Watching from their various realms, gods and devils unconsciously leaned forward.
The sky in every world was filled by the same image: a lone man standing in a broken, corpse-gray expanse, nine muted suns turning behind him like wheels of carved jade.
For a heartbeat, the projection turned into nothing but light and noise.
Curses howled.
Evil Dragon breath raked across the image in jagged lines of annihilation, the projection trembling under the force. Nyx's night collapsed inward like a starving black hole, swallowing color and depth. Tartarus' abyssal gravity seized the scene and twisted it into funhouse angles, trying to fold the viewpoint into an impossible maze.
Angra's malice boiled across every surface like acid fog, whispering in a dozen languages at once. Kill. Rot. Break.
Even through a screen, it felt wrong.
In Kuoh's manor, the living room flinched as if the attack were happening on top of them.
Asia's hands flew to her mouth, green eyes brimming.
Issei's knuckles went white where they clenched the edge of the couch, Boosted Gear's jewel faintly glowing even in its sealed form.
Even Serafall's usual flippant aura thinned. Her blue eyes were hard and sharp, all idol-cute gone, Maou's instinct staring through the projection like it was a battlefield report.
Irina's fingers tangled with Xenovia's, both girls' knuckles bone-pale.
On the screen, the storm came down.
...
Ren watched it arrive.
Nine Fate Palaces turned slowly behind him, each rotation carving quiet lines of law into unseen space. To DxD eyes, they were just strange halos with ancient, unreadable patterns. To an Emperor's Domination cultivator, they were whole worlds — domains, kingdoms, heavens — compressed into symbols and light.
The Immortal Soul Bone at his core pulsed with a serene, implacable rhythm, every foreign law touching him for a breath, then being filed away, understood, and dismissed.
He took a single breath.
The Realm of the Dead raged. Space howled, the ground split into bottomless fissures, cursed winds tried to peel his flesh from his bones.
The Dao around him… calmed.
Not the world's Dao. His.
A small bubble of existence settled around his body, utterly still, every line of force flowing where he allowed and nowhere else.
"Alright," he said quietly, in that relaxed, almost amused modern drawl that didn't match this place at all. "My turn."
He stepped forward and punched.
...
It wasn't a complicated move.
No flourish. No named technique shouted to the heavens.
Shoulder, elbow, knuckles aligned. Weight dropping cleanly through his hips. Every fragment of cultivation, physique, and will concentrated into one honest, straight line.
The Fate Palaces flared.
For a moment, to every watching realm, it looked like nine suns ignited behind him. Each was etched with countless Dao seals, turning through layers of reality that no magic circle had ever mapped.
The punch left his hand.
It crossed the space between him and the oncoming storm in the time it took a heart to twitch.
Curses met the fist first.
They didn't shatter.
They… stopped.
Angra felt it before he saw it — a fixed point in space where his authority simply ceased to exist. His curses, which had seeped through worlds and eras, here turned into ink meeting a void. They were drawn in, stripped of malice and structure, reduced to pure, clean energy and swallowed whole.
A concept — "corruption" — hit a stronger one:
You don't write the rules here.
Nyx's night crashed onto the fist.
For an instant, the Realm of the Dead saw something it had never been meant to see: darkness being compressed. Folded over itself again and again, each "infinite" layer forced to admit it had edges after all.
The "endless" night shrank, pressed toward the knuckles of his fist until it could no longer pretend to be boundless.
Tartarus' abyssal fractures, those bottomless cuts in existence itself, twisted around the blow. Space bent, angles broke, distance tried to stretch and curl, attempting to send the strike elsewhere, to anywhere but through him.
The punch ignored the bending.
It didn't move through space.
It moved through Dao.
Then it hit the dragons.
The cloned Evil Dragon roars cut off like a chorus with its throat slit.
The wave of constructs — fanged mouths, coiling bodies made of annihilation and malice — did not explode or scatter. They vanished, as if an invisible eraser had passed through the sketch of them and wiped the page clean.
For a breath, the space they'd occupied hummed, agreeing with the correction.
Then it went still.
The punch traveled on.
It met Angra.
The god of all curses, the seething knot of a million violated prayers and broken oaths, felt something he had not known since he first took shape: the sensation of being defined from the outside.
