(New Leaf) Canicular 11 (Patreon)

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Koneko

“I was about to destroy Rapidly,” Xenovia said accusingly towards me with Durandal held at the ready by her hip, not taking her eyes off of the six-winger. “You shouldn’t have pulled me away.”

I grunted glancing at her in irritation. “You would have died, dumbass.” I’d have to hold on to the mind-altering power of Senjutsu for a bit longer in order to stay effective, which did nothing to help my current mood.

“I am prepared to die in service of the Lord.” Her reply was steadfast.

“So you would’ve destroyed Rapidly, just to leave Durandal behind for him instead, and me to fight him one on one?” I retorted, then scoffed. “Great plan, genius.”

“...”

She didn’t have a counter. She’d just been arguing out of a stubborn sense of duty, despite knowing what the logical outcome was. She was definitely emotionally dumb enough to earnestly and unquestioningly follow through with her stupid beliefs, no matter how smart she actually was. It just took someone else pointing out the flaws for her to recognize the need for other options.

She’d be a perfect exorcist, if it weren’t for all the fucked up stuff the church has a reputation of sending exorcists to do. I got the feeling the church was gonna have a rough time keeping a leash on her in the future.

“What am I, chopped liver? Do you kids really think you can afford to ignore me?” Despite the mocking tone and casual, unconcerned stance he took, I could feel the six-winged fallen observing us intently the entire time. His calculating intent washed over us, unconsciously gravitating towards my limbs and Durandal as his main points of focus. He shrugged, then acted as if he was going to reach down with his free hand. “If you’re not gonna come and stop me, I guess I’ll just take this and leave-”

Danger.

“Don’t.”

The overly-earnest idiot had just been about to take the bait before I spoke, her calves tensing and her weight shifting in order to dash forwards and start the fight. Whether it was because Xenovia somehow noticed something off on her own, or her gut told her she should trust my lead, she stopped. It was the right choice.

After all, he was waiting for us to make the first move.

His focus invisibly shifted more heavily to me as he straightened back up.

“He wants us to attack first.” I informed Xenovia. “Don’t play into his hand. Stay alert.”

She nodded once. “Right.”

I didn’t know why he was waiting, and I didn’t really care at the moment. The only thing I cared about at this moment was making sure Freed couldn’t escape yet again, with retrieving Rapidly being a distant second.

“Smart cookie,” he said appraisingly, stepping forward and performatively glancing down at Freed for a second. “What gave me away? I know I’m not as easy to read as this amateur killer. It’s almost like he goes out of his way to make sure people cross to the other side of the street when they catch a glimpse of him, the little psycho!”

“Filth like you, who have known the Father and still spurned His Grace, have no place casting stones at men who haven’t yet felt salvation, abomination,” Xenovia said with a calm distaste. “Freed Sellzen is a monster, but still a man. You are lesser than even him.”

His head tilted. “Have you ever considered the possibility that maybe, just maybe, those of my kind who Fall do so because we’ve experienced Heaven?” Power began radiating from him, tinting the dark street red. His voice became heavy despite the undercurrent amusement in his aura. “‘Salvation’ ain’t all that, kid.” 

Danger.

He was roughly on the same level of power as me in my base, maybe a tiny bit stronger.

‘So what am I missing?’

With Xenovia here and Senjutsu still amping me by a lot, even with my injuries, it was weird that he’d feel this self-assured while facing us, to the point of deliberately giving us openings to attack with full confidence he’d be fine. Either he consistently fought people stronger than him and came out on top by baiting and predicting them, or…

I remembered him releasing his third pair of wings in the attack on the mansion, going from an unremarkable four-winger to six wings in a moment after his squad got wiped.

Or, he was like a challenge runner in a game, restricting himself to a certain tier of strength and relying on skill and experience instead of equipping the most busted gear. So basically the same as the first option, but while holding back even more power in reserve for whatever reason.

“Your lies mean nothing to me, filth,” Xenovia simply spat.

Other than the distant sounds of panic and sirens after multiple buildings in the area finished collapsing, the street was silent for a moment.

“Heh-hahahahaha!” He cackled. “How faithful of you. You’re right by the way, I was totally lying. Heaven was fantastic. Literally a perfect heaven!” He laughed again.

Danger.

“Tough crowd,” he said with amusement after a moment of neither of us joining him. “And neither of you attacked while I was open, either?”

Was he even actually…?

