Well, this is a preview of the second season of DXD: Chronicles of a Human Without Faith. As I said, I plan to put the template I have up for sale; I think it has 30 to 50 chapters. It covers from the Sacred Swords arc to the fight against Diodora. Clearly, the reason I haven't done it yet is because the AI doesn't analyze the previous season, and it's a real headache. I'm sure it would only bring me more hate and complaints, and honestly, I don't have enough self-esteem to handle that.
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The indestructible crystal mountain blew apart, falling like shining rain over the battlefield. Vali Lucifer floated at the center of the destruction, his immaculate white armor reflecting the moonlight, looking like the untouchable being he was destined to be.
But Diamondhead had not tried to crush him. While the debris fell, the Petrosapien had been moving his hands, altering the structure of the ground.
Vali looked around. He was surrounded by immense curved walls of crystal, smooth ramps, and angled pillars placed with obsessive geometric precision. It was as if the alien had built a closed half-pipe track fifty meters in diameter.
"If pure magical power can't pierce your defense, then let's try elementary physics, lizard," Diamondhead hissed. His crystal hand struck the emerald symbol on his chest.
FLASH!
The crystalline figure was replaced by a stocky creature with broad shoulders and yellow-and-white armor plates covering its body.
"CANNONBOLT!"
Without losing a millisecond, Cannonbolt threw himself to the ground and curled into himself, becoming a perfect sphere. His plates spun like the tires of a Formula 1 car, and he shot toward the nearest crystal ramp.
ZOOOOOM!
The rolling alien hit the first diamond panel and bounced toward the next. The zero friction of the crystal Diamondhead had created earlier meant Cannonbolt did not lose speed, but accumulated it. He bounced once. Twice. Five times. In three seconds, the yellow sphere was nothing but a supersonic blur bouncing through the air like a crazed pinball.
Vali narrowed his eyes. The kinetic momentum that creature was accumulating was monstrous.
[DIVIDE!] Vali tried, aiming his hand at the blur.
But Cannonbolt bounced at a blind angle just before the absorption pulse touched him, and he was launched from above, falling like a meteor.
BAAAAM!!
The armored sphere struck Vali Lucifer directly in the back. The White Emperor let out a choked cry of surprise and pain as the massive kinetic force, incalculable from the accumulated friction, sent him flying forward, crashing into one of the crystal pillars and cracking his armor for the first time that night.
"He hit him!" Issei celebrated, clenching his fists.
But the joy did not last long. Vali stopped himself in the air, his blue wings flashing with blinding fury.
"You miserable insect!" Vali roared. His eyes shone beneath the visor. He was no longer playing. The White Dragon's killing intent erupted, vaporizing Diamondhead's crystal ramps in an instant.
Cannonbolt, losing his bounce track, fell toward the ground. Vali did not let him land. Moving at a speed that broke the sound barrier, he intercepted the armored sphere in midair.
With a fist wrapped in demon magic concentrated to the absolute limit, Vali struck Cannonbolt's impenetrable shell.
CRACK!!
The sound of biological armor splintering echoed through the courtyard. The force of Vali's blow was so absurdly destructive that the shockwave pierced through Cannonbolt's plates. Inside the sphere, Yugo spat a mouthful of blood as he felt three of his alien ribs fracture.
The impact sent him crashing into the ground, creating a deep crater.
Vali dove like a hawk, preparing a spear of demonic light in his right hand to impale the wounded beast.
"You're not getting out of here alive!" the Dragon sentenced.
But before the spear touched the broken shell... Cannonbolt's hand struck the dial.
FLASH!
The spear of light pierced the space where the armored alien had been... and sank uselessly into a pool of green, viscous slime.
"GOOP!" the unicellular polymorph gurgled. Vali's fist passed cleanly through Yugo's liquid anatomy. Taking advantage of the fact that Vali had ended up buried to the elbow inside his acidic body, Goop's anti-gravity disc buzzed, wrapping the entire gelatinous mass around the White Emperor's right arm and torso.
The alien acid began to hiss, superficially melting the coating of the white armor.
"What the hell?!" Vali tried to shake off the slime, but Goop was sticky and inescapable.