For an instant, every face in his churning mass screamed — rage, disbelief, terror overlapping in an ugly, dissonant chorus.
Then he was gone.
No lingering stain. No echo that might someday re-take root.
Erased so completely that even his curse-echoes burned away.
The blow kept going.
Nyx tried to twist aside, night distorting around her into infinite regressions of shadow, layers of her divinity folding and unfolding as she attempted to make herself untouchable, somewhere between real and unreal.
The fist brushed the edge of her concept.
Her throne, her body, her authority as "Night" in this realm — all folded and snapped like a bad dream under morning sun, dissolving into a quiet, reluctant dawn.
Tartarus rose, abyssal form towering enough to blot out the false sky, trying to spread himself, to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Any normal attack would fall forever before reaching his "bottom."
Ren's punch didn't care where the bottom was.
It struck the core of the idea itself — the knot of "Abyss" Tartarus had wrapped around his soul over endless ages — and bored straight through it.
The sound that followed wasn't an explosion.
It was the absence of one.
Silence fell.
...
The projection showed what the Realm of the Dead saw: three presences, once titanic and suffocating, flickering, collapsing, and then—
Nothing.
The shockwave rolled out.
Not just as blunt force, but as rewritten rules, the "new normal" traveling outward faster than sound.
It swept across the lower hells, through the deeper layers of the Underworld, rattling chains and tombs and ancient seals. It brushed the wards around familiar prisons, made every cursed artifact in Hades' vault shiver like it had just remembered it could be broken.
It struck Hades' palace and nearly tore it apart.
The god of the underworld staggered where he stood, coughing black-gold blood onto his robes. Columns cracked. Skulls rattled loose from walls of bone.
In every realm, god and devil, reaper and dragon felt the same thing:
Three rulers of Hell's alliance had just been erased by a single blow.
The roar of curses, the dragons' scream, the sound of cracking space — all of it faded.
Only Ren remained, standing in the middle of a suddenly much emptier plane.
He looked up.
Through the projection.
Through every watching eye.
Smile soft. Eyes clear.
"Alliance of Hell," he said pleasantly, as if noting a score on a whiteboard. "Down three."
In the higher chambers of the Greek underworld, Hades' teeth ground audibly.
....
In Kuoh, the silence shattered.
"HE JUST—"
Issei's voice broke halfway through the sentence. Words failed.
Rias didn't even try to speak. She stood by the window, fingers fisted in the curtains, crimson eyes wide and shaking. Deep inside her Soul Palace, on the Throne of Ruin Ren had helped her shape, her destruction aura shivered like something wild recognizing a greater predator.
Part of her — the devil heiress, the budding king — thrilled at the sight of that overwhelming power wrapped around her family like a shield.
The rest of her just wanted to grab the idiot responsible, yell at him until she cried, and kiss him until the world went away.
Asia had both hands pressed over her heart, tears spilling silently down her cheeks. Joy and terror were so tangled she couldn't have separated them if she tried.
"Ren-san…" she whispered, voice breaking.
Serafall forgot to breathe for a second.
Her hands clamped together under her chin, knuckles white, pupils dilated like a girl watching her crush stand onstage and announce he'd picked a fight with God.
"…my boyfriend is terrifying," she whispered, half-fascinated, half-proud, a hysterical bubble of laughter caught in her throat.
Sona's fingers dug into her skirt.
Behind her glasses, her mind raced through casualty projections, faction charts, possible responses—then hit a wall and went very, very quiet.
There was nothing in any textbook for this.
Akeno's lips parted, breath coming out in a soft laugh she didn't quite mean to make. Lightning slid over her skin in a slow, awed ripple, reacting to the memory of that punch the way a storm reacted to a mountain.
Kuroka's tail fluffed, then resumed a lazy sway. Golden eyes gleamed hot and intrigued.
"Nyaa… brutal, possessive, and stupidly sweet." Her mouth curled. "He really is my type."
Koneko's ears twitched.
"…ours," she corrected softly.
Kuroka's smile widened.
"Ufufu. Of course, of course."
Le Fay's fingers flew over her notebook, scribbling in cramped, excited handwriting — diagrams of how the curse storm had folded, approximations of the punch's timing, wild guesses at the 'script' she'd glimpsed circling his Fate Palaces.