He shrugged. “Oh well, guess I’ll have to take the lead, since you-”

I didn’t have time to consider further. I swung and fired my claws, just as he formed and shot a dozen Light spears at us. My claws intercepted his spears like precision anti-aircraft fire, clashing with enough force to cause the projectiles’ energy to destabilize in purple and red explosions that blocked line of sight between us. The angel burst through the visual cover with his crimson spear lunging, while I had jumped up and to the side. Xenovia was already swinging up with a slash of Durandal, intending to meet his attack head on and come out the victor of the exchange.

My sight was fixated on the unconscious body a dozen meters back, already throwing a set of chakra strings far over the Fallen’s shoulder towards Rapidly and Freed with one hand.

Kill him!

I ignored the urge. If we got him to Asia soon, it would still be possible to save and interrogate him with mental magic to find the other Excaliburs, as much as the idea of saving his life made my blood boil. We could always execute him afterwards.

The Fallen kicked off the ground, abandoning his charge while jumping over Durandal’s blade and the wave of force it sent out, and flapped all six of his wings to fling himself backwards in the air. Just as my threads connected, the blade of his spear tore through them, severing the chakra constructs before I could affect my targets. With the distance he gained from Xenovia and me still banking to the side, his focus shifted from the much slower human to me, lifting a palm above his head as a massive amount of red Light began gathering rapidly, just like at the mansion.

My fingers flexed in a specific way and I lifted my hand, then swung it down.

“Hahh!” Xenovia let out a sound of exertion in the air as her power surged.

“!!!” The angel barely dodged in surprise with another flap of his wings, losing a little blood and a few feathers as Xenovia came slicing down from above, right through the bolt of power he’d been charging, and caught the edge of his left uppermost wing. The force from Durandal making contact and his half-formed attack explosively destabilizing sent him spinning away, crashing into the ground to bounce across the street.

Durandal blasted a crater into the street where she landed, busting a pipe and sending water spraying everywhere in a mist.

I sent another round of threads out to grab the unconscious exorcist and the Excalibur fragment, but before I could even come close to snagging them, a massive transparent greatsword the width of a person and length of a building chopped through the air and severed my threads before slamming into the ground long-ways, glowing red with menacing Light.

I turned my head to look where the attack came from out of habit, not that I needed my eyes to track our enemy as I was.

The Fallen had turned his tumble into a roll and was on his feet within a moment of being ragdoll-ed, looking somewhat worse for wear. His hood had fallen to reveal messy dark brown hair, and the top right corner of his mask had cracked and broken off, leaving a slight nick on his forehead that began dripping red.

Even with his dark blue eyes peering at the misting water through his mask’s eye-holes, I felt his attention on both me and Xenovia.

The misting spray revealed nearly invisible lines of chakra, shimmering like a weirdly purple rainbow as they stretched from my fingers to connect to Xenovia’s limbs and torso.

“A support technique?” I heard him mutter. “I knew she wasn’t fast enough…”

Normally, my control of my chakra wasn’t precise enough on a micro scale to get my threads this thin while staying strong enough to use. I almost always end up running too much power through them, making them thick and dense enough that the chakra becomes bright and obvious, even though chakra is– for the most part– usually supposed to be invisible. It’s why I always used them like whips and bungie-gum, instead of their original intended purpose.

Xenovia’s gut instincts really were top notch, I had to admit. It had been my first time ever trying to use my imitation of the ninja puppet strings technique the way it was meant to be used, and Xenovia went along with it without any planning, hesitation, or resistance. If she’d fought my threads’ influence even a little, tensing a muscle against my direction at just the wrong moment, she could have broken the connection and I wouldn’t have been able to assist her jump and launch her at our enemy. It didn’t hurt things that I could read and predict her better than I could most other people, especially as I was right now, helping me keep us in sync.

Even though I liked my friends inside and out, it had honestly been refreshing working with her, interacting with someone who was the same on the outside as they were on the inside. What you saw was really what you got with her.

“You, youkai girl-” he called out, lifting his arm and rolling his shoulder. “-It’s obvious to me that you’re not experienced enough to read me as well as you have. I assume that’s your kind’s famous ‘Sage Arts’ at work, am I right?”

I didn’t answer, only turning to face him while creating a set of claws on my free hand, keeping up my puppeting strings to assist and enhance Xenovia.

“Quiet-type killjoy,” The man sighed. “This is taking too long, and you’re giving me a surprising amount of trouble dealing with you non-lethally at this level, so I’m going to end our play-time here and knock you out now, ‘kay? No hard feelings.”

“You say that fighting without intent to kill has made things difficult in one breath, and declare you’ll knock us out with another, yet you’ve achieved nothing this battle but stalling your own defeat.” Xenovia lifted Durandal one-handedly to point his way. “Enough of your chattering. Fight, or run to be hunted another day.”

