense and terrifyingly heavy.
Asia floated at the edge of the group, her face pale but her eyes fierce. The air around her smelled of antiseptic and ozone, her Twilight Healing aura inverted into a dense field of life-manipulation that kept the beasts she had put to sleep in a comatose state miles away.
Akeno glided down on crackling wings, her shrine maiden outfit in disarray, her hair wild. Her eyes were currently fading from a neon, predatory yellow back to their usual violet, though the static charge clinging to her skin made the air taste like a thunderstorm.
Rias landed last. The Ruin Princess. Her Crimson aura was reined in tight, no longer a leaking faucet of destruction but a pressurized container. The air around her felt thin, scarred by tiny pockmarks of erasure where reality was still trying to heal itself.
They didn't speak. They just looked at one another, breathing hard.
They could feel it. The resonance. Six Souls. Six Palaces. All humming at the exact same frequency. The structure was no longer a half-baked scaffold; it was architecture.
Soul Creation Realm: 60% Condensation.
Then, Ren Ming arrived.
He didn't descend from the heavens on a golden cloud. He didn't burst out of the ground. He just walked out from between two twisted iron trees, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his track pants, looking like a guy who had just stepped out to pick up a pack of gum from a 7-Eleven.
"Yo," Ren said, casually kicking a piece of scrap metal aside.
The six of them snapped their heads toward him.
For a long moment, nobody said a word. The contrast was too jarring. They were vibrating with the aftereffects of enlightenment and violence; he looked like he was about to ask for the Wi-Fi password.
Issei opened his mouth, closed it, then tried again. "Ren-sensei..." His voice cracked, thick with emotion.
Ren studied them, his grey eyes scanning them like a barcode reader.
Rias, a queen who had finally found her throne. Akeno, a storm that had built its own circuit. Asia, a healer who had decided to become a fortress. Koneko, an anchor. Kiba, a falling star. Issei, a perpetual motion machine.
Ren let out a low, appreciative whistle.
"Not bad," he said simply. "Solid work."
The words dropped into the clearing like stones in a still pond, breaking the tension instantly.
Rias's shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. Akeno let out a shaky, laughing exhale. Koneko's ears twitched. Asia's eyes immediately shimmered with unshed tears. Issei's jaw clenched, and he looked away, rubbing his nose to hide the fact that he was overwhelmed.
"I'm proud of you," Ren continued, his tone matter-of-fact, devoid of any flowery drama. "All of you. You took the Scripture, took the beatings, and actually used your brains for once instead of just screaming attack names at the camera. That's a serious upgrade."
Issei barked out a hysterical, wet laugh. "Hah... if someone told me a week ago I'd be happy about being used as a chew toy for monsters, I'd have called the cops."
"Last week you thought push-ups were a violation of the world," Ren snorted, walking closer. "You've come a long way, kid."
"Ren-sensei," Kiba said, bowing slightly, his voice steady but respectful. "Thank you. Without your guidance... this kind of growth in a week would have been impossible."
"It would have been a flagrant violation of power-scaling laws," Ren corrected dryly, waving a hand. "Yeah, yeah. I cheat. That's the whole point of having me around. I read the walkthrough so you don't have to."
He rolled his shoulders, the lazy, confident smile on his face widening just a fraction.
"Anyway. Praise session is over. Don't let it go to your heads. Now comes the boring but important part." He jerked his chin toward the east. "Rossweisse."
A complex Norse magic circle flared at the edge of the clearing. Rossweisse stepped through, full Valkyrie armor donned, her staff glowing. She looked professionally composed, though her eyes darted nervously between the students and the oppressive atmosphere of the forest.
"I have located a stable mana pocket, precisely eight hundred and seventy-three meters east of here," she reported, her voice crisp. "The leyline turbulence is minimal. It is the optimal location for meditation and realm stabilization."
Ren clapped his hands once. The sound echoed sharply.
"Perfect. Alright, listen up. Formation: Ducklings. You follow the Valkyrie. You sit your asses down. And you stabilize those Soul Palaces before they start leaking power and you hurt yourselves."
Rias frowned, stepping forward. "We just finished," she protested, the adrenaline still singing in her veins. "We can still fight if—"
"And that is exactly why you're going to sit down," Ren cut her off, his voice flattening into something non-negotiable. "Breakthroughs are dangerous. That's when people die. Or go crazy. Or explode and take half the country with them. I don't need any of you doing an impression of a nuclear reactor just because you got high on your own hype."
Issei winced. "That... actually sounds exactly like something I would do."
"I know," Ren said. "So go. Asia, Koneko, Kiba, Akeno, Rias, Issei—move out. Rossweisse will set up the safe zone. Meditate. Circulate the Scripture. Let the new architecture settle. No sparring. No 'just one more cool move.' Just breathing."
Asia tilted her head, clutching her rosary. "Um... Ren-san? What about you?"
Akeno narrowed her eyes, sensing the shift in the air. "Ara... where are you going, Ren-sama?"
Rias crossed her arms, the crimson energy flaring slightly. "You said 'now comes the boring part.' Don't tell me you're planning to just watch from the sidelines while we do the work?"
"I," Ren said, lifting a hand and pointing a thumb at his chest, "am going to do a little breakthrough of my own."
The group froze.
"A... little?" Koneko repeated, her voice deadpan.
Ren scratched his cheek, looking at the sky. "Well. Little for me. For the universe, it might be... I don't know. Mildly noticeable."
"Define 'mildly,'" Rossweisse demanded immediately, her pen hovering over a notebook.
Ren shrugged, utterly unconcerned. "Might cause a stir. Some thunder. Minor global panic. You know, Tuesday stuff."
"Ren-sensei!" Rias snapped, her eyes widening in disbelief. "You can't just say 'minor global panic' like you're ordering a side of fries!"
"Relax," Ren laughed, waving it off. "I'll go deep enough into the forest that anything short of a True Dragon will think twice about checking it out. You all stay in Rossweisse's barrier, keep your heads down, and enjoy the free light show."
Akeno's eyes gleamed, a mix of worry and intense curiosity. "Ren-sama's breakthrough... I admit, I want to see it."
