Sirzechs was absolutely, utterly pissed. The worthless trash he thought he could humiliate at will had suddenly caught him off-guard and made a fool of him right in front of his entire family.
His father, his sister, his mother—even the goddamn servants—had all watched as Riser's fist connected squarely with his face.
The memory was a raw, stinging brand on his pride.
His mother's expression had shifted from shock to cold, profound disappointment, and she hadn't spoken a single word to him since. His father had just sighed, a sound of pure weariness, and retreated into isolated silence in his study.
Rias had packed her things for Kuoh Academy without even looking at him, and a full week of complete radio silence from her only twisted the knife deeper.
For that entire week, Sirzechs had raged, scouring the Underworld for any trace of Riser Phenex, his mind burning with visions of brutal, humiliating revenge.
But the bastard had vanished—completely. To make it worse, the Head of the Phenex Clan had issued a formal declaration: they were terminating their youngest son's engagement to Rias Gremory.
Not only that, they were publicly aligning themselves with the Great Baal Faction, withdrawing all political support from the Gremorys, and—the most crippling blow—cutting off the supply of their legendary Phenex Tears to the Gremory Clan indefinitely.
Then came the true devastation.
His own mother, who had previously tolerated his actions with silent disapproval, finally broke. She spoke out. To everyone. She declared that her son had systematically bullied the youngest son of the Phenex Clan.
She revealed that all prior accusations of rape and sexual harassment leveled by maids within the Gremory mansion were falsified—fabrications Sirzechs had orchestrated to smear Riser and abuse his power as a Satan to crush a fellow noble clan and its retainers.
The Underworld erupted in outrage. The hypocrisy was too glaring to ignore: the champion of peace and love, exposed as a petty, vicious tyrant targeting a youth.
With his own mother's testimony sealing his disgrace, and her subsequent return to the Baal Clan to seek refuge from his influence, Sirzechs found every one of his actions under a scorching spotlight.
He wanted to tear the realms apart to find Riser, but he was trapped—buried under an avalanche of political shit he now had to manage just to keep his faction from collapsing entirely.
Unknown to the seething Lucifer, Riser wasn't hiding in some remote corner of the underworld or cowering on Earth. He was, in fact, lounging in the perfectly ordinary Student Council President's room at Kuoh Academy.
Sunlight streamed through the windows as he sat across from a sharp-eyed, short-haired beauty, Sona Sitri, a chessboard between them.
Sona moved her queen with precise finality. "Checkmate."
Again. Riser stared at the board, his king surrounded. He was, to put it bluntly, absolute shit at chess. Strategy and long-term planning had never been his strengths; he'd always relied on brute force and inherited privilege.
But the arrogant young master was gone, burned away by the humiliating torment at Sirzechs's hands and the vicious, unfair treatment from the entire Gremory clan.
In its place was a colder, more patient man. He had learned the taste of powerlessness, and it had made him willing to listen, to endure loss, to learn.
He may not be smart now, but he was willing to lose—repeatedly, painfully—if it meant understanding why he lost. He studied the board, then Sona's impassive face.
"Show me," he said, his voice calm. "Show me the move three turns back where I doomed myself."
Sona, who had only ever respected intellect equal or superior to her own, looked at him with new eyes.
There was a grit to his patience she hadn't expected. A dignity in his acceptance of defeat. It wasn't about winning the game for him anymore; it was about learning the rules so thoroughly he could one day change them.
Moreover, they were soulmates.
In the eyes of a soulmate, flaws aren't just forgiven—they're reframed. His stubbornness became perseverance. His strategic blindness became a blank canvas waiting for her guidance. What others saw as a slow mind, she was starting to see as a deliberate, thorough one, unwilling to jump to conclusions.
Sona was no exception to this rule. With every game he lost with quiet focus, with every question he asked instead of throwing a tantrum, she felt a flicker of something warmer than respect. She admired his grit. She admired the sheer, unglamorous patience of a man rebuilding himself from the ground up, piece by piece, even if that piece was just a captured pawn.
He leaned back, a faint, unburdened smirk on his lips—a far cry from his old, arrogant grin.
"Again," he said, resetting the pieces. "And this time, I'm taking your bishop before you even see it coming."
After a moment, he added, his tone dropping to something quieter, more serious, "Just like I'll settle my debt with a certain Lucifer. After I pay everything else back first."
