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(Sona Sitri's Point of View)
The VIP broadcast room of the Underworld was sunk in a pandemonium of outraged murmurs, spilled wine glasses, and fallen monocles.
Sona Sitri, seated in one of the velvet chairs in the front row beside her Queen, Tsubaki, kept her hands elegantly crossed over her lap. Her face was a perfect mask of ice, worthy of the heiress of one of the most calculating families in the Underworld.
But inside, the Student Council President was on the verge of suffering a stress-induced aneurysm.
Everything had begun a little over an hour ago, when the Rating Game's magical system announced the lineups. Sona had been certain that her two-meter-tall headache had decided to stay on the sidelines, hidden in Saturn selling noodles. However, when the system's voice echoed throughout the room: "Special Guest Pawn of House Sitri: Yugo Hano!" Sona's heart stopped.
The pure-blooded nobles around her had erupted into questions. What was a Pawn of House Sitri doing interfering in an official duel? Was Sona declaring political war against House Phenex?
Sona had not answered. She had simply adjusted her glasses, pretending everything was part of an inscrutable master plan.
"Damn slippery human," Sona had thought at that moment, putting the pieces together in her head at lightspeed. "That's why Rias was so calm. That's why Hano-sensei fled through the window that night. The 'favor' he owed Rias wasn't political... it was his own brute force on the board. And somehow, he tricked or provoked Riser into allowing it legally."
During the first phase of the game, Sona had watched the screens with her brow slightly furrowed. Rias's peerage was massacring Riser's pieces. They moved with an efficiency, brutality, and tactical anticipation they had not possessed barely ten days ago. Kiba did not run in a straight line; Koneko broke defenses by striking tension points...
"That is XLR8 and Diamondhead's style," Sona analyzed, feeling a chill of pure respect. "He trained them. He subjected them to the same hell as us."
But the true torture for Sona's analytical mind was that the camera could not focus on Yugo. The man simply did not appear on the map. Sona had scrutinized every pixel of the projection. And then, she noticed Akeno Himejima. The Priestess of Thunder moved strangely, avoiding attacks that could damage her chest and smiling with a smugness Sona recognized immediately.
Grey Matter.
Under the table, the Sitri heiress had snapped a pencil out of pure territorial indignation. "First I find him in bed with Rias, and now he hides in Akeno's cleavage to smuggle himself in? When he gets back to Kuoh, I'm going to freeze him in a block of ice for a month," she promised herself, fighting against an annoying heat in her cheeks.
And then... the Yubelluna disaster happened.
The Bomb Queen had used the Phoenix Tear and detonated the ground at Akeno's feet. Sona had leaned forward, tense. If Akeno fell, the game was lost.
The Priestess's clothing tore on the broadcast. And from the shadows of that torn fabric, radioactive emerald light—that light Sona both feared and admired so much—illuminated the giant screen of the Underworld.
The five-meter Vaxasaurian materialized.
The nobles in the VIP room went silent.
"What kind of familiar is that?!" a Lord had shouted, standing up.
"That isn't a familiar! That is Sitri's Pawn! Look at his energy!" another had replied.
Sona had smiled. A tiny, sharp smile full of dark pride.
On the screen, the Jurassic colossus did not use magic. He did not use spells. He simply raised a fist the size of a boulder and, with the irritation of someone who had just been awakened, crushed the immortal Queen against the earth's crust, erasing her from the game with a single kinetic impact.
The entire Underworld had swallowed in unison. A low-class devil... had just humiliated House Phenex's strongest piece using pure physical strength.
Tsubaki had leaned toward her mistress, whispering:
"Kaichou... our Pawn is an absolute monster."
"I know, Tsubaki," Sona had replied, her eyes shining. "And he is our monster."
Now, in the present, Sona watched the main screen.
Riser Phenex was alone on the athletic field. The board was clean. The magical camera focused on the old Occult Research Club building, from which a spike of energy so absurd emanated that the broadcast system displayed reading errors.
"What is he doing now?" a noble behind Sona murmured, sweating cold. "Why are the Gremory pieces flying into the night sky?"
Sona leaned slightly forward, resting her chin on her intertwined hands. She knew that massive energy signature. She knew that green light beginning to seep through the cracks in the building.
"I suggest you hold on to your seats, Lords of the Underworld," Sona said aloud, her tone overflowing with icy authority. "Because the true game has just begun."
On the immense magical screen, the wooden building detonated.
It was not a magical explosion; it was an expansion of physical mass so overwhelming that the camera system shook violently, distorting the image.
From among the flying debris, the figure rose.
And kept rising.
And rising.
Sona Sitri opened her eyes behind her glasses, her composure finally cracking before pure and absolute astonishment.
