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!
Kuoh
Issei Hyoudou was worried, and when Issei Hyoudou worried, he did it with his whole body.
He paced the length of the old schoolhouse corridor for what had to be the fortieth time, his sneakers squeaking against the worn wooden floor, his hands shoved deep into his pockets and his brow furrowed into an expression his friends would have found almost comically out of place on his usually cheerful face. Outside, the late afternoon sun was sliding toward the rooftops of Kuoh, painting the empty halls in long amber bars, and somewhere far above him, beneath a different sky entirely, the people who might have talked him out of what he was about to do were sitting at a table with the gods of Olympus.
Which was rather the problem.
"He's gone, Koneko-chan," Issei said for the third time, rounding on the small white-haired girl who sat perched on the windowsill, methodically working her way through a bag of sweets and watching him wear a trench into the floorboards. "Kiba is just… gone. Nobody's seen him since this morning. Not since Yumi-san left with Marid-san for the whole Greek god thing. I went to his apartment, I went to the club, I went to that dumb training clearing he likes, nothing. It's like he vanished off the face of the earth."
"…He does that," Koneko said around a mouthful of caramel, her expression as flat and unbothered as ever. "Kiba-senpai broods. He'll come back."
"No. No, this is different." Issei stopped his pacing and dragged a hand through his hair. "You saw his face in that meeting, same as I did. When those exorcists said the words Excalibur and Valper. He went white as a sheet. He looked like—" He struggled for the words. "He looked like someone had reached inside his chest and squeezed. And then Yumi-san and Marid-san leave for a whole week, and the exact same night Kiba disappears? Come on. That's not brooding. That's Kiba going after those swords by himself."
For the first time, something flickered across Koneko's small face. She set the bag of sweets down in her lap.
She had felt it too, if she was honest. The wrongness that had hung around Kiba these past hours like the smell of ozone before a storm. And she had heard, same as everyone, the warnings Marid had left ringing in that clubroom before he departed: no involvement in the church's business unless it is officially sanctioned. Kiba had bowed his head to that order along with the rest of them.
But Marid had also said something else, quieter, that Koneko had not forgotten. He had said that Kiba was going to run.
"…Buchou said to stay out of it," Koneko murmured, though there was less conviction in it than there had been a moment ago.
"Buchou also said to look out for each other," Issei shot back, and for once there was no goofiness in him at all, only a stubborn, earnest fire that made him look, briefly, like the man he was slowly becoming. "Kiba's our friend, Koneko-chan. He's hurting, and he's about to do something really, really stupid all by himself, and I am not just going to sit here polishing my Sacred Gear and hoping he comes back in one piece. I'm going to find him. I'd rather get yelled at by Buchou for helping a friend than sit safe and sound while Kiba gets himself killed."
Koneko stared at him for a long moment.
Then she sighed, a tiny, put-upon exhalation, and hopped down from the windowsill.
"…You're an idiot," she informed him.
"Yeah, well—"
"A big idiot." She dusted crumbs off her skirt. "And Kiba-senpai is a bigger one. And if the two biggest idiots in Kuoh go wandering into a Holy Sword mess alone, with no one watching their backs, they will die." She looked up at him, golden eyes steady. "So I'm coming. Someone has to keep you two alive."
Something in Issei's chest went warm and grateful. "Koneko-chan—"
"Don't get sappy." She was already walking for the door. "We'll need help. More than just us two. If we find Kiba-senpai and there's a fight, three of us won't be enough."
"Way ahead of you." Issei grinned, the worry not gone but tempered now with purpose, and pulled out his phone. "I know exactly who to call. He owes me one anyway."
Twenty minutes later, in a quiet corner of the Kuoh Academy grounds where a student council member held its less official business, Saji Genshirou was regretting every choice that had led him to answer that phone.
"Absolutely not," the blond pawn of Sona Sitri said, folding his arms across his chest with the desperate firmness of a man who already knew he was going to lose the argument. "No way. No way, Hyoudou. Do you have any idea what Kaichou will do to me if she finds out I ran off to chase Holy Swords behind her back? She'll—she'll reassign me to filing duty for a century. She'll make me reorganize the entire archive. By hand. With no magic."
