The heavy thud of boots hitting the earth echoed behind Karna.
Levi stood perfectly still, the momentum of his own strike still humming through his muscles.
He had calculated Karna’s defenses with absolute precision.
A blade capable of cleaving through the very fabric of space should have left a deep, lasting lesson on the Heroic Spirit standing before him.
Instead, a single gash marred the golden armor plating Karna’s back.
The tear stretched diagonally from his shoulder down to his waist.
Crimson blood beaded along the jagged edge of the divine metal, dripping slowly onto the dirt.
But that was the extent of the damage.
The wound was on his back, not his chest.
Grayfia and the others observing from the edge of the training grounds had seen the entire sequence unfold.
In a fraction of a second, Karna had shattered four of Levi’s Summoned Swords, reducing them to a cloud of brilliant blue light.
Yet those fractured specks had not faded.
The exact moment Karna thrust his spear forward, the azure light coalesced, pulling Levi’s physical body directly into the space the swords had occupied.
A flawless teleportation.
His blade had already been drawn, descending in a merciless arc.
Draw, slash, sheathe, land.
The sequence was brutally efficient, devoid of a single wasted breath.
Yet Levi found himself staring at the shallow wound.
“I can slice through the boundary of space itself, and all I managed was a scratch?” Levi turned his head, his tone dryly amused.
“I fully expected that strike to leave you half-dead.
I was already calculating how to heal you before you bled out.
You live up to the legends, Karna.”
Karna turned to face him, his expression placid.
“It is nothing.
This was not a battle to the death, merely a spar.
And I have already lost.”
Levi glanced at the translucent interface hovering at the edge of his vision.
The check-in objective glowed with completion.
He gave a slow nod, finally grasping the true upper limits of a Heroic Spirit’s parameters.
While using his Devil Trigger, his physical strength as a Satan-class devil vastly eclipsed Karna’s baseline.
The only reason his blade had connected was pure, overwhelming superiority in speed and raw kinetic force.
Stacked with Mana Burst, his bodily capabilities firmly crushed those of a top-tier Servant.
They were more than qualified to tear through the Holy Grail War.
Once he summoned the King of Knights, he wouldn’t even need to worry about an opponent drawing their sword first.
“I appreciate the guidance,” Levi said, the demonic energy receding from his skin as he dropped the Devil Trigger state.
“In a true death match, I might have lost the advantage if this dragged on.
But I have the data I need.”
A chime echoed in his mind.
[Check-in reward: Morning Star.]
[Effect: Complete immunity to light-based damage.]
A genuine smile touched Levi’s lips.
The timing was impeccable.
Kuroka and the others remained silent, entirely ignorant of the political landmines surrounding Levi’s next move.
They had zero objections.
Grayfia, however, stepped forward, her silver hair catching the wind.
“Lord Levi, you do not truly intend to strike the church in Fuyuki City directly, do you?”
She understood the catastrophic weight of such an act.
And she knew Levi was smart enough to understand it too.
If a direct descendant of the Lucifer Clan personally annihilated a holy church, the forces of Heaven would never let it slide.
It was an act of absolute provocation.
In the past, the Underworld could easily shift the blame for minor skirmishes onto Stray Devils.
This was entirely different.
If Levi marched in and slaughtered priests, Heaven would have the justification to launch a full-scale holy war against the Underworld before sunrise.
“None of you should pretend this time,” Grayfia warned, her tone measured but firm.
Surely the heir to the Lucifer bloodline wasn’t going to act as recklessly as a pack of starving Stray Devils.
“I am absolutely taking action,” Levi replied, brushing a speck of dust from his sleeve.
“That old priest is holding something I require.
But relax, Grayfia.
I will play the same game those low-class devils do.
I’ll put on a mask, give the angels their precious face, and maintain our paper-thin peace treaty with the three factions.”
“I understand.”
Grayfia lowered her gaze, dropping the subject instantly.