"It might be the last thing you ever see if you get too close," Ren replied cheerfully, though his eyes were serious. "And I'm kind of attached to you being alive. You're quite lively, and I like having you around."
Issei swallowed hard. "Oi, Sensei... just how big of a breakthrough are we talking here?"
Ren's smile sharpened. The casual mask peeled back, revealing the ancient, terrifying confidence of a cultivator who had stared down heavens.
"Let's just say I'm about to pluck the stars of the world. My place call it the Star Plucking Realm." He spoke calmly.
Kiba sucked in a breath. He didn't know the terms, but the weight of the words made the sword in his hand vibrate in sympathy.
"Is... is that safe?" Asia asked, her voice small.
"For me? Yeah," Ren said. "For the laws of physics in this neighborhood? We'll see."
"Ren," Rias said seriously, stepping into his personal space. Her eyes searched his. "You don't have to push this hard. Not right now. You've already—"
He reached out and flicked her forehead. Gently.
"Ow—"
"I'm not doing this instead of you," he said softly, his voice dropping to a register that was genuine and warm. "I'm doing it for you. You guys just jumped a whole weight class in a week. If I don't widen the gap again, you'll get cocky and start thinking you can solo the boss fights. I can't have my students outshining me completely. Bad for my brand."
Issei winced, rubbing his neck. "That... is actually very fair."
Ren squeezed Rias' shoulder. His hand was warm, solid. "I'll be careful. I'm not planning to die before I see just how much of a menace you all become to the rating games."
Rias bit her lip, looked at his hand, then nodded reluctantly. "Fine. But if you destroy Asgard, you are explaining it to Odin."
"I'll tell him it was a weather balloon," Ren grinned. "He'll buy it."
Rossweisse sighed heavily, the sound of a woman who was not paid enough for this. "I will prepare layered barriers around our meditation area. If... if something goes wrong, I will—"
"You'll stay with them," Ren cut in, his gaze locking onto hers. "No heroics, Valkyrie. If something really goes wrong, you getting close won't help. Just keep my students alive. That's the job."
Rossweisse flinched at the word "students," then straightened, her expression hardening into resolve. "Understood."
Ren turned away, raising a hand in a lazy wave over his shoulder.
"Go stabilize," he commanded. "When you come out, the world will be a little louder. Try not to freak out."
"Ren-sensei!" Asia called out, her voice trembling. "Please... come back."
He didn't turn, but he shot a thumbs-up into the air.
"Wouldn't dream of doing anything else."
...
Ren stepped, and the forest swallowed him.
He didn't stop at the edge of the mapped territory. He kept walking, moving deeper into the dark heart of the Iron Forest where the map simply said Do Not Enter.
The metallic trees thickened, twisting into agonizing shapes, merging into titanic pillars of black ore that pierced the crust like the fossilized ribs of a dead world. The air here wasn't just heavy; it was toxic. The mana density was so high it had become radioactive, a poison that would have liquified the lungs of an Ultimate-Class Devil in minutes.
Ren inhaled deeply. His Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique drank it in like crisp mountain air.
"Deepest part of the forest," he muttered, checking his surroundings.
He stopped.
The ground beneath his feet was smooth, mirror-like iron, polished by eons of crushing gravity. The ley lines here weren't streams; they were roaring rivers of light pulsing just beneath the metallic skin of the earth, converging on this spot like the entire realm was plugged into a single socket.
His Immortal Soul Bone hummed, instantly stripping away the magical noise.
"Yeah," Ren said, cracking his neck. "This is the spot."
The Iron Forest answered him.
The crust heaved.
Pillars of ore snapped like dry twigs. Molten metal bled from the earth's wounds. A roar shook the world—a sound made of grinding tectonic plates and the screams of a thousand storms.
The Iron Calamity Wyrm tore its way out of the underworld.
It was colossal. A creature of living metal and hatred, easily dwarfing the skyscrapers of Tokyo. Its scales were jagged plates of cursed iron, its eyes burning like dying suns.
Maybe under normal times, he would play around for fun. He'd used a few moves to test its strength.
Now, Ren had a schedule to keep.
The titanic serpent—more a natural disaster than a biological organism—lunged. Its jaws yawned open, wide enough to swallow a battleship, gravity fields blooming like black flowers around its teeth to crush anything before it was even bitten.
Ren didn't dodge. He didn't summon a weapon.
He looked up, his expression bored.
"Sit."
He didn't shout. He just spoke the word.
[Petryfing Immortal Light]
Two beams of grey-white brilliance shot from Ren's eyes. They didn't travel; they impacted.
The light hit the Wyrm's skull like a conceptual hammer dropped from orbit.
There was no explosion. Just a sickening, absolute halt.
The massive beast froze mid-lunge. The laws of motion governing its body were rewritten instantaneously. Momentum became mass. Speed became stone. The Wyrm's own gravity field collapsed in on itself, slamming the creature into the iron plain with enough force to carve a canyon.
BOOOOM!
Ren stepped. Space folded. He appeared instantly above the Wyrm's colossal, pinned eye.
He brought his heel down.
It looked like a casual stomp, the kind you'd use to crush a soda can.
But behind his back, the image of a majestic, terrifying Noble flickered—a figure that had trampled eras.
[Hell Suppressing Kick]
SPLURCH.
The Wyrm's head didn't just break. It imploded.
Brain matter, cursed metal, and ancient bone were vaporized instantly. For one second, there was a God-tier beast, the apex predator of the Norse borders. The next second, there was a headless corpse and a massive shockwave of displaced air.
Ren landed on the neck stump, his sneakers pristine.
"Waste not, want not," he whispered.
He opened his mouth.
[Ancient Ming Bloodline: ACTIVATE]
The air turned cold. A vortex of pure, unadulterated hunger unfolded from his core. It wasn't a technique; it was a biological imperative. The Ancient Ming blood was a gluttonous royalty, a predator that viewed all energy in the universe as a meal prepared solely for it.
The vortex latched onto the Wyrm's corpse.
It didn't just drain mana. It tore the "concept" of the beast apart. The resentment, the draconic authority, the eons of accumulated metallic essence—it was all sucked out, compressed into a thick, swirling rope of black-red light that poured into Ren's chest.