"Saji." Issei put a hand on his shoulder, his expression grave. "A friend is in trouble."
"He's not my friend! He's your friend! I barely know the guy! He just stands in corners looking handsome and mysterious and making the rest of us look bad!"
"Saji," Koneko said, from where she stood watching with her arms crossed.
"…What?"
"He's going to die if we don't help him." She tilted her head. "Do you want him to die?"
"That's—that's not fair, you can't just—" Saji made a strangled noise, looking between the two of them, and Issei could see the exact moment his resolve began to crumble, because Saji Genshirou, for all his complaining, had exactly the same fatal flaw that Issei did. He was, underneath all the bluster, a fundamentally good person who could not stand the thought of leaving someone to suffer.
"…Kaichou is going to murder me," Saji groaned, dropping his face into his hands. "She is going to murder me, and then Vine-san, Serafall-sama's terrifying Knight, the one who treats Kaichou like she's made of glass and would cross an ocean to skewer anyone who put her in danger, is going to murder whatever's left, and then Serafall-sama herself is going to murder that. I'm going to be murdered three separate times." He looked up, miserable and resigned. "Fine. Fine. I'm in. But when this goes wrong, and it's going to go wrong, I am telling everyone this was your idea."
"Deal," Issei said cheerfully.
And so it was that three young Devils, none of them yet strong enough to truly understand the size of the thing they were walking toward, set out into the gathering dusk to find a fourth who was already halfway to a cliff's edge, with no one older or wiser left in the city to stop any of them.
Far away, beneath a golden Mediterranean sun, the person who had predicted all of this to the letter was about to have his patience tested by a god.
Marbella, Spain
The negotiations had been underway for the better part of two hours, and they were, by any reasonable measure, going well.
Serafall Leviathan had opened with grace and gravity, presenting the return of the Greek heroes as the first, unconditional word of a longer conversation, and the Olympians had received the gesture with the wary appreciation it deserved. Athena had asked precise, probing questions about the intentions of the Underworld, and Marid had answered each of them with a candor that seemed, more and more, to unsettle her; she was a goddess accustomed to peeling away layers of deception, and she kept finding, beneath each of Marid's answers, only more honesty, which she plainly did not trust. Poseidon had spoken little, watching the Devil delegation with the deep, unreadable patience of the tide. Apollon had smiled and made pleasant conversation and revealed nothing. Artemis had watched them all like a hawk deciding which rabbit to take first.
And Heracles had seethed.
The King of Olympus's vanguard had held his tongue for two full hours, standing at Zeus's right shoulder with his massive arms folded and his jaw set, but the resentment radiating off him had grown thicker with every passing minute, and at last, during a lull in the discussion, it boiled over.
"I will say the thing no one else at this table has the spine to say," Heracles rumbled, and his deep voice cut across the hall like a landslide. Every eye turned to him. "I find the very shape of this insulting."
"Heracles," Zeus said mildly, without turning.
"No, my lord, let me speak." The descendant of the great hero stepped forward, his small dark eyes fixed on Marid with open contempt. "We are the gods of Olympus. We shook the earth before these creatures had a written tongue. And when the Underworld comes to beg peace of us, who do they send? A Maou, yes, well enough, Lady Leviathan is a ruler and I will grant her the courtesy of one." His lip curled. "But beside her? A child. A boy. The son of the great Lucifer, sent to sit at a table with gods, as though we were a schoolyard squabble to be settled by whichever brat his father could most easily spare." His voice rose. "This is nepotism dressed as diplomacy. This is arrogance wearing a smile. Sirzechs Lucifer thinks so little of Olympus that he could not be troubled to send a true statesman, and instead handed the task to his own whelp to blood him, like a hunting pup on its first kill. And we are meant to sit here and pretend it is an honor." He spat the last word. "I say it is a spit in the face, and I say the correct answer to a spit in the face is a fist. I have never understood this reluctance to simply crush what insults us. We would win. We always win."
A ripple of tension went through the chamber. Behind Marid, Kenta's shoulders had gone rigid, and Yumi's hand had drifted, very slightly, toward the sleeve where one of her Sacred Gears lived. The hundred Devil guards stationed throughout the mansion could not have heard the words, but something in the air had changed, and disciplined as they were, a few hands found the grips of weapons.
