Kuoh Town has two layers at night.
The surface layer is the white glow of convenience stores, laughter spilling out of izakayas, the chime of last-train announcements. Ordinary people live in this layer. They walk the sidewalks, eyes down on their phones, glancing up at traffic lights now and then before moving on. Their world contains no magic circles, no fallen angels, no creatures that kill with light in dark alleys.
The bottom layer is something else entirely.
Kyoya Hibari could see the bottom layer now.
Not metaphorically. Literally. His post-transformation vision turned darkness into a deep-gray transparency — every alley, every shadow, every corner tucked beneath an eave rendered to him like film stock with the exposure cranked up. He could make out the iris color of a crow perched on a utility pole a hundred meters away. He could read the silhouette of a person moving behind curtains on the third floor of a building across the street.
He could see the city's veins.
Thursday night. 10:23 p.m. Hibari walked south along the shopping street, crossed the intersection in front of the station, and turned onto the narrow road at the edge of the residential district. He had walked this route countless times — the Disciplinary Committee Chairman's night patrol, covering a three-kilometer radius around Kuoh Academy.
He used to patrol to catch students breaking rules. Curfew violations, smoking, fighting, loitering in parks.
Now he patrolled because —
He needed to walk.
The power the Rook piece had poured into him moved through his bloodstream like mercury — heavy, burning, restless. He could feel his muscles twitching beneath his jacket, like an animal testing the bars of a cage. Suppressing that force through a full school day was exhausting enough on its own. He had cracked three door handles, crushed a ballpoint pen, and left a fist-sized dent in a hallway wall when he'd misjudged a corner.
He needed to burn it off.
He needed this body — which no longer belonged to a human — to learn where its limits were.
The tonfa shifted faintly in his sleeve, a whisper of metal. Hibari pushed his hands into his pockets and exhaled. The April night wind carried the sweet-rot smell of late cherry blossoms mixed with asphalt and drainage. His sense of smell broke every scent into separate channels, like a radio receiver too sensitive to filter anything out.
Noisy. But he was learning to tune it.
He passed the park and swept a glance at the man sleeping on the bench. Heart rate 62, body temperature low, the sour edge of metabolizing alcohol. Not a threat.
He passed the convenience store. The glass door threw his reflection back at him. Black jacket, white shirt, Disciplinary Committee armband. Nothing different from before.
But he knew where the difference was.
It was in his heartbeat. His resting rate used to be 58. Now it was 44. The Rook piece had turned his heart into a more efficient pump — each beat moving nearly twice the blood volume it once had.
It was in his bones. He used to feel their weight. Now he didn't — not because they were lighter, but because the density of his skeleton and the load capacity of his muscles had reached some kind of perfect equilibrium, making his body feel like a precision instrument that had been recalibrated from the ground up.
It was in the faint cracking sound every paving stone made under his feet.
He was still learning.
Learning how to open a door with the right amount of force instead of crushing the frame. Learning how to hold a pen without pulverizing it. Learning how to walk without leaving cracks in the ground.
It irritated him.
Not because he couldn't do it. He was learning fast; his control improved every day.
It irritated him because he shouldn't have to learn these things at all. Three days ago he was human. Three days ago his body was his own. Three days ago he didn't have to calculate how many newtons a door could withstand before reaching for the handle.
That red-haired woman.
She had pushed a chess piece into his body.
His anger was not explosive — Kyoya Hibari's anger never exploded. It ran at a constant temperature. Like a bed of coals held at a precise heat. It never burned outward. It never went out.
He walked past the church.
Kuoh Town's church was a white Western-style building at the edge of the residential district, enclosed by a low stone wall. The church was dark at this hour; the spire's silhouette cut against the moonlit sky like a blade thrust into the clouds.
Hibari had never felt anything about this building before. It was just a building.
Now it was different.
