The sound of rain pounding against the mansion's immense windows was the only requiem for the fallen.
In the center of the luxurious office, on a Persian rug soaked in a thick, dark puddle, lay the body of a middle-aged man. His face, frozen in a mask of utter terror, stared lifelessly at the ceiling. He was an important, wealthy, and respected man. He was the husband of the current headmistress of the prestigious Kuoh Academy.
And above him, standing erect like a statue sculpted from ice, was his assassin.
The young man, now twenty-seven, stared at him with a look so dead and empty it seemed as if he had been robbed of his soul. His hands were covered in blood, a bright red that contrasted horrifyingly with the pallor of his skin. Slowly, he raised his right hand, where he held the metal hilt stolen six years before. With a dull whir, the blade of pure light that had pierced the man's heart withdrew and vanished, plunging the room back into darkness.
The young man didn't blink. He didn't gasp. His heart rate remained at sixty beats per minute, the calm of someone who had just drunk a glass of water or read the newspaper.
She began walking through the corridors of the immense house. Her steps were silent, a technique perfected after years of tearing and rebuilding her own muscles and tendons. As she left the office, she passed the body of a private security guard, his neck broken at an unnatural angle. A few feet away, in the kitchen, lay one of the maids; an innocent young woman who had simply had the misfortune of being on the night shift.
The young man paused for a moment in front of the woman's body. His empty eyes scanned the
victim's face, bathed in dried tears.
"They don't even exist," he murmured coldly in the solitude of the mansion. His voice was harsh, devoid of any human nuance. "They're just drawings on paper... Traces of ink in a rotten story. Why are you looking at me like that while I die?"
It was a lie, of course. A lie his disturbed mind needed to repeat a thousand times a day to avoid sinking into an abyss of utter madness. Six years had passed since he killed Mateo, the young exorcist. Six years of descent into hell. During that time, he had become a wandering specter, hunting and murdering both criminal scum (rapists, yakuza, assassins) and completely innocent people who crossed his path.
He didn't do it out of sadism. He didn't derive pleasure from killing; in fact, he felt a crushing apathy. He did it for a terrifyingly logical purpose: to extinguish his murderous intent.
In the supernatural world, sakki (the intent to kill), or bloodlust, is like a blinding beacon. High-class demons, like Rias Gremory, could sense an approaching assassin from miles away simply by the instinct and malice they exuded. If the young man wanted to behead the Gremory clan princess, he couldn't hate her in the moment of the blow. He couldn't feel anger, vengeance, or adrenaline. He had to kill her with the same indifference with which a gardener prunes a withered rose.
And to achieve that state of absolute emptiness, killing a human being had to become as mundane, routine, and boring as breathing. He had spilled rivers of blood, both of the righteous and the sinners, just to train his mind. And now, standing in that massacred mansion, he had succeeded. He was the perfect predator. A walking void.
He approached a mirror in the hallway and gazed at his reflection. His eyes, framed by understated glasses that gave him an intellectual air, showed no remorse. His posture, stiff from the permanent damage to his joints after countless thousands of repetitions of Battojutsu, made him look elegant and dignified.
Beneath his shirt, the black lens still hung on his chest, cold and silent, devouring any trace of aura or anomaly that might betray him to the supernatural world.
The young man who wept for his mother, who fed a girl named Akeno strawberry candies, and who sent letters to an unreachable universe, was dead for good. The name his mother had lovingly given him at birth no longer existed; it had been erased, buried beneath nameless tombstones.
He adjusted his bloodstained glasses. "From today on... my name is Yugo Hano."
...
Yugo's plan was a meticulously crafted mechanism he had been orchestrating for years. Murdering the Kuoh Academy headmistress's husband was no random act; it was a precise operation on the chessboard of fate.
He made it appear as if the massacre had been the work of a street demon or an extremely violent assault, smashing doors and leaving fake marks. The headmistress, who was away on a business trip, returned to find her life reduced to ashes. She was widowed, devastated, and plunged into a deep depression. And it was precisely in this abyss of grief that Yugo Hano made his appearance.