Serafall opened her mouth, her expression darkening.
But it was Marid who raised a single hand, forestalling her, and rose smoothly to his feet.
He was not angry. That was the first thing everyone in the room noticed. A boy accused so openly, before gods, might be forgiven a flush of temper. Marid only looked, if anything, faintly amused, and entirely unbothered, as though Heracles had complimented the weather.
"Lord Heracles," Marid said pleasantly. "Thank you. Genuinely. It is refreshing to hear someone at this table simply say what they mean." He inclined his head. "You are quite right, of course. I am young. Absurdly so, by the reckoning of anyone in this hall. And you are right, too, that my father could have sent an elder statesman in my place, a grey-bearded diplomat with three centuries of treaties behind him, and no one would have blinked."
He let that sit for a moment.
"But consider, my lord, why he did not." Marid's lightning-blue eyes swept the table, and his voice, still light, took on a quiet edge. "My father, Sirzechs Lucifer, does not do things by accident. He never has. So ask yourself, if it please you, not whether it is an insult to send his son, but why a being as deliberate as the Lucifer would choose to. Perhaps because a grey-bearded diplomat would sit at this table and lie to you beautifully, as diplomats do, and you would spend three days catching each falsehood while the real conversation never began. Or perhaps, Lord Heracles…" a faint smile, "…because there are things a son may say, and risk, and offer, that no hired statesman ever could. Because sending his own blood into a room full of gods is not a sign that my father holds Olympus cheaply. It is the single most expensive gesture of respect he had to give. He sent you the thing he could least afford to lose." Marid spread his hands. "Now. You may take that as arrogance if you wish. But I would think very carefully, before I did, about what it says of a man that he would wager his own child on the hope that Olympus was reasonable enough to talk to."
The silence that followed was different from the one before it.
Athena's grey eyes had narrowed, not in hostility, but in the sharp reassessment of a strategist who had just watched an opening gambit she had not anticipated. Poseidon's craggy features shifted by some fraction that might, in a mortal, have been the beginning of respect. Even Zeus was regarding the young Devil now with a new and thoughtful glint in his lightning-pale eyes.
Heracles, for his part, opened his mouth, found he had nothing to put in it, and shut it again with a click of teeth, glowering.
"Well spoken, brat," Zeus rumbled at last, and there was the barest thread of amusement in it. "Well spoken indeed. But do not think a clever tongue has settled the matter." The King of Olympus leaned forward, and abruptly the amiable host was gone, and something vast and old and genuinely dangerous looked out from behind his eyes, so that the very air of the chamber seemed to press down. "For Heracles is not wholly wrong, whatever the cleverness of your answer. Let us speak plainly, you and I, and set aside the pretty dance of diplomacy for a moment."
Zeus's pale gaze fixed on Marid, and on Serafall beside him, and it was the weight of a being who had ended civilizations on a whim.
"Tell me, little Devils," the King of Olympus said softly. "Why should I want peace with you at all? You come to my hall with gifts and pretty words and clever boys, and you ask me to lay down a war before it has even begun. But I am Zeus. I have crushed titans. I have unmade things older than your entire race." Lightning flickered, briefly, in his beard. "Why should I bargain with creatures I could simply kill? Give me one reason I should not end this conversation, and your delegation, and your little rebellion of a species, here and now."
The threat rolled through the hall like thunder, and for a moment, no one breathed.
Marid and Serafall stiffened. It was impossible not to; the killing intent that had bled into the chamber was a physical thing, the promise of a being who could make good on every word. Behind them, Yumi had gone pale, and Kenta's breath had stopped in his chest, and even Yumeko Sangre and Valentine Vine, veterans of a hundred battlefields, had gone very, very still.
But Marid did not look away. And when he answered, his voice, though quieter than before, did not shake.
"Because you would win, Lord Zeus," he said.
The King of Olympus blinked. Whatever he had expected, it was not that.
"You would win," Marid repeated, "and it would be the most expensive victory Olympus has bought in ten thousand years. That is why you will not do it. That is why none of you will do it. And I know this, my lord, because it is the very reason you invited us here at all."
