Hello, Vinzelles here. Welcome back to A Path to Freedom.

You caught me a bit unprepared, to be honest. This week went by sooooo fast. I barely remembered it was time to upload, haha.

Today we have a bit of a long one, it was 9 pages in my document for Arc 2. As anticipated last time, Raynare will have some screen time. This is no screen, of course, but I hope I'll be able to allow you all to picture properly what is happening, as I tried to do every chapter up to now.

...I got nothing. Really, this is just a strange time of the week. Nothing happens, at all; it will probably stay that way until E3 comes around.

Now that's something I'm eagerly waiting for. In theory, the new Fire Emblem title for Switch will be announced, and I'm super hyped for it. Too bad I don't have a Switch myself! XD

Anyway, back to the story. I'll see you at the bottom.

Enjoy.

Arc 2 Chapter 12 - Angel VS Devil

The dust lifted by Orochi's second Bergschneider had yet to settle down.

The boy had started running through the path created by Raynare's Fragments, a sleeve over his mouth to prevent himself from breathing in the dust.

'Note to self: do NOT try Senjutsu again until a proper teacher is found.'

When he executed his second Bergschneider, he had tried to generate Ki, after merely observing the nekomata twins use it, and channeled it in his fist before launching the attack. And the technique came out too strong for him to control: he was in fact barely able to land a blow on his intended target rather than miss it completely and hit something else instead.

'Too bad. Such an attack from this distance wasn't enough to beat Phenex, I would've heard the announcement by now otherwise. ...!'

The Wind Brand reacted.

'...Someone is in front of me!'

He hurriedly sidestepped just as a literal shockwave passed right through where he had been a moment before.

"Oh? You dodged my attack somehow."

Orochi was able to discern a person's silhouette in the dust, which was finally starting to settle. A woman with a ponytail and light armor was revealed, a zweihander held tightly in her hands.

"I am Siris, Knight of Riser Phenex-sama. I shall be your opponent, monster!"

"...Oh? You went and introduced yourself. I can appreciate some politeness from time to time, so I shall return the favor."

Orochi put one leg in front of the other and a hand on his heart before bowing slightly.

"My name is Kamakura Orochi, a human from Japan. Nice to fight you.

"Y-You mean "to meet you", right?"

"I know what I said, Knight-san. HAAA!"

The boy suddenly launched itself forward. Spinning around, he made a straight kick with his right leg, his heel aiming for the girl's face. However, the girl immediately disappeared from her spot.

"Haha, you're a fast one!"

Orochi lowered his feet to the ground as he flew in order to stop his own momentum, spun around once more using the landed foot as a pivot, and axe-kicked the zweihander approaching from behind with his other leg.

It was as if two swords had just clashed. Whatever remained of the dust around the two was blown away by the wind generated from the clash.

"Tch, were you hiding a weapon after all?"

"Silly girl, I AM the weapon!"

It seemed that Siris was mistakenly assuming that he had hid a blade of some kind in his pants.

'As if someone like me would do such a thing. Clearly they don't know what they are dealing with!'

He started applying pressure on the pinned down Knight.

"And the moment you forced our fight into a contest of strength was the moment you lost this battle!"

The Knight soon found her own feet dug forcefully into the soft ground.

"Wha-"

For the the third and final time, Orochi spun around, forcefully interrupting the clash with the zweihander. Its blade went straight past his raised leg, and after touching the ground with the formerly airborne foot, he darted forward and uppercutted the girl.

"Ghah!"

She landed on her butt as Orochi disappeared.

"Gespenst!"

Siris started looking around frantically for her opponent, without realizing that he was above her, ready to perform a dive-kick.

*SLAM*

Which landed straight on her head and drove it literally into the ground.

"...Heh, that was almost an interesting fight. Almost."

The poor Knight, who had already passed out, disappeared in a flash of light, leaving behind only the cracks that her head left on the now barren field.

"One of Riser Phenex's Knights has retired."

Orochi looked around after hearing the announcement, the Wind Brand on his abdomen aiding him in his search.

