P.S this story starts a few years before the start of our favorite DXD verse!
AND I DON'T OWN ANY DXD MATERIAL, ALL CREDIT TO THE ORIGINAL WRITERS!
"Talking out aloud"
'Thinking with ones mind'
"Spirits inside the sacred gears talking"
Without further delay, lets start the chapter!
The Underworld
The sky of the Underworld was a bruise that never healed.
Marid Gremory had walked beneath that endless violet expanse more times than he could count, and still, on certain evenings, it gave him pause. There was no sun here, not truly, only that deep amethyst glow that hung over everything like the light of a wound, painting the jagged horizon in shades of plum and old blood. And higher still, riding pale and serene above the violet haze, hung the moon, the great artificial moon that the current Maous had conjured into the Underworld's sky and set to wax and wane in patient imitation of the world above. It had not always been there. It was a gift of the new age, wrought after the civil war by the four who now ruled, hung in the heavens for the sake of the countless reincarnated Devils, humans once, who had come to call the Underworld home and had ached, quietly, for the familiar silver light they had known in their first lives. A small mercy, that moon. A way of saying, without words, you belong here too. To the Devils born under it, the violet sky was simply the color of home. To Marid, who had spent six years abroad walking beneath a hundred different skies, it had become something he noticed again, the way a man notices the face of an old friend after too long apart.
He walked with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, the formal robes he had donned for the meeting stirring in a wind that carried the faint mineral tang of sulfur and cold stone. Gone was his usual travelling attire; today he wore the deep crimson and gold of a high-born son of Gremory, tailored and dignified, the dress of a diplomat come to treat with gods rather than a wanderer come to close a contract. Behind him, keeping an easy pace, came the two members of his peerage he had chosen to bring along.
"—and I am simply saying," Kenta was rumbling, his deep voice carrying the particular exasperation of a man who had been making the same point for the last ten minutes, "that leaving those two alone in Kuoh, right now, with the church stomping about waving holy swords like torches at a hay festival, is asking the universe to test our patience. And the universe, Lord Marid, has never once turned down that invitation."
The Kuroshishi rolled one massive shoulder as he spoke, the movement rippling through a frame that stood a full head over most men. Even relaxed, even strolling across a barren plain with his hands shoved into his pockets, Kenta carried himself with the coiled, unhurried menace of a predator that had simply never met anything worth hurrying for. His golden eyes, so like a lion's, were fixed on the back of Marid's head with the stubbornness of a man who intended to be proven right.
"You are being unfair to them," came the quiet, firm reply from Marid's other side.
Yumi walked with her hands folded neatly before her, her blond hair stirring against the shoulders of her kimono, and though her voice was soft, there was steel threaded through every word. Where Kenta was all rolling thunder, Yumi was the still, patient pressure of a blade held level.
"Kiba gave his word," she continued. "We all sat in that clubroom and heard the same terms. No involvement in the church's business unless it is officially sanctioned, by Rias or by Lord Marid. Kiba bowed his head and accepted that, same as the rest of us. To assume he will simply throw it away the moment our backs are turned is to assume the worst of a man who has done nothing to earn it."
"He has done nothing to earn it," Kenta repeated, and there was no cruelty in it, only a blunt sort of pity. "Yumi. I like Kiba. Genuinely. He is a fine swordsman and a finer friend. But you sat in that room the same as I did, and you watched his face when the words Excalibur and Valper Galilei were spoken aloud. You watched his hands go white on his own knees." The lion-youkai's voice gentled, but he did not relent. "That was not the face of a man weighing his options. That was the face of a man who stopped hearing the conversation the moment those words entered it. You know it. You knew it before I said it, because you carry the same ghosts he does."
Yumi's step did not falter, but something flickered across her features, there and gone, like a cloud passing over still water. Her fingers tightened, just slightly, in their fold.
"…That is precisely why I trust him," she said at last, more quietly. "Because I do carry the same ghosts. And I did not throw my word away. Neither will he."
"You had someone," Kenta said, almost gently. "You had Lord Marid pull you out of that pit before it swallowed you whole, and you had somewhere to put all of it that was not a sword and a name and a list of the dead. Kiba spent years with nothing but the list." He shook his great head. "I am not calling him weak, Yumi. I am saying grief does not care how strong you are. It only cares whether you are looking away when it comes."
The two of them fell into a taut silence, and it was Marid who finally broke it.
"I am afraid," the crimson-haired Devil said, without turning around, "that I am going to have to side with Kenta on this one."
Yumi's head snapped toward him. "Lord Marid—"
"I want to believe you, Yumi. Understand that first. There is very little in this world I would like more than to be wrong about Kiba, and to come home in a week's time to find him exactly where we left him, sulking handsomely in a corner and terrorizing the female student body simply by existing." A dry note entered his voice. "But wanting a thing does not make it true, and I did not become what I am by mistaking my hopes for my forecasts."
He let out a slow breath, his gaze fixed on the broken horizon ahead.
"Kiba is unstable," Marid said plainly. "Not weak. Not disloyal. But when the subject turns to the Holy Swords, to the men who forged them and the children they burned to do it, something in him goes very quiet and very cold, and the part of him that reasons stops answering the door. You have all seen it. I have watched a young man who can out-think a Rating Game opponent three moves deep lose the ability to hear a single word spoken to him the instant a certain name is mentioned." He shook his head slowly. "When the church begins its hunt for Valper Galilei, and it will, Kiba is not going to sit in that clubroom and wait for permission. He is going to follow those exorcists into the dark, on his own, with a list of the dead in one hand and a sword in the other, and he is going to try to put Valper's head on the ground. Orders be damned. Rias be damned. Us be damned."
"And Issie will follow him," Kenta finished grimly.