The forest screamed.
Ley lines buckled as the bloodline reached out further, latching onto the earth itself. The ambient mana in a hundred-kilometer radius shuddered, then rushed toward him, ripped from the air, the ground, the trees.
To an outside observer, it looked like a black hole had opened on the surface of Asgard.
Inside the storm, Ren was calm.
Five Fate Palaces spun behind his soul—towering, universe-filled structures, crystalline and dense. The Myriad Origin Scripture roared, acting as the refinery, turning the chaotic flood of "waste" energy into perfectly measured high-octane fuel.
'Time to completely transform,' he thought.
The Fifth Palace expanded, intricate Dao patterns lighting up the facade. The surplus energy surged past it, slamming into the empty locus where the Sixth should be.
His Immortal Soul Bone stripped away the confusion.
Asgardian Runes. DxD Physics. Dimensional Gap interference. Leyline turbulence.
The Soul Bone processed it all. It turned the mystical into the mathematical.
Construct Palace.
The Sixth Fate Palace began to condense.
It wasn't gentle.
The reality around him screamed.
...
Kyoto, Japan.
Deep beneath the ancient streets and shrines, the Dragon Vein network that formed the spiritual nervous system of the Youkai capital shivered violently.
Yasaka jerked awake on her tatami mats. Her nine golden tails burst into existence instinctively, foxfire flaring bright enough to light up the room.
"W-What...?" she gasped, clutching her chest.
She reached out with her senses, plunging into the earth.
The Dragon Veins weren't just flowing—they were being pulled. It felt like someone had jabbed a straw into the planet's jugular and was taking a deep drink.
"This isn't natural," she breathed, her ears flattening. "Something is... drinking the ley lines?"
The shoji screen slammed open. Kunou stood there, her pajamas disheveled, terror in her small eyes.
"Mama! The sky—!"
Yasaka rushed to the veranda.
Thunder boomed over Kyoto—a city that had seen its fair share of supernatural storms. But this was different.
The clouds weren't storm-dark. They were metallic. They were lit from within by pulses of grey-violet lightning that didn't flash, but crawled across the sky like living veins.
Yasaka shivered.
"This feels..." she whispered, "...like a calamity."
Sixth Heaven.
Michael, serene and composed as the cornerstone of the angelic host, stood before the massive wall of glowing Sephirothic symbols—the command console of the Heaven System.
Gabriel hovered at his side, her hands clasped in prayer, her face etched with concern.
Suddenly, every glyph on the wall flickered.
Red warning text, harsh and jagged, slashed across the holy light.
[UNCLASSIFIED ANOMALY DETECTED] [REALITY RULESET INTEGRITY: 99.2% -> 98.7%] [UNKNOWN PARAMETER INJECTION]
Michael's eyes widened a fraction. "What...?"
A holographic model of Earth and its adjacent dimensions materialized. A spike of energy, sharp as a needle, rose from Northern Europe. It punched through the firmament, ignoring the boundaries between dimensions.
"This signature..." Gabriel whispered, clutching her chest. "It is not Demonic. It is not Holy. It is not even Draconic. It is... Other."
Michael's halo flared, his mind processing algorithms at the speed of light.
"The System is attempting to classify it as an error," he murmured, fascinated and horrified. "As if the universe itself is trying to reject a foreign entity."
Lightning cracked across the hologram, linking the anomaly to every major realm.
Michael looked toward the north, his gaze piercing the physical walls.
"Asgard," he said.
...
The Underworld, Lucifer's Office.
Sirzechs Lucifer was signing paperwork. It was a peaceful night.
Then his pen snapped.
Ajuka Beelzebub, sitting on a floating cushion across the room, looked up from a complex array of demonic formulas. The patterns on his glasses were spinning wildly.
Falbium Asmodeus groaned, opening one eye from his nap on the sofa. "Why does the air feel like it's vibrating?"
Serafall Leviathan's cheerful humming cut off from the hallway. She burst into the room a second later, magical girl wand in hand, eyes wide and panic-stricken.
"Zechi-kun! The sky! The sky is doing the thing!"
They all felt it.
Pressure. Not just a lot of mana—they were used to that. This was quality. It was a heaviness that pressed down on the very concept of "Devil," making their instincts scream DANGER.
"Is that... Heavenly Dragon Class?" Serafall asked, her face pale.
Ajuka narrowed his eyes, typing furiously on a holographic keyboard. "No. The waveform is wrong. This isn't a Dragon's aura. Dragons dominate the environment. This... this is overwriting it."
Sirzechs stood up. The Power of Destruction leaked from his body, a crimson aura reacting defensively to the threat.
"...This is coming from the Norse side," he said, his voice dropping to absolute zero.
"Yes," Ajuka confirmed. "Near Asgard. Near where Rias is training."
The temperature in the room plummeted.
Sirzechs' smile vanished.
"Prepare a gate," he ordered.
...
Grigori Headquarters.
Azazel dropped his cigarette.
The entire lab went dark as the building's wards overloaded, sparked, and then rebooted. Screens filled with static. Sacred Gear sensors screamed high-pitched warnings.
"What the hell?" he muttered, shaking the ash off his lab coat.
He snatched up a tablet. The Grigori's sensor network—the most advanced in the three factions—was pinging a single location like a beacon.
Norse Territory. Asgard-Adjacent.
A single point of insane, vertically climbing output.
Azazel stared at the numbers. They didn't make sense. The energy curve wasn't an exponential rise; it was a vertical line.
"...Ren," Azazel hissed, a mixture of dread and grudging admiration on his face. "You absolute maniac. What did you do?"
...
Norse Realm, Asgard.
Odin's feast had long since devolved into drunken snoring when the first bolt of Tribulation Lightning struck.
The All-Father lurched awake as the hall shook. Mead sloshed from overturned kegs.
Thor stumbled in from the training yard, Mjölnir buzzing angrily in his hand, sparks flying from the hammer.
"Father!" Thor roared. "The sky is breaking!"
They ran outside.
The beautiful aurora borealis was gone.
In its place, a ring of clouds spun like a galactic hurricane. The eye of the storm wasn't over the city; it was distant, over the Iron Forest. And in the center, a column of lightning so bright it bleached the color from the world was hammering down.