Weeks after the funeral, Yugo showed up at the Academy. With his impeccably forged documents, purchased with money stolen years before, his profile was that of an elite educator: an orphan, hardworking, brilliant, with infinite patience. He approached the headmistress not just as a job applicant, but as an emotional pillar. He used his dead empathy to feign understanding; He knew exactly what words to say, how to look at her with calculated pity, how to offer to shoulder the administrative burden so she could mourn her husband.
The headmistress, blinded by grief and the desperation to find support, fell into the trap. She saw in this twenty-seven-year-old a savior, an angel fallen from heaven to help her keep the prestigious school afloat. In less than three months, Yugo Hano was officially hired as a history and literature teacher at Kuoh Academy.
The first day Yugo crossed the academy's grand wrought-iron gates, the wind swirled around him. He took in the majestic brick buildings, the perfectly manicured gardens, and the central fountain. It was still an all-girls academy; the co-educational system had not yet been implemented. Hundreds of girls in elegant school uniforms strolled through the halls, oblivious to the beast who had just entered their sanctuary.
Yugo walked toward the teachers' lounge. His internal radar, honed by paranoia and training, scanned the surroundings. He sensed nothing out of the ordinary. The Occult Research Club building, the old wooden structure in the woods behind the school, was empty and locked.
"They're not here yet," he thought, as he signed his entry log in impeccable handwriting. "Neither the Gremorys nor the Sitris. I have this territory all to myself."
The consolidation phase then began. Yugo knew that when the demons arrived and made the school their base of operations, Sona Sitri (or Souna Shitori) would scrutinize every member of the teaching staff. If he was a nobody with no connections, or someone solitary and suspicious, Sona would keep a close eye on him. Therefore, he needed to build an invulnerable social shield: the absolute devotion of the students and staff.
Yugo constructed his master facade: the "Tsundere Professor."
In his classes, he was the embodiment of rigor and coldness. His monotonous baritone voice demanded absolute discipline. If a girl arrived late, he'd slam the door in her face; if they weren't paying attention, he'd academically humiliate them with impossible questions. His empty eyes, which the teenage girls interpreted as "mysterious and mature," kept everyone in line. He earned a reputation as the most feared, strict, and unattainable teacher at Kuoh.
But that was only half the story.
The real trap was the "exceptions."
One rainy afternoon, a first-year student missed her train and stood crying at the academy gate, without an umbrella and terrified. Yugo walked past, looked at her with his usual disdain, and without a word, threw his own designer umbrella at her, walking away into the rain to get soaked himself.
Another week, he intercepted a group of older girls who were bullying a scholarship student in the back courtyard. Yugo didn't shout or raise his voice. He simply stood behind the bullies, releasing only a microscopic fraction of the immense, dark pressure he carried in his soul. The girls, feeling an inexplicable, primal terror, fled in panic. Yugo picked up the books from the weeping girl, handed them back roughly, and said coldly, "If you let them walk all over you again, I'll suspend you. Get up."
Those isolated, meticulously calculated actions ignited a firestorm at the academy. The students began to romanticize him. "Hano-sensei is terrifying, but he's actually very kind," they murmured in the hallways. "He's only strict because he cares about our future," others said. His fellow teachers saw him as a wounded young man in need of companionship, and the headmistress considered him her adopted son and right-hand man.
By the end of his first year as a teacher, Yugo Hano was untouchable. He was the heart and soul of Kuoh Academy. The female students secretly adored him, the teachers deeply respected him, and the board considered him indispensable.
And while all this was happening, while he received anonymous letters of admiration in his locker, chocolates on Valentine's Day, and respectful bows in the hallways, Yugo sat at his desk, staring into space, feeling immense disgust and boredom.
"Pathetic," he thought, as he threw away the handmade chocolates a student had spent hours making. "They're just lines of code in a sick world. Puppets dancing on a paper stage. They adore me and have no idea that my hands are stained with the blood of dozens of people just like them."
That night, when the academy was deserted, Yugo walked toward the abandoned building of the Occult Research Club. He stood before the wooden structure, dry leaves crunching beneath his shoes. He slipped his hand under his shirt and caressed the black crystal that throbbed against his chest, the same cold stone that rendered him invisible to the gods. Then, his hand slid down to the inside of his jacket, stroking the cold, cylindrical hilt of his light sword.
He gazed up at the starry sky of Kuoh, a sky that would one day be stained crimson with the blood of demons.