Shigune sat cross-legged on the floor, hands pressed over her heart. Taotie, buried deep inside, had fallen silent in the face of prey-that-wasn't-prey, like a wild beast flattening itself as something bigger passed overhead.
Natsume's fists clenched and unclenched, eyes bright with something that was equal parts awe and raw, stubborn determination.
Sona exhaled, voice barely audible.
"One blow…"
Beside her, Tsubaki's expression stayed cool, but her eyes were narrow and sharp.
"And that was his opening move," she said quietly.
...
On the screen, Ren lifted his head a fraction, as if listening to more than the dead wind.
"Thanks to those idiots," he said conversationally, "I've got a much better read on the rest of you."
He was no longer speaking to Angra, Nyx, or Tartarus.
They were gone.
He was speaking to everyone else.
In distant palaces and hidden bases, in dragon lairs and godly sanctuaries, figures who had been watching from the shadows froze, as if a spotlight had suddenly found them.
...
Ren raised his hand again.
This time, he didn't clench it into a fist.
He extended it sideways, fingers together, hand turning into the edge of a blade.
Lines of light traced along his arm in the projection, forming the illusion of a sword without hilt or sheath — nothing but edge and intent.
"Let me explain something," he said quietly. "You lot who sit in the back rows and think you're untouchable because there are layers of schemes and realms in front of you."
His gaze was calm. Almost gentle.
"I don't care about your lineage," he said. "I don't care about your titles. I don't care which mythology wrote your name first."
His hand dropped.
Sword-light exploded outward — not in a single beam, but in countless strokes, thin as brush-lines on rice paper, heavy enough to make space groan.
They vanished into the void.
The projection followed.
...
In the gloomy halls of his palace, Hades sat on a throne of bone and iron, watching the earlier scene with a tight jaw.
"This is… unacceptable," he hissed. "Nyx, Tartarus, Angra—"
Light speared through his ceiling.
There was almost no warning.
The god of the Underworld flung his arms wide, calling up the full might of his realm. Rivers of souls surged in midair, howling. Skeletal armies rose as one, ancient seals flared along the walls and floor, all the authority of death itself wrapping around him like an iron mantle.
Ren's sword-beam hit.
The palace shuddered. The cloak tore as if it were wet paper.
The beam didn't quite take Hades' head off — but only because some deep, primal instinct he hadn't used in an age made him twist at the last possible instant.
Instead, the light sheared through half his torso.
For one stunned heartbeat, the god of the dead stared at the empty space where his right side had been, fingers scrabbling at nothing.
Then the pain arrived.
He screamed.
...
Far away, in a hidden base littered with magic circles and broken "toys," Rizevim Livan Lucifer lounged across a couch, watching the projection with a wide, delighted grin.
"What a fun kid," he drawled, chin in one hand. "He really went and offed those three. Ahh, I'm jealous. I wanted to break them myself someday."
His followers murmured nervously, some glancing at him, some at the sky of his own base, where the projection flickered like a second moon.
The silver-haired Super Devil waved them off, still chuckling.
"Relax, relax. He can't possibly reach—"
Light stabbed into the room.
For once, Rizevim's smile froze.
"Oya?" he said.
The sword-beam descended.
He reacted with genuine speed, all madness stripped bare to reveal the vicious, cunning killer underneath. His aura spiked, demonic power flaring to Super Devil levels in an instant. He layered curse defenses, demonic shields, dimensional warps — even the nullification field of his Sacred Gear-breaking power — between himself and the light.
His guards screamed as they threw themselves into the beam's path, bodies and spells stacking up like sandbags before a flood.
It didn't matter.
Everything the beam touched — seals, shields, flesh — burned away. Not in fire. In absence.
It carved through his defenses, shearing off his right arm and half his chest. Black, thick demonic blood splattered the floor, hissing where it touched his own magic.
Rizevim collapsed sideways, laughter twisting into a ragged, wet cough.
"Well," he wheezed, eyes bright, voice trembling between hysteria and delight. "That's… fun…"
Half his faction lay in smoking pieces around him. The few still alive were on the ground, whimpering, their bodies refusing to obey.
...
