The landscape looked apocalyptic.
Craters within craters. Stone fused to glass where the magma stars had kissed the earth and then detonated. Trees that had stood for centuries on the mountain's lower slopes were simply gone—not felled, not burned, but gone, the ground where their roots had been scoured clean down to pale bedrock. The air itself tasted of sulfur and ozone, a chemical grief that coated the back of the throat.
Riser Phenex was reforming in pieces.
It was not a dignified process. The Phenex flame knit him back together from the ground up—first bone, then organ, then muscle, then skin—each layer rebuilding itself with a wet, crackling industry that turned several of the surviving youkai warriors at the perimeter a particular shade of pale. His expression, once the musculature of his face had returned, was one of profound and personal offense. He had been disintegrated. He, Riser Phenex, heir to one of the seventy-two pillars, had been turned into scattered carbon and vapor by some jumped-up demon's blood magic.
He was going to be insufferable about this for years.
Sairaorg Bael stood roughly forty meters from where he'd been when the orbs detonated, which meant the shockwave had carried him that distance without his consent. A thin line of blood traced its way from his temple down the hard angle of his jaw, dripping off his chin with quiet patience. He touched it with two fingers, examined the red, and decided it was beneath his concern. His touki still burned around him, steady and gold, though the edges of it guttered like a candle in wind. His eyes had already found Lucion, still hovering above the corrupted form of Yasaka, and they hadn't moved since.
Azazel looked, by his own internal assessment, terrible.
His coat was in ruins along the left side, the fabric shredded by the pressure wave and scorched at the edges where the magma heat had caught him a glancing blow. His dark wings had taken the worst of it—three of the twelve feathers on his left side were simply stripped away, the stumps smoking faintly. He ran a hand through his disheveled hair, took a brief inventory of his body, and concluded that nothing was broken that couldn't be walked off. The Blazer Shining Aura Darkness Blade was still manifested in his right hand, its edge flickering with residual holy energy, which meant his reserves were holding. That was something.
He looked to his left. Sirzechs stood in the center of the blast radius looking exactly as he had before the attack. Not a hair displaced. His crimson aura had simply absorbed the magma stars the way a deep ocean absorbs a thrown stone—with total, indifferent completeness. The Crimson Satan's expression hadn't changed either, which Azazel found privately more unsettling.
Vali was on one knee.
That was new.
He'd taken the fifth orb to the chest. In the final fraction of a second before detonation, his tactical mind had calculated that the combined pressure wave from six simultaneous magma stars would be survivable if someone absorbed a portion of the radial energy directly, buying the others a marginal improvement in their positioning. He hadn't announced this decision. He'd simply stepped into the orb's path, activated Divide at the point of impact, and accepted the consequence.
The consequence was that his Balance Breaker armor had cracked down the left pauldron, a hairline fracture in the silver scales that had never cracked before in any fight he could remember. His ribs on that side were either broken or deeply bruised. What interested him was the faint curl of silver smoke rising from the damage, and the way Albion's presence in his mind felt slightly muted, the way a voice sounds muted when heard through a wall.
You pushed the divide limit, Albion observed, without accusation.
I know.
Serafall was far behind them.
She had caught the full lateral force of the pressure wave—not the heat, not the magma, but the shockwave itself, that invisible fist of compressed air that moved faster than sound and cared nothing for the rank of the being it struck. It had picked her up and flung her the way a careless hand flings a doll, and she had skipped across the ruined earth twice before coming to rest against the exposed face of a shattered boulder, her body leaving a shallow furrow in the scorched ground behind her.
She was conscious, breathing, and still in possession of all her limbs, which was more than she could say for the landscape. She was lying on her back staring at a sky, orange at the edges, the stars above the corruption field obscured by the column of crimson energy still erupting from the cave mouth below. Her twin tails had come undone entirely. Her outfit, already ruined from the earlier battle with Lucion, now had new ruin layered over the old ruin, which she decided was almost artistic.
She sat up slowly, pressing a hand to her ribs. Other than the burns from before, she hadn't suffered any severe injuries; however, she was completely drained. She evaluated that she likely couldn't form a simple icicle if she tried.
As they recovered from the attack, coming back together slowly, minus Serafall, Lucion continued to marvel at his power.
"HAHAHA! Look at you all! Bugs beneath my boots! I'll crush all of you! Let's start with the girl—" Although clearly not paying attention to Sirzechs lack of damage or fatigue, he was interrupted by something unexpected.