Even Gods had to shield their eyes.
"What kind of storm is this...?" Thor breathed.
Odin didn't answer. His single eye was wide, seeing not just the light, but the Law behind it.
"This is no storm," Odin said hoarsely, gripping Gungnir. "This is Judgment."
Behind them, the Dragon King Tiamat froze mid-step, her aura curling tight against her scales. Grayfia Lucifuge, who had been monitoring Rias from the shadows, stared at the horizon with uncharacteristic shock.
Azazel, who had teleported in the instant the sensors spiked, landed beside them. He took one look at the pillar of light and swore loudly.
"Yeah," the Governor-General muttered. "He really didn't undersell it."
...
The Dimensional Gap.
Great Red, the Apocalypse Dragon, paused mid-loop through the infinite emptiness.
The vast, red dragon—the concept of dreams made flesh—twisted its titanic body. Its cosmic "eye" flicked toward the tiny, insignificant bubble that was the Norse Realm.
Beside him, a small girl in a gothic lolita dress floated in the silence.
Ophis. The Ouroboros Dragon. The Infinite.
She tilted her head.
"Annoying," she said flatly. "Noise."
Great Red snorted, a sound that birthed a nebula. He shared the sentiment.
Ophis's eyes narrowed imperceptibly.
"Chewing... on my silence."
She didn't move closer. But for the first time in eons, the two strongest beings in existence stopped their eternal drifting to simply... watch.
...
Back in the Iron Forest.
The Sixth Fate Palace slammed into place.
Ren's soul-space shook violently. Six palaces now revolved like a miniature solar system behind his soul, each one a super-dense node of supreme authority.
Fate Destroying Noble had climbed to the peak. He was now a Supreme Noble.
In the cultivation world, this was the point where people stopped. They would spend decades consolidating, terrified of the next step.
Ren didn't stop. He didn't even pause.
The flood of energy hadn't slowed. The universe seemed angrier now, throwing more raw mana and leyline power at him, trying to smother the fire before it grew out of control.
"Right," Ren muttered. Lightning was beginning to crawl over his skin—not external electricity, but internal power venting through his pores. "On to Star Plucking."
He reached higher.
In the Emperor's Domination system, Star Plucking was the Twelfth Realm. The beginning of the Enlightened Being level. It was the realm where a cultivator seized the stars themselves—metaphorically or literally—and built a sky inside their cultivation.
But here? In High School DxD? There were no Dao Laws. There was no "Grand Dao Will" to negotiate with.
But there were rules.
The Heaven System. The Sacred Gear System. The laws of physics. The divine authorities of the pantheons. They were all stacked on top of each other like spaghetti code on an ancient server.
Ren's Immortal Soul Bone reached into those rules for his own purpose.
"Okay," he gritted out, his vision filled with cascading sigils—Dao runes overlaying DxD magic circles. "No Dao? Fine. I'll use the local ingredients. Let's truly terrify the locals."
He attempted to define his first Star within the DxD framework.
That was when the lightning truly started.
CRACK-BOOM!
The first bolt came from nowhere.
One second, Ren was standing in the eye of the energy maelstrom.
The next, a pillar of lightning as thick as a skyscraper nailed him from directly above.
The world turned white.
From Rossweisse's hastily constructed safe zone—a triple-layered ward banked inside the mana pocket—Rias and the others felt it like a physical punch to the gut.
The ground heaved. The air turned ionized and metallic. Every hair on their bodies stood up.
Rias slammed a hand against the shimmering barrier. "Ren!"
"Stay back!" Rossweisse barked, sweat beading on her forehead as she poured mana into the runes. Norse shields, Devil arrays, and Ren's own paper talismans overlapped, forming a dome that creaked ominously under the pressure. "That isn't ordinary lightning! That is... pure rejection!"
Issei's heart hammered against his ribs. The Dragon Recycle Drive inside him spun up instinctively, roaring to match the chaos outside.
"Sensei's really in there...?" he whispered, eyes glued to the blinding column of light.
Asia clutched her rosary so hard the chain snapped. "Ren-san..."
Koneko's hands trembled at her sides. Her primal instincts were screaming at her to run, to burrow, to hide. "It... feels like death," she muttered.
It did.
Even through layers of barriers, the instinct of every living thing screamed: DO NOT GO THERE.
At the very edge of the Iron Forest, figures began to appear.
Sirzechs. Serafall. Ajuka. Falbium. Michael. Gabriel. Azazel. Baraqiel. Odin. Thor. Tiamat.
The heavy hitters. The Kings. The Gods. They arrived one by one, drawn like moths to a bonfire that could incinerate their souls.
Even members of the Khaos Brigade lurked in the shadows, their curiosity momentarily outweighing their self-preservation.
But none of them crossed the tree line.
The lightning didn't allow it.
It wasn't just bolts falling from the sky anymore. It was a Domain. A sea of violet-gold electricity and raw rule-enforcement, centered on one man.
Every time someone took a step too close, their instincts yanked them back, flashing visions of their own instant annihilation.
"This pressure..." Sirzechs murmured, his eyes narrowed, the Power of Destruction thrumming uselessly under his skin. "If I walk forward... I die."
Serafall swallowed hard, looking her age for the first time in centuries. "Even with full power... I can't see myself lasting a second in that."
Ajuka's mind raced, numbers spilling across his vision, trying to calculate a solution and finding none. "It's not just output," he muttered, fascinated. "It's compatibility. That lightning isn't attacking the body—it's rewriting the coordinates of existence. Anyone who steps in gets formatted."
Michael's wings trembled. Not from fear, but from the sheer holiness of the structure he was sensing—a cold, impersonal judgment that reminded him of the Old Testament days.
"Is this... the World's Will?" he whispered.
"No," Gabriel said softly, her eyes wide and reflecting the violet storm. "It is the World's Will... screaming. It is trying to destroy something it cannot understand."
Odin leaned on his spear, his beard bristling in the static wind.
"That brat," the All-Father growled, a mix of fury and awe in his voice. "He's provoking the very bones of reality."
Tiamat's tail lashed slowly, carving a groove in the rock.