Yugo did not want to burn him; he wanted to break him. While literally hugging Vali's body, the green mass struck the dial floating on the anti-gravity disc.
FLASH!
The green liquid expanded violently and solidified into three meters of pure red muscle.
"FOUR ARMS!"
The point-blank transition from liquid to solid was a death trap. Four Arms materialized his immense weight and strength while grabbing Vali in an inescapable bear hug. His four hands closed around Albion's torso, shoulders, and wings, squeezing with tectonic force.
The crack of the white armor giving way beneath the immense pressure of the Tetramand species made Vali release a choked scream.
"Tell me, lizard..." Four Arms growled inches from Vali's helmet, his four yellow eyes bloodshot with fury. "Can you breathe with your chest crushed?"
[WARNING! CRITICAL STRUCTURAL DAMAGE!] Albion's mechanical voice warned.
Vali, suffocating under the Tetramand's power, released all his magical power.
[DIVIDE! DIVIDE! DIVIDE!]
Four Arms' strength plummeted. The death grip loosened enough for Vali to move his free arm. The White Dragon, his eyes filled with rage and desperation from the pain in his ribs, channeled a blade of demonic light directly onto his forearm.
With a brutal and merciless movement, Vali drove the glowing blade deep into Four Arms' lower left side.
SQUELCH!!
The blade pierced the dense red muscles, tore through tissue, and emerged from the alien's back. Thick, dark blood gushed from the mortal wound.
"YUGO!" Sona and Rias's heartbreaking scream echoed from the edge of the battlefield when they saw the man being impaled. Asia covered her mouth, crying even harder as she watched the person protecting her dying in front of her.
Yugo, in his Four Arms form, violently coughed blood, staining Vali's immaculate white helmet. Sharp, tearing pain ran through his nervous system. It was a fatal wound that would have killed any human and incapacitated a high-class devil.
Vali smiled cruelly beneath the helmet, ready to pull out the blade and decapitate him.
"I told you... you're no match for me, human."
But Four Arms did not let him go.
Despite having a sword of light piercing his intestines, Yugo's face twisted into a grimace of pure sadistic hatred. Blood dripped from his mouth, but his four yellow eyes shone with the madness of a cornered animal.
"I don't give a shit..." Four Arms rasped.
His lower right arm, ignoring the massive damage to his side, rose to the Omnitrix symbol on his left shoulder.
FLASH!
The immense four-armed figure vanished, leaving Vali's sword cutting through empty air. In his place landed an enormous bipedal tiger with orange-and-black fur, sharp claws on his knuckles, and an expression that oozed pure, uncontrolled, absolute violence.
The wound was still there. The transformation did not instantly heal the huge bleeding hole in his left side that Vali had made, since genetic assimilation maintained the wound damage in the base body during continuous combat. Blood stained Rath's orange fur.
But the Appoplexian species did not care about pain. In fact, pain only made them more dangerous.
"LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING, WHITE EMPEROR VALI LUCIFER!" Rath roared at the top of his lungs, his thunderous voice overflowing with murderous testosterone and making the air vibrate. "RATH DOESN'T FEEL PAIN! RATH ONLY FEELS RAGE! AND RATH IS GOING TO TEACH YOU THAT NOBODY MAKES THE BLONDE GIRL CRY IN HIS TERRITORY AND LIVES TO TELL THE TALE!"
Vali blinked, bewildered by the suicidal aggression and sudden third-person speech of the new form. He tried to retreat to launch another ranged attack, but Rath was faster.
Ignoring the pool of his own blood, Rath lunged forward, grabbed Vali by the "horns" of his white helmet, jumped ten meters into the air while spinning his own body, and delivered a devastating spinning suplex.
BOOOOOOM!!
Rath slammed Vali Lucifer's head directly into the molten asphalt with such force that it created a crater the size of a baseball field, burying the White Dragon Emperor himself headfirst into the earth.
Rath landed on his knees, panting, clutching the bleeding wound in his side while releasing a roar of victory toward the night sky. The battle to the death had escalated past the point of no return. The gods might be dead, but Yugo had just proven he could still make them bleed.