"And Issie will follow him," Marid agreed, and for the first time a thread of genuine fondness warmed the grim certainty in his voice. "Because Issei Hyoudou is, without exaggeration, the single most altruistic idiot the Underworld has produced in a generation. That boy would walk into a Cadre's jaws with a smile on his face if he thought a friend was already inside. He will not stop to weigh it. He will not think about the mission, or the war, or his own two legs. He will see Kiba walking toward a cliff, and he will run to catch up so his friend does not have to fall alone." A wry, almost helpless smile touched Marid's lips. "It is the best thing about him. It is going to get him killed one day, and it is the best thing about him."
Yumi was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, the defensiveness had drained from her voice, leaving only worry.
"…Then why are we leaving?" she asked softly. "If you believe this. If you truly believe Kiba will run and Issie will chase him, then why are the three of us walking across the Underworld instead of standing in that city to stop it?"
Marid was silent for several steps.
"Because I cannot be in two wars at once, Yumi," he said finally. "And because some fires you cannot put out by standing over them. You can only make certain that, when they catch, there is water within reach." His jaw tightened. "I have done what I can for Kuoh. I have said my piece to Rias and to Sona, in front of witnesses, in words they will remember. I have made certain that if the worst happens, help is a single scream away, and that the people best placed to answer it already have their ears to the ground." He exhaled. "The rest is theirs to carry. I have to trust them with it, because I am needed somewhere the fate of a great deal more than one city is going to be decided. And that, my friends, is exactly where we are going."
And with that, the three of them crested the edge of the ridge, and the land fell away before them.
Yumi's breath caught. Even Kenta went still.
The Thorns
Below them stretched a wasteland.
It was not the ordinary desolation of the Underworld's outer reaches, that cold, quiet emptiness of stone and dust that Devils had long since made their peace with. This was something else. This was a wound in the world.
The land had been torn. There was no gentler word for it. Vast furrows had been gouged into the earth as though some titanic hand had raked its fingers across the continent, leaving trenches deep enough to swallow cathedrals whole. Great slabs of bedrock jutted at broken angles toward the violet sky, some the size of mountains, tilted and shattered like the headstones of a graveyard built for gods. In the far distance, the skeletal remains of structures clawed at the horizon, and it was impossible to tell whether they had once been fortresses, or towers, or simply the bones of something that had been alive. Whatever they were, they had been broken a very long time ago, and nothing had ever come to mend them.
And over all of it, clinging to the shattered ground like a shroud, hung a haze.
It rose from countless fissures in the broken earth, a sickly, luminous mist the color of a drowned man's skin, pale green shot through with veins of yellow. It curled and drifted in slow, deliberate coils, catching the amethyst light and throwing it back wrong, and even from the high ridge Marid could feel the wrongness of it prickling against his senses like static before a storm.
"Do not breathe it," he said quietly, and both of his companions stiffened. "We are far enough up that the air is thin here, and it will not touch us where we stand. But do not, under any circumstances, descend into that haze. What you are looking at is not smoke. It is the land itself, still bleeding." He nodded toward the drifting green. "The fumes that rise from the Thorns are toxic beyond anything you have encountered. A mid-class Devil who wandered into that mist would feel nothing at first. Then a heaviness in the chest. Then a burning. And within the hour, prolonged exposure would strip the life from him as surely as a blade through the heart, and far less mercifully. Even I would not linger there long. Some poisons do not care about the strength of the one breathing them."
Yumi stared out at the ruined expanse, her face pale. "What happened here?"
For a long moment, Marid did not answer. The wind keened across the ridge, carrying with it the faint, acrid bite of the fumes below, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost every trace of its usual lightness.
"This is where the world ended," he said. "Or where it very nearly did."
He gestured out across the broken land, and there was something almost reverent in the motion, the way a man might gesture across a battlefield where his own ancestors lay.
"You are looking at the final battleground of the Great War," Marid said. "The last one. The place where the three factions, Heaven, the Underworld, and the Grigori, threw the very last of their strength at one another and did not stop until there was nothing left to throw. Every skirmish, every siege, every atrocity of that war, it all funneled here, to this plain, at the end. This is where it finished." His eyes moved slowly across the wasteland. "They say the fighting was so terrible, the powers unleashed so vast, that the land itself could not survive the wielding of them. The earth was poisoned down to its roots. It has been thousands of years, and still nothing grows here. Still the ground bleeds its venom into the air. This is what the annihilation of gods looks like, long after the gods have gone quiet. It does not heal. It simply remains."
"The Satans," Kenta murmured, understanding dawning. "The original four. This is where they—"
"This is where they fell. All of them." Marid's voice was low. "The first Lucifer. The first Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Leviathan. The four great Kings of the Underworld, the founders of everything we are, they died on this ground, in a single day, at the very end. This soil drank the blood of Satans." He paused. "And they were not alone. The two Heavenly Dragons, Ddraig and Albion, the Red and the White, the most feared beings of that entire age, they too met their end in this place. Or as near to an end as such creatures can be given. Their war with each other ran straight into the greater war, and here, on this plain, both of them were struck down and sealed away into the Sacred Gears they still haunt to this day."
He fell silent.
Yumi waited. When the silence stretched too long, she prompted, gently, "And… who else? You said the Satans fell here, and the Dragons. But you paused, Lord Marid. As though there was someone more."
For just a moment, something moved behind Marid's lightning-blue eyes. Something old, and careful, and heavy with the weight of a thing known but not spoken. It was there and gone in a heartbeat, smoothed over before either of his companions could name it, and when he answered, his voice was even.
"Many things fell here at the end, Yumi," he said, turning his gaze out across the ruined plain. "It was the last battlefield of the last war. When I say the Satans died on this ground, understand that they did not die alone, nor did the Dragons. A great many of the powers of that age spent themselves here. Among them, more than a few of the leaders of the Grigori, the great Fallen Angels who had once been generals of Heaven itself. Whole lineages of them, ended in a single day, on this poisoned earth." He let out a slow breath. "It is one of the reasons Kokabiel is the way he is, I suspect. That thirst of his for another war, that hunger that has never once cooled in all the centuries since. A being does not carry a grief like his without having buried someone precious in the ground that made him. He lost something here. I would wager a great deal of it never left."