"That human," she hissed, her voice low and trembling. "Is more dangerous than any Evil Dragon."
...
The next bolt didn't fall.
It descended.
The sky above the Iron Forest didn't just darken; it folded. The clouds, heavy with metallic dust and ancient curses, twisted into a funnel of law-script—a spiraling vortex of white-violet glyphs that looked less like a storm and more like the universe's source code glitching out. The sheer weight of it made the bedrock of the Norse Underworld groan.
All of it was pointing at one speck on the ground.
Ren Ming.
The second stroke of Tribulation Lightning made the first look like a static shock from a doorknob. It came down in absolute silence—a straight, white line that erased color from the world. For a heartbeat, there was no forest, no sky, no Asgard. Only white.
Then the sound hit. A delayed, planetary crack that shuddered through every realm at once, dusting the ceiling of the Underworld and rattling teacups in Heaven.
BOOOOM!
Inside that storm, Ren stood barefoot on molten iron. His track jacket had long since disintegrated, leaving him in just his pants, his upper body exposed to the fury of the heavens.
His skin shone with a strange, grey-gold light. The lightning that should have vaporized him into sub-atomic particles didn't scatter. Instead, it flowed across his muscles like water over polished stone, vanishing into the five spinning universes behind him.
Fate Palaces.
They towered in his soul-space, each one a crystalline world, dense and terrifying. They were currently roaring, spinning at maximum velocity to process the influx of energy. The Fate Calamity didn't stop; it poured down harder, a torrent of rejection trying to crush the anomaly that dared to tamper with the rules.
Ren's lips curled into a smirk. He wiped a streak of soot from his cheek, looking up at the apocalypse with the expression of a guy waiting for his microwave burrito to finish.
"Yeah, yeah," he muttered, his voice lost under the thunder but clear to himself. "'Know your place,' 'don't skip realms,' blah blah. Save the lecture for someone who cares."
He lifted his right hand, palm open to the sky.
[Myriad Origin Scripture: Cycle of Waste]
The Tribulation Lightning struck his palm.
It should have erased his arm. It should have traveled down his nerves and turned his heart to ash.
Instead, it bent.
The force, the voltage, the raw, screaming hatred of the World's Will spiraled down his arm. It moved like a living snake, sucked into the vortex of his Ancient Ming Bloodline. The Myriad Origin Scripture acted as the refinery, taking this "waste" energy—this destructive intent—and spinning it into a closed loop.
It was the same principle he had used to train his students. He had taught Issei to recycle pain, Koneko to recycle Touki. Now, he was recycling the wrath of God.
Behind him, in that inner world only he could see, something changed.
A sixth light ignited.
The empty locus beside his five Fate Palaces flared as the stolen energy slammed into it. Structure assembled in fast-forward: foundations of Dao-patterns, walls of condensed mana, layers of laws simplified to their barest equations by his Immortal Soul Bone.
Complexity became clean geometry. Noise became signal.
CLANG.
The sound wasn't physical. It was the sound of a heavy, metaphysical door slamming shut.
The Sixth Fate Palace locked into existence.
Ren exhaled, a visible puff of steam escaping his lips. The pressure around him doubled, then tripled.
"Supreme Noble," he thought, rolling his neck. "Peak Fate Destroying. Nice plateau. Great view."
He looked up into the descending sea of lightning, his grey eyes narrowing.
"But I'm not staying."
He opened his arms and invited the storm in.
"Next floor."
Outside the storm's core, the world changed color.
The Iron Forest was gone. In its place was a horizon-filling dome of lightning, a hemisphere of white-violet static that pushed the darkness of the underworld back for miles. Every bolt that slammed down didn't scatter; it flowed along invisible lines, drawn to a single, vertical axis.
Ajuka Beelzebub, floating near the edge of the Rossweisse's barrier, adjusted his glasses. His eyes were wide, glowing with the reflection of the formulas streaming across his retinas.
"The... the vectors are being recycled," the Satan of Technology muttered, his voice trembling with scientific disbelief. "The energy isn't dispersing into the atmosphere. It's folding in on itself. That center point is acting like... like a closed system."
"Like a star being born," Michael said quietly. The Archangel stood with his hands clasped, his halo flickering in sync with the tremors shaking the dimension. The Heaven System in the Sixth Heaven was screaming warnings into his mind like an overtaxed server: [UNKNOWN PROCESS. RULESET COLLISION. CLASSIFICATION ERROR.]
"Not a star," Gabriel whispered, her eyes huge, her golden wings shivering against the gale. "A... sky."
The lightning sphere brightened further. Inside, something was building.
In Ren's soul-space, above the newly-stabilized six palaces, darkness opened.
Star Plucking Realm.
In the world of Emperor's Domination, Enlightened Beings at this realm seized the stars of the nine heavens to craft their own—personal suns, forged from stolen sky, each one a node of absolute authority. The first star was a miracle. The ninth was a declaration: Eternal Prestige.
But here? In High School DxD? There were no native Dao Laws. There was no "Grand Dao Will" to negotiate with.
"Fine," Ren murmured, his consciousness expanding. "Store-bought is fine."
He thrust his mind into the lattice of rules this universe did have. He felt the gravity curves of the planet, the magic vectors of the ley lines, the Sacred Gear routines buried in human souls, the permission structures that let Gods override physics. It was all messy, layered code—spaghetti code written by different pantheons over millennia.
His Immortal Soul Bone stripped them down to axioms. It deleted the fluff and kept the math.
"Alright," he gritted out, the lightning crawling over his skin turning from violet to a blinding, pure white. "No Dao, but plenty of scaffolding. I can work with this."
He took the tribulation's lightning—this furious attempt to delete him—and fed it into the forming structure above his palaces.
A point of light winked into existence.
The first star.
BOOOOM!
Every pantheon felt it.
Above Mount Olympus, Zeus staggered, dropping his goblet. His own lightning stuttered mid-arc, cowed by a superior frequency.
"What—?" he hissed, looking North.
In Kyoto's Dragon Veins, Yasaka gasped, clutching at her chest. For a terrifying heartbeat, the ley lines she ruled didn't listen to her. They flowed toward a distant, alien center, like rivers obeying a new gravity well.