She despised questioning his judgment.
As long as Levi wasn’t trying to drag the devils into an apocalyptic war with Heaven, the destruction of a single human church was beneath her concern.
The three factions were still decades away from shaking hands in any official capacity.
To her, angels remained the enemy.
“But with Karna here, the logistics are much simpler.”
“After all…
he is not a devil.”
Technically speaking, the Holy Grail War had already begun.
The Masters chosen by the Grail had summoned their Servants, securing their pieces on the board.
Yet the atmosphere in Fuyuki was suffocatingly still.
“Every Master and their respective Heroic Spirit has gone to ground, hoarding intelligence in the shadows,” Tohsaka Tokiomi murmured, swirling the wine in his glass.
“We know the Einzbern faction has secured a Master.
The Matou lineage may lack capable heirs, but we cannot afford to underestimate them.”
The entire foundation of the Heaven’s Feel ritual was built on the sins of those two families.
The Einzberns provided the vessel and the summoning framework.
The Matou engineered the Command Spell system.
Tokiomi had never fully understood why they insisted on using Fuyuki as the battleground, given that the Tohsaka merely provided the spiritual land.
Because of that blind spot, his paranoia toward them ran deep.
“Kirei, the burden of reconnaissance falls to you,” Tokiomi said, turning to the tall priest standing in the shadows.
“Your Assassin is far better suited for this work than direct confrontation.”
“That is indeed the case.” Kotomine Kirei offered a shallow, mechanical nod.
He turned to leave the study, but Tokiomi’s voice caught him at the door.
“By the way, Kirei.
If you turn up nothing by tonight, proceed with the contingency plan we discussed.”
“Understood.”
Kirei bowed to his teacher and walked out of the Tohsaka manor, his face a mask of absolute apathy.
Tokiomi watched him go, deeply satisfied.
He firmly believed this young priest was the one Magus in the world who truly comprehended his noble ideals.
It was a laughable delusion.
Kotomine Kirei understood nothing of Tohsaka Tokiomi.
In truth, Kirei couldn’t comprehend the motivations of any normal human being.
He knew exactly what he was.
A defect.
An outlier.
Kotomine Kirei was a man who had never once felt joy.
His chest housed a hollow, echoing void.
No matter what he achieved, no matter what holy texts he recited, he felt nothing but a crushing, suffocating apathy.
On the rare occasions his instincts flared during a mission, the sensation only sickened him further.
It felt as though he were standing on the precipice of a bottomless abyss.
One step forward, and he would plummet into the dark, warping into a monster he could no longer recognize.
The dread was exhausting.
But after decades of living with the void, he had simply adapted to the numbness.
He would follow his teacher’s orders.
He would complete his tasks.
He would exist as a hollow tool until he died.
That was how it was supposed to end.
“I’m not mistaken, am I?
Father Kotomine Kirei.”
Kirei paused at the intersection just outside the Tohsaka estate.
He had been planning to report to the church, but the sudden voice broke his rhythm.
He turned to see a young man with dark hair, offering a bright, disarmingly sunny smile.
“Have we…
met?” Kirei asked, his voice flat.
“It makes sense you wouldn’t recognize me.
But I know you.”
Kirei offered no response.
He was not a man prone to idle chatter.
He searched his memory and found nothing—perhaps a stray face from the Sunday congregation.
He prepared a polite dismissal to end the interaction.
Before his lips could part, the stranger’s next words nailed him to the asphalt.
“I know everything about you, Kotomine Kirei.
You’re defective.
You can’t feel joy at all, can you?”
The words were phrased as a question, yet they carried the crushing weight of an absolute truth.
In his entire life, no human being had ever looked him in the eye and laid bare his soul.
Kirei’s pupils contracted to pinpricks.
His breath hitched.
He reached out, but the dark-haired youth was already walking past him, his pace casual and unhurried.