"I have to say that she was decently well trained, though. The only blind spot I could find was above her, so staying on the ground as I used Gespenst wouldn't have been the best idea for me." he pondered aloud.

A sigh escaped his mouth.

"...Nobody has closed in while I fought. ...Well, at the very least these guys can take a hit from me without dying. Had they been humans, I'd need more than one hand to count the number of murders I'd have committed by now."

His gaze settled on the ruins of the new building, now visible with the dust gone.

"...How strange that he didn't come out, I was counting on it too."

The boy then hit his fist on the palm of his other hand, seemingly having an epiphany.

"Ah! Maybe now he's so pissed that he decided not to have a fair fight anymore, maybe he'll ambush me or something. That would be bad, so I'd better keep the Brand active for now."

After coming to that realization and deciding what to do, he resumed his running towards the ruins.

Raynare had been dodging Yubelluna's explosion magic for a while already, and had yet to start retaliating, as she didn't even unfold her wings yet while her opponent was flying a short distance from the roof.

'This woman... the strength of a Queen is obvious in her, but her movements are so very dull when compared to Kamakura's. I suppose I have to give him credit, he did say he thought we had a good margin of error.'

In the meantime, Yubelluna was thinking of something else.

'Why can't I hit this damn rogue Fallen?! I did my research on her and I'm sure she isn't supposed to put up this much of a fight!'

She truly did gather information on Raynare before the fight. 'Never let it be said that I don't think about Riser-sama's well-being. Better be safe.' she had thought.

Raynare was apparently an official rogue, banished from the Grigori, and was nothing more than a low-level Fallen Angel. Against a somewhat powerful, and most of all well-trained Devil, even if said Devil was also low-level, she shouldn't have been able to keep up.

'Can those three days of training really make this much of a difference?! Just what has she been through to reach a level equal to mine?'

The Queen's patience ran out.

"HEY, STOP PLAYING AROUND AND FIGHT ME PROPERLY!"

"Ok."

"!"

After dodging another blast, Raynare lifted a finger and pointed at Yubelluna. A Fragment emerged from it, and was shot directly at the Devil at incredible speed.

'! If that thing hits me I'm done for!' Yubelluna had already witnessed the power of those little segments of concentrated unstable light when she saw a good half of the forest blow up because of them. So, she hurriedly created a barrier that managed to block the shining needle that was sailing the air, which got itself stuck on the shield's surface.

The Fragment exploded.

*BOOM*

Luckily the barrier managed to hold, but several cracks had appeared on the circle. It seemed that it was barely enough against that much destructive power.

Just as she lowered the crumbling barrier in a small cloud of smoke, a foot hit her in the face.

She stumbled back as Raynare flipped in mid-air and landed back on the roof, her Kuoh uniform barely even damaged by her opponent's fire magic.

Yubelluna held her face with one hand. Her nose was bleeding.

"Hey, bomb woman. I sure hope you're not gonna keep trying to compete with me in terms of raw power. Mere fire magic will never be enough."

The Fallen was observing her with an unreadable expression on her face while saying that.

"...I can see that. Direct attacks are not cutting it. How about THIS, then?"

The Bomb Queen raised a hand and created a red magic circle one more time.

'Again? How stubborn can a single person get?'

This time however the attack was different. A second, bigger circle appeared under Raynare's feet.

"Oh, it's actually different. Still pointless though."

Raynare extended her arms to the side and generated a Fragment in every finger. They all took flight, soaring and circling around Raynare at immense speed before charging towards her.

"What the?!"

Yubelluna did not understand that maneuver. Truthfully, she had expected the Fallen to take flight to dodge the exploding circle under her feet, and following that she would have closed in and launched an attack from a short distance in order to prevent her from escaping. However, the girl didn't even bother. Instead, she created several of those damn needles, which then flew in a full circle around her before separating and charging her own position.

The Fragments closed in on where Raynare was standing, and dived towards the circle on the ground.

They flew low enough to scratch the floor of the roof, and left marks all over the circle, which then disappeared.

"WHAT?"