The moment he drew close, a faint layer of goosebumps rose across his skin. Not fear — revulsion. The invisible resistance of two like-pole magnets being forced together. His body was telling him: something in there is fundamentally wrong for what you are now.
Sacred power.
He was a devil now. Churches were a devil's natural enemy.
Hibari's brow tightened.
Not from discomfort. From the fact that his body was making decisions for him — telling him what to stay away from.
He didn't like that.
He didn't like his own body telling him what to do.
He stood deliberately in front of the church doors for three full seconds. He let the repulsion press against his skin like fine sandpaper. Then he turned and kept walking.
Not retreat. There was simply nothing here worth biting to death.
He turned into the alley beside the church.
And then he caught a scent.
Sweet.
Not food-sweet. Not flower-sweet. Something more fundamental — like a single drop of honey dissolved in clean water, harmless and transparent and drawing. Something that made you want to move closer.
But beneath that sweetness, something else was hiding.
Hibari's footsteps stopped.
His nose was working through it. Devil-enhanced smell functioned like a mass spectrometer, pulling every molecule apart for analysis. The surface layer was that sweetness — warm, luminous, like sunlight on cotton.
The bottom layer was —
Ash.
No. Deeper than ash. The residue left by something that had been burned, torn apart, uprooted from wherever it had originally belonged. Like the smell of soil clinging to a flower's roots after it's been ripped from the ground — carrying the scent of fracture, of loss, of incompleteness.
And threading between those two layers, faint as a shadow line —
Fallen angel.
Not the smell of a fallen angel itself. The smell of something that had been touched by one. Soaked in that power for too long. Like a piece of cloth left in dye until the color had seeped into the fibers — even after washing, the stain remained deep inside.
Hibari's eyes narrowed.
His body produced a clear response to this scent — not the same revulsion as the church, but something more primal. Disgust. Instinctive, physiological, rising from the marrow. Like biting into rotten food and feeling the stomach prepare to reject it before the mind has even processed what happened.
He followed the scent with his eyes.
At the far end of the alley, at the edge of a streetlight's halo, someone was standing.
A nun.
Golden hair. Green eyes. Black-and-white habit, white veil. Her frame was small — she barely reached his chin. She looked about his age, maybe younger.
She was holding a cardboard box. From inside it came a faint, fuzzy sound — a small animal. Probably a kitten.
She was clearly lost.
She stood at the mouth of the alley, looking left and right, her face carrying an expression of near-childlike bewilderment. Her lips were moving — talking to herself. Hibari's hearing caught the fragments, like words scattered on the wind:
"…this is… hmm… the map said turn right… but I already turned right three times… hmm hmm…"
She looked completely harmless.
Her golden hair formed a soft halo under the streetlight. Her green eyes were clean in a way that suggested nothing complicated had ever settled in them. Her heart rate was 72 — steady, healthy, carrying no trace of hostility.
An ordinary nun who had gotten lost.
Then she turned her head and saw Hibari.
"Oh —!"
Her face lit up. Not wariness, not fear. The pure relief of someone who had been wandering a strange city too long and had finally spotted another person.
"Um, excuse me —!" She took two quick steps toward him; the small animal in the box protested. "Is this Kuoh Town? I'm looking for a church — a white church — I think I took a wrong turn somewhere…"
Her Japanese carried a clear foreign accent. The grammar slipped occasionally, as though she was assembling sentences in another language first and then translating them over.
She stopped three meters in front of him.
At three meters, the scent sharpened. Sweet surface, ash underneath, the fallen angel's dark thread. Three currents at different temperatures, braided together, washing over his senses.
His stomach contracted slightly.
Disgust.
Not toward the girl herself. Her heartbeat was steady, her expression genuine; she really was just a lost nun.
Toward the scent on her.
That soaked-in, fallen-angel smell. That been-touched smell. Identical in character to the been-touched smell on himself — only from a different source. His was Rias's devil chess piece. Hers was some form of fallen angel power.
Two kinds of been-touched, overlapping in front of him.
