~Ten Years Later, One Week Before Kuoh Academy’s New School Year, Hidden Workshop Beneath the Takashina Residence~
A dim crimson glow spilled across the polished stone table…
Fifteen Evil Pieces rested within a circular formation carved into its surface…
A complete set…
One Queen, two Rooks, two Bishops, two Knights, and eight Pawns…
At least…
That was what they had once been.
The pieces still retained their familiar crimson color, but thin veins of unstable light moved beneath their surfaces whenever Soutarou focused upon them…
Faint…
Almost invisible…
Yet each pulse carried the same mutated pressure as the larger King Piece sealed within a separate barrier several feet away…
Cleria Belial’s stolen Mutation King Piece to be exact.
The object that had quietly saturated every unused Piece stored beside it until the entire set changed alongside it…
Soutarou leaned over the table and rested two fingers against the edge of the formation.
At seventeen, the softness of childhood had vanished almost completely from his face…
His jaw had sharpened…
His shoulders had broadened…
And the small boy who once needed to look upward at nearly everyone had grown into a tall, lean young man who already stood a full head above most adults.
Messy light-brown hair fell over hazel-golden eyes flecked with red…
Those gleaming eyes narrowed…
The world beneath the Pieces opened before his eyes…
The crimson shells remained intact, but their internal structure became visible to Soutarou in layers…
The channels that accepted demonic power…
The pathways through which a reincarnated soul would be reconstructed…
The mutation energy embedded into every surface…
And beneath all of it…
A small biological imprint woven through each Piece like a signature written in blood…
Cleria Belial.
Soutarou quietly clicked his tongue.
‘Tsk…
Then again if it was that easy life would’ve been too simple…
Still… physical possession of the pieces was never the problem…’
His finger traced the outer formation without touching the Pieces themselves.
‘But…
every one of them still carries Cleria’s blood imprint…’
‘Use them like this and anyone I reincarnate becomes hers…
Not to mention Cleria’s dead…
So that opens an entirely other can of worms…
But her blood imprint…
Man…
What a drag…’
You see blood didn’t merely mark ownership in some ceremonial sense…
It formed the metaphysical connection between King and servant and tethered and grounded reincarnation…
Without it…
You get those monstrous stray devils…
Replacing it improperly could damage the Pieces, destabilize the reincarnation process, or destroy the mutation they had spent years accumulating.
Not to mention his reincarnated devils wouldn’t inherit pieces of his power at all.
Sure, Soutarou could probably reverse-engineer the method eventually…
Most likely, but even that carried far too much risk when applied to fifteen irreplaceable Mutation Pieces… And more importantly the people that he was destined to use the pieces on.
‘Breaking into Heaven was one thing…
Experimenting upon the foundation of my future peerage without knowing whether a mistake would turn someone inside out is something else entirely.’
‘Especially considering that every person in my peerage is destined to be someone close to my heart…
That’s not a risk I can afford…’
The Underworld had a well established method for removing one King’s blood and replacing it with another’s.
A legal transfer…
An inheritance…
A reassignment after death…
Soutarou didn’t particularly care what excuse normally surrounded the procedure.
His gaze moved toward the isolated Mutation King Piece.
Unlike the others, the stolen King Piece carried no blood-based ownership…
No master waiting upon the other end…
No requirement beyond taking it and allowing the mutation accumulated inside to rewrite the user.
Soutarou could use it now, but he had chosen not to.
‘A growth shortcut should be used when natural growth stops being efficient…
Not while I’m still climbing.’
At seventeen, Soutarou’s strength had already reached the level Lavinia classified as High Ultimate Class… B+, by the private ranking he had built for himself over the years.
His actual reserves remained far greater than that…
A vast ocean of power hidden beneath the amount his body could currently compress, refine, and release safely…
But density mattered more than empty quantity…
Control mattered more than having enough energy to flood a country…
And Soutarou had no intention of wasting the Mutation King Piece merely to jump ahead by a few years, especially when he had room to grow…
‘Not to mention…’
Soutarou’s gaze shifted as he lifted his hand from the formation and turned toward the opposite side of the workshop, where a black draconic gauntlet rested within another isolation barrier.
Layered plates overlapped across its surface like scales…
Long hooked claws curved from the fingers…
Jagged spikes ran along the forearm…
And pale white-gold channels spread through the black metal in the shape of an incomplete skeletal dragon.