"What IS it with Devils and shouting? Shut up already!" It was Raynare's turn to put her hand forward. The Fragments she had generated, still flying around, gathered close to her palm, forming a small spiked ball of light. She then fired that strange projectile at Yubelluna.

'Hell no, I'm not gonna try to block THAT!' Yubelluna flied away from her position, but it was futile. Raynare had closed her hand into a fist before pointing at her little spiky ball with her index and middle fingers. It seemed she was going to drive it from afar into Yubelluna.

"It's chasing me?!"

"That's right. Give it a tight hug, maybe you'll feel better afterwards."

"ARE YOU MAKING FUN OF ME?"

Phenex's Queen seemed angry as she ran from the oddly shaped bullet, but Raynare didn't think much of it, since she turned out to be less intimidating than what the Fallen was expecting.

Yubelluna's magic circle was so easy to neutralize that Raynare actually started to feel the boredom creeping in her being.

'Is this what Kamakura feels when he faces weak people? I have to admit that it's fairly unpleasant.'

When his own training sessions were over, Orochi himself was the one who ran her through the wringer after dinner time.

His idea of training for the first night was 'I will actively try to kill you until you find a way to prevent me from moving', and it took hours of what could have been valuable sleep time for Raynare to figure something out in sheer desperation. She really wanted to yell at him, but she quickly realized the purpose behind that night's training: he wanted her to draw out everything she had and then some, before he could start training her properly, and make sure that nothing of what she had been able to drag out of her body would be lost.

The following evening, her focus would be movement optimization and understanding how kinetic energy transferred from muscle to muscle. Orochi had told her that martial arts, in his opinion, were 'kinda optional for a supernatural creature, but you're allowed to do whatever you want after the Rating Game, right now we don't have time.'. He told her however that certain basics of fighting could apply to pretty much anyone despite how much or how little they knew about martial arts, so he had wanted to focus on those first. Those lessons were a 50-50 of theory and practice, with Orochi telling her what she was doing wrong and how to correctly perform certain movements, and her pretty much repeating the same things until muscle memory was established in her body.

The last evening, finally, was dedicated to the sharpening of her instincts. In other words, the same thing as the first night, but with the small difference of 'you're not allowed to think during the fight. I will do the same, which means I won't be able to hold back at all.'. That was the hardest part: Raynare had never been able to fight mindlessly like Orochi could, and despite what she learned she struggled immensely. As it turns out, though, pain was a great motivator: even with several bruises on her, she eventually started to react automatically to some of the boy's own movements, clear and subtle both, and even managed to catch him off guard a few times before collapsing on the grass in their house's backyard at the end of the session. Nina had to call Asia over in the middle of the night to heal her, or so she heard.

Training with him and the Devils for three afternoons in a row, and being forced to keep up with a monster for three nights straight did wonders to both her body and mind. She had become stronger and faster, and had gained a half-decent level of control over her Fragments.

Something like the Queen piece of a high-class Devil turned out to be not that big of a deal for those reasons.

"Careful, love, it's closing in." declared Raynare in a monotone voice.

"IS IT?"

"Nope, I lied."

"?"

The spiky ball was indeed gone, and Raynare wasn't pointing at anything anymore.

"Where is it now?!"

"I'll give you a hint."

Raynare pointed upwards.

"Cloud."

'...Cloud?' Yubelluna instinctively looked at the fake sky.

Sure enough, the spiked ball of light was free-falling towards her head at immense speed.

It was as if an air-to-air missile had been fired, with her as the target. She panicked and dodged to the side as the ball almost grazed her leg in its dive.

"Not good enough." Raynare extended the same fingers she used before from her hand and pointed to the sky.

The ball, faithfully following the order it had received, stopped in its tracks a short distance away from the hovering Yubelluna, and lunged at her.

'I can't dodge it!' She channeled all the magic she could muster, and created a large barrier. Like the single Fragment did before, the ball stuck itself in the barrier.

But oddly enough, it didn't detonate.

"...Huh? Is it a dud?"

"As if. Time to finish this."

