High School DxD: The Lucifer's Devil Trigger — Chapter 56

Chapter 56: The Foolish Gamble

Levi accepted Kuroka’s assessment without a second thought.

“Tsuchigumo is just ahead. Go deal with him.” Levi pointed down the shadowed corridor. “We will take this path straight into Hagoromo Gitsune’s lair.”

His Observation Haki had already locked onto Tsuchigumo’s massive, oppressive aura, tracing the dense demonic energy all the way to the distant main camp to pinpoint Hagoromo Gitsune’s exact location.

“I do not want anyone getting in our way,” he added.

Hearing the command, Tiamat and Kuroka stepped away from the main group.

“Understood, meow!” Kuroka brimmed with sudden energy, her twin tails perking up high behind her.

Beside her, black and crimson light violently intertwined around Tiamat’s figure. The overwhelming pressure of her Dragon King form bled into the air. “Leave it to me. It will be no problem at all.”

With a burst of displaced air, Tiamat grabbed Kuroka and dived straight toward the eastern sector where Tsuchigumo waited.

Levi, Yakumo Yukari, Artoria, and Ingvild continued their advance. Because Tsuchigumo occupied the eastern territory, his territorial pressure kept the minor yokai completely at bay. The stone-paved path remained eerily peaceful, devoid of the usual swarms of low-level monsters.

Levi breached the headquarters of the Kyoto yokai faction without facing a single obstacle.

He pushed open the heavy wooden doors of the main hall. Inside, Hagoromo Gitsune and Kyokotsu stood waiting, the atmosphere instantly dropping to a freezing chill.

“You disposed of Tsuchigumo so quickly?” Hagoromo Gitsune narrowed her dark eyes. She clearly had not expected intruders to reach her inner sanctum this fast.

She spread her senses outward. A moment later, she caught the massive shockwaves echoing from the eastern sector. Another extremely powerful entity was currently clashing with the giant spider yokai.

Turning her gaze back to the intruders, she carefully sized up the group standing in her doorway. Aside from the leading man and the frail-looking blonde yokai beside him, the auras radiating from the other two women were actually on the exact same level as her own.

A deep crease formed between Hagoromo Gitsune’s brows. When Kyokotsu previously reported that devils had come knocking at their gates, she had acknowledged their strength but dismissed them as a minor nuisance. Most devils could not even begin to compare to her centuries of accumulated power.

But this specific group standing in her hall forced her to reevaluate.

“Devils, what do you want?” Hagoromo Gitsune’s voice turned to absolute ice.

Levi saw no reason to waste words. “Stop what you are doing. Do not fight this war anymore.”

Stop the war?

A cold, mocking smile touched Hagoromo Gitsune’s lips. Her desire to slaughter Nurarihyon was carved into her very soul. That centuries-old hatred was a venom deep in her bones, impossible to uproot with a few casual words from a stranger.

If it had been anyone else making such a demand, she would have already severed their head. But the women standing beside this man radiated a terrifying intensity. A greater fury boiled within her chest, yet she forced her posture to remain elegant and composed.

“You should know how deep the enmity between this concubine and that Nurarihyon runs,” she said softly. “Even knowing that, do you truly think this war can simply be stopped?”

“Of course it can be stopped.” Levi smiled faintly. “I just came from the Nura Clan. I have already persuaded them to stand down. If you nod your head today, this war ends right now.”

Hagoromo Gitsune’s eyes sharpened into dangerous slits.

Whether Nurarihyon could let go of his grudge meant nothing to her. She absolutely would not.

What she did not know was that Nurarihyon’s quick surrender was not entirely due to the Nura Clan’s inability to defeat her Hundred Demons. Yakumo Yukari had already visited the Supreme Commander of the yokai beforehand. The boundary yokai had thoroughly dismantled his resolve. Levi’s subsequent visit merely finalized the change in management. Nurarihyon’s spirit had been ground to dust by successive, overwhelming blows, leaving him no choice but to accept.

Hagoromo Gitsune was a completely different variable. Her forces held the absolute upper hand in military strength, and Yakumo Yukari had never bothered to “greet” her first.

Why should she yield?

Even if high-ranking devils came to play peacemaker, she refused. Even if this man brought powerful experts to her doorstep, she would not bow.

Her mind raced through the tactical possibilities. The powerhouse fighting Tsuchigumo in the distance would be occupied for a while. Of the two dangerous women standing behind the man, one felt slightly weaker than her, while the other was likely stronger.