The Humungousaur who had crushed Yubelluna had been five meters tall. Terrifying, yes. But the creature that had just emerged from the ruins of the Gremory base darkened the moon itself. It was an eighteen-meter-tall titan, a mountain of armored scales and primordial power.
The silence in the VIP room was so deep that one could hear the tinkling of the demonic ladies' earrings trembling with fear.
Sona watched, her heart pounding wildly in her chest, as the colossal beast opened his gigantic palms for Akeno and Asia to land, while Rias Gremory settled atop the crown of scales on his head.
It was an image taken from the oldest nightmares of mythology. An armored god of destruction, serving as a living throne for the Princess of Ruin.
Lord Phenex, Riser's father, who was seated a couple of rows ahead, rose from his seat, pale as a corpse.
"T-That aberration...! Sirzechs! This must be a violation of the rules! That thing is going to kill my son!"
Sona rose from her seat, her voice cutting through the nobles' panic like an ice whip.
"I suggest you remain silent, Lord Phenex," Sona dictated, adjusting her glasses with a finger trembling from pure adrenaline and territorial pride. "Your son accepted the conditions of integrating my Pawn into the game. Riser wanted to prove that his family's flames were invincible."
Sona shifted her gaze toward the screen, where the eighteen-meter titan turned his monstrous face toward the tiny and pathetic figure of orange fire on the athletic track.
"Now... let us see if the Phoenix can survive the end of the world."
...
The sound of the footsteps was not a simple echo; it was a seismic event.
Every time the eighteen-meter-tall Vaxasaurian planted one of his colossal scaly feet on the ground of the dimensional academy, the earth cracked, the remaining trees bent, and the magical barriers delimiting the battlefield flickered under the kinetic stress.
On the athletic track, Issei Hyoudou and Kiba Yuuto, covered in scrapes and sweat after sweeping through the Phenex vanguard, had to plant their feet into the ground to keep their balance. Both looked up, eyes wide. They had seen Yugo transform into giants before, but this scale surpassed any nightmare they had faced in training.
The armored colossus stopped about thirty meters from them. With a slowness and absolute control that contrasted with his destructive appearance, Humungousaur lowered his two immense palms until they touched the destroyed grass of the track.
Akeno Himejima descended elegantly from the right hand, adjusting the dress shirt that looked enormous on her, wearing a radiant smile. Asia Argento climbed down from the left hand with a small jump, her face lit up by adrenaline.
"Good job cleaning up the trash, Hyoudou, Kiba," Humungousaur's voice rumbled. The sound was so deep and low that Issei felt his molars vibrate. "Rest. The peerage's work is over."
"S-Sensei...!" Issei swallowed, looking up toward the top of the beast. "You're huge!"
Humungousaur did not bother shrinking or transforming. After leaving the Priestess and the Bishop safe with the rest of the team, the titan stood upright again at his full height.
Up there, crowning the flat and armored head of the alien monster, Rias Gremory stood firm. The night wind made her long crimson hair wave like a war banner. She was no longer the frightened girl who cried in the shower, nor the desperate aristocrat willing to sell her dignity. On the head of that god of destruction, Rias looked exactly like what she had been born to be: the true Princess of Ruin.
With heavy, calculated steps, Humungousaur resumed his march, passing beside Issei and Kiba, and heading directly toward the center of the field.
There waited Riser Phenex.
The third son of House Phenex was completely alone. His fifteen pieces had been swept from the board. His immortal orange flames burned around his body in a desperate attempt to project authority, but the fire looked pathetic and tiny before the immense shadow that had just devoured the moonlight.
Humungousaur stopped right in front of him.
The difference in proportions was a direct insult to the pride of the high-class devil. Riser, who had always looked down on others, now had to bend his neck backward until the nape nearly hurt just to look into the creature's bloodshot eyes... and at his own fiancée, who looked down at him from above with icy disdain.
The Vaxasaurian colossus snorted through his nostrils. The hot, thick air swept away Riser's superficial flames, forcing the noble to cover his face with one arm so he would not be blown away.
"The stage is yours, President," Humungousaur murmured, his cavernous voice resonating throughout the Underworld through the broadcast systems. "Give the bird your speech."
Before Riser could shout some curse about the insolence of using a monster as a podium, the immense dinosaur slightly turned his heavy head to glance sideways at Issei, Kiba, Akeno, and Asia, who were watching the scene from a distance.
"And as for you four..." Yugo warned, and this time his tone had not even a trace of kindness or gallantry. It was the pure, hard, clinical order of a war veteran about to unleash an apocalypse. "Fall back. Run to the edge of this field's barrier and activate every defense you have left."
Issei blinked, feeling a warning chill through Ddraig's gauntlet. "Sensei? Why?"
The titan's sharp green eyes shone in the darkness with a lethal, thermal promise.
"Because as soon as Rias finishes speaking, I'm going to smash this damn watch... and this place is going to burn."