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Night had wrapped the city of Kuoh in a mantle of silence, and inside the undetectable treehouse, peace reigned absolute.
In the spacious main bedroom, Kaiju slipped out of bed with the stealth of a shadow. He arranged the sheets with extreme delicacy over Sylvie's shoulders, making sure not to wake her. The gray-haired girl let out a small, soft sigh in her sleep, hugging the pillow he had just vacated.
The young man dressed quickly. He put on dark pants, a black T-shirt, and his long traveling jacket. He was not going to fight, nor train under King Kai's gravity. This was a different routine, one he kept in the strictest secrecy.
He walked through the immense corridors of the dimensional laboratory in complete silence, heading toward the main exit. However, as he passed near the living room, a small figure sitting on one of the armchairs caught his attention.
It was Asia.
The young blonde nun wore a modest nightgown and had her hands clasped over her lap, her gaze lost in the moonlight filtering through the large window. Upon hearing the boy's light footsteps, she gave a small start and turned toward him.
"Kaiju-san?" Asia murmured, surprised to see him dressed in street clothes at that hour before dawn. "Where are you going? Is something wrong? Did the Fallen Angels find us?"
Kaiju stopped walking. The paranoia in the girl's emerald eyes was understandable after the hell she had lived through. He relaxed his shoulders and gave her a crooked smile, soft and reassuring.
"No one has found us, Asia. We're safe," he answered, approaching her with calm steps. "I simply... have a matter to attend to. A little nighttime walk."
Asia looked him up and down. Despite the calm he radiated, the nun felt immense curiosity toward the boy who had saved her life. A being capable of defying monsters, who had given her a home without asking for anything in return, and who was now sneaking out in the middle of the night.
Kaiju stared at her for a couple of seconds. An idea crossed his mind. She had been excommunicated for using her healing miracle to help someone the world considered an "enemy." She had suffered for her kindness.
"You know what?" Kaiju said, extending his hand toward her. "You should come with me. There's something I want to show you."
Asia blinked, confused, but the warmth in the teenager's voice convinced her instantly. She took his hand and stood up.
Without warning, Kaiju wrapped his free arm around the nun's small waist, pulling her toward him. Asia let out a small choked squeal, her cheeks dyeing an intense crimson from the sudden closeness, but before she could ask a question, Kaiju brought two fingers to his forehead.
POP!
Space contorted, and the treehouse disappeared.
The cold of the night was immediately replaced by an artificial temperature, and the smell of Kuoh's earth and leaves gave way to an unmistakable, aseptic aroma: clinical alcohol, iodine, and cleaning products.
Asia blinked, instinctively clinging to Kaiju's jacket. When her eyes adapted to the bright and buzzing fluorescent light, she realized they were standing in the hallway of an immense white building. Doctors were running, nurses with exhausted faces carrying medical charts, and the constant, rhythmic, agonizing beeping of vital sign monitors filled the air.
The signs on the walls were not in Japanese. They were in English and Arabic.
"A-A hospital?" Asia whispered, realizing they were thousands of kilometers away from Japan. "Kaiju-san... they're going to see us."
"No one can see us. We're under my Divine Concealment," Kaiju assured her, releasing her waist but taking her hand to guide her. "Walk with me."
They began to move through the hallways invisibly. The scene unfolding before the nun's eyes was heartbreaking. This was not a luxury hospital; it was an overwhelmed medical center, probably near a conflict zone or in a country struck by extreme poverty.
They passed through the emergency room. They saw adults broken by accidents, groaning in pain while doctors tried to contain hemorrhages. They passed through the psychiatric wing, where patients with empty gazes fought against the invisible demons of their mental illnesses, trapped in suffering that human medicine could barely sedate.
They went up to the pediatric wing. There, Asia had to bring a hand to her mouth to choke back a sob. Small children without hair, connected to dozens of tubes and dialysis machines, slept with pale and tired faces, victims of terminal illnesses and relentless leukemias. Beside the beds, mothers and fathers cried in silence, begging the heavens for a miracle science had already denied them.