A kind of thrumming pressure filled the street, and Xenovia’s muscles tensed in surprise, almost breaking my threads connection.

‘Uh-oh.’

Power surged from the Fallen’s core, pouring out of seemingly nowhere as he released the floodgates of his reserves, perfectly hidden from me up until this moment. His body glowed with a Crimson outline, and his Light streamed from his back like crackling plasma, lighting up the street as the jet of energy stretched out into two hazy shapes sticking out of his upper spine.

The Light began condensing as more and more kept pouring out, the red color growing darker and deeper as its shape smoothed and gained definition. Then, for barely more than an instant, the blood red forms flared with a blinding, pure white Light, before blinking out entirely, leaving feathered limbs in its place.

Within seconds, a pristine pair of newly formed raven wings sat in sequence above the Fallen’s other three sets, the pitch-black feathers so glossy they seemed to reflect the very stars in the night sky.

Four sets. An eight-winged Fallen Angel.

“Allow me to officially introduce myself…”

Danger!

His hand reached up his damaged mask and pulled it up off of his face, revealing… a scruffy, middle-aged looking man?

“My name is Gomeisa, co-leader of Lord Kokabiel’s Canis Minor squad.”

Danger!

Somehow, I expected him to look a lot more evil or intimidating after the dark red transformation sequence. Then again, just standing in front of him was sending my heart racing and fur standing on end. The amount of power I could sense rolling off of him right now was more than enough to do the job, dwarfing my own current power.

My tail was stiff with the fight/flight/freeze response, because unlike people like Rias’s dork of a brother– whose power was so far beyond my ability to grasp that it looped back around to feeling like just another part of the natural order of things, like the sky being blue– Gomeisa’s power was well within my ability to comprehend; just over four times stronger and still growing rapidly.

Danger!

“And as of my transformation just now, a member of my Lord’s honor guard too, though he’ll probably punish me for breaking my vow.” Gomeisa rolled his shoulders with a chuckle, stretching his wings as he did so. “Father above, it feels good though. You have no idea how long I’ve been holding back my Ascension, just to be allowed to get into fights. The amount of restrictions the Grigori place on us the higher we go are fucking depressing. Not that that’s gonna be a worry anymore pretty soon. Think fast.”

Dozens of spears flashed into existence above him, lighting up the area in a bright red glow. I only glanced at them reflexively for a fraction of a fraction of a second, readying myself to react. I only realized my mistake when I saw that none of them were aimed at me, and his dark form blurred out of my sight the moment I took my eyes off him.

D-!

He appeared in front of me. I was already mid swing… but Excalibur Rapidly was in one of his hands.

‘When did he-?!’

His other fist buried itself into my gut, with all the force moving at those kinds of speeds carried.

The shockwave rolled through me, crushing my diaphragm and sending spittle flying from my mouth as all the air in my lungs was forced out violently.

My back crashed into a concrete wall, my injured tail shooting agonizing pain up my spine after being smashed between the two like that, before gravity took hold and I fell to the ground on my hands and knees, retching up blood.

It took a second for me to pull myself out of the distant shock enough to realize that I didn’t even remember being launched through the air. One moment I was sucker punched, and the next, I hit the building. I had blacked out, just to wake up on impact.

If I was that hurt after one hit–

My head shot up in concern.

‘Xenovia!’

Gomeisa was standing behind her barely upright form, Rapidly’s blade piercing through her back and sticking out from her torso being the only thing holding her up. 

Durandal was held up to the side, paused mid-backswing in an arc that was clearly intended to sweep behind her.

Kill him.

“You know, it’s actually impressive how honed your instincts are,” Gomeisa said conversationally as he took his free palm off of her elbow, where he’d stopped her attack dead. “Managing to position your sword to shield yourself from the frontal barrage, and twisting just out of the way of a backstab to the heart while making a play for killing me? Quite the feat. If only you weren’t so much slower than the youkai girl, you might have had an actual chance at trading with me.”

I forced myself to shaky feet. It was an agonizing struggle to breathe, hunched over and stumbling forward. I forced myself onward anyway. ‘If I don’t, Xenovia will-!’

Kill him!

He pulled Rapidly from her back with a spray of red identical in color to his Light constructs, and Xenovia sagged and fell to her knees while leaking her lifeblood like a faucet, still clutching the slab of gold and blue Holy metal. She struggled to stay upright for a second, choking and gurgling on her blood as she tried to say something full of honest defiance, before tipping over and collapsing on her side with a thud.

A slowly growing puddle of red seeped out beneath her.

Kill him!!!

Chakra streamed out and solidified into claws without conscious thought, and I was immediately swinging for his head.