He thought of the Rook piece in his chest. That thing that didn't belong to him, that had been forced inside, that had turned him from human to devil.
He looked at the nun in front of him.
She was still waiting for an answer. Her green eyes held expectation and a thread of unease.
"Um… sir? Are you all right?"
Hibari pulled his hands out of his pockets.
He walked past her.
No answer. No eye contact. No pause.
As though she didn't exist.
"Oh — wait, please —!"
Her voice rose behind him. Confused, deflated. The animal in the box cried out again.
Hibari kept walking.
His pace didn't quicken or slow. He simply walked through the alley, turned onto the main road, and left that sweetness and ash and fallen-angel residue behind him.
Fifty meters out, the scent finally cleared from his senses entirely.
He exhaled.
Not relief. He was expelling the last trace of it from his nasal cavity.
That nun.
The smell on her was wrong. Not the girl herself — the things surrounding her were wrong. The fallen angel saturation was too deep to have come from brief contact.
She had been near a fallen angel for a long time.
Or more precisely — she had been used by one for a long time.
Hibari didn't care about that.
It was her problem. Not his. Her scent made him uncomfortable, so he had left. That was the entire logic.
He kept walking.
The night wind carried the last few cherry blossom petals across the street. The tonfa shifted quietly in his sleeve.
The restlessness inside him hadn't faded. The Rook's power moved through his bloodstream like a caged animal pacing a space too small for it. He needed to burn it off. He needed this force to find an outlet.
He turned toward the forest.
East of Kuoh Town, a stretch of forest ran to the foot of the mountains. People came to walk or jog there during the day, but after dark almost no one went near it. Too dark. The streetlights only reached the parking lot at the forest entrance; beyond that was pure black.
For Hibari, darkness was no longer a problem.
His vision rendered the forest as a precise deep-gray blueprint. Every tree's position, every branch's angle, every fallen leaf's outline was clear. He could see a beetle thirty meters away working its way over a stone.
He walked into the forest.
The sound of his shoes on dead leaves was amplified in the silence. Somewhere, an owl called. From the distant highway came the low-frequency tremor of a passing truck.
Then he caught another scent.
No. Not one. Many.
Rot. Distortion. Several different smells — decaying flesh, rust, an acid with no name — stirred together and baked at high heat. Each one carried a quality of brokenness, like a shattered mirror, every shard reflecting a different warped image.
Hibari's footsteps stopped.
His body was responding.
But this time it wasn't disgust. It wasn't revulsion.
It was —
Anticipation.
Muscles tightening. Heart rate climbing from 44 to 52. Pupils dilating slightly. The tonfa vibrated once in his sleeve, as though it had sensed its owner's mood.
The sources of those smells were moving. Deep in the forest. More than one — at least —
He closed his eyes and let his sense of smell fully expand.
Five. No, six. Spread across a fan-shaped area roughly two hundred meters ahead. Moving, but not in any organized way. Chaotic, hungry, irrational wandering. Like a pack of dogs that had lost all direction, searching for anything they could tear into.
Hibari opened his eyes.
The corner of his mouth moved.
A very, very small arc. If anyone had been present, they might have read that expression as —
A smile.
He drew his hand from his pocket. The tonfa slid from his sleeve into his palm, cold metal against skin. His fingers closed around the shaft, feeling that familiar weight — and then he noticed something different.
Lighter.
Not the tonfa itself. Him. The Rook piece's power boost had turned this weapon — already as precise to him as a scalpel — into something even more precise. The surplus of strength meant he could make finer adjustments, finer corrections, more choices in the instant of a swing.
Before, he had used the tonfa to cut.
Now he could use it to carve.
He walked deeper into the forest.
The first one appeared eighty meters out.
Its body was twice the size of a human. A hunched frame covered in gray-black carapace, dark-red muscle tissue visible where the shell had split away, like a giant reptile with half its skin peeled off. Its head had no clear features — only a mouth split to the ears, lined with three rows of irregular fangs.