"Before that, Riser-kun," Sona began, her tone shifting into something solemn and serious.
She set down her teacup, the delicate clink emphasizing the weight of her words. "What will you do after this? You've been hiding here in the Student Council room, but it's only a temporary respite. Once Sirzechs manages to put out the worst of the political fires in the Underworld, he will eventually turn his full attention back to finding you. And when he does… your fate will not be good."
Her concern was deep and personal. He was her soulmate. She believed, completely and utterly, his account of being wronged.
The damning public testimony from Sirzechs's own mother had only solidified the truth: Riser had been systematically framed, bullied, and crushed under the Satan's heel for years.
In the eyes of Sona—and in the eyes of a growing number of devils in the Underworld—Riser Phenex was no longer the scumbag playboy of popular gossip.
He had been reframed as a young genius, a promising scion of a Great Clan, who had lived under the oppressive tyranny of a Satan pathologically jealous of his engagement to a younger sister.
The narrative had twisted into something darker and more sensational: most of the Underworld now whispered that the Satan's fixation on his sister went far beyond normal familial affection, veering into something improper and predatory.
Sona herself had raised a skeptical eyebrow at the rumors. She considered the possibilities. Was Sirzechs merely an overprotective brother, or was there a more disturbing intention beneath his vicious campaign against Riser?
Given her now inherent bias in favor of her soulmate, her mind inevitably leaned toward the latter conclusion. It seemed the more plausible explanation for such extreme, hate-fueled sabotage.
This belief had compelled her to act. She had done her best to subtly warn Rias, her best friend, to maintain a cautious distance from her older brother. 'He is more dangerous to you than your own fiancé ever was,' she had implied.
Truth be told, Rias had already been wrestling with the same terrifying possibility. The sheer volume of coincidences surrounding her life had become impossible to ignore.
Rias was not a genius, but she was far from a retard. She had begun to connect the dots. How was it that she had encountered every single member of her peerage under such perfectly convenient, tragic, or opportune circumstances, often right after spending time with her brother?
A trip to the Vatican with Sirzechs, and she just happened to find a grievously wounded, church-hating Kiba, desperate for revenge and allegiance?
Then Akeno, and all the others—each story a piece of luck that defied probability.
On the surface, one could argue it was merely the act of a loving, protective older brother curating a perfect, powerful peerage for his cherished sister.
But Sirzechs's exaggerated, venomous hatred for Riser—the way he had painted him as a monstrous rapist and actively sabotaged the engagement with relentless cruelty—stretched far beyond the bounds of normal protection.
It felt obsessive. It felt sick. And it had finally succeeded in making Rias feel something she'd never felt toward her brother and Riser before: genuine fear, and a crushing wave of guilt.
Riser was targeted because of her, she realized with dawning horror.
And I was so dumb, so willing to believe my brother's every word, that I never defended him. I sat at that table and watched him be humiliated, over and over again, and said nothing.
She had confessed all of this to Sona in a tearful, shaken rush, her voice thick with self-loathing and confusion.
Sona, in turn, had not offered empty comfort. Instead, she had carefully, methodically, presented the other side of the story. She spoke of Riser's actual, documented feats—his resilience, his burgeoning patience, his willingness to learn from defeat, the quiet dignity he showed now despite everything.
She painted a picture of the young man he was becoming, not the caricature Sirzechs had crafted.
This conversation had led Rias to her current state: isolated in Kuoh, afraid to return to the Underworld, guilt-ridden over her complicity, and seeing both her brother and her former fiancé in a terrifying, new light.
Without Sona's quiet but persistent influence, Rias would undoubtedly still be drowning in her inherited prejudice against Riser, seeing him only through the warped lens her brother had provided.
But Sona's careful words, her logical deconstruction of events, and her deliberate sharing of Riser's positive qualities had acted like a pry bar, forcing Rias's eyes open wide.
The result was a horrifying clarity—a stark view of her own naivety and a crushing sense of guilt for her passive role in his torment.
Riser had sought out Sona and taken refuge in her domain not merely because of their soulmate connection, though that was the foundational pull. She was also a fellow member of the Dimensional Guild.
Before he ever swung his fist at Sirzechs, Riser had sent her a private message through the guild's system, calling in a favor and a privilege: the ability for one guild member to teleport instantly to another's registered location.
That was his escape plan, activated the moment his punch landed. He vanished from the Gremory estate and materialized directly in the safety of her Student Council room.