Kenta was quiet a moment, then gave a slow, understanding nod, taking the words at their weight. It made a grim sort of sense, and the Kuroshishi had seen enough of loss to know how it could curdle in a heart across long enough years.
But Yumi did not nod.
She had known Marid the longest of anyone here. She had been at his side since he pulled her out of the dark, and in all those years she had learned the particular cadence of his voice when he told the truth, and the subtly different cadence of when he told a truth in order to keep from telling a larger one. Everything he had just said was real. She did not doubt a word of it. And yet she felt, with quiet certainty, the shape of the thing he had folded the answer around, the someone more she had asked about and he had, ever so gracefully, declined to name.
She held his gaze for a heartbeat longer than the others. Marid met it, and something passed between them, unspoken, an old and wordless understanding.
Then Yumi let it go. She did not press. If her King was holding a thing back, then he had his reasons, and those reasons had never once, in all their years together, been careless of her. He would tell her when the time was right. Of that, at least, she had never had any doubt.
Kenta was the one to break the silence, his deep voice unusually subdued. "…Why did you bring us here, Lord Marid? There are faster roads to a meeting than one that runs past the grave of the world."
"Yes," Marid said. "There are." He turned to face them then, and the gravity in his young face was the gravity of a man decades older. "I brought you here because in a few hours we are going to sit at a table with the gods of Olympus and try to talk them out of a war. And I wanted, before we did, for the two of you to see what a war between powers of that magnitude actually costs. Not to read it in a report. Not to hear it in a story. To stand on the edge of it and smell it in the air." He gestured once more across the poisoned wasteland. "This is the bill, my friends. This is what does not go away. Thousands of years, and the land still cannot forgive what was done to it. Every clever argument I make at that table today, every concession, every scrap of pride I swallow to keep the peace, I make it here, in my mind, standing on this ridge. Because the alternative to a difficult peace is not a comfortable stalemate." His jaw set. "The alternative is another plain like this one. And I have walked this world long enough to know that it can always, always make room for another."
For a long moment, the three of them simply stood there, three small figures on the edge of a ruined world, the violet light washing over them and the poisoned mist drifting far below.
"…When you put it that way," Kenta said quietly, "I find I am suddenly a great deal more invested in this meeting going well."
"That," Marid said, the ghost of his usual smile returning at last, "was rather the point. Come. Serafall-sama will be waiting, and she does not enjoy being kept from her theatrics."
The Departure Point
A short distance beyond the ridge, where the poisoned ground gave way to a rare stretch of stable stone, the barren monotony of the borderlands broke at last into something resembling order.
A wide plateau had been cleared and reinforced with layered arrays of protective magic, their soft blue glow a stark contrast to the sickly green haze of the Thorns behind them. This was a sanctioned crossing point, one of the few places along the tangled seam where the territories of the Devils, the Fallen Angels, and Hades' own dominion all pressed against one another, and where, by ancient and carefully negotiated accord, a delegation might safely be assembled and sent abroad. It was neutral ground, or as neutral as anything got in a place that had once been the deathbed of gods.
And standing at the center of it all, quite impossible to miss, was a Maou.
"MA-RI-CHAN!"
The shriek of delight split the solemn air like a firework at a funeral, and before Marid could so much as brace himself, a small, dark-haired blur had launched itself across the plateau and collided with his midsection.
Serafall Leviathan, one of the four rulers of the Underworld, the Devil whose military campaigns had reshaped entire fronts of history, whose name was still spoken in hushed dread by the enemies of her people, clung to the front of Marid's robes and beamed up at him with the unrepentant joy of a child who has just been reunited with a favorite cousin.
She was, Marid reflected, always somehow smaller than his memory insisted she must be. Serafall stood barely over five feet, a slight, doll-like figure whose girlish appearance concealed one of the most formidable magical talents alive. Today, mercifully, she had left the magical-girl costume at home; for a diplomatic function of this weight even Serafall understood the value of restraint, and so she had dressed in an elegant if severely-cut gown of deep Leviathan blue, its lines sharp and formal, its color the exact shade of the deep-sea trenches from which her title took its name. Her long black hair was bound in its customary twin tails, and her large blue eyes sparkled with a manic warmth that had disarmed diplomats and demolished generals in equal measure.
"You have grown taller again!" Serafall accused, poking him in the sternum. "This is unacceptable. I distinctly remember when you were a tiny little Mari-chan I could carry on my shoulders and now look at you, all long and broody, thinking you are so clever with your little schemes. Sona-chan tells me everything, you know. Everything!" A sudden, theatrical gasp. "Did you truly make three whole exorcists cry in one afternoon?"
"I made one exorcist cry, and it was out of relief," Marid said, gently prying the Maou off his robes with the ease of long practice. "The other two merely wished to. It is good to see you as well, Serafall-sama. You are looking radiant, and only slightly terrifying, which for you is practically demure."
"Flattery!" she declared, delighted, releasing him and spinning on her heel. "You see, Yumeko? This is how you greet a lady of my standing. Take notes, Vine. Take copious notes."
Behind her, two women waited with the patient, unhurried composure of those long accustomed to their King's whirlwind entrances, and it was to these two that Marid, Yumi, and Kenta now turned their attention.
The first was tall, strikingly so, standing a full head and shoulders above her diminutive King, so that the sight of the two of them side by side was almost comical. Yumeko Sangre carried her considerable height with a languid, unhurried grace, and everything about her seemed designed to draw and hold the eye. Her hair fell in a long, straight curtain of soft rose-pink that reached nearly to the small of her back, framing a face of unnerving, ageless beauty; her skin was a flawless, creamy white, her eyes a cool, clear green that regarded the newcomers with the frank, measuring interest of a woman who had lived a very long time and had learned to take the measure of a person before they had finished walking toward her. Her figure was full and voluptuous, and she wore a gown of dark wine-red that complemented her King's blue without ever competing with it, the deference of a servant expressed in the language of tailoring.