A stray devil.
Hibari had encountered the term in Rias's explanations — no, he hadn't listened to Rias explain anything. He had pieced it together from fragments overheard outside the Occult Research Club's door and from materials he'd looked up himself afterward.
Stray devils: devil servants who had lost or been separated from their masters. Without order, their reason collapsed and they regressed into pure monsters. They were the common enemy of every faction — angels killed them on sight, fallen angels killed them on sight, proper devils killed them on sight. Because they belonged to no order. They were bugs in the world's system.
Belonging to no order.
Hibari found that description mildly interesting.
Only mildly. Because this thing's "belonging to no order" was fundamentally different from his own — it had lost its order and become a beast. He had refused order from the beginning.
The former was a fall. The latter was a choice.
The stray devil found him.
That split mouth released a low, guttural shriek. Black fluid dripped from between the three rows of fangs, hitting the dead leaves below with a faint hiss of corrosion. Its body dropped into a crouch — predator's stance.
Then it charged.
Fast enough. For an ordinary human, it would have been like a runaway truck. The ground cracked under its feet, tree roots snapped, dead leaves exploded upward in its wake.
Hibari stood still.
He was calculating.
Not its speed or trajectory — his body would handle those automatically. He was calculating himself. Testing how much the Rook piece had boosted his reaction time, how much it had amplified his striking power, how much recoil his body could absorb.
This wasn't a fight.
This was calibration.
When the stray devil closed to two meters, Hibari moved.
He didn't dodge. He stepped forward — into it.
The tonfa traced an arc.
Not full force. He deliberately used what he estimated to be thirty percent. He wanted to know what thirty percent looked like.
The answer was —
The stray devil's head carapace shattered under the tonfa's impact like an eggshell. Cracks radiated outward from the point of contact in every direction; gray-black shell fragments scattered, exposing the dark-red, fragile tissue beneath. The entire head was knocked ninety degrees off-axis by the force, and the cervical vertebrae snapped with a clean, sharp crack.
The body was still moving forward on momentum, but it had no direction left. It veered sideways into a pine tree, snapped the trunk in half, and collapsed to the ground. Two convulsions. Then nothing.
Hibari looked at his right hand.
Thirty percent.
That was thirty percent.
His hand hadn't trembled. Before, a full-force strike against something hard would send a faint vibration back through his wrist and forearm. Now thirty percent had shattered a carapace harder than steel, and his hand was as steady as if he'd been turning a page.
Rook. Superior attack and defense.
Not just a numerical increase on paper. The entire power framework had been rebuilt. His old fighting style had been about squeezing every last drop of performance from a human body. Now that ceiling was gone — or rather, it had been pushed back to a distance he couldn't yet see.
He needed more data.
He walked deeper into the forest.
The second stray devil was larger than the first.
It dropped from the canopy — a creature with bat wings and a lizard's body, wingspan roughly four meters. Its attack method was a high-speed aerial dive, using the product of mass and velocity to generate impact force sufficient to crush rock.
Hibari used fifty percent.
One strike.
An upward diagonal swing. The tonfa head connected precisely with the sternum. That position was the structural weak point of any flying creature — the sternum anchored all the flight muscles, and shattering it meant shattering the ability to fly.
The sternum broke. The flight muscles lost their anchor; the wings became two useless membranes in an instant. It fell from the air and hit the ground, throwing up a ring of dirt and leaves.
Hibari stepped onto its back and delivered a follow-up strike as it tried to roll over. Cervical vertebrae.
Silence.
Fifty percent. Sternum. His wrist registered a faint feedback — not pain, just the vibration of force transmission. Negligible.
He logged the data.
The third came crashing out of the undergrowth on his right. Smaller than the first two, but faster. Its body was insectoid — a dozen legs cycling rapidly across the ground in a dense, rapid rhythm. Its mouthparts were a pair of hooked blades like a mantis's forelegs.