Then, she spotted the fatal flaw in their formation.

They possessed incredible high-end strength. If a full-scale battle erupted, even her entire Hundred Demons parade would suffer catastrophic losses. But they had brought dead weight.

That blonde yokai looked incredibly weak, shrinking back with a timid expression. She clearly held no authority and could be ignored.

Hagoromo Gitsune’s gaze finally locked onto Levi.

When not actively using his demonic power, this man’s baseline aura hovered around the level of a High-Class Devil. Yet, he stood at the very front. He was the undisputed leader.

A desperate, vicious idea formed in her mind.

She would take a gamble. If she could capture the leader before the powerhouses could react, she could use him as a hostage to force their compliance. She knew the risks perfectly well. If she lost the bet, her physical vessel would die. But if she won, crushing Nurarihyon would become effortless.

The immortality of a reincarnating yokai gave her the ultimate safety net. She had nothing to fear from death.

The very second Yakumo Yukari casually raised a fan to cover her face, Hagoromo Gitsune moved.

“Four-Tailed Spear: Tiger Slayer.”

Her elegant figure blurred into a streak of lethal shadows. In the blink of an eye, she crossed the grand hall and lunged directly into Levi’s personal space. Her massive tails fused and reared up like a hardened steel spear, thrusting straight for his throat.

She did not aim to kill. She only needed to pin him down and shatter his limbs for use.

But the instant she closed the distance, a terrifying realization crashed over her. Levi’s eyes had never left her. They tracked her absolute top speed without a single millimeter of error.

She did not see the panic or fear common among her prey. She only saw a bottomless, abyssal chill that instantly froze the blood in her veins.

The spear-like tail abruptly halted a mere inch from Levi’s throat.

She had not stopped the attack.

Levi’s hand was clamped around her tail like a vice.

“So that is how it is. You chose this path.”

His left hand, now encased in the heavy, metallic gauntlet of the Beowulf Devil Arm, gripped her tail with bone-crushing force. A violent eruption of blue demonic power blasted outward, shattering the floor tiles beneath them. Levi bypassed all restraints and directly entered his Devil Trigger.

The suffocating, world-ending pressure of a true Satan-class entity instantly pressed the oxygen out of the room.

In that final fraction of a second, Hagoromo Gitsune understood the magnitude of her mistake. She had bet against a monster wearing human skin.

“What a foolish decision,” Levi whispered.

Still gripping her tail with his left hand, his right hand fell to the hilt of the Yamato.

No one in the room saw the blade leave the scabbard. It was a phantom movement. A millimeter of steel exposed, followed by the soft click of the guard returning to its resting place.

Hagoromo Gitsune’s perspective suddenly shifted, tilting sideways as her vision plunged into absolute darkness. Her body completely refused to obey her commands.

“Elder Sister!”

Kyokotsu shrieked, throwing herself across the ruined floor to kneel beside Hagoromo Gitsune’s collapsed form.

There was not a single visible wound on the yokai leader’s pristine body, yet every trace of her life force had been cleanly severed.

Yakumo Yukari slowly lowered her fan and strolled to Levi’s side, not even sparing the corpse a glance. This was her first time witnessing Levi use this specific, overwhelming power.

“My… Lord Levi really does not know how to cherish women, does he?”

Levi glanced at her, his expression entirely neutral. “If she had chosen the other path, I originally planned to have you use a boundary to send her to Hell. The result is the same regardless. She wanted to see Abe no Seimei. I merely expedited the reunion.”

He turned his attention back to the weeping yokai on the floor. “She is different from Nurarihyon. She would never give up until she saw him.”

Clutching Hagoromo Gitsune’s empty physical vessel, Kyokotsu knelt on the cold stone, her mind entirely blank with grief and shock.

Levi looked down at her from his towering height, his voice devoid of any warmth. “Now, take Hagoromo Gitsune’s people and guard this body well. Hide away quietly and do not cause trouble. She might still be able to come back to life in the future.”

Kyokotsu snapped her head up. Her tear-streaked eyes widened in sheer disbelief.

She suspected the grief was making her hear things. But the terrifying devil standing above her had absolutely no reason to offer false comfort. Even if it was only a microscopic sliver of hope, she desperately wanted to believe it.

“You… no, Milord… are you saying Elder Sister can still be saved?”

