Issei
The new presence didn’t descend onto the battlefield.
It cut into it.
One instant Kokabiel was still smiling over the whole ruined school like the night belonged to him, and the next a white figure was already there floating above the middle of everything, so sudden that my eyes never properly caught the movement.
Kokabiel was the first to give it a name.
“The Vanishing Dragon.”
That made my whole body lock up.
White armor.
A presence as beautiful as it was unsettling.
The opposite of the red power around my own body in every way that mattered and somehow still recognizable on instinct alone.
Ddraig’s voice rumbled through my gauntlet before I could even ask.
[Albion.]
The name made me react in fear for a moment.
The White Dragon Emperor.
The Hakuryuukou.
My opposite.
The one Ddraig told me I would fight to the death with.
Kokabiel clicked his tongue and leaned back in the air just enough that I knew he recognized the threat immediately.
“One of the Longinus, White Dragon Emperor’s Light Wings, Divine Dividing. And you’re already in armor mode too. So you’ve already achieved your balance breaker, Divine Dividing Scale Mail. Just like your counterpart with the Boosted Gear. It appears that both of you are here to challenge me.”
The white-armored figure didn’t bother answering with his own name right away.
Kokabiel began to speak again.
“I don’t care if you are here to challenge your counterpart. If you get in my way I-“
And then blood flew.
A black wing tore free from Kokabiel’s back so suddenly that it took my brain a second to understand what had happened.
The white figure stood a short distance away with the severed wing in one hand like it was something disgusting he had plucked from the air.
I never saw him move.
Not even a blur.
Just before and after.
“It’s like the wing of a sickly crow,” he said, voice younger than I thought he’d be. He sounded calm, almost bored. “It’s quite a disgusting color isn’t it? Azazel’s wings are much darker. They have the color of true darkness, you know?”
Kokabiel’s face twisted.
“Y-You! My wing!”
The White Dragon Emperor laughed quietly.
“You’re a Fallen aren’t you? It’s why your wings are like this. Or maybe I should make your title more accurate. It doesn’t make sense for a “Fallen” to be able to fly does it?”
The insult landed almost as hard as the blow.
Kokabiel snarled.
“Vanishing Dragon! You’re just Azazel’s pet! You dare to oppose me!?”
At last the white-armored figure answered.
“My name is Albion.”
And then his gauntlet’s voice rang out.
[Divide.]
The effect was immediate.
It wasn’t something flashy or explosive. It was more sinister than that.
The pressure around Kokabiel dropped.
Sharply.
So sharply that even I, standing on the ground who couldn’t even feel how strong Kokabiel was before, felt the change at once.
Half the light-spears Kokabiel had suspended above the field vanished as his power dropped.
Albion spoke as if explaining a lesson he expected us to understand.
“The primary ability of Divine Dividing. Like it’s counterpart every ten seconds I can half the power of something and take it for myself. You’re out of time Kokabiel. The longer you take to fight me the worse it will be for you. By the end you’ll be so weak a common human could beat you in a fight.”
That was insane.
No.
It was worse than insane.
It was perfectly designed to humiliate something stronger than him by forcing it to watch itself become lesser in real time.
Ddraig almost sounded pleased inside my arm.
[This is your goal partner, watch.]
Kokabiel launched forward.
Or tried to.
Albion was already somewhere else.
A spear of light stabbed through empty air.
A sword of light followed.
Albion swatted them aside with his arm like they were annoying insects.
Another [Divide] echoed across the field.
Kokabiel got angrier.
Albion got faster.
Their fight stopped looking like a battle and started looking like a demonstration of what it meant to be outclassed.
I had never seen anything like it.
Kokabiel—the same Kokabiel who had blocked Buchou’s boosted attack, smashed Xenovia aside, nearly cut Koneko-chan to ribbons with his wings, stood above all of us like a disaster given flesh—was being played with.
Like he was nothing.
He chased and missed.
He cast and failed to land cleanly.
Every few seconds Albion’s voice or his gauntlet’s voice rang out again, and Kokabiel’s aura dropped another step.