But it was the way she stood that told the true story. Yumeko Sangre stood like something that had been very dangerous for a very long time and had made peace with it.
"Lord Marid." Her voice was low and smooth, faintly accented with something old and continental. She inclined her head, precise and graceful. "It has been some time. The years have been kinder to you than the company you keep would suggest."
"Lady Yumeko." Marid returned the bow with equal precision, and there was real respect in it. To his companions, he offered a quiet introduction. "This is Yumeko Sangre, Serafall-sama's Queen, and the longest-serving member of her peerage. Do not let the poise fool you, Kenta; you and she are, in a certain sense, cousins in circumstance." He glanced at his Rook. "She was not born a Devil, any more than you were. Once, long ago, she was a Shinso, a true progenitor-blooded vampire, and one of the most powerful the Carmilla faction ever produced."
Kenta's golden eyes sharpened with new interest, and Yumeko's lips curved, very faintly.
"A lifetime ago," the Queen said. "In another age, when the vampire courts still believed themselves invincible. And Count Dracula believed it most fervently of all, for he was of them, blood and bone, and no vampire ever born held their own supremacy as an article of purer faith than he did. Where the courts were content to sit in their castles and believe themselves the masters of the night, however, the Count was not. He meant to prove it to all creation." Her green eyes grew distant. "He looked upon the Underworld, weakened and bleeding from its own civil wars, and he saw not a neighbor but a thing to be broken open, a stage upon which vampire-kind might at last announce its dominion over all the world. He went too far. Far further than the courts themselves would ever have dared. He set out, very nearly, to declare open war upon the whole of the Underworld, alone, so certain was he that nothing born of Devils could stand against him." Her voice lowered. "I stood against him. I very nearly died standing against him, in truth, for a Shinso alone is no match for a thing like the Count in his full fury. I bought time with my body and expected to buy nothing else with it." A slow, warm glance drifted toward the small figure of her King. "And then the sky came apart, and the sea came with it, and Serafall Leviathan brought her Celsius Cross Trigger down upon Count Dracula like the wrath of a frozen ocean. She stopped him before he could make good on a single word of his boast. She saved the Underworld that day, and she saved a foolish half-blood vampire who had already made her peace with dying, and I have never once regretted the second thing being included with the first."
"The vampires gave her to me!" Serafall chirped, bouncing back into the conversation with a bright, slightly vicious smile. "Can you believe it? As a thank-you gift! 'Oh, great Leviathan-sama, please accept this humble servant in gratitude!' As if Yumeko were a fruit basket!" The Maou's smile went briefly, coldly sharp, a glimpse of the general beneath the girl. "Of course, the truth is they wanted her gone. My Yumeko is a half-breed, you see, and the courts could not abide it. All that power, all that skill, all that beauty, and they looked at her and saw only impure blood. They dressed their bigotry up as a gift and handed her away, and they thought they had won something." Serafall linked her arm possessively through Yumeko's. "They handed me one of the strongest women in the world and thought they were being rid of a problem. Idiots. Every single one of them. I turned her into my very first servant, with her blessing, and I have been thanking those short-sighted fools in my heart every day since."
"Top-tier Ultimate Class," Marid said quietly to Kenta and Yumi, so they would understand precisely who they stood before. "There are perhaps a handful of female Devils alive who could stand against Lady Yumeko in open battle, and you have met, or will soon meet, most of them. After Serafall-sama herself, and after my mother, the Silver-haired Queen of Annihilation, there are very few names in the Underworld spoken with more respect than Yumeko Sangre's. Remember that, both of you, and mind your manners accordingly."
Yumi bowed deeply. Kenta, after a moment's consideration, offered the slow, respectful nod of one predator acknowledging another, and Yumeko returned it with the faintest glimmer of approval.
The second woman stepped forward then, and where Yumeko was languid stillness, this one was quiet, contained motion, even at rest, like a drawn bowstring that had simply decided not to loose yet.
She too was tall and full-figured, and her hair was a striking match for the Queen's and King's own coloring: a vivid pink shot through with streaks of vivid lime green, as though someone had threaded lightning through rose petals. She wore practical, elegant combat dress rather than a gown, and at her hip rode a slender, beautiful blade whose plain, worn grip spoke of a weapon that had been used, and used, and used again. Her eyes were sharp and restless, and they moved constantly, cataloguing exits, distances, threats, the endless quiet arithmetic of a bodyguard who had never once in her life been off duty.
"And this," Marid said, "is Valentine Vine. Serafall-sama's sole Knight, and the last living daughter of the House of Vine."
That drew a reaction. Yumi's eyes widened; even Kenta's brow rose. The extinction of one of the original Seventy-Two Pillars was not a small thing, and to stand before its last survivor was to stand before a walking piece of tragic history.
"The House fell," Valentine said simply, her voice clipped and even, offering the words without invitation to pity. "I did not. That is the whole of the story worth telling." Her sharp gaze flicked across the three newcomers, weighing them, and then, having judged them no threat to her King, she relaxed by a precise and measurable degree. "Lord Marid. Sona speaks well of your Rating Game against the Phoenix boy. She does not speak well of many things. Take the compliment; you will not get another from that family without earning it twice over."
"I shall treasure it," Marid said dryly.
"She took two Knight pieces to reincarnate," he added to his companions, "which should tell you something of the caliber of warrior she was even before Serafall-sama got hold of her. Today she is counted among the strongest Knights in the entire Underworld. There is a story, and it is not exaggerated, that she once fought Souji Okita himself to a standstill in a sparring match, blade to blade, and Okita is the man most of the Underworld would name as its finest Knight without a second thought." Marid's tone turned faintly wry. "They call her the Lovelorn Tempest. You will understand the name the very first time you see someone she loves come to harm, and you will pray never to see it a second time. Her loyalty to Serafall-sama is absolute, and her devotion to Serafall-sama's little sister, our own dear Sona, is a thing best described as protective in the way a hurricane is protective of the eye at its center."
