High School DxD: The Lucifer's Devil Trigger — Chapter 17

Chapter 17: Dawn of the 72 Pillars

But she was already prepared.

No matter how harshly he cursed or what cruel words he spat in his final moments, she would stand her ground and listen to every single one.

And then—

“…Thank you for your forgiveness…” The raspy, broken voice bled through the air. “The Rebellious Knight Lancelot… finally… receives the punishment he deserves…”

Ah…!

The last vestiges of strength abandoned Lancelot’s limbs. He slid down the length of the radiant holy sword, his armored body falling backward. Before he even hit the ground, his physical form began to fracture, his Spirit Origin dissolving into drifting golden dust.

He took one last look at Artoria’s face. The faint, tragic smile on his lips softened into something entirely at peace. “My King… farewell.”

“Yes… goodbye, Sir Lancelot.”

A short distance away, Levi watched the horizon. Solomon was absolutely not an entity to be trifled with. If Levi were in peak condition right now, he still wouldn’t choose to fight this monster one-on-one if an escape route existed. He wasn’t a reckless brute driven by chivalry; if he had the numbers to jump an enemy, he would exploit that advantage without a second thought. Ideally, he would just have Karna hand him that God-Slaying Spear and end it from a distance.

But reality was far less accommodating.

The eastern horizon was already bleeding a pale, sickly white. The ambient demonic buffs he enjoyed under the cover of night were slowly draining from his veins. Having just survived a grueling clash with Saint George, his magic reserves were more than half-empty, and his physical stamina was running dangerously low. The only silver lining was the system reward he had reaped from checking in at Saint George’s defeat, which had forcibly injected a surge of magic power back into his core, dragging him up to roughly half his peak state.

But Solomon? The Grand Caster stood there in absolute prime condition, having expended virtually nothing.

Levi let out a slow, measured exhale. “I just came to the Matou estate to see if the seventh Master was hiding here. Who knew Tohsaka would crash the party, and you’d wander over to join the fun.”

He didn’t want to run anymore. More accurately, he couldn’t.

The Summoned Swords he had anchored at his old home could only teleport him away. But Sakura was still hiding in the nearby woods, two knights were concluding a death match right behind him, and Karna and Arjuna were completely off the grid. He had to buy time to desperately cycle his remaining magic power.

Solomon, however, had zero interest in idle chatter. Seeing Levi dodge his initial strike, the Caster simply raised a hand, the air warping as dense, lethal magic power condensed into his palm once again.

Levi narrowed his eyes. “I know what you want, Solomon. You want to use the Holy Grail to turn yourself into an ordinary human, right?”

Hm?

Solomon’s hand paused. The motion was microscopic, but it was there. He was a being who fundamentally cared for nothing, but the existence of a personal wish meant there was at least one thread that could command his attention.

It seemed the gamble paid off. “I’m not here to criticize your desires,” Levi continued, his tone conversational but sharp. “But Solomon, this wish of yours will irreparably damage this world.”

“…So what?”

It was the first time Solomon had spoken directly to him. His tone was entirely flat. Not a single muscle in his face twitched. He spoke as if stating a mundane law of physics. It matched the legends perfectly—even if he foresaw a catastrophe, he wouldn’t lift a finger to prevent it. He would simply watch. Devoid of human emotion, he was more akin to a living mechanism than a man.

To stall him, Levi had to strike at the core of the impending disaster.

“You want to become an ordinary person. But the moment your power vanishes, that grand ritual you left behind—Goetia—will activate. Even knowing this, you probably don’t think it matters.” Levi’s voice remained eerily calm. “You think that even if the Incineration of Humanity begins, it’s no big deal for the broader world.”

Levi gripped the hilt of his katana. “But you forgot one crucial detail, Solomon. If God were still alive, you’d be right. Unfortunately, God died a long time ago in the ancient war, right alongside the original Devil Kings.”

Solomon’s gaze shifted, narrowing by a fraction of an inch. Levi knew the Caster’s clairvoyance could instantly discern truth from lies.

He pressed the advantage. “What maintains the balance of this world now is the Heaven system, not God Himself. The creator is gone. The world is no longer the airtight fortress it used to be. The moment the Incineration of Humanity ritual ignites, that dilapidated, overworked system will instantly collapse.”

Levi ticked the points off on his fingers. “The first wave is the catastrophic fallout of the system shattering. The second wave is the literal destruction brought by the Incineration. And the third wave? With the system gone, every seal across the globe will break. All those ancient evil dragons will break loose, and the world will plunge into a third great war.”

He paused, a genuine headache throbbing behind his temples.

Truthfully, Levi wanted absolutely nothing to do with the Incineration of Humanity. In a standard Type-Moon timeline, Goetia’s tantrum would only wipe out the human order, leaving the Underworld and Heaven relatively untouched. If God were still around, a simple miracle could reverse the damage.

But God was dead. Once the Heaven system failed, the fallout would be apocalyptic. It was the exact reason Grayfia had heavily advocated for the Underworld to mobilize its armies. It wouldn’t just be the end of humanity; it would trigger an Eternal War. The sealed abominations would rise, and eventually, the Beast Emperor, Trihexa, would awaken prematurely.

Levi abhorred the idea of spending the next few millennia wading through endless battlefields just to clean up Rizevim’s mess and put down the Beast Emperor.

“God… is dead.”

For a fleeting instant, a ripple of actual fluctuation bled into Solomon’s voice. But the moment passed as quickly as it arrived. The Caster’s eyes went dead again. “…So what?”

Levi clicked his tongue. Stubborn bastard.