The dust and debris from the crater had not yet settled when an explosion of blue light swept across the entire area.
The molten asphalt flew in every direction. From the depths of the crater, Vali Lucifer emerged like a missile, his white armor covered in dirt and cracks, his visor glowing with homicidal fury that no longer held even a trace of boredom.
"DAMN ANIMAL!" the White Dragon Emperor roared.
Vali did not use ranged magic. He closed the distance in the blink of an eye and slammed his fist, wrapped in a dense layer of annihilation power, directly into Rath's face.
The impact was devastating. The alien tiger was sent flying backward, bouncing across the concrete like a stone skipping across a lake. The wound in the Appoplexian's left side opened even more, leaving a macabre trail of blood across the asphalt.
Rath dug his claws into the ground to stop his retreat, panting, coughing blood, but with a sadistic smile and exposed fangs.
"RATH STILL ISN'T DONE WITH YOU, YOU SHINY PIECE OF TRASH!" the alien shouted, trying to stand.
Vali raised both hands, his wings humming at maximum capacity.
[DIVIDE! DIVIDE! DIVIDE!]
Rath's immense physical strength was abruptly drained. His knees buckled under his own weight. Vali channeled all the stolen energy into an immense sphere of destructive magic between his hands.
"The transformation game is over! Disappear!" the Dragon sentenced, firing the cannon of demonic light directly at the wounded feline.
But Yugo's mind, despite the immense physical pain and Rath's testosterone, was still calculating. Brute force did not work if Vali constantly stole it. Magic was absorbed. He needed a physical attack. Something so immensely massive, fast, and unstoppable that Divine Dividing's assimilation network would collapse before it could process the kinetic energy.
Yugo needed gravity. A lot of gravity.
Rath's clawed hand struck the dial on his chest a fraction of a second before the light cannon disintegrated him.
FLASH!
Vali's beam hit, raising a cloud of smoke and fire. The White Emperor lowered his arms, breathing heavily.
"Finally..."
Pew! Pew! Pew!
Three green neuro-electric blasts shot from the smoke, striking directly against the visor and chest of Vali's armor, paralyzing his nervous system for a critical couple of seconds.
From the dust cloud, a red humanoid creature with manta ray-like wings and yellow membranes shot into the night sky at a speed that instantly broke the sound barrier.
"JETRAY!" the Aerophibian's high, raspy voice echoed through the air as he left a red and green trail behind him.
Vali recovered from the paralysis almost immediately, looking upward.
"Where do you think you're going, coward?!" he roared, beating his wings of light and chasing after the flying alien.
But chasing an Aerophibian in a straight line was a bad joke. Jetray was a species capable of reaching hyperspace speeds.
BOOM!
A second sonic boom.
Jetray pierced through the clouds. The air around him began to thin. The wound in his side was still bleeding, staining his red skin, but Yugo ignored the pain. His yellow gaze was fixed on the starry sky.
BOOM!
A third boom.
Jetray left the exosphere. The dark blue sky was replaced by the absolute, cold blackness of outer space. Earth's gravity stopped pulling at him. Vali Lucifer had been left far behind, barely a tiny blue flash in the lower atmosphere; the White Emperor's armor was fast, but it was not designed for interplanetary travel in seconds.
The silence of the vacuum of space enveloped Yugo. The bleeding temporarily slowed due to the change in pressure and the species' biological resistance.
In front of him, immense, pale, and silent, floated the Moon.
Jetray skimmed past the lunar orbit, his yellow wings shining with starlight. He had gained enough altitude. He had created the deadliest and most devastating landing strip in the solar system.
The red alien turned in the vacuum. He looked down, toward the immense and beautiful blue sphere that was Earth. With his enhanced senses, he tracked the colossal and hostile draconic energy signature of Vali Lucifer, waiting for him in Japan with fury.
Yugo Hano's dark wells, filled with suicidal determination and unbreakable hatred, shone beneath Jetray's mask.
"Nobody... makes my anchor cry," Jetray whispered in the vacuum of space.
He folded his wings against his body, adopting a perfect aerodynamic shape.
And he let himself fall.