Neck.

Torso.

Anywhere that could possibly, conceivably, kill the shit out of the bastard.

Without even a glance, they were batted away with a flex of one of his wings.

Step after step, swing after swing, my thrown claws were smacked aside to pierce through nearby buildings like anti-tank rounds.

That stupidly honest girl was going to-!

“Maybe you’ll survive if they get you to that little healer of theirs, maybe you won’t. Out of respect for your skill, I’ll let fate decide.” He shrugged indifferently, before crouching down beside her. “It won’t matter by tomorrow anyway. I’ll be taking that along with my wayward exorcist. Compensation for taking Transparency and Mimic from us, you understand.”

The fucking bastard reached down for Durandal’s handle, the handle that even now Xenovia was holding onto for dear life. His eight wings remained spread from his back and curving inward, like some sort of demented spider hovering over its prey.

KILL–

“-SFER]!”

A beam of crackling plasma as wide as I was tall appeared at an angle, passing just over my shoulder and blocking my view of the Fallen while just missing Xenovia.

I snapped out of whatever fugue I’d fallen into when the boom shook through me moments later, my eardrums rupturing. I felt my bones vibrate and blood pool inside my top set of ears as the laser strafed down the length of the street, the roar of continuous thunder that began right next to my head having shocked my senses as it swept away the enemy. Xenovia was left lying alone on the road next to a steaming, bubbling trench of asphalt, her weapon still in hand.

I rushed over immediately and dropped to my knees, ignoring my hurting everything and placing my hands on her back and chest to put pressure on the wound, while flooding her torso with as much chakra as I safely could.

As long as I could stall her condition getting worse for just a little longer, Asia had a better chance of saving her.

I rapidly found the most serious threats to Xenovia’s life and did my best to run triage.

Severed aorta-

‘I can press it back together, stitch with chakra threads and hope it’s enough pressure to keep some blood flowing, stem the loss and buy some time.’

Mostly-severed spine-

‘Leave it, can’t fix quickly and not an immediate threat.’

Punctured lung-

‘Stop more blood from entering the lung, support her breathing. Blood filling chest cavity, pressing on lung wall? siphon away if possible.’

The issue was, I wasn’t actually that good at the complicated stuff, unless it was specifically Naruto who I was healing. I was extremely familiar with his body, to the point that I basically became overspecialized in working on him and his chakra network. Heart surgery and spinal work weren’t exactly things I could do on my own with any hope of the patient coming out alive, even if that patient was Naruto.

Devil healing magic relies on conceptualizing what “ideal health” looked like for a species and then applying it; the closer your internal concept was to reality, the better it worked.

From what I could tell, Senjutsu healing relies on understanding the ideas of recovery and vitality themselves, and “sharing” those ideas with the patient’s body, effectively allowing it to heal itself as best it can using borrowed energy.

I was still mediocre at both, and could only imitate being a high level healer when it came to Naruto, because I understood his body, and his body took to chakra healing like a fish to water. For everything else, my best skills were effectively just setting bones and assisting the body’s natural regeneration and healing, which had been what most of my work on Naruto’s chakra network amounted to.

“... Sorry I’m late, Koneko-chan.” Akeno’s voice reached me as though I was underwater, muffled and distant-sounding even though it was coming from right behind me. I’d barely even noticed her arrival, though I guess the electrical plasma beam was a giveaway. My sensory range had shrunk around me to focus on Xenovia, and I only caught a glimpse of Akeno’s aura as she slipped by. She was nearly overflowing with more power than usual, electrical Light thrumming wildly just beneath the surface. “I’m here now though. Everything will be alright. I’ll make sure of it.”

Despite the tenderness in her tone as she spoke to me, there was an undercurrent of cold rage as she walked past me in the direction her attack had gone.

“Koneko-chan!” Another girl’s voice called out, and I felt some of the tension drain from my body as I looked up.

There was the sound of flapping wings catching the air, and I saw Kiba swooping down at high speed, his wings out and Asia held in a princess carry. He touched down at an angle, in a skid to bleed off speed, and slid to a stop in a crouch on the other side of Xenovia’s pale, prone form. He was already in the process of lowering Asia to her feet, when the former nun gasped.

“Xenovia-san!!” She cried out with worry for our temporary teammate, [Twilight Healing]’s rings appearing on her fingers.

“Quick, her heart!” I urged the former sister to hurry.

“Right!” In the next second, a pair of glowing green hands laid themselves over the exorcist as Asia dropped to her knees across from me. I watched with a complex surge of emotions that I had trouble untangling as Xenovia’s vital systems began knitting back together under Asia’s attentive care, and I almost slumped in relief.