"Sona is a good girl," Valentine said, with the first flicker of genuine warmth she had shown. "Too serious. Works too hard. But good." The warmth vanished back beneath the professional calm as quickly as it had come. "See that your little city does not get her killed while we are away, Lord Marid, or you and I will be having a very different sort of conversation when I return."
"Understood, Lady Valentine. And believe me, that is a conversation I intend to avoid at nearly any cost."
"Oh, they are BOTH in the show, you know!" Serafall interjected brightly, apparently deciding the mood had grown far too serious for her liking. "My Miracle☆Levia-tan program! Yumeko plays the mysterious elder sorceress and Vine plays the loyal blade-guardian and the children adore them. The ratings when the two of them are on screen together are simply magnificent—"
"Serafall-sama," Marid said gently, "the heroes."
"Hm? Oh! Yes! The heroes! Right, right, the whole reason we are here, silly me." She waved a dismissive hand, though the sharpness that returned to her eyes proved she had never for a moment truly forgotten. "They are over there being dreadfully sulky about the whole business. Do go and be diplomatic at them, Mari-chan, you are so much better at that than I am. I always want to just freeze them a little."
Marid followed her gesture, and his gaze settled at last upon the group that had been watching the entire reunion in stony, resentful silence.
The heroes.
There were perhaps a dozen of them, gathered close together near the edge of the plateau, and though no chains bound them and no cages held them, there was no mistaking what they were. Wronged. Violated. Proud creatures who had been seized and defiled in a manner that struck at the very core of what they were, and who had never once, since the ordeal began, stopped calculating the odds of escape from the hands that now held them.
They were, to a soul, magnificent physical specimens, even worn as they were. These were the demigods and champions of Greece, sons and daughters of a warrior culture that had been forging heroes since before the Devils had a written language, and it showed in every line of them, the broad shoulders, the scarred forearms, the way even the smallest of them stood balanced on the balls of their feet as though the ground itself might at any moment become a battlefield. Some bore the bronze-touched complexions and dark curls of the old Hellenic bloodlines; others were paler, harder-featured, marked with the ritual tattoos of mountain cults and island shrines. One massive man near the back, easily as large as Kenta, bore a jagged scar that split his face from brow to jaw and did nothing at all to soften a glare that could have curdled milk. A lean woman beside him kept one hand perpetually near her hip, where a weapon had clearly once hung, her fingers twitching in the empty air with the phantom memory of it.
They had not been taken in any honest war. That was the shame of it, and Marid felt the weight of it keenly. These heroes had been kidnapped, seized in a reckless, arrogant scheme by a band of young Devils led by the heir of the House of Barbatos, and then forcibly, obscenely, converted into Devils against their will, their Greek souls chained into Evil Pieces as though the champions of Olympus were so much livestock to be reincarnated at a bored highborn's whim. It had been a catastrophe of the highest order, the kind of insult that started wars, and it had very nearly done exactly that. Only the direct intervention of the Maous had kept the sky from falling. Ajuka Beelzebub himself, greatest mind the Underworld had produced in an age and the very architect of the Evil Piece system, had bent his genius to the problem and accomplished what all had thought impossible: he had reversed the conversions entirely, unmaking the forced reincarnations and restoring every last one of the heroes to their original nature, human and demigod and champion, exactly as they had been born. As for those responsible, the Barbatos heir and his little cohort of teenage abductors, the Maous had shown no mercy. Every one of them had been stripped of the privilege of holding a peerage, their Evil Pieces confiscated in disgrace, and they now languished in an Underworld prison, awaiting whatever further judgment the crime warranted. Whatever the intentions behind that day's madness, the heroes had been held, and used, however briefly, and now, restored to themselves, they were being returned home, the opening gambit of a peace their captors' people desperately needed.
And not one of them believed it.
Their eyes, when they turned upon the newly arrived Devils, were flat with distrust and bright with contempt. They had heard the promises. They had heard that they were to be returned to their homelands, restored to the mountains and islands and sunlit shores of the Greece that had been stolen from beneath them, and they had heard it from the mouths of Devils, the very race that had torn them from their lives and wrought upon their souls an obscenity no apology could undo, and so they did not, could not, would not believe it. To them, this was simply another act in the same cruel farce, and if the crimson-haired boy approaching them expected gratitude, he would find none here.
Marid stopped a respectful distance from them and inclined his head, a proper, formal bow, the kind one warrior offered another.
"Heroes of Hellas," he said, and he pitched his voice to carry, clear and unhurried. "I am Marid, of the House of Gremory. I will not insult you with easy words, for I know precisely how little the promises of Devils are worth to you, and I know exactly why. So I will say only this." He straightened, and met the scarred giant's glare without flinching. "Within the hour, you will stand once more upon Greek soil, beneath a Greek sky, before your own gods. Not as an argument. Not as a bargaining chip. As free men and women, going home. I do not ask you to believe me. I ask only that you watch what happens next, and judge us by what we do, and not by what has been done to you before." A faint, grim smile. "If we are lying, you will know soon enough, and you will have every right to spit on the name of Gremory for the rest of your days. But I do not think we are. Walk with us a little further, and see."
The scarred giant studied him for a long, contemptuous moment. Then he spat, deliberately, onto the stone at his own feet, and said nothing at all.
But the lean woman beside him, the one with the phantom weapon, tilted her head, and something in her flat gaze shifted, very slightly. Not trust. Nothing so generous as that. But perhaps the faintest willingness to wait and see.
It was, Marid reflected, more than he had any right to expect. He would take it.