[Divide.]
“Damn you!”
[Divide.]
The pressure around Kokabiel fell far enough that I could feel the difference without needing Ddraig to explain it to me anymore.
Ten-winged monster. Biblical battlefield freak. Ancient enemy of Devils.
And he kept getting smaller.
After one more exchange, Albion sighed.
“So that’s it? You’re already at the level of a middle-level Fallen Angel, huh. This turned out to be boring. I thought that a leader of the Gregori would be more entertaining.”
Then he vanished from my sight and reappeared with his fist buried in Kokabiel’s stomach.
The impact bent Kokabiel around the blow.
He vomited.
Actually vomited.
The image almost didn’t fit in my head.
That impossible enemy. That pressure. That arrogance.
Folded in half.
“…I-Impossible…… me……”
Albion laughed.
“What are you an anime villain? That’s such a cliche. “Impossible? Me?” Hah. What’s next “this can’t be?”.”
He sounded entertained.
Not strained.
Not impressed.
Entertained.
Then he said the part that mattered most.
“Azazel told me to bring you back even if it had to be by force. You’ve overstepped here. It won’t be good for you.”
Kokabiel looked up at him with something dangerously close to real fear for the first time that night.
“So it was that coward! I should have know! Azazeeel! I’ll—“
Albion hit him again.
A clean punch to the face.
Kokabiel’s body spun, lost all balance, and crashed down into the ruined field hard enough to leave another crater.
Silence followed.
Not real silence. There were too many people breathing too hard for that.
But the field itself had gone still.
The ten-winged Fallen Angel who had made all of us feel like insects had been beaten down so fast it barely counted as a proper fight.
Albion descended without hurry, lifted Kokabiel over one shoulder like dead weight, and then looked toward Freed’s collapsed body.
“Hah. I’ll have to carry Freed too then. There are still things I need to ask him. I’ll let the others deal with him after that.”
He bent to take Freed too.
And that, somehow, was the thing that finally got Ddraig to speak aloud.
[Are you just going to ignore me, White-one?]
I heard the voice in my head and from my gauntlet at once.
Albion’s jewel on his arm answered immediately.
[I didn’t realize you were awake, Red-one. Your presence is faint.]
For a second I could only stare.
The two Heavenly Dragons were talking.
Like old rivals meeting in passing instead of mythic enemies who should have been tearing the sky apart.
[We finally met this time, but it’s in a complicated situation like this,] Ddraig said.
[You're correct that it is not the right time to fight. But it is our destiny for us to fight one day. Things like this happen as well.]
That should have sounded cooler than it did.
Instead it sounded almost… casual.
Like two old men chatting.
Ddraig gave a low rumble.
[Say, White-one. I can barely feel any hostility from you. In the past we would have been at each other’s throats by now.
[Red-one. You're the same. I can’t feel it from you either.]
Ddraig almost chuckled.
[Looks like both of us have things that interest us more than fighting at the moment.]
[I guess that’s how it is,] Albion said. [We should be having fun by ourselves for a while. It’s not bad like this sometimes, right? Let’s meet again, Ddraig.]
[That's fine too, I guess. We will fight later. See you then, Albion.]
That was it.
That was their great exchange.
Not prophecy.
No baring teeth.
Not war.
Two dragons casually agreed to settle things later while the rest of us were still trying to recover from not dying.
I was offended on principle.
So I stepped forward.
“Hey!”
Albion turned his head slightly.
“Why are you here!?” I shouted. “Why did you help us? But more importantly, because of you I’m not going to be able to touch Buchou’s oppai as a reward from winning the fight!”
The entire field went dead again.
Somehow deader than before.
Behind me, I could feel Buchou’s outrage and embarrassment needing to look.
Koneko-chan made a tiny, long-suffering sound.
“That’s what you’re worried about?” Yuuto-san asked.
Akeno-san laughed once.
Just once.
Albion finally looked at me.
He finally looked at the one who was supposed to be his rival.