Lucion never finished the sentence.
The interruption did not come from any of the five beings standing in the ruined landscape before him. It did not come from the sky, or the cave, or the corrupted pillar still hemorrhaging crimson light into the atmosphere. It came from the ground, from a small patch of scorched earth near the cave mouth where a body had been lying undisturbed since the battle began, and it came in the form of a feeling.
Pressure.
Not the hot, aggressive pressure of Lucion's magma-star detonations. Not the suffocating, authoritarian weight of Sirzechs' aura. This was something familiar yet completely foreign. Azazel felt it first in his back teeth, a vibration just below the threshold of sound. Vali felt it as a sudden, inexplicable silence from Albion, the ancient dragon going very still in the back of his mind the way animals go still before earthquakes. Sairaorg felt it in his touki, which flickered as though something had passed through it without touching it.
Every head turned.
The body lay where Serafall had placed it, on the scorched earth near the cave mouth. It had not moved. There was still a hole through the skull. The eyes were still closed. There was nothing about its physical state that should have commanded anyone's attention at all.
But around it, growing and slowly enveloping it, was black.
Not darkness in the conventional sense, but the absence of light found in the void of a black hole. This was something that light did not enter and did not escape from—a sphere of absolute negation. Once it enveloped the corpse in the form of a half dome, it slowly started to rise.
The stars above the corruption field, the ones visible at the edges of the crimson column, ceased to exist wherever the sphere's boundary crossed them. The corrupted energy from the cave mouth, which had been bending everything around it toward its own violent purpose, bent away from the sphere's edge as though warped.
Lucion stopped speaking.
He stared down at the phenomenon from his elevated position above Yasaka's bound form, his four arms slowly lowering. His demonic red eyes narrowed. Something moved behind them that was not entirely confidence—a flicker of calculation, then something sharper, something that in a less proud being might have been recognized as wariness.
"What," he said to no one in particular, "is that?"
No one answered him because no one knew.
The sphere continued to rise, and as it grew, it became clear that it was not simply surrounding the body—it was consuming the space around it, the ground beneath disappearing into its boundary without sound, without debris, and without any of the dramatic violence that was caused by any conventional magic attack. It stopped expanding once it reached 8 feet in diameter. But still it slowly rose.
The sphere pulsed once, slow and deliberate, like a heart finding its first rhythm.
Then it surged.
The surge was not so much visible as felt—a wave of a more intense pressure that rolled outward from the sphere's surface without sound or heat or any of the physical properties that the assembled warriors understood as the language of power. It passed through stone and through flesh and through the corrupted leyline energy still hemorrhaging from the cave mouth with equal indifference, touching everything and disturbing nothing in any way that could be defended against. It was not an attack. It was an announcement.
Every surviving youkai at the perimeter stumbled. Not from force, but from the involuntary animal response of a body recognizing something it could not categorize and choosing, at the most fundamental level, to be afraid of it.
Riser, still in the final stages of reconstitution, stopped regenerating for a full three seconds. The flame simply paused, as though it too was listening.
Sairaorg's touki was snuffed out. Although quickly reignited.
Sairaorg Bael, who had never in his life experienced his touki failing him involuntarily, stood very still and said nothing.
Azazel's hand tightened around the Blazer Shining Aura Darkness Blade until his knuckles went white. His analytical mind was already working, already cataloguing, already reaching for frameworks and precedents that might explain what his eyes were showing him, and finding nothing. Nothing in Grigori records. Nothing in the accumulated intelligence of centuries spent studying sacred gears and dragon energies and every flavor of supernatural phenomenon the world had produced. Nothing.
Vali's cracked pauldron smoked. Albion had gone so silent in his mind that Vali could have believed himself alone in his own skull. The ancient dragon—who had witnessed the Great War, who had been present at the death of God and had not found it worthy of silence—was silent now.
What is it, Vali thought, not quite a question.
Albion did not answer. Which was, itself, an answer.
Sirzechs watched.
His crimson aura had not faltered. His expression had not changed. But something had shifted in his eyes—a quality of attention that was different from the focused, tactical assessment he'd been applying to Lucion. This was older. This was the look of a being who had, over centuries, developed an acute sensitivity to the moments when the world was about to become something it had not been before. He had felt it twice in his life. Once at the end of the Great War. Once when he had first fully understood the nature of his own Power of Destruction.
He felt it now.