Levi gave a soft, dismissive snort. “It is not me saving her. She will save herself. That is all I have to say on the matter. Take care of yourselves.”

Without waiting for a response, he turned his back on the ruined throne room and walked out, his group following closely behind.

Kyokotsu remained kneeling in the dust, watching their retreating figures until they disappeared into the courtyard. She stayed frozen for a long time, the silence of the hall pressing down on her. Finally, she gritted her teeth, wiping the tears from her face.

She had no other path left to take. She had to protect the vessel.

“We must make Elder Sister’s Hundred Demons stop.”

After leaving the palace grounds, Levi’s immediate priority shifted to Tiamat’s battlefield.

He had a perfect grasp of Tiamat’s overwhelming strength. He was not remotely worried about her losing to Tsuchigumo. The real variable was Kuroka.

According to the natural progression of her potential, Kuroka should have already broken through to the Satan-class by now. But reality was rarely that accommodating. Reaching the pinnacle of demonic power was an agonizingly difficult threshold.

Levi was concerned the psychological pressure was pushing her too hard.

She was entirely different from Ingvild. The Leviathan descendant had slept for over a century, her body naturally maturing and passively accumulating a massive reservoir of Satan-class energy. Ingvild only lacked the technical application of her power. She just needed to learn the controls, leaving her free of any anxiety regarding her limits.

Kuroka possessed flawless technique and application, but her foundation and raw accumulation were still lacking.

The path she walked was the artificial extraordinary scheme originally developed by the Naberius Clan’s deranged researchers. Stripped of its academic terminology, the process was nothing more than brute-force stacking.

It involved squeezing a subject’s innate potential to its absolute breaking point, forcing them to master combat experience through lethal pressure, and compelling their physical body to adapt to the skyrocketing energy to forcibly stretch their upper limits. They were trying to swallow decades of slow, natural cultivation in a single, violent gulp.

Within Kuroka’s body, four completely distinct power systems violently coexisted.

There was Demonic power, the foundational source that drove her magic.

There was the Qi obtained through her Senjutsu cultivation, a surging yet fundamentally gentle life force.

There was the inherent Yokai power bound to her bloodline.

And finally, there was the elusive Fear she was desperately trying to awaken.

The Naberius formula stacked these conflicting systems together, fusing and converting them through a highly unstable internal matrix. The ultimate goal of this madness was the creation of an artificial extraordinary.

Currently, Kuroka was the sole surviving success of that horrific experiment.

Even if she perfectly awakened her Fear, the resulting fusion would only push her to the baseline Satan-class. Progressing beyond that threshold would rely entirely on her individual talent and the slow grind of accumulation. Reaching the heights of someone like Grayfia or Tiamat would be a monumental achievement.

Becoming a true extraordinary through this method relied entirely on blind luck.

The fatal flaw of this brute-force stacking was painfully obvious to Levi. Until the internal pressure reached the critical mass required for a breakthrough, the Demonic power, Qi, and Yokai power inside Kuroka remained hard-capped at the level of an Ultimate-Class Devil.

She was perpetually stuck one step away from the Satan-class.

Without sufficient accumulation, the door would remain permanently locked. But the moment the internal volume reached the exact required threshold, the bottleneck would instantly vaporize. She would naturally ascend, resetting the cycle for the next tier of power.

The greatest advantage of the Naberius method was also its greatest curse—it was far too stable. It required such absolute equilibrium that the slightest emotional or physical fluctuation during the fusion process could trigger a catastrophic internal collapse.

It was precisely this volatile stability that drove the Naberius Clan to conduct increasingly depraved experiments during their final days.

Levi refused to let Kuroka touch those dangerous, unstable edges just because she felt pressured to prove her worth. He needed to reach the eastern sector and assess her condition with his own eyes.

But before they could cross the courtyard, a sharp sound cut through the quiet night.

A cat’s meow.

Or rather, several distinct, overlapping meows echoing from the distance.

Hearing the strange chorus, Levi abruptly stopped in his tracks.

“Levi, what is wrong?” Artoria halted beside him, her hand resting on the pommel of her invisible sword as she noticed the sudden shift in his expression.

Ingvild stepped closer, her eyes scanning the dark rooftops, while Yakumo Yukari merely tilted her head with a look of mild curiosity.

“No…” Levi murmured, his voice trailing off as he hesitated for the first time that night.