Hibari tried a different approach.
No power. Only speed.
The tonfa spun in his hand — a micro-adjustment of his fingers rotated it one hundred eighty degrees, switching from forward grip to reverse. Then he drove the reverse end — the sharper tip — forward like a javelin.
A thrust.
The tip punched through the center of the insectoid stray devil's mouthparts and exited through the back of its skull. The precision gave him a faint, quiet satisfaction. Before, a thrust like that would have required at least 0.3 seconds of aim. Now it took 0.1 — the Rook's power hadn't only boosted strength and defense; dynamic visual acuity and neural response speed had made a qualitative leap as well.
He pulled the tonfa free. Shook off the black fluid.
Three down.
The restlessness inside him had eased slightly. Only slightly. He needed more.
He kept moving. His sense of smell told him the remaining three were roughly a hundred and twenty meters ahead. Clustered together. Possibly feeding.
He picked up his pace.
The fourth and fifth appeared simultaneously.
They were circling a fallen tree, tearing at the carcass of a deer. Two large stray devils, both over three meters — one quadrupedal, one bipedal but with a severely curved spine.
Hibari gave them no time to react.
He broke into a run from twenty meters out. The Rook's power flooded into his legs; the ground cracked beneath each footfall, leaving fist-deep impressions. Twenty meters disappeared in 1.2 seconds.
He cut between the two stray devils.
Left tonfa first — horizontal sweep.
The quadruped's forelegs were struck clean through. The sound of bone breaking was like snapping a dry branch. It lost the support of its front half and drove its head into the mud.
Then right tonfa — downward chop.
The curved spine of the bipedal one was its most vulnerable point. Hibari's tonfa came from above and landed precisely on the third lumbar vertebra. The spine shattered; the lower body lost all nerve signal in an instant, and it collapsed like a snake cut in two.
Two strikes. Two targets. Time elapsed —
Under two seconds.
Hibari stood between the two downed stray devils. They weren't dead yet — still writhing and shrieking on the ground. He calmly delivered a finishing blow to each. The force was exactly right — just enough to end them, not a fraction wasted.
He was starting to appreciate this power.
Not because he was stronger. He had been strong enough before.
It was the precision. The Rook's power let him calibrate the force of every strike exactly. Before, his choices had been strike or don't strike. Now he could choose which bone to break.
This was good.
This turned violence into craft.
The sixth stray devil had tried to flee while he was handling the fourth and fifth. It was the smallest of the six — barely half a human's size, like some kind of maximally degenerated dwarf-form creature. Its intelligence seemed marginally higher than the others — at least it knew to run.
Hibari didn't chase it.
He picked up a fragment of stone his footfall had cracked loose — roughly fist-sized — and threw it with a force entirely unlike anything he'd used on the stray devils.
The stone fragment cut through the air with a sharp, thin whistle.
It struck the dwarf-form stray devil in the back of the skull. Millimeter-precise.
Distance: seventy-eight meters.
The stray devil fell face-first. One convulsion. Then nothing.
Six.
All of them handled.
Hibari stood in the forest clearing scattered with six stray devil corpses. Moonlight filtered through a gap in the clouds and fell across his face. The tonfa was coated in black fluid; a few drops had spattered onto the hem of his jacket.
His breathing was steady. Heart rate 56 — only 12 above resting.
Thirty to seventy percent force. Reaction windows of 0.1 to 1.2 seconds. Strike precision controllable down to individual bones. Throwing precision within five centimeters of target at seventy-eight meters.
That was tonight's data.
He slid the tonfa back into his sleeve and was turning to leave.
Then —
"…Oh."
A voice. From the tree line behind him. Not a stray devil's shriek. A human voice — no, not human. A devil's voice. Carrying exactly the right amount of surprise and a laugh pressed very low.
"Akeno. Look at this."
Rias Gremory's voice.
Hibari turned around.