On a lonely, storm-wracked plane, Apophis and Crom Cruach clashed.
Apophis' Eclipse Dragon aura blotted out the sky, a devouring darkness threaded with sun-black flame. Crom's Crescent Circle Dragon form coiled under it, silver eyes cold, his draconic presence cutting through like a scythe.
The two Evil Dragons met again and again, each strike a continent-breaking event scaled down only because they both made the conscious decision not to tear their playground apart.
They both felt the projection, that intrusive "window" opening above them, and looked up with identical snarls.
"What is this… human?" Apophis hissed, fangs bared.
"A cultivator," Crom answered, narrowing his eyes. "And something… beyond that."
The sword-beam arrived.
Apophis roared, pouring all his might into a wall of dark solar flame, a burning eclipse turned into a shield. Crom lunged forward, coiling his strength around the same point at the last heartbeat, claws of dragon aura latching onto the defense without thinking about why.
The beam hit their combined barrier.
The clash was titanic. Light and darkness roared, twisting the dimension's fabric like molten glass.
Reality held — for a second.
Then it cracked.
The barrier broke.
The beam tore through both dragons. It didn't erase them completely — Ren hadn't aimed for that — but great chunks of their draconic bodies vanished, authority and flesh and power carved away in a single brutal stroke.
Apophis screamed, Eclipse aura fraying wildly at the edges.
Crom forced his own roar down into a harsh breath, body flickering, forcing himself back into humanoid form through sheer will. Blood slid from the corner of his mouth, each drop heavy with draconic power.
"That bastard," Apophis snarled through clenched fangs. "He dares—"
"He can," Crom rasped, clutching his torn chest, expression twisted into a wolfish grin despite the pain. "That's the problem."
...
In another sealed space, a base hidden in folds of reality, Cao Cao sat at a table surrounded by his Hero Faction comrades.
"…So in conclusion," he said, tapping a diagram of Longinus resonances, "if we—"
The projection unfolded above them, washing the room in gray death-light.
Cao Cao's eyes sharpened at once. Georg's pen stopped mid-stroke. Leonardo looked up from his sketches, expression unusually focused, undefined monsters on his pages turning slowly toward the image as if they could see it too.
"It's him?" Cao Cao murmured.
He watched Ren's conversation with the underworld's rulers. He watched the punch.
When the sword-beams shot out, one rushed toward their base.
"Brace," Cao Cao snapped.
They moved instantly.
Georg wove layered barriers, space distorting into nested cubes of twisted distance. Leonardo's monsters surged forth from ink and imagination, throwing themselves into position with alien cries. Heracles roared, Balance Breaker flaring, muscles and armor swelling like a demi-god's wrath. Jeanne's holy swords lined up in a shining wall.
Cao Cao raised True Longinus, unleashing its forbidden might, spear humming with the authority to pierce gods.
The beam hit.
The Hero Faction's combined defenses lasted longer than most had.
But not long enough.
Barriers shattered. Monsters died without even having time to scream. Holy swords melted, turning to liquid light.
The beam sheared through the room.
It didn't kill Cao Cao outright — again, not the aim — but it smashed him into the far wall, armor breaking, right arm completely vaporized from shoulder to wrist. Blood spattered the cracked stone behind him, painting a ragged halo.
Around him, his comrades lay groaning, badly injured. Some didn't move at all.
Cao Cao stared at the charred line the sword-light had carved through his base, breath shallow, heartbeat loud in his ears.
"…So this is… the gap," he muttered.
...
The lesser Khaos Brigade hideouts never had a chance.
The beams that found them weren't the largest or most refined. They didn't need to be.
They speared through wards and enchantments, through arrays built by magicians who thought they understood "absolute defense," erasing leaders and grunts alike in flashes of painless, instantaneous annihilation.
In one such hideout, a familiar, loathsome aura clung to the air like stale incense.
Diodora Astaroth reclined in obscene comfort, surrounded by stolen holy maidens, drunk on power he had never earned. The projection unfolded above him.
He looked up, annoyance twisting his face.
"Who dares—"
The sword-beam cut through him.
There was no scream.
There was no body.
One moment he existed; the next he did not. Even the fragments of Ophis' power coiled around him — the snakes he had so greedily coveted — froze, then quietly unraveled, their path severed.