The sphere had stopped rising. It hung in the air, eight feet of absolute void, perfectly still.
Just then, Akeno and Rias came onto the battlefield, floating in the air a safe distance away but still able to see the battlefield and the black sphere.
"I'm telling you, Rias, I felt Toshio!" Rias, exacerbated by her stubborn queen, soon noticed that Toshio's body was nowhere to be seen. In fact, near where her slain friend lay, was just a large black orb, endless in its abyss.
In a few more moments that seemed to drag on for the spectators, the sphere began to shrink. It collapsed, revealing a creature that certainly didn't exist before. The void continued to become smaller until the creature was fully revealed. The orb of void shrunk down to the size of a large fist, remaining in the creature's chest where its heart would have been. Still stunned by the creature's appearance, none were expecting what came next.
Sensing the potential danger, Sirzechs called out to his allies.
"Prepare defenses!"
No sooner than when they each erected their own unique defense, the black orb pulsed again, then collapsed like a dying star. As it disappeared, a massive shockwave tore through the air like a supernova. A massive pillar of cerulean blue energy erupted from the creature's form, the light reaching the heavens.
The shockwave of power annihilated the ground around the creature half a mile in diameter!
The blast formed a massive crater, the curves so smooth it was as if someone cut them. The blast of energy caused all of them to jump back from the creature, except for Lucion, who remained in the air. Using the leyline energy, he blocked the shockwave, but he wished he hadn't. It had consumed far too much energy.
The pressure from the creature now was incomparable to before. Akeno and Rias, although quite far away, crashed to the ground, unable to remain flying.
Vali dropped to all fours.
Saieorg was using all the touki he could muster to remain standing.
Riser was simply crushed under the tremendous pressure.
Azazel, eyes wide, felt the pressure press down on him hard enough to drive him to a knee.
Serafall was fully flattened on the ground where she lay, shock on her face.
Sirzechs, eyes narrowed, was the only one somewhat unaffected, but beads of sweat formed on his brow from the effort of resistance.
The wind was whipping around like a hurricane from the massive pillar of energy coming from the terrifying creature.
"What is that?!" Lucion repeated, although a fair bit more panicked. The energy seemed to be suppressing the leyline energy, slowly lowering him from his floating position, despite his efforts to remain airborne.
Having recovered from the fall, Akeno propped herself up on the ground to look at the source of their hasty plummet. She could hardly believe what she saw. A tall, humanoid creature with near-black skin.
It stood in the clearing like something dragged out of a nightmare and hammered into the shape of a man. Its body was tall and lean, more like a weapon given life than any living creature, covered in dark armor-like skin marked by glowing cerulean lines that ran across its mask, chest, and limbs like cracks filled with radiant power. A rigid, demonic-looking mask covered its face completely, blank and inhuman, with a crown of curved horns rising from its head. From the back of that mask, short black hair spilled out in uneven strands, making the thing somehow look even more menacing.
Beneath the hollow eye sockets burned cerulean eyes so bright they looked like unnatural fire. Torn black robes hung from its body in ragged strips, blending into the darkness around it, while a towering pillar of blue spiritual energy roared upward from its form and bent the air with sheer pressure. In one hand it held a black double-edged sword wrapped in slow, mesmerizing flames of crimson, violet, and faint blue. Crimson flakes drifted around it like embers caught in a storm, and for one terrible moment, Akeno could not decide whether she was looking at a warrior, a monster, or something far more terrifying than either.
Then her eyes found the sword.
She knew it. She knew its shape the way you know the shape of something you have spent enough hours watching to have memorized without meaning to—the single-edged curve of it, the particular way it caught light. She had watched Toshio draw it a hundred times. She knew its proportions the way she knew the proportions of his shoulders, of his hands, and of the particular angle at which he held himself when he was thinking.
But despite the similarities, this was not that sword.
This was a double-edged longsword, its blade a black so complete it seemed to eat the light that touched it rather than reflect it, the way the sphere had eaten light before the creature emerged. Along the blade moved flames—slow, almost languorous, utterly wrong for fire, which was always urgent—deep crimson bleeding into violet bleeding into small wisps of blue that drifted upward like the last breath of something dying beautifully. The tsuba where blade met grip was not metal. It was not any material she could name. It was a circle of absolute darkness that rotated slowly on its own axis, a swirling event horizon that pulled at the eye the way heights pulled at the body—not with physical force, but with something older and more fundamental than physics.
