The cleanup took us almost an hour.
After Sirzechs, Michael, Azazel, and Gabriel arrived, the remaining Old Satan Faction forces crumbled quickly. Those who didn't flee were eliminated. Those who surrendered were restrained and handed over to the respective faction's security forces.
It was over relatively fast once the leadership was taken care of.
But the aftermath was another story entirely.
The Old Satan Faction hadn't just targeted the peace treaty venue. They hadn't come to disrupt it.
They'd come to make a statement.
And innocent people had paid for it.
I moved through the streets in silence, taking in the scale of destruction with grim eyes. Buildings collapsed into rubble. Cars overturned and burning. Entire blocks reduced to smoldering ruins.
And among all that rubble—bodies.
Innocent ones.
A middle-aged man crushed under fallen debris, his groceries still clutched in his hand. A woman caught in the crossfire, her expression forever frozen in shock. An elderly couple who hadn't been able to evacuate in time. Children.
My hands curled into fists at my sides.
This was what happened when supernatural beings waged their wars in the human world. This was what happened when ancient grudges and political ambitions took precedence over the lives of mortals who had absolutely nothing to do with any of it.
I ascended above the city, high enough to see the full scope of the destruction spread below me.
I pulled out my grimoire. The pages flipped on their own, bypassing hundreds of spells until they landed on the one I needed. A mass healing spell I had specifically prepared for scenarios like this—large scale supernatural conflicts spilling into civilian territory.
I had hoped never to need it.
I positioned myself at the center of the city, floating high above the destruction. I pressed both hands together, channeling every thread of mana I could muster. The spell formation materialized around me.
A massive, complex geometric pattern expanding outward in every direction, each layer interlocking with precise calculation.
It took everything to hold it together at this scale.
"Radiant Benediction." I muttered.
To be honest, I didn't need to chant the name. The spell would activate regardless. But the words helped me focus. Gave my mind something to anchor to while managing the sheer volume of energy required.
The spell detonated outward like a shockwave of golden light. It rippled across the entire city in seconds, passing through walls, through rubble, through everything. Every living person caught within its radius felt it—wounds closing completely, bleeding stopping, shattered bones mending perfectly as though they had never been broken at all. The injured rose from the rubble confused but whole. The dying gasped with renewed breath.
A perfect heal. Every single person touched by the spell was restored completely.
Except for those who were already gone.
That was the one thing even this spell couldn't fix. The bodies scattered throughout the rubble remained still. Unmoving. Beyond any magic's reach.
But the dead remained dead.
And that would never sit right with me.
The last of the golden light faded into the distance.
I exhaled slowly.
My vision swam. The edges of my consciousness blurred as the energy drain hit me all at once. I descended toward a rooftop, landing with less grace than usual. My knees nearly buckled on impact.
I steadied myself against a ventilation unit, breathing through the weakness spreading through my limbs.
Worth it.
Then I heard a voice from above.
"Leon."
I recognized it immediately.
I looked up.
Sona was descending from the sky.
She landed in front of me, her eyes sweeping over me from head to toe.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah. I'm fine," I replied.
"You're pale," she said, frowning. "Was that you? The healing light?"
I nodded.
She stared at me for a long moment.
"You idiot," she said softly. There was no venom in it. Just quiet exasperation and something much warmer underneath. She leaned her forehead against my shoulder. "You absolute idiot."
I let her stay there for a moment.
"The others?" I asked.
"Safe. My peerage is accounted for. Tsubaki handled herself well." A pause. "Better than I expected honestly."
We stayed like that for a while.
I gazed out over the city.
Kuoh had always been special—a place where the supernatural and human worlds coexisted in deliberate ignorance of each other.
A fragile illusion maintained for centuries.
That illusion is gone now.
Soon the entire world would be talking about what happened.
Back when I'd fought Azazel, the cover up had been manageable. It was localized—a single contained area, limited witnesses, and the supernatural factions had moved quickly to suppress footage and memory wipe those who had seen too much. Inconvenient but containable.
This was different.
Every major news network. Every government intelligence agency. Every conspiracy theorist who had spent decades being dismissed and ridiculed suddenly vindicated in the most undeniable way possible. There was simply no covering this up. No memory wiping a global audience. No explaining away footage being shared millions of times across every platform simultaneously.
The hidden world behind humanity's mundane one had announced itself—not with diplomacy, not with carefully managed disclosure, but with fire and destruction and bodies in the streets.
I exhaled slowly.
Things will never be the same.
=====
Days passed.
And the world descended into exactly the kind of chaos I had anticipated.
News networks ran continuous coverage. Governments convened emergency sessions behind closed doors. Military installations across multiple countries went to elevated alert status. The United Nations called for an emergency assembly—the first of its kind in its entire history—to address what world leaders were now openly calling the supernatural disclosure.
