Yukinoshita Yukino's easy victory over Sharon gave the Eligos peerage a strong opening. Unfortunately, while she was securing that win, someone on the Hero Faction's side had pinned down another member of Leo's servants, putting them in serious danger.
That someone was none other than Siegfried.
As mentioned before, this former top-tier Church warrior possessed extraordinary strength. He stood firmly in the number two position, the strongest member of the entire Hero Faction after Cao Cao.
He carried the genetic legacy of the dragon-slaying hero Sigurd, and the Church's brutal warrior training program had brought his combat ability into full bloom.
As a demonic swordsman, he wielded several formidable demonic swords, each with different abilities. His swordsmanship was exceptionally refined, at least on par with Kiba Yuuto's, if not outright superior.
He was also a Sacred Gear user, possessing a subspecies of Twice Critical, a Sacred Gear capable of doubling his power for a set duration. It manifested as silver arms sprouting from his back, boosting his strength while allowing him to wield additional demonic swords simultaneously. The result was a force multiplication far greater than the sum of its parts.
His Balance Breaker, Chaos Edge Asura Ravage, could increase the number of arms further. Like the legendary Asura, he could sprout six arms total. Each arm multiplied his power again, and with a demonic sword in every hand, even a typical Ultimate-Class Devil wouldn't last a single exchange against him.
Naturally, Shiina Mahiru was no match for him either.
The angel had grown considerably through repeated training, but she simply hadn't reached the Balance Breaker threshold the way Yukino and Utaha had in just a few months. Incinerate Anthem was powerful, certainly, but against a human opponent like Siegfried rather than a creature with demonic weaknesses, her ceiling was somewhere around High-Class Devil level. An Ultimate-Class opponent was still too much.
So after engaging Siegfried, Mahiru was quickly overwhelmed. She came dangerously close to being cut down by his demonic swords on several occasions.
Yuuki Asuna found herself in the same predicament.
Jeanne wasn't quite as powerful as Siegfried, but she was still a supremely skilled swordswoman. Having already reached Balance Breaker, she outclassed Asuna entirely.
In terms of swordsmanship, Jeanne was every bit Asuna's equal.
In terms of innate gifts, Jeanne was human, but she had inherited the soul of the Maid of Orléans. At minimum, she wasn't inherently inferior to Asuna, who'd been reincarnated as a devil.
In terms of Sacred Gears, Asuna could freely wield holy swords of various attributes by now, but Jeanne had reached Balance Breaker, putting her leagues ahead.
In the original story, it took both Rias and Himejima Akeno fighting together just to hold their own against this swordswoman. Asuna trying to take her on alone was simply premature.
As a result, despite both wielding Blade Blacksmith, Asuna was completely outmatched by Jeanne in every regard, facing danger every bit as dire as Mahiru's.
If the fighting had continued like that, both Mahiru and Asuna would have met the same fate: being thoroughly brutalized until they stopped breathing.
At the critical moment, Yukino and Utaha, having defeated their own opponents, arrived just in time to save them.
Yes. During that same stretch, it wasn't just Yukino. Kasumigaoka Utaha had also defeated her opponent and claimed victory.
Her opponent Heracles truly did inherit the famous Greek hero's strength. Physically imposing with tremendous raw power, his Sacred Gear Variant Detonation allowed him to generate explosions on impact, and his Balance Breaker, Detonation Mighty Comet, transformed his entire body into a weapons platform, sprouting countless missile launchers across every surface. Through sheer firepower alone, he could suppress an entire devil legion. But he'd picked the wrong opponent.
The barriers Utaha erected with Create World could already withstand the full-power attacks of an Ultimate-Class Devil. Even with his Balance Breaker unleashed, Heracles' formidable firepower couldn't breach her defenses. Worse, his lack of agility, a consequence of his own bulk, made him easy prey for Utaha to catch. She simply trapped him inside a barrier and subjected him to a merciless bombardment from all directions.
Heracles was perfectly countered. Within a few exchanges, he collapsed in a cloud of smoke, unable to rise again.
With him down, Utaha was free to join Yukino in supporting Mahiru and Asuna.