Somewhere in the Dimensional Gap, Ophis blinked once.
"…He cut my snake again," she said, voice soft and flat, more curious than angry.
Great Red rumbled something like a laugh in the endless distance.
...
When the last beam faded, the world held its breath.
In the ruins of Hades' palace, the god of the Underworld clutched at the ragged edge of his missing torso, ichor hissing where it hit the floor.
In the broken bunker of his base, Rizevim lay among corpse-littered stone, giggling weakly through his own blood.
On the storm plane, Apophis and Crom Cruach clung to consciousness, their regeneration slowed, their pride cracked.
In the carved-out headquarters of the Hero Faction, Cao Cao and his surviving comrades stared at the ceiling, the weight of what had just happened pressing down on them harder than their wounds.
Across the world, many Khaos Brigade strongholds simply… no longer existed.
In the projection, Ren stood alone in the emptied Realm of the Dead.
He breathed out once.
"This," he said quietly, "is what happens when you ignore my words."
His voice carried everywhere. Through barriers. Through blessings. Through the little gaps in reality that all these beings had once thought safe.
Somewhere in the Underworld, Sirzechs Lucifer closed his eyes, recognizing the simple, merciless truth in those words.
Michael bowed his head. Azazel exhaled roughly.
"The only reason some of you are still breathing," Ren went on, "is because it's more efficient to kill you together than to chase you like cockroaches."
He smiled.
It wasn't kind.
"So here's how this is going to work," he said. "Hades. Rizevim. Apophis. Crom Cruach. Cao Cao. Any remnants of Khaos Brigade. Any god, dragon, devil, or other would-be mastermind who thinks I'm a temporary problem you can outlast."
His gaze hardened. His tone didn't rise, but it thickened, each word dropping like a verdict.
"In one day," he said, "you will come to the Dimensional Gap."
The words rang through Heaven and Hell. Even the True Red Dragon God, lazing in that formless void, lifted his head.
"If you're not there," Ren continued, "I'll hunt you down one by one. Slowly. Thoroughly."
The projection sharpened, his eyes seeming to meet each hidden gaze in turn.
"Don't test me on that."
His aura spiked.
Not to crush, not to flaunt, but to press his next sentences into the backbone of the world.
"If you try anything—if you touch my wives, my future wives, my students, or anyone under my umbrella—hell will look gentle compared to what I do to you."
He spoke it like a promise.
"In case anyone's still confused," he added, almost lazily, "I don't care who you are. Chief god, dragon, old Satan, random idiot with a Longinus. Status doesn't impress me. Power doesn't scare me. You stand in my way, I keep walking."
He let that sink into the silence.
"One day," he said again. "Use it however you like. Pray. Plot. Run."
He tilted his head, as if listening to the stunned quiet across a dozen pantheons.
"Any questions?" he asked.
The worlds stayed silent.
Somewhere, a lower god began to stammer, courage twisting his tongue into foolish shapes—then froze as the projection's focus shifted, Ren's eyes seeming to pin him in place despite the fact they had never met.
Ren laughed softly.
"You know where to find me," he said.
The projection shattered.
Light dissolved. The skies of each realm went back to their proper color.
The echo of his words remained.
...
For a moment that felt longer than it was, everything held still.
Then noise crashed back into existence.
Every major faction's war rooms exploded into frantic activity. Calculations. Arguments. Orders.
In the Devils' territory, charts were dragged out and torn up in the same breath. Numbers scribbled, crossed out, written again higher.
In Heaven, trumpets that had been prepared for centuries-long plans now lay silent as the Seraphs recalculated what "peace" meant.
In the Norse halls, laughed-off prophecies crawled back out of old books and demanded another look.
Gods reevaluated strategies they'd held longer than nations had existed.
Dragon elders stirred in their caves, ancient eyes opening, muttering about "interesting times" with equal parts annoyance and thrill.
...
In the Underworld, noble devils shouted.
Sirzechs stood in frozen silence amid the noise, red eyes dark and unreadable.
Grayfia adjusted her glasses with a hand that barely trembled. Her expression was maid-blank; her aura betrayed a knife-edge tension.