Only a few years remained. Soon, the board of directors would announce the academy's transition to a co-ed system. Soon, a brown-haired idiot named Issei Hyoudou would set foot on these grounds. Soon, the Princess of Ruin and the Sitri heiress would claim this school as their territory, believing themselves to be the absolute owners of everything they saw.
And they would suspect nothing. They would see Yugo Hano, the strict, cold teacher, yet deeply loved by all. They would scan him with their magic and see only an ordinary human, devoid of any magical energy or murderous intent. They would smile at him, bow to him, call him "Sensei." They would let him into their personal spaces, turn their backs on him without a second thought.
Yugo Hano smiled in the darkness of the forest. It wasn't a smile of joy, but a macabre grimace, a crack in his human mask that revealed the true demon dwelling within.
The stage was set. The trap was laid. Now, he only had to sit and wait patiently for his prey, those foolish "protagonists" who had stolen his reality, to walk into the slaughterhouse on their own.
...
Spring in Japan always brought with it an atmosphere of cloying rebirth. The petals of the cherry blossoms fell like pink snow on the immaculate courtyards of Kuoh Academy, carried by a warm breeze that seemed to promise new beginnings and bright futures. For the hundreds of young students who crossed the wrought-iron gates that day, the world was a blank canvas brimming with hope.
For Yugo Hano, standing at the main entrance in an impeccable dark suit, an attendance list in hand, the world was nothing more than a slaughterhouse decorated with flowers.
Another year had passed. Seven winters since the universe had vomited him into this hell. Seven years of mental erosion, of blood spilled in the shadows, of broken bones, and of training so inhumane it had turned his own body into a single-use weapon.
"Good morning, Hano-sensei!" a group of second-year students greeted him, bowing enthusiastically, their cheeks slightly flushed.
"Good morning, young ladies. Be sure to check the bulletin boards for your new classrooms. I will not tolerate any tardiness on the first day," Yugo replied. His voice was the epitome of professional perfection: strict, deep, yet tinged with that faintest hint of manufactured warmth that drove the students wild.
As the girls walked away laughing and whispering about how "incredibly stoic" the professor looked, Yugo maintained his rigid posture. His eyes, two black abysses devoid of any spark of life, scanned the throng of first-year students entering the building.
And then, he saw her.
He didn't need to turn his head. He didn't need to look directly. In a sea of black, brown, and dyed-blonde hair, the color was a visual aberration impossible to ignore. An absolute crimson red, brilliant and unnatural, rippling gently in the morning sunlight.
Rias Gremory had crossed the threshold.
Yugo's heart didn't race. His breath didn't catch in his throat. The opaque black crystal resting against his chest, hidden beneath his white shirt and tie, absorbed any minute fluctuation in his aura before it could even arise. His mind, trained in the art of sociopathic apathy, registered the presence of the demonic heiress with the same indifference one might use to note a typo in an old book.
Rias walked with aristocratic grace, surrounded by an aura of superiority that the humans around her unconsciously sensed, stepping aside to let her pass. Beside her, like a silent and elegant guard dog, walked another figure whose hollow echo resonated deep within Yugo's broken psyche.
Akeno Himejima.
Yugo watched them out of the corner of his eye as he signed the entry pass of a distracted student. "The end of this world has just enrolled," he thought coldly. The countdown had begun. The spark that would ignite the factional civil war and the annihilation of supernatural beings was now walking the very halls he patrolled.
However, the hunter's instinct and patience dictated his next move: absolute inaction.
Yugo knew perfectly well how territorial demons operated. Upon arriving in a new area, the Gremory House and the Sitri House—which was also infiltrating the Student Council through Souna—would be on high alert. Their magical familiars, bats, and small, invisible demons would be scrutinizing every inch of Kuoh Academy in search of heretics, priests, fallen angels, or street magicians. If Yugo showed the slightest interest in the old school building they would soon claim, or if his gaze met Rias's with even a hint of hostility, they would discover him.
Therefore, Yugo decided that, for the entire school year, he would do absolutely nothing. He would become the most boring and perfect piece of furniture on the set.
The months dragged on agonizingly, but Yugo's camouflage plan worked with terrifying precision. While Rias Gremory founded the Occult Research Club and Souna Sitri took the reins of the Student Council, Yugo devoted himself entirely to his role as an exemplary teacher.