Kirei’s muscles locked; a primal instinct screamed at him that trying to stop this man by force would result in his own immediate death.
The stranger didn’t look back.
Only his final words drifted through the chilling night air.
You’ll understand when you see it.”
“Next time we cross paths, if you’ve finally woken up…
remember to thank me.”
“Goodbye, Father.”
Kirei stood frozen under the streetlamp, his dead eyes locked onto the youth’s retreating back until the shadows swallowed him whole.
Slowly, Kirei turned his head.
He looked down the long, winding road leading to the Fuyuki Church.
His father, Kotomine Risei, was waiting for him there.
A dark, twisted hypothesis clawed its way up from the depths of his mind.
For the first time in decades, the dead muscle in Kirei’s chest seized.
His heart began to pound.
A violent, erratic rhythm hammered against his ribs.
The precipice was back.
The abyss yawned wide beneath his feet, whispering his name.
He had no choice.
He had to know.
Kirei drew in a long, shuddering breath, forcing the cold, expressionless mask back over his features.
His heavy boots turned toward the church, and he began to walk.
Levi stood on a rooftop overlooking the city, ignoring the cold wind.
He hadn’t actually planned on running into Kirei so soon, but the timing was convenient.
He looked down at his arms.
Dozens of blood-red Command Spells coiled around his skin like creeping crimson vines, pulsing with immense magical energy.
The objective was complete.
“I will say it again.
Had we simply eliminated the priest, our position would be far more secure.”
Karna stood behind him, his golden spear resting at his side.
The Lancer rarely offered unsolicited opinions, but Levi’s tactical choice baffled him.
If Levi had ordered him to assault the church to steal the Command Spells, leaving the old overseer alive was a glaring loose end.
Levi let out a low chuckle, admiring the glowing red marks on his wrists.
“Originally, I had no intention of sparing him.
But then I realized we needed a scapegoat.
Why dirty our own hands when someone else is perfectly positioned to take the fall?”
He closed his eyes, extending his Observation Haki across the city blocks.
The sensory feedback was crystal clear.
Inside the distant church, one of the two human life signatures had just flickered and died.
The one that vanished was definitely not Kotomine Kirei.
[Check-in goal: Let Kotomine Kirei experience joy]
[Check-in reward: Devil Trigger (Sin Devil Trigger)]
Levi opened his eyes, a dangerous glint in his gaze.
“Someone just took the fall for us.
When dealing with the Heaven faction, a scapegoat of that magnitude is exactly what we need.”
Boom!
A pillar of apocalyptic blue demonic fire erupted in the center of the Einzbern castle courtyard.
The sheer heat instantly incinerated hundreds of layered bounded fields.
The azure flames tore through the magical defenses like wet paper, crashing violently against the great Hakurei barrier surrounding the estate before finally guttering out.
From a safe distance, Grayfia and Kuroka watched the devastation.
As masters of barrier magecraft, they immediately recognized the truth.
The barriers hadn’t stopped the demonic fire.
The monster generating the flames had simply turned them off.
“Ha…
ha…
ha…”
Levi collapsed onto the scorched earth, his chest heaving violently as he gasped for oxygen.
‘Probably…
not even a full minute…’
The moment the system delivered the reward, he had unlocked the Sin Devil Trigger.
He knew exactly what this transformation represented.
It was the absolute zenith of demonic power, the ultimate release that Dante and Vergil wielded.
Entering the Sin Devil Trigger granted unmatched, invincible destruction.
It was a form that shattered the very concept of limits.
But the toll was horrifying.
Activating it instantly stripped away a user’s sanity, reducing them to a berserk god of ruin that would annihilate everything in its path.
He had taken every precaution.
He had evacuated the immediate area and warned his peerage not to intervene under any circumstances before he dared to test it.
Even so, the sheer exhaustion tearing through his muscles was a stark reminder of the terrifying power he now possessed.
[Akarin’s Note:
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