The wind was screaming around them. Akeno's hair whipped across her face and she shoved it back with one hand, still staring, and something in her chest was doing something she didn't have a name for.
"What is that?" she heard herself shout, and the wind took the words and shredded them. "What is happening? What is—"
No one answered her. Rias was beside her, and Rias was not answering because Rias did not know.
Azazel, much closer to the creature, was still on one knee. His mouth was open slightly in complete shock, a rare sight.
Sirzechs said nothing. He was watching the creature with the expression of a man who has just heard a sound he recognizes from a dream he cannot quite place and is deciding whether to be grateful or afraid.
Lucion moved first.
Perhaps it was pride. Perhaps it was the particular madness of a being so accustomed to being the most powerful thing on the battlefield that the presence of something larger registered not as danger but as insult.
Whatever the cause, his four arms rose together, and the magma blood sun that had been pulsing behind him throughout the entire distraction compressed further, the compression making it hotter and denser than before, and then began to compress again. The process was different this time. Before, the compressions had been controlled. Now it was violent, the demon lord pouring into it with the frantic energy of something threatened, and the result was a sphere barely larger than a human head that radiated heat so intense the ruined ground beneath it fused back to glass.
"It changes nothing!" Lucion's voice cracked across the wind, raw with fury. "Nothing! You hear me? YOU DIE LIKE THE REST!"
He threw it.
The projectile covered the distance between them in less than a heartbeat—a white-hot star of compressed magma-blood that had, in a less compressed form, forced Sirzechs himself to expend genuine effort in containment. The air around it ignited. The ground beneath its trajectory turned to plasma. It struck the creature's outstretched hand with a sound like a mountain being struck by another mountain.
And stopped.
The creature had not moved. Had not braced. Had not raised a barrier or invoked any visible technique. It had simply extended one arm at the last moment with the unhurried precision of someone catching a thrown object they had already decided to catch, and the magma blood sun—Lucion's finest, most condensed, most powerful single attack yet—sat in its palm and burned there like a coal in a fireplace, and the creature's hand did not blacken, and the creature's gaze did not move from Lucion's face.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Akeno had ever experienced.
Riser had stopped reconstituting again. Sairaorg's touki was barely a candle flame. Vali, still on all fours, had lifted his head, and his silver eyes were very wide, and whatever Albion was doing in the back of his mind, the White Dragon Emperor himself had forgotten to maintain any expression at all.
Lucion stared at his own attack sitting in the creature's palm. Something moved through his expression that was not calculation and was not fury. It was the thing underneath both of those, the thing that creatures like him almost never had occasion to feel.
The creature closed its hand.
The magma blood sun—the concentrated power of corrupted leylines and ancient demonic will and everything Lucion had poured into it—compressed to nothing between its fingers with a sound like a single note struck on an instrument no one had ever built and went out.
Then, slowly, the creature raised its sword arm.
The blade of void and slow fire lifted with the deliberate patience of a tide coming in. There was no urgency in the motion. No anger. The creature did not appear to feel anything about what it was doing, which was somehow the most terrible quality it possessed. It aimed the tip of the sword at no particular point in the air between itself and Lucion, and then it drove the blade forward.
In a distorted, terrifying, quiet voice, the creature simply uttered: "Shin'en no Hanamuko (Consort of Deep Resentment)".
The sword passed through empty air.
Lucion had braced—every one of his four arms had crossed before him, corrupted leyline energy flooding into a barrier that should have been capable of stopping anything short of a Maou's full output. He had prepared for an attack he could see, understand, and absorb.
He had not prepared for the ghost.
It appeared in his chest without warning, without passage through the intervening space, and without any of the physical logic that governed the movement of objects from one location to another. A sword—translucent, cerulean-edged, identical in shape to the void-black blade the creature carried—materialized inside his ribcage as though it had always been there and only now become visible. It did not cut flesh. It did not sever muscle or crack bone. It passed through all of that as though those things did not exist, because it was not interested in those things.
It was interested in something deeper.
Lucion's scream was not the scream of a body in pain. It was something far more primal, a sound that came from a place beneath voice and beneath thought, from the part of any being that existed before it learned language or pride or the performance of power. It was the sound of a soul encountering something that had come specifically for it.
"Soul—" he gasped, and then the word dissolved into another scream. "SOUL ATTACK—?!"
Behind him, the world changed.