At first, it was only free fall. But Jetray activated his neuro-propulsion in reverse, accelerating his descent with the same hyperspace power he used to fly.
One hundred thousand kilometers. Fifty thousand. Ten thousand.
Jetray struck Earth's mesosphere. The instant friction against air particles at that absurd speed transformed the alien into a living meteor. Flames wrapped around his red body, creating a cone of superheated plasma around him.
Down at Kuoh Academy, Issei, Rias, Sona, and Vali looked up at the sky. An abnormally bright and gigantic shooting star was descending directly toward them.
"What... is that?" Rias murmured, her voice trembling from the sheer atmospheric pressure already beginning to crush them.
Vali clenched his fists. His dragon instincts screamed at him to move, to run, but his pride as an Emperor refused to allow it. He raised both hands toward the sky, preparing Divine Dividing's network at maximum capacity.
"I don't care how much speed you bring! I'll absorb it all!"
Barely a thousand meters from the ground, the temperature around Jetray's body surpassed the surface of the sun from friction. His alien skin began to burn.
With his last gram of consciousness before the G-force knocked him out, Jetray's hand struck the dial on his chest.
FLASH!
The fire, plasma, and hypersonic speed did not disappear, but the Aerophibian's fragile body was instantly replaced by the broad-shouldered creature with thick yellow-and-white armor plates.
"CANNONBOLT!"
Yugo curled into himself in midair. The armored sphere, now wrapped in meteoric fire and carrying the kinetic weight of a literal fall from the Moon, became a mass-extinction bomb.
Vali Lucifer saw the sphere of plasma descending upon him.
[DIVIDE! DIVI—!]
The Sacred Gear's mechanical voice choked. Divine Dividing tried to drain the energy, but it was not magic. It was elementary physics taken to a cosmic extreme. It was too much mass, traveling too fast, processed in too short a span of time. Albion's absorption system overloaded and instantly collapsed.
Yugo, inside Cannonbolt's impenetrable shell, with three broken ribs and a hole in his abdomen, smiled.
CAA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
Cannonbolt impacted directly against the White Dragon Emperor's armor and the academy grounds.
There was no normal sound. There was an atrocious microsecond of silence, followed by the roar of a cataclysm. A hemispherical shockwave of plasma, molten earth, and super-compressed air swept through the courtyard. What remained of Sona's barrier shattered into a million magical pieces. The academy buildings were ripped from their foundations.
Rias, Akeno, Issei, and the others were thrown dozens of meters away, saved only by the combined defensive barriers they managed to raise at the last second.
A crater of biblical proportions, smoking, glowing with molten glass and thermal radiation, replaced the entire battlefield. At the center of ground zero, the silence of absolute destruction declared the end of the assault.
The silence that followed the meteoric impact was deafening. The crater, now spanning almost the entirety of what had once been Kuoh Academy, looked like a lake of melted asphalt, broken glass, and red-hot earth.
At the center of ground zero, a yellow-and-white sphere slowly uncurled.
Cannonbolt stood, but the sight was grotesque and heartbreaking. His biological shell, supposedly impenetrable, was splintered and shattered by the thermal stress of free fall and the direct impact against the White Emperor. Thick, dark blood dripped profusely from the immense wound in his left side, the same wound Vali had made when he was Four Arms. His back plates were burned, his breathing was an agonized whistle, and every movement made his broken alien ribs crack.
Even through the transformation, Yugo Hano's base body was on the verge of total collapse. His lungs burned, his skin was covered in third-degree burns from the plasma, and blood loss threatened to shut down his brain.
But Yugo did not fall.
Barely ten meters away, a mound of molten debris began to move.
With a crack of metal and bones, Vali Lucifer struggled to his feet. His immaculate White Dragon armor had been reduced to scrap. The helmet had split in half, revealing the bloodied, bruised, exhausted face of the young devil. One of his mechanical wings of light had vanished completely, and the other flickered weakly.
Vali coughed up a blood clot, looked at the shattered spherical creature before him, and let out a choked, painful laugh.
"You're... you're dead, human..." Vali panted, forcing his demon magic to manifest once more, creating an unstable but lethal sphere of annihilation in his trembling hand. "No mortal... survives this. Disappear."