She stood in the tree shadows at the edge of the clearing. Her red hair moved in the moonlight like dark-crimson silk. Three people stood beside her — Akeno Himejima, Yuuto Kiba, Koneko. Issei Hyoudou was not among them.
All four were in Kuoh Academy uniforms. Rias wasn't holding a teacup — instead she held a posture Hibari hadn't seen on her before. Her right hand was slightly raised, fingertips trailing a faint dark-red luminescence. The residue of a magic circle. They had transferred in.
She was looking at the bodies on the ground. Six of them. Their positions traced a clear path — from the forest entrance to this clearing, covered in under five minutes.
"The stray devil signatures went dark too fast. I expected at least fifteen minutes." Rias's tone held no reproach — only a kind of curiosity that had just been confirmed.
She walked into the clearing. She paused over the first corpse and looked down. Head carapace shattered. One-hit kill.
The second. Sternum shattered. One hit.
The third. Mouthparts pierced through. One thrust.
She stopped between the fourth and fifth. The two bodies lay less than three meters apart; their fatal wounds were in completely different locations — forelegs and lumbar spine — struck from entirely different angles, but clearly dealt within the same instant.
"Two targets in under two seconds." She said it quietly. Not to Hibari. To herself.
Then she looked toward the sixth, seventy-eight meters away. Thrown kill.
The corner of her mouth moved.
Hibari watched her.
"What are you doing here."
Not a question. A statement. He hadn't needed her to come. Her presence here was itself an irritant.
"Stray devils fall within a servant's area of responsibility," Rias said. "When stray devil signatures appeared in this territory, I had an obligation as its administrator to respond."
"It's already handled."
"I can see that."
Silence.
Rias said nothing more. She turned and glanced at Akeno.
Akeno smiled.
That smile was different from her usual cool composure. It carried something — Hibari wasn't sure how to name it — the expression an adult makes when they've seen something genuinely interesting.
"President." Akeno's voice was soft and even. "There are more signatures nearby. Not stray devils — a second group. They were probably drawn in by the combat energy from just now."
Rias nodded.
She didn't look at Hibari. But what she said next was clearly meant for him.
"Since you've finished your warm-up — you wouldn't mind watching how we do it?"
Hibari didn't answer.
But he didn't leave either.
That was enough.
They came from the north side of the forest.
The second group of stray devils. More than the first — at least ten. Larger, too. They had been drawn by the residual devil energy released when the first group died, like sharks following blood in the water.
The moment they surged into the clearing —
"Kiba."
Rias said one name.
Yuuto Kiba's silhouette vanished.
Not invisibility. Pure speed. His figure disappeared from Hibari's field of vision for 0.3 seconds — then reappeared between the two stray devils charging at the front.
A sword was in his hand.
Not an ordinary sword. The blade was semi-transparent, radiating a faint blue-white luminescence; frost flowers crystallized in the air around the edge.
One slash. Horizontal.
The lead stray devil was cut in two at the waist. The cut surface was smooth as a laser incision. The severed cross-section froze instantly — blue-white frost spread outward from the cut and covered the entire lower half in 0.5 seconds.
The upper half was still airborne on momentum. Kiba pivoted, reversed his grip, and split it into two pieces as well.
The second one. Kiba's toe touched the ground lightly and his body glided three meters as though gravity had briefly forgotten him. The sword's angle shifted — this time an upward diagonal cut, the blade entering from the groin and exiting through the right shoulder.
Two. Two cuts. Time elapsed —
One second.
Hibari watched.
His eyes narrowed slightly. Not in admiration. In analysis. Kiba's speed was high — possibly a fraction above his own current level. But the source of that speed wasn't raw physical ability; it was the acceleration that came with the Knight piece's enhancement. In other words, it was piece-boosted speed.
And that sword — Sword Birth. Capable of generating magic swords with different attributes in an instant. That last cut had been ice-attribute.
Yuuto Kiba. Knight. Speed-type. Close-range swordsman.