He delivered his history classes with brilliant eloquence. He reprimanded students who fell asleep, stayed late in the teachers' lounge grading exams, and continued his charade of being a "good Samaritan in disguise." The students' devotion to Hano-sensei grew into a psychic barrier. When Rias or Akeno's demonic energies swept through the school to detect threats, they only sensed the pure love, admiration, and respect that hundreds of humans projected toward Yugo. It was an armor made of artificial light that completely blinded the radars of the underworld.
He never went near the old building. He never sought out Rias. If he saw her in the hallways, he'd greet her with the same distant politeness he'd give any other student, making her feel pathetically mundane.
The true challenge to his cognitive dissonance, however, came in late autumn, during preparations for the cultural festival.
The teachers' lounge was nearly empty. The sun was setting, painting the sky that same sickly orange hue Yugo detested. He was sitting at his desk, stamping some forms, when the door slid open.
"Excuse me..." A soft, lilting voice, laced with a lethal dose of poisonous sweetness, echoed in the room.
Yugo looked up from his papers. Akeno Himejima was standing in front of his desk. She wore the academy uniform perfectly, her dark hair tied back in her signature ponytail with an orange ribbon. Her face, beautiful and mature for her age, wore a polite smile that masked her sadistic nature. She carried a stack of documents from the Occult Research Club that required the signature of the teacher on duty.
"Himejima-san," Yugo said, his tone flat but polite. "What brings you here at this hour? The curfew for clubs is approaching."
"I'm so sorry, Hano-sensei," she replied, approaching silently and placing the papers on the desk. "President Gremory asked me to submit the permits for the use of the sound equipment during the festival. We know it's late, but we were hoping you could get them stamped."
Yugo took the papers. As he reviewed them, he felt Akeno's gaze on him. She was analyzing him. Demons always analyzed notable humans.
For a split second, Yugo's photographic memory superimposed an image on the teenager before him: a skeletal girl, soaked by the rain, covered in mud and blood, trembling with terror in the back room of a convenience store, clutching a strawberry candy wrapper in shaking hands.
Akeno. The girl to whom he had given his own clothes. The girl to whom he had told stories in Spanish to ward off the monsters of the storms. The only spark of light in the darkest months of his miserable survival.
Yugo looked up, and his eyes met hers.
Akeno blinked. A strange sensation ran down her spine, a fleeting shiver, like a feather of ice brushing against the back of her neck. For a moment, the cadence of the professor's voice, the breadth of his shoulders, something in his body language made a buried, fragmented memory from her painful childhood threaten to surface. The foreigner from the convenience store. The loud man with disheveled hair and desperate, warm eyes who shouted in an incomprehensible language to save her life.
But as Akeno searched Hano-sensei's eyes, the connection broke before it could even form.
There was nothing there.
The eyes staring at her weren't warm, or erratic, or human. They were two pieces of dead obsidian. Yugo's gaze was so eerily empty that, instead of nostalgia, Akeno felt a slight unease, a prey instinct warning her of a predator she couldn't see. Moreover, logic crushed instinct: the man who had saved her was a destitute vagrant who barely spoke a few words of Japanese. The man before her was a refined, immaculate academic with impeccable calligraphy and perfect native Japanese. They were two incompatible universes.
The compassionate boy who had sheltered her from the rain was dead. And the fractured-minded killer inhabiting his corpse had made sure not to show a single crack.
"Everything seems to be in order, Himejima-san," Yugo said, breaking the silence. He stamped his personal seal on the last page with a mechanical movement and handed the documents back to her. "Tell Gremory-san to be careful with the auditorium wiring. It's old."
Akeno took the papers, blinking to dispel the strange confusion from her mind. Her charming smile returned to her face immediately.
"Thank you very much, Sensei. Fufufu, I'll tell the President to be very careful. Have a wonderful evening."
Akeno bowed perfectly and left the teachers' lounge, closing the sliding door behind her. She never looked back. She never knew she had just said goodnight to the man who, years before, had wept for his family while clutching a child's drawing she had made for him.
Alone in the room, Yugo dropped the seal onto the table. His right hand, hidden beneath his suit sleeve and covered in deformed internal scars, trembled microscopically.