Asia's instinct, the heart of the bearer of Twilight Healing, screamed at her to run toward them. She wanted to use her green light to heal their wounds, to return the smiles to those parents. But there were too many. Hundreds of souls suffering in a single building. Her power, no matter how sacred, would run out before she could help even a tenth of them.
The nun lowered her gaze, trembling with helplessness, while thick tears slid down her cheeks.
Kaiju stopped at the geometric center of the hospital, in a wide crossing of hallways where the suffering of the upper and lower floors seemed to converge.
He released Asia's hand and turned to look at her. His face, illuminated by the cold hallway lights, was devoid of his usual sarcasm or laziness. There was an ancient solemnity in his features, a weight that transcended his fifteen years of age.
"Asia," Kaiju said, his voice sounding gentle, yet resonating with an authority that seemed to make the air itself vibrate.
The nun lifted her tear-soaked face.
"I know they expelled you because you believed you were doing what was right," Kaiju continued, looking around. "I know the rules of the factions, of angels, of devils, and of the gods of this world. I know their arrogance."
Kaiju closed his one healthy eye for a second, and when he looked back at the blonde nun, he spoke with brutal and beautiful honesty.
"I may not be a god as powerful as the Father you believe in, Asia. And I certainly am not as kind, pure, or patient as the Son..." Kaiju lowered his hands, relaxing his posture. "But I am still a god, in some way. And sometimes, when I look at all this... I feel a kindness inside me telling me that I have the ability, and therefore the right, to help. Without asking for worship. Without asking for prayers in return."
Asia held her breath, feeling her heart beat hard in her chest.
Kaiju's eyes mutated. The earthly brown was devoured in an instant by an immaculate, bright, and deep radiance. The unmistakable and majestic Ocean Blue Color.
"Watch, Asia," whispered the God of Destruction. "This is my miracle."
Kaiju did not raise his hands to the sky or recite any chant. He simply released the energy.
A wave of blue light, liquid, warm, and absolute, burst from his body. It expanded spherically, passing through the concrete walls, floors, and ceilings at the speed of light, covering the entire immense hospital.
For the doctors and patients, it was as if a soft, warm sea breeze had caressed their faces in the middle of the night.
And then, the impossible happened.
In the emergency room, shattered bones gently cracked as they fused back together perfectly; hemorrhages closed without leaving scars, and accident victims opened their eyes, breathing without pain.
In the psychiatric wing, chemical fog and neurological pain dissipated. The brain chemistry of dozens of patients balanced instantly, returning to them a lucidity and mental peace they believed lost forever.
And upstairs, the heart-monitoring machines in the pediatric area went insane, not because of cardiac arrest, but because of the sudden and absolute normalization of vital signs. Cancer cells were eradicated at the molecular level. Terminal children opened their eyes, sitting up in their beds, with healthy color in their cheeks, asking their stunned parents why they were crying.
In a matter of seconds, illness, pain, and death were completely banished from that building.
Asia Argento fell to her knees in the middle of the hallway. She brought both hands to her chest, clutching the cross of her habit, while listening to the choked cries. They were no longer cries of pain. They were cries of joy, exclamations from astonished doctors, and sobs from parents embracing their healthy children.
She looked at the scarred boy. The blue light in Kaiju's eyes slowly began to fade, returning to their brown color, and on his lips appeared a small, tired smile of satisfaction.
The Church had taught Asia about the power of divine miracles, but she had never witnessed one. And now, that teenager who rejected titles and hid from the world had just given hundreds of families a second chance at life in the blink of an eye.
There were no more words. They were unnecessary. In that hallway of a faraway country, Asia understood that she had found a being infinitely more worthy of her faith and devotion than any institution that had betrayed her.
...
The silence in the Student Council office, usually a refuge of order and tranquility for the Sitri peerage, felt so dense tonight that it almost made breathing difficult.