Raynare finally resolved to make a real move. She unfolded her wings, and with that single and natural movement Yubelluna felt all her hopes wash away.

The Fallen in front of her had not one, but two pairs of wings.

Which remained in the Queen's line of vision for all of half a second.

There was still some distance between the two, forty meters or so. Raynare however crossed it in a flash and delivered a brutal kick to her spiked sphere, still stuck in the barrier. The sheer strength of the kick drived some of the Fragments that composed the ball of light deeper into the barrier, until they emerged on Yubelluna's side. The Fallen then used her own momentum to repel herself away from the shield, which was already cracking.

'...I see. She isn't an equal...'

"It's over."

She snapped her fingers.

'She has already surpassed me.'

*SNAP*

*BOOOOOOOOOOM*

Once more, a cloud of smoke was generated from the explosion, and Yubelluna bursted out of it, still half-conscious but full of burns. She was free-falling towards the ground, but her body was still making slight movements. Movements that Raynare immediately noticed: she clicked her tongue and darted towards Yubelluna.

"Sorry, but being half-asleep won't allow you to leave this battlefield, and I have no time to waste!" She approached her opponent's body, grabbed her waist, and accelerated. She then forcefully glided as the two of them approached the ground, turned around, and kept accelerating as she quickly closed in to the old building.

She gained a little height before letting go of Yubelluna completely. Her body flew forward at great speed, and crashed against the wall.

Now truly out of commission, the Bomb Queen disappeared in a flash of light.

"Riser Phenex's Queen has retired."

Raynare graciously landed in front of the building and released a breath. "Phew, hard part's over. Since Kamakura is going to handle the big shot himself, I should be able to handle what remains before directly helping him out. ...Well, assuming he doesn't start whining about some stupid crap like "You're in the way" and so on..."

She then started to leisurely walk towards the new building, while shaking her head as she thought of quite possible scenarios she would walk into.

"One of Riser Phenex's Knights has retired."

Ravel clicked her tongue at that announcement.

"As expected, the poor girl didn't last long."

The Phenex girl's relative calmness, coming from the fact that she had predicted such a scenario, contrasted strongly with the feelings of the Rook Isabela.

"That damn bastard! To think that he would take out someone as strong as Siris so quickly!"

"Calm yourself, Isabela. Giving in to your anger will only quicken your own defeat at this rate." said the Knight Karlamine.

"Tch, guess you're not wrong there. He seems like the kind of guy that will take every opportunity he's given. My apologies, Ravel-sama."

"Don't worry about it." commented Ravel. "He took advantage of the slackened rules of this exceptional Rating Game, and turned the match in his favor from the very start. In a sense, he's quite amazing despite his ruthlessness. I suppose it's understandable for one to lose their cool after seeing what he did."

Suddenly the group of four saw a figure closing in slowly from afar.

Kamakura Orochi was walking towards them, barely even hurt despite the many battles he fought in that short time.

'Oh, a welcoming party! Everyone who remains is here, aside from Riser, that is. I wonder if he's still under the rubble after all?' thought the boy.

He pondered that possibility as he kept walking towards the group of Devils, still a long distance away.

And then, he sensed it. The one thing that the Brand couldn't help him identify; the one thing that he had, however, been familiar with for all his life. That one emotion could be felt from the Devils in front of him, an emotion that left him utterly disappointed every time it appeared.

An emotion he saw in one of the nekomatas' eyes as she ran away from him earlier.

Fear.

They were afraid of him. And he knew that any person that kept that fear in their hearts would never stand a chance against him.

It wasn't a matter of him bullying inferior fighters. He would battle against whoever got in the way no matter how strong or weak they were.

But a wavering heart could never put up a proper fight.

"Riser Phenex's Queen has retired."

And just like that, that sensation of fear had intensified. A person strong enough to defeat their Queen was now also moving in their general direction and they were even more afraid because of that.

'...I guess there's no more entertainment to be had here. I'll quickly crush them before moving on to Riser-'

All of a sudden the rubble behind the group exploded in flames. As several pieces of what had been a building took flight and rained back to the ground, Riser Phenex climbed over what remained in his way and jumped down from the rubble silently.