Yugo, breathing heavily, fixed his eyes on the wounded dragon.
There was no sarcasm. No apathy. All that remained was the unbreakable will to crush the bastard who had dared threaten the only thing he cared about in this rotten fantasy world.
Cannonbolt's trembling hand rose to the exposed and bloodied Omnitrix core on his forehead. The watch, recognizing its bearer's intent and the critical state of his vital signs, required no selection. It extracted the heaviest, most devastating, most colossal genetics Yugo had unlocked thanks to Issei's sacrifice.
"Farewell... lizard."
FLASH!
The pillar of green light that erupted from the crater was not normal. It was a beacon that pierced the clouds and reached the stratosphere. The ground shook with the force of a category eight earthquake.
The light dissipated, and the most primitive terror seized Vali Lucifer.
The shadow that covered the battlefield erased the moonlight. Before the White Dragon, there was no tiger, no crustacean, no armored sphere. There rose an absolute colossus over thirty-five meters tall.
His skin was white and red, with metallic fins on his head and forearms. His eyes shone with the green energy of newborn stars, and on his chest, the Omnitrix symbol pulsed with the power of a cosmic storm.
"WAY BIG!" The To'kustar's voice did not merely echo through the air; it made the tectonic plates beneath Kuoh vibrate.
Issei, Rias, Sona, and the rest, watching from the distance while protecting Asia, fell backward at the sight of the alien titan. He looked like an ancient god, an entity born from supernovas that had descended to Earth only to pass judgment.
Vali's eyes widened. The sphere of energy in his hand suddenly looked like a small, pathetic spark in front of a hurricane.
[DIVIDE! DIV—!] he tried to activate Albion desperately.
But Way Big gave him no time.
The titan's immense fist, the size of an entire house, descended from the heavens at a terrifying speed for his size.
BAAAAM!!
The punch crushed Vali into the crater. The shockwave shattered the foundations of the surrounding buildings and raised a wall of earth twenty meters high.
Vali spat blood, his magic collapsing beneath pure physical pressure. But Way Big did not stop.
He raised his other fist and brought it down.
BAAAAM!!
The ground gave way, sinking Vali even deeper into the Earth's crust. The White Emperor's ribs splintered.
Yugo, operating the To'kustar's immense mass through the pain of his own transferred wounds, raised both fists together and brought them down like a cosmic hammer upon his enemy's body.
BAAAAM!!
The crater widened. Vali Lucifer, the prodigy of the Supreme Class, the bearer of the White Dragon, was being hammered into the earth like a simple nail by an alien god. His armor completely disintegrated, and his consciousness began to fade into an abyss of pain.
Way Big slowly straightened. The red-and-white colossus looked down, toward the bottom of the hole where Vali's shattered body barely moved. He was still alive. His ridiculous demonic and draconic vitality kept him breathing.
But Yugo was going to make sure he would not stand again for a long, long time.
The To'kustar crossed his enormous arms in front of his chest in an "X," then brought his right arm into a vertical position and his left into a horizontal one, forming a perfect "+."
The metallic fins on his body began absorbing the residual energy from the atmosphere and outer space. A blinding glow, a mixture of blue plasma, starlight, and emerald energy, condensed along the edge of his vertical arm.
"Good night, Emperor."
Way Big fired.
An immense and deafening beam of cosmic light descended from his arm, a torrent of celestial destruction that struck directly into the center of the crater.
The light consumed everything. There was no fire explosion, only silent, brilliant annihilation that evaporated earth, stone, and residual magic in an instant. The pillar of energy pierced deep into the underground, branding the land with the indelible signature of intergalactic power.
When the cosmic ray finally faded, silence claimed the night.
At the bottom of the incandescent abyss, Vali Lucifer's body lay completely inert. His breathing was weak, almost imperceptible, but he was alive. However, his armor had disappeared and his magic was completely exhausted. He was, without a doubt, absolutely and totally out of combat.
The thirty-five-meter titan lowered his arms. His green eye swept over the devastated battlefield, making sure no other threat was breathing.
Yugo had won the war. The alien god had claimed victory for a single girl crying in the rear.