Sona Sitri, the president and heiress of the clan, kept her gaze fixed on the monitor of her laptop. The screen's lights reflected the exhaustion accumulated after days of insomnia and paranoia.
POP!
A sharp, dry sound suddenly echoed, breaking the stillness of the night. It felt like a minimal rupture in the pressure of the air, a subtle wave that made the windowpanes vibrate slightly.
Beside her, Tsubaki Shinra lifted her gaze from her documents, her hand instinctively seeking her Naginata. "President? Did you feel that?"
Sona blinked, rubbing the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses, and let out a sigh of exhaustion. There was no trace of mana. No demonic fluctuations, nor sacred signatures.
"Ignore it, Tsubaki," Sona murmured, returning her attention to the screen. "It is probably the old wood of the building yielding to the wind, or a simple pocket of air. Our detection barriers are intact. We have infinitely greater problems than Kuoh's atmospheric pressure."
The vice president nodded, though the tension in her shoulders did not disappear, and lowered her guard.
Sona refocused her gaze on the holographic file floating on her monitor. The perfect grades, flawless medical histories, and seamless attendance records of Kaiju Hano, Sylvie Hano, and the newly added Asia Argento mocked her intellect from the screen.
"It is humiliating," Sona said, her voice stripped of its usual authority, stained with bitter resignation. "For years, we devils have believed ourselves the true rulers in the shadows of this city. We believed we had control over every variable, every human, and every threat."
Tsubaki remained silent, knowing her president needed to verbalize the tactical nightmare they were facing.
"That boy... Kaiju." Sona pronounced the name as if it were a forbidden spell. "Rias and I thought we were facing a skilled hunter or a dragon in disguise. But this... this is reality manipulation at a conceptual level. He rewrote the memory of more than a thousand people and altered national servers in a single night without emitting a single gram of detectable magical energy."
Sona slammed the computer shut, unable to continue looking at the divine forgery.
"If he wanted, he made it so Asia Argento had always existed here. If tomorrow he decides that Rias Gremory, you, or I are a nuisance, he will simply erase our existence. He will make our parents in the Underworld forget we were ever born. There would be no war. No revenge from the Maous. We would simply disappear from the tapestry of reality."
"President..." Tsubaki intervened, her tone reflecting contained fear. "What if the Fallen Angel faction decides to retaliate for Dohnaseek's annihilation? If they try to attack the academy or the city while searching for the nun..."
"Then may the gods have mercy on the Fallen Angels," Sona sentenced coldly. "If Kokabiel or any other leader of Grigori decides to step into Kuoh with hostile intentions, they will face something even the God of the Bible did not leave in his records. Our role in that scenario will be to stay out of the way."
The Sitri heiress rose from her chair and walked toward the window, looking at the empty campus bathed in moonlight, unaware that the sound she had dismissed minutes earlier was precisely the anomaly transporting itself from another continent.
"Rias has given the same order to her peerage. Issei Hyoudou will be our only façade of normality," Sona concluded, crossing her arms. "As long as Kaiju Hano wants to play at being an ordinary high school student, we will be the most ordinary students in the world. We will protect his 'illusion' of a peaceful life with our own lives if necessary. Because the instant that façade breaks, Kuoh will cease to exist."
"Don't be so paranoid, President. Chronic stress isn't good for devils your age."
The voice, monotonous, lazy, and mortally bored, did not come from the door, nor the hallway, nor the window. It came from the highest part of the room.
Sona Sitri froze. Her violet eyes opened wide, and her breathing caught in her throat. Tsubaki Shinra reacted through pure warrior instinct; in a fraction of a second, she materialized her Naginata in her hands and spun on her heels, aiming the sharp blade toward the origin of the sound.
There, sitting casually on the upper edge of the highest mahogany shelf in the office, with his legs dangling and his arms resting on his knees, was Kaiju Hano.
He wore his usual dark street clothes. He had emitted no mana fluctuation, opened no magic circle. He had simply been there, listening to every word of their surrender.