"Explain yourself," Athena said sharply, leaning forward, her grey eyes suddenly blazing with interest. "You claim to know our reasoning better than we do. Explain it, Devil, and be precise, for I will know at once if you are guessing."
"Gladly, Lady Athena." Marid inclined his head to her, and then he stopped being a supplicant and became, instead, the thing he truly was: a broker of information, laying his goods upon the table.
"Let us game it out honestly, then, the way you would, Lady Athena, in the quiet of your own war-room," he began, and he began to pace, slowly, along the near arc of the table. "War comes between Olympus and the Underworld. The gods march. And yes, in the end, the gods win. I will not insult this table by pretending otherwise. You are older, you are mightier, and the raw divinity in this room alone could level mountains. Victory is yours." He paused. "But at what price?"
He held up a single finger.
"First. The Devils of today are not the Devils of the Great War. Our numbers are a shadow of what they once were, this is true; the civil war saw to that. But numbers are not power, and what we lack in bodies we have made up for many times over in concentration. The reincarnation system, the Evil Pieces, the gathering of humanity's mightiest into our ranks, has forged the most distilled fighting force in our history. So allow me to be precise, my lords and ladies, for I know this is a table that respects precision." He laid the comparison out plainly, tier against tier. "Your rank and file, the base soldiers of Olympus, the Spartan warriors you have recruited and honed across the long centuries, stand a fair and even match for our low and middle-class Devils. Blade for blade, there is little to choose between them. Your Elites climb higher, to the measure of our High-class. And your Commanders, your demigods and heroes of true legend, Lord Heracles, Lord Perseus, the very champions standing at your own shoulders in this room, they stand equal to our Ultimate-class Devils. On that much, I think, we can all agree without quarrel."
He paused, and his tone grew more careful.
"And then there are the gods themselves. Here I will neither flatter nor lie: a god of Olympus surpasses even our Satan-class rulers. One against one, in single and honest combat, the advantage is yours, and I would be a fool to claim otherwise." His voice sharpened, quiet and pointed. "But wars are not fought one against one, my lords. So I would put the harder question to you. Could a single god hold, and keep holding, not against one Satan-class Devil but against three at once, or four, pressing in from every side? And in the desperate heat of such a moment, would a god's pride permit him to cry out for the aid that might yet save him, or would he stand alone and unbending until the tide simply pulled him under? Pride is a very heavy thing to carry onto a battlefield of that scale."
His eyes flicked, briefly, to Serafall, who inclined her head in grave confirmation, and then returned to the gods.
"And I have not yet named our sharpest edges. For among the Devils stand two names that belong to a rarer reckoning still. Ajuka Beelzebub, and my own father, Sirzechs Lucifer. Super-class Devils, both, counted today among the ten strongest beings in the whole of the supernatural world." He inclined his head, granting the qualification before it could be seized upon. "They sit in the lower half of that list, I will freely grant you, no shame in it, for they share those very rungs with three of the greatest powers your own world has ever known: great Zeus himself, Lord Hades of the dead, and the monster Typhon. But upon the list they sit, all the same. Do you take my meaning, my lords and ladies? We do not merely field soldiers to answer your soldiers. We hold two beings who stand among the mightiest things alive, spoken of in the very same breath as the King of Olympus." He let his hands fall to his sides. "You would not be fighting a swarm of weaklings to be brushed aside. You would be fighting the most lethal generation of Devils that has ever drawn breath, every one of them defending their home."
A second finger.
"Second. Tannin." He let the name land. "The Blaze Meteor Dragon King. A Dragon of such staggering power that upon his conversion to our race he was classified, automatically and by special ruling, as an Ultimate-class Devil, no trial, no slow ascent through the ranks, his might simply too self-evident to be reckoned any other way. He serves today under Mephisto Pheles, one of the greatest magicians our kind has ever produced, and he has sworn his own strength, and the strength of every dragon who follows him, to the defense of Devil territory. When war comes to our borders, my lords, it is not only Devils you will face. It is dragons. Flights of them. And you of all pantheons know what it costs to kill a true dragon, do you not?" His gaze drifted, deliberately, toward Apollon, and toward the empty air where a certain legend's name hung unspoken. "Your own myths are soaked in the blood it takes to bring one down. Now imagine a sky black with them, each defending the land it has claimed as its own."