Around the perimeter of the plateau, meanwhile, the true scale of the undertaking had begun to make itself felt. Assembled in disciplined ranks stood a full hundred Devils, hand-picked and battle-hardened, their power ranging from the solid competence of high mid-class fighters to the honed lethality of proper high-class combatants. They were not there for show. They wore the practical, layered war-gear of soldiers who expected to use it, their expressions schooled to the flat readiness of professionals, and they stood in the loose, alert formation of a bodyguard detail that took its charge with deadly seriousness. A hundred trained Devils, to shield a Maou and a diplomatic party in the heart of foreign, and potentially hostile, divine territory.
It was a sobering sight. It was also, Marid understood, a carefully calculated one, large enough to protect, small enough not to threaten. Serafall Leviathan did many things that looked like whimsy. She had never once, in all the centuries of her rule, done a single thing that actually was.
"Serafall-sama," Marid said, drifting back to the Maou's side as the final preparations were made. "Before we cross. I would hear it from you plainly. What is our strategy at this table? What is the shape of the thing you mean for us to achieve?"
Serafall's perpetual, manic brightness dimmed, just for a moment, into something older and wearier and far more honest. She looked, in that instant, exactly like what she truly was beneath all the ribbons and theatrics: a ruler who had carried the weight of her people through more crises than most beings could imagine, and who was tired, bone-tired, of watching them bleed.
"The strategy, Marid," she said quietly, and there was no theater in it at all, and the sudden absence of her usual playful nickname landed with more weight than any raised voice could have, "is peace. That is all. That is the whole of it." She sighed, a small, tired exhalation. "We do whatever we must. We swallow whatever we have to swallow. We return their heroes, we speak them fair, we offer what can be offered and we endure what must be endured, and we walk out of that hall with the Olympians as friends, or at the very least as something other than enemies." Her blue eyes met his, steady and serious. "I know it is not a clever answer. I know you would prefer some intricate scheme with a dozen moving parts. But sometimes the wisest strategy in the world is simply to want peace more badly than the other side wants a fight, and to prove it. So. We prove it. Whatever it takes."
Marid held her gaze for a moment, and then, slowly, he nodded.
"…That," he said, "is a better answer than any scheme I could have devised. Thank you, Serafall-sama."
"Of course it is. I am very wise. It says so on my show." The brightness came flooding back into her all at once, the general vanishing beneath the girl once more. "Now! Everyone gather close, hold on to something, and do try not to be sick, the Greek circles are dreadfully show-offy about the whole business of moving people about. Yumeko, if you would!"
Yumeko Sangre raised one pale hand, and the plateau came alive with light.
It was not the crimson magic of the Gremory, nor the cold blue of the Sitri and Leviathan lines. This was something wholly other, older and stranger and beautiful in a way that set Devil teeth faintly on edge. A vast circle bloomed beneath their feet, intricate beyond reckoning, its geometry a dizzying lattice of concentric rings and radiant spokes, every inch of it crawling with flowing script in a divine Greek that predated the written word by uncounted ages. Constellations wheeled slowly within its bounds. The whole enormous construct pulsed with a warm, golden, honey-colored light, so unlike the light of the Underworld that several of the assembled Devil soldiers actually flinched from it.
The heroes, by contrast, went very still, and more than one of them drew a sharp, involuntary breath. They knew this light. They had grown up beneath it. And whatever their doubts about the Devils who now stood among them, the sight of a true Olympian summoning circle blooming to carry them home struck something deep and wordless in their chests.
"Hold fast," Yumeko murmured.
The golden light rose to swallow them whole, and the poisoned wasteland, the ruined plain where gods had died, the violet sky of the Underworld, all of it vanished in a single silent surge of divine radiance.
Marbella, Spain
The world returned in a wash of warmth and light and the distant, unmistakable murmur of the sea.
The delegation found themselves standing within the vast atrium of a mansion unlike anything in the Underworld, a sprawling palace of sun-bleached stone and cool marble, its high arched windows thrown open to admit the golden Mediterranean afternoon. Bougainvillea spilled in riots of magenta down whitewashed walls. Somewhere beyond the colonnades, water trickled in ornamental channels, and the air, after the poisoned mineral bite of the Thorns, was almost overwhelming in its sweetness: salt and citrus and sun-warmed stone, the smell of a living world. Through a distant archway, the Mediterranean itself glittered, an impossible sheet of hammered blue stretching out to the horizon.
It was a place chosen with care. Marbella, on the southern coast of Spain, sun-drenched and beautiful and utterly removed from the seats of power of any of the three Biblical factions, was neutral ground of a different kind entirely, a discreet, luxurious, defensible retreat where the gods of Olympus might receive an unusual delegation without the whole watching world taking note.
And they were not, Marid noted at once, unwatched.
The moment the golden light faded, the atrium bristled.
From the shadows of the colonnades, from the tops of the sweeping staircases, from doorways and balconies and the deep cool recesses of the great hall, warriors emerged. Spartans.
There was no mistaking them for anything else. They moved with the terrible, economical precision of men bred and honed for a single purpose across a thousand generations, and they arranged themselves around the arriving Devils with a speed and coordination that spoke of endless, merciless drill. Each was a study in lethal perfection: tall and broad and corded with the dense, functional muscle of true warriors rather than the sculpted vanity of statues. They wore the crimson cloaks of their ancient order over burnished bronze cuirasses that gleamed like captured fire in the Mediterranean light, and they carried the great round hoplon shields and long spears of a fighting tradition that had once, with a mere three hundred of its number, held the doom of an empire at a narrow pass. Their faces, framed by the cheek-guards of crested helms, were hard and impassive and entirely without fear. They did not glare, as the heroes had. They simply watched, with the patient, absolute attention of men who had already, in their minds, worked out exactly how they would kill everyone in the room if it came to that, and were merely waiting to see whether it would.