He stared at the door through which the girl had left. His expression remained unchanged, as if carved in stone, but in the silence of his own madness, a voice whispered from the abyss of his mind.
"You're not real either... Just a piece of ink," Yugo thought, and an absolute coldness froze the last millimeter of his soul.
The first year had passed. Trust had been gained. The trap was set. The fictional world continued its ignorant course, dancing merrily on the grave of the young man they had destroyed, unaware that the corpse already had its finger on the trigger.
...
Time, that silent and relentless executioner, continued its inexorable course.
Winter gave way to a new spring, and with it came the official announcement that shook the foundations of the institution: starting next school year, Kuoh Academy would no longer be exclusively for girls and would open its doors to male students.
For the female students, it was scandalous and exciting news. For Yugo Hano, it was the final bell. Exactly one year remained until the start of the canon. One year until Issei Hyoudou entered the academy, met Raynare, and the gears of destiny began to turn.
Yugo knew he could postpone it no longer. He had to find a gap, a perfect opportunity to isolate Rias Gremory and strike the final blow before the Red Dragon Emperor joined their ranks and reinforced their "plot armor." However, as the months passed and he watched the demons from the shadows, something inside him began to unravel. His cold, mathematical plan was stalling, and the reason was a monumental miscalculation he himself had made.
Yugo had believed his mind was completely dead. He had killed, he had physically tortured himself, and he had brainwashed himself by repeating that the people in this world were nothing more than "drawings on paper." He had justified every good deed at the academy—saving girls from bullying, giving away his umbrella in the rain, staying late to help struggling students with their exams—as cold infiltration tactics to build his alibi as a "strict but kind teacher."
But it was a lie.
Deep within his fractured psyche, beneath layers of cosmic hatred and dried blood, the core of who he once was remained intact. He was still the protective older brother. He was still the son who worked himself to the bone to send money to his mother. His intrinsic, biological need to help the vulnerable had never died; it had simply been camouflaged under the guise of survival. Without realizing it, he hadn't been acting. He had genuinely cared for those girls.
The collision between his trauma and his true nature occurred on a day he himself had erased from his memory. When he bought his forged documents on the black market years ago, the forger had asked him for a birthdate for his new identity as Yugo Hano. On a morbid whim, a small offering to his past life, Yugo had dictated his real birthday. Then, he simply forgot it. For an empty killer, birthdays meant nothing.
It was late, mid-November. The sun had already set, and the academy was shrouded in silence. Yugo stood alone in the third-year classroom, grading exams under the harsh white light of a fluorescent lamp. His right hand, calloused from sword use, mechanically marked the papers with a red pen. His mind was plotting escape routes from the Occult Research Club.
Suddenly, the hallway went dark. A sector-wide blackout.
Yugo's killer instinct kicked in in a split second. His muscles tensed like springs, his breath caught in his throat, and his left hand slid beneath his jacket, brushing against the cold metal of his lightsaber. "Demons? Fallen angels? Have they spotted me?" he thought, calculating how many seconds it would take him to draw and decapitate anything that crossed the threshold.
The soft creak of the sliding door opened echoed through the room.
Yugo adjusted his grip, ready to unleash a kinetic inferno of light.
But what he saw wasn't the crimson magic of the Gremorys or the demonic water of the Sitris. What broke the darkness was the warm, flickering light of thirty small candles.
"Surprise!" The light illuminated the excited faces of nearly twenty students. There was the girl to whom he'd given his umbrella; there was the scholarship student he'd saved from the bullies; there were the class representatives and the students he'd helped pass history. In the center of the group, carefully holding a huge, hand-decorated chocolate cake, stood the class president, beaming from ear to ear.
"Happy birthday to you!" they began to sing in a slightly disorganized but joyful chorus. "Happy birthday, Hano-sensei!"
Yugo froze. His hand slowly released the grip of his weapon, which fell limply to his side. His eyes, usually abysses of dead indifference, opened wide, reflecting the tiny candle flames.
"Girls..." His voice, always firm and monotonous, came out as a hoarse whisper, almost inaudible. "What... what is this?"
"We know you always grade exams late, Sensei," said the girl holding the cake, approaching his desk. "We went to the administration office and saw in your records that you're turning thirty today. You never told us."