A third finger, and now his voice dropped, and grew grave.
"And third, my lords and ladies. The cruelest arithmetic of all." Marid stopped pacing and faced them fully. "In such a war, Olympus wins. But Olympus does not win cleanly. When you throw gods against Maous, against Ultimate-class Devils, against Dragon Kings and their broods, some of those gods do not come home. It is not a possibility. It is a certainty. The mathematics of a war on that scale do not permit otherwise. Before the last Devil falls, some of the great names of this very table, some of the powers seated in this room, will have been slain." He let the word hang in the perfumed air. "And here is the part that turns a costly war into an unthinkable one. This is not the age of your glory. Fewer mortals light candles to Olympus now than at any time since your rise. Your power flows from faith, and the faith runs thin. A god of this dwindling age who falls in battle does not rise again as he once might have. He is simply… gone. Forever."
The chamber had gone utterly silent.
"So game it to its end, Lady Athena," Marid said softly. "Olympus goes to war with the Underworld, and Olympus wins, and in winning, Olympus loses several of its greatest gods, permanently, in an age where it can afford to lose none, all to crush a foe that offered you peace. And a pantheon already fading finds itself gutted of its mightiest, its numbers thinned, its power broken, limping into a future where the next pantheon that looks upon it sees not the terror of Olympus, but prey." He spread his hands. "You do not win that war, my lords. You survive it. And you spend the rest of eternity regretting that you ever fought it. That is why you sent for us. Because you ran these same numbers, in your own war-rooms, long before we ever arrived, and you did not like the answer any more than I do."
For a long, long moment, nothing at all was said.
Then Athena leaned back in her chair, and let out a slow breath, and something almost like a smile, thin and rueful and deeply reluctant, touched the corner of the war-goddess's mouth. But she said nothing.
She did not need to. She would not give the boy the satisfaction of hearing it spoken aloud, not here, not with the meeting only half-run; to voice agreement now would be to concede the entire negotiation before a single term had been set, and no god of Olympus would hand a Devil that victory so cheaply. And so the war-goddess held her tongue, and merely regarded Marid across the ancient table with new and wary eyes, and let the silence do the conceding for her.
He is not guessing, Athena thought, turning the whole of his argument over in the cold, swift machinery of her mind and finding not one loose thread in it. Every word of it is sound. That is precisely the calculation that brought us to this table, recited back to me by a boy who should not possess it. I did not expect that. I do not enjoy it. Her grey gaze lingered on him, reassessing. I begin to understand, young Gremory, exactly why your father sent you.
She said none of it. But Marid, who read silences for a living as surely as he read words, saw the answer written plain in the stillness that had settled over the table, in the reluctant set of the war-goddess's mouth and the way not one of the gods rushed to contradict him. No voice rose to call his reasoning false. No god scoffed, or waved the argument away. And that quiet, that careful, telling quiet, was worth more than any spoken concession they might have given him. He inclined his head, very slightly, and did not press. He knew better than to make a god say the thing aloud.
Zeus, meanwhile, had sat back upon his great seat, and the terrible pressure that had filled the hall receded like a tide going out, and when he spoke again the amusement had returned to his voice, warmer now, and edged with something that had not been there before. Interest. Real interest.
"So the whelp has teeth after all," the King of Olympus mused. "And uses them to argue for peace. How novel." He studied Marid. "Then tell me plainly, boy, since we are being plain. Set aside the grand arithmetic of gods and dragons. You. Marid of Gremory. Why do you, personally, want this peace? What does a clever young Devil get out of talking his elders down from a war?"
Marid smiled, and for the first time it was entirely genuine.
"Honestly, my lord?" he said. "Because peace is good for business, and war is just a great deal of work."
A beat of startled silence. Then Poseidon, of all of them, let out a low, rumbling chuckle like the grinding of tectonic plates.