“It seems we made it just in the nick of time,” Kiba spoke up, drawing my attention. “Akeno-senpai had been worrying that she’d messed up when you didn’t respond over the radio.”

I blinked, lifting a hand off of Xenovia’s chest now that Asia was handling everything, and pressed a finger to my earpiece. My finger slid straight into my human ear, no earpiece to be found. ‘Must’ve fallen out.’

I grimaced as I accidentally gave myself a wet willy, mixing Xenovia’s warm blood with the trickle of my own that was slowly leaking out of my ear canal.

“Even as close as it was though, it seems she made the right call after all,” Kiba concluded with a tight but warm smile.

“What?” I focused back on him in confusion when he finished. He’d just turned away to stand guard over the three of us, so I was left looking at the back of his head as he held [Holy Eraser] up in a ready position. “What do you mean?”

Now that I thought about it, was he talking about why he was here instead of with his squad? That he came here with Akeno in order to ferry Asia around with his [Knight] speed?

“Akeno-senpai told us she had a bad feeling coming from your direction and made a quick detour to our team, maybe a minute off course since we were making our way through the area already. She wanted to return that sword to Irina while she had the chance, to make sure it was kept safe and couldn’t cause issues while she tried to help you,” Kiba explained without turning, an undercurrent of controlled animosity in his voice when he referenced Mimic. “With you not responding over radio, she decided it would be better to have us all come with her instead of going by herself. She had Issei-kun begin Boosting a bit before we got here, so he could use [Transfer] on her just in case.”

‘So that’s why…’

I stared past the [Knight], watching Akeno walk down the melted street with both sets of her wings out, towards the end of the steaming trench that the Fallen Angel Gomeisa was rising out of.

I didn’t know whether I felt like laughing or crying.

Based on the timing of the Fallen arriving and Issei beginning to stack Boosts for a Transfer, the ‘bad feeling’ she got earlier was probably her sensing when I unconsciously began drawing on natural energy, and immediately started to lose control of myself.

She didn’t get here in time to stop him from stabbing Xenovia, because of me.

But.

She also got here with enough power and backup to save Xenovia and fight him on equal footing because of me.

Maybe she could have taken him out before he transformed if she got here earlier, or maybe he would have transformed anyway and we’d be screwed. Whether I looked at it optimistically or pessimistically, my failure to control Senjutsu properly caused her delay.

‘No more hesitating.’

No more taking it slow. After this crisis was over, I would learn how to control- no, master this power as fast as possible. No more excuses.

The last wisps of my failed Sage Mode slipped away from my body, and this time I did slump over in fatigue.

I forced myself up to my feet a moment later though, because there were still things that needed to be done. I still had a role to fill.

“Here, keep this safe for me. I’ll want it back.”

I reached down my shirt and pulled the red-stained cutting of my tail out, getting a horrified gasp from Asia and dropping the limp appendage beside her. “Koneko-chan, your tail?!?!”

Right, I forgot she didn’t see that happen. ‘Whoops.’

“I’ll be back in a moment.” I didn’t elaborate, walking off to the side while keeping an eye on the confrontation between Akeno and Gomeisa. Other than a few superficial burns and ruffled feathers, he seemed mostly fine, and was actually grinning. With how furious Akeno obviously was, I could only guess the only reason she hadn’t attacked again yet was for a similar reason as me; she sensed something about him that told her it would be a mistake to attack.

He was on a mission just like we were; as much fun as he might have fighting her, he’d probably try aiming for Xenovia and Asia or something if he felt he needed to. Whoever made the first move would be at a disadvantage, forced to react to the reaction, but neither of them could afford to wait and they both knew it, based on how–

A thin line of golden light seemingly split the world, intersecting with the Holy Sword fragment in Gomeisa’s hand and stretching into the distance at a slight angle.

Wind visibly kicked up around the light’s path with the booming shockwave of the sound barrier being broken as Excalibur Rapidly shattered into pieces, followed by the distinct crack of a cannon going off in the distance.

I traced the path the light took in disbelief.

Far in the distance– barely a speck even to my eyes– with Tsubaki holding her steady in the air and Issei’s [Boosted Gear] touching the barrel, was Shidou Irina with a fucking shining-gold anti-tank rifle.

Even with my ears still damaged as they were, and having no particular skill at lip-reading, when I turned back to look at the Fallen standing there with the Excalibur shards littering the ground at his feet, the exasperated words leaving his mouth were clear as day;

“Well, shit.”

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AN: I meant to have a quick Naruto section to get a look at what he’s doing at the end here, but I ran out of time. I’ll leave that for next chapter.