Social media was a warzone of a different kind. Panic. Denial. Religious fervor. Mass hysteria. People abandoning cities. Hoarding supplies. Demanding answers from governments that had none to give.
And underneath all of it—fear.
Raw, primal, all-consuming fear.
Because the truth was painfully simple. Humanity had just learned that beings of incomprehensible power existed alongside them. Had always existed alongside them. And the first impression the supernatural world had made wasn't one of peace or coexistence.
It was fire and destruction and innocent bodies in the streets.
No one could protect them.
That was the thought driving the panic. The singular terrifying realization echoing across every country, every culture, every language simultaneously.
They were helpless.
I sat in my study, watching the coverage across multiple screens. Press conferences from world leaders who visibly didn't know what they were saying. Military generals speaking about deterrents against threats their weapons couldn't scratch. Religious institutions fracturing over theological implications overnight.
I leaned back in my chair, watching a clip of terrified civilians being interviewed on screen.
"E.V.E.," I said quietly.
The soft chime of my personal AI responded immediately. "Yes, Leon?"
"Arrange a press conference as soon as possible."
A brief pause. "Global broadcast?"
"Yes."
"Understood. I'll begin arrangements immediately," E.V.E. replied. "Shall I prepare your usual security protocols?"
"Yes."
Another pause. "Leon. Are you certain about this? Stepping into the public eye at this scale will change things considerably for you personally."
I looked back at the screens.
People were scared. Helpless.
Someone needed to stand between them.
Someone needed to make it clear that humanity was not without protection. That there were consequences for those in the supernatural world who looked at mortals and saw nothing but acceptable collateral damage.
That there was a deterrent.
"I'm certain," I said.
"Very well." E.V.E.'s tone carried something almost resembling quiet approval. "The stage is yours, Leon."
I sat back in my chair, as I watch the world continued to unravel on broadcast.
The door opened quietly.
I glanced over.
Ophis stood at the threshold, her small frame filling the doorway with that characteristic stillness of hers.
The oppressive weight that used to accompany her existence, that suffocating pressure of infinite draconic power that made every supernatural being instinctively tense—
It was gone.
Or rather, what remained of it was a faint echo of what it once was.
"Ophis," I said. "How are you feeling?"
She was quiet for a moment, those eyes staring at nothing in particular.
"Weird," she said simply.
I understood immediately. More than most people would.
I gestured to the chair across from me. She moved to it silently and sat, her gaze drifting to the news screens without much visible interest.
Ophis had woken up a day after the attack. Unfortunately Samael's curse had done its damage.
Perhaps because she had been exposed to it for too long before I arrived. Perhaps because even after I denied Samael's nature, the poison had already run too deep. Whatever the reason, Ophis had lost the vast majority of her power upon waking.
And unlike what I knew of the original timeline—where her power was eventually restored through Lilith—I had a feeling this loss was permanent.
No Lilith. No restoration.
I leaned forward, lacing my fingers together.
To be honest, I had a theory about why.
When I denied Samael's dragon-killing properties, I hadn't just neutralized the creature. I had denied the very concept of what it was doing—which included the power it had been actively draining from Ophis.
The denial hadn't just stopped the process.
It had locked it.
The power Samael had consumed, the infinite draconic energy it had been siphoning from the Dragon God—it had been denied along with everything else.
Simply... denied from existing in that state ever again.
"Your power," I asked. "Does it feel like it's still there somewhere? Distant? Or does it feel like it's simply gone?"
Ophis considered the question with the same unhurried patience she applied to everything.
"Gone," she said. "Like it was never there."
"I see."
Her gaze drifted back to the screens. The chaos of the world unfolding in real time.
She watched it with the detached curiosity of someone observing something entirely foreign to their existence.
"I do not know what to do," She spoke after a while.
"I feel..." She paused, searching for words that her limited emotional vocabulary struggled to produce. "Weak."
"I know."
"I have never felt weak before."
I said nothing. There wasn't much to say to that.
She was quiet for a long moment, her small hands resting in her lap, fingers curled slightly.
"I want to go home," she said finally. "To the Dimensional Gap. To my silence."
"I know."
"But." The word came out almost hesitant. "Getting it back. The silence. It feels..." She trailed off again.
"Distant," I offered. She looked at me.
"Yes," she said softly. "Distant."
The Dimensional Gap was Ophis's sanctuary. Her entire reason for everything—every scheme, every alliance, every manipulation across centuries—had been to reclaim the silence that Great Red had stolen from her home. That singular obsession had defined her entire existence.
And now she sat in a chair in my study, stripped of the power that made her pursuit even remotely possible.
This was a version of Ophis that likely had never existed before.
The Infinite Dragon God, rendered finite.
Lost.
=====
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