"I am an information broker by trade and an alchemist by passion," Marid went on, unabashed. "I make my living on the quiet flow of goods and secrets between the factions of this world, and there is no flow at all across a battlefield. War is bad for commerce, it is bad for scholarship, it is bad for the leisurely completion of interesting contracts in half-submerged caves, and it is, above all, catastrophically bad for me, personally, on account of my likely being killed in it." He said it lightly, but his eyes were steady. "I will not pretend to some grand nobility, my lords. I want peace because peace lets me work, and lets my people live, and lets everyone at this table go on existing to do business another day. That is the whole of it." A small, wry smile. "And I will be honest about the rest, too. The thought of dying is not one I find especially pleasant. I am rather young, and there is a great deal I still intend to do. But." His jaw set, and something flinty showed beneath the humor. "But if it came down to it, my lords, if peace could not be had and the dice had to be rolled, then I would roll them. I would fight, and I would very probably die, and I would do it anyway, because the alternative is watching my home burn. I would simply vastly prefer not to. So I am here, asking, humbly, that we all agree to save ourselves the trouble."
"Good for business," Artemis repeated. The huntress-goddess had been silent for much of the exchange, watching Marid with those cool, moon-pale eyes, and now she spoke for the first time in an age, her voice clear and sharp as a drawn arrow. "You keep returning to that phrase. So let us hear the shape of it, Devil. When you say peace is good for your business, what precisely is it you imagine doing with us?" Her eyes narrowed. "Do not think I have missed the way you keep circling the subject. Out with it. Is this some scheme to have gods dance in your little… what do you call them. Your Rating Games."
"The Rating Games are not for the likes of—" Heracles began, spitting the words out of turn, his face darkening.
"I see no problem with it whatsoever," Marid said, cutting smoothly across the vanguard as though he had not spoken, and he smiled.
The reaction around the table was immediate and varied. Heracles' face went purple. Athena's eyes sharpened. But Artemis had leaned forward, and Apollon, at the far curve of the table, had abruptly stopped looking bored.
"Consider it, if you would, before Lord Heracles bursts something vital," Marid continued, spreading his hands in the manner of a merchant unrolling his finest cloth. "The Rating Games are the beating heart of modern Devil society. They are how we settle rivalries that would once have been settled in blood. They are how reputations are made, how the young prove themselves, how old grudges are worked out on a field where no one truly dies. And there is no reason under any sky that the champions of Olympus could not take part." His eyes glittered. "Picture it. Spartans, demigods, perhaps in time even gods, competing upon a stage watched by the entire supernatural world. What does Olympus gain from that?"
He raised a finger.
"First, glory, and the renewal of your legend, in an age that has begun to forget you. Every match a Spartan wins is a story told a thousand times over, a candle relit in the dark. Faith, my lords, is your lifeblood, and there is no faster way to rekindle it than spectacle." A second finger. "Second, opportunity. Your Spartan warriors are magnificent, but a warrior needs a ladder to climb, and a fading pantheon offers few rungs. Let them fight in the Games, let them earn renown and rank, and you give your finest a path to promotion within Olympus's own halls that they do not currently have. Ambition satisfied is loyalty secured." A third finger. "Third, and not least, the friction. Nothing shuts down the whispers of war between two peoples faster than watching their champions clash on a field where the loser simply goes home to sulk instead of to a grave. Rating Games would turn the enmity between Olympus and the Underworld into rivalry, and rivalry, my lords, is the healthiest thing two great powers can share. It is a war that never has to be fought."
He let his hands fall.
"And yes," he added, with a flash of white teeth, "there is a great deal of money to be made on the side, for everyone involved. I would be a poor broker if I pretended otherwise." He gave a small, self-deprecating shrug. "But the money is merely a pleasant bonus laid atop the true prizes. Now, as for the particulars of such an arrangement, the terms, the pieces, the scheduling of gods upon a Devil's field, that is a conversation far above my station. That belongs to Serafall Leviathan and the other Maous, who negotiate as equals with your good selves. I merely plant the seed and note that the soil looks rich." He bowed. "I will happily leave the tending of it to my betters."
Serafall, at his side, wore an expression of such delighted, dangerous satisfaction that several of the Devil guards took an unconscious half-step back. The Maou said nothing. She did not need to. The gleam in her eye said that a very great deal of tending was going to be done.
Artemis and Apollon exchanged a single, brief glance across the table, and in it passed the wordless understanding of siblings who have each, independently, decided that they are interested.