Yukino went to Mahiru's aid, and together they took on Siegfried.
Utaha went to Asuna's side, and together they fought Jeanne.
With reinforcements, the nearly-crumbling Mahiru and Asuna could finally catch their breath and push back.
Even so, Siegfried and Jeanne were genuinely formidable. Even two-on-one, they proved difficult to break through.
Seeing Utaha coming to Asuna's aid, Jeanne decisively activated her Balance Breaker, Stake Victim Dragoon, creating a dragon whose entire body was composed of countless holy swords. She seized control of the skies, raining attacks down on Utaha and Asuna from above. Siegfried likewise unleashed his Balance Breaker alongside the demonic emperor sword Gram, cleaving through Yukino's blizzards and Mahiru's purple flame crucifixes one after another. None of their attacks could touch them.
Jeanne's mobility was on a completely different level from Heracles'. Soaring through the sky astride her holy sword dragon, even Utaha's barriers couldn't catch her. Meanwhile, Siegfried relied on pure brute-force suppression to compress Yukino and Mahiru's room to maneuver, making the fight a miserable grind for the girls.
Left with no choice, Yukino and Utaha finally activated their Balance Breakers one after another, going all out.
"Sounds like it was a hell of a fight." Leo felt a pang of something.
As their master, he naturally knew what Yukino and Utaha's Balance Breakers entailed.
Absolute Demise's Balance Breaker was The Eternal Silver World. It could flash-freeze a vast area, conjuring blades of ice throughout the domain and bringing a world of ice and blades crashing into reality.
The technique was devastatingly powerful. At full output, it could freeze an entire country solid, permanently. Unless countered by a Longinus ranked above Absolute Demise or an equivalent force, breaking the ice was simply impossible.
The world of ice and blades also dealt extreme damage, a torment rivaling the frozen hells. It was a terrifying power capable of slicing through and shattering even a Maou's body.
Create World's Balance Breaker was Illusion and Reality Utopia. It could expand the barrier's coverage to encompass everything within line of sight, and freely convert the nature of any power manifesting inside the barrier between "illusion" and "reality."
In simple terms: enemy attacks aimed at you were converted to illusion and rendered harmless. Allied attacks aimed at the enemy were converted to reality, meaning even intangible mental assaults or phantom illusions could inflict physical damage. Terrifying in every sense.
With these two Balance Breakers in play, Yukino, Asuna, Utaha, and Mahiru finally had the means to fight back.
Siegfried's demonic swords couldn't withstand the ice and blades capable of freezing an entire nation. All six of his arms were frozen solid, and then Mahiru's purple flame crucifix slammed into his body. He ignited on the spot, reduced to charcoal. The first casualty of the entire battle.
Pitiful, really. If measured by raw combat power alone, Siegfried was arguably the strongest fighter on the field. Yet he'd been the first to die. Life was cruel that way.
Jeanne didn't die outright like Siegfried, but she fared little better. Utaha's Balance Breaker couldn't directly affect living beings, but the holy sword dragon Jeanne rode was a manifestation of Sacred Gear power, not a living creature. Once Utaha's expanded barrier caught it, a snap of her fingers turned it to illusion. Jeanne plummeted from the sky, where Asuna's hidden trump card, a strike from the Niten Ichi-ryū, found its mark. Countless sword wounds opened across her body, and she crumpled into a pool of her own blood, barely clinging to life.
Hearing all this, Leo couldn't help but raise a question.
"They just lost like that? Didn't they use anything else to fight back?"
His brow furrowed slightly.
He vaguely recalled that in the original story, the Hero Faction possessed a forbidden drug called Chaos Break.
It was a substance refined from the blood of the original Maou, capable of forcibly activating Sacred Gears created by the God of the Bible. By fusing the holy nature of divine artifacts with the abyssal nature of demonic blood, it induced a state called Chaos Drive, dramatically amplifying the user's power.
In the original, both Siegfried and Jeanne had resorted to this drug. Heracles had carried it too. There was no reason these three wouldn't pull it out when cornered.
But Yukino and the others said otherwise.
"No. Apart from their Balance Breakers, they didn't use any other means to fight back."