"We know you're all alone in the city, Hano-sensei," added another student, stepping forward with a small box wrapped in gift paper. "You've protected us, taught us not to give up, and always make sure we're okay, even if you grumble while you do it. We wanted to thank you for everything."
"You're the best teacher in the whole academy. We want you to be happy today!" "—exclaimed a third, and the rest of the girls nodded enthusiastically, clapping softly.
The black crystal on Yugo's chest seemed to vibrate, but this time it wasn't absorbing darkness. He was being overwhelmed by something he couldn't suppress.
Yugo looked at them one by one. Their faces flushed with emotion, their smiles genuine, the youthful awkwardness with which they had secretly arranged everything. He looked at the thirty candles burning on the cake. Thirty years. He had spent nine years in hell, convinced that everything had been stolen from him, convinced that the universe was empty and that his only mission was to burn it to the ground.
But before him there were no "drawings on paper." No NPCs or monsters. There were human girls. Girls with hopes, fears, and an unconditional love for a man who believed he had no soul.
The cognitive shock was absolute. The colossal mental dam that Yugo had built to keep his humanity at bay, forged with Mateo's blood and the pain of his broken bones, cracked. And then, it simply collapsed.
A burning sensation, painful yet infinitely warm, rose from his stomach to his throat. Oxygen seemed to return to his lungs after nine years of suffocation.
Before the astonished gaze of his students, the unyielding, terrifying, and cold Hano-sensei lowered his head. The lenses of his glasses fogged up. And then, a single tear, thick and silent, escaped from his right eye, tracing a wet path down his pale cheek before falling onto the wooden desk.
"S-Sensei? Are you alright?" asked the class president, alarmed to see Kuoh's strictest teacher shed a tear. "Did we... make you angry?"
Yugo slowly raised her face. She removed her glasses with a trembling hand and wiped her cheek. When she looked at them again, the lifeless abyss in his pupils had vanished.
"No…" he murmured, and for the first time in nearly a decade, the muscles in his face didn't form an icy grimace or a forced, polite smile.
His lips trembled, then curved upward into a genuine, awkward, warm, and deeply nostalgic smile. It was the smile of the twenty-one-year-old who used to work at the Saturn convenience store. It was the smile of an older brother.
"I'm not angry," Yugo replied, his voice cracking with boundless gratitude. "It's just… I completely forgot it was my birthday today. Thank you so much, girls. It's the best present you've ever given me."
The students let out a collective sigh of relief and smiled even wider, moving closer to place the cake on the desk and force him to blow out the candles. As they laughed and joked about how "soft" their teacher really was, Yugo's mind was rebuilding itself at breakneck speed.
The cosmic hatred that had consumed him vanished. He realized the terrible truth of his past actions: in his zeal to punish the supernatural world for taking his family from him, he had become an even worse monster. He had been on the verge of sacrificing thousands in a senseless war.
But as he ate a slice of the sweet cake, surrounded by the laughter of his students, Yugo found his true absolution. He couldn't return to his old universe. His mother and siblings were lost to him. However, fate hadn't left him empty-handed; it had given him hundreds of students around him. They had no magic. They had no Sacred Gears. If demons (like Rias or Sona) or Fallen Angels decided these girls were expendable, they would erase them from the face of the earth or alter their memories without hesitation. The supernatural world saw them as mere toys.
But he didn't.
"I will protect them," Yugo thought, and this time, his resolve was tempered steel, not brittle ice. "I no longer care about the original story. I no longer care about destroying the canon for revenge. If any damned demon, angel, or god tries to harm a single student in this academy, I will cut off their head."
...
Water poured from the showerhead, but it was freezing cold. Yugo didn't feel the chill.
He braced both hands against the white bathroom tiles and let his head fall forward. The sharp thud of his forehead against the ceramic wall echoed in the small room, barely muffled by the patter of the water.
The warmth of the birthday cake, the smiles of his students, the candlelight... all of it had been a beacon of humanity that tore through the darkness of his mind. But, tragically, that same light that restored his sanity also illuminated the abyss of his own sins. Remembering that he could feel empathy, remembering that he was still human, the weight of what he had done over the past nine years crashed down on him like a collapsing skyscraper.