"…So this is the road he meant," Sirzechs murmured at last, more to himself than anyone. "A path where gods fall… like that…"
Ajuka stared at his floating formulas, the Demonic Code screaming warnings and spitting out impossible values. For once, the answer wasn't "tweak parameters."
There were no parameters for this.
...
In Heaven, Michael bowed his head at the foot of a quiet altar.
"Lord," he whispered, voice trembling with awe and worry, "grant us the wisdom to walk this new era without losing ourselves."
Griselda stood very still nearby, fingers tight around her rosary. In her mind, Ren's casual words replayed:
You're under my umbrella now; that doesn't come with an expiration date.
Her chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
...
In Grigori, Azazel barked a laugh that was half hysterical, half delighted, then dropped into his chair and dragged both hands through his hair.
"Well," he said to his empty office, "that escalated."
Files and plans lay scattered across his desk — delicate balance schemes, recruitment charts, countermeasures against Khaos Brigade.
They all looked very small now.
Penemue sat at her own desk in another room, coffee forgotten. One hand covered her lips. Her heart hammered against her ribs.
"…Idiot," she whispered, eyes glued to the place where the projection had vanished. "You really are going to flip our world upside down."
...
In Takamagahara, Amaterasu stood on her sunlit porch, eyes resting on the empty patch of sky the projection had briefly occupied.
The sun goddess' gaze was calm, but a flicker of amusement danced at the edges.
"Interesting," she murmured. "You really intend to force the world to choose."
Beside her, other gods shifted, some frowning, some smirking, none of them entirely at ease.
...
In Kyoto, Yasaka held Kunou close, tails wrapped protectively around her daughter as the little fox clung to her kimono.
"Mama," Kunou whispered, staring at the memory of the projection. "He's… really strong."
"Yes," Yasaka said softly, voice threaded with gratitude and concern. "He is."
She thought of the threads Ren had woven through Kyoto's leylines, the invisible second sky he'd spread over the city. How easily that same hand had just reached into the Underworld and drawn blood.
Protection and danger had never looked so similar.
...
In Asgard, Odin wheezed with laughter, then winced, clutching his lower back.
"What a youngster," he cackled. "Hah! The old monsters will be grinding their teeth tonight."
He knocked back another drink, then reconsidered and poured a second, as if to toast an upcoming storm.
...
Vali watched the last echo of the projection fade on a conjured screen, arms crossed, expression sharp.
"…This is getting fun," he murmured, a dragon's grin curling over his face.
...
In a shattered chamber deep in the Underworld, Hades leaned against the remnants of his throne, ichor-stained fingers digging into the cracked bone.
Pain was familiar. Pain was distant. Gods at his level had endured worse.
But this crawling, ugly fear — the knowledge that someone had reached into his own domain, erased three of his allies, and maimed him without even walking through the front gates—
That was new.
His remaining hand clenched.
"So," he rasped, voice low. "He wants us all in the Dimensional Gap…"
...
Rizevim, bleeding and laughing shakily in his ruined base, stared at the ceiling.
"Ahahaha…" The sound fizzled, turning into heavy breaths. "He's crazy. Completely insane."
His grin faltered for a moment, madness' mask cracking.
"…But if we don't go," he muttered, "he really will kill us one by one."
...
Apophis lay in his cavern, regeneration crawling along the edges of his wounds, Eclipse aura guttering like a dying sun.
"We were supposed to be the calamity," he said, voice a low hiss.
Crom Cruach chuckled weakly, one hand pressed to his torn chest, silver eyes bright even in pain.
"Feels like we've been upgraded," he said. "Now we're the prey."
...
Cao Cao, bandaged and pale, sat propped in a makeshift bed. True Longinus rested within arm's reach, its shaft cracked but still humming faintly, like a wounded beast.
He stared at the empty air where his right arm should have been.
"One day," he said quietly.
Around him, Georg slept, drained; Jeanne prayed in silence; Heracles snored through painkillers; Leonardo sketched trembling lines without looking, hand moving on its own.
"Do we run?" Cao Cao asked the ceiling. "Hide? Change sides?"
He smiled, bitter and bright.
"No," he decided. "We go. That's the only path left for humans like us. To stand in that storm and see how far we can reach."
...
In the Kuoh manor, the spell finally broke.
"REN-SENSEI!"