That was the quiet, pre-arranged spark before the political inferno engulfed the Underworld.
His time here wasn't just about hiding. It was a period of intense preparation. He trained, he played chess to sharpen his sluggish strategic mind, and he used Sona's extensive networks to gather intelligence on Kuoh Town, scouting for any advantage, any source of power he could use for his own empowerment.
During his surveillance, he had spotted them: Fallen Angels, skulking around the abandoned church. More importantly, he had identified the tools they carried—devices specifically designed to extract and steal Sacred Gears from their human hosts. A dangerous power, but power nonetheless.
Maybe I could use this, he thought, a plan beginning to form. He laid it out for Sona, his voice low and intent.
Sona listened, then let out a soft, bitter sigh of lament. "You're too late, Riser. Sirzechs… in the past, he was already several steps ahead on this path. He has already located and secured two of the most potentially powerful Sacred Gear users in this place. Both are male. Their names are Saji Genshirou and Issei Hyoudou. As we speak, Sirzechs possesses the Boosted Gear and the Vritra Sacred Gear. I am not certain if there are any other viable, unclaimed Gear users left in this town. Even those lowly Fallen Angels you've spotted are scouring the area and finding nothing but dregs."
She adjusted her glasses, her gaze analytical and grim. "Perhaps your path to power lies in another world entirely, accessed through the Guild. But convincing senior members to grant you visitation rights to a high-tier world… I'm afraid that would be exceptionally difficult."
Riser's hand clenched into a tight fist, his knuckles turning white.
A storm of frustration and burning question erupted from him.
"How," he demanded, his voice strained with the need to understand the depth of his enemy's reach, "how did Sirzechs find them first?"
Sona's eyes narrowed behind her glasses, a flicker of cold, analytical suspicion in their depths.
"I'm not certain of the details," she admitted, her voice low. "But my sister Serafall has often mentioned… a prophet behind him. Someone who fundamentally changed him as an individual. She complains constantly that the Sirzechs she once knew—the one who was kind, even lovely—is gone. The man he became after he started boasting about this prophet and his future predictions is cruel, paranoid, and utterly out of character."
She paused, choosing her next words carefully, as if laying out evidence. "His justification for eliminating those two humans—Saji and Issei—was that the prophet foretold they would become mortal enemies of the Devil race and a direct, existential threat to both Rias… and to me. That prophecy became his unshakeable rationale. It's why my sister, despite her own reservations, ultimately supported his decision to have them killed within our territory. An action of that magnitude, on Earth, cannot be hidden from the other Satans. The prophecy provided the necessary political cover."
"So, it's this Chinese Prophet again," Riser hissed, the word dripping with pure, undiluted hate.
This was the hidden root, the invisible hand that had orchestrated his suffering. In his mind, those two humans were most likely innocent—pawns framed by a manipulative China with a larger agenda.
The logic was brutally simple: those Sacred Gears, in the hands of humans, represented future power. They would have either been recruited into the peerages of Sona or Rias, or they would have been killed by the Fallen Angels hunting such treasures.
There was no middle outcome.
The Prophet's intention, therefore, was glaringly obvious: to seize both Sacred Gears for himself, using Sirzechs as his unwitting executioner and thief.
The realization offended Riser on a profound level. It wasn't just personal vengeance anymore; it was a struggle over resources. He wanted those Sacred Gears. He needed that power. And this China Prophet was aggressively strip-mining his world, stealing what Riser saw as his rightful fortune, his means to rise and fight back.
He wished, with a burning intensity, for this faceless manipulator to die a painful death.
Shaking off the violent thought, he turned his attention back to Sona.
His expression was one of grim determination. "I will convince them. Just tell me, Sona. Which members of the Dimensional Guild hold the most potential for my goals? And introduce me to the common sense of their worlds. I need to know what I'm walking into."
"If you are truly set on this path…" Sona relented with a slow nod.
She then began to methodically outline what she knew of the Guild's more reclusive members—their observed personalities, the rumored nature of their worlds, the potential risks and rewards. She detailed the unspoken rules, the cultural pitfalls, the types of power that might be accessible.
With her briefing, the nebulous list of names solidified into a strategic shortlist in Riser's mind.
He now knew which members were worth approaching, which doors might lead to the arsenal he desperately needed.
So, he made his choice.
He would reach out to…