A full battalion of them, arrayed in silent, disciplined ranks. The honor guard of the gods themselves.
And at their head strode a single figure, and even among that company of deadly perfection, he drew the eye like a blade drawn in sunlight.
He was tall and powerfully built, his dark hair curling about a face of stern, classical beauty that seemed carved from the same marble as the mansion around them. He wore armor finer than the Spartans', chased with silver and adorned with motifs of the sea, coral and wave and the curling forms of things that swam in deep water, and over one shoulder was slung a curved blade of extraordinary make. But it was his bearing, more than any ornament, that marked him: he moved like a man who had walked into the lairs of monsters that turned armies to stone and had walked back out again carrying their heads, because that was, quite precisely, what he had done.
"That," Marid murmured to his companions, and there was genuine awe threaded beneath the calm of his voice, "is Perseus. The Perseus. Slayer of the Gorgon, son of Zeus, one of the greatest heroes the Greek world ever produced. He serves as Lord Poseidon's vanguard now, and it seems he commands the guard for this meeting personally." A dry note. "They have sent a legend to greet us at the door. Understand what that means. It is a courtesy and a warning in a single breath."
Perseus came to a halt before the delegation, and his dark, sea-grey eyes swept across them, measuring, before settling upon Serafall and Marid at their head. For a long moment he simply studied them. Then, to the visible surprise of several of the Devil soldiers, he inclined his head, a precise and formal fraction, the courtesy of one power to another.
"Lady Leviathan. Lord Gremory." His voice was deep and resonant, carrying easily across the atrium. "I am Perseus, and I speak with the voice of Lord Poseidon in this matter. On behalf of the Lords and Ladies of Olympus, you are welcome to this hall, under guest-right and the ancient laws of hospitality, which not even gods break lightly." His gaze flicked, briefly, to the gathered heroes at the delegation's rear, and something in his expression tightened, hope and doubt and a warrior's caution all at once. "You come bearing gifts, I am told."
"We come bearing your own people home, Lord Perseus," Serafall said, and for once she was entirely, gravely regal. "Freely, and without condition. Consider it the first word of a conversation we hope will be a long one."
Perseus studied her for a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, and stepped aside, sweeping one armored arm toward the great doors at the far end of the atrium.
"Then be welcome," he said. "The Lords of Olympus are assembled and await you. Come. It is not wise to keep gods waiting, and it is a great deal less wise to keep this particular gathering of them so."
He fell into step beside the delegation as they crossed the sunlit atrium, his Spartans peeling off into a flanking escort with silent precision, and together they passed beneath the towering doors and into the meeting hall beyond.
The Hall of the Gods
If the atrium had been beautiful, the meeting hall was breathtaking.
It was a vast, circular chamber, open along one entire curved wall to a colonnaded terrace and, beyond it, the endless glittering sweep of the sea. Sunlight poured in through the great openings and fell in golden bars across a floor of inlaid marble worked in the likeness of the heavens, and the domed ceiling far overhead had been painted with a churning, living fresco of storm and star and sea that seemed, if one looked too long, to actually move. At the center of it all stood a great round table of pale stone, ancient and worn smooth by uncounted ages, and around its far arc, waiting, were seated five of the gods of Olympus, with two towering figures standing sentinel at the shoulders of the two brothers who ruled them.
The sheer presence of them struck the chamber like a physical weight. Even Kenta, who feared very little in this world or any other, felt the fur along his arms stir. This was divinity, raw and undiluted, the concentrated might of beings who had shaped the beliefs of an entire civilization and drawn power from it across millennia. To stand in a room with even one such being was a thing few mortals ever survived the wonder of. To stand before five of them at once, with two heroes of legend standing guard besides, was to feel, keenly and humblingly, exactly how small one truly was.
At the head of the table sat Zeus.
The King of Olympus was a towering figure of a man, broad and magnificent, with a great mane of iron-grey hair and a beard to match, both seeming to crackle very faintly, as though a storm were forever contained just beneath the skin. His eyes were the pale, flickering blue-white of a lightning strike frozen at the instant of contact, and they held the amused, appraising, faintly dangerous glint of a monarch who had ruled for longer than most pantheons had existed and had grown neither bored nor careless in all that time. Power rolled off him in slow, thunderous waves, and when he shifted in his seat, the very air seemed to grumble.
To his right sat Poseidon, and where his brother was the storm of the sky, this was the storm of the deep. The Lord of the Sea was leaner, his hair and beard a wild sea-green threaded with white like foam on dark water, his eyes the deep, shifting, unknowable blue-green of the ocean's abyss. He held a trident of black coral and pale metal loosely across his knees, and about him hung the faint, constant smell of salt and the low, subliminal roar of distant surf, as though a piece of the sea itself had chosen to sit at the table wearing the shape of a man.
Standing at Zeus's right shoulder, rather than seated among the divine, loomed Heracles, and even in that posture of a guardian at rest he was a mountain given the shape of a man. He was no god, this one; not truly. He was a descendant of the original Hercules, the great hero of old, and the blood of that legend ran thick enough in his veins that he served now as the King of Olympus's own vanguard, the mortal-born champion set to stand between Zeus and any harm the world might offer. His frame was so vast, so densely muscled, that he seemed less a warrior than a fortress that had learned to walk; the fabled lion-skin of Nemea, that heirloom of his fearsome ancestor, was slung across his shoulders, its head resting upon his own like a grim second face, and his blunt, honest features wore an expression of restless, barely-contained energy, a warrior's impatience with the slow work of words. Yet there was shrewdness in his small dark eyes as well. It did not do, Marid reminded himself, to mistake Heracles for a mere brute. Many had. Very few had lived to correct the error.
Across the table sat the goddesses, and if the male gods were storm and mountain, these were something colder and sharper and, in their way, far more dangerous.