Near the wrist rested a dark purple gem.
The Devouring Gear.
Or so he’d dubbed it…
Soutarou released the outer layer of the barrier and extended his hand.
The gauntlet dissolved into black particles before reforming around his arm with a low metallic growl.
*Grrrrn…*
Three sealed objects hovered behind the barrier where the Gear had rested…
Three separate Sacred Gears…
Three fragments of the Black Dragon King, Vritra.
Their energy had been locked inside a layered isolation formation that swallowed every trace they released before any supernatural senses outside the workshop could detect them.
One had been acquired through Lavinia’s limited contact with Grigori…
The other two had been stolen through Soutarou’s own investigations.
Those thefts had taught him something useful and something rather unpleasant.
You see a Sacred Gear could be removed while leaving much of the host’s soul intact…
But even then the host still died.
The first extraction had surprised him, but the second had confirmed it when even supplying life force didn’t stop the chain reaction…
Soutarou looked down at the gauntlet and opened his palm.
A compressed sphere of black-red energy rested above it…
The remains of a High-Class stray creature he had hunted several nights earlier.
The Devouring Gear’s purple gem pulsed once…
The sphere collapsed inward and vanished…
Silence followed…
Soutarou waited…
Nothing changed…
No additional pressure…
No improvement in the Gear’s structure…
Not even the faint warmth that accompanied its earliest meals.
‘Another waste…’
Several years ago, a High-Class corpse would have strengthened the Gear noticeably.
Before that, even Middle-Class material had been useful…
Now…
Anything beneath Ultimate Class barely registered.
The Devouring Gear had reached the point where filling it with scraps was no different from trying to feed a dragon with grains of rice…
Soutarou slowly clenched his gauntleted hand.
‘Diminishing returns were inevitable…’
His awareness sank through the connection between the Gear and his soul…
Apophis.
The dragon’s soul had remained almost completely unresponsive since Soutarou first forced it into the Twice Critical vessel.
Occasionally, after the Gear devoured something significant, a distant pressure would shift inside…
A twitch…
A breath…
The faintest suggestion that a consciousness remained buried beneath the darkness…
But Apophis had never awakened…
Soutarou had originally assumed the dragon needed more power…
Then better power…
Then more refined power…
After years of increasingly disappointing results, the answer had become obvious.
‘You aren’t starving…’
His gaze traced the white-gold skeletal lines trapped beneath the black plating.
‘You’re suffocating.’
Twice Critical had been useful as a foundation…
Draconic…
A vessel without an inherent soul…
Naturally capable of amplification…
Already accepted as a Sacred Gear within the heaven system…
But at the end of the day it remained a small vessel designed for a minor ability.
So when Soutarou had shoved the soul and devouring nature of Apophis into something that had never been intended to contain a being of that scale…
Sure the Gear could grow…
It could consume…
It could process…
But the vessel itself prevented the power inside from properly unfolding.
Soutarou looked toward the three isolated Vritra Gears.
‘It’s time.’
Nearly ten years had passed since another Sacred Gear vanished from his hands and began a journey toward Heaven…
Light’s Sanctuary had never answered…
Not once…
No confirmation…
No failure…
No sign that Ark Dominion had survived the path he designed for it.
In all fairness Soutarou had expected that…
After all, sending something into the broken system surrounding God’s abandoned authority wasn’t the sort of project that returned a progress report every few months.
But he could wait.
The Devouring Gear, however, no longer required patience…
It required better material.
A soft chime rang through the workshop.
Then Mamako’s voice echoed from the hidden communication circle above the door as she warmly called, “So-kun…
Breakfast is ready!
And you promised Nia-chan you would be upstairs before training!”
Soutarou glanced toward the ceiling….
He paused and then Soutarou dismissed the gauntlet.
Black particles slid from his arm and returned to the containment barrier.
He restored every layer around the Vritra Gears…
Then checked the formation surrounding Cleria’s Pieces twice…
The fifteen mutated Pieces remained silent…
The King Piece remained sealed…
The Devouring Gear remained dormant.
Nothing released enough energy for even Lavinia to detect from above…
Soutarou turned toward the stairway and casually called, “Coming!”
Mamako’s relieved voice immediately answered through the circle, “Don’t run on the stairs!”
Soutarou stared at the empty stairway.
‘I’m seventeen…’
He began walking upward.
‘Then again…
I could become two hundred and she’d still manage to say that.’