In the Hindu realm, Shiva paused his cosmic dance, one foot hovering inches above the ground. A new beat had slipped into the rhythm of the universe—off-tempo, defiant, but undeniably strong.
"What strange drum..." the Destroyer murmured, a smile touching his lips.
At the edge of the Iron Forest, the assembled monsters of the world watched in stunned silence.
Sirzechs, Serafall, Ajuka, Falbium. Michael, Gabriel, Azazel, Baraqiel. Odin, Thor, Tiamat.
They all flinched as the star appeared in the storm.
It wasn't a normal star. It wasn't even light. It was a concept: a brilliant, white-gold sphere hovering above the lightning dome, visible not to eyes but to senses tuned to power. It hung there, heavy and undeniable, radiating a sense of permanence.
"Eh!?" Serafall squeaked, hiding behind Sirzechs' cape. "A... star? Inside the lightning?"
A second appeared.
Then a third.
They spun slowly around an invisible axis, each one brighter than the last, each forming a layer in an expanding, internal cosmos. Their light leaked through dimensions, casting long, strange shadows across the Underworld, shadows that didn't point away from the light but seemed to be absorbed by it.
Dragons growled low in their throats. Gods gripped their weapons tighter, their knuckles white.
"...He's not just drawing on the world," Ajuka whispered, his calculations finally crashing. "He's... patching a whole new structure on top of it. He is building a personal heaven. If he keeps going..."
"Ajuka," Sirzechs said, his voice devoid of its usual warmth. "How many stars?"
Ajuka swallowed, his throat dry.
"...Nine," he said hoarsely. "If this follows the mathematical pattern of the energy curve... it will be nine."
Inside the safe zone, the Gremory group could barely breathe.
The triple-layered barrier Rossweisse had erected was humming, the runes screaming in protest as external forces slammed into it like the tide against a dam. Inside, the air buzzed like a beehive made of static.
Rias pressed both palms against the glowing wall, her crimson hair whipping around her face. Her eyes were locked on the silhouette inside the storm.
"Ren...!" she whispered.
Issei's teeth chattered, not from fear, but from the sheer electric pressure rattling his bones. The Boosted Gear vibrated on his arm, the green jewel pulsing violently. The Dragon Recycle Drive Ren had taught him was spinning on its own, reacting instinctively to the kinetic carnage outside.
"Sensei is really... really doing this," Issei croaked, his eyes wide. "He's just... eating it. He's eating the sky."
Kiba stared upward, his pupils pinned. The Sword Intent he'd honed—the heavy, earth-severing pressure he was so proud of—felt like a candle held next to a colliding galaxy.
"It doesn't feel... like magic," Kiba said, his voice hollow. "Or demonic power. It's something completely different. Like... like the rules are being carved into stone right in front of us."
Koneko's Touki loop purred in frantic overdrive, trying to ground out the oppressive aura. She hugged herself, her white tail fluffing under her clothes, ears flattened against her skull.
"...Scary," she muttered. "But... familiar. This... is Ren-sensei."
Asia knelt on the ground, hands clasped so tight her knuckles were white. Her Twilight Healing was glowing on pure reflex, a soft green light trying to heal the world from the trauma it was enduring.
"Ren-san... please... don't disappear..."
Akeno's wings crackled, neon-yellow lightning crawling over them without her consent. She bit her lip hard enough to draw a bead of blood, her eyes shimmering with a chaotic mix of fear and arousal.
"Ara... what a selfish man," she whispered, her voice trembling. "Doing something like this alone... leaving us to just watch."
They all felt it at the same time.
The gap.
They had just broken a realm barrier that most devils would never even see. They had gone from High-Class to the equivalent of solid Ultimate-Class in a week. They were monsters who could fold warriors of Valhalla. The power inside them now was intoxicating, heavy, real.
And yet—
—compared to the thing forming above the Iron Forest, they were ants standing on the edge of a supernova.
Rias' chest ached. Not from envy, but from something deeper: a raw, fragile gratitude.
"He... trained us first," she said quietly, her voice cutting through the static. "He spent a week beating lessons into our bodies, polishing our Souls, explaining things until we understood. Even knowing he could... do this... he chose to stay with us. Step by step."
Akeno laughed weakly, wiping a tear before it could fall. "Ara ara... it's unfair. He belongs to a completely different world, and yet... he looks at us so kindly."
Koneko clenched her fists at her sides. "...I don't like it," she muttered.
"Ko-Koneko-chan?" Asia blinked, looking down at the small rook.
"I don't like... that it hurts," Koneko said bluntly, her golden eyes burning. "Seeing how far he is. How high up he is. It... makes my chest feel tight. Like he's going to leave."
Issei's hands shook. He grabbed his left wrist to steady it. "Yeah. Same," he muttered. "It's like... watching a rocket leave orbit, and realizing you're still on a bicycle."
Then he grit his teeth. The Boosted Gear roared, a sound of defiance.
"But... he's our rocket," Issei snarled, eyes blazing with a newfound fire. "Our sensei. If he can go that far, then we... we can chase him, right? That's what he wants!"
Rias closed her eyes. Behind her, five Soul Palaces hummed, 60% condensed, aligned to the Myriad Origin loop. Each one was a promise. A path forward.
She opened her eyes, and they were the color of destruction.
"...Yes," she whispered. "We will chase him. No matter how far he runs. We are his students. We won't embarrass him by staying on the ground."
The realization settled in all of them at once:
He wasn't just a teacher.
He was a horizon.
...
Fourth Star ignited.
Five.
Six.
With the birth of each new star, the Tribulation above the Iron Forest shifted gears. The lightning ceased to behave like a weather phenomenon. It thinned out, shedding its violent violet hue for a cold, surgical white. It no longer struck to burn; it struck to correct. It was the universe's immune system trying to hotfix a fatal error in its code.
Ren Ming stood at the epicenter of the annihilation. He was shirtless, his torso a canvas of intricate, pulsating black-red lines—the manifestation of the Ancient Ming Bloodline. These weren't just markings; they were deeper than veins, swirling beneath his skin like living ink.
A bolt of white eradication slammed into his shoulder. It should have vaporized him, turning him into atomic dust. Instead, the black-red lines surged, latching onto the lightning like a predator. The energy hissed, corrupted instantly by the Ancient Ming blood, and was devoured whole.