It did not change in the way that battles changed landscapes, through fire and force and the physical reordering of matter. It changed the way dreams changed—suddenly, completely, with a logic that was internally perfect and externally inexplicable. A sakura tree erupted into existence in the space directly behind the screaming demon lord, its trunk vast and pale, its branches spreading outward in a crown that should not have fit within the confines of the ruined battlefield but did, because the tree existed according to different rules than the battlefield.
Its blossoms burned. Not with fire but with heartfire—that specific luminescence that belonged to no element and no school of magic and had no name in any of the three factions' libraries—deep crimson at the core and blooming to violet at the edges of each petal. Whisps of blue fell from the branches like falling leaves, like tears of sorrow from an endless amount of pain.
In its light, shapes appeared.
They were not solid. They were not quite transparent. They occupied the space between those categories the way grief occupied the space between memory and the present moment—present enough to hurt, absent enough that you could not touch them. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Every shape was different. Youkai and humans and creatures that had no name in any living tradition. Children. Warriors. Ancient things that had existed long before Kyoto had a name. All of them rendered in that same heartfire luminescence, all of them gathered in the branches and roots of the blazing tree, all of them turned toward the writhing form of Lucion Mephisto with expressions that required no translation.
Every wound he had ever opened in another living thing, he felt now in his own soul. Every death he had caused—not just the physical sensation of dying, which was finite, but the full weight of what that death had meant to the being experiencing it, the terror and the grief and the particular agony of an existence that had not finished yet being ended anyway. Every act of cruelty he had committed for entertainment, every life he had consumed as fuel, every being he had broken as a demonstration of his own significance—all of it returned to him simultaneously, not as memory but as experience.
He had no defense for this. There was no barrier that could be raised against the full accounting of one's own history. There was no technique that could deflect what was, at its most fundamental nature, simply the truth.
The disintegration began at the edges.
His outermost form—the grotesque skeletal extremities of his true demonic body—began to come apart first, not with the drama of destruction energy or the violence of a physical attack, but with the quiet, inevitable quality of something that had simply ceased to have any reason to continue existing. His screams continued until they could not, until the mechanism that produced them was no longer present, and then there was only the tree and its light and the shapes within it, and the last few fragments of what had been Lucion Mephisto spiraling slowly downward like ash.
The final particle disappeared.
For a fraction of a second the battlefield was absolutely still.
Then the blood-red energy erupted.
It came from everywhere Lucion had been and from everywhere he had touched, the stored and stolen power of everything he had consumed releasing simultaneously without a vessel to contain it. It moved in visible streams, following lines of least resistance outward across the landscape, and those lines ran along the corrupted leyline network that had fed him—back along the paths it had traveled, toward every node and shrine and spiritual anchor point across the length of Japan. The energy reached them all in the same instant, slamming into corrupted stone and corrupted earth with a force that registered on every spiritual sense present as something like a thunderclap heard from inside the thunder.
The largest stream did not go outward.
It went down, and then it went toward the cave mouth, and it hit the dome of gale-force power surrounding Yasaka's corrupted form with everything it had. The dome—which had been sustaining itself autonomously, independent of Lucion's continued existence, anchored in the leyline network itself—received the full reverse surge of all the energy it had stolen, and the physics of what happened next were not complicated.
It shattered.
The corrupted pillar of energy guttered. Its crimson deepened, flickered, and then began to dim for the first time since it had erupted from the cave mouth hours ago, the tainted light withdrawing back toward the earth like a tide going out, the leylines beneath beginning, slowly and haltingly, to breathe again.
In the sudden comparative quiet, the creature that had delivered the effortless, decisive blow to the demon that was Lucion, silently drifted down to the ground, its demon-like feet touching the ruined ground lightly. Its devastating aura was reeled in, no longer pouring out of it.
As the leyline energy dissipated, Yasaka's form slowly started to wilt. The youkai elders, noticing the energy going down, quickly rejoined the battlefield.
"Quick! We must purify the leylines now that the demon influence is gone!" Since the communication barrier was no longer present, they quickly communicated with all youkai near shrines with leyline connections, getting them to start the purification rituals.
Sirzechs, giving one last look at the creature that now just silently stood there looking upon the dying yokai queen, moved to join the youkai elders.
The creature was then surrounded by the 4 allied combatants that could still fight. Azazel stepped forward, ready to attack.
"Not that we don't appreciate the help, but mind telling us who you are?" The creature didn't respond nor look at the fallen angel. "Because you look remarkably similar to the demons we were just battling." The only response from the demon-like entity was a slight narrowing of his eyes. This caused all four to jump back, ready to unleash any attack they could muster against this thing. The creature didn't move.