Hibari filed the data.
"Akeno."
Rias's second name.
Akeno Himejima moved to the edge of the clearing. Her movement was nothing like Kiba's — she was unhurried, slow, carrying an ease that bordered on elegance. She raised her left hand, fingers drawing together.
Then she smiled.
That smile sent a thin current of cold down Hibari's spine.
Not from fear. Because he saw something in that smile that resembled something in himself —
Enjoyment.
She was enjoying the violence that was about to happen.
Lightning.
The arc that erupted from Akeno's fingertips lit the entire forest. Not one bolt — dozens. Yellow-white lightning branched and wove and spread through the air like living things, each strand carrying enough voltage to ionize the air around it.
The lightning fell into the charging mass of stray devils.
Three were struck simultaneously. Current tore through their bodies; carapaces cracked under the heat; muscle tissue seized in the arcs. Their shrieks were swallowed by thunder.
When the light faded, three stray devils lay on the ground. Smoke rose from their bodies. Their shells were covered in lightning-shaped burn marks, as though branded with a pattern.
Akeno lowered her fingers. She turned her head and gave Hibari a smile.
"My. Was that satisfying to watch, Hibari?"
Hibari didn't respond.
But he noted it internally: Akeno Himejima. Queen. Long-range annihilation type. Lightning-based. Extremely wide area of effect. Destructive capacity —
Very high.
"Koneko."
Koneko set down — when had she gotten candy? She crumpled the wrapper and pushed it into her pocket.
Then she launched herself forward like a cannonball.
No weapon. No magic. Nothing extra.
Just her fists.
Her frame was the smallest of anyone present — shorter even than some of the stray devils' legs. But when her fist connected with the first stray devil's abdomen, the creature — five times her size — was launched backward as though hit by a truck, bounced twice across the ground, and snapped three trees before stopping.
Rook.
The same piece as Hibari.
He watched Koneko's fighting style. She was small and quiet, her expression unchanging throughout. But every punch she threw carried a force that simply refused to be argued with. The second stray devil tried to sweep her with its tail — she extended one hand, a hand that looked like a child's hand, and caught that tail, which was thicker than her waist.
Then she swung the entire stray devil into the air.
Like wringing out a wet towel. The stray devil's body traced an arc and was slammed into the ground. The earth cracked. The stray devil convulsed in the crater and went still.
Rook.
Same piece. Same superior attack and defense.
But a completely different style.
Koneko was channeling the Rook's power directly through her body and close-range combat. No weapon, no technical variation. Pure force, applied as a blunt instrument.
Hibari —
Hibari used a weapon. Precise strikes carrying the logic of martial arts. The tonfa wasn't just an extension of his strength; it was an amplifier of his control. He didn't just knock opponents down — he chose where to hit, how much force to use, at what angle.
Same piece. Two entirely different philosophies of violence.
Koneko finished the last stray devil, brushed the dust from her hands, walked back to Rias's side, pulled another candy from her pocket, unwrapped it, and put it in her mouth.
Expression unchanged throughout.
Hibari looked at her.
Just once.
But what was in that look — if anyone could have read it — was not hostility, and not indifference.
It was a degree of acknowledgment.
Very small. Almost nonexistent. But real.
Last was Rias.
The final two stray devils were the last to enter the clearing. Larger than anything before them — nearly four meters, covered in heavy black carapace, spraying black corrosive fluid from their mouths.
Kiba, Akeno, and Koneko all looked toward Rias simultaneously. No one moved. They were waiting for her signal — or more precisely, they knew these two were the president's to handle personally.
Rias stood in the center of the clearing.
She raised her right hand.
Dark-red light surged from her palm. Not the dazzling flicker of lightning — something heavier, more oppressive, bending like light at the edge of a black hole.
Power of Destruction.
The Gremory bloodline ability. The obliterating force capable of annihilating any existence.