It was Apollon who spoke next, and when he did, his gaze had drifted, idly, to the young men and women standing in attendance behind the Devil delegation. His bright, clever eyes lingered for a moment on the empty air around Serafall's guards, then flicked, with a knowing little smile, toward the distant reaches of the mansion, as though he could see straight through its walls to something far away.
"You speak of dragons, young Gremory," the golden god said lightly, "and you glance my way when you do it, and you think me too polite to remark upon the obvious. So allow me." His smile widened. "You have the Red Dragon Emperor among your people, do you not. The current Sekiryuutei. Oh, I can feel the faint echo of him even from here, that old, familiar flavor. Ddraig's little vessel."
A stir went through the Devils. Marid's expression did not so much as flicker.
"I do," he acknowledged smoothly. "Though I confess I am impressed you can sense him from a continent away, Lord Apollon. He is not with us today."
"No, I imagine not. And in truth, it changes little." Apollon waved an elegant hand, dismissive, and leaned back. "The current holder is a child, is he not? A boy who has only just begun to grasp the edges of what he carries. I mean no offense to your Emperor, Devil, but let us be honest, one god to a broker: whatever he may one day become, the boy who holds Ddraig now is no threat to the likes of us. He barely understands his own power. Set him before an Olympian today and it would be an unkindness, like setting a puppy against a lion. The Sekiryuutei of this generation does not frighten me." He examined his nails. "So no, the presence of Ddraig's vessel among you does not move the scales one way or the other."
It was a graceful dismissal, and a true one, and the table seemed content to let it lie.
But Marid, who read people for a living, did not miss the thing that flickered behind the golden god's carefully bored expression. For all his airy disdain for the boy, Apollon's eyes had lit, just slightly, at the mention of Ddraig, the dragon himself, not the vessel. And no wonder. The name of the Red Dragon Emperor was carved deep into the old stories of the Greek lands, whispered in the same breath as the greatest monsters and mightiest heroes of that ancient age, a being whose legend in the Hellenic world was written in the blood of the powerful beings, gods and titans and champions alike, who had dared to stand against him and been unmade for their trouble. Apollon might sneer at the puppy. But the lion whose spirit slept inside that puppy was another matter entirely, and some old, bright spark of a god's curiosity had kindled behind his eyes at the memory of it.
He said none of this aloud, of course. But Marid saw it, and filed it away, as he filed away all things.
And it was into that moment, as Apollon leaned back with his easy, dismissive smile, that an entirely different voice spoke up, and it came from a place no one at that table had expected.
It came from the hand of Kenta the Kuroshishi.
"Perhaps," said a warm, feminine voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, rich and crackling like a hearth-fire on a winter night, "the existence of another soul within a Sacred Gear might vouch for the sincerity of the Devils' request for peace!"
A band of light bloomed into being around Kenta's finger. It resolved, in the space of a heartbeat, into a ring, elegant and ancient, wrought of some dark metal chased with veins of living flame that pulsed and flickered as though a coal had been trapped within the band. Warmth radiated from it, gentle and comforting, the warmth of a protective fire rather than a devouring one, and the whole chamber seemed, for a moment, a little brighter.
Kenta startled so violently he nearly overturned his own footing. "A-Adara?! What are you—"
But the effect on the far side of the table dwarfed his surprise entirely.
Apollon shot upright in his seat.
The easy, golden boredom had vanished from the god's beautiful face as though it had never been, replaced by an expression of such raw, undisguised shock that every other deity at the table turned to stare at him. His bright eyes were fixed upon the ring on Kenta's finger, wide and disbelieving, and when he spoke, his voice had lost all of its practiced lightness.
"…Adara?" Apollon breathed
Chapter End
AND WE'RE BACK!
Finally we have the Olyumpus arc in full swing! Keep an eye out since I will be uploading the second chapter for the Olympus Arc very shortly as well! In the meantime have fun and get some popcorn since you are about to see quite a few reveals from here onwards. Specifically on some of the stuff you guys have been complaining about.
As ALWAYS, please please PLEASE leave a comment and let me know what you thought! Constructive criticism is hugely appreciated, if something felt off or you spotted a plot hole, tell me, it genuinely makes the next chapter better. Your comments are my fuel!
Until next time, stay safe and have fun!
DGZalama out!
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