"Tastes a bit spicy," Ren muttered, rolling his neck with a casual crack. He looked less like a cultivator defying the heavens and more like a guy enduring a slightly too-hot shower. "Six stars. Alright, let's keep this train moving. Seven. Eight..."
He didn't scream. He didn't chant. He simply willed it.
The eighth star roared into existence, joining the constellation hovering above his Fate Palaces.
In the Nine Worlds, this was the threshold of a Heaven Rider—the point where a cultivator's inner sky became a firmament capable of suppressing entire realms. But here, in the DxD universe, it was an alien architecture being welded onto a reality that couldn't support the weight.
He reached for the ninth.
That was when his body clicked.
A deep, grinding sound, like tectonic plates shifting inside a human frame, reverberated through the air. His Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique, previously hovering at the edge, chose that exact moment to stride into Minor Completion.
Three thousand invisible shackles anchoring his flesh to mortality snapped. Snap. Snap. Snap.
The gravity around him collapsed. The ground for ten miles instantly turned to fine powder, pressed down by the sheer weight of his existence. His body stopped being a vessel and became a world-ending weapon.
The universe noticed.
"Oh," Ren said, blinking as a sickly-sweet pressure bloomed under his skin, distinct from the lightning above. "Right. That thing."
The Heavens didn't give him time to admire the milestone. They sent the second storm.
This one didn't come from the sky. It came from within.
The Physical Tribulation arrived like a massive cardiac arrest layered over a stroke. At the same exact moment, the Fate Calamity screamed downward, trying to crack his True Fate and tear his six palaces apart.
Inside him, it was anarchy. Muscles tore and re-knit in nanoseconds. Bones pulverized to dust and regrew denser, sharper, heavily inscribed with Dao laws. His meridians twisted and expanded like a tree forced through a million years of evolution in a single minute. The Hell Suppressing Immortal Physique wanted to ascend; the DxD world wanted to smash it back down into the mud.
For a fleeting moment, Ren wondered if the so-called geniuses of the Nine Worlds ever had to deal with this level of garbage. The Old Villainous Heavens just wanted to suppress you.
This universe? It wanted to erase his entire existence.
A smirk tugged at the corner of Ren's mouth.
"Cute."
...
Outside the Barrier
The effect on the world was catastrophic.
Space around Ren didn't just bend; it cracked. Actual fractures appeared in the air, black spiderwebs tearing through the sky. Segments of reality slipped out of alignment, revealing flashes of nightmare geometry, starless voids, and a churning grey sea that definitely didn't belong to the biblical factions.
Every god, devil, and entity with a scrap of power felt it.
The aura rolling out from the storm wasn't just "power." It wasn't the killing intent of a Dragon.
It was Death. Pure, abstract, unbiased Death. The kind that didn't care if you were a Chief God, a Super Devil, a Maou, or a Longinus wielder. It was a death that declared you irrelevant.
Sirzechs Lucifer, the Satan who could annihilate matter with a thought, felt his breath hitch.
"This..." he whispered, his eyes locked on the distant storm. "This isn't like Ophis. It isn't like Great Red. This is..."
"An intruder," Michael finished, his angelic face pale, the halo behind him flickering as if struggling to maintain its frequency. "A foreign system trying to overwrite the laws of our world."
Deep in the shadows of the Khaos Brigade, scrying orbs shattered. Hooded leaders clutched their heads as the alien aura scraped across their souls like sandpaper.
"That's not a weapon," one hissed, blood dripping from his nose. "It's a... seed."
"Can we control it?" another demanded, greed warring with terror.
The first laughed, a broken, wet sound. "Control? You idiot. Step into that light and you don't die. You vanish. You get removed from the equation entirely."
In the Dimensional Gap, the Great Red snarled. A fresh wave of interference tickled his scales—but this time, it had teeth. Fragments of space cracked open near him like popping soap bubbles, revealing a tiny, distant thunderhead and a human silhouette standing at its core.
The Apocalypse Dragon squinted. He snorted, dismissive, but for the first time in eons, he didn't roll over to sleep. He watched.
On her fragment of nothingness, Ophis tilted her head. The death-aura brushed against her infinite silence. It wasn't as vast as her chaos, but it possessed a density she had never tasted.
"...Not... from here," she murmured, her eyes narrowing. "Outside rule."
She did not move. She waited.
....
The Iron Forest
Ren grit his teeth. Pain tried to rip his consciousness in half—Fate Calamity on the soul, Physical Tribulation on the flesh. Double billing.
"Sorry, universe," Ren grunted, sweat evaporating off his skin instantly. "We're doing nine stars today. I don't care what your policy is."
His Sixth Palace shuddered. The nascent seventh through ninth loci flickered, threatening to collapse under the contradiction of laws.
He didn't panic. He didn't beg. He jammed his metaphysical hand into the howling mess of his own body—into the tearing muscles and overloading veins—and redirected the flow.
The Myriad Origin Scripture.
Ren's masterpiece of simplification. While the rest of the cultivation world wasted 90% of their energy as heat or leakage , this scripture turned the body into a closed-loop reactor.
Pain? Energy. Tribulation Lightning? Energy. Cellular death? Energy.
"Get in the recycler," Ren thought.
He slammed the fury of the Physical Tribulation into the same loop as the Fate Calamity, forcing the two opposing storms to spiral together. Instead of tearing his scaffold apart, they were ground down, refined, and fed directly into the core of the forming star.
The eighth star stabilized, flaring blinding white.
Space screamed.
Cracks spiderwebbed further, some opening directly into the raw Dimensional Gap. The ground buckled, molten iron surging up before being flattened by an invisible hand.
And then, the ninth star slammed into existence.
For one impossible second, Ren's inner sky was complete: nine blazing suns revolving above six Fate Palaces. Each star was a compression of stolen rules and devoured tribulation.
Enlightened Being. Eternal Prestige. Nine-Star.
But the universe lost its patience.
The combined tribulation went berserk. The lightning shifted color again—this time to a shade that didn't exist in the visible spectrum. It was a conceptual "NO." It stopped trying to burn him and started trying to erase the very memory that he had ever existed.