Thud.
He slammed his forehead again, a little harder.
He closed his eyes, and the water trickling down his face mingled with his tears, but in his mind, the water became thick, sticky, and a deep red.
Suddenly, the echoes that the black crystal in his chest had kept at bay for years erupted in his head. He heard the screams. Not the screams of demons or monsters, but the shrieks of the innocent humans he had massacred to train his sakki, to quell his murderous intent.
He saw the headmistress's husband's face, staring at him with pure terror. He heard the young maid in that mansion choking on her own blood. He saw entire families, people whose names he never knew, begging for mercy on their knees.
"Please, don't hurt my daughter! Take everything!"
"Why...? We don't know you!"
"Oh God, help me!"
"SHUT UP!" roared Yugo, pounding his fist against the wall until his knuckles were raw.
But the screams didn't stop. They surrounded him, suffocated him. He realized, with nauseating horror, that he was no better than the Fallen Angels or the Street Demons he hated so much. To prepare himself to kill monsters, he had become the devil himself. He had tortured and murdered his fellow human beings like mere practice dummies.
He dropped to his knees under the shower. The icy water pounded his hunched back. He stared at his pale hands, imagining them stained with blood that no soap in the world could wash away. His sins were a black ocean, and he was drowning at its bottom.
He couldn't pretend to be a savior. He couldn't embrace the light of those students after having stolen the light from so many others.
Gradually, the heart-wrenching sobs subsided. The ultimate defense mechanism of his broken psyche kicked in again to prevent his brain from collapsing under the weight of guilt. His muscles relaxed. His breathing became terrifyingly slow. When he looked up at the tiles, the warm glow his students had managed to kindle in his pupils died. A completely empty, gray, soulless gaze once again ruled his eyes.
"It's done..." he murmured, his voice nothing more than an icy echo in the empty room. "There's no going back now. I'm sorry."
The following days passed in a fog of utter lethargy. Yugo returned to his routine as a strict and unapproachable teacher. He deliberately ignored the dull ache in his chest every time one of his students greeted him affectionately. He forced himself to see them again as lines of code, as collateral damage, even if it cost him every fiber of his being.
Then, fate, with its perverse sense of humor, presented him with the opportunity he had been waiting for for almost a decade.
It was dusk. The sun bathed the halls of Kuoh Academy in an orange, almost blood-red hue. Classes had ended, and most of the clubs were empty. Yugo was walking down the second-floor corridor when his keen senses detected movement.
He watched from the shadow of a column as Akeno Himejima left the third-year classroom and headed for the stairs, carrying a stack of documents toward the principal's office. Her gait was calm. There were no other members of the Gremory peerage nearby; Kiba and Koneko weren't yet part of the usual routine at this time.
Rias Gremory was alone.
It was the perfect moment. A blind spot in the narrative.
Yugo adjusted his glasses. His right hand slipped under his jacket, feeling the metal hilt of the lightsaber. His heart didn't race; it remained at an icy pulse, devoid of even the slightest murderous intent. He walked toward the half-open classroom door.
As he entered, he saw her. Rias was sitting at one of the desks near the window. The breeze stirred her crimson hair. She frowned, concentrating on a thick trigonometry book that was clearly giving her trouble. It was the same image, the exact same scene he had visualized and replayed in his nightmares.
"Gremory-san? Are you still here?" Yugo asked, adopting his impeccable professorial tone.
Rias looked up, surprised, and her beautiful blue-green eyes recognized him instantly. She cleared her throat and smiled politely.
"Hano-sensei. Yes, I stayed to finish some exercises. Human math can be quite... peculiar."
"If you're stuck, I can go over your steps," he offered, slowly approaching her desk with silent steps.
Rias suspected nothing. He was just her teacher, an ordinary human. She made some space for him and pointed to the book. Yugo stood beside her, resting a hand on the table as if reading the equations. Her other hand, hidden from the demon's view by her own body, closed tightly around the hilt of her weapon.
Her cold mind calculated the sequence with terrifying speed.
"One second. I only need one second. I draw, activate the light, and cut at a forty-five-degree angle from the base of her neck. Her head will fall onto the desk."