"You...!" Tsubaki clenched her teeth, placing herself between the boy and her president, though her hands trembled imperceptibly as she held the weapon.
"Lower that, Tsubaki," Sona ordered, forcing her own voice not to tremble. She knew perfectly well that, if that boy wanted, a physical weapon would serve absolutely no purpose. "Kaiju Hano... what are you doing here?"
Kaiju tilted his head, observing them with his one healthy eye, evaluating their terror with almost insulting indifference.
"I came to clear up a couple of things, since it seems you and Gremory's entourage can't stop going in circles over the matter," said the scarred young man, jumping down from the shelf. He landed on the wooden floor without making the slightest sound, as if gravity did not apply to him. "To begin with, calm down. I do not wish to exterminate the city of Kuoh. The humans here are peaceful, the food is acceptable, and the school is entertaining in its own way."
Kaiju slipped his hands into his pockets, taking one slow step toward the center of the office.
"The supernatural beings wandering around my territory, on the other hand, are another matter," he added, his tone dropping an octave, suddenly becoming heavy. "I think it was about time I started familiarizing myself with you... devils."
Sona kept her chin high, using every drop of her aristocratic pride to avoid stepping back. "If you have been listening, then you know we have no hostile intentions toward you, nor toward Sylvie, nor toward Asia Argento. We know our place on the board."
"I know." Kaiju sketched a small, cynical smile. "From what I just heard, you already know me, and I certainly know you. But there is one detail you do not seem to fully understand about how I operate."
Kaiju took his right hand out of his pocket. He raised his index finger to the height of his face. At the tip of his finger, a minuscule sphere of purple-and-black energy began to condense. It was the size of a marble, but the spatial pressure it emitted began to crack the window glass and make the office walls vibrate. A mini-Hakai.
Sona and Tsubaki's eyes fixed on that tiny sphere of pure conceptual annihilation, paralyzed by instinctive panic.
"A couple of days ago, when I sensed that Issei had been transformed into one of you, I was about to go to the old Occult Club building and exterminate all of you in the fastest and most painful way possible," Kaiju confessed, his voice devoid of any emotion, making the tiny sphere of destruction spin above his finger with boredom. "That idiot is a disaster. He tells me how he suffers every day; he says he has an alarm clock with a tsundere voice that is supposed to wake him up, but it doesn't manage to, and he always ends up mumbling on the floor because he falls out of bed."
Kaiju let out a lazy snort, remembering his classmate's morning complaints.
"The fool won't stop whining about how the morning sun is totally bad for him and how sunlight feels as if it penetrates through his skin, something he simply can't stand," Kaiju continued, stopping the destructive sphere's spin. "You had an innocent human suffering the consequences of your selfish war. I was ready to erase you from the map."
Tsubaki took half a step back, swallowing as she understood how close they had been to absolute death.
"But..." Kaiju lowered his hand slightly, shrugging. "It turns out that, despite his complaints, Issei was strangely and stupidly happy being a devil under Rias Gremory's skirts. Since he was happy with his new life, I saw no problem and decided to cancel your execution."
With a casual movement, like someone tossing a coin into the air, Kaiju threw the mini-Hakai directly toward Sona's massive and elegant oak desk.
There was no explosion. No fire or smoke. At the exact instant the small sphere touched the surface, the immense desk, along with all documents, files, the computer, and the seals of the Sitri family, simply ceased to exist. It was erased from the fabric of reality, leaving the space completely empty and the floor intact.
Sona Sitri lost her breath, falling to her knees before the empty space where her desk had been, her analytical mind collapsing before the physical impossibility of what she had just witnessed.
Kaiju turned around, showing them his back with total tranquility. Before vanishing into the air through a subtle spatial jump, he slightly turned his head, fixing his one eye on the terrified heiress.
"Consider this a friendly warning, President. Tell Gremory and her pets," Kaiju sentenced, his voice sounding like distant thunder. "Tomorrow at this hour, in the old building, it is time for all of you to know who the true king of Kuoh is."