That microscopic hesitation hadn’t bought him nearly enough time. His magic reserves were still dangerously low. Above them, the dawn finally broke, painting the horizon in a stark, unforgiving white light.

Solomon’s second wave of attacks descended.

A blinding pillar of white light slammed into the earth directly at Levi’s feet, obliterating the ground and sending a shockwave of shattered rock into the air.

This time, Levi didn’t step back.

He raised his left hand, hurling a Summoned Sword into the sky, while his right hand locked onto Yamato. He lunged forward, his boots scraping the very edge of the searing light beam. Mid-sprint, his demonic blood boiled over, surging through his veins in a violent, explosive expansion.

Devil Trigger, activated.

The residual magic from Saint George’s defeat acted as the final catalyst, shattering his physical bottlenecks. This time, the transformation was far more armored. A pitch-black, metallic steel mask clamped over his face, leaving only a sleek, T-shaped opening for his eyes and breath—a brutalist evolution of a knight’s helm.

The instant the demonic armor locked into place, Levi’s combat output violently spiked, crashing directly into the threshold of a Satan-class Devil.

His speed broke the sound barrier. In less than a heartbeat, he materialized directly in front of Solomon. Yamato hissed as it left the scabbard. A terrifying sphere of blue, spatial-rending light erupted outward. The blade and its afterimages moved in perfect synchronization, slicing Solomon’s torso into three distinct sections.

But the severed pieces didn’t bleed. They twisted, blurred, and rippled away like a disturbed reflection on a pond.

An illusion.

Levi snapped his head up. High above, silhouetted against the bleeding grey-white light of the morning sky, a black shadow floated in absolute silence.

Solomon.

Crimson, circuit-like patterns bled out of the empty void, physically connecting to the Caster’s back. As the sun crested the horizon, massive, grotesque pillars of pitch-black flesh and shadow erupted from the earth, piercing the sky like the ribs of a dead god.

Solomon looked down at Levi. Those eyes possessed a terrifying weight—a gaze that saw through the past, present, and future. Once locked onto a target, there was nowhere in time or space to hide.

But Levi had no intention of hiding.

Dawn had fully arrived. Every passive buff his Devil blood enjoyed in the dark was gone. He had already triggered the emergency ritual to contact Grayfia. The magic power left in his core was exactly enough for one final Dimension Slash.

What came next?

Fight. Fight until one of them was dead. It was that simple.

The 72 Pillars anchored themselves into the earth, their massive forms stretching all the way to the horizon. The sheer, suffocating density of the magic power radiating from the 72 Demon God Pillars warped the air, making it hard to breathe.

Levi finally understood. As a Caster-class Heroic Spirit lacking his Grand Saint Graph, Solomon relied heavily on Territory Creation and Item Construction. Levi had spent the entire fight wondering how the Caster planned to lure him into a trap.

He hadn’t needed to. Solomon simply used the very ground they stood on as his foundation, slamming down a massive Bounded Field with a single wave of his hand.

The sky formed the natural dome of this territory. The rising sun actively burned away Levi’s demonic aura. The earth acted as the perfect anchor. The 72 Pillars were locked into this space, their magic power flowing entirely according to Solomon’s will.

Levi felt the weight of countless, invisible eyes staring at him from every conceivable angle. The ambient mana was so violently disrupted by the Pillars that his standard perception couldn’t even pinpoint Solomon’s exact coordinates anymore.

He let out a long, slow breath through the vents of his steel mask.

His stance sank lower. His right hand rested lightly on the hilt of Yamato. He closed his eyes.

Observation Haki pulsed outward from his mind, spreading like an invisible spider web, mapping the chaotic battlefield into a perfect, spherical grid.

Seventy-two targets… no, seventy-three.

The 72 Pillars were already pooling their magic power. In the next fraction of a second, that apocalyptic energy would funnel directly into Solomon through the grotesque, blood-vessel tethers attached to his back. If Levi allowed that sequence to finish, he would be staring down the barrel of a Noble Phantasm. Even if it wasn’t the full planetary-incineration ring of Goetia, a direct hit from that energy torrent would erase him from existence.

He couldn’t wait.

“You end here.”

Levi’s eyes snapped open. His Haki had perfectly locked onto the exact spatial coordinates of the 72 Pillars and the precise altitude of Solomon’s floating form.

This was his final strike.

Unsheathe. Draw.

Seventy-three spatial tears. Not one more, not one less.

The instant Yamato cleared the scabbard, the entire domain mapped by his Observation Haki was saturated with jagged, blue dimensional rifts. Inside the strike zone, the blinding light of the morning sun was violently severed. Outside the zone, the world plunged into pitch black.

Countless sword marks crisscrossed, tore, and strangled the very fabric of space. The 72 massive pillars of flesh were instantly shredded into a fine, bloody mist.

High above, Solomon clasped his hands in front of his chest, preparing to block the spatial distortion hurtling toward his neck.

But in that exact millisecond, a young woman’s voice—audible only to the Caster—echoed sharply in his ear.

“In the name of the Command Spell, Solomon, return.”

A violent surge of crimson energy enveloped Solomon’s body, forcibly ripping him out of the physical space just as Levi’s Dimension Slash shattered the sky where he had been floating.

Solomon remembered the details of his summoning perfectly. His Master was a man. Yet, a woman’s voice had just used a Command Spell to drag him across the city.

When the spatial transfer ended and Solomon materialized back in his hidden workshop, he looked down. His original Master was sprawled across the floor in a massive pool of blood, his chest entirely devoid of breath.