"Ren!"
"Idiot!"
"Amazing!"
"Scary!"
"Cool!"
Voices crashed over each other, everyone talking at once, half-standing, half-crying.
Asia sobbed openly now, relief rolling over her in shuddering waves. Irina and Xenovia flanked her, arms around her shoulders, awkward and earnest.
"H-he's okay," Asia said, like someone reassuring herself in front of a mirror. "He was smiling. He was… he was still himself…"
"Yeah," Xenovia muttered, blue eyes wide. "Just… more ridiculous than before."
Irina wiped her own eyes with the back of her hand, wings trembling. "I'm supposed to be the angel here," she sniffed. "Why is my faith shaking like this…?"
Akeno laughed under her breath, electricity crackling harmlessly along her arms. The sound held her usual teasing tilt, but there was soft relief beneath it.
"As expected of my Ren," she murmured, violet eyes bright. "He doesn't do 'halfway'."
Koneko's tail puffed twice, then slowly smoothed. Her amber eyes were fixed on the now-blank screen, ears flattened but… calm.
Her small hand, resting on her knee, had stopped trembling.
Kuroka purred, tail swaying lazily.
"Nyaaa… now that was possessive," she drawled. "Threatening the whole world over his women and brats… Really, really my taste."
Koneko glanced sideways, cheeks coloring just a little.
"…He kept his promise," she said quietly. "About… umbrellas."
Kuroka's gaze gentled, just for a breath.
"Mm," she hummed. "He did."
Le Fay scribbled furiously, pages filling with lines of light and equations only she could read.
"Dimensional locks… conceptual cuts… curse layer erasure… um, and something like… like a personal law overwriting the world's template…?" she muttered, eyes shining despite the tremor in her voice.
Shigune sat on the floor, Taotie finally quiet inside her. Both hands pressed flat over her heart, as if she were physically holding it in place.
"He really did it," she whispered. "He stood in that place and didn't… bend."
Natsume clenched and unclenched her fists, jaw tight.
"I don't wanna just watch through a screen next time," she said, voice low. "I want to see that level with my own eyes."
Sona pushed her glasses up, trying to impose order on the chaos in her mind.
"One day…" she murmured. "He just gave the entire world a deadline."
Tsubaki's gaze was cool, but her words were knife-sharp.
"And in that one day," she said, "every major power has to decide whether to oppose him now… or later… or never."
Serafall flopped back on the couch with a groan, legs kicking weakly.
"My boyfriend is going to give me so much paperwork," she whined. "So, so much. The Maou Council is going to explode. The media, the elders, the—"
She cut herself off, hands smacking over her own flushed cheeks.
"…But he looked really cool, so I can't even be mad. What do I do, Sona-chan?!"
Sona's lips twitched despite everything.
"…Deal with it," she said dryly.
Asia hiccuped, then let out a watery laugh.
Rias exhaled slowly, hand pressed over her racing heart.
Her Throne of Ruin hummed low in her Soul Palace, resonating with what it had just witnessed. Part of her — the king, the heir — thrilled at the realization that this was the foundation under her future territory.
The rest of her just whispered, almost soundlessly:
"…You really… called the whole world out like that…"
Akeno leaned lightly against her shoulder, voice soft.
"He did it for us too," she said. "That's just how he is."
Rias' cheeks warmed.
"Yes," she said. "That's the problem."
Deep in another part of the manor, Gasper peeked out from behind a curtain he'd instinctively hidden behind the moment the curses had appeared. He stared at the empty air where Ren's image had been.
"…Senpai is seriously scary…" he whispered. Then, after a beat, "…but I feel safer."
...
Near the wall, a special window — one Ren had carved himself between Kuoh and the Dimensional Gap — shimmered faintly.
From the other side, Tiamat watched.
The Dragon King's golden eyes were narrowed, not in hostility, but in sharp, evaluating interest. Her aura was calm now, but layered with something that felt less like disdain and more like wary… curiosity.
"Of course you crush a primordial abyss like it's rotten wood," she muttered, lips tugging upward despite herself. "Stupid human…"
Her tail flicked once, the faintest echo of draconic approval rumbling in her chest.
"Now this," Tiamat murmured, smile turning dangerous, "is entertainment."