Artemis sat with the coiled stillness of a hunting cat, a lithe, silver-eyed young woman whose apparent youth fooled no one who looked into those ancient, moon-pale eyes. A great silver bow leaned against her chair, and everything about her, the lean muscle, the alert poise, the faint wildness that clung to her like the scent of a forest at dusk, spoke of the huntress who did not miss and did not forgive. She regarded the Devils with cool, frank assessment, weighing them as she might weigh quarry.
Beside her sat Athena, and of all the powers in that hall, it was she whom Marid found himself most wary of. The goddess of wisdom and just war was serene where the others were vivid, a tall, grey-eyed woman of severe and stately beauty, her expression composed into a perfect, unreadable calm. But behind those clear grey eyes turned a mind that had outmaneuvered gods and mortals alike since the dawn of strategy itself, and Marid, who made his living reading the intentions of others, felt the disquieting sensation of being read right back, thoroughly and effortlessly, the instant her gaze touched him. Here, he understood at once, was the true architect of whatever the Olympians intended today. Here was the mind to watch.
And at the table's far curve sat Apollon, radiant and golden, the most conventionally beautiful of them all, a youthful god whose fair features seemed to hold their own soft light, as though a portion of the sun had been poured into mortal shape. A golden lyre rested near his hand, and his handsome face wore an easy, pleasant smile, warm and welcoming. Yet his eyes, bright and clever and knowing, moved across the delegation with a quick, restless intelligence, and Marid marked him too, for the smiling ones, in his long experience, were very often the ones who saw the most.
Five gods of Olympus arrayed around the ancient table, their two vanguard champions standing sentinel behind them, and the weight of their regard settled over the Devil delegation like the hush before a coming storm.
"Welcome," Zeus rumbled, and his voice was the low roll of thunder over distant hills, filling the great hall without any apparent effort at all. There was warmth in it, of a sort, the expansive, dangerous warmth of a host who could as easily annihilate his guests as feast them, and had not yet decided which he found more entertaining. "Welcome, Devils, to our hall. Lady Leviathan. Young Lord of Gremory. You have come a long way, and you have come bearing our own blood home to us, which is no small thing, and speaks well of you before a word of business is even spoken. Sit. Be at ease, insofar as any creature may be at ease in a room such as this one." A flicker of lightning-blue amusement. "We do not bite. Not, at least, before the negotiations have properly begun."
"Lord Zeus." Serafall bowed with a grace and gravity that erased every trace of the giddy magical-girl the Devils knew, presenting to the gods only the Maou, the ruler, the equal come to treat with equals. "You honor us with your welcome, and with the laws of hospitality you extend. We come in good faith, and in the earnest hope that when we leave this hall, it will be as friends. On behalf of the Underworld and the four Maous, I thank you for receiving us."
"As do I," Marid added, bowing at her side, "on behalf of the House of Gremory, and of all those who would see peace kept between our peoples rather than another plain left poisoned for a thousand years. Your welcome is a kindness we will not forget, my lords and ladies."
"Prettily said, young Gremory," Athena observed, and her voice was cool and clear as mountain water. Her grey eyes had not left him once. "We shall see, before this day is done, how much of that pretty speech is sentiment, and how much is strategy. I confess I look forward to learning the ratio."
"As do I, Lady Athena," Marid replied smoothly, meeting her gaze without flinching. "Though I suspect you have already made a fair estimate of it."
Something that might, in a mortal, have been the ghost of a smile touched the corner of the war-goddess's mouth, and was gone.
Serafall and Marid took their seats at the near arc of the great table, and their peerages arranged themselves behind them in silent, watchful attendance, Yumeko and Valentine at Serafall's shoulders, Yumi and Kenta at Marid's, the very picture of a delegation that had come to talk but had not, for one moment, come unguarded. Across the ancient stone, the five gods settled into their own places, while the vast bulk of Heracles held his station at Zeus's right hand and Perseus stood his post behind Poseidon's chair, the two vanguard champions framing their brother-kings like living pillars.
For a moment, the great hall was utterly silent, save for the distant sigh of the sea against the shore and the low, ceaseless murmur of the surf that clung to Poseidon like a second heartbeat. Devil and god regarded one another across a table older than most of their civilizations, and the whole weight of the future, war or peace, ruin or friendship, seemed to hang suspended in the golden Mediterranean light.
Then Zeus, King of Olympus, Lord of the Sky, raised his great hands.
And he brought them together in a single, echoing clap that rang through the hall like a peal of thunder, and rolled out across the sea, and marked the beginning of the meeting that would decide the fate of them all.
Chapter End
AND CUT! Whew, what a chapter to write! We finally set foot in the Olympian arc properly, and I am SO excited to finally show you all this side of the story!
So a LOT of new faces this chapter! Let me quickly cover them: Yumeko Sangre (Serafall's Shinso-vampire Queen) and Valentine Vine (the last of House Vine and Serafall's Knight) are both characters I have been dying to introduce for AGES. They will both play a big role going forward, so keep them in mind! And yes, they are both in Serafall's magical girl show, because OF COURSE they are lol.
We also got our first proper look at the Thorns, the poisoned final battleground of the Great War. That mystery about who ELSE fell there besides the Satans and the Heavenly Dragons? Ohohoho. Trust me. That one is going to matter A LOT later. Leave your theories in the comments, I love reading them!
And of course, the GODS. Zeus, Poseidon, Heracles, Artemis, Athena, and Apollon, with Perseus leading the Spartan guard. Marid has his work cut out for him at this table, and Athena in particular has already got her eye on him. Next chapter, the negotiations BEGIN in earnest, and meanwhile, back in Kuoh… well. You all heard what Marid predicted about Kiba and Issie, didn't you? Hehehe.
As always, PLEASE do leave a comment and let me know what you thought! Constructive criticism is always welcome, tell me if something felt off or if you spotted a plot hole, it genuinely helps me make the next chapter better. Your comments keep me going!
Until next time, stay safe and have fun!
DGZalama out!
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