Ren laughed. The sound was raw, wild, and utterly unbothered.
"Alright," he shouted at the sky, his voice booming over the thunder. "If you're going to cheat... then so am I."
He had planned to stop at Enlightened Being. But this? This level of rejection?
Enlightened Being wasn't enough for survival.
He had to dominate.
He lifted his hand.
Petrifying Immortal Light.
A beam of grey-white conceptual light flashed from his eyes. It didn't aim at a person. It hit the space directly above him.
Click.
Time and space froze in a specific coordinate, locked in stasis by the sealing light.
"Open," Ren commanded.
With a sharp, precise chop of his palm, he cut.
He didn't slice the air. He sliced the fabric of the dimension.
A jagged gash ripped open, yawning wide. On the other side was the Dimensional Gap.
Raw chaos. Colorless infinity. Broken laws. The toxic waste of the universe that even Dragon Gods navigated with caution.
Ren stepped one foot into it.
Far away, Ophis's eyes widened a fraction. A hand of foreign law was reaching into her backyard, not to invade, but to steal.
Ren didn't ask for permission. He inhaled.
The chaotic energy of the Gap rushed into the wound. To any devil or angel, this was poison. It was garbage data—corrupted, half-deleted rules from destroyed universes.
But to the Myriad Origin Scripture, it was an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Waste.
Perfect.
The closed loop in Ren's body flared, greedier than ever. It stripped the Gap chaos down to raw, undifferentiated fuel. The Immortal Soul Bone turned the complexity into simplicity, filtering out the poison and leaving only power.
The nine stars gulped it down. The six palaces swallowed the overflow.
Outside, the lightning dome expanded, then imploded, folding tighter around him like a shrinking sphere.
"He's dragging in energy from the Gap!" Ajuka Beelzebub, watching from a remote monitor, choked on his own breath. "That shouldn't be... that's physics-defying!"
"Completely insane," Azazel muttered, his cigarette burning down to his fingers unnoticed. "He's using the void as a battery."
The aura changed again.
It wasn't just death now. It was Creation crawling through Death like green shoots bursting through a concrete grave.
In Ren's soul-space, something snapped.
The six Fate Palaces, gorged on the double tribulation and the chaotic Gap energy, hit critical mass.
A Seventh Palace began to form.
Then an Eighth.
Then a Ninth.
Normal cultivation required eons. It required stepping stones. A five-palace cultivator could not defeat a six-palace one. The hierarchy was absolute.
But Ren Ming wasn't working with "normal." He was a casual guy from the 2020s who found rules boring.
"Ancient Saint..." Ren muttered, blood leaking from his lips as he forced the structure to stabilize. "Let's see if you can stop me at Ancient Saint!"
He pushed.
The lightning sphere that had consumed the Iron Forest collapsed into a single, glaring point of singularity.
And then, that point exploded upward.
A colossal phantom unfurled above the sky—a blurry, shifting silhouette of a man standing in the heavens, hands shoved casually in his pockets. Behind him, nine Fate Palace-like structures spun in a slow, majestic orbit. Around them, an entire Saint Kingdom took shape.
It wasn't a metaphor.
To sensitive eyes, a whole world crystallized in the air: mountain ranges made of Dao laws, rivers of compressed mana, stars hung like ornaments.
The image bled through every realm.
The human world's clouds parted. Kyoto's Dragon Veins rose in gold lines to map the phantom. The Underworld's blood-red sky halted its eternal storm. Heaven's eternal blue gained a second horizon.
Every being with power felt the Urge.
It wasn't fear. It was biology. It was the instinct of a lower lifeform realizing a sovereign had stepped onto the balcony.
Kneel.
Sirzechs' knees buckled. He caught himself on a table, sweating, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm.
"What... is that...?" Serafall Leviathan whispered, her magical girl persona gone, her voice tiny. Her eyes shimmered with something dangerously close to worship. "It feels like... if I get any closer... I won't die. I'll just... cease to be."
Michael's wings spread reflexively, his halo blazing in defense. "It is not a god," he said, his voice trembling. "Not a dragon. Not an angel. But... it is a Kingdom. He rules that space completely."
In the Khaos Brigade, hardened terrorists dropped. They hit the floor, gasping, horrified as their bodies betrayed them to bow before the unknown entity.
"Monster..." one choked.
Ophis watched the projection slide along the boundary of the Gap.
"...World," she said softly. "A small world. Moving."
...
In the safe zone, the Rias Peerage collapsed.
The barrier shielded them from the raw erasure, but not from the majesty of the structure that had just been born.
Rias gasped for air, her vision swimming. She could see it—not with her eyes, but with the Soul Palace senses Ren had forced open in her. Nine Palaces. Nine Stars. A miniature kingdom.
And at its center, that familiar, casual presence.
"Ren..." she whispered, voice cracking.
Issei's jaw clenched so hard his teeth threatened to shatter. "So that's... the level you're aiming for..." he rasped, tears of frustration and inspiration streaming down his face. "Damn it, Sensei... you absolute... show-off..."
Kiba bowed his head, his hand over his heart. "To call that simply 'strong' is an insult," he said hoarsely. "This is... a different axis entirely."
Koneko's small shoulders shook.
But as the pressure mounted, they realized something impossible. They weren't in despair.
Because the core of that impossible Saint Kingdom felt... warm.
It felt like Ren cracking a dumb joke at the breakfast table. It felt like him ruffling Koneko's hair. It felt like him telling Rias she was more than her last name. It was the feeling of someone who could crush the world, but chose to use that hand to hold theirs.
Asia pressed her forehead to the ground, sobbing with relief.
"Ren-san... is still Ren-san..." she whispered.
Akeno laughed, the sound raw and wet with tears. "Ara... what a terrible man," she said, clutching her arms. "Making us fall even deeper right when we realize how unreachable he is..."
Rias wiped her cheeks with trembling fingers. She looked up at the phantom in the sky—the Ancient Saint who defied the universe with his hands in his pockets.
"...Then we'll just have to reach," she said, a fierce, shaky smile breaking through her awe. "No matter how long it takes. No matter how high we have to climb. We'll reach him."