“You’re lacking in strength. Only if you’re strong enough will you be able to understand. So get stronger rival-kun. With how you are now you’ll need all the help you can get. I’ll fight you one day.”
He said before turned into a streak of white light as he flew up into the sky.
Kokabiel and Freed carried with him as if tonight’s disaster belonged to a different scale than ours.
Gone.
Just like that.
The pressure on the field eased so suddenly it made my knees feel weak.
The huge magic circle Kokabiel and Valper had spread over the grounds had already collapsed.
The barrier over the school still stood, but the feeling of immediate apocalypse had gone with the White Dragon Emperor’s departure.
No one spoke for a moment.
I think we were all trying to figure out whether surviving something counted as winning if another monster just walked in, beat the first monster senseless, insulted me personally, and left.
Then the battlefield started becoming real again.
Broken school grounds.
Scorched earth.
Valper dead.
Freed gone.
Xenovia still gripping her swords too hard.
Asia pale and shaking but upright.
Koneko-chan breathing a little too carefully.
Yuuto-san standing with her Holy-Demonic Sword lowered now, but not yet dismissed.
Akeno-san watching everyone at once.
I came up to Yuuto-san and patted her shoulder.
“You did it! Your balance breaker looks beautiful. Your holy-demonic swords seem amazing!”
She blushed lightly at the praise.
“I-Ise-kun you don’t need—“
“Don’t worry about it. Everything turned out alright in the end and you were able to avenge your friends. Right?”
She looked at me and then nodded after a moment.
Asia came up to her next.
“Yuuto-san. This means that you’ll come back to the club right? We all missed you while you were gone.”
“I… yes of course Asia-san. I won’t go anywhere again.”
Koneko-chan joined in after Yuuto-san’s reply.
“….Yuuto-senpai, I’m glad you came back.”
Koneko-chan looked at her with her expressionless face but her eyes seemed to hold sincere worry.
“I’m sorry I worried you Koneko-chan.”
I turned to look at Buchou.
Buchou and Kusari-san stood next to each other.
I looked at Buchou first.
Then at Kusari-san.
Because some part of me had already started checking the people who mattered more than whatever the hell that White Dragon Emperor’s problem was.
Kusari-san looked wrong.
Not “she cast too much and pushed too far” wrong.
Worse.
She was still standing.
Still composed.
Still wearing that careful, controlled expression of hers.
But I’d seen her after heavy backlash before. I knew what overcasting looked like on her.
This was different from that.
Her exhaustion felt too deep for the number of spells she’d cast, even with all the Baleful Bolts she’d been firing and the support work she’d layered over the field.
There was a thinness to the way she held herself now, like the only thing keeping her upright was that too many people were still looking at her.
That wasn’t normal for her, not even after a bad fight.
I left the group around Yuuto-san as Akeno-san came over to it.
I walked to Kusari-san and Buchou.
“Kusari-san?”
She turned toward me too slowly.
Then answered in a voice that was still level and therefore meant absolutely nothing.
“I’m fine.”
No, she wasn’t.
And Buchou—
For one split second, before she drew herself back up and put her [King] face on again, she looked close to tears.
Not crying.
Not collapsing.
Just there, at the edge of it, as if the whole battle and God’s death and the White Dragon Emperor and everything else had finally reached her all at once.
My chest tightened.
It had to be the fight, or me saying something embarrassing.
Everything tonight had been insane. Of course Buchou would be that close after holding the line for all of us.
But I wasn’t certain that was it.
They both seemed off in a way I hadn’t seen before.
Kusari-san had a distant look on her face and held herself more stiffly than she should have after we survived that insane fight.
Buchou looked relieved and happy that everything was over, but when she looked at Kusari-san her eyes took on a complicated gaze and her smile fell from her face.
Something more might have happened. But I didn’t know what.
I only knew that the real danger was gone, the field was quiet, and somehow both of them looked more fragile in that silence than they had while Kokabiel was still above us.
And that frightened me in a way the battle hadn’t.
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