"Sirzechs-sama! We don't know what to do! She's dying! How do we save her?!" The youkai elder pleaded with the Maou. He didn't really know, as this kind of thing wasn't his area of expertise. But time was running out. The nine-tailed fox lay limply, slowly withering away. Sirzechs then noticed a small black stone attached to the large fox's forehead. He remembered Azazel saying something about a stone. Out of time, he made his best guess.
He raised his hand, forming a gun with his pointer finger, the energy of destruction quickly forming on the tip of it.
"!!!"
Before the youkai elder could physically react, Sirzechs shot a tiny bullet of energy at Yasaka, the projectile slamming into the black stone, annihilating it, and only the stone. Sirzechs was confident in his level of control with the PoD. The stone gone, Yasaka's huge form began to recede back into her humanoid form.
Kunou, rejoining the battlefield, rushed to her mother's side.
"MOTHER!" The small fox girl dropped to her knees and cried over her unconscious mom. Her form was rapidly aging.
"Damn. Too late," Sirzechs cursed. She wasn't going to survive.
"So we just going to let this thing stand here?" Vali asked no one in particular, eyes not leaving the creature in front of the four.
Not focused on what was behind him, he didn't notice a person walking past him.
"Hey hey HEY! Don't get—!"
He didn't finish his sentence due to surprise. Rias Gremory's queen, if he remembered right, walked right up to the creature and softly put her hands on his abdomen. At the touch, blue eyes met violet ones.
"Toshio? Is that…" Akeno whimpered out, eyes full of tears. The creature's menacing expression didn't change. But it slowly wrapped its free arm around the desperate girl.
"Toshio!" Akeno cried out, burying her face into its torso, which was hard as steel. Her tears stained its skin.
"Akeno-san, I know you're desperate to get him back, but now isn't the time to try to play nice with the unknown ultimate-class threat," Azazel urged. Akeno ignored him. The creature suddenly looked toward Yasaka, causing all but Akeno to flinch. It put its hand on Akeno's shoulder, slowly pushing her away. Surprise followed her confusion, as it was simply not there anymore.
Vali, Sairiorg, Vali, and Azazel all widened their eyes. They barely even noticed him moving! He appeared next to Yasaka's prone form silently. This caused the youkai elders to yelp in alarm.
"Kunou!" The girl raised her head and screamed in fright at the sight of the demonic-looking creature. Its sword no longer in hand, it placed one hand softly on Kunou's head. A hand that could block and crush Lucion's strongest attack was now placed so gently on the girl's head, Sirzechs, standing nearby, could only marvel at the sight. Whatever this creature was, it clearly wasn't an enemy.
He wanted to believe it to be Toshio, but the change was too radical to make sense. If the boy possessed a sacred gear maybe, but he was just a regular human magician. A talented one, but that was all. Or so he thought.
The creature placed its other hand just as softly on Yasaka's withering head. Everyone was on edge, other than Akeno, who seemed to trust the creature implicitly. Then something incredible happened. That blue light that once surrounded it with crushing pressure lit up and flowed into the youkai queen, sparkling with violet embers.
The aging stopped immediately, and then slowly, Yasaka regained her youthful appearance.
Azazel was once again flabbergasted at the display. He knew a lot about every race's power structure, but this one was completely foreign to him! Utterly new! It fascinated him.
The creature stood, disappeared, then reappeared a short distance away. That hole that left the empty space where its heart would be began to fill with that same void-like black sphere. It slowly expanded, enveloping its form.
"Toshio!" Akeno called out, trying to reach it but held back by both Rias and Azazel.
The sphere consumed Yasaka's apparent savior, then cracked into pieces. The sphere crumbled, revealing a completely healed but unconscious Toshio Amano. No longer holding her back, Akeno was immediately at his side.
"Toshi! My Toshi!" She picked up his head, hugging it into her generous bosom. She wept.
But this time, they were tears of joy.
Waiting a moment for the reunion, Azazel spoke up.
"Well, now that this mess is over, we should probably head back to the shrine." Sirzechs snorted.
"Agreed. No doubt, Yasaka will have many questions when she wakes," the redheaded satan said calmly, glad that this whole thing was over with.
Rias moved to Akeno's side, feeling complicated feelings but overall happy that her friend was alive.
"Toshio…"