Yukino, Asuna, Utaha, and Mahiru all confirmed it without hesitation, and Leo could only nod thoughtfully.
Maybe it's still too early in the timeline, and the Hero Faction hasn't developed that drug yet.
That was the only explanation.
After that, the rest of the battle hardly bore mentioning.
Once Yukino and the others had defeated their opponents, the only enemies left were Georg, Leonardo, and a handful of second-string fighters who didn't amount to much.
Those second-stringers, seeing Siegfried and the others fall, finally scrambled into action, but against Yukino and Utaha in their Balance Breaker states, with their devastating area-of-effect capabilities, they were completely ineffective. They were wiped out in short order.
There was no denying it. Once they'd reached Balance Breaker, Yukino and Utaha were genuinely powerful. Setting aside the recently recruited Kanna and Stella, the two of them could absolutely compete for the top three spots in the entire Eligos peerage, maybe even contest first place.
At the very least, unless Ram used Pawn Promotion to massively boost her power, and unless Rem activated her Oni transformation, both of them could very well fall short.
Knowing Balance Breaker versus not knowing it were two entirely different things. Take the original protagonist, Hyoudou Issei. Before achieving Balance Breaker, he'd been a perpetual underdog who needed to pull off mid-battle power-ups just to scrape by. He was constantly on the receiving end, more punching bag than fighter. It wasn't until he mastered Balance Breaker that he finally looked the part of someone strong, capable of facing powerful enemies head-on instead of serving as comic relief and a walking buff station for his teammates.
Within the Hero Faction itself, only those who'd achieved Balance Breaker could serve as frontline fighters. Without it, you were relegated to the second string. If not for Sharon's special circumstances, she wouldn't have had the right to deploy alongside Siegfried and the others that day.
After that, seeing the tide turn against him, Georg began retreating. He manipulated the mist generated by Dimension Lost to forcibly teleport Hero Faction members out of the pocket dimension en masse, preserving as much of their fighting strength as possible. Leonardo, at Georg's signal, threw everything he had into one last gambit. Ignoring the strain on his young body and his incomplete mastery of the Sacred Gear, he forced Annihilation Maker into Balance Breaker, Bandersnatch and Jabberwocky, spawning twelve Bandersnatch, each roughly one hundred and fifty meters long, and a single Jabberwocky measuring nearly two hundred meters. All thirteen monstrosities charged the Eligos peerage at once.
To deal with thirteen colossal beasts, the entire Eligos peerage threw everything they had into the fight. In the end, they managed to put down twelve of the Bandersnatch, but the final Jabberwocky was beyond them.
Defeating those twelve had already pushed everyone past their limits. Yukino and Utaha had overloaded their Balance Breakers. Ram had activated Pawn Promotion. Rem had gone into full Oni transformation. Asuna and Mahiru had traded wound for wound in desperate exchanges. Even Ravel had exhausted every last drop of power, to the point where she couldn't even maintain her immortal body, her demonic power completely drained.
Even after all that, every one of them had taken serious injuries, and the final Jabberwocky simply couldn't be brought down. Despair was closing in.
"Honestly, you've already done well."
Leo saw the girls' spirits dip as they recounted this part, and he couldn't help but speak up.
He wasn't just saying it. Their performance had genuinely exceeded his expectations.
In the original story, it was Leonardo's Balance Breaker that had thrown the entire Underworld into chaos. Those twelve Bandersnatch had devastated city after city across the Underworld, and it had taken the mobilization of numerous powerful devils to finally deal with them.
As for the final Jabberwocky, defeating it had required deploying Sirzechs's entire peerage. Grayfia herself had taken to the field. And in the end, it was Hyoudou Issei, merged with Great Red, who finally brought it down. For the Eligos peerage to handle a monster like that without Leo present was simply impossible.
So Leo didn't blame the girls in the slightest. If anything, he thought they'd performed far better than they had any right to.
They were the heroines of their respective stories, after all.
The fact that they'd managed to destroy those twelve Bandersnatch was already a monumental achievement.
The only question remaining was...
"So who took care of the last Jabberwocky?"
Leo's question made the girls exchange glances.
Then Yukino gave him the answer.