The light condensed into a sphere. Roughly the size of a basketball. Dark red and black woven together, tiny lightning sparks jumping continuously across the surface. The air around the sphere was warped — Hibari could see light bending at its edges, as though space itself was being affected by the thing's presence.
Then she let go.
The sphere flew.
Slowly. Slowly enough that the stray devils had time to see it, react to it, attempt to dodge it.
They didn't dodge.
Because when the sphere reached three meters from them, it expanded.
From basketball-sized to two meters in diameter. The expansion was fast enough that both stray devils were completely engulfed in dark-red light.
And then —
Gone.
Not an explosion. Not combustion. Not fragmentation.
Gone.
The two stray devils' bodies were — erased — inside the sphere of the Power of Destruction. Carapace, muscle, bone, organs — every component was broken down inside that dark-red light into something smaller than atoms, and then reduced to nothing.
Three seconds.
From solid matter to void. Three seconds.
The sphere dissipated. Where it had existed, nothing remained. No bodies. No residue. No smell of burning. Only a shallow circular depression in the ground — even the earth had been stripped away by a layer.
Rias lowered her hand.
She turned and looked at Hibari.
No expression of showing off. No implication of did you see that. She simply looked at him, calm and level, her blue-green eyes in the moonlight like two pools with no visible bottom.
"This is the devil's world."
Her voice was quiet.
"You're already part of it. Whether you accept that or not."
Hibari looked at the circular depression in the ground.
That thing — the Power of Destruction — could annihilate any existence. If it were aimed at him?
Would his body also become nothing in three seconds?
He didn't know the answer.
But he knew one thing.
His tonfa was in his sleeve. His heart rate was 48. His breathing was steady.
He was not afraid.
"— Mm."
One word.
Then he turned and walked away.
Behind him, Rias watched that black-clad figure move through the moonlit forest. The curve at the corner of her mouth was very faint.
Akeno came to stand beside her.
"President. He was observing every one of us during the fight."
"I know."
"More than observing. He was analyzing." Akeno's smile faded slightly. "He was logging our ability ceilings, attack ranges, reaction speeds. He was studying us as potential opponents."
"I know."
"…Doesn't that concern you?"
Rias shook her head.
"The fact that he's analyzing us means he's already incorporated us into his world."
Her blue-green eyes stayed fixed on the direction Hibari had disappeared.
"Someone who truly ignores us wouldn't spend time analyzing us."
Kiba put away his sword and walked over. His expression carried a complicated admiration.
"The way those six stray devils died… every single one had a different fatal wound. He wasn't killing them — he was using them to test his own power. The first at thirty percent, the second at fifty, the third using speed instead of force, the fourth and fifth testing simultaneous multi-target handling, the sixth testing throwing precision."
He paused.
"That was a systematic self-calibration process. He completed in under five minutes what most newly reincarnated devils need months to assess about their own power."
"So?" Rias asked.
"So —" Kiba gave a wry smile. "Even as a devil, his thinking is completely that of a combat genius. He wasn't fighting. He was building a database."
Koneko finished her candy.
Her gaze moved toward the trees where Hibari had gone.
"…Same piece as me."
Her voice was barely audible, nearly swallowed by the night wind.
"But — different."
She couldn't articulate where the difference was. But her instincts told her: the way that person used the Rook's power was not in the same dimension as her own.
She used power to crush.
He used power to carve.
Rias drew a slow breath. The night wind pulled her red hair back behind her.
"Let's go. Tonight's patrol is done."
She looked one last time into the depths of the forest.
"He'll come back."
Akeno raised an eyebrow. "You're certain?"
"Because he learned two things tonight." Rias opened a magic circle; dark-red light illuminated her face. "First, that his power is stronger than he thought. And second —"
The corner of her mouth lifted slightly.
"That there are things in this world stronger than him."
The magic circle flared. Four silhouettes vanished in the red light.
The clearing held only stray devil corpses and moonlight.
And one direction —
The direction Kyoya Hibari had walked away.