From that moment, the plan was set. He would take the Demon King's sister's head, wrap it, leave the city that very night, and seek out Kokabiel, the bloodthirsty leader of the Fallen Angels. He would present the head to him as a trophy. Sirzechs Lucifer's fury would be absolute. Angels and Fallen Angels would be dragged into an indiscriminate slaughter. The War of the Three Factions would resume with apocalyptic violence, breaking the divine seals and finally unleashing the beast of the end times: Trihexa.
The world that had kidnapped him, the world of arrogant magic that had stolen his family, would be reduced to ashes. The sky would darken, and the demons would burn. The perfect revenge.
He tightened his grip. His muscles tensed, ready for the kinetic blast of Battojutsu.
Just do it.
But then, his treacherous and partially reconstructed brain forced him to face the true consequences of the
war he was about to unleash.
If he unleashed Trihexa... if the world were reduced to ashes... the flames wouldn't just consume the demons. The apocalyptic fire would devour Kuoh Academy. It would devour the girl he'd given the umbrella to. It would devour the class president who'd baked the cake for him with her own hands. It would devour every student who had admired him with respect, who had trusted him, who had offered him a smile when he thought his soul had perished.
The screams of his students who were burning alive mingled with the screams of his previous victims.
Yugo's body froze. The hidden hand that held the lightsaber began to tremble violently. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead. The abyss in his eyes contrasted sharply with the paternal love he felt for his students. He understood the terrible truth: killing Rias meant destroying the universe, and destroying the universe meant killing the only good thing he had left.
"Sensei?" Rias asked, noticing that the man had been staring at the book for too long. "Is everything alright? Is there a serious error in the equation?" The young demon's voice, genuinely confused, snapped him out of his trance. Yugo blinked, took a deep breath, and felt his soul sink. He loosened his grip on the sword's hilt. His fingers spread, surrendering to the crushing weight of his own humanity.
"No…" she murmured, her voice a little hoarser than usual. She pointed to a number on the sheet of paper with a trembling finger. "You got the cosine sign wrong. Correct it, and the equation will solve itself." "Oh, you're right! How absentminded of me!" Rias laughed softly, picking up her pencil to correct it. "Thank you so much, Hano-sensei."
Yugo straightened up. He looked as if he had aged ten years in those ten seconds. His expressionless gaze fixed on the face of the girl he had sworn to kill. She smiled at him gratefully.
"You should go home, Gremory. It's getting late," she said, turning away before she could see the utter despair on his face.
"I will, sensei. See you tomorrow."
Yugo left the classroom. He walked down the corridor, hearing Rias gather her things and leave in the opposite direction, heading down the stairs towards the Club.
He had let her live. He had failed. The great architect of the end of the world, the monster who had murdered exorcists and civilians to feed his hatred, had cowered at the memory of a chocolate cake.
As he trudged toward the academy's upper terrace, the harsh reality of his existence hit him. He could no longer be the calculating monster who would destroy the world of High School DxD; his love for his students prevented it. But neither could he return to being the kind human being he had been in his previous life; the blood of dozens of innocents stained his hands beyond repair.
It was an anomaly. An aberration that belonged neither to the darkness of demons nor to the light of humans. It was a flaw in the universe's code, a ghost trapped in a limbo of constant pain and self-loathing. It didn't deserve salvation, and it no longer desired revenge.
He pushed open the heavy metal door that led to the terrace. The icy night wind of Kuoh immediately lashed at him, ruffling his hair and drying the sweat from his brow.
He walked to the edge. The city stretched out before him, a sea of blinking lights, completely oblivious to the secret war being waged in its streets. He looked down at the asphalt of the backyard, a drop of several stories that guaranteed absolute oblivion.
There was only one path left. One last chance for the killer who had recovered his heart too late.
Yugo Hano climbed the wire railing. He stood on the narrow concrete ledge, his heels dangling over the void. This time there were no tears. No panic. Only an immense and profound peace.
"Forgive me, Mom. Forgive me, girls," she thought.
With an expressionless gaze, devoid of all torment, the young man closed his eyes, leaned forward, and simply took a step in the air.
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Here's today's chapter. I hope you enjoy it, and if you find any mistakes, please leave a comment in the corresponding paragraph. See you in the next chapter. Goodbye!
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( ̳• · • ̳) ~ ♡ Thanks for reading ♡
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