He observed the human as he walked closer and closer towards him, and started walking himself for a short while before stopping at Ravel's side, who was still stunned by his appearance.

"...Ravel. Ladies. Please lend me your strength."

Four pairs of eyes looked at him in amazement. Such a request was incredibly odd coming from Riser after all. Said man raised his voice and addressed Orochi.

"Human! No, Kamakura Orochi! I acknowledge your power!"

That one sentence was enough to stop the boy in his tracks. He suddenly showed a blank expression in his face.

"Out of respect for you, we shall now come at you with everything we have! After seeing what you are capable of, I truly believe you deserve nothing less!"

Riser then briefly addressed his peerage. "Please forgive my selfishness, everyone. I haven't found myself overwhelmed to this extent in a long time, and this battle made me realize it."

His fingers were trembling. "It has been a while since the last time I was this excited. I can't help this feeling! I feel like I want to defeat him no matter what! I don't even care about that wish anymore! I feel like I want to prove myself to him, even if I end up losing! Even if I get beaten up! Even if I die!"

While the normal servants didn't quite understand what their master was talking about, Ravel knew. There was that one person her brother trained with in hand-to-hand combat. That person was, in a way, very similar to the human before them, and Riser had never been able to beat him. As such, she could understand Riser's feelings when confronted by someone powerful like that human.

"You have my support, Onii-sama!"

Ravel was the first in Riser's peerage to speak. She had to set an example, and reassure her servants. The five of them might have had a chance against the beast in front of them, but only if their hearts were calm.

And sure enough...

"I will fight, Riser-sama!"

"I refuse to be left behind!"

"I shall also aid you, Riser-sama."

Riser smiled at them before turning to Orochi.

"So, there you have it. Will you allow them to fight by my side, Kamakura Orochi?"

The boy had been silent the entire time, listening to his opponent's speech with his head lowered.

He suddenly discarded his uniform jacket, and unbuttoned his blouse before taking it off as well.

His attire under the formal uniform of Kuoh Academy was the same he had used during his training.

He lifted his head, revealing a huge and sincere smile on his face.

That smile was enough of an answer for the Devils, who all took a stance.

'They have poured their true feelings out. They are ready to go down even after witnessing my power, and will come at me with everything they have.'

Orochi's entire body tensed as he clenched his fists.

'This is the fight I was looking for.'

He took a deep breath.

'I must respond to their feelings!'

"GGGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

It was time for him to fight at full power once more.

Welcome to the bottom.

So, how was the fight? Good? Bad? It was technically a side-show of sorts due to the circumstances I created, but again, I hope I was able to entertain.

Now, from what I inferred from the show (the LN for the most part, to be fair), it looks like gaining wings is a pretty big deal. And Raynare has already gained a pair, now totaling at 4 wings. This implies something of course, but I'll let you, the readers, figure out what that something is. As for me, I'll just give you a little clue in the form of this next sentence.

One does not simply "keep up" with Orochi.

Make of this what you will.

After the fight, a bit of anime-y stuff, and a reference to the light novels. Riser's old training partner is mentioned in volume DX1 (a short side-story). Go look it up if you want, no spoilers from me.

Anyway, this RG is fundamentally different from the original one. Normally, Riser would be arrogantly boasting about how strong he is compared to Rias' peerage, or something to that effect. He would also be, statistically speaking, evidently superior to the opposing team. That is obviously not the case in APtF: he is in fact completely overwhelmed, to the point where putting up a facade or getting angry about it will serve no purpose, and this is where his attitude changes. He can't allow himself to take Orochi lightly anymore: hell, he probably won't be able to do much on his own, so he realizes he has to gather all the strength he can muster to even have a chance. And asks his remaining servants for aid.

I went all out for the final chapters of the arc. It should be evident just by looking at the content of this one.

Next time, the final bout of the arc. Reviews are welcome.

